Bob Dylan, Masters of War and the Ukraine Crisis

Posted on 23/02/2022 by Michael

Ukrainian servicemen on patrol

Bob Dylan, Masters of War and the Ukraine Crisis

[The article below was first published on the Common Dreams website on 22nd February 2022. It’s reproduced here as part of the anti-war campaign that must develop to prevent matters getting out of hand. This in no way means support for Putin’s actions (although there is an understanding of the threat the Russians feel from expansive NATO) but also highlights the overwhelming hypocrisy and lies that are emanating from both the Americans and the British.]

Bob Dylan, Masters of War and the Ukraine Crisis

by Norman Solomon

Red-white-and-blue chauvinism is running wild. Yet there are real diplomatic alternatives to the collision course for war.

Fifty-nine years ago, Bob Dylan recorded “With God on Our Side.” You probably haven’t heard it on the radio for a very long time, if ever, but right now you could listen to it as his most evergreen of topical songs:

I’ve learned to hate the Russians
All through my whole life
If another war comes
It’s them we must fight
To hate them and fear them
To run and to hide
And accept it all bravely
With God on my side

In recent days, media coverage of a possible summit between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin has taken on almost wistful qualities, as though the horsemen of the apocalypse are already out of the barn.

Fatalism is easy for the laptop warriors and blow-dried studio pundits who keep insisting on the need to get tough with “the Russians,” by which they mean the Russian government. Actual people who suffer and die in war easily become faraway abstractions. “And you never ask questions / When God’s on your side.”

During the last six decades, the religiosity of U.S. militarism has faded into a more generalized set of assumptions—shared, in the current crisis, across traditional political spectrums. Ignorance about NATO’s history feeds into the good vs. evil bromides that are so easy to ingest and internalize.

On Capitol Hill, it’s hard to find a single member of Congress willing to call NATO what it has long been: an alliance for war (Kosovo, Afghanistan, Libya) with virtually nothing to do with “defense” other than the defense of vast weapons sales and, at times, even fantasies of regime change in Russia.

The reverence and adulation gushing from the Capitol and corporate media (including NPR and PBS) toward NATO and its U.S. leadership are wonders of thinly veiled jingoism. About other societies, reviled ones, we would hear labels like “propaganda.” Here the supposed truisms are laundered and flat-ironed as common sense.

Glimmers of inconvenient truth have flickered only rarely in mainstream U.S. media outlets, while a bit more likely in Europe. “Biden has said repeatedly that the U.S. is open to diplomacy with Russia, but on the issue that Moscow has most emphasized—NATO enlargement—there has been no American diplomacy at all,” Jeffrey Sachs wrote in the Financial Times as this week began. “Putin has repeatedly demanded that the U.S. forswear NATO’s enlargement into Ukraine, while Biden has repeatedly asserted that membership of the alliance is Ukraine’s choice.”

As Sachs noted, “Many insist that NATO enlargement is not the real issue for Putin and that he wants to recreate the Russian empire, pure and simple. Everything else, including NATO enlargement, they claim, is a mere distraction. This is utterly mistaken. Russia has adamantly opposed NATO expansion towards the east for 30 years, first under Boris Yeltsin and now Putin…. Neither the U.S. nor Russia wants the other’s military on their doorstep. Pledging no NATO enlargement is not appeasement. It does not cede Ukrainian territory. It does not undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty.”

Whether or not they know much about such history, American media elites and members of Congress don’t seem to care about it. Red-white-and-blue chauvinism is running wild. Yet there are real diplomatic alternatives to the collision course for war.

Speaking Monday on Democracy Now!, Katrina vanden Heuvel—editorial director of The Nation and a longtime Russia expert—said that implementing the Minsk accords could be a path toward peace in Ukraine. Also, she pointed out, “there is talk now not just of the NATO issue, which is so key, but also a new security architecture in Europe.”

Desperately needed is a new European security framework, to demilitarize and defuse conflicts between Russia and U.S. allies. But the same approach that for three decades pushed to expand NATO to Russia’s borders is now gung-ho to keep upping the ante, no matter how much doing so increases the chances of a direct clash between the world’s two nuclear-weapons superpowers.

The last U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union before it collapsed, Jack Matlock, wrote last week: “Since President Putin’s major demand is an assurance that NATO will take no further members, and specifically not Ukraine or Georgia, obviously there would have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion of the alliance following the end of the Cold War, or if the expansion had occurred in harmony with building a security structure in Europe that included Russia.”

But excluding Russia from security structures, while encircling it with armed-to-the-teeth adversaries, was a clear goal of NATO’s expansion. Less obvious was the realized goal of turning Eastern European nations into customers for vast arms sales.

A gripping chapter in “The Spoils of War,” a new book by Andrew Cockburn, spells out the mega-corporate zeal behind the massive campaigns to expand NATO beginning in the 1990s. Huge Pentagon contractors like Lockheed Martin were downcast about the dissolution of the USSR and feared that military sales would keep slumping. But there were some potential big new markets on the horizon.

“One especially promising market was among the former members of the defunct Warsaw Pact,” Cockburn wrote. “Were they to join NATO, they would be natural customers for products such as the F-16 fighter that Lockheed had inherited from General Dynamics. There was one minor impediment: the [George H. W.] Bush administration had already promised Moscow that NATO would not move east, a pledge that was part of the settlement ending the Cold War.”

By the time legendary foreign-policy sage George F. Kennan issued his unequivocal warning in 1997—“expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold War era”—the expansion was already happening.

As Cockburn notes, “By 2014, the 12 new members had purchased close to $17 billion worth of American weapons.”

If you think those weapons transactions were about keeping up with the Russians, you’ve been trusting way too much U.S. corporate media. “As of late 2020,” Cockburn’s book explains, NATO’s collective military spending “had hit $1.03 trillion, or roughly 20 times Russia’s military budget.”

Let’s leave the last words here to Bob Dylan, from another song that isn’t on radio playlists. “Masters of War.”

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good?
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could?

Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death“ (2006) and “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State” (2007).

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The Malvinas War

Posted on 27/01/2022 by Michael

The sinking of the Belgrano – 2 May 1982

The Malvinas War

The war in the Malvinas (erroneously called the ‘Falklands’ in the UK) wasn’t the most serious ‘post-imperial glory’ conflict that Britain has been involved in the last just under 80 years – since the end of World War II – but it certainly was the most pointless, avoidable and shameful of all such outrages.

Two equally inept fascist leaders (Thatcher in the UK and Galtieri in Argentina) sought to divert attention to their failing policies at home by playing the nationalist/imperialist gambit over a collection of treeless islands in the South Atlantic. As a result almost a thousand lives were lost, half as many more were injured and an unknown number psychologically scarred. On top of that millions of pounds of resources were wasted during the (relatively) short conflict and in subsequent years.

The British were ‘victorious’ – but only by the skin of their teeth and with a huge dose of luck. And for the future of the people of Britain that was probably the worse possible result. The Union flag once more flying over Port Stanley meant that Thatcher was able to adopt the mantel of the Roman Emperors, standing to take the salute as the British Armed Forces marched past her in London on 12th October 1982.

For Britons at the time (and in the subsequent 40 years) it meant that Thatcher was able to grab hold of the tail of moribund imperialism, play on the feelings within the country that bemoaned the ‘loss of the empire’, manipulate an undercurrent of racism and use the ‘Falklands factor’ to get herself and her inept Tory Government re-elected in 1983.

The result of that was the speeding up of the programme of privatisation (a programme that originally started as a tactic of ‘selling off the family silver’ due to the Tories non-existent economic policy – which was later turned into the ‘philosophy’ of neo-liberal economics), the beginning of the destruction of the welfare state and a full frontal attack upon workers rights through the attempts to destroy their trade union organisations.

Subsequent governments (of whatever political colour) followed similar policies and that resulted in the destructive, baseless and futile wars of the 21st century with the country arriving at the sorry state of affairs that it found itself when having to confront the covid pandemic in March 2020.

The documents reproduced below are presented here to give an idea of the (in the main) opposition to the shameful and disgraceful ‘adventure’ in the Southern Atlantic in the (northern) spring of 1982.

The Falkland Islands – The Facts, London, HMSO Books, May 1982, 12 pages. The Thatcher Government’s justification for the war crime.

Falklands Crisis – A ‘Socialist’ answer, Ted Grant, Militant, London, 1982, 7 pages. A typical example of Trotskyite drivel that justified a clear imperialist operation.

Falklands-Malvinas, Whose Crisis, Latin American Bureau, London, 1982, 148 pages.

Malvinas are Argentina’s, Revolutionary Communist Party, London, 1982, 32 pages. A Trotskyite view of the Malvinas War.

One Man’s Falklands …. , Tam Dalyell, Cecil Woolf, London, 1982, 144 pages.

‘Rejoice’ – Media Freedom and the Falklands, Susan Greenberg and Graham Smith, Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, London, 1982, 40 pages.

Iron Britannia – why Parliament waged its Falklands War, Anthony Barnett, Alison and Busby, London, 1982, 160 pages.

Thatcher’s Torpedo – The sinking of the Belgrano, Tam Dalyell, Cecil Woolf, London, 1983, 80 pages.

A message from the Falklands, David Tinker, Penguin, London, 1983, 214 pages.

On the Spot – The Sinking of the Belgrano, Diana Gould, with an introduction by Tam Dayell, Cecil Woolf, London, 1984, 80 pages.

An A to Z of the Falklands, Tam Dayell, West Lothian Labour Party, 1984, 32 pages.

The sinking of the Belgrano, Arthur Gavshon and Desmond Rice, New English Library, London, 1984, 238 pages.

Information leaking out 40 years after the event

UK deployed 31 nuclear weapons during Falklands war

British warships deployed to the South Atlantic after Argentina’s invasion of the ‘Falkland Islands’ (las Malvinas) in 1982 were armed with dozens of nuclear depth charges. Prince Andrew served on HMS Invincible, which carried 12 nuclear weapons.

How the Malvinas War is remembered in Argentina

Monument to the Fallen in the Malvinas – Buenos Aires

National Malvinas Monument – Ushuaia

Museum of the Malvinas War – Rio Gallegos

Malvinas Monument El Calafate

Las Malvinas and Rio Gallegos

The situation with Las Malvinas – 40 years on from the war

Argentine minister: ‘We can’t be sure there aren’t nuclear weapons in the Falklands’.

On the 40th anniversary of the ‘Falklands’ War, Declassified sits down with Argentina’s minister responsible for the disputed islands at his office inside the Foreign Ministry in Buenos Aires.

Independence Day – 29th November 2021 – in Gjirokaster

Posted on 22/12/2021 by Michael

Gjirokaster Martyrs’ Cemetery – Liberation Day 2021

Independence Day – 29th November – in Gjirokaster

Albania celebrates two ‘independence’ days. The first, on 28th November, is the anniversary of when Albania ‘gained’ its independence from the Ottomans with the signing of an agreement in Vlora in 1912. But this was sham independence (although it was still celebrated during the Socialist period and Enver Hoxha was very much involved in the design of the huge lapidar to commemorate the event which exists in that city) as nothing significantly changed for the vast majority of the population. The second was much more meaningful and that occurred on the 29th November 1944. That was the date when the last of the Nazi invaders of the country were either dead or had surrendered.

There’s very much a political divide when it comes to celebrating these respective dates.

The ‘right’, the reactionaries, will make a big deal out of the 28th as all countries need something to which they can attach their identity. For them the period between 1944 and 1990 was a disaster as the Party of Labour of Albania led the people in the construction of Socialism and that necessarily meant stamping down on private wealth and selfishness. They will, therefore, ‘ignore’ any commemoration of the 29th.

The ‘left’ will probably celebrate both days but the one on the 29th will be of more significance. Much of what was gained in the country following that date in 1944 has now been lost. Even the ‘left’ governments that have been in power since 1990 have merely presided over the restoration of capitalism and all governments have effectively given up any independence the country had, either the 1912 version or the true independence of 1944 – to not even the highest bidder. Anyone, be it the European Union (EU), the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO), the various brands of mysticism or companies from anywhere in the capitalist world can come in and do whatsoever they like. The only response from the political parties (and, it must be said, the population in general) is ‘please sir, can we have some more?’

But, sadly, neither of these dates seem to be of any importance to the vast majority of the population. Certainly when it comes to attending any formal celebration.

In Gjirokaster, in 2021, the 28th involved a wreath laying ceremony at the lapidar to the Cajupis. These were independence fighters against the Ottomans in the 19th century. Even this innocuous lapidar was submitted to vandal attacks at some time after the victory of the counter-revolution in 1990 but a few years ago it was cleaned up and access to it made much easier so this is why the town now has a rallying point for pre-Socialist celebrations.

On the other hand the commemoration of the 29th takes place in the Martyrs’ Cemetery, which is on the edge of the new town, close to the north-south main road. This was the place where the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the Liberation of the town took place on 18th September 2019.

In 2021 the commemoration was no more than a wreath laying ceremony – so not significantly different from the event the previous day. There were formal wreaths from the local municipality and a number of political parties on the ‘left’ – but nothing from the so-called ‘Democratic Party’, a bunch of fascist inclined individuals who regret that the Nazis lost the battle for Tirana. There were also a couple of individual offerings.

In the past, during the Socialist period, such events would have been crowded and highly organised. The tradition was that members of the Young Pioneers would be standing next to the (empty) tombs and would be charged with laying a single flower on each of them at one point in the ceremony. (Even though these monuments to those who died in the fight against fascism are called ‘cemeteries’ no bodies are interred there, the vast majority of those who died having done so high in the mountains throughout Albania, their remains being lost to nature.)

However, now at such events the individuals who receive a token of respect are only those who still have family members close by and who respect the sacrifice they made. This meant that only a handful of tombs received a floral tribute.

Amongst the ‘tombs’ are two of the young female Partisan fighters, Bule Naipi and Persefoni Kokedhima, who were murdered by the Nazis in a public execution on July 17th 1944, a few short months before the liberation of the town. These young women were 22 and 21 respectively. However, their sacrifice wasn’t remembered in any significant way with only a single flower being laid on Bule’s tomb.

And the ‘commemoration’ was over in less than 15 minutes – about the same time of the event the previous day.

One interesting thing that happened, when most people had left, was that a wreath laid by the local police was removed from the collection of wreaths at the centre of the lapidar and moved so that it stood alone. I assume some sort of political comment but don”t know exactly what.

I assume that such commemorations will take place in other Martyrs’ Cemeteries throughout the country but that could well be dependent upon which political faction controls the local municipality.