Are U.S.-NATO setting up pretext for attack on Syria?
Workers World editorial, May 29, 2012:
Spokespeople from the NATO countries and their loyal media outlets have seized upon a massacre at Houla, Syria, to mobilize for open imperialist military intervention against the Syrian government and — and no one should doubt this — against the people of Syria. NATO governments have already begun expelling Syrian diplomats.
There seems to be no doubt at this time — May 29 — that a massacre took place. There is, however, much confusion about who exactly carried out the massacre. The corporate media is blaming the killings on the Syrian government and calling for foreign intervention. The Syrians, however, deny that their armed forces or police have taken part, blame the killings on the armed opposition and have themselves condemned the killings and are organizing an investigation.
While we have no special knowledge about what did or didn’t happen, we do have a treasury of knowledge of how the imperialists have manipulated such events in order to justify a war or intervention on a “humanitarian” basis. It is this type of manipulation that anti-war and anti-imperialist forces should be most on the alert for.
classe: this is exactly my position about the massacre. And about Syria’s crisis in general.
As Marx would put it, such a rising is a festival of the masses. The incidental harm is far outweighed by the fact that it raises the level of the struggle to a higher plateau. The wounds inflicted by the gendarmerie will be healed. The lessons will be learned: that a spontaneous uprising has to be supported with whatever means are available; that a great divide exists between the leaders and the masses.
(via classe)
Denazification in socialist Germany opened door to gay rights
By Leslie Feinberg
Articles appeared in many newspapers advocating the elimination of Paragraph 175. In Saxony, which later became a part of East Germany, the legislature endorsed repeal of the Paragraph.
One communist in particular deserves credit for these efforts: Dr. Rudolf Klimmer.
As a medical student in Dresden during the Weimar Republic, Klimmer, a gay man, had traveled to Berlin many times to follow developments within the homosexual emancipation movement. He particularly developed an association with Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Human itarian Committee.
Klimmer was a member of the Communist Party. So was the committee’s secretary and later chairperson, Richard Linsert.
During 12 long years of fascism, Klimmer kept his political views and sexuality under wraps, marrying a lesbian for mutual protection. After the Nazis were defeated, he chose to live in the Soviet Occupied Zone and joined the Communist Party once again.
Steakley noted, “He launched a one-man campaign which aimed at repealing all laws against homosexuality, re-establishing Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, and agitating with Soviet and local authorities for the full equality of gay people.”
More by Leslie Feinberg on LGBT rights in East Germany:
Same-sex rights in East Germany: Legal and material progress
East Germany in the 1970s: Lesbian & gay movement blossoms
East Germany: Forming of gay groups ignites church struggle
Lesbians and gay men: Great gains in 1980s East Germany
(via classe)
Tiananmen Square ‘massacre’ was a myth
By Deirdre Griswold, Workers World
Not one U.S. newspaper, television or radio outlet has reported or commented on these cables released by WikiLeaks, nor on the Telegraph story about them. It is as though they fell into a bottomless chasm.
Is it because the media here don’t believe the report is credible? Hardly.
The New York Times knows it’s credible. Their own Beijing bureau chief at the time, Nicholas Kristof, confirmed it in an extensive article entitled “China Update: How the Hardliners Won,” published in the Sunday Times magazine on Nov. 12, 1989, five months after the supposed massacre in the square.
At the very end of this long article, which purported to give an inside view of a debate within the Chinese Communist Party leadership, Kristof stated categorically: “Based on my observations in the streets, neither the official account nor many of the foreign versions are quite correct. There is no massacre in Tiananmen Square, for example, although there is plenty of killing elsewhere.”
Had there been fighting in Beijing? Absolutely. But there was no massacre of unarmed students in the square. That was an invention by the West, intended to demonize the Chinese government and win public sympathy for a counter-revolution.
The turn toward a market economy under Deng Xiaoping had alienated many workers. There was also a counter-revolutionary element trying to take advantage of popular grievances to completely restore capitalism.
The imperialists were hoping the struggles in Beijing would bring down the Chinese Communist Party and destroy the planned economy — similar to what was to happen two years later in the Soviet Union. They wanted to “open up” China, not to truth, but to the looting of the people’s property by imperialist banks and corporations.
After much wavering at the top, the army was called out and the uprising crushed. China was not broken up like the Soviet Union; its economy has not imploded nor has the standard of living declined. Quite the opposite. Wages and social conditions have been improving at a time when workers elsewhere are being forced backward by a severe capitalist economic crisis.
Despite deep concessions to capitalism, foreign and domestic, China continues to have a planned economy based on a strong state-owned infrastructure.
(via classe)
