Monthly Archives: November 2016

La guerra contra las drogas es la nueva Inquisición española

18 Friday Nov 2016

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(Este artículo también está disponible en inglés)

En el siglo 15, los Reyes Católicos Fernando de Aragón e Isabel de Castilla estaban ocupados estableciendo su dominio sobre la España reconquistada y con el sometimiento y la limpieza étnica de los musulmanes y los judíos. Por otro lado, estaban iniciando un Imperio que pronto se expandió en gran parte del continente americano recién invadido. El establecimiento del Imperio era ante todo un acto de puro robo, y de construcción de un spanish-inquisition-torturesistema de opresión y esclavitud para la población nativa. En algunos lugares, incluso se convirtió en un genocidio.

Nadie puede construir un estado, ni hablar de un imperio, bajo las banderas del robo, la explotación y la opresión. Ellos necesitaban un lema que los puso en el terreno moral. Mientras más opresión sea necesaria para subyugar a los reacios, se requiere más motivos ideológicos para justificar esta opresión. La Inquisición española, que supuestamente promovería y salvaguardaría la fe cristiana, en su interpretación católica ortodoxa, dio el marco ideológico necesario para una campaña de terror que se requería para la consolidación del imperio.

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En la mayor parte del siglo 20, la principal justificación para la opresión en el hemisferio latinoamericano fue el peligro del comunismo. Bajo esta bandera los Estados Unidos de América promovieron dictaduras militares en Brasil, Chile y Argentina, por citar sólo algunos ejemplos. La guerra contra el pueblo y la dependencia de los opresores locales del imperialismo estadounidense frenó el desarrollo de la economía local y se aseguró la sumisión económica a los intereses de las empresas multinacionales norteamericanas.

Como el comunismo pasó de moda después de la caída de la Unión Soviética y el bloque socialista de Europa del Este, la justificación de la represión violenta desvaneció. Nuevos movimientos populistas comenzaron a ganar terreno.

Guerra contra las drogas en los EE.UU

El término “Guerra contra las drogas” se deriva de la declaración del presidente de los nixon-watergate-testimonyEstados Unidos Richard Nixon en 18 de junio de 1971. A continuación declaró el abuso de drogas el “enemigo público número uno”.

Esto se convirtió gradualmente en una guerra contra los pobres en los propios Estados Unidos, y sobre todo contra los negros. Desde la declaración de guerra contra las drogas, el número de personas encarceladas en Estados Unidos, como parte de la población, aumentó más de cuatro veces.us_incarceration_rate_timeline

El uso de la guerra contra las drogas como un instrumento de opresión contra la población negra es evidente en muchos sentidos. En 1986, el Congreso de los Estados Unidos aprobó una ley que hace que la pena por posesión de una pequeña cantidad de “crack”, una droga usada en su mayoría por negros pobres, es la misma que la pena por posesión de una cantidad cien veces mayor de “cocaína”, la cual es mayormente utilizada por la elite blanca. Según una investigación, los negros son el 13% de los consumidores de drogas, el 35% de los detenidos por el uso de las drogas, el 55% de los condenados y el 74% de los encarcelados por delitos de consumo.

La guerra contra las drogas en México

La guerra contra las drogas en México es sólo el último ejemplo grave de la guerra internacional contra la droga. En realidad, México se convirtió en un centro del comercio de droga sólo últimamente, como resultado del éxito parcial en la opresión de la producción de drogas en Colombia, mientras que la demanda lucrativa de los EE.UU. continúa sin cesar.bodies-pile-up

Desde el año 2006, bajo la presión de los EE.UU., el gobierno mexicano desplegó el ejército para combatir a los traficantes de drogas. Esto causó un aumento alarmante de la violencia. Según Wikipedia, en 2013 el número de muertos estimado estaba por encima de los 120.000, además de 27.000 desaparecidos.

El éxito ideológico de la guerra contra las drogas hace que la opinión pública mundial “acepte naturalmente” este número de muertos, al contrario que el número de muertos mucho menor (pero todavía horrible) de, por ejemplo, la campaña de terror de la dictadura argentina de 1976.no-more-drug-war-demo-big

El alto número de muertes tiene varias razones. En primer lugar, el ejército no es apto para la vigilancia y utiliza la violencia indiscriminada impunemente contra los sospechosos. Además, si algunos comerciantes están muertos o detenidos, mientras que la demanda de drogas sigue siendo el mismo, se produce un fuerte aumento de los precios de las drogas e inicia una lucha feroz entre los diferentes traficantes para llenar la brecha entre la oferta y la demanda.

Los políticos que iniciaron esta guerra sangrienta niegan cualquier responsabilidad por el increíblemente alto costo humano en vidas perdidas y sufrimiento. Ellos incluyen no sólo el gobierno de Estados Unidos y el gobierno de México, sino también los cuerpos especiales dentro de las Naciones Unidas. Pero aunque quisiéramos creer ellos que inicialmente no podían esperar el resultado de sus decisiones, aún continúan buscando esta devastadora guerra inútil año tras año con indiferencia total al costo humano.

Efectos Secundarios

Además, la violencia derivada de la guerra contra las drogas está socavando la economía regular, que requiere estabilidad. Como resultado, mejora el atractivo de tráfico de drogas como la única manera de tener una vida “digna” para amplias capas de la sociedad.missing-students-ayotzinapa

Por último, pero no menos importante, en la atmósfera de terror e impunidad, las clases dominantes tienen una mano libre para aterrorizar a las masas también para servir a sus intereses económicos y políticos.

El secuestro masivo y la desaparición de 43 estudiantes que protestaban de una escuela normal en la ciudad de Iguala, en el estado mexicano de Guerrero en 2014 es el famoso caso que dio luz a este fenómeno y encendió las protestas masivas en contra de la responsabilidad del gobierno.maxico-till-when

Las matanzas, desapariciones, encarcelamiento y el terror contra las masas no son un subproducto accidental de una política de buenos deseos. Son las medidas necesarias para mantener la hegemonía del Imperio.

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Y, sí, si se piensa en ello, la criminalización social de la sexualidad de las mujeres y el consiguiente terror contra las mujeres está en la base del sistema que permitió que la opresión a las mujeres y la preservación de los privilegios masculinos durante milenios.

 

The War on Drugs is the new Spanish Inquisition

18 Friday Nov 2016

Posted by in One World, Uncategorized

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(This article is also available en Español)

In the 15th century the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile were busy establishing their rule over re-united Spain, subordinating and ethnically cleansing Muslims and Jews, and starting an Empire that soon expanded over much of the newly invaded American continents. The establishment of the Empire was first an act of pure robbery. It developed into a system of oppressing and enslaving the native population. In some places it even became an all-out genocide.european-history-spanish-inquisition-250x150

Nobody can build a state, let alone an empire, under the banners of robbery, exploitation and oppression. They needed some slogan that will put them on the moral high ground. The more oppression is required to subdue the unwilling subjects, the more ideological firepower is required to justify this oppression. The Spanish Inquisition, which was supposed to promote and safeguard the Christian faith, in its orthodox Catholic interpretation, gave the required ideological framework for a campaign of terror that was required for the consolidation of the empire.

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In most of the 20th century the main justification for oppression in the Latin American hemisphere was the danger of communism. Under this banner the US encouraged military dictatorships in Brazil, Chile and Argentine, to name just a few examples. The war against the people and the dependency of the local oppressors on US imperialism held back the development of the local economy and ensured the economic subordination of Latin America to the interests of the multinational North American companies.

As communism went out of fashion, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the East European Socialist Block, the justification for violent repression faded and new populist movement started gaining ground.

War on Drugs in the US

The term “war on drugs” stemmed from the declaration of the US president Richard Nixon in June 18, 1971. He then declared drug abuse to be “public enemy number one”.nixon-watergate-testimony

This gradually developed into war against poor people in the Unites States itself, mostly against black people. Since the declaration of the War on Drugs, the number of people incarcerated in the United States, as proportion of the population, increased more than fourfold.

The usage of the War on Drugs as a tool of oppression against the Black population is us_incarceration_rate_timelineapparent in many ways. In 1986 the US congress passed a law that made the penalty for possessing a small amount of “crack”, a drug used mostly by poor blacks, on the same level as the penalty for a 100 times bigger amount of “cocaine”, which is mostly used by the white elite. According to one research, blacks are 13% of drug users, 35% of those arrested for using drugs, 55% of those convicted and 74% of those actually sent to prison for drug usage.

The War on Drugs in Mexico

The War on Drugs in Mexico is just the latest severe example of the international War on Drugs. Actually Mexico became a center of the drug trade only lately, as a result of the partial success in oppressing drugs’ production in Colombia while the lucrative demand from the US continued unabated.bodies-pile-up

Since 2006, under pressure from the US, the Mexican government deployed the army to fight drugs traders. It caused an alarming rise in violence. According to Wikipedia, by 2013 the estimated death toll was above 120,000 killed, in addition to 27,000 missing. The ideological success of the War on Drugs causes the world public opinion to “accept naturally” this death toll, unlike the much lower (but still horrific) death toll of, for example, the terror campaign of the Argentine dictatorship of 1976-1983.

The high death toll has several reasons. First the army is unfit for policing and uses indiscriminate violence with impunity against suspects. Also, if some traders are killed or arrested, while the demand for drugs stays the same, it causes a sharp rise in drug prices and initiates a fierce fight between different traders to fill the gap between supply and demand.

Side Effectsmissing-students-ayotzinapa

Also, the violence stemming from the war on drugs is undermining the regular economy, which requires stability. As a result it enhances the lure of drug trafficking as the only way to make a “decent” living for wide strata of society.

Last but not least, in the atmosphere of terror and impunity, the ruling classes have a free hand to terrorize the masses also to serve their economic and political interests.

The mass kidnapping and disappearance of 43 protesting students from a teachers’ college in the city of Iguala in the Mexican state of Guerrero in 2014 is the famous case that threw light to this phenomenon and ignited mass protests against the government’s responsibility.maxico-till-when

The mass killings, disappearances, imprisonment and terror against the masses are not an accidental by-product of a well-wishing policy. They are the necessary measures to maintain the Hegemony of the Empire.

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And, yes, if you think about it, the social criminalization of women’s sexuality and the ensuing terror against women is at the core of the system that allowed oppression of women and the preservation of male privileges for thousands of years.

Sorry America, It is not YOU, it is US (*) …

05 Saturday Nov 2016

Posted by in China's Rise, Crisis of Capitalism, One World, Uncategorized

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Lessons from the USA election campaign

The coming elections in the US supplied an extraordinary drama, watched with both trump-vs-clintonenthusiasm and disdain almost all over the world. If this is the most important democratic election for the most influential leadership position in the world, the scarcity of the debate about the real issues at stake must make people ask substantial questions about democracy. The identity and performance of the candidates, especially Republican Donald Trump, and the fact that an enormous establishment, with millions of people and billions of dollars, couldn’t produce a more respectable candidate, must raise even more substantial soul searching questions about the human nature.

The Big Picture

Lenin once said that, while the yellow press floods us with lies about everything, the good serious capitalist press feeds us with plenty of facts and information in order to hide the big picture. In the rest of this post I will try to relate to some of the big issues that all this election campaign and all the serious fact-finding and analysis around it are either ignoring or trying to hide…

Trump promises to “make America great again”. Clinton is trying to out-perform Trump’s patriotism by claiming that mighty America is as great as ever and couldn’t be diminished. But the whole election campaign is only a small animated illustration to the fact that the USA is not what it used to be.

The people of the US are famous for their ignorance of the world outside their borders. But for the last hundred years the fate and meaning of the USA, call it “greatness” or “the big Satan” or “imperialism” or “leader of the free world”, was not about what happens inside these borders but developed around its role as the strongest and finally the only world superpower.

This time is over. And it is not over because America became any smaller. It is over because we, the rest of the world, succeeded somehow to grow.

China’s rise, USA’s decline

In 2012, in one of the first posts in this blog, I presented an optimistic view on China’s rise. Let me try to sketch here in raw lines an optimistic view about America’s decline, or rather the decline of the North American imperialism.

First ask yourself what is “America”? Talking about the United States as “America” already ignores and marginalizes most of the people living in the American continents from Canada in the north to Chile and Argentine in the south. The population of the US is hardly a third of the almost billion people that live in the Americas. This naming that ignores your neighbors is only a symbol of the disregard toward and tramping over the people of the rest of the world…

Second, how do you define greatness? No doubt, at least when we speak about the most capitalist nation, that the economy is playing a central role in it. What most readers of the mainstream media might have easily missed is the “small” fact that the US is no more the biggest economy in the world. According to “The World Factbook”, a site maintained by the CIA, in 2015 China’s GDP (measured by purchasing power parity) was 19.7 trillion dollar, almost 10% more than the US’s 18 trillion. In fact China has already become the biggest economy in the world in 2014.world-factbook-gdp-ppp

But this raw measure is far from revealing the whole picture. China’s economy is in a positive momentum, while the US (and the rest of the imperialist powers in Western Europe and Japan) failed to get their economies back on their feet after the 2008 world financial crisis. To hide this we can read every day articles about the “slowdown” in the Chinese economy, which means that it is developing steadily at 6-7% yearly. In China’s planned economy they build modern cities (no shanty towns there) for 300 million people that will move from their villages to the cities over the next 15 years – that alone is like building a brand new USA or Western Europe.

The difference between a rising productive power and a declining parasitic empire is illustrated as we look at the relations of the two economies with the outside world. According to the same source, China’s exports at 2.1 trillion are 40% higher than the US’s 1.5, while its imports at 1.6 are only 70% of the US’s 2.3.

The good jobs that went to China, manufacturing everything from steel to trains to computers and smartphones, are not such good jobs any more. They don’t pay western salaries. It is just that people around the world can now buy all of these things much cheaper. This is another reason why we don’t cry with our USA brothers.

China is a different kind of world power. Its 1.3 billion people made all the way from being one of the poorest people on earth, just fifty years ago, to the top of the world economy by hard work and (relatively) good management. They are the first great world power that didn’t gain its place through occupation and exploitation of other nations. This in itself is a basic fact to think about and a major reason for optimism.

Imperialism is not working any more

The hegemony of the Western powers, and over the second half of the 20th century the hegemony of the USA, enabled them to dictate the world division of labor and the terms of trade to the benefit of the big multinational capitalist companies. This was the source of the “good jobs” that the US and European citizens are now longing for. 80% of humanity was forced to sell its resources for cheap and work for pennies in marginalized agriculture or industry and serve as an open market for the Western developed economies.

After direct colonialism and military occupations were not sustainable any more, neocolonialism and neoliberalism served the same hegemony very well. In the second half of the 20th century, almost any local leader in the 3rd world that tried to do something to develop his country was either deposed or assassinated by agents of the USA. Look for the fate of Patrice Lumumba in Congo, Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran, Sukarno from Indonesia, Salvador Allende of Chile and Omar Torrijos of Panama, to name just a few.patrice-lumumba

Bloody dictatorships, regional wars, civil wars, ethnic cleansing, bombing and occupation – no cruelty was too much to force the subjugation of the third world – the vast majority of humanity – to imperialist rule. In the nineties, after the fall of the Soviet Union, there seemed to be no challenge left to the imperialist rule. By that time most 3rd world countries were under some form of sanctions by the “international community” for this reason or that. Real commodities prices, representing the terms of trade of the 3rd world, reached unprecedented historic lows (see graph taken from a study by David Jacks in NBER). The global gap between the starving majority and the prosperous imperialist center seemed widening forever.real-commodity-prices-historic-low-in-the-nineties

But every party has its hangover. There came the surge of noisy protests at trade conferences and summits of the world imperialist leaders. There were the world social forums, looking for alternatives. When neoliberalism drove Argentine into an economic wall, mass mobilization casted away one government after another and brought to power (in 2003) the leftist Peronists, which refused to pay Argentine’s international debt. When, out of the blue, crazy Arab militants kidnapped airplanes and flew them into the WTC in New York, some people in the USA started to ask “why do they hate us?”

The empire tried to strike back to re-establish its authority, but somehow the world was not responding as expected. In 2002 the army in Venezuela tried to repeat the CIA coup scenario that worked so well in Latin America before, but the masses took to the streets and reinstated Hugo Chavez. When the US army occupied Iraq in 2003, it found that defeating the Iraqi army was the easiest part of it. Popular resistance made the occupation unsustainable and the ensuing US-imposed government in Iraq ended up doing business with China and closer politically to Iran, which is supposed to be the strategic rival of the US in the region. The US ended up burning about one trillion dollar in Iraq for no obvious benefit, (killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and destroying the lives of millions is nothing to count in world politics). It was about the same one trillion that were missing in its coffers when it financial system collapsed in 2008.

From Argentine to Iran, from Cuba to Sudan and Zimbabwe, when the Western powers were trying to force economic blockade of undisciplined third world nations, we’ve seen the new China factor. There is almost nothing you can’t buy in China these days. Over the last fifteen years the gap between the imperialist centers and the 3rd world started to contract. For the first time talking about “developing countries” doesn’t sound so hollow.

Dangerous curves ahead

Being optimist doesn’t mean that you should ignore the dangers ahead. One fact that makes the next period combustive is that while the USA is a declining economic power it still holds the strongest military by far. An irresponsible US president may try to use this power to try to “make America great again”. I do not think that there is a real danger that the USA can make itself the top world power again, but in the process of trying it can easily destroy humanity.the-end-of-the-world

We have seen president Obama declaring his pivot to East Asia, trying to build all kind of military alliances in the region to contain China. We have read the capitalist media writing endlessly with running tears about the danger to World Peace from China building some artificial islands, while they see no danger in the easily preventable death of thousands of refugees in the Mediterranean and have little problem with the continuing killing of hundreds of thousands of Arabs in civil wars in Syria and Yemen.

Some good friends that are fed up by US interventions in our (and other) region(s) are hoping for a Trump victory. They believe it will be such a disgrace that it will accelerate the process of diminishing US influence worldwide. It could happen. You can forgive them if they are ready to sacrifice the US itself for another period of internal racist tension and upheavals. But as I see that the decline of US power is irreversible, and the main danger today is from a desperate attempt to reverse it, I wouldn’t recommend taking the pill that may kill you.

It is us, the people

I would like to finish with one more optimistic note about democracy in the USA and in general. When we speak about democracy we should look for the substance, not any symbolic representation. How much power people really have to control their future?

First start with what comes up in mind in this election, the qualities of the candidates… It is my humble opinion that the candidates in this election are not basically morally different from most candidates over the last decades. I think the main difference is that now we know much more about everything, including about the candidates past, their connections and obligations to the capitalist class, etc. The other factor that comes up in this election is that most people are angrier and less tolerant to the behavior of the candidates – only that they differ about their priority target for anger. So, even as there is no positive alternative in sight, we see that the basic balance of power between the establishment and the people is changing as a result of technological progress, education and the crisis of the system.

Second the content of democracy is not the “consumerist” free choice between Coca Cola and Pepsi, as many US elections used to be. Till now voters in Iran had more diverse options (consider Ahmadinejad vs. Khatami) and more influence about the general direction of the regime than US voters used to have. In this election for the first time a more profound option, the vaguely socialist Bernie Sanders, came anywhere close to be counted.

The US is not ripe for true change, but in this election it already raised the glass ceiling that prevented women from contesting the presidency, and it may have its first Ms President. Not a small change if you remember that women are allowed to vote there only since 1920.

The greatness of US imperialism left its people weak and helpless. It deprived them of free education and health care that are taken for granted in many much poorer countries. It made them work longer hours and be thrown to the dogs if they are not useful to the machine. If they are Native Americans, Black, Muslims or Hispanic they may be terrorized or humiliated. The only statistic in which the US leadership is unchallenged worldwide is the rate of incarceration.

While the US multinationals had the power to rule and rob the world, ordinary people could only run endlessly along the predesigned competition for career and consumerism, with minimal control over their own lives and no say about the future of their country.

Now, as the system is disintegrating, it is the time that the people will take control of their lives. The American people (from Canada to Argentine, NY & Texas included), like all the people of the world, will be the winners from the demise of US imperialism.

(*) Comment about the title

I don’t know whether you share my associations – so I may explain.it-is-not-you

It is a common saying in “relations”, when a guy leaves a girl (or vice versa), that he tries to be nice and says: “It is not you, it is me”. Meaning, don’t blame yourself. I’m “not built for a lengthy connection”. It is intended to be polite, but as it became an easy pattern it is thought to be nasty.

I wanted to start with “Dear America” to emphasis the romantic cord – but many of my readers are too angry at “America” and may have no patience with my literature niceties…

But my American readers are really dear to me, and I hope they will find this piece somewhat consoling in these hard days.

 

Will poet Dareen Tatour be released from house detention?

02 Wednesday Nov 2016

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Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour was arrested in a nightly police raid on her home in Reineh on October 11, 2015. She spent 3 months in different Israeli prisons and the rest of the year in house detention under strict limitations. She is being tried in the Israeli court in Nazareth for “incitement to violence”, based on a poem she published on Youtube and Facebook. Her case provoked wide protest from the literary community, by Palestinians and Israeli writers and even more on the international level. Many famous and prize winning poets, writers and intellectuals, and the international writers’ organization “Pen”, called for her release and for the dropping of charges against her.

Tatour’s lawyer, Abed Fahoum from Nazareth, was lately joined by lawyers Gaby Lasky and Nery Ramati from Tel Aviv. They filed a request to reconsider the decision to hold Tatour under house detention until the end of the trial. The request relies mainly on the long time that already passed and on the expected long time until the trial will finish. It also states that the prosecution, which finished resting its case on September 6, failed to bring substantial evidence.20161031_094606

After some legal struggle just to get the hearing going, it was set for Monday, October 31, 2016. I was reporting from the court on Tweeter (hashtag #DareenTatour) and Facebook (on the “Free Dareen Tatour” page) and here is the full report…

The case was not assigned to any specific judge and as we came in the morning it seems that judges do not want to handle it. The file was passed from one judge to the other like a hot potato.

In the end we started one and a half hour late with Judge Lili Jung-Goffer that only received the file a short time before. She is a senior judge in the magistrate court, and by her age she probably doesn’t wait for promotion, so she can be more independent. But she spent much of her career working for the prosecution in Nazareth and it seems from her behavior that she still feels like doing it – she hardly let lawyer Lasky utter one full sentence throughout the hearing.

As we went in she looked at Tatour and seemed to know her. She asked whether Tatour is this woman from the knifing incident that didn’t materialize… Lasky answered: No, she wrote a poem. It didn’t seem to make much of a difference.20161031_094131

The judge tried hard to press for a compromise that will let Tatour to go out for 2 hours each day – instead of the 3 days a week currently – but still accompanied by a “supervisor”. She even raised the idea that Tatour may get 4 hours for 3 days a week, saying that being closed in the house for such a long period is really suffocating.

Basically Tatour was not interested in such a compromise as she wants to go back to work and study. Besides, there is no much fresh air to take for a 34 years old woman when you must always drag one of your parents or brothers with you for every step you go.

The defense presented some decisions from the military court in Ofer, which decided to release Palestinians detainees while on trial for incitement. On the other hand lawyer Hardak for the prosecution said she have plenty of cases of Palestinians that are held in detention, many of them in prison and not house detention, while on trial for charges similar to Tatour’s.

When Lasky tried to say that the security situation in Israel today is less tense than it was when Tatour was first arrested on October 2015, the judge interrupted her again in the middle of the sentence. When we discussed the trial later some of the people that were present in the court were ready to swear that they heard the lawyer for the prosecution saying that we can gladly say that the security situation is not any better. Checking in the protocol we found that she was cited as saying that we can’t gladly say that the situation improved…

We almost lost any hope before the judge came with the proposal to ask for a new report from a probation officer. She said she knows any decision in this case will be appealed, and the district court will ask for a report anyway, so better to have it now. Lasky agreed. Hardak, in a show of obstinacy that is not usual in the courts but typical to the prosecution’s behavior in this case, objected even to having an expert opinion.20161031_141942_004

The next hearing was set to Monday, November 14, 10 am, on the hope that the report from the probation officer will be ready. It left us some slim hope that Tatour will be freed before the next hearing of the main trial and will be able to wage the struggle to prove her innocence without the constant pressure of a prolonged detention.

Meanwhile we learned that in the next hearing of the main trial, in November 17, the court will hear again the defense request to oblige the prosecution to release information concerning the claim of discriminative enforcement. At this hearing, also, poet Dareen Tatour should stand before the court and testify for the first time, more than 13 months after her detention, to explain that her poem is a legitimate protest against the crimes of the occupation.