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Arabica Robusta

The Efflorescence of American Fascism » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names ... - 0 views

  • A figurehead? Only in the sense that he fronts a stage of advanced capitalism which itself, to reach that point, presupposes a tightly organized ruling stratum. I use “stratum” rather than “class” so as to signify the accommodation by upper groups, economic, social, political, of diverse others useful to purposes of social control at home, hegemony abroad—i.e., leaders of the military and intelligence communities as both stabilizing/conservative influences and resources for enforcing group dominance.
  • In sum, he is a willing figurehead—the most dangerous kind. Militarism especially attracts him, like a fly to flypaper.
  • The liberal mask Obama presents in justification for the Democratic party’s proclivity toward war, intervention, and sacrifice of the class interests of working people and minorities at home, is just that, a mask that covers inner moral emptiness as well as fools the constituency to be addressed and the public at large.
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  • Too harsh? We hear that surges, assassination, spying, must be laid at Bush’s door, hence exonerating Obama (part of the mythology of liberalism and the presumption a black president somehow must stand for social justice).
  • From this brief background, I shall take up Obama’s obsession with besting Putin (luckily for him, not a matter of two out of three falls), and then, in a subsequent article, his cover-up of a war crime (not his own, e.g., drone assassination, but that on Bush’s watch), which, nonetheless, he was able to keep largely under wraps for more than six years. In this case, liberals’ blame is heaped on Bush with no admission of Obama’s silence tantamount to complicity.
  • The real fear in Washington is that Putin is telling the truth and is seeking a peaceful solution. For in that way, it becomes more difficult both to maintain tensions and scare the EU into America’s arms.
  • Peace is ridiculed as an expedient to those maintaining a confrontational stance in international politics, i.e., the US, and as events play out, even, now moving closer to the present than in Baker’s piece, with Poroshenko of Ukraine signing a trade agreement with the EU (June 27), Putin’s continued pursuit of an overall settlement fails to make a dent in the Obama administration’s belligerent attitude (read, state of readiness).
  • Overreach intuitively seems unlikely in capitalism, yet the realization is slowly sinking in that, particularly egged on by the Congressional Right, Obama ultimately may be bad for business.
  • Bad enough we as a nation have to endure massive surveillance of our own people, bad enough to have Kerry smother Sisi with love as journalists go to prison, bad enough that Obama is back to drone assassination and the use of the Espionage Act to prevent revelations of USG wrongdoing. But to an overt face-off against Putin when Putin has not given cause, is ugly, bizarre, madness, as though Obama wills intervention and war as politically expedient and somehow economically rejuvenating.
  • His fear is that Poroshenko will not be as compliant, i.e., anti-Russian, as was originally hoped. Obama may be right. [No, written the 25th; Poroshenko has ended the cease-fire on the 30th, and July 1 sees massive Ukrainian air and land attacks in the East.]
  • Ukraine Signs Trade Agreement with European Union,” but the finer points hardly suggest an unqualified Obama victory over Putin and Russia. Russia, of course, was angry, envisioning the West’s attempt at absorbing into its orbit not only Ukraine but Georgia and Moldova, as part of a concerted effort to dismember the Russian Federation piece-by-piece, a not unreasonable assumption because generally bruited about in Neo-Con circles (though not mentioned by the reporters, themselves not even willing to credit the fact of a coup, simply saying that Poroshenko “won Ukraine’s presidential election in May to fill a post left vacant by Mr. Yanukovych’s flight from the country in February”). Angered, too, again not mentioned, that Ukraine would make possible the movement of NATO forces to the Russian border.
  • Poroshenko’s initial renewal of the truce implied that he viewed the trade agreement as just that, affecting trade and not part of an anti-Russian mobilization of forces to promote confrontation. When a Putin senior adviser, Sergei Glazyev, charged the Kiev government was “Nazi,” Putin’s spokesperson contradicted him, stating this was “not the official position” of Russia—perhaps further indication Putin seeks an accommodation rather than war with the Ukrainian government.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Tribute to Chris Hani on the 20th anniversary of his assassination - 0 views

  • The close links between the liberation movement and the Soviet Union very likely had an important role in affirming the ANC’s non-racial perspective. In their biography of Hani, Smith and Tromp describe his first visit to the Soviet Union (in the early 1960s): ‘In the USSR now, the men were witnesses to the way a powerful nation was run. For Hani, having joined the Communist Party a mere two years earlier, but having read extensively on socialism and Marxism, it was the culmination of theory, reading, imagining… There were no beggars and no blatant poverty. The activity in the city was frenetic: houses being built on one side, flats on the other.
    • Arabica Robusta
       
      It is likely that Hani and his associates were taken where the Soviet state elite wanted them to go. I am sympathetic to arguments that the Soviet Union was a place of state capitalism, rather than socialism.
  • Chris Hani was murdered on 10 April 1993 in Johannesburg by a fascist gunman by the name of Janusz Waluś, who was working with a senior South African Conservative Party MP on a plot to assassinate a number of prominent liberation fighters and thereby spark a civil war along race lines, derailing the negotiations to end apartheid. Their plot was unsuccessful, as the massive wave of shock and grief at Hani’s death was channelled towards a new momentum in the peace process. South Africa’s first democratic election – one of the most historic events of the twentieth century – took place a year later, on 27 April 1994.
  • ‘I think finally the ANC will have to fight a new enemy. That enemy would be another struggle to make freedom and democracy worthwhile to ordinary South Africans. Our biggest enemy would be what we do in the field of socio-economic restructuring. Creation of jobs; building houses, schools, medical facilities; overhauling our education; eliminating illiteracy, building a society which cares, and fighting corruption and moving into the gravy train of using power, government position to enrich individuals. We must build a different culture in this country... and that culture should be one of service to the people.’
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