Definition Of An American

One of an unexceptional group of people known collectively as Americans who scour the planet blowing up shit.

Unlike Hitler who only sort to impose his will on Europe an American seeks to impose his will on the world.

The Red Flag

The ruling class and the spectre of Leon Trotsky

From WSWS

Seventy-six years ago today, the assassin Ramon Mercader plunged an ice axe into the head of Leon Trotsky at his home in Coyoacan, Mexico City. Gravely wounded, Trotsky valiantly fought back against his killer. He died of his injuries the following day.

The aim of the assassin’s paymaster, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, was to silence the voice of his principal foe and so deprive the Russian and international working class of its greatest revolutionary leader.

Stalin failed. Today, the dictator’s name and that of his followers is reviled. He was, as Trotsky warned, “The grave digger of the revolution,” whereas Trotsky is forever associated with the incorruptible struggle against Stalinism and for international socialism.

Trotsky remains not only a towering historical personality, but also a figure of acute contemporary political relevance for workers the world over. This finds confirmation in the way that his name has been invoked repeatedly in the deepening crisis of the British Labour Party.

The right wing of the Labour Party, beginning on August 9 with an article in the Guardian by its deputy leader Tom Watson, is bitterly denouncing “Trotskyist entryists” and portraying all supporters of Labour’s current leader, Jeremy Corbyn, as unwitting dupes of these shadowy forces.

In the Corbyn camp, the response has been to express outrage and incredulity that such an accusation has been made—with Corbyn reassuring the Observer, “At no stage in anyone’s most vivid imagination are there 300,000 sectarian extremists at large in the country who have suddenly descended on the Labour Party [emphasis added].”

None of this has prevented Britain’s major newspapers from being inundated with articles on Trotsky, seeking to denigrate him and warn against any association with his ideas. Repeated references have been made to “Trotsky’s ghost” haunting the Labour Party and portraying the political struggle within it as one between reform and revolution.

Whatever the factional intentions of the Labour right, the emergence of Trotsky’s name to the centre stage has enormous objective significance. Indeed, whenever capitalism is gripped by crisis and an eruption of social and political conflict involving the working class, Trotsky’s presence is always felt.

Why is this?

Despite the declarations of his supposed “irrelevance”, the ruling elite and its media is acutely aware of the threat posed by Trotsky and Trotskyism under conditions of bitter social divisions, the political turmoil produced by the Brexit referendum and, above all, the threatened breakup of the Labour Party that has policed the struggles of the working class for more than a century.

Millions of workers and young people are looking for a means of fighting back against austerity and militarism. Corbyn’s pretence of being such an alternative, while opposing any break with the Labour Party, cannot last. The question of building a new and genuinely socialist party will inevitably arise.

The situation in Britain only expresses that which is developing the world over. The working class is moving to the left, but it has yet to build the socialist leadership it requires.

Next year is the 100th anniversary of the October 1917 revolution in Russia. Alongside Lenin, Trotsky’s name is synonymous with that epochal event that established the first workers state in the world. Today, world capitalism is once again in the grip of an escalating economic, political and social crisis that raises anew the question of whether humanity will be dragged into an era of dictatorship, barbarism and war, or whether the working class will succeed in establishing world socialism, ending class exploitation and national divisions.

Trotsky led the political fight against the degeneration of the Soviet Union under Stalin. His struggle and that of the Left Opposition, which culminated in the founding of the Fourth International in 1938, refutes the central claim of anti-communist propagandists that Lenin led to Stalin, and that socialism produced bureaucratic tyranny.

Trotsky is the author of the Theory of Permanent Revolution and of such epoch-defining phrases as “The death agony of capitalism.” He is the personal embodiment of the perspective of world socialist revolution. And as far as Britain’s ruling class and its counterparts internationally are concerned, this makes Trotsky the most toxic and dangerous figure in history.

Even after the passage of decades, Trotsky’s writings have immediate relevance. Not only did he pay close attention to the class struggle in Britain, he offered the most trenchant and scathing appraisal of the Labour Party and of its role as a defender of capitalist rule. His classic work, “Where is Britain Going?” was published in 1925, just one year before the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress betrayed the General Strike. His writings on the Fabian left and its impotence, cant and hypocrisy, provide a salutary warning against placing any trust in Corbyn and his backers in the union bureaucracy:

They are the main prop of British imperialism and of the European, if not the world bourgeoisie. Workers must at all costs be shown these self-satisfied pedants, drivelling eclectics, sentimental careerists and liveried footmen of the bourgeoisie in their true colours. To show them up for what they are means to discredit them beyond repair. To discredit them means rendering a supreme service to historical progress.

In the next period, the burning issue that must be clarified among advanced workers and youth internationally is that of Trotsky and his political legacy. The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), the world Trotskyist movement that is represented in Britain by the Socialist Equality Party, has dedicated itself to refuting what we have termed the “post-Stalinist school of historical falsification” regarding Trotsky and his life and work.

In the first decade of this century, and on the eve of the 2008 financial crash, British historians Ian Thatcher, Geoffrey Swain and Robert Service all published biographies of Trotsky. World Socialist Web Site Chairman David North conducted systematic work to expose the lies and falsifications they contained. Published in 2010 under the title In Defense of Leon Trotsky, North described their tendentious works as “pre-emptive biographies” seeking to “completely discredit Trotsky as a historical figure” on the eve of renewed revolutionary struggles.

In his introduction, North made the following observation of the motivations for all present efforts to denigrate Trotsky:

Leon Trotsky was, above all else, the great tribune and theoretician of world socialist revolution. The passions evoked by his name testify to the enduring significance of Trotsky’s ideas. Arguments about Trotsky are never simply about what happened in the past. They are just as much about what is happening in the world today, and what is likely to happen in the future.

Since these words were written, much additional ink and paper has been wasted on seeking to diminish and slander Trotsky. Yet despite these slanders and those that will follow, it has never been possible to erase his enduring presence. This is because Trotskyism is not only a spectre but a political movement. The organization that he founded, the Fourth International, is the conscious expression of deep objective tendencies that are once again bringing the working class all over the world into revolutionary struggle against the capitalist system.

The Big Fake

American and British media propaganda knows no bounds. Consider the video of the child supposedly caught up in a bombing raid by Russia in Aleppo. Forget for a moment that the US has inspired and funded the whole Syrian catastrophe and continues to do so by supplying ISIS with all the means they need to topple the Assad government - forget that and just look at the photo.

A boy has supposedly been plucked from the rubble of a bombed building and instead of being rushed to hospital where his wounds can be treated he is instead plonked in a chair for the world to gawk at. Does it make sense to you. 

Hooray I got it removed. So much egg on the BBC's face.

The Olympic Flame Should Be Extinguished

Rio 2016: The “Olympic ideal” and the reality of capitalism

From WSWS

“The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.” These words, which appear in the Olympic Charter’s “Fundamental Principles of Olympism,” are supposed to sum up what is referred to with sanctimonious reverence as the “Olympic ideal.”

There has never been a golden age of the Olympic games, which have for over a century served as an arena for the promotion of nationalism. The founder of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, was candid in acknowledging that he valued sport not only for its potential for advancing mankind’s development, but also for its use in preparing French men to become better soldiers in war.

With the opening of the 2016 games in Rio de Janeiro, however, the contrast could hardly be more stark between the supposed Olympic ideal and the reality of a capitalist system mired in economic crisis and social inequality and hurtling toward another world war.

The opening ceremony of the Rio games, held in the city’s iconic Maracana Stadium, was widely covered by the international news media. Less reported was a brutal attack by the Brazilian police against a demonstration organized a half mile away, called against what the protesters termed “the exclusion games.” Police used tear gas, pepper spray and stun grenades to drive the demonstrators off the streets, injuring several.

Earlier clashes were seen along the route taken by the Olympic Torch, which in one case was extinguished by a crowd of workers and youth in the coastal town of Angra dos Reis. They had turned out to protest the expenditures on the Olympics under conditions where public employees and teachers are not being paid and transit service and health care are being cut because of the deepening fiscal crisis.

In 2009, when the Brazilian government secured the 2016 games for Rio, then President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva proclaimed, “Our time has arrived.” During the same period, Lula was boasting that Brazil, whose growth rate had rebounded to 5 percent, was immune from the effects of the global financial meltdown of 2008.

Since then, the world capitalist crisis has devastated Brazil’s economy, driving the official unemployment rate to over 11 percent and sending real wages falling. Millions are threatened with being thrown back into extreme poverty in what is already one of the world’s most socially unequal countries.

Even as the games unfold, the Brazilian Senate is moving ahead with the impeachment of ousted President Dilma Rousseff on trumped-up charges of budgetary irregularities. Those moving against the Workers Party (PT) president are, like the PT itself, implicated up to their necks in the multi-billion-dollar Petrobras bribery scandal. Nonetheless, they are backed by both Brazilian and foreign capital, which wants a full change of regime in order to proceed with sweeping austerity policies under interim President Michel Temer, Rousseff’s former vice president and political ally.

In the run-up to the opening of the games, the Brazilian government heavily publicized alleged terror plots that appeared to have little if any substance. In fact, the massive security operation accompanying the Rio games is aimed not at terrorists, but at the Brazilian population itself. An occupation army of some 100,000 troops and police—twice the number mobilized for the already militarized 2012 London games—has been deployed across Rio, many dressed in combat gear, carrying assault rifles and backed by armored cars and even tanks.

This operation has been supplemented by the United States military and intelligence apparatus, which, according to NBC, has “assigned more than 1,000 spies to Olympic security,” hundreds of whom have been sent to Brazil. In addition to the CIA, FBI and NSA spooks, detachments of Marine and Navy commandos from the US Special Operations Command have been deployed on the ground.

This is the culmination of a campaign of repression that has unfolded over the past few years in tandem with preparations first for the 2013 World Cup football tournament and now for the Olympics. Violent police measures have been used to drive tens of thousands from their homes in impoverished districts targeted for development, while thousands more homeless have been swept from the streets in what amounts to an exercise in “social cleansing.” Police have killed between 40 and 50 people a month in the city over the recent period, while extra-official death squads have murdered many more. So much for the Olympics and “human dignity.”

Against this backdrop, the vast wealth expended on the Olympics, all in pursuit of enrichment and private profit, is obscene. Corporate sponsors, including Coca-Cola, Samsung, Dow Chemical, General Electric, McDonalds and others, have paid hundreds of millions of dollars for exclusive marketing rights and are spending hundreds of millions more to exploit them. TV companies have shelled out $4 billion to broadcast the 19-day event, while marketing revenues are expected to total $9.3 billion.

A relative handful of individual professional athletes will make tens of millions more from product endorsements. The days when the Olympics were a celebration of amateur sports are a distant memory.

Within the games themselves, the overriding atmosphere of social inequality is ever present. While poorer teams are dealing with substandard conditions in hastily constructed Olympic villages, the US basketball “dream team” is residing on the luxury cruise ship Silver Cloud, moored in Rio’s harbor and surrounded by police and navy patrol boats.

Meanwhile, the use of the Olympics to promote nationalism and prepare for war is as virulent in the Rio games as at any time since Adolph Hitler convened the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

On Monday, it was announced that Russian athletes will be banned entirely from the Paralympics to be held next month in Rio in connection with charges of state-sponsored doping of athletes. Earlier, 118 members of the country’s track and field team were banned under a system relegating the decision to the federations of each individual sport.

Washington, the World Anti-Doping Agency, various NGOs and the Western media have waged a virulent campaign to exclude every Russian athlete from the Rio Olympics and prevent the country’s flag from even appearing there, as part of a broader effort to paint Russia as a “rogue” nation that must be stopped by force.

The campaign to bar Russia from the games is inseparably bound up with the growing US-NATO siege of the country’s Western borders, which has been steadily escalated since the US- and German-orchestrated coup that installed an ultra-right, anti-Russian regime in Ukraine in 2014.

The sanctimonious denunciations of Russia for having corrupted an otherwise pristine sporting event reek with bad faith and hypocrisy. The anti-Russian campaign intentionally obscures the wholesale corruption surrounding the entire organization of the games as well as the rampant doping practiced by nearly every country.

The controversy, which has run in tandem with the Democratic Party’s neo-McCarthyite campaign denouncing Vladimir Putin for interfering in the US election, has been pumped up as part of the attempt to prepare public opinion for a military conflict with Russia that could quickly lead to nuclear war.

While this year’s Olympic Games will once again provide a display of astounding athletic ability by participants from across the planet, the entire event is overshadowed by a social system that is founded on inequality and exploitation, and threatens the very survival of humanity.