Are Islamic Jihadists Fascist?

Ex-leftist Christopher Hitchens, now ensconced with his new buddies on the right at places like the neofascist Wall Street Journal, promotes the term "Islamofascist" to describe Taliban and Al-Qaeda types. (Ironic given his new bedfellows.) These fundamentalist fanatics are certainly violent and totalitarian in the extreme. Does that make them fascist?

Well, that depends on the definition of "fascist." People who use the term virtually never define it.

But here are what I see as some commonalities between one group of undeniable fascists, the Nazis, and the vicious, terrorist murderers of the (Sunni) Islamic persuasion:

-Hyperviolent and sadistic

-Extremely fanatical (thus uncompromising- yet we keep hearing naive talk of negotiating/compromising/listening to their grievances)

-Possessors of an anti-human ideology which they impose by extreme force

-Murderously intolerant of most other people on this planet

-Terrorists- systematically use terror not just as a weapon to seize power, but as a permanent instrument of rule, used ubiquitously to keep their oppressed subjects under their power

-Uncompromising as noted, except tactically when it suits them to gain advantage and then only temporarily. (The tactics of the Taliban in Pakistan, where they negotiated to take over the Swat valley, and then immediately grabbed more territory, are reminiscent of Hitler's prewar games over Czechoslovakia and etc.)

-Feign sham interest in "peace" & "negotiations" with adversaries, as a trick or ruse or temporary expedient to grab an advantage. Any "peace" thus gained is extremely temporary. Inevitably they must be fought by force of arms

-Despite their extreme ignorance and intolerant narrow-mindedness, possess a dangerous degree of animal cunning about power, politics, and manipulating other people

-Totally ruthless, unethical, immoral, and unburdened by conscience.

 So they certainly have things in common. But this description could apply to others. Perhaps "Islamofascist" is sloppy and lazy, an easy epithet used as a shortcut to a more accurate description. I guess it's serviceable if you need to reduce the description of these horrible creeps to only one word. (Forget 9/11- these shitheads throw acid on little girls to stop them from going to school, among other monstrous atrocities. What they do to other Muslims is far worse than what they've done to the U.S. And they've killed more Muslims in other countries than the number of Americans killed on 9/11 and in the attacks on the two U.S. embassies in Africa and on the USS Cole combined.)

Intellectual Architect of Kent State Massacre Finally Dies

Irving Kristol, one of the endless supply of rightwing ideologues who provide intellectual justifications for the current social, economic, and imperialist order in America, has finally died. Treated as a major figure, not because of his brilliant ideas, but because of his political significance as an ideological Godfather of one of the many strands of anti-human reaction in the U.S., in his case the one called "neoconservatism." (A claque of mostly Jewish reactionaries ensconced in New York City institutions, including academia, private propaganda nests, and right-wing rags which are always copiously funded by the right-wing rich.)

Days before the Kent State massacre, Kristol met with President Richard Nixon (a truly pathological creature and one of the most evil presidents in U.S. history, which is really saying something) and urged Nixon to crush the anti-war movement on the college campuses. Days later, Republican Ohio Governor Rhodes unleashed his National Guard on defenseless students, murdering four and wounding others, including one rendered paraplegic for life. This was preceded by and followed by a reign of repression directed against the students, turning the campus into a police state. Students wandering into town were subjected to baseless, summary arrest, and assault by local louts.

Of course, the establishment rag The New York Times rolled out a huge obit, fawning over The Great Man. As usual when they fete reactionaries, they do not quote his actual "ideas," which are shockingly stupid and vicious, as always with reactionaries, no matter the verbal finery they're dressed up in to appear "intellectual."

Kristol was an enemy of humanity in everything he wrote and did.

NY Times STILL Running Pinochet Propaganda

Chile is one of many countries in which the U.S. instigated a military coup and subsequent bloodbath in order to keep a society backward and oppressive, and ripe for economic exploitation. Immediately after the 1973 Chilean coup, led by traitorous fascist general Augusto Pinochet, the military junta put out the false story that President Salvador Allende committed suicide. In fact, he was executed in the Moneda Presidential Palace. The last photo we have of Allende is of him in a steel helmet carrying a gun, determined to defend the Moneda and Chilean democracy.  And none other than the FBI, a rightwing U.S. secret police organization, concluded that the suicide story was false.

The FBI came to this conclusion in the course of investigating the murders of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt by terrorist bomb in Washington, D.C. Within a week of that bombing, Newsweek ran CIA disinfo in their "Periscope" column saying the junta and DINA, their secret police, had nothing to do with it. That was a lie, of course. Turned out the junta hired American terrorist Michael Vernon Townley and some fascist Cuban terrorists to make and plant a bomb in Letelier's car. Pinochet's cover story was that Letelier bombed himself to be a martyr. (So much for the credibility of their "Allende killed himself, we didn't" story.) George Bush the Elder was CIA director at the time, and thus a terrorist accomplice. The CIA also helped smuggle Townley into the country under a false passport. The Bush family's material support to terrorists also include sheltering Orlando Bosch, an architect of an airliner bombing that killed 73 people. The U.S. continued to employ, and shelters to this day the terrorists responsible for that terrorist atrocity. [See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubana_Flight_455 or search "Cubana airliner bombing" for more.] [There are two good books about the Letelier-Moffitt assassinations and aftermath that I know of- Assassination on Embassy Row by Landau & Dinges, and Death in Washington: The murder of Orlando Letelier by Donald Freed. Only Townley was punished, and he only served 3 years. On the other hand, "ecoterrorists" get that and heavier sentences for vandalism, and Muslims running charities for Palestinians get 65 years in prison, which just happened. Which proves how blatantly political the U.S. "justice" system is.

So now, 36 year later, the New York Times is still running fascist propaganda. And apparently so is the rest of the U.S. corporate propaganda system (aka "the media").  They cribbed an AP obituary of Allende's wife, who just died, which repeats the suicide canard intended to exonerate the regime for its murder of the President and make Allende appear cowardly.

"By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: June 18, 2009

"On Sept. 11, 1973, while under air and ground attack at the presidential palace, Mr. Allende killed himself rather than surrender to the military."

Of course, the Times was an enthusiastic backer and celebrator of the Chilean coup, and hired a noxious propagandist by the name of Shirley Christian to write pro-Pinochet propaganda for the paper, at which task she was quite prolific. (You can search the NYT archives under her name. Christian was also a big fan of U.S. client dictator Somoza of Nicaragua, and excoriated the U.S. press for what she took to be their insufficient enthusiasm for that butcher. But they only soured on him after his thugs murdered one of their members, a stupid move.) 

It's a small lie as U.S. media lies go. Bigger ones: the Kennedy and King assassinations, "Yellow Rain" (bee pollen the U.S. media claimed was Soviet chemical warfare), the "Pope Plot," (Turkish fascist terrorist shoots a Pope, KGB and Bulgarian diplomat framed by CIA and their U.S. media pals) and on and on. 

This is not the first time the Times has included political/ideological propaganda in an obituary. It seems there is no part of the Times that is off-limits for nonobjective content. (For example, after Oliver Stone came out with the movie JFK, the Times, an assiduous promoter of the official coverup of the assassination, went ballistic, and for months afterwards barbs aimed at Stone would pop up in the middle of unrelated articles. You'd be reading a restaurant review, say, and suddenly read something like "the soup left one with a feeling of nausea as if one had just viewed an Oliver Stone movie." I don't know if they put out a memo to the staff to "get Stone," or the kind of careerist creeps who work at the Times just took it upon themselves to score brownie points with their editors, but it was truly batty.)

Ironically, this pro-fascist paper (there are plenty of other examples of its support for fascist regimes, like in "South" Vietnam, Indonesia, Argentina, El Salvador, etc. etc.) is reviled as "liberal" by domestic U.S. fascists and reactionaries. Guess they don't know how to read. (Ranting, raving and reviling they do, not reading. Or thinking.)

NY Times Runs Interference For Anti-Abortion Terrorists

In Wake of Tiller Assassination, NY Times Runs Interference For Anti-Abortion Terrorists

Monday, June 8, 2009, on page A10, the NY Times is at it again, running political interference for the anti-abortion movement. Almost the entire page is taken up by a puff piece on the anti-abortionists and their alleged dilemmas and uncertainty in the wake of their smashing victory resulting from the execution of Dr. George Tiller. The Times repeats over and over the phony disclaimers of responsibility and alleged regret over the murder by the anti-abortionists, and reinforces the sham contention that there is no terrorist wing to the anti-abortion movement. (This contention is belied by the support given to terrorists like Slepian assassin James Charles Kopp and clinic and Olympics bomber and cop-killer Eric Robert Rudolph, who were able to avoid capture for long periods because of support from the anti-abortion community. The Catholic press even editorialized on behalf of Kopp while he was on the lam.) The article reeks sympathy for these terrorist supporters, who are no doubt secretly gleeful over their success in permanently ending Tiller's medical practice after decades of attacking him, his workers, his family, and his clinic.

This most recent Times article on behalf of the anti-abortionists falsely distances the assassin of Tiller, Scott P. Roeder from the movement he is a part of, repeating absurd lies that no one knew him, he wasn't connected to them, etc.

And of course the times continues to hide FBI complicity in the latest murder, namely their refusal to enforce Federal law and arrest Roeder when he was caught redhanded by clinic personnel glueing their locks the day before carrying out the assassination, and previous Federal crimes he was seen committing. (The bogus Federal Clinic Protection Act is one of these window-dressing laws designed to dupe people and keep them passively waiting for the Government to protect them. It neutralizes people by keeping them corraled within the system, while with the other hand the Government allows terrorists to operate freely.)

The Times also ignores the vicious hostility of Kansas "authorities" (the legitimizing term for people in power) towards abortion providers, including Tiller, who they repeatedly harassed, investigated, and prosecuted, while ignoring criminal violations by the anti-abortion terrorists. (Screaming in people's faces to change their behavior certainly constitutes terrorism in its low-grade form. And as with mob pressure, the implied threat of violence backs up what the anti-abortionists do.)

The Times of course has long been anti-abortion, in a smarmy, underhanded, dishonest way, trying to undermine the beliefs of their "liberal" readers. It does this most obviously by using anti-abortion terminology in its "news" articles (which is pretends are "objective"). It never calls intact dilation and extraction just that, but uses the inflammatory anti-abortionist propaganda term "partial birth abortion." It calls the anti-abortionists "pro-life," another propaganda term. (These fanatics who allegedly find life so sacred, never made a peep about Reagan's massive state terrorism in Central America in the 1980s, for example.)

The Times also consistently slants its abortion coverage negatively towards women's right to control their own bodies. They paint pro-choice people are unreasonable and uncompromising.

This is a line the whole ruling class of the U.S. pushes. The right to abortion was one of the concessions the rulers of the U.S. were forced to make in the 1960s and '70s under pressure from militant movements from below. Ever since, they have been trying to reverse these concessions, including the right to abortion, which they constantly chip away at and demonize. Laws and court decisions keep adding more and more restrictions to the "right," (some right!). Abortion, when it is discussed in the media, is treated as something awful or tragic, or at best something undesirable to be eliminated. Pro-choice people are constantly invited to "the debate" in terms of how to eliminate abortion. Abortion providers have been effectively isolated from the medical establishment, forced to practice in standalone clinics which is like painting a bullseye on them.

The massive terrorism starting under Reagan, which included countless thousands of acts of intimidation, threats, vandalism, firebombings, bombings, maimings and now 8 known assassinations, is blacked out by the Times and the rest of the U.S. media. Only an out and out assassination is "newsworthy" to these propagandists. Environmentalists who commit property damage are reviled as "ecoterrorists" by the media, Times, FBI, and the full weight of secret police methods is brought to bear against them- infiltration, agents provocateurs, every kind of spying method, draconian "conspiracy" and "terrorism" laws, Grand Jury dragnets; the whole panoply of repressive methods the U.S. has in its arsenal. Same thing they did to the totally legal Central American solidarity movements. The FBI even tried to have one of its infiltrators, Frank Varelli, plant guns on one such group, according to Varelli's Congressional testimony. More recently, Muslim men were subjected to a massive roundup and brutal internment in the U.S. in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, but the U.S. Government covered up the Oklahoma City bombing conspiracy, even though they had moles inside the terrorists' nest in that case. No raids or roundups resulted. Muslim charities have also been shut down and persecuted, with draconian sentences for people sending humanitarian aid to Palestinians.

But repression by U.S. secret police agencies doesn't stop there. They also use rightwing terrorist organizations to carry out bombings and assassinations. A few of many examples include the San Diego “Secret Army Organization.” An FBI agent (i.e. badge-carrying member of the FBI, an alleged “law enforcement officer,” participated in a shooting attack on an academic perceived as leftwing by the FBI. He was in the car with the gunman who fired into the professor's home, hitting a woman in the elbow, permanently maiming her.

When the KKK assassinated civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo, FBI “informer” instigator Gary Rowe was in the assassins' car. The FBI was in the business of persecuting civil rights activists. Headed for years by notorious racist J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI tried to blackmail Martin Luther King, Jr. into committing suicide before accepting his Nobel Peace Prize by making him aware of their tapes of his sexual trysts in motel rooms. (The “respectable” “commentator Patrick J. Buchanan, an avowed admirer of fascists like Franco and McCarthy and known anti-Semite, was the FBI's media conduit for “leaking” this sexual blackmail dirt into the public domain. It speaks volumes about the political economy of the U.S. that Buchanan is a ubiquitous presence in the U.S. media.)

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (part of the U.S. Treasury, which contains a number of repressive “police” agencies, has been involved in various acts of terrorism through surrogate organizations. The BATF had an infiltrator in the base camp (“Elohim City”) from which the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing emanated, and was forewarned by their mole.

BATF also had one of two Government agents inside the Klan-Nazi combine that murdered five leaders of the Communist Workers Party in Greensboro, North Carolina. In fact they organized the assassinations which specifically targeted the CWP leaders at a public demonstration. The NY Times went so far as to label a photo of the assassins taking guns from the trunk of their car as “CWP” members. (Stalinist propagandists had nothing on the NY Times.) Not only is this not secret, but the PBS show Frontline even had a program about it discussing the instigation by these Government agents provocateurs. (The assassins were acquitted at trial, this being the reactionary South. The CWP was effectively destroyed. The Government targeted the CWP because the CWP was effectively standing up to the Klan-Nazis and encouraging armed opposition to these Government-sponsored terror groups.

As in the Weimar Republic, where Nazis could murder leftists with impunity, but leftists who fought back were vigorously prosecuted for self-defense, the heavy hand of state power puts progressives, and indeed any decent human beings who want to be politically engaged, at a huge and physically perilous disadvantage. Since people who engage in what is supposed to be legal political activities are also targeted for “neutralization,” -anything from constant harassment, firing from jobs, evictions, false arrests, oppressive surveillance through electronic and other means, on through to long prison sentences on trumped up charges with perjured and fabricated “evidence” and even assasination, this makes it virtually impossible to effectively organize for change in America. (And then the impulse for change gets channeled and neutralized by gulling people into following Pied Pipers like Barack Obama.)

Meanwhile the anti-abortion terrorists have scored another victory. Abortion is unavailable in at least 83% of all U.S. counties. Tiller's clinic is closed permanently. More people are intimidated. The official U.S. definition of terrorism is violence used for the purpose of achieving a political goal. If the U.S. media and Government weren't totally cynical in their use of law and language, they would have long ago used the words "terrorists" and "terrorism" for the violent arm of the anti-abortion movement and their crimes. But of course they won't even report their thousands of crimes with exceedingly rare exceptions.

The "law" is not neutral, and "justice" is not blind. Laws are instruments of power for rulers, which only fitfully are related to morality, and their application and enforcement are rarely evenhanded and in the interest of justice, understood in terms of normal human morality. This is true in most countries, and most certainly in the U.S. Meanwhile the pernicious false consciousness promoted and reinforced daily by the system's propaganda organs, aka "the media," needs to be chipped away at with facts and truth.
June 10, 2009

NY Times Phony "Reform" Editorials

Every week or two the New York Times runs an editorial bemoaning the dysfunction of the State Government in Albany and calling for "reform."  But when there was an actual chance for reform to occur, the Times went all-out to sabotage it.

I refer to the aborted Governorship of Eliot Spitzer. Spitzer, unlike all the phonies who preceded him in the office, actually was determined to reform the horribly corrupt, inept, dysfunctional and ossified political setup perpetuated by the horrible hack politicians who rule New York State. Spitzer was a driven and hard-driving, moralistic man who genuinely tried to shake up the venal political system. 

Immediately the Times and the other NYC daily rags (NY Post and NY Daily News, owned respectively by plutocrats Rupert Murdoch, a global purveyor of crude fascistic agitprop, and real estate baron Mortimer Zuckerman) set out to check Spitzer. Instead of supporting Spitzer, the Times ran character assassination pieces about what a rotten personality Spitzer had, this being the putative reason he was running into opposition to reform! (That the entrenched vested interests could care less about his personality, and resisted change because of their self-interest, is obvious, and was ignored in these Times' hatchet jobs.) 

Next, Joseph Bruno, a lifelong corrupt hack who was the Republican boss of the State Senate, was discovered to be misusing State Police copters to ferry himself around the state on partisan political errands. When Spitzer's people leaked this to the press, the press turned it into a scandal against Spitzer! That is, Spitzer broke some unwritten rule by investigating Bruno and by leaking the results. This was labeled "Troopergate" by the media lynch mob. Even to this day, "Troopergate" means a Spitzer scandal, not a Bruno scandal. Amazing.

Finally, the media found a sword with which to slay Spitzer. The FBI, one of the U.S.' secret police agencies, snooped into a prostitution ring. (Or were tapping Spitzer.) Of all the upper classs clients of the ring, ONLY SPITZER was named. Yes, he broke the law. Of course, it is oppressive and unjust that prostitution is illegal in the first place. And Spitzer was hypocritical (show me a person who isn't hypocritical about something!) because of his past public crusading against prostitution and johns. But Spitzer was in the bullseye of the finance capitalists and their Federal hatchetmen who held a grudge from when, as State Attorney General, he went after Wall Street and made them pay fines for their various crimes and misdemeanor. (The financiers and their organs like the Wall Street Journal were positively gloating when they got Spitzer.)

As recently as Saturday, June 6, 2009, the Times was at it again, with another hand-wringing, sanctimonious "reform" editorial. They're full of it. The Sulzbergers and their fellow plutocrats like the political system just the way it is, because the corrupt hacks in Albany (and in New York City for that matter) give them everything they want. For instance, when the Times needed to run roughshod over property owners in Times Square to seize a site for its new temple, the Government used its power to do the Times' bidding,

It's easier to control unethical, amoral hustlers who have no principles and are dependent on and beholden to the media. The reason these rags run fake calls for "reform" is pure posturing, and to fool the rubes who credulously believe the propaganda they're reading. Apparently you can fool most of the people most of the time quite easily.

Since this was originally posted,  the Times has run a couple of more editorials (through June 14, '09) bemoaning the political circus in Albany. Two putative Democrats, a girlfriend-face-slashing bully named Hiram Monserrate, and a sleazy crook named Pedro Espada Jr., were paid by a billionaire named Thomas Golisano to vote with the Republicans to seize control of the State Senate from the Democrats. Golisano had the brass to run a full page ad in the NY Daily News braying about how wonderful it all is. (Both Monserrate and Espada are under investigation for scams whereby they set up "nonprofits," fund them with taxpayer money, and siphon off the proceeds. Espada also lies about where he lives- he doesn't live in the district he "represents," as required by law, but lives outside NYC in an "upscale" area. They are classic examples of amoral, ethics- and scruples-free political animals who dominate politics, especially in New York.) 

So the times just deeps its cynical hypocrisy with each new handwringing editorial bemoaning the tawdry state of NY politics, which it helped perpetuate by sabotaging would-be reformer Spitzer.

The Shameless Moral Chutzpah of Vaclav Havel

Vaclav Havel is a Hero of Western Imperialism because for years he was the bourgoise President-In-Waiting for Czechoslovakia. Hailing from a rich landowning family, all he had to do was bide his time until the decrepit system of Soviet socialism collapsed in order to take over the country. (No such thing is possible in the U.S. Empire, because all potential opposition leaders in places like Latin America are systematically murdered. Miraculously, in a few countries new people's leaders have arisen anyway.)

Havel is an adoring fan of fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet (not a secret, but a fact never mentioned in the U.S. press). So it's sickeningly hypocritical (if not downright cynical) whenever Havel presumes to climb on a moral high horse and denounce/lecture.

Most recently he was at it on the NY Times op-ed page (May 11, 2009; May 10 in their online archive), denouncing the "tyrants" of the UN Human Rights Commission.

Sure, the UN is full of shit. A club of bosses of the world's nations would have to be loathsome. But the idea that Havel hates tyrants and loves democracy is a sick joke. Capitalism is what he loves. Salvador Allende, the President of Chile murdered by the fascist traitor Pinochet, was a democrat- too democratic, as it turned out. Since Havel celebrates his murderer, Havel is obviously an ANTI-democrat, notwithstanding his grotesque posturing to the contrary.

Of course the NY Times is guilty of the worst kind of bad faith for not only running such deceptive and dishonest propaganda, but for promulgating a totally fraudulent worldview, the purpose of which is to create and sustain a false consciousness of reality among the public. This false consciousness if a basic reason why America is hopeless and cannot evolve in a positive direction. (All you dupes of the Pied Piper Obama, President "Hope & Change," I hope you're keeping count of his broken campaign promises. He's been breaking several a week now.)