Breaking The Australian Silence by John Pilger

07 November, 2009
Countercurrents.org

In a speech at the Sydney Opera House to mark his award of Australia's human rights prize, the Sydney Peace Prize, John Pilger describes the "unique features" of a political silence in Australia: how it affects the national life of his homeland and the way Australians see the world and are manipulated by great power "which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war -- against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else's country".

Thank you all for coming tonight, and my thanks to the City of Sydney and especially to the Sydney Peace Foundation for awarding me the Peace Prize. It’s an honour I cherish, because it comes from where I come from.

I am a seventh generation Australian. My great-great grandfather landed not far from here, on November 8th, 1821. He wore leg irons, each weighing four pounds. His name was Francis McCarty. He was an Irishman, convicted of the crime of insurrection and “uttering unlawful oaths”. In October of the same year, an 18 year old girl called Mary Palmer stood in the dock at Middlesex Gaol and was sentenced to be transported to New South Wales for the term of her natural life. Her crime was stealing in order to live. Only the fact that she was pregnant saved her from the gallows. She was my great-great grandmother. She was sent from the ship to the Female Factory at Parramatta, a notorious prison where every third Monday, male convicts were brought for a “courting day” -- a rather desperate measure of social engineering. Mary and Francis met that way and were married on October 21st, 1823.

Growing up in Sydney, I knew nothing about this. My mother’s eight siblings used the word “stock” a great deal. You either came from “good stock” or “bad stock”. It was unmentionable that we came from bad stock – that we had what was called “the stain”.

One Christmas Day, with all of her family assembled, my mother broached the subject of our criminal origins, and one of my aunts almost swallowed her teeth. “Leave them dead and buried, Elsie!” she said. And we did – until many years later and my own research in Dublin and London led to a television film that revealed the full horror of our “bad stock”. There was outrage. “Your son,” my aunt Vera wrote to Elsie, “is no better than a damn communist”. She promised never to speak to us again.

The Australian silence has unique features.

Growing up, I would make illicit trips to La Perouse and stand on the sandhills and look at people who were said to have died off. I would gape at the children of my age, who were said to be dirty, and feckless. At high school, I read a text book by the celebrated historian, Russel Ward, who wrote: “We are civilized today and they are not.” “They”, of course, were the Aboriginal people.

My real Australian education began at the end of the 1960s when Charlie Perkins and his mother, Hetti, took me to the Aboriginal compound at Jay Creek in the Northern Territory. We had to smash down the gate to get in.
The shock at what I saw is unforgettable. The poverty. The sickness. The despair. The quiet anger. I began to recognise and understand the Australian silence.

Tonight, I would like to talk about this silence: about how it affects our national life, the way we see the world, and the way we are manipulated by great power which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war – against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else’s country.

Last July, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said this, and I quote: “It’s important for us all to remember here in Australia that Afghanistan has been a training ground for terrorists worldwide, a training ground also for terrorists in South-East-Asia, reminding us of the reasons that we are in the field of combat and reaffirming our resolve to remain committed to that cause.”

There is no truth in this statement. It is the equivalent of his predecessor John Howard’s lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
Shortly before Kevin Rudd made that statement, American planes bombed a wedding party in Afghanistan. At least sixty people were blown to bits, including the bride and groom and many children. That’s the fifth wedding party attacked, in our name.

The prime minister was standing outside a church on a Sunday morning when he made his statement. No reporter challenged him. No one said the war was a fraud: that it began as an American vendetta following 9/11, in which not a single Afghan was involved. No one put it to Kevin Rudd that our perceived enemy in Afghanistan were introverted tribesmen who had no quarrel with Australia and didn’t give a damn about south-east Asia and just wanted the foreign soldiers out of their country. Above all, no one said: “Prime Minister, There is no war on terror. It’s a hoax. But there is a war of terror waged by governments, including the Australian government, in our name.” That wedding party, Prime Minister, was blown to bits by one the latest smart weapons, such as the Hellfire bomb that sucks the air out of the lungs. In our name.

During the first world war, the British prime minister David Lloyd George confided to the editor of the Manchester Guardian: “If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and they can’t know.”

What has changed? Quite a lot actually. As people have become more aware, propaganda has become more sophisticated.

One of the founders of modern propaganda was Edward Bernays, an American who believed that people in free societies could be lied to and regimented without them realising. He invented a euphemism for propaganda -- “public relations”, or PR. “What matters,” he said, “is the illusion.” Like Kevin Rudd’s stage-managed press conferences outside his church, what matters is the illusion. The symbols of Anzac are constantly manipulated in this way. Marches. Medals. Flags. The pain of a fallen soldier’s family. Serving in the military, says the prime minister, is Australia’s highest calling. The squalor of war, the killing of civilians has no reference. What matters is the illusion.

The aim is to ensure our silent complicity in a war of terror and in a massive increase in Australia’s military arsenal. Long range cruise missiles are to be targeted at our neighbours. The Rudd government and the Pentagon have launched a competition to build military robots which, it is said, will do the “army’s dirty work” in “urban combat zones”. What urban combat zones? What dirty work?

Silence.

“I confess,” wrote Lord Curzon, viceroy of India, over a century ago, “that countries are pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world.” We Australians have been in the service of the Great Game for a very long time. Do the young people who wrap themselves in the flag at Gallipoli every April understand that only the lies have changed – that sanctifying blood sacrifice in colonial invasions is meant to prepare us for the next one??

When Prime Minister Robert Menzies sent Australian soldiers to Vietnam in the 1960s, he described them as a ‘training team’, requested by a beleaguered government in Saigon. It was a lie. A senior official of the Department of External affairs wrote this secret truth: “Although we have stressed the fact publicly that our assistance was given in response to an invitation by the government of South Vietnam, our offer was in fact made following a request from the United States government.”

Two versions. One for us, one for them.

Menzies spoke incessantly about “the downward thrust of Chinese communism”. What has changed? Outside the church, Kevin Rudd said we were in Afghanistan to stop another downward thrust. Both were lies.

During the Vietnam war, the Department of Foreign Affairs made a rare complaint to Washington. They complained that the British knew more about America’s objectives than its committed Australian ally. An assistant secretary of state replied. “We have to inform the British to keep them on side,” he said. “You are with us, come what may.”

How many more wars are we to be suckered into before we break our silence?

How many more distractions must we, as a people, endure before we begin the job of righting the wrongs in our own country?

“It’s time we sang from the world’s rooftops,” said Kevin Rudd in opposition, “[that] despite Iraq, America is an overwhelming force for good in the world [and] I look forward to working with the great American democracy, the arsenal of freedom …”.

Since the second world war, the arsenal of freedom has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, and crushed some 30 liberation movements. Millions of people all over the world have been driven out of their homes and subjected to crippling embargos. Bombing is as American as apple pie.

In his acceptance of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter asked this question: “Why is the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought of Stalinist Russia well known in the West while American criminal actions never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it never happened. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”

In Australia, we are trained to respect this censorship by omission. An invasion is not an invasion if “we” do it. Terror is not terror if “we” do it. A crime is not a crime if “we” commit it. It didn’t happen. Even while it was happening it didn’t happen. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.

In the arsenal of freedom we have two categories of victims. The innocent people killed in the Twin Towers were worthy victims. The innocent people killed by Nato bombers in Afghanistan are unworthy victims. Israelis are worthy. Palestinians are unworthy. It gets complicated. Kurds who rose against Saddam Hussein were worthy. But Kurds who rise against the Turkish regime are unworthy. Turkey is a member of Nato. They’re in the arsenal of freedom.

The Rudd government justifies its proposals to spend billions on weapons by referring to what the Pentagon calls an “arc of instability” that stretches across the world. Our enemies are apparently everywhere -- from China to the Horn of Africa. In fact, an arc of instability does indeed stretch across the world and is maintained by the United States. The US Air Force calls this “full spectrum dominance”. More than 800 American bases are ready for war.

These bases protect a system that allows one per cent of humanity to control 40 per cent of wealth: a system that bails out just one bank with $180 billion – that’s enough to eliminate malnutrition in the world, and provide education for every child, and water and sanitation for all, and to reverse the spread of malaria. On September 11th, 2001, the United Nations reported that on that day 36,615 children had died from poverty. But that was not news.

Journalists and politicians like to say the world changed as a result of the September 11th attacks. In fact, for those countries under attack by the arsenal of freedom, nothing has changed. What has changed is not news.
According to the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a military coup has taken place in the United States, with the Pentagon now ascendant in every aspect of foreign policy.

It doesn’t matter who is president – George Bush or Barack Obama. Indeed, Obama has stepped up Bush’s wars and started his own war in Pakistan. Like Bush, he is threatening Iran, a country Hillary Clinton said she was prepared to “annihilate”. Iran’s crime is its independence. Having thrown out America’s favourite dictator, the Shah, Iran is the only resource-rich Muslim country beyond American control. It doesn’t occupy anyone else’s land and hasn’t attacked any country -- unlike Israel, which is nuclear-armed and dominates and divides the Middle East on America’s behalf.

In Australia, we are not told this. It’s taboo. Instead, we dutifully celebrate the illusion of Obama, the global celebrity, the marketing dream. Like Calvin Klein, brand Obama offers the thrill of a new image attractive to liberal sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he bombs.

This is modern propaganda in action, using a kind of reverse racism – the same way it deploys gender and class as seductive tools. In Barack Obama’s case, what matters is not his race or his fine words, but the power he serves.

In an essay for The Monthly entitled Faith in Politics, Kevin Rudd wrote this about refugees: “The biblical injunction to care for the stranger in our midst is clear. The parable of the Good Samaritan is but one of many which deal with the matter of how we should respond to a vulnerable stranger in our midst …. We should never forget that the reason we have a UN convention on the protection of refugees is in large part because of the horror of the Holocaust when the West (including Australia) turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe who sought asylum.”

Compare that with Rudd’s words the other day. “I make absolutely no apology whatsoever,” he said, “for taking a hard line on illegal immigration to Australia … a tough line on asylum seekers.”

Are we not fed up with this kind of hypocrisy? The use of the term “illegal immigrants” is both false and cowardly. The few people struggling to reach our shores are not illegal. International law is clear – they are legal. And yet Rudd, like Howard, sends the navy against them and runs what is effectively a concentration camp on Christmas Island. How shaming. Imagine a shipload of white people fleeing a catastrophe being treated like this.

The people in those leaking boats demonstrate the kind of guts Australians are said to admire. But that’s not enough for the Good Samaritan in Canberra, as he plays to the same bigotry which, as he wrote in his essay, “turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe”. .

Why isn’t this spelt out? Why have weasel words like “border protection” become the currency of a media crusade against fellow human beings we are told to fear, mostly Muslim people? Why have journalists, whose job is to keep the record straight, become complicit in this campaign?

After all, Australia has had some of the most outspoken and courageous newspapers in the world. Their editors were agents of people, not power. The Sydney Monitor under Edward Smith Hall exposed the dictatorial rule of Governor Darling and helped bring freedom of speech to the colony. Today, most of the Australian media speaks for power, not people. Turn the pages of the major newspapers; look at the news on TV. Like border protection, we have mind protection. There’s a consensus on what we read, see and hear: on how we should define our politics and view the rest of the world. Invisible boundaries keep out facts and opinion that are unacceptable.

This is actually a brilliant system, requiring no instructions, no self-censorship. Journalists know not what to do. Of course, now and then the censorship is direct and crude. SBS has banned its journalists from using the phrase “Palestinian land” to describe illegally occupied Palestine. They must describe these territories as “the subject of negotiation”. That is the equivalent of somebody taking over your home at the point of a gun and the SBS newsreader describing it as “the subject of negotiation”.

In no other democratic country is public discussion of the brutal occupation of Palestine as limited as in Australia. Are we aware of the sheer scale of the crime against humanity in Gaza? Twenty-nine members of one family -- babies, grannies – are gunned down, blown up, buried alive, their home bulldozed. Read the United Nations report, written by an eminent Jewish judge, Richard Goldstone.

Those who speak for the arsenal of freedom are working hard to bury the UN report. For only one nation, Israel, has a “right to exist” in the Middle East: only one nation has a right to attack others. Only one nation has the impunity to run a racist apartheid regime with the approval of the western world, and with the prime minister and the deputy prime minister ofb Australia fawning over its leaders.

In Australia, any diversion from this unspoken impunity attracts a campaign of craven personal abuse and intimidation usually associated with dictatorships. But we are not a dictatorship. We are a democracy.

Are we? Or are we a murdochracy.

Rupert Murdoch set the media war agenda shortly before the invasion of Iraq when he said, “There’s going to be collateral damage. And if you really want to be brutal about it, better get it done now.”

More than a million people have been killed in Iraq as a result of that invasion -- “an episode”, according to one study, “more deadly than the Rwandan genocide”. In our name. Are we aware of this in Australia?

I once walked along Mutanabi Street in Baghdad. The atmosphere was wonderful. People sat in cafes, reading. Musicians played. Poets recited. Painters painted. This was the cultural heart of Mesopotania, the great civilisation to which we in the West owe a great deal, including the written word. The people I spoke to were both Sunni and Shia, but they called themselves Iraqis. They were cultured and proud.

Today, they are fled or dead. Mutanabi Street has been blown to bits. In Baghdad, the great museums and libraries are looted. The universities are sacked. And people who once took coffee with each other, and married each other, have been turned into enemies. “Building democracy”, said Howard and Bush and Blair.

One of my favourite Harold Pinter plays is Party Time. It’s set in an apartment in a city like Sydney. A party is in progress. People are drinking good wine and eating canapés. They seem happy. They are chatting and affirming and smiling. They are stylish and very self aware.

But something is happening outside in the street, something terrible and oppressive and unjust, for which the people at the party share responsibility.
There’s a fleeting sense of discomfort, a silence, before the chatting and laughing resumes.

How many of us live in that apartment?

Let me put it another way. I know a very fine Israeli journalist called Amira Hass. She went to live in and report from Gaza. I asked her why she did that. She explained how her mother, Hannah, was being marched from a cattle train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen when she saw a group of German women looking at the prisoners, just looking, saying nothing, silent. Her mother never forgot what she called this despicable “looking from the side”.

I believe that if we apply justice and courage to human affairs, we begin to make sense of our world. Then, and only then, can we make progress.

However, if we apply justice in Australia, it’s tricky, isn’t it? -- because we are then obliged to break our greatest silence – to no longer “look from the side” in our own country.

In the 1960s, when I first went to South Africa to report apartheid, I was welcomed by decent, liberal people whose complicit silence was the underpinning of that tyranny. They told me that Australians and white South Africans had much in common, and they were right. The good people of Johannesburg could live within a few kilometres of a community called Alexandra, which lacked the most basic services, the children stricken with disease. But they looked from the side and did nothing.

In Australia, our indifference is different. We have become highly competent at divide and rule: at promoting those black Australians who tell us what we want to hear. At professional conferences their keynote speeches are applauded, especially when they blame their own people and provide the excuses we need. We create boards and commissions on which sit nice, decent liberal people like the prime minister’s wife. And nothing changes.

We certainly don’t like comparisons with apartheid South Africa. That breaks the Australian silence.

Near the end of apartheid, black South Africans were being jailed at the rate of 851 per 100,000 of population. Today, black Australians are being jailed at a national rate that is more than five times higher. Western Australia jails Aboriginal men at eight times the apartheid figure.

In 1983, Eddie Murray was killed in a police cell in Wee Waa in New South Wales by “a person or persons unknown”. That’s how the coroner described it. Eddie was a rising rugby league star. But he was black and had to be cut down to size. Eddie’s parents, Arthur and Leila Murray, launched one of the most tenacious and courageous campaigns for justice I’ve known anywhere. They stood up to authority. They showed grace and patience and knowledge. And they never gave in.

When Leila died in 2003, I wrote a tribute for her funeral. I described her as an Australian hero. Arthur is still fighting for justice. He’s in his sixties. He’s a respected elder, a hero. A few months ago, the police in Narrabri offered Arthur a lift home and instead took him for a violent ride in their bullwagon. He ended up in hospital, bruised and battered. That is how Australian heroes are treated.

In the same week the police did this -- as they do to black Australians, almost every day – Kevin Rudd said that his government, and I quote, “doesn’t have a clear idea of what’s happening on the ground” in Aboriginal Australia.

How much information does the prime minister need? How many ideas? How many reports? How many royal commissions? How many inquests? How many funerals? Is he not aware that Australia appears on an international “shame list” for having failed to eradicate trachoma, a preventable disease of poverty that blinds Aboriginal children?

In August this year, the United Nations once again distinguished Australia with the kind of shaming once associated with South Africa. We discriminate on the basis of race. That’s it in a nutshell. This time the UN blew a whistle on the so-called “intervention”, which began with the Howard government smearing Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory with allegations of sex slavery and paedophile rings in “unthinkable numbers”, according to the minister for indigenous affairs.

In May last year, official figures were released and barely reported.

Out of 7433 Aboriginal children examined by doctors, 39 had been referred to the authorities for suspected abuse. Of those, a maximum of four possible cases were identified. So much for the “unthinkable numbers”. Of course, child abuse does exist, in black Australia and white Australia. The difference is that no soldiers invaded the North Shore; no white parents were swept aside; no white welfare has been “quarantined”. What the doctors found they already knew: that Aboriginal children are at risk -- from the effects of extreme poverty and the denial of resources in one of the world’s richest countries.

Billions of dollars have been spent – not on paving roads and building houses, but on a war of legal attrition waged against black communities. I interviewed an Aboriginal leader called Puggy Hunter. He carried a bulging brief case and he sat in the West Australian heat with his head in his hands.
I said, “You’re exhausted.”

He replied, “Look, I spend most of my life in meetings, fighting lawyers, pleading for our birthright. I’m just tired to death, mate.” He died soon afterwards, in his forties.

Kevin Rudd has made a formal apology to the First Australians. He spoke fine words. For many Aboriginal people, who value healing, the apology was very important. However, the Sydney Morning Herald published a remarkably honest editorial. It described the apology as “a piece of political wreckage” that “the Rudd government has moved quickly to clear away … in a way that responds to some of its supporters’ emotional needs”.

Since the apology, Aboriginal poverty has got worse. The promised housing programme is a grim joke. No gap has even begun to be bridged. Instead, the federal government has threatened communities in the Northern Territory that if they don’t hand over their precious freehold leases, they will be denied the basic services that we, in white Australia, take for granted.

In the 1970s, Aboriginal communities were granted comprehensive land rights in the Northern Territory, and John Howard set about clawing back these rights with bribery and bullying. The Labour government is doing the same. You see, there are deals to be done. The Territory contains extraordinary mineral wealth, especially uranium. And Aboriginal land is wanted as a radioactive waste dump. This is very big business, and foreign companies want a piece of the action.

It is a continuation of the darkest side of our colonial history: a land grab

Where are the influential voices raised against this? Where are the peak legal bodies? Where are those in the media who tell us endlessly how fair-minded we are? Silence.

But let us not listen to their silence. Let us pay tribute to those Australians who are not silent, who don’t look from the side – those like Barbara Shaw and Larissa Behrendt, and the Mutitjulu community leaders and their tenacious lawyer George Newhouse, and Chris Graham, the fearless editor of the National Indigenous Times. And Michael Mansell, Lyle Munro, Gary Foley, Vince Forrester and Pat Dodson, and Arthur Murray.

And let us celebrate Australia’s historian of courage and truth, Henry Reynolds, who stood against white supremacists posing as academics and journalists. And the young people who closed down Woomera detention camp, then stood up to the political thugs who took over Sydney during Apec two years ago. And good for Ian Thorpe, the great swimmer, whose voice raised against the intervention has yet to find an echo among the pampered sporting heroes in a country where the gap between white and black sporting facilities and opportunity has closed hardly at all.

Silences can be broken, if we will it. In one of the greatest poems of the English language, Percy Shelley wrote this:

Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number.
Shake your chains to earth like dew.
Which in sleep has fallen on you.
Ye are many – they are few.

But we need to make haste. An historic shift is taking place. The major western democracies are moving towards a corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies -- socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor -- and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war.

This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food.

How do we change this? We start by looking beyond the stereotypes and clichés that are fed to us as news. Tom Paine warned long ago that if we were denied critical knowledge, we should storm what he called the Bastille of words. Tom Paine did not have the internet, but the internet on its own is not enough.

We need an Australian glasnost, the Russian word from the Gorbachev era, which broadly means awakening, transparency, diversity, justice, disobedience. It was Edmund Burke who spoke of the press as a Fourth Estate. I propose a people’s Fifth Estate that monitors, deconstructs and counters the official news. In every news room, in every media college, teachers of journalism and journalists themselves need to be challenged about the part they play in the bloodshed, inequity and silence that is so often presented as normal.

The public are not the problem. It’s true some people don’t give a damn – but millions do, as I know from the responses to my own films. What people want is to be engaged – a sense that things matter, that nothing is immutable, that unemployment among the young and poverty among the old are both uncivilised and wrong. What terrifies the agents of power is the awakening of people: of public consciousness.

This is already happening in countries in Latin America where ordinary people have discovered a confidence in themselves they did not know existed. We should join them before our own freedom of speech is quietly withdrawn and real dissent is outlawed as the powers of the police are expanded.

“The struggle of people against power, “wrote Milan Kundera, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

In Australia, we have much to be proud of – if only we knew about it and celebrated it. Since Francis McCarty and Mary Palmer landed here, we’ve progressed only because people have spoken out, only because the suffragettes stood up, only because the miners of Broken Hill won the world’s first 35-hour week, only because pensions and a basic wage and child endowment were pioneered in New South Wales.

In my lifetime, we have become one of the most culturally diverse places on earth, and it has happened peacefully, by and large. That is a remarkable achievement – until we look for those whose Australian civilisation has seldom been acknowledged, whose genius for survival and generosity and forgiving have rarely been a source of pride. And yet, they remain, as Henry Reynolds wrote, the whispering in our hearts. For they are what is unique about us.
I believe the key to our self respect -- and our legacy to the next generation -- is the inclusion and reparation of the First Australians. In other words, justice. There is no mystery about what has to be done. The first step is a treaty that guarantees universal land rights and a proper share of the resources of this country.

Only then can we solve, together, issues of health, poverty, housing, education, employment. Only then can we feel a pride that comes not from flags and war. Only then can we become a truly independent nation able to speak out for sanity and justice in the world, and be heard.

Nahida Izzat: Equal Rights for serial killers and their Victims???

Can anyone see some ethical flaws with that?
I have no authority to talk in the name of all Palestinians, but I have previously stated that I DO NOT wish the zionist murderers, those of whom were directly or indirectly involved in massacres, theft of land, subjugation and oppression, to remain in Palestine after its liberation from the occupier, except of course for the very few good people amongst them – as no soul should carry the liability of another.
I reiterate, I do not wish the invader, occupier and criminal racists to stay in Palestine, the land that they have incessantly raped, destroyed and disfigured, nor do I desire them to be my neighbours.
They have shown no respect, no appreciation, and no love to this land or to her people.
They do not deserve to live there.
Many of our supporters freak out upon hearing this declaration of mine, they think that I am becoming an uncaring person, or turning into a radical hardliner; and some curiously and attentively listen, then, timidly and modestly, try to understand.
I will try here to elucidate by asking some simple questions, as to why I think it is unreasonable to make the premises of a JUST SOLUTION dependent upon our acceptance –as Palestinians, of giving the right of permanent residency and equal rights of citizenship to all zionist Jewish occupiers in our stolen land of Palestine.
Here are my questions:

•  Why do our supporters, progressives who advocate a one state solution, keep asking us – Palestinians – to share our land with those who acquired it by theft, military force and murder?
•  Would you share your home with the armed robber who came to steal from you?
• Should a thief get to enjoy the same rights of ownership to materials and assets that he acquired by armed robbery, as the person who was robbed?
• Should a colonialist imperialist occupier regime, who keeps hold of countries by terrorizing the indigenous population and perpetrating endless scores of bloodshed, not be severely sanctioned as legislated wisely by International Law ?
• Should the USA decide to move a few tens of millions of its citizens to Iraq or Afghanistan, confiscate Iraqi lands, give it to those colonizers, then demands that those citizens have equal rights with Iraqis or Afghanis; should we support the equal rights of those colonizers?
•  Should the Algerians have waited for the French occupiers to be magnanimous enough to give them "equal rights”?
•  Would Algeria be to the Algerians today, had they not fought for the liberation of their country against colonial France?
• Under International Law; is an occupying entity entitled to ANY rights whatsoever?
•  Why defend the “right” of the barbaric occupier – who has been engaged in ethnic cleansing and genocide for over six decades, to stay in Palestine after its liberation, and this while keeping land and houses, villages, archaeological treasures, churches and mosques, libraries, they’ve forcibly stolen at gun point?
•  Why imagine that it is unrealistic to return the stolen land and property to its legitimate owners while ignoring its mode of acquisition by zionists?
•  Why instead of defending the right Palestinians to get ALL their country back; including: homes, orchards and land, supporters ask the victims to keep on giving, by the supposition that returning back stolen property creates "another injustice" to the OCCUPIER?
•  Why are we – Palestinians – continuously pressed to accept this scurrilous logic, by our supporters?
•  Are people so naïve that they don't realize that doing so, invariably corresponds in fact to… a full support – quasi unconditional, of the zionist thieves and their ideological core which deems colonising Palestine as a “Divine and historical right” for the Jewish people ?
•  What does the notion of Justice, social responsibility, fair dealing mean if we are to equate criminals with victims in terms of rights to ownership of stolen property?

My logic is simple:
Supporting "equal rights" in which the occupier gets the privilege of staying in the land they’ve looted and destroyed, while keeping hold of the estate of absentees, would mean a grave violation of the fundamentals of ethical foundations of human social interaction.
The message it gives: bullies, criminals, thieves are allowed to get away with MURDER. literally!
It is a carte blanche for bullies to do what they like, steal, kill, colonize, rape, oppress, torture…
Advocating "equal rights" between the criminal and victim, in which the criminal escapes punishment for his crimes, gets to keep stolen lands, while being rewarded by enjoying the fruits of his aggression in terms of total participation in decision and law making in the land he abused, is an assassination of the concept of justice, on which peaceful Civilization is built and needs to prosper.
Furthermore, I reiterate; any future decision on the status of ILLEGAL COLONIZERS in Palestine should be a PALESTINIAN DECISION; they, and ONLY they, can choose whether to allow their tormentors to stay or not.
فليتكَ تحلو والحياةُ مريرة
وليتكَ ترضى والأنامُ غضابُ
ألا ليتَ الذي بيني وبينكَ عامرٌ
وبيني وبينَ العالمينَ خرابُ
إذا صحَّ منكَ الودُ فالكلُ هينٌ
وكلُ الذي فوقَ  الترابِ ترابُ
يارب علمني ان احب الناس كما احب نفسي
وعلمني ان احاسب نفسي كما احاسب الناس
وعلمني ان التسامح هو اكبرمراتب القوة وان
حب الانتقام هو اول مظاهر الضعف
يارب اذا أسأت الى الناس فأعطني شجاعة الإعتذار
وإذا أساء لي الناس فأعطني شجاعة العفو
http://poetryforpalestine.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!92AA638F9B6EA940!5195.entry

PFLP: US is not a mediator but an enemy of the Palestinian people

By Carlos Latuff

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine said on November 3, 2009 that the Palestinian Authority, and all Palestinian parties, must immediately end any and all illusions about the United States or its president, Barack Obama, and instead reject its "negotiations" based on surrender and rely on the Palestinian people and their resistance, unity and national rights.
Comrade Rayya Amin, of the Information Office of the PFLP, said that it must be abundantly clear that Barack Obama is nothing more than U.S. imperialism in new packaging, saying that the United States is an enemy of the Palestinian people and the Arab people, and all progressive and peoples' forces in the world. Comrade Amin stressed that the policy of the United States had not changed in any way, and was engaged in the same strategic alliance with Zionism and conquest of the Arab world that has always determined its actions. She demanded that the PA and all Palestinian, Arab and progressive forces cast aside any and all illusions about Obama and "change" and instead struggle to confront U.S. imperialism and the occupation.
Comrade Dr. Maher al-Taher, member of the PFLP and leader of its branch in exile, said that the U.S. administration is entirely hostile to the Palestinian people and has put all of its efforts into trying to force us to surrender by calling upon Palestinians to enter into unconditional "negotiations" with the occupier, recognizing none of the national rights of the Palestinian people.
Comrade Taher emphasized that the U.S. call for the resumption of so-called negotiations means that the U.S. wants to provide a Palestinian cover of surrender for the ongoing aggression of the Zionist enemy and its policies of Zionization of Jerusalem, escalation of settlement and land confiscation, and present a false image to the world of a "peace process". He said that the occupation wants a so-called "peace process" on the basis of force and intimidation, and said that there can be no "peace" with this enemy. Furthermore, said Comrade Taher, the only road forward for Palestinians is to continue the resistance, end internal division, and unite Palestinian ranks through the reconstruction of the Palestine Liberation Organization on clear national principles and rejecting the entire project of "political settlement" and "negotiations" under the auspices of the United States.
He emphasized that the U.S. is not an "honest broker," nor "neutral," but is instead a hostile party against Palestinian, Arab and Muslim interests and must be dealt with on that basis. He denounced the Netanyahu strategy of so-called "economic peace," noting that he wants to pay for Palestinian surrender with donor funds while continuing settlements, land confiscation, home demolitions and the imprisonment of thousands of Palestinian political prisoners while denying the Palestinian right to return or ending the occupation, and noted that the U.S. is involved in a direct partnership with Netanyahu in denying Palestinian national rights.
Comrade Jamil Mizher, member of the Central Committee of the PFLP, demanded that the Palestinian Authority end its reliance on the U.S. administration and President Barack Obama, saying that all must instead rely on the Palestinian people and uniting our forces in order to confront the occupation.
In an interview with Al-Jazeera Forum on November 2, 2009, Comrade Mizher described the U.S. position approving of Zionist settlements as "scandalous," and demanded that all forms of direct and indirect negotiations with the occupation be immediately ended. He said that all Palestinian and Arab illusions about Obama must be discarded immediately, and that anyone who claims to speak on behalf of the Palestinian people must instead rely on Palestinian national rights and requirements. Furthermore, he called for an end to official Arab silence and complicity with the U.S./Israeli attacks on Palestinian rights, emphasizing the need for popular Arab pressure to support Palestinian resistance.
Comrade Abu Ahmad Fouad, member of the Political Bureau of the PFLP, reacted to the U.S. Congress' official denunciation of the Goldstone Report on war crimes in Gaza on November 3, 2009 by denouncing the Congressional resolution and affirming that this only makes yet more clear that there should be absolutely no illusions about the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama. Comrade Fouad said that this once again reaffirms that there is no change whatsoever in U.S. policy toward the Arab-Zionist conflict, or its policy that supports the Zionist entity and all of its crimes and massacres against the Palestinian people.
Comrade Fouad said that the congressional resolution, House Resolution 867, comes on the heels of the announcement of Obama's Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, a few days ago that the fascist Zionist regime of Netanyahu was making "unprecedented concessions," stating the US' support for its settlement and land confiscation program, as well as the enemy's actions in Jerusalem and at Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Comrade Fouad denounced the warm reception Clinton met in Arab capitals while she affirmed the U.S. support for unlimited Zionist expansionism and attacks on the Palestinian people's rights, and stressed that these positions "are and always have been the real position of the Obama administration, and any postures to the contrary are nothing more than smokescreens to mislead Arabs and Palestinians."
He said further that the primary objective of Clinton's visit was to support Israel while promoting deceit about "peace" and "negotiations", but made it clear that the U.S. position is fully aligned with the Zionist policy of aggression, colonization and Zionization before the eyes and ears of the world.
Comrade Fouad commented also on recent joint military exercises between the U.S. and Israel, noting that the U.S. war machine is a full partner in Israeli state terror, recalling the comments of the commander of the U.S. naval ship, the USS Higgins, that the "defense" of Haifa is the same as the "defense" of San Diego, California.
source: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=59730

Give up on Obama, Disband the Palestinian Authority

 By Sami Jamil Jadallah
The issue of continuing and expanding Jewish settlements came back to haunt the Palestinian leadership that negotiated Oslo and continued to negotiate with Israel for the last 16 years while Israeli continued to build and expand its settlements, not to mention building the Apartheid Wall.

Now 16 years later finally the Palestinian leadership discovered there is a problem with the Jewish settlements. One has to wonder why did Arafat continue to negotiate with Israel while Israeli continued with its settlement program? And why did Abbas continue to negotiate with Netanyahu predecessor Olmert while Olmert continued with his settlement program not to mention his on War on Gaza?
There is something fundamentally wrong with this Palestinian leadership that accepted, and for so long, Israel’s settlements policy that saw settlements expand 150% since Oslo, while we hear nothing but lip service and denunciation from Ramallah, while it continues to deal with Israel business as usual.
Of course we do understand this leadership that lead the Palestinian people from one failure to another, from one disaster to another continues to proceed with its Oslo policies even though those policies simply failed to make a difference for the millions under occupation. Of course Oslo made a big and substantial difference to the leadership and its army of do-nothing functionaries.
The statement of Hillary Clinton that Israel made “unprecedented concessions” on the issue of settlements should be a red flag for the Palestinian leadership that America under Barack Obama is no different from America under George Bush and that peace in the Middle East is not an international issue but strictly a domestic issue. The Palestinian leadership has to come to terms with and has to understand that the powerful American Jewish leadership and community will never, ever allow any US president to proceed and make serious efforts in making peace possible in the Middle East. Peace is never in the interest of this leadership and community.
The shifting sands are not in the Middle East, the shifting sands are in Washington, with President Barack Obama under tremendous domestic pressure from the American Jewish leadership and community to simply give up on his commitments to make peace possible. Instead this leadership and community wants and is demanding President Barack Obama manage the conflict but not solve it. Hence the backtracking on the issue of settlements as illegal and obstacle to peace.
Of course Bibi Netanyahu is challenging the Palestinian leadership to start the negotiations without pre-conditions and as he stated “the Palestinians have been negotiating for the last 16 years while Israel was building the settlements why stop negotiating now?" And yes, perhaps Bibi Netanyahu is correct; why stop negotiating now? This is the question the Palestinian leadership must answer and now.
If the Palestinians and the leadership are counting on the US and the Obama administration to deliver peace or deliver Israel to withdraw and ends its occupation they better think twice. Now and for the foreseeable future there is no US president who can muster the courage to stand up to the powerful, vengeful and harmful American Jewish leadership and community. Peace for Israel, peace in the Middle East, ending the longest occupation in modern times will undermine the power and influence of this leadership and community, and its is not about to give all that up, even it means tens of thousands of lives are lost on both sides.
Now the Palestinian leadership has to understand that the people are fed with a dialed and inept leadership, fed up with the same excuses, fed up with everything that comes out of Ramallah and for that matter out of Gaza or Damascus. The people are fed up with the Oslo Team continuing to manage the Jewish Occupation as if there are no expanding settlements, as if there are no demolition of homes, as if there is no Apartheid Wall, as if there is no ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Jerusalem, as if there are no 650 security checkpoints and expanding, as if there are no targeted assassinations. The people are fed with up the Ramallah negotiation team, fed up with Hamas stupid rockets and claims of effective armed resistance, fed up with Hamas, with Fatah and fed up with the PLO and the same leadership that failed them for so long. The Oslo Team that managed the Jewish Occupation since Oslo must close shop and close today before tomorrow.
We all know this is rather a difficult decision to make, not because it is the right thing to do, or because it is in the best interest of the people, no, because such a decision to close down Oslo Shop has so much implication for the rights, benefits privileges and personal financial interest of a leadership and a team that are direct beneficiaries of the continuing Jewish Occupation. Oslo was a bonanza.
Senior members will have to give up very expensive multi-million dollar villas, give up fleet of cars for them and members of their families, give up all the personal security guards and armed escorts, give up their Israeli issued VIP cards, give up on evenings in posh Tel-Aviv restaurants and night clubs, give up on business interests with the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli Occupations. They simply have to give up salaries and benefits in the 6 digits figures. They have to give up all of this. Of course, tens of thousands of Fatah members also have to give up salaries paid directly by the PA since it is doubtful if Israel will keep them on its payroll. Members of Hamas will also have to give up similar privileges if Oslo closes shop.
There is no other choice but to disband the Palestinian Authority and to call Oslo null and void since Israel never had any intention to give up the Occupation, give up on settlements and was only interested in a Palestinian partner that can manage the Occupation but not deliver on ending the Occupation. The Road Map was a dead end to start with designed to allow Israel to continue with its Occupation. The Palestinian Authority and the PLO must stop being the manager of the Jewish Occupation and must stop begging for funds to fund the Jewish Occupation; time to let Israel pay for its own occupation.
Mahmoud Abbas should take the first flight to New York and demand to speak before the UN General Assembly and there and then announce the disbanding of the Palestinian Authority and asking the United Nations to take over managing the Jewish Occupation from the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization. That step will make ending the Jewish Occupation not an American domestic issue but an international issue as well. The US and especially the Obama administration must then make up its mind whether it wants to manage the conflict to appease the powerful American Jewish leadership and community or it wants to end this conflict and do what is right, the only right thing to do, ending the Jewish Occupation that lasted for some 43 years. The Arabs also have a right to know where the Obama administration stands on ending the Jewish Occupation.
source: http://www.jeffersoncorner.com/give-up-on-obama-disband-the-palestinian-authority/

No nation can liberate another by Malalai Joya

http://socialistworker.org/2009/11/03/no-nation-can-liberate-another

Speech: Malalai Joya

November 3, 2009

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Malalai Joya is known around the world as a courageous opponent of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, the corrupt regime presided over by President Hamid Karzai--and the Taliban and other conservative Islamist forces battling U.S. and Afghan government troops.
An uncompromising fighter for women's rights, Joya was elected to parliament in 2005, where she denounced the presence of representatives who she called "warlords" and "war criminals." In 2007, she was suspended on the grounds that she had "insulted" fellow members. An international solidarity campaign has rallied support for her.
Joya has been the target of assassination attempts and must travel in Afghanistan with armed bodyguards, wearing a burqa as a disguise. She has written a new book about her life, A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice [1].
As the first stop on a speaking tour of the U.S., Malalai Joya was the featured speaker on a panel discussion at the Northeast Socialist Conference in New York City on October 23. Introducing her were several American opponents of the U.S. war on Afghanistan, including Iraq Veterans Against the War member Mathis Chiroux. Here, we print edited excerpts from Joya's speech.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

GOOD EVENING, everyone. First of all, let me thank the International Socialist Organization, which invited me here and gave me this opportunity to talk about the ongoing disaster in my country, and about the activities of the so-called "war on terror" by the U.S. and NATO--which is not a war on terror, but a war on innocent civilians.
And let me thank our dear brother Mathis. We are so proud of you, Mathis. I am short of words on behalf of my people to express my feeling to Mathis and the many Mathises and all of you who will not leave us alone in this disastrous situation. By your support, you give us more determination and courage, and hopes that will not sit silent.
I will never forget the first time that I met Mathis--it gave me that much hope in the meantime. Like now, Mathis was talking, and I couldn't control my tears, because he was apologizing to me for the war crimes of the U.S. government. I said no, it is your government that must first of all apologize to democratic people like you, for deceiving you and sending you to war in my country. And not only in my country, but Iraq--and today, as one of our friends mentioned, what they are going to do in Pakistan by drone attacks.
I said to Mathis that they first of all must apologize to you, the democratic people of United States, and especially to the troops, because they are the victims of a wrong policy of their government--they have been sent for a bad cause, for war.
Democracy never comes by gun. Democracy never comes by cluster bomb. Democracy never comes by war.
I hope that we will have more brothers like Mathis, who will stand up and refuse to go to war in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, the United States occupies these two countries, and especially in my country, it is under the banner of woman rights and democracy.
It is even worse than Iraq. Why? Because they brought into power a photocopy of the Taliban, with a mask of democracy, and a suit and tie. But do not believe it. They are still deceiving people around the world. They are responsible for the current disaster in Afghanistan. They are the foreign masters, the U.S. government and its allies in NATO. And now they are going to negotiate with the Taliban.
I have a lot to say about the ongoing disaster in my country, and I can talk for hours about how much this means, the actions of Mathis and the many Mathises. Mathis, you said I am a hero, but you are our hero. We really love you, and my people hope one day that we will see you in my country--in a democratic Afghanistan. This is my dream for the future of Afghanistan.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THERE IS a famous saying: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Your international solidarity is key. As always, nations are separate from the policymakers. It is the governments that are committing these war crimes. They are betraying democracy, women's rights and human rights, and they are betraying the truth. The mainstream media is still trying to throw dust in the eyes of democrat people around the world.
You know what your government is doing now? They have put a soft name on the Taliban, these terrorist people, to bring them into power as well. Mullah Omar--this fascist man, this dinosaur--is not in power, and neither is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, but they want to bring them into power to complete the circle of warlordism and drug lordism and terrorism in my country.
The U.S. is occupying my country and making a military base there. They are not leaving my country because of their strategy and policies. They don't care about the wishes of my people--how much they are fed up by the situation. Now, my people are sandwiched between two powerful enemies.
Democracy is the alternative for the future of Afghanistan. But there are still many risks for us. Those who tell the truth, those who stand and praise the war against injustice, insecurity and occupation receive death threats. They get killed or they have to leave Afghanistan. The first casualty is the truth.
Let me say a few things about the role of troops first, since now Obama wants to surge with more troops in Afghanistan. His foreign policy is quite similar to the wrong policy of the Bush administration. It's even worse--according to officials statistics, even more civilians have been killed than during the same time period under Bush.
The worst massacre in Afghanistan from September 11 to now happened during the presidency of Obama. In May, in Farah province, a bombing killed 150 civilians, most of them women and children. They were even using white phosphorus and cluster bombs. On September 9, a bombing in Kunduz province--you may have heard about this through the media--killed 200 civilians, and again, most of them women and children.
Then, after all these crimes, White House says it apologizes, and Karzai's government--this puppet regime--says thank you. That's it. My people are so fed up that they want an end of the occupation--the end of this so-called war on terror--as soon as possible. As long as these troops are in Afghanistan, the worse the war will be. Through the mainstream media, they are telling you and democratic people around the world that civil war will happen if the U.S. withdraws, but nobody is talking about civil war today.
Eight years ago, the U.S. and its allies invaded Afghanistan under the banner of women's rights. Today, the situation for women--half of the population of the country--is hell in most of the provinces. Killing a woman is as easy as killing a horse. A few days before I come here, in Sar-e Pol province in the north of Afghanistan, a 5-year-old girl was kidnapped and killed. The rape of women and kidnapping and acid attacks--all of this violence is increasing rapidly, even at historical levels. And all of these crimes are happening in the name of democracy, women's rights and human rights.
I'm saying that as long as these warlords are in power along with these occupation forces, there is no hope to make positive changes in the lives of the men and women of my country.
It's not only women who are suffering. If I talked only about conditions for women, it would be all morning, but I wouldn't even be finished. All of this shocking news that the media never even gives to the people around the world. Women don't even have a human life.
But today, women and men don't have liberation. Millions of Afghans suffer from injustice, insecurity, corruption, joblessness, etc. Your government says that it sent troops there so that girls can go to school, but according to official figures from the government, more than 600 schools have been closed. When the girls go to school, they throw acid on their faces.
I think education is important--very important in my country. I always say that it's the key to our emancipation. But security is more important than food and water. They keep the situation dangerous like this so they can stay longer in Afghanistan because of their strategy and policies.
To know more about the deep tragedy of Afghanistan, during these eight years, they changed my country to the capital of the center of drug trade.
Today, 93 percent of opium produced in the world is from Afghanistan. The brother of Hamid Karzai, Ahmed Wali Karzai, is a famous drug trafficker, as the New York Times recently wrote. Through dirty business of opium, every year, $500 million goes into the pocket of Taliban alone. And since 2001, there has been a 4,500 percent increase in opium. If the U.S. government don't stop this wrong policy, the drugs will find their way onto streets of New York, and destroy the life of youth here as well.
Another example of the catastrophic situation of my country is that a few days ago, the United Nations human development index ranked Afghanistan 181st out of 182 countries. This is a country where the government received $36 billion over the past years, according to official reports. Where did that money go? Into pockets of warlords and drug lords--these criminals and misogynists.
Today, 18 million people of my country live on less $2 a day. Mothers in Herat and Ghor provinces are ready to sell their babies for $10 because they cannot feed them. And this is another example of many shocking examples that never made it to mainstream media.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
MY PEOPLE are caught now between two powerful enemies, and they are being crushed. From the sky, the bombs of the occupation forces are falling, killing civilians. And on the ground, there is the Taliban, and also these warlords. So we have three kinds of enemies. But the withdrawal of one enemy--these U.S. occupation forces whose government sends them for war, and that also supports the corrupt mafia system of Hamid Karzai with more money and guys--will make it much easier to fight the enemies that are left.
I promise I will never be tired as long as war is in Afghanistan as well as in other countries--what is going on in Iraq, in Burma, in Pakistan, in Palestine. The list can be longer. No nation can bring liberation to another nation. These are nations that can liberate themselves. The nations that pose themselves as liberators to others will lead them into slavery. What we have experienced in Afghanistan and in Iraq prove this point.
If the U.S. and its allies let us have a little bit of space and peace, then we know what to do with our destiny. The people of Afghanistan don't want occupation. They need honest support, they need educational support, they need your powerful voice--which means, first of all, international solidarity against the warmongers of your government.
Regarding Barack Obama, and the Nobel Peace Prize, they are giving the Peace Prize to the president of war--who is carrying out war in Afghanistan, in Iraq and in Pakistan, and is also supporting the criminal regime of Israel and what is going on today in Palestine. Many heroes and heroines are risking their lives and doing a lot for peace, but nobody knows their name. They must be nominated for the prize. I think the question for Obama is, so far after nine months, what did he do for piece that he received this Nobel Peace Prize?
And in such a disastrous situation, they are talking about so-called democratic elections. I think you would agree with us that an election under the shadow of guns, warlordism, drug lordism, awful corruption and occupation forces has no legitimacy at all. There's a famous saying that it's not important who's voting, it's important who is counting. That's our problem. Some democrats ran for the election in Afghanistan, but all the ballot boxes are in the hands of mafia. They betrayed the vote of my people.
Before the results of the election, people in my country discussed among each other that the result is like the same donkey--hopefully, I won't be insulting to donkeys--but with a new saddle. Everyone knows that winner of the election will be picked by the White House.
There's a huge difference between the presidential election and the parliamentary and provincial elections. For the parliamentary election, we have some chance for democrats to run, and that is my message to my people. If a few of us are allowed, it's good to be in these national bodies to be a small voice of our people. As I experienced, in this parliament, I said it was worse than animals--that it's like a zoo. These criminals told me that I must apologize for this comment. I said that I must say apologize to the tanimals that I insult.
Don't misunderstand--in our parliament, we have a few democrats, men and women. Unfortunately, you can count them very quickly, but it's good to be the voice of the people. But for the presidential election, we have one choice--the person who will be the next puppet.
Do not be deceived with this melodrama of a so-called democratic election--I think it's the most ridiculous election anywhere in the world. They spent $250 million for the election while people do not have enough food to eat. Less than 10 percent of people participated in the election. And now they want to waste more money. That's why we believe that your government and NATO are wasting taxpayer money and the blood of your soldiers in Afghanistan by supporting such a terrorist.
I gave only a few examples of the disastrous situation of my country. I'm saying that my people can liberate themselves. But we need your helping hand. As always, I again stress that we separate people from the -policy makers of their government. We are honored that we have the support of democratic-minded and peace-loving people in the U.S. But we need more of your solidarity and support for our country.
Let me conclude my speech with a quote from Bertolt Brecht, who said that "Those who struggle may fail, but those who do not struggle have already failed." Thanks a lot for your solidarity and support.
Transcription by Christine Darosa

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Material on this Web site is licensed by SocialistWorker.org, under a Creative Commons (by-nc-nd 3.0) [2] license, except for articles that are republished with permission. Readers are welcome to share and use material belonging to this site for non-commercial purposes, as long as they are attributed to the author and SocialistWorker.org.

1. [1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FWoman-Among-Warlords-Extraordinary-Afghan%2Fdp%2F143910946X%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1257101246%26sr%3D8-1&tag=socialistwork-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325
2. [2] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0

Cuba: UN for the 18th consecutive year demands end to US blockade

General Assembly GA/10877

Department of Public Information • News and Media Division • New York

UN General Assembly, for 18th consecutive year, overwhelmingly calls for end to the US economic, trade embargo against Cuba

Vote: 187 in favour to 3 against, with 2 abstentions;

Even though many delegates expressed a newfound optimism that United States-Cuba relations could improve with the change of Administration in Washington, the United Nations General Assembly today once again adopted a stern resolution calling on the United States to end a trade embargo, which had created human suffering and wrecked havoc with the economy of the island nation.

With a recorded vote of 187 in favour to 3 against (Israel, United States and Palau), and 2 abstentions (Federated States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands), the 192-Member Assembly in its resolution urged the lifting of stiff commercial, financial and economic sanctions that were slapped on Cuba in the aftermath of the cold war.  This marked the eighteenth year the world body had adopted a similar resolution on the issue.  (See Annex.)

As happened last year, a burst of applause greeted the Assembly’s passage of text that reaffirmed the sovereign equality of States, the non-intervention and non-interference in their affairs, and the freedom of international trade and navigation.  The two-page document again called upon all States to refrain from promulgating and applying laws and measures such as that promulgated in the 1996 “Helms-Burton Act” which carried extraterritorial effects that impacted the sovereignty of other States.

Introducing the resolution on the Cuban trade embargo, Bruno Rodriguez Parrila, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Cuba, called the blockade an “uncultured act of arrogance” that had hampered the development of Cuba’s economy and was also applied to other countries that wanted to carry out business with the Caribbean nation.  He said it was an “absurd policy” that caused suffering and led to shortages of basic necessities.  The embargo was a massive, flagrant and systematic violation of human rights.  In the Geneva Convention of 1948, it was classified as an act of genocide, he added.

With executive powers, President Obama had an historical opportunity to lead a policy change and lift the blockade.  He was vested with the executive powers to substantially modify the implementation of the measures by granting “special license” or waivers, making humanitarian exceptions, or acting for the sake of the United States national interests.

Speaking ahead of the vote, the United States’ representative said “here we go again”.  The Cuban Government’s hostile language seemed straight out of the cold war and the United States would not respond in kind to such familiar rhetoric.  She would, however, acknowledge “a new chapter to this old story”.  In recent months, the United States had taken several steps to reach out to Cubans to help ensure they could freely determine their country’s future.  Like all countries, the United States had the sovereign right to conduct economic relations with another country as it saw fit, and the embargo was part of a broader set of relations.

She drew attention to distortions in the Cuban position and said she regretted that Cuba continued to incorrectly label trade restrictions as an act of “genocide.”  It was equally erroneous to charge that sanctions were the cause of Cuba’s deprivation.  The United States maintained no restrictions on humanitarian aid -- it was the largest provider of food to Cuba and exported other items like wood and medicine.  Given that scenario, she called on Cuba to take steps to respond to the desire of its citizens to enjoy social, political and economic freedoms.

ANNEX

Vote on Necessity of Ending the Embargo against Cuba

The draft resolution on the necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba (document A/64/L.4) was adopted by a recorded vote of 187 in favour to 3 against, with 2 abstentions, as follows:

In favour:  Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Belize, Benin, Bhutan, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei Darussalam, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Canada, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Chile, China, Colombia, Comoros, Congo, Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire, Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Denmark, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Fiji, Finland, France, Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kiribati, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Latvia, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Malta, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mexico, Monaco, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nauru, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Republic of Korea, Republic of Moldova, Romania, Russian Federation, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, San Marino, Sao Tome and Principe, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, Somalia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Timor-Leste, Togo, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Tuvalu, Uganda, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United Republic of Tanzania, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Venezuela, Viet Nam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

Against:  Israel, Palau, United States.

Abstain:  Marshall Islands, Micronesia (Federated States of).

Absent:  None.

South Africa: ‘The African Communist': 50 years of mobilisation, analysis by Blade Nzimande

By Blade Nzimande

October 26, 2009 -- A browse through the very first edition of the African Communist in 1959 not only gives an insight into the time and context during which it was launched but also the courageous and defiant character of those who breathed life into our historic journal.

This magazine, the African Communist, has been started by a group of Marxist-Leninists in Africa, to defend and spread the inspiring and liberating ideas of Communism in our great Continent, and to apply the brilliant scientific method of Marxism to the solution of its problems.
It is being produced in conditions of great difficulty and danger. Nevertheless we mean to go on publishing it, because we know that Africa needs Communist thought, as dry and thirsty soil needs rain.

These conditions of "great difficulty and danger" developed as a result of the banning of the Communist Party of South Africa in 1950 and its underground reconstitution as the South African Communist Party in 1953.
Born of struggle: The political origins of the African Communist
Veteran comrades tell of the fierce behind the scenes debate at the time about whether the reconstitution of the party should have been publicly announced. Those who argued against the public declaration worried that it would jeopardise and raise suspicions about the motives of known communists in the trade union movement, in the African National Congress (ANC) and the congress alliance. It is ironic that even now, 50 years later, the tendency to ring alarm bells about the motives of communists has not dissipated; albeit now this view reinforced by a creeping and dangerous intersection between holding of public office and business interests. All this proves is that our Alliance [between the South African Communist Party (SACP), the ANC and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU)] has stood the test of time.
Those who wanted the reconstituted party to be publicly announced, argued that this would be a necessary act of defiance and would give confidence to existing communists that they still had a political home. It would also allow for ease in the recruitment of new members into the underground.     
True to the robust character of the SACP, the debate raged for many years until in 1959 the publication of the African Communist symbolised a compromise. It was decided that a journal would be published as a forum for Marxist-Leninist thought in Africa, but not as an official publication of the now reconstituted SACP, as it indeed was.
Although it was launched in trying conditions and faced severe restrictions, the African Communist, which was produced in London, was from the outset bold and forthright. Under the heading "Why they hate communism", an editorial in that historic first issue in part read as follows:

It is no accident that the first thing the Nationalist Government did, when it took power in 1948, was to outlaw Communism. They banned the Communist Party, which for thirty years had led the people in struggles for freedom and equality. Hundreds of Communists have been banned and banished, driven out of their jobs, forbidden on pain of jail to go to meetings or take any part in political and trade union movements.
Yet, belief in Communism lives on in South Africa. It is spreading throughout the Continent, although every day it is denounced and attacked by agents of United States, British, French, Portuguese, and Belgian imperialism.
They hate Communism because they know that the Communists are the bravest, most clear-headed and incorruptible leaders in the people's struggle against imperialism, for freedom and equality. They know that once the African workers and peasants have mastered the great ideas of Communism, nothing will stop them in their onward march to freedom, independence and socialism.

African revolution not ‘renaissance'
That first edition of the African Communist pioneered the idea of an African revolution saying the peoples of the continent needed the "liberating spirit of Communism" in order to be free of the forces of imperialism. It is a point worth noting that the founders spoke of an African "revolution" not an African "Renaissance". They wanted an uprising which was rooted in African realities not a conversion which copied the European Renaissance.  
The heroic contribution of SACP freedom fighters to the liberation struggle will perhaps never be completely documented and understood, particularly by future generations. One of their greatest achievements was to enrich political discourse through published material and to lead and develop public debate in the movement. While the struggle against racial discrimination defined the liberation struggle, a succession of SACP leaders promoted an understanding of the class struggle, and the intersection between racial and class divides and struggles in South African society. The African Communist was one of the mediums which reflected and supported years of fearless political activism and thinking through examining topical issues of the time from a communist perspective.
The pioneering role of communists on progressive media in South Africa
The SACP is proud of its role promoting and cultivating progressive media in South Africa. Umsebenzi (The Worker) played a pioneering role in the late 1920s and early 1930s as a platform for internal and external communication for the working class.
The apartheid machinery did its damnest to restrict, ban or close publications, and in so doing constrain the flow of information and political knowledge in South Africa. Lobbies for censorship can be traced back to at least 1898 in the Cape but the rise to power of the Nationalist Party government in 1948 ushered in unprecedented degrees of censorship. Over the next 37 years, more than 100 laws restricting the flow of information wiped away all semblance of press freedom.   
But an array of brave and heroic journalists kept the spirit alive through publications such as New Nation, Weekly Mail, Vrye Weekblad, South, New African, Injula and Speak. Despite having limited resources and in the face of constant harassment by the apartheid regime, they displayed tenacity, courage and resourcefulness. These publications played an invaluable role in exposing the horrors of the regime and telling "the other side of the story". It is one of the tragedies of our past that not one of these publications still exists to tell the story of this phase of our history. In their place are, at best, poor cousins of those valiant publications, pandering to special, narrow and commercial interests.
During the liberation struggle, there was recognition within the movement that an integral part of defiance and mobilisation against apartheid was through the promotion and sustenance of media publications. Work in Progress, for instance, was a progressive publication, produced from 1977 to 1994 and founded by University of Witwatersrand postgraduate students. Under trying conditions, the African Communist was also kept alive as an internal theoretical journal of the SACP, and in 1990 moved to South Africa where it took on a new role during the transition phase and democratic era.
It is also important that at this stage we must note the fact that for the entire existence of both the ANC and the SACP, (white-owned) colonial and bourgeois media, which has been the mainstream media for more than a century, has always been against the national liberation movement. Prior to 1994 it acted as the mouthpiece of the white bourgeoisie and the apartheid state, and since 1994 has generally acted as part of the array of forces in opposition to the national liberation movement.
In the course of its vehement opposition to the national liberation movement, the colonial and bourgeois mainstream media has consistently supported and praised all the factions that have sought to undermine the national liberation movement and its alliance components and formations. For example, when the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) broke away from the ANC in 1958, it was praised by the media as the more genuine representative of the oppressed majority, in the same way as the Group of 8, the UDM and now COPE [Congress of the People] have been championed as better organisations than the ANC and the Alliance.
Similarly, the enthusiastic manner in which a publication like the Mail and Guardian has prominently published sinister and opportunistic attacks on the SACP and COSATU by essentially what are elements of the emerging black sections of the bourgeoisie and other compradorial elements on the October 9, 2009, are nothing but a reflection of this continuous attacks of bourgeois media on progressive policies of our movement.
As has always been the case, colonial and bourgeois media have always found useful idiots to advance their agenda, even within the ranks of our own movement. It was also these tendencies that the very first edition of the African Communist referred to; highlighting the fact that imperialism often succeeds under conditions where it also fosters its own local compradorial elites, by also projecting them favourably in their own media. It is precisely for these reasons that publications like the African Communist are important in exposing this agenda whilst simultaneously being a platform for deepening a working class led national democratic revolution.
The African Communist as a platform for debates on the national democratic revolution and the struggle for socialism
Since its launch, the African Communist became a leading platform for debate on current and controversial issues. The July/August edition of 1962 talks of its reception around the world and how the first special edition in French made a favourable impression in French-speaking parts of Africa. An editorial on the success of the AC read as follows:

Since its first publication, at the end of 1959, The African Communist has met with, and continues to find, a warm, indeed a glowing reception, not only in all parts of Africa, but in many other parts of the world. Articles from our magazine have been reprinted in British, Canadian and United States publications; they have been translated and published in Arabic, Russian, Chinese and other languages. The British monthly, Marxism Today, in its issue of April, 1962, says, "We would like warmly to greet and pay tribute to our colleague The African Communist," and proceeds to give its readers a detailed survey of the contents of our issue No. 8. In the same month, the French journal De'mocratie Nouvelle, reprinting the article on South African racialism by Toussaint from our French language special edition, lists the contents of this edition and offers to make copies available to its readers on request.
For this continuing success we who, under severe difficulties, produce this journal owe most of all to you, our readers, who continue to write in from every part of Africa and many other parts of the world, encouraging and inspiring us in our work.

The recognition of our journal in the communist world as a formidable medium for Marxist/Leninist thought and debate was also illustrated through the extension of an invitation by the editor of the distinguished Soviet publication Pravda, for a representative of the African Communist to attend its 50th anniversary celebrations.
All this coincided with the program of the SACP in 1962 The Road to South African Freedom which first introduced the concept of "colonialism of a special type" as the most appropriate characterisation of South Africa, a colony where both the coloniser and colonised shared the same territory.
The 1962 program will perhaps go down in history as one of the SACP's most significant programs in shaping and defining both the character and tasks of the South African revolution. This program firmly emphasised the need to unite all the oppressed whilst simultaneously defining the leading role of the working class in the national liberation struggle.
The imprisonment of many of our freedom fighters in the 1960s including Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Bram Fischer, Ahmed Kathrada, Elias Motsoaledi and many others, and the harassment of those who operated in the underground, led to a challenging and dark period in the struggle for liberation with a visible stagnation in the revolution. In 1970, an augmented central committee of the SACP issued a call to the South African people that reignited the spirit of defiance and mass struggle. "Freedom Can Be Won" was circulated illegally inside the country and reproduced in the African Communist. The call to action then included the following:

Today at this critical time, the Communist Party calls on you. It calls on all South Africans who love their country and who love freedom. We call upon the workers and the people in the countryside. We call upon the African people, the Coloured people, the Indians and the democratic elements among the whites.
Let us build up our people's organisations, in town and country, in factories, mines and villages.
Let us unite for the fight to end the shame and suffering of white minority rule: headed by the Nazi Nationalist Party.
Let us resolve that the beginning of the seventies will put an end to white South Africa and mark the beginning of People's South Africa advancing towards socialism.
The armed groups of Umkhonto we Sizwe are ready to enter the fight. But they cannot fight alone.
The people must act!
They must build and support their illegal organisations. The ANC: the trade unions and the Communist Party.
They must act militantly for higher wages, land and freedom.
They must arouse the spirit of resistance and defiance.
They must arm themselves.
The war of national liberation is on and we must fight it to the finish.
Victory or death!

The people of South Africa responded and with the working class in the lead, three years later South Africa was rocked by the 1973 Durban strikes that laid the foundation for the internal rebuilding of a progressive trade union movement. Six years later, the Soweto students' uprisings, spreading into many parts of our country, indeed changed the course of history. The African Communist was able to analyse the uprising and provide an understanding of the mood and circumstances of the time.
The African Communist was also central in debates around the formation of COSATU, particularly the two strands of thinking at the time about its nature and character. It was able to examine the thinking within FOSATU which was at its formation dominated by a workerist tendency, as well as the push for a revolutionary trade union movement aligned to the Congress movement. In this way, the African Communist guided debates and analysis as COSATU took shape and deepened working-class struggles in the workplace.
Over the years, the African Communist became the only published platform of major Alliance discussions, among the most notable was the debate on the "sunset clauses" during the transition period in the early 1990s.
Post 1994, it remained a major carrier of central committee discussion documents and political reports of the SACP. It led the debates and analyses on amongst other things, the dangers associated with access to state power without a mobilised working class, undertook the most thorough critiques of the ill-advised GEAR [the ANC's neoliberal econmic] policy and attempts on wholesale privatisation of state-owned enterprises, and properly grasped the weakness and what is to be done on what we now refer to as the 1996 class project.
The following 10 years after the adoption of GEAR our Alliance relations turned for the worst perhaps in its entire existence. But what our detractors, both inside and outside our movement, do not fully appreciate has been the role of our publications, especially Umsebenzi and the African Communist in keeping us focused, deepened the SACP's and broader working-class ideological coherence, and clearly defined the revolutionary line of march for our country. Due to resource and other constraints, we did not publish all editions in each year as planned, but the African Communist continues to be an important weapon in the struggle to deepen, advance and consolidate the national democratic revolution.
Then, in November 2007, the African Communist published an open letter from the SACP to the ANC membership titled: "We can't go on like this... together, let's make sure things change". The concluding paragraph read:

The SACP calls on fellow ANC members -- together, let us rise to the challenge of the ANC 52nd National Conference. Together, let us re-build an ANC and an alliance of which cdes Albert Luthuli, Moses Kotane, O.R. Tambo, Walter Sisulu, Chris Hani could be truly proud. That historic responsibility is now in our collective hands.

As with the call to action in 1970, the spirit of this letter resonated and indeed we are pleased that the ANC delegates to the Polokwane [national] conference grasped the moment and reclaimed the ANC, and indeed our alliance, back to the control of their organisation from the clutches of the 1996 class project [the victory of Jacob Zuma's supporters over those of Thabo Mbeki]. We will forever be proud of the contribution of the SACP, together with others, in effecting this turnaround. True to our historic role, we will continue to stand as the vanguard of the working class and not be cowed by attacks by those who seek to reinvent the 1996 class project in our ranks, mainly guided by narrow class interests. The African Communist will continue to re-affirm the truism that there is no contradiction between the multi-class character of our movement and the working-class bias of the ANC.
One of the greatest achievements of our 50-year-old journal, the African Communist was that it developed and encouraged writing and analytical talent over the decades of its existence. In so doing, it has become a major resource for analysis of the challenges we have overcome and continue to face. In keeping the African Communist alive, we need to promote writing particularly among young communist cadres and provide a platform for new ideas and debates.
As we celebrate the remarkable milestone of our journal, we need to ensure the sustenance and development of publications which counter the proliferation and influence of bourgeois media. South Africa has been ideologically suffocated by a mainstream media which remains out of touch with the masses of our people.
Therefore publications such as the African Communist, Umsebenzi, Umrabulo, the Shopsteward and others remain important platforms to provide information, knowledge and timely analysis of political developments and working-class struggles in our country and in the world.
In advancing some of our recent perspectives and analyses, and enriching Marxism-Leninism in Africa, especially when we talk about the ``1996 class project'', a ``compradorial BEE [black empowerment program]', etc., some of our detractors claim that theAfrican Communist, if not the SACP, has substituted labels for analysis. Nothing can be further from the truth, as such concepts are not labels but actually capture the evolving class struggles and tendencies in South African society.
We owe to generations of communists, and indeed revolutionaries and combatants in our broader liberation movement, to continue to publish the African Communist and other progressive journals.
We also need to take this opportunity to salute the founders of the African Communist, and the thousands of leaders and cadres who participated in its production and debates over the last 50 years.
[Blade Nzimande is general secretary of the South African Communist Party. This article is the text of a speech given to mark the African Communist's 50th anniversary. A number of past issues of the African Communist can be downloaded HERE. See also the collection at Digital Innovation South Africa.]