3658. Arundhati Roy on Israel/U.S. Genocidal War in Gaza/Palestine

 By Arundhati Roy, October 2024 

Arundhati Roy, the internationally celebrated author and human rights activist's speech upon receiving the PEN Foundation’s annual Pinter Prize in October 2024, Roy announced that she’d be donating her prize money to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.

Named for the late British playwright Harold Pinter, the PEN Pinter Prize and the Pinter International Writer of Courage awards have been distributed annually since 2009.

Transcription into Farsi is by Abdi Kalantari. 

3631. Ongoig Genocidal Zionist State's War in Gaza

By Latin Press Agency, Escambray, January 6, 2024

Almost 90,000 Palestinians, four percent of the total population of Gaza, died, were injured or are missing after three months of Israeli aggression against the territory, the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor reported on January 6.

The non-governmental organization denounced in a statement that the Army's continuous air, land and sea attacks destroyed 70 percent of the civil facilities and infrastructure in the enclave.

The approach of the Israeli bombings seems to be aimed at carrying out collective punishment against the population and turning the area into an uninhabitable place, he stressed.

Gaza authorities estimate that since October 7, 22,600 Palestinians have died there and another 58,000 have been injured as a result of military operations by the Armed Forces of the neighboring nation.

The Observatory pointed out that the majority of Gazans were displaced from their homes by the bombs and detailed that during the ongoing war campaign, almost 68,000 homes were destroyed and another 179,000 were damaged.

Israel deliberately destroyed or caused serious damage to essential facilities, including 318 schools, 1,612 industrial centers, 23 hospitals, 57 clinics, 201 mosques and three churches, as well as 169 press and media offices, he stressed.

That country's troops deliberately target Palestinian civilians in order to force them to emigrate, in violation of the norms of international law, he noted.

The entity stated that these actions amount to crimes against humanity and war crimes, including genocide.

3627. Washington, D.C. Bi-Partisan “March for Israel” Rally Supports Zionist Genocide in Gaza!

 By Barry Sheppard and Jeff Mackler, Socialist Action, November 23, 2023

From left, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson of La., left, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of N.Y., Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of N.Y., and Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, right, join hands at the March for Israel on Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2023, on the National Mall in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

The November 14, Washington, D.C. “March for Israel” in support of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza had all the earmarks of a US government-backed affair.  In comparison to the largely ignored or barely mentioned unprecedented in size and breath pro-Palestinian antiwar mass actions over the past five weeks, the Zionist-backed event was widely covered by the corporate media.

Organizers claimed that 200,000 attended from across the country; others put the numbers at closer to 50,000, perhaps 100,000.

The rally had the informal imprimatur of the U.S. government. Senate Democratic Party Leader Chuck Schumer was a featured rally speaker representing President Joseph Biden. Schumer reiterated to cheers that the whole U.S. government was completely backing Israel’s war.

Also speaking was the new House Republican speaker and Donald Trump supporter, Mike Johnson.

A big contingent from Christian white nationalist evangelicals was also present and notably the Zionist rightest anti-Semite, anti-LGBTQI Christian Pastor, John Hagee, who was a prominently featured speaker. 

John Hagee

Like other white nationalists, Hagee and his ilk play on the fears of many whites that they are being “replaced” by Blacks, Latinos, Muslims, and others in movements financed behind the scenes by Jews.

The white Christian nationalists add their special viewpoint that Zionism is right, and Jews should leave America and “return” to Israel in order to fulfill the biblical prophecy of the return of Jesus.

Two days after the pro-Israeli war rally, Democracy Now! discussed Mike Johnson’s history and politics as well as Hagee’s, who once said “God sent Hitler to help Jews reach the Promised Land.”

Of course, Hagee didn’t repeat that or similar arguments at the rally, but he did blurt out things like “As Prime Minister Netanyahu says so well, this is a fight between light and darkness, between civilization and barbarism.”

Sarah Posner, author of How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind, was on the Democracy Now! program.

She explained that Hagee only talks about his total support for Israel to gatherings like the November 14 rally, but before churches he says “according to biblical prophecy, that one day Jesus will return and fight a very bloody battle [in Israel], which will result in Jews, and Muslim’s too, either converting to Christianity or dying” and Jesus will rule the world.

Democracy Now!’s co-host, Juan Gonzalez asked her, “What does Israel and its staunchest defenders get from this alliance?”

Posner responded: “What Israelis and American Jews who embrace Hagee’s support get is a huge movement, much larger than the number of Jewish Americans, that has the ear of the Republican Party, that is enmeshed in the Republican Party.

“Hagee’s organization, Christians United for Israel (CUFI),” Posner continued, “has juice on Capitol Hill.  It is more than that. It is common among [white] evangelicals, even if they are not members of CUFI, to share these ideas about Israel and Bible prophecy and the return of Jesus. What they do is they bring this huge constituency to Republicans, many of whom, like Speaker Johnson, believe all this themselves.

“They have morphed together this idea of supporting Israel with being a good American Christian. They believe that God has commanded America as a country, not just them as Americans, to support Israel.”

And Posner concluded: “In their minds supporting Israel involves supporting the occupation, supporting the Israeli military no matter what it does. It doesn’t mean supporting Israel from the standpoint that some day, Israelis and Palestinians can live in peace. That is not part of the equation.”

Democracy Now!’s host, Amy Goodman, then said “I want to play another clip. In 2008 John McCain [Republican candidate for President] rejected John Hagee’s endorsement, after the pastor said God sent Hitler to help Jews get to Israel.

“This is a clip from Hagee’s sermon: ‘Then God sent a hunter. A hunter is someone who comes with a gun, and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter.’’’

Posner said in more recent statements [Hagee] “is saying that God has punished Jews throughout history as part of his plan to get them to return to Israel, which is a pre-condition of Jesus’ return.”

Speaker Mike Johnson’s reactionary background

The new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, worked for an organization now called Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). “It’s a major Christian right legal organization that sees itself as a Christian counterweight to the ACLU,” Posner told Democracy Now! “It is behind many Supreme Court cases, including Dobbs, which overturned Roe v. Wade; and Masterpiece Cakeshop, involving the anti-gay baker [who refused to serve same sex couples].”

Posner had interviewed Johnson in 2007, when “he laid out for me the organization’s ambition to eviscerate the separation of church and state at the Supreme Court and to create a legal framework in which conservative Christians could object to things like LGBTQ rights in the name of religious freedom.

“Everything he said to me back in 2007, ADF has pretty much done and accomplished or is well on its way to accomplishing — undermining church-state separation, elevating religious freedom to conservative Christians who oppose LGBTQ and reproductive rights….

“He also believes that God created civil government and that government should be run from what Christian nationalists would call a biblical worldview. So his entire ideology and framework and way of looking at the world, in particular, are very classic, to the T, of the right, of Christian nationalists … believing that their biblical worldview is what should dictate law and policy in the United States.”

Christian Zionists are both anti-Semitic and pro-Israel. They want Jews to get out of the United States, their anti-Semitism — and by going to Israel, their Zionism.

Zionism’s reactionary origins

To better understand this connection, a brief overview of the history of the connection between Zionism and anti-Semitism helps. An article by Joseph Massad, Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History that appeared on Al Jazeera provides a sketch.

While there were some Zionists in Europe in the 19th century, Theodore Herzl is recognized as the founder and of what became modern Zionism, in reaction to anti-Semitism in the European Christian nations.

He led the creation of the Zionist Organization (now World Zionist Organization) at a conference of European Zionist groups in Basel, Switzerland in 1897.

He and his followers insisted that it is the presence of Jews in these countries that caused anti-Semitism, and that the solution was for the Jews to leave Europe and form their own nation.

He said in his foundational pamphlet, written in 1896, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), “The governments of all countries scourged by anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want.”

Herzl said in his Diaries that “The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.”

In its early years, Zionism would invoke, along with the Protestant millenarian Christians, that European Jews were linked historically to Palestine to which they should “return” to re-establish Biblical Israel.

The Zionists understood this could only be realized through a settler-colonial project, which could be achieved through an alliance with European colonial powers. The Arab people who already lived there would have to be driven out. One of these colonial powers was Great Britain.

The 1917 Balfour Declaration

In 1905, there was a revolution in Russia. When it was defeated, there were mass pogroms against Jews organized by the Tsarist regime. At the time, Arthur Balfour, a well-known anti-Semite, was Prime Minister of Great Britain. He sponsored the Aliens Act that prevented Jews fleeing the pogroms from entering the country.

Balfour was the Foreign Secretary of the British government during the First World War. In 1917, as the war came to an end, Britain was set to take over Palestine from the defeated Ottoman Empire. The Balfour Declaration was issued by the British government. It advocated the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, and the Zionists embraced him.

When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, the Zionists, sharing Herzl’s understanding that an anti-Semitic state could become an ally of Zionism, were the only Jewish group that would collaborate with them — all other German Jews recognized the Nazis as the Jews’ bitterest enemy.

Zionists saw an opportunity to strengthen colonization of Palestine. In 1933, Zionists signed the Transfer Agreement with the Nazis. Under it, Germany would compensate German Jews who emigrated to Palestine for their lost property by exporting German goods to the Zionists there.

Between 1933 and 1939, 60 percent of all capital invested for Jews in Palestine came from German Jewish money brought in under the Transfer Agreement.

German Zionists supported Nazi anti-Semitic laws

In 1935, the German branch of Zionism supported the Nazi anti-Semitic and racist Nuremberg Laws, and was the only non-Nazi party still allowed to publish its own newspaper, the Rundschau.

Nazi officials visited Palestine as guests of the Zionists in 1934 and in 1937. In the later year, it was none other than Adolf Eichmann, who became a major architect of the Holocaust, who was among those who arrived in the country, and visited a Jewish colonial settlement. Eichmann was found and brought to Israel in 1961, where he was hung for his crimes.

In 1938, the Nazis organized a pogrom of Jews across Germany, known as Kristalnacht, Crystal Night — the “night of broken glass” for the destruction of Jewish property. All Jews, including the Zionists, were targeted, and the German Zionists were crushed.

The defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War, and the horrors of the Holocaust, put an end to anti-Semitic regimes in Europe. But not an end to collaboration between Zionism and anti-Semites, as was seen on the stage of the pro-Israeli war mobilization in Washington November 14.

Formation of the Zionist state in 1948

With the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, Britain ruled Palestine from 1918 until 1947. Britain was one of the Western victors of the Second World War, and was instrumental in forming a Jewish state in Palestine in 1948, backed by the other Western imperialist powers, including the United States. Stalin’s Russia also voted for the UN’s 1948 partition of historic Palestine that granted 52 percent to the Zionist colonizers, of course, against the wishes of the dispossessed Palestinians and virtually all of the region’s Arab nations. British arms were turned over to the Zionist’s already formidable military apparatus. 

The main countries which backed Israel’s formation were colonial Britain and France. Later the United States took on that role. Western imperialism, led by the U.S., backed Israel economically and militarily in all its wars with the Arab countries and the Palestinians from 1948 onward up to today, as a bulwark against the Arab anti-colonial struggle, and against the Soviet Union which supported that struggle (how effectively is another question).

Zionism, from its inception, could and can only achieve its goals by relying on imperialism, as Herzl understood. Until World War II Zionism was a minor and reactionary current among persecuted Jews worldwide. Vast numbers stood in solidarity with revolutionary socialist currents everywhere, including in the 1917 Russian Revolution that overthrew Czarism and capitalism and formally abolished all their anti-Semitic laws and practices. Indeed, Russian Jews were among the central leaders of the Great Russian Revolution of 1917.

That today’s twin parties of US imperialism effectively back a screaming reactionary pro-war Zionist rally in Washington stands in sharp contrast to the inspiring antiwar mobilizations that have been organized around the world. Tens of millions, if not billions of humanity’s best, today rally in unprecedented numbers against the US-backed Zionist genocide in Gaza. The U.S. and its imperialist government allies stand isolated and exposed everywhere.

The world demands an immediate CEASEFIRE and an end to the GENOCIDE while the U.S. Congress votes additional billions to replenish Israel’s undeniable weapons of mass destruction, including its U.S.-supplied bunker buster bombs, the largest non-nuclear weapons on earth. And now Zionism’s “leaders” openly talk of using nuclear weapons!

End All Aid to US-backed Apartheid Israel!

To the Streets!

Ceasefire now!

For the Right to Resist!

Free Palestine From The River to the Sea! For a Democratic, Secular Palestine with the Right of Return of All Dispossessed Palestinians! For a Socialist Palestine Where All Can Live Together As Equals!

3538. The Coming War on China

 By Documentary Channel, January 12, 2020

3402. George Monbiot: The Origins of Modern Day Racism, George Floyd Killing, and Environmental Destruction

By George Monbiot, Doouble Down News, July 14, 2020

3309. How Britain Helped Islamic Republic of Iran to Destroy the Pro-Soviet Union Tudeh Party

By Mark Curtis and Phil Miller, Maverick Insider, January 21, 2020

Nouraldin Kianouri, Secretary-General of Tudeh Party "confessed" on television to a plot against the Islamic Republic.  Many Tudeh leaders and rank-and-filers, as well as Fedayeen Majority leaders and rank-and-filers, were arrested tortured and executed in the 1983 wave of repression. 

The UK’s secret intelligence service, MI6, worked with the CIA to provide a list of alleged Soviet agents in Iran to Ayatollah Khomeini’s theocratic regime, which took power after the overthrow of the UK-backed Shah in 1979. The information was used by the regime to execute leading members of the Iranian communist party, the Tudeh.

The British files also highlight how at least one Foreign Office official considered how the UK might benefit from the forced confessions given by Tudeh members at the time, which were believed to be extracted under torture.

The files suggest British policy was motivated by the desire to curry favour with Iran’s new rulers, rather than concerns over Cold War geopolitics or Soviet influence in Iran, which was recognised to be minimal.

The hit list

The list of Iranians allegedly working for the Soviet Union in Iran was provided to Britain by Vladimir Kuzichkin, a major in the KGB who defected to the UK in June 1982, as reported by the New York Times and London Times in 1986. The information gleaned by MI6 from Kuzichkin – who was responsible for maintaining contacts with the Tudeh party, the main leftist organisation in Iran established in the 1940s – was also shared with the CIA, and passed on to Tehran.

The Iranian regime proceeded to round up over 1,000 members of the Tudeh party and eventually executed as many as 200. The party was banned and forced underground.

Britain’s senior official in Iran at that time, Nicholas Barrington, states in his memoir that Kuzichkin’s information simply “found its way” to the Iranian authorities after the Russian’s defection, without specifying the British role.

Files from the time – when Barrington was head of the British Interests Section in Tehran since Iran and the UK had cut full diplomatic relations – suggest that British officials supported Iran’s repression of the Tudeh.

Telegram from Nicholas Barrington, the UK’s senior official in Iran, to the Foreign Office in London, 9 May 1983. (National Archives)

‘A significant step’

As Iran’s crackdown was under way, Barrington met a senior Iranian official on 5 May 1983 seeking British views “on his government’s action against the Tudeh”, which, he said, was evidence of “Iranian independence of the big powers”.

Barrington replied, according to his memorandum on the meeting: “I said I had never doubted this independence. The latest Iranian [actions] seemed to me a significant step.”

The Iranian official then mentioned to Barrington a “confession” forced by the new regime which had aired the previous night on Iranian television by a Tudeh member who had previously been jailed for 24 years under the Shah. The activist was said by the Iranian official to have previously revealed nothing “despite all the Savak’s tortures” – referring to the former regime’s brutal security service.

Barrington commented: “I said, half in jest, that perhaps the Islamic Republic’s torture was more effective than that of the Shah.”

By this time, Barrington and other British officials were well aware of Iranian repression. On the same day he met the Iranian official, Barrington had informed the Foreign Office in London of the “destruction of the Tudeh”.

He noted that “it is widely believed that some [Tudeh members] have already suffered the death penalty and the rest will do so soon”. He added that “the public have been taking the law into their own hands” in dealing with Tudeh members and “no doubt scores will be settled and some comparatively innocent will suffer with the guilty”.

 Telegram from Nicholas Barrington, the UK’s senior official in Iran, to the Foreign Office in London, 5 May 1983. (National Archives)

 Telegram from Nicholas Barrington, the UK’s senior official in Iran, to the Foreign Office in London, 5 May 1983. (National Archives)

Earlier, in February 1983, when Iran arrested a number of Tudeh members, Barrington commented that “it looks as if the regime are making a determined effort to root out the Tudeh”. By April, Barrington was informed by a Hungarian diplomat that “several hundred” Tudeh members were in prison, who were expected to be dealt with by a military court.

Barrington did not lament the Iranian regime’s actions, but rather saw them as an opportunity. He wrote that fellow European heads of mission “felt that it was time for Western European and like-minded countries to keep their lines open to Iran”.

No evidence could be found in the 1983 files that UK officials did anything other than approve of this severe repression.

Barrington later wrote in his memoir that “there was money to be made” in Iran where “an important part of our work was maintaining British commercial links with Iran and promoting exports”.

By July 1983, another British official in Tehran, Chris Rundle, told the Foreign Office that “some rank-and-file members are being executed and there are rumours of large-scale executions”. He added that the “best estimates here are that about 80% of the Tudeh members in Iran have been arrested, the rest having gone into hiding or escaped”.

Extracted confessions

The Iranian regime’s aim to destroy the Tudeh party was made easier by the forced “confessions” it extracted from two key figures – Noureddin Kianouri, the party’s secretary-general, and Mahmoud Etemadzadeh, editor of the party newspaper.

On 30 April 1983, after nearly two months in jail, Kianouri and Etemadzadeh appeared on television, saying that the Tudeh had worked against Iran and spied for the Soviet Union. Barrington noted that, “The pressures, or threats, in detention must have been great judging by the appearance of the two men.”

A British file from its embassy in Moscow noted a report from Pravda – the official newspaper of the Soviet regime – claiming that the confessions “had been extracted by Gestapo-like methods inherited from the Savak”.

Despite this, the head of the Middle East and North Africa department in the Foreign Office, Oliver Miles, suggested that the “admissions” on television might be useful to Britain. He noted that “there could well be references to friendly parties in other countries which we might be able to make use of”, such as the Tudeh’s relations with the Syrian Communist Party.

Miles also noted: “Libya and Algeria also have tolerable relations with Iran, and it is just possible that something interesting might crop up in that connexion [sic] too”, before adding, “I should be grateful if whoever is principally concerned with studying the material could bear this point in mind”.

Memorandum by Oliver Miles, head of the Middle East and North Africa Department, Foreign Office, 6 May 1983. (National Archives)

Three days later, Barrington reported: “Tudeh cadres are being rounded up in the provinces.”

On 4 May 1983, when Iran expelled 18 Soviet diplomats, Barrington noted: “The action against the Tudeh has received the seal of Khomeini’s approval…he praises the revolutionary guards, the other security forces and the judiciary for ridding Iran of the Tudeh, which he referred to as a mottled snake which had been working to overthrow Islam”.

‘A major landmark’

Barrington told the Foreign Office in May 1983 that due to the destruction of the Tudeh “a major landmark has been reached in Soviet/Iranian relations and perhaps also in the history of Communist parties overseas”.

Yet the files suggest that Britain’s support for Iranian repression of the Tudeh cannot be principally explained as a Cold War episode to counter Soviet influence. Officials did not fear the Iranian regime would turn to the Soviet Union since it was implacably opposed to its communism.

There were various sources of friction between Iran and the Soviet Union at this time, notably Moscow’s arming of Iraq, with whom Iran had been at war since 1980. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 had also resulted in millions of Afghans fleeing into Iran.

Neither were the Soviets prepared to go to great lengths to support the Tudeh. Barrington stated in a July 1982 letter to London – by which time Kuzichkin was in the UK passing on information – that while the Islamic regime was in power in Iran, the Russians were “prepared to play it cool and ditch the Tudeh Party, if necessary”.

Barrington went on to receive a knighthood and became Britain’s High Commissioner to Pakistan.

Formal approval for working with the CIA to pass Kuzichkin’s information to the Iranian regime was probably made by then prime minister Margaret Thatcher, foreign secretary Francis Pym and head of MI6, Colin Figures.

An unsuccessful attempt was made to contact Sir Nicholas Barrington for a comment. DM

Mark Curtis is editor and Phil Miller is staff reporter, for Declassified UK, a journalism organisation investigating UK foreign, security and intelligence policies. They tweet at @DeclassifiedUK, @markcurtis30 and @pmillerinfo

3202. Bernie Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez Legitimize Regime Change in Venezuela

By Ben Fredericks, Left Voice, February 28, 2019

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (Photo: J. Pat Carter)

As the social and political crisis in Venezuela drags on, the fate of the country’s 32 million residents remains uncertain. Elected president Nicolas Maduro remains in control of the country for the time being, but self-appointed “interim president” Juan Guaidó has maintained his oppositional base and continues to bid for power. The conditions for the masses are dire, with food and medical scarcity endemic. For now, the Venezuelan military has remained loyal to the Maduro government, though its allegiance could change.

The Trump administration, for its part, has put forward an array of militarist right-wingers to push “regime change” in Venezuela: Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and the new “envoy to Venezuela,” Elliot Abrams – a man complicit in propping up right-wing dictatorships in Latin America in the 1980s. U.S. forces have linked up with Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Columbia’s Iván Duque to plot Maduro’s ouster.

The hypocrisy of the anti-Maduro coalition’s supposed concern for human suffering could not be more transparent. Not only does the U.S. government support regimes far less democratic than Venezuela (e.g. Saudi Arabia), but the U.S. has its own hand in perpetuating the suffering of the Venezuelan people through the imposition of economic sanctions on Venezuelan oil, the country’s main export. Thus, the U.S. political elites are starving Venezuela of billions of dollars, while making a big show of financial aid amounting to only a fraction of lost oil revenue.

In fact, Venezuela is accepting humanitarian aid. Just not from those governments explicitly trying to kill all remnants of the “Bolivarian Revolution.” U.S. aid to Venezuela is not impartial or benevolent. Rather, weaponized aid is being used to destabilize Maduro and provide a potential material base for Guaidó to manipulate the desperate population toward his ends.

AOC and Bernie: legitimizing regime change

With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s rise to prominence and Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential run kicking off, Venezuela provides an important test, both for them and their supporters on the socialist left. If socialism stands for the interests of the international working class, Venezuela today poses the question: what is a truely socialist, internationalist position? How should we, leftists in the “belly of the beast,” relate to the crisis that our own government has a direct hand in creating?

As many have argued, the most basic position of socialists must be a complete rejections of U.S. imperialism’s attempt to destabilize and control sovereign nations – be it Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Venezuela or elsewhere. As we know from history, U.S. foreign policy has never been about helping the masses take their destiny in their own hands. Rather, the U.S. has helped topple innumerable democratic leftist governments, and has propped up innumerable right-wing dictatorships. Opposing U.S. meddling with the call “Hands off Venezuela!” is essential.

The second basic position of socialists in relating to the Venezuelan crisis must be a revolutionary, anti-capitalist perspective for resolving the crisis. This includes drawing a clear delimitation from Maduro’s government, which has become increasingly repressive. Against the idea that Venezuela’s failure is a sign of the failure of socialism, we assert quite the contrary. The reason of Venezuela’s crisis today is that Chávez’s regime did not really break with national or foreign capitalists, and did not end the dependent character of the country’s economy. Whatever gains were made by the Venezuelan masses under Hugo Chávez should be defended, and the working class must fight for real socialism and a workers government.

Yet Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders have failed both tests. Neither of them have taken a clear stand against U.S. meddling, and neither advocate real socialism.

Ocasio-Cortez, for instance, recorded herself explaining her opinion about the Venezuelan crisis: “People want to make this about ideology, about capitalism, about socialism. What people don’t understand is that this is about authoritarianism vs. democracy in many different ways…” She went on to compare Venezuela to Zimbabwe as “failed states.” Her message? The Venezuelan people need “democracy.”

Indeed Ocasio-Cortez, by remaining silent on the very real U.S. military build-up and the machinations to topple Maduro, gives legitimacy to “the military option” of a coup. By refusing to denounce U.S. meddling, she betrays the interests of Venezuelan masses and provides a left cover for Trump’s exceedingly right-wing goal of regime change. And by vaguely focusing on “democracy,” AOC is giving an approving nod to Guaidó’s pro-imperialist opposition as the legitimate expression of the Venezuelan people’s will – an absurd claim.

Bernie Sanders, for his part, has also jumped on the bandwagon of regime change by calling on Maduro to allow in weaponized “humanitarian aid” and to “respect the opposition”:

The people of Venezuela are enduring a serious humanitarian crisis. The Maduro government must put the needs of its people first, allow humanitarian aid into the country, and refrain from violence against protesters.

Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters blasted Sanders on twitter for this statement. “Are you f-ing kidding me?” he commented, “you cannot be a credible candidate for President of the USA. Or, maybe you can, maybe you’re the perfect stooge for the 1%.”

While both Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders would likely oppose a crude military invasion of Venezuela, each in their own way are legitimizing the opposition and remaining deadly silent on the threat of a coup. Neither are willing to truly examine the role of U.S. imperialism or envision a socialist Venezuela. The U.S. left must do better than that.

Hands off Venezuela!

3036. The Rise of China and the End of the American Century

By Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times, September 25, 2018

Chinese and Russian naval exercise in the South China Sea.

Editor's note: At the turn of the millennia, I wrote an essay for the Farsi socialist magazine Negah published in Sweden about the end of the American century.  Today's NYT columnist Thomas Friedman acknowledges as much except he seems to lay the blame in part on President Trump.  In this, he forgets the very fact that the rise of Mr. Trump itself is a telling signal of the relative decline of the United States as the hegemonic power.  If anything, Trump and the Republican party today represent a backward-looking political force that sees the power of American imperialism in the rear mirror. The Democratic party is not much better as it had joined the Republicans in the onslaught on the society and nature at least since the 1974-75 recession.  To grasp how imperialist and backward-looking the Obama administration was read again the leaked Hillary Clinton's speech to Gladman Sachs in October 2013 on how to confront China. I post the entire Friedman's text which includes his proposal on how to share the dominance over the world with China. Of course, humanity deserves much better but only if enough of us working people get organized and mobilized to challenge the world capitalist class.  KN

*      *     *

Early in the movie “Crazy Rich Asians” a Chinese-Singaporean father admonishes his young kids to finish their dinner, saying, “Think of all the starving children in America.” I’m sure that everyone of my generation in the theater laughed at that joke. After all, we’d all been raised on the line: “Finish your dinner. Think of all the starving children in China.”

That little line contained within it many messages: The first, which any regular traveler to China’s biggest urban areas can tell you, is that rich China today — its luxury homes, cars, restaurants and hotels — is really rich, rich like most Americans can’t imagine.

The second is that this moment was destined to be a test of who will set the key rules of the global order in the 21st century: the world’s long-dominant economic and military superpower, America, or its rising rival, China. And this test is playing out with a blossoming full-scale trade war.

What does such a test of wills sound like? It sounds like a senior Chinese official telling me at a seminar at Tsinghua University in April that it’s just “too late” for America to tell China what to do anymore on issues like trade, because China is now too big and powerful. And it sounds like President Trump, in effect, telling China: “Says who? Show me what you got, baby!” Or as Trump actually tweeted last week: “We are under no pressure to make a deal with China, they are under pressure to make a deal with us. … If we meet, we meet.”

I guess we should be grateful that this confrontation has been confined to trade, but, as I said, it was inevitable. Because, as one top tech executive pointed out to me: “China is not a ‘near peer’ anymore. It is a peer.”

As Mary Meeker’s latest internet trends study noted, five years ago China had only two of the world’s largest publicly traded tech companies, while the U.S. had nine. Today, China has nine of the top 20 — Alibaba, Tencent, Ant Financial, Baidu, Xiaomi, Didi, JD.com, Meituan and Toutiao — and the U.S. has 11. Twenty years ago, China had none.

Do you see a trend? Do you hear footsteps? The total value of China’s internet economy is already bigger than America’s. And China’s economy now is so cashless that many women no longer carry purses or men wallets — just a cellphone with mobile apps — to buy anything, or even donate to a beggar.

And don’t get me started on the biggest emerging work and services tool in the world — artificial intelligence. China’s plan is to catch up to America in A.I. and surpass it as soon as possible, and it’s well on its way. Because with A.I., the more training data you can feed the machine the faster it learns, the more patterns you can see and the more algorithms you can write to improve products and services or invent new ones. Because China has so many more people than we do, and so many more of them use mobile apps for their daily lives, China’s ability to amass giant data sets and train more machines faster is considerable.

“If data is the new oil, then China is the new Saudi Arabia,” remarked Kai-Fu Lee, author of “AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order.”

Chinese companies are already the world leaders in computer vision/facial recognition and speech recognition, which can be used for commerce and for surveillance and societal control. In just the last two years there has been an explosion of fintech start-ups in China, offering mobile payments, lending, brokerage and banking. And the No. 1 and 3 drone manufacturers in the world — DJI and Xiaomi — are Chinese. France’s Parrot is No. 2. At the same time, China is producing far more engineers and scientists than the U.S., and their quality is steadily rising.

America today, by contrast, has become the unrivaled world leader in generating data about Donald Trump and from Donald Trump.

In the daily barrage of Trump news and tweets, some Trump statements are actually true, though — like the need for the U.S. to confront China’s unfair trade practices. China has grown incredibly these past 30 years with a very specific formula: hard work, unleashing capitalism, smart planning and long-range investments in education and infrastructure — but also by stealing intellectual property, forcing technology transfers and cheating on World Trade Organization rules.

We have to respond. But wisely.

Historically the U.S. could dominate the global scene and check a rising power like China, and set the global rules, with just our sheer physical mass — more money, more troops, more naval ships, more top-10 companies, more scientists and more universities. That is just not possible any longer, as China has become both big and smart in more and more areas. But all is not lost.

It happens that we have three huge assets that China doesn’t have, and is unlikely to acquire them anytime soon. We should be doubling down on our strengths: immigration, allies and values. Instead, Trump is squandering them.

Many of the smartest and most talented people in the world — high-I.Q. risk-takers — still want to come to our country. And in a knowledge-talent era, where companies thrive by being the first and fastest to put intelligence into everything they make, we should be welcoming more high-skilled immigrants than ever and giving green cards to every Chinese, and other foreign students, who come to America for advanced degrees. China can’t attract the best and brightest Indian, Israeli, Arab, French, Brazilian and Korean immigrants, but we still can. So why would we put out a sign saying “Go Away” or make it harder for their students to stay here?

Also, we have real allies in a way China does not. China has clients, customers and frightened neighbors. It does not have real partners like Canada and Mexico. It doesn’t have the whole Atlantic alliance with the European Union or tight relations with Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Australia — which we can leverage if we aren’t doing stupid stuff, like slapping them with steel tariffs or tearing up the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Finally, as a society, we stand for things — or at least we used to stand for things — values people admire, about the dignity of human beings, the rights of minorities and women and the virtues of freedom and the rules for fair play.

Our nation has never been just a beacon for profit-making, which only measured countries by their trade balance with us. Our values attracted people to our shores and helped us spread our rules onto the wider world. When Trump tore up the TPP trade deal I’m certain that he actually disappointed China’s economic reformers, who wanted to use the pact to create pressures inside China to reform.

In short, a strategic president wouldn’t squander our strengths but would reinforce them by creating a stronger global network of people and countries that share our values. We won the Cold War with a strategy of containment and bankrupting the Soviet Union by outspending the Kremlin on defense. But we will “win” this standoff with China, not by brute force alone, or by containment of China’s giant economy, but by “entanglement” — the entanglement of Chinese students with our schools, Chinese businesses with our values, and the Chinese government with our allies. That is, with the broad alliances and global institutions, and their rules of fair play, that we’ve been part of since World War II.

So we have to fight for those rules, and China will fight for its versions. But ultimately, I believe, the U.S. and China together will have to play the role that the U.S. played alone after World War II — to define the rules of the new international order, from A.I. to privacy to trade. And our weight in that process — we must never forget — will depend on the talent we attract, the allies we rally and the values we embrace and promote.