"In the midst of a blockade that intends to suffocate us, we will continue working in peace to overcome this situation". This was stated, through the social network X, by the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party and President of the Republic, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, while denouncing the propagandistic and instigating articulation of the enemies of the Revolution to provoke destabilization and chaos, based on the tensions generated by the current limitations of the electric service in the country, due to fuel deficit, and other daily shortages, mainly as a result of the relentless policy of economic suffocation of the United States Government against Cuba. "In the last few hours we have seen how terrorists based in the U.S., whom we have repeatedly denounced, encourage actions against the internal order of the country," the president accused, referring to the growing counterrevolutionary campaign that, through the artificial multiplication of hate messages and subversive content disseminated on social networks and anti-Cuban sites, distort and manipulate the claim that groups of citizens have expressed, due to logical disagreements with the electricity service and food distribution. "The disposition of the authorities of the Party, the State and the Government is to attend to the claims of our people, to listen, to dialogue, to explain the numerous steps being taken to improve the situation, always in an atmosphere of tranquility," Díaz-Canel argued. A clear example of this was the honest and open dialogue held yesterday by the first secretary of the Provincial Committee of the Party in Santiago de Cuba, Beatriz Johnson Urrutia, with a group of people who complained about the unbalanced schedule in the supply of electricity and the effects on products such as milk for children. According to statements in X, Johnson Urrutia explained that "the population of Santiago de Cuba was respectful and listened attentively to the information provided by the municipality's management regarding the distribution of the food basket", and added that "they also talked about the supply of electric energy, due to the effects on the National Electro-energy System, because of the problems of the thermoelectric power plants and the availability of fuel". "The premise will always be the attention and explanation to the people, in an atmosphere of peace and tranquility, in the face of the persistent attempts of counterrevolutionaries and terrorists abroad to destabilize the country", stressed, also through X, the member of the Political Bureau and Secretary of Organization of the Central Committee of the Party, Roberto Morales Ojeda. That the traditional enemy of the Cuban Revolution and its chorus of mercenaries associate for the strangulation of the Island has nothing spontaneous about it. "They seek asphyxiation with the genocidal blockade and, on the shortages and daily difficulties they impose on us, they articulate their other war from the platforms they dominate and usufruct," denounced Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, also a member of the Political Bureau, when he pointed out the interferenceist conspiracy of the diplomatic representation of the Northern power in our country. "The direct and cruel responsibility of the U.S. in the acute economic situation that weighs on the well-being of the Cuban people is well known. The U.S. Government, especially its Embassy in Cuba, must refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of the country and inciting social disorder," he demanded. Archives March 2024
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3/19/2024 Haiti: Trapped Between U.S. Guns, Death Squads, and the Next Colonial Invasion. By: Danny ShawRead Nowaiti is again breaking news. One of the top news stories in the world on March 12 was the alleged “cannibalism” of a Haitian gang. No different than the Department of Health’s equating Haitians with carriers of the AIDS virus in the 1980’s and Hollywood films such as The Serpent and the Rainbow, this disinformation campaign is a racist attack on the collective Haitian self-esteem. Such propaganda seeks to ideologically justify the impending fourth U.S.-directed invasion and occupation of Haiti in the past 100 years. But where there is repression, there is resistance. Haitian grassroots actors and their supporters around the world are saying no to both internal and external mercenaries usurping Haitian participatory democracy. As Haitian Bald Headed Party-affiliated (PHTK) paramilitary death squads rampage through Port-au-Prince, seeking to displace and massacre as many families as possible, Jake Johnston’s new book Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism and the Battle to Control Haiti is a valuable contribution to understanding the geopolitical origins of these “gangs.” The book provides context on why the Biden government appointed the unelected prime minister, Ariel Henry, in 2021 and then requested his removal from office last week as continued support for the illegitimate leader became untenable. Gangs or Mercenaries for Hire? Johnston’s page-turner is a necessary read for those new to Haitian studies, as well as those long familiar with the anti-dictatorship and anti-paramilitary struggles that Haiti has embarked upon in decades and centuries past. One thing is clear: the current paramilitaries, described in the mainstream press as “gangs,” must be analyzed on the historical continuum of U.S.-sponsored, state-affiliated armed groups, tasked with subduing the perennially “restless natives.” The preferred weapon of the mercenary gang bosses—Izo, Kempès, Barbecue, and others—is the torching of the communities they seek to subdue. Johnston points to the Michel Martelly administration (2011 - 2016) as being the first expression of the PHTK to use armed mercenaries to do their bidding. This assault on Haitian democracy, as personified by the politically-active populations of Belè, Lasalin, Solino, Delma anba, and the other ghettos of downtown Port-au-Prince, has reshaped Haiti’s capital city (spellings of Haitian words are in Haitian Kreyòl and not in the French colonial language). While early 2021 saw a mass movement that sought to topple the second expression of the PHTK dictatorship, headed by Jovenel Moïse, today armed and masked gunmen control some 80 percent of Port-au-Prince. According to the Displacement Tracking Matrix of the International Organization of Migration, 330,000 people have been internally displaced in Haiti, the majority of whom are children. Consistent with one of the principal themes of the book, I documented in visits to refugee camps at the end of January how the U.S.-sponsored Haitian state has yet to even visit the thousands of families sheltered in schools, alleyways, public plazas, and beyond. Aid State compiles 10 plus years of Johnston’s research in the Capital Beltway and 1,400 miles away, in the ancestral homeland of Haitian revolutionary leaders Dutty Boukman, François Makandal, and Jean-Jacque Dessalines. The backdrop of the work is a literary tour de force of the spellbinding mountains of the Grandans department, the crowded refugee camp of Titanyen, and the abandoned farms of the Grannò. The reader who has not visited Haiti in the past years as a result of what the Haitian people call the ensekirité planifye e òganize (planned and organized instability) is sure to shed a tear or two of nostalgia upon reading of the landgrabs of armed thugs employed by the PHTK. Haitian Patriots or Colonial Lackeys? The meat of the book provides a broad overview of the corrupt inner workings of Haitian state corruption beginning with the selection of Martelly as president in 2011 up to the present, and the U.S. government puppeteers who oversee the clumsy “politics as usual.” Johnston examines from the inside-out how the “aid state”—a state almost wholly dependent on thousands of private, foreign NGO’s—both consciously and unconsciously functions to disempower Haitians. Every page confirms what almost any Haitian will tell you: politics and “aid” are a rich man’s game which mocks the lives, interests, and dignity of Haiti’s 99 percent. Haitian young professionals searching to be of service to their country would have been militants of national liberation organizations in decades past. Today, much of this homegrown talent is compelled to follow the lure of some 10,000 NGOs that can pay salaries in U.S. dollars the Haitian left does not have access to. “Soft imperialism” contributes to an internal brain drain that discourages the upcoming generation from struggling for true Haitian sovereignty. Johnston shows how the Republic of NGOs—one accurate nickname for both pre and post-earthquake Haiti—is not organized to respond to everyday people’s needs. The product of years of investigative journalism, Johnston shows how the Republic of NGOs—one accurate nickname for both pre and post-earthquake Haiti—is not organized to respond to everyday people’s needs. Thoroughly researched chapters show how donors responding to the 2010 earthquake, including the Clinton Foundation, Citibank, and an entire cast of neocolonial characters, squandered $10 billion dollars, $1 billion of which was from the United States, constituting the “largest ever international mobilization to respond to a natural disaster.” A high percentage of that money was pilfered by Western companies who created fraudulent paperwork and looked out for corporate bottom lines, not the needs of the Haitian people. The chapter “The $80,000 House” explains with painstaking detail how Haitian Martelly’s government and his cronies, such as his childhood friend Harold Charles, worked with USAID and their U.S. contractors—including Thor Construction, Tetra Tech, and the CEEPCO company—in the wake of the earthquake to swindle Haiti’s population in the north. The Caracol-EKAM village was supposed to provide $8,000 homes for workers displaced by the earthquake who were the rank and file of the Clinton-USAID free trade or sweatshop project. After the vultures divided up the booty, each house turned out to have “cost” $88,000. What was supposed to be a community of 15,000 “culturally appropriate” homes for survivors of the earthquake ended up being 750 homes with major construction and sewage problems. This malfeasance was “the perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with our foreign aid system: the favoritism and corruption, the reliance on expensive foreign ‘experts,’ the lack of community consultation. Most of all, the houses stood as proof of how difficult it was to hold anyone accountable for their actions in Haiti.” Johnston, a Senior Research Associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, provides the necessary global—or more accurately U.S.—geostrategic context that explains how political unknowns like Martelly, Moïse, and Henry became the leaders of the nation, despite enjoying very little popular support. Johnston shows that the PHTK, the party of the U.S.-backed former president Martelly, is the principal Haitian actor at the center of the Guns, Gangs, and Neocolonialism drama that continues to play out. Interviews with former president René Préval, the head of the scaled-down UN mission Susan Page, and musician, hotelier, and former Martelly ambassador Richard Morse add to the entertaining, easily-digestible chapters. Aid State is further bolstered by chapters covering the theft of billions of dollars in Petro Caribbean funds by the Haitian state from Venezuela, and the 628,000 “zombie votes” from people who did not exist in 2016 that guaranteed victory for the PHTK and the United States’ man in Haiti, Moïse. Aid State ends with explosive new plot twists that help explain who was behind the July 7, 2021, assassination of Moïse that will shock even seasoned followers of all things Haiti. The Only Solution: Haitian Self-Determination The myriad threats and doxing to which the author has been subjected are the clearest proof he has exposed and touched the sensitive veins of colonial rule in Haiti. Like Jeb Sprague’s Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti, Mark Schuller’s Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti, Dada Chery’s We Have Dared to Be Free: Haiti's Struggle Against Occupation, and a phalanx of others, this is a book that belongs in every library of Haitian and anti-colonial studies. Johnston has been a valuable witness to an important chapter in the ongoing Haitian national liberation struggle. His lucid pen does justice to the continued mobilization of millions of Haitians against the Aid State. The myriad threats and doxing to which the author has been subjected are the clearest proof he has exposed and touched the sensitive veins of colonial rule in Haiti. I am an ethnographer who has filled up notebooks with notes on Haitian Kreyòl and culture for almost three decades. Since 2021, I have been following the paramilitary gang war on the long-peaceful and stable ghettos of Port-au-Prince. Jake Johnston’s rigorous research over the course of fifteen years has helped me better understand the present brutality that neocolonialism has produced. Johnston’s book is a necessary read for any friends and supporters of Haiti seeking to contextualize what is playing out in the korido (alleyways) and katyè popilè (oppressed communities) of Port-au-Prince as you read this article. Upon finishing this political science and journalistic gem, the reader wonders how, nearly one quarter of the way through the 21st century in the era of social media and identity politics, Haiti can so clearly remain a colony of the United States. Every U.S. government move in Haiti, from appointing prime ministers to organizing the next invasion, reflects their desire to maintain hegemonic control over Haiti. The years 1492 and 1697—the year of the “Peace of Ryswick” treaty which defined colonial ownership of the island the Taino natives called Ayiti—hemorrhage into 2024 as the masses of hungry and humiliated Haitians continue to dream of and fight for the Second Haitian Revolution. Until then, Haitian communities stand like David before Goliath, erecting their barricades to resist the onslaught of the paramilitaries and their foreign masters. Author Danny Shaw teaches Latin American and Caribbean Studies and International Relations at the City University of New York. He holds a master’s degree in International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. As the Director and professor of the International Affairs Department at the Midwestern Marx Institute, he works to build unity and anti-imperialist consciousness. He is fluent in Spanish, Haitian Kreyol, Portuguese, Cape Verdean Kreolu and has a fair command of French, and works as an International Affairs Analyst for TeleSUR, HispanTV, RT and other international news networks. He has worked and organized in eighty-one countries, opening his spirit to countless testimonies about the inhumanity of the international economic system. He is a Golden Gloves boxer, fighting twice in Madison Square Garden for the NYC heavyweight championship. He teaches boxing, yoga and nutrition and works as a Sober Coach. He is a mentor to many, guiding them through the nutritional, ideological, social and emotional landmines that surround us. He is the father of Ernesto Dessalines and Cauã Amaru. He has also authored articles on Latin American history, boxing and nutrition, among other topics. You can follow his work at @profdannyshaw Republished from NACLA Archives March 2024 THERE is a paradox at the core of the efflorescence of science that has occurred over the last millennium. In essence this efflorescence has the potential to increase human freedom immensely. It increases the capacity of man within the man-nature dialectic; scientific practice aims to go beyond the “given” not just in a once-for-all sense but as a perpetual movement through incessant self-questioning, so that this practice is potentially a collective act of liberation. But this promise of freedom remains significantly unfulfilled; and while its potential has not been realised, this efflorescence of science has been utilised to a great extent for domination by some over other human beings and other societies. The paradox lies in the fact that scientific practice that has the potential to increase human freedom has been utilised to increase domination, that is, to attenuate human freedom. The roots of this paradox lie in the fact that the unleashing of scientific advance required an overthrow of the stranglehold over society of the church (which, it may be recalled, had forced Galileo to recant); and this overthrow could occur only as part of the transcendence of the feudal order, i.e., as part of the bourgeois revolution, of which the 1640 English Revolution was a prime example. The development of modern science in Europe therefore was inextricably linked from the very beginning with the development of capitalism; and this fact left its indelible imprint on the use to which scientific advances were put. This bourgeois imprint also had major epistemic implications with which philosophers (like Akeel Bilgrami) have been concerned, namely the treatment of nature as “inert matter” and the attribution of a similar “inertness” to indigenous populations in far-flung areas of the world (“people with no history”) which “justified” in European eyes the acquisition of “mastery” as much over nature as over such distant populations, and hence “justified” the phenomenon of imperialism. Keenly aware of the fact that the freedom-enhancing role of science could be fully realised only through a transcendence of capitalism itself, the finest of scientists in the era when such transcendence had come on to the historical agenda, joined the struggle for socialism. This was not just essential for them as citizens, to prevent the abuse of science; it was also a moral imperative for them as scientists: struggling against the abuse of their own praxis that produced scientific advance, had paramount importance for them. In the matter of struggling for socialism the example of Albert Einstein is well-known. He was not only an avowed socialist, but actively participated in political activities and meetings, because of which the American FBI had put a “tail” on him and kept a dossier on him which is now open to the public; in fact because of his socialist convictions he was not given security clearance for taking part in the Manhattan project that developed the atom bomb. Likewise in Britain, the finest scientists in the twentieth century were part of the Left, from JD Bernal to Joseph Needham, JBS Haldane, Hyman Levy, GH Hardy, Dorothy Hodgkin and many others. With the onset of neo-liberalism however there has been a fundamental change. There has been a “commoditisation” of science, under which the responsibility of funding research has shifted from the State to private, mainly corporate, donors. This has meant that the freedom of the scientist to express political opinions that underscore the need for transcending capitalism has got greatly curtailed. If a scientist wants to engage in a research project then he or she has to be sufficiently acceptable to private donors; and it does not help the scientist if he or she is known to hold socialist beliefs. Even university appointments are determined by the ability of the scientist to attract funds from donors. The same political constraints therefore apply even in a sphere where until recently the academics had the freedom to profess diverse beliefs. Commoditisation of science in other words produces, as a necessary consequence, a political conformism, and hence a social irresponsibility, on the part of the scientist. The “luxury” of internalising the moral imperative of attempting to go beyond capitalism, in order to make one’s scientific practice contribute towards human liberation, is denied to the scientist in the era of neo-liberalism; and this in turn implies the adoption of scientific advances without adequate discussion of consequences. An obvious example of such thoughtless adoption that is occurring today before our very eyes relates to artificial intelligence. It has of course several implications which I shall not go into; my concern is only with one implication, namely the creation of massive unemployment, to which the recent strike by the Hollywood script writers drew attention. Any measure that substitutes human labour by a mechanical device is potentially liberating: it can reduce the drudgery of work, or alternatively raise the magnitude of output with the same deployment of labour as before, and hence the availability of goods and services for the population. But under capitalism, every such substitution of human labour by a mechanical device adds to human misery. Consider an example. Suppose an innovation doubles labour productivity. Under capitalism, each capitalist would use the innovation for retrenching half the work-force that was being employed earlier. This very fact would increase the relative size of the reserve army of labour, because of which those who continue to remain employed would experience no increase in their real wage. There would therefore be a halving of the wage-bill and an increase in the magnitude of surplus, if the earlier level of output keeps getting produced. But because of the shift from wages to surplus at the earlier level of output, there would be a fall in demand (since a larger proportion of wages is consumed than of surplus) and hence the earlier level of output will not be produced and there would be an additional degree of unemployment, this time because of insufficient demand, over and above the unemployment generated because of the original doubling of labour productivity. The English economist David Ricardo had not cognized this additional unemployment because of the deficiency of demand. He had assumed Say’s Law, that is, that there is never any deficiency of aggregate demand, and that not only are all wages consumed but all surplus in excess of the part that is consumed is automatically invested. From this assumption he had drawn the conclusion that the shift from wages to surplus, while it would lower total consumption out of the earlier output, would raise investment, but leave the earlier output unchanged to start with; and this raising of the share of investment would raise the output growth rate and hence the employment growth rate. The use of machinery therefore, while it may reduce employment immediately, would raise its rate of growth, so that employment exceeds after some time what it would otherwise have been. Say’s Law however has no validity whatsoever. Investment under capitalism is determined by the expected growth of the market and not by the magnitude of surplus (unless there are untapped colonial markets that can be accessed or the State is ever willing to intervene to overcome a deficiency of aggregate demand). The reason why technological change did not historically cause mass unemployment within the metropolis was two-fold: first, colonial markets were available on tap, because of which much of the unemployment generated by technological change was shifted to the colonies (in the form of deindustrialisation); that is,there was export of unemployment from the metropolis. Second, whatever local unemployment was generated by technological change did not linger, because the unemployed migrated abroad. Through the “long nineteenth century” (up to the First World War) 50 million Europeans migrated to the temperate regions of white settlement like Canada, the United States, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Today however an entirely different situation prevails. It is not just that colonialism does not exist, but third world markets are inadequate to counter any deficiency of aggregate demand in the metropolis. Likewise, the State cannot counter a deficiency of aggregate demand as it can neither increase its fiscal deficit beyond the FRBM Act limit, nor tax the rich for increasing its expenditure (taxing the working people to increase its expenditure scarcely increases aggregate demand). It follows therefore that mechanisation, including the use of artificial intelligence, in the context of capitalism today will inevitably generate massive unemployment. Consider what would happen in a socialist economy by contrast. Any mechanisation, including the use of artificial intelligence, will reduce the drudgery of work without reducing employment, output and hence the wage-bill of the workers, all of which are centrally determined. This fundamental difference between the two systems explains why the benign use of artificial intelligence is conditional only upon a transcendence of capitalism. Author Prabhat Patnaik is an Indian political economist and political commentator. His books include Accumulation and Stability Under Capitalism (1997), The Value of Money (2009), and Re-envisioning Socialism (2011). Republished from MR Online Archives March 2024 3/19/2024 IT IS NOT A BORDER CRISIS, JUST ANOTHER ELECTION YEAR IN THE US. By: Slava the Ukrainian SocialistRead NowRemember the classic movie “Groundhog Day”, where the main character Phil experiences the previous day's events repeating exactly and believes it’s déjà vu? Similar to the film's plot, Americans have the election-year scenario on repeat every four years. It never changes; neither the Democrat nor Republican parties bother to care about any issue facing constituents unless they can exploit it during election season. The immigration question is one of the main topics in their political football game. In the first part of this series, we discussed how Republicans accuse Democrats of having an ‘open borders’ policy but why stopping immigration is also not the solution. Now, let’s break down some of the talking points presidential candidates and party representatives are making about immigration. Virtue Signaling In recent months, an interesting trend has emerged: Republican-led states like Florida and Texas have begun relocating undocumented immigrants discovered within their borders to more liberal-leaning areas such as Martha’s Vineyard, New York, and Washington D.C. Typically inhabited by liberal residents who claim to welcome and advocate for immigrants, these areas have surprisingly reacted negatively to this sudden influx. Governor Gavin Newsom of California, for instance, has called for Department of Justice investigations into the transfer of immigrants across state lines. This backlash by liberal areas against the arrival of undocumented immigrants highlights the superficiality of buzzwords like ‘sanctuary city,’ ‘diversity,’ and ‘inclusivity.’ Despite advocating for policies such as health coverage and housing for immigrants, politicians like Newsom display glaring hypocrisy in their reactions. This hypocrisy was on display during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Newsom was criticized for enjoying restaurant dining while most Californians faced lockdowns. Here the sentiment "Do as we say, not as we do" rings true. This encapsulates the self-defeating aspect of Democratic virtue signaling on immigration. While it's easy to pay lip service to diversity and inclusivity, Democrats do not extend their advocacy to universal healthcare and affordable housing for every American worker. And Democrats only support open immigration policy insofar as it serves their political interests, namely to vilify Republicans. However, they are aligned with Republicans on our imperialist foreign policy and the economic coercion that displaces so many people from their countries of origin. Of course, Republicans are guilty of virtue signaling, too. Donald Trump's rhetoric on immigration and trade is a blend of populism and protectionism that resonates strongly with his base. One of his recurrent themes is the notion that immigrants are taking jobs away from American citizens. However, Trump's extensive business ventures have frequently involved manufacturing goods abroad. While he denounces immigrants for supposedly depriving Americans of employment opportunities, he conveniently overlooks the fact that his products bear the "Made in China" label. By scapegoating immigrants, he deflects scrutiny from his own outsourcing practices to portray himself as a defender of American interests. Identity Politics Both parties' reliance on personal attacks reflects a failure to engage in constructive dialogue, undermining the integrity of political discourse and deflecting attention from substantive policy debates. Rather than addressing the concerns of working-class Americans, Democrats often resort to labeling them as ‘racists’ and ‘deplorables’. Most also suffer from a chronic case of ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome,’ or an intense and irrational hate towards former President Donald Trump. Rather than engaging in substantive debate about the merits of specific policies, discussions often devolved into character assassination. Let’s take Trump’s impeachment trials, for example, where he was accused of ‘abuse of power and obstruction of justice.’ The case relies on attacking the character of President Trump - an ad hominem argument, which serves only to defame a person as inherently untrustworthy, without providing substantive evidence. Ad hominem attacks are inherently flawed because they fail to address the truthfulness or falsehood of the person's statements. The crux of the Democrats' articles of impeachment revolved around portraying Donald Trump as either a "dictator" as stated by Rep. Jerry Nadler or a "threat to our democracy" as asserted by Rep. Adam Schiff. Trump is also known for his frequent and often controversial use of ad hominem attacks against his political opponents, critics, and adversaries. ‘Crooked Hillary’, ‘Sleepy Joe’, ‘Crazy Bernie’, and ‘Pocahontas’ - Trump's use of these and similar terms is a consistent feature of his political communication style, both during his presidency and current campaign. The former president didn’t hesitate to engage in character assassination against immigrants, either. In June of 2015, Trump referred to Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists, stating when Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. Despite facing backlash, Trump doubled down on his stance and continues to use inflammatory language when discussing immigration-related issues, portraying immigrants in a negative light. He demonizes immigrants as "alien invaders" and "illegal aliens," to further divide the working class. Another way of practicing identity politics is to bring a new face to represent US Imperialism; a new face that’s different from the straight white man. Dressing up the same capitalist and imperialist policies with someone female, LGBT, or African American, gives the illusion of inclusive and progressive change. How many hopes were dashed when Obama proved to be the more effective evil in perpetuating the same policies, but with a ‘prettier face’? This woke-washing also lays a trap for Republicans, who when criticizing Democratic policy can more easily be condemned as sexist, racist homophobes. Only after the economic revolution, when workers take control of the means of production, can the immigration question finally be resolved. We should understand that neither of the two major parties nor the presidential candidates are interested in improving the lives of citizens or immigrants. Siding with one of the parties is not useful for the revolutionary movement. We must oppose and expose them both Archives March 2024 3/19/2024 Suppressed for Decades: FBI Reports Suggest Japanese WW2 Balloon Attacks on U.S. & Canada Included Biological Agents. By: JEFFREY S. KAYERead NowTwo FBI reports, one of them fully declassified only this year, describe the likely, if limited, use of biological agents, in particular bubonic plague and anthrax, as part of a large-scale balloon, or “Fu-Go,” barrage launched by Imperial Japan on the United States and Canada in late 1944 and the first four months of 1945. The most damning of the two reports was a July 6, 1945 FBI memorandum that memorialized a report from a Special Agent in Charge at the Norfolk FBI office who was briefed by a military official at Langley Air Force Base. Addressed to the Chief of the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division, Daniel M. Ladd, the memo stated, “recently several Japanese balloons were found in [North and South Dakota, and Nebraska] which were determined to have been carrying bacteria” (bold added for emphasis). The identity of the memo’s author is redacted. A separate FBI memo dated May 11, 1950, from the Office of the Director of the FBI, relied on expert opinions in citing unusual outbreaks of bubonic plague in certain areas where the World War II Japanese balloons had landed in New Mexico and Alberta, Canada. The experts believed the outbreaks were likely due to the balloon landings. The existence of Japanese balloon landings in New Mexico has not been reported publicly before, and some of these had come quite close to U.S. nuclear facilities. The 1950 memo was copied to the directors of the CIA, Naval Intelligence, and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, as well as to the Acting Director of the Security Division at the Atomic Energy Commission. This new evidence significantly challenges our understanding of a little-known but important episode in World War II. If this new historical evidence holds up, it means that Japan, the United States, and Canada, have hidden evidence of a germ warfare attack against the North American mainland for nearly eighty years. Additionally, the technology for the Fu-Go balloons was studied and helped to inform the U.S.’s own efforts to create in the early 1950s the secretive E77 balloon bomb, which carried a biological agents payload. (A follow-up article will look in some depth at the U.S. balloon bomb.) Japan’s Fu-Go Bomb Attack on North America In November 1944, though possibly even earlier, after a series of setbacks in their war with the United States, Japan’s military began lofting thousands of balloons more than 30,000 feet (10,000 meters) into the jet stream to be carried by prevailing winds to the North American continent. The balloons carried some combination of incendiary devices and high-explosive antipersonnel bombs, as well as devices for self-destruction. The intent appears to have been to cause fires where they landed, and spread panic among the U.S. and Canadian populations. It was also greatly feared at the time that they might carry biological weapons (BW) aimed primarily at U.S. livestock and agriculture. While the balloon bombing campaign didn’t begin until November 1944, the origins of Japan’s secret “Fu-go” balloon project went back to September 1942, when the Science Research Center at the Japanese Army’s Noborito Research Institute, located in Kawasaki’s Tama Ward, began working on the project of a transoceanic air attack on the North American continent. The premise for the balloon assault rested upon on a pioneering study by Japanese meteorologists on the nature and patterns of the jet stream. The bombs carried by the balloons could produce notable explosions. One bomb was deliberately set off by an Army Intelligence officer in Rapid City, South Dakota. It “tore a hole in the ground three feet deep and five feet in diameter,” according to an account published by the South Dakota State Historical Society (pg. 106). The Japanese balloon episode from World War II was recalled in a number of articles following the media frenzy surrounding a wayward Chinese balloon discovered floating over the U.S. in January-February 2023. This balloon, shot down by a U.S. F-22 fighter jet, was not however, as feared, collecting intelligence over the United States. It seems likely that China’s balloon was as Chinese authorities described it, a research or weather balloon blown off course by storms. But why the U.S. panic? Perhaps the U.S. response stemmed from secret knowledge of what a balloon attack could portend. A May 5, 2023 Time Magazine article took the opportunity of the controversy over the Chinese balloon to revisit the old episode of the Japanese WWII balloon barrage. In an interview with Japanese balloon expert Ross Coen, the article described both the U.S. government’s fear that the World War II-era balloons could carry a payload of infectious biological agents, and the widely accepted finding that allegedly, despite such fears, none of the balloons were found to contain any weaponized pathogens. Coen, who wrote the 2014 book, Fu-go The Curious History of Japan’s Balloon Bomb Attack on America (University of Nebraska Press), told Time: “From the perspective of the War Department and Army intelligence, the thing that they feared most was biological warfare. They inspected all balloons for any presence of biological agents, something that might spread disease among humans or livestock. Ultimately there never was any biological component to the balloons.” In his book, Coen summarized the extent of Japan’s balloon attacks: “… as many as 630 balloons—7 percent of 9,000 launched—may have landed in North America between November 1944 and April 1945. With the number of confirmed landings standing at just over 300, it seems probable that a number of balloons, at least one or dozens or possibly hundreds, await discovery.” (Coen, Ross. Fu-go (p. 199). Kindle Edition.) The purported fact that the balloons lacked anything that would mark them as biological agent delivery devices was repeated in sundry scholarly examinations of the subject, going all the way back to U.S. Air Force Major Robert Mikesh’s 1973 Smithsonian Press booklet, Japan's World War II Balloon Bomb Attacks on North America. Mikesh stated that he had met with sundry Japanese officials, including “many of those having firsthand knowledge of the balloon program” (pg. v). He concluded in his monograph that in regards to the threat of BW delivery via the balloons, though such use was “possible, the Japanese did not consider this aspect” (pg. 3). When considering Japanese testimony, it seems important to mention that all records inside Japan relating to their secret balloon program were destroyed at the end of World War II. The contemporaneous examination of the Japanese balloons was shrouded in a veil of secrecy and censorship. As early as January 1945, the government imposed a “voluntary” program of media censorship concerning the balloons. Robert Mikesh’s monograph quoted an April 1945 “strictly confidential note to editors and broadcasters”: “Cooperation from the press and radio under this request has been excellent despite the fact that Japanese free balloons are reaching the United States, Canada, and Mexico in increasing numbers.... There is no question that your refusal to publish or broadcast information about these balloons has baffled the Japanese, annoyed and hindered them, and has been an important contribution to security.” (pg. 27) What makes any on-going secrecy into the 21st century surrounding the presence of biological agents as part of the Japanese balloon attacks especially surprising is that it involved a serious use of weapons of mass destruction — biological weapons — against the U.S. mainland. Moreover, it was not Japan’s only planned use of BW against the continental U.S. The following article will present in some detail the evidence behind these new revelations. Anthrax mixed with balloon gas The FBI memo to Daniel Ladd was declassified in 2004 but was been otherwise unnoticed until discovered by this author. It is reproduced here: The bacteria, described as coming from balloons that landed in the Dakotas and Nebraska, were identified as anthrax. The pathogen was discovered in the gas (mostly hydrogen) that inflated the massive paper-laminated balloons. The purveyor of this new information was the Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the FBI’s Norfolk Field Division (probably SAC Robert Hicks), who had reported all this information to the unknown FBI author of the memo. According to an FBI Field Office history of the Norfolk division, Hicks was special agent in charge from 1944-1945. The Norfolk field office was opened on December 15, 1941, approximately one week after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. According to the FBI history, “Given the Bureau’s central role in homeland security during the war and the presence of the Hampton Roads naval facility in the Norfolk Division, the new office initially concentrated on national security issues.” This included “countering sabotage and espionage.” The circumstances of the FBI’s extraordinary memo to Ladd are as follows. On Thursday, June 28, 1945, Norfolk’s SAC (probably Hicks) attended a Weekly Intelligence Conference. One guest brought to this meeting was from a unit within the U.S. Army Air Forces at Langley Field, Virginia. Because of redactions, it’s not clear who invited this official to the meeting. The identity of the Langley AFB official has been redacted by the government. But the identification of the source as someone who was “until recently… assigned to handling investigations concerning the landing of Japanese balloons in the states of North and South Dakota, and Nebraska,” strongly suggests the informant for the BW revelation was Army Intelligence Major Charles D. Frierson, Jr., as this memoir attests (p. 738-739). Copies of the memo to Ladd were also sent to the FBI’s Assistant Director at the time, E.A. Tamm, and to the head of the FBI’s crime laboratory, Edward Coffey, and a third recipient whose identity has been redacted. Coffey also happened to be a member of the Bacterial Warfare Committee at the U.S. government’s World War II biowarfare agency, the War Research Service. According to a November 30, 1942 FBI memo, Coffey was well-connected in U.S. intelligence circles, as he also served on the government’s Joint Cryptanalysis Committee, and the Special Committee on Truth Serum, formed “at the instigation of the MIB [Military Intelligence Board] of the Army” (PDF pg. 137). By April 1944, the Truth Serum committee had been taken over by the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. The memo’s author quoted from the SAC’s report about the meeting with the Army official. Noting that he had been told that Anthrax spores had been included in the hydrogen gas that lifted the balloon, the SAC described the significance of the finding: “I was told that such bacteria mainly affects cattle. When the bacteria lands on wheat or other types of farm land where food is being raised for the cattle, the bacteria remain in the food when it is eaten by the cattle, and upon human consumption of the milk or meat, the bacteria can be passed on.” The SAC further explained he was informed that the Army was “not greatly concerned over the number of such balloons which have been located, but that it does show a different trend in the Japanese attack….” Earlier examinations of the balloons had heretofore only found they carried “small bombs.” The FBI’s Army informant was not alone in his lack of concern over the potential impact of the balloons using bioagents. A U.S. Navy "Technical Air Intelligence Center Report #41" from May 1945 concluded that while use of "insect pests or disease germs" in the balloons were a possibility, they concluded such an attack would be “Of doubtful effectiveness.” (The quoted material in this paragraph is from the "Japanese World War II Balloon Bombs Collection", Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Archives, Elizabeth C. Borja, 2018.) Another reason the Army official and/or other bioweapons experts may not have been too concerned about balloons with anthrax was because existing cattle vaccination programs against anthrax had been very successful. As a January 26, 1946 article in the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader put it, “There were only 14 herds of cattle quarantined for anthrax in South Dakota, Nebraska and Iowa in 1945, which is probably the lowest nunmber of cases of this disease in the past 20 years. Continued vaccination of cattle in bad anthrax areas each spring and prompt quarantines of all outbreaks are reducing the disease. The control campaign organized in 1938 is effective." A June 1953 article in Public Health Reports examining outbreaks of anthrax in the U.S. from 1945 to 1951 also shows very few outbreaks in this midwest region. Whatever the danger involved, including potential public panic should news of the presence of BW pathogens leak out, the FBI memo to Ladd was not meant to be have wide distribution. Its footer declared (in all caps): “THIS MEMORANDUM IS FOR ADMINISTRATIVE PURPOSES TO BE DESTROYED AFTER ACTION IS TAKEN AND NOT SENT TO FILES” As will be shown, any cover-up of the apparent use of Japanese biological agents in attacks on the United States is consistent with the decades-long cover-up the U.S. organized around the activities of Japan’s biological warfare units – chief among them Unit 731. Not only did the U.S. help cover up the existence of Japan’s World War II BW efforts, it engaged in a clandestine collaboration with the personnel of these units and shielded them from war crimes prosecution. Like with the data from the Japanese balloon examinations, the information was kept tightly controlled by intelligence agencies. “War Balloons Over the Prairie” The fact that gas from downed Japanese balloons was examined by military and/or FBI personnel is corroborated by a 1979 report by University of Missouri historian Lawrence H. Larsen. Published by the South Dakota State Historical Society, Larsen’s essay describes a Japanese balloon that landed at Cheyenne Indian Reservation on March 20, 1945, less than four months before the memo to Ladd. Still partially afloat, the balloon was towed to a nearby ranch, where the next day it was examined by Range Supervisor John P. Drissen. The March 20 balloon sighting is not listed in the compilations of known sightings included in all of the three major monographs written about the Japanese balloon barrage campaign: Robert Mikesh’s 1973 monograph for the Smithsonian Institute; Bert Webber’s 1975 book, Retaliation: Japanese Attacks and Allied Countermeasures on the Pacific Coast in World War II (University of Oregon Press — see especially chapters 9-11); or Ross Coen’s more recent investigation, referenced above. An October 1949 Canadian Army report, The Japanese Balloon Enterprise Against North America, noted there were four balloon sightings in South Dakota in March 1945, but no specific dates were recorded. Larsen’s account mentioned eight different balloon sightings in South Dakota in March 1945, three more than Mikesh-Webber-Coen studies claimed, and four more than the Canadian Army monograph. The Cheyenne Indian River Reservation balloon was one of the three sightings overlooked by the other U.S. studies. An August 20, 1945 article in the Rapid City Journal also provides an early, if incomplete, account of Japanese balloon landings in the region. The unreliability of the total amount of balloon landings is not a surprise to any historian of these events, as the extreme secrecy by both U.S. and Canadian governments put upon the balloon sightings and discoveries, and the fact that many hundreds of balloons sent to North America were never accounted for, has meant that no one who has studied this subject feels the balloon statistics we currently have are fully dependable. Still, it is interesting that the one reliable report we have that specifically cites the presence of biological agents on any of these balloons comes from an area that has sightings that has otherwise, outside of Larsen’s study, gone unreported and unnoticed. As described below, the linkage between the presence of pathogens and the failure to document certain balloon landings will be true for balloons judged possibly linked to bubonic plague outbreaks in other regions. In his monograph, Larsen described how the balloon was first discovered by some workers at a nearby ranch, who took the contraption back to the ranch and secured it to a post overnight. The next day, Range Supervisor John Drissen at the Cheyenne River Agency arrived on the scene, warning everyone present that they were not to publicize their discovery under penalty of “prosecution for espionage” (pg. 105). According to Larsen’s account, Drissen examined the landing site and took photographs. “When a rising wind tore the envelope of the balloon, he collected some of the escaping gas in two borrowed fruit jars. Soon, an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and several army security men appeared. They took custody of the film and fruit jars, made arrangements to keep the story out of the local papers, loaded the deflated bag and the gear onto a truck, and left for their respective headquarters. The range supervisor went back to the agency, and life on the ranch returned to normal.” (pg. 105) The appearance of both Army and FBI personnel was mandated by an agreement between the two government agencies, who were “working in close harmony” and had determined by early 1945 that all “reports of enemy missiles be made concurrently to the FBI and the Army,” according to a February 12, 1945 letter from the Office of Civil Defense to New Mexico Governor John Dempsey. By reference to the sampling of the balloon’s gas, and the transfer of this evidence to both the FBI and Army personnel, the Cheyenne balloon is a prime candidate for the apparatus from one of the balloons that supplied evidence of the presence of anthrax. Yet, a perusal of anthrax statistics for South Dakota for the period in question shows no evidence of significant anthrax outbreak, though one such instance, however, is discussed further below. While the Ladd memo, which also specified the anthrax balloon landings had occurred also in North Dakota and Nebraska, could have been a false report, but that seems unlikely. In relation to the incompleteness of balloon statistics, further on this article will describe an FBI report on possible bubonic plague-carrying balloons in New Mexico. The report claims a number of New Mexico balloon landings, but none of these have ever showed up in any list of balloon sightings by any authority. As regards the capture of gas from the balloons, The National Air and Space Museum Archives’ “Japanese World War II Balloon Bombs Collection” (large PDF) has a number of reports from the War Department’s Military Intelligence Division (MID). MID General Report No. 4, dated May 1, 1945, which concerned “Japanese Free Balloons and Related Incidents,” cited an analysis of gas from one balloon recovered from Volcano, California on March 23, 1945. The captured gas from the balloon was analyzed by the Shell Development Chemical Company in Emeryville, California, and was found to contain primarily hydrogen, with 9-10% nitrogen, and a trace amount (2%) of oxygen. (PDF pg. 174-175] The MID report on Japanese balloons for July 1, 1945 nevertheless stated, “Although there has been no evidence thus far that the balloons have been used to transport biological agents, the possibility that the balloons may be employed for this purpose still exists” [PDF pg. 198]. Even so, the vast majority of documents released to date fail to mention that bacteriological or biological substances had been discovered on any of the balloons. On this fact, most historians seem in agreement. Yet, a recent declassified memo points to powerful circumstantial evidence consistent with the claims of the FBI Ladd memo. Dead Rats in New MexicoAnother FBI memo was released in September 2023 to this author by the National Archives upon mandatory declassification request. It was written nearly five years after the end of the war. The memo was from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (or his office) to the Chief of the Army’s Military Intelligence Security and Training Group in Washington, D.C., with copies sent to the Director of Naval Intelligence, the Director of Special Investigations at the U.S. Air Force Inspector General Office, the Director of the CIA, and the Acting Director, Security Division, at the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). One reason Hoover may have copied Security at the AEC was because Hoover’s memo indicated that Japan’s Fu-Go barrage included some balloons that landed in New Mexico’s Sandia Mountains, not far from secret U.S. nuclear installations. No other history of Japan’s balloon attacks has ever indicated that any balloons were sighted or landed in New Mexico. According to Hoover, Dr. Lincoln La Paz, then Head of the Department of Mathematics and Astronomy at the University of New Mexico, suspected that an outbreak of bubonic plague in the east Sandia Mountains was related to the Japanese balloon landings towards the end of the war. LaPaz died in 1985. During World War II, La Paz, an expert on the study of meteorites, had been Technical Director for the U.S. Second Air Force Operations Analysis Section. A webpage connected to the American Heritage Center has noted, “During this time he investigated Japanese Fu-Go balloon bombs.” La Paz told Hoover, “two of the [plague infected] rats found on the east slope of the Sandia Mountains were only about three and a half miles from the Atomic Energy installation at Sandia Base, New Mexico.” The infected rats, the majority of which had been found at elevations twice as high as any with plague had ever been found, were examined by New Mexico’s State Department of Public Health. The results were “unusual,” in that the rats that tested positive for plague had not done so via “an agglutination test,” a standard test for the presence of plague bacteria, indicating they might represent “some strange type of the plague.” New strains of bacterium were routinely sought by biological warfare scientists in most countries where established BW programs existed. Scientists Theodore Rosebury and Elvin Kabat discussed the matter in a landmark article in The Journal of Immunology (Vol. 56, No. 1, May 1947), “Bacterial Warfare: A Critical Analysis of the Available Agents, Their Possible Military Applications, and the Means for Protection Against Them.” Rosebury had been the head of the air-borne infection project at Camp Detrick, Maryland during World War II. Rosebury and Kabat wrote: “A general principle of some potential importance concerns the selection, during the course of repeated subcultures and animal passages, of highly virulent or drug-resistant variants, or both. The possibility that strains with unusual properties might be developed by such means should be one of the problems studied by a military experimental unit.” (pg. 24-25) In fact, the U.S.’s own biological warfare program had by late 1950 used “selective cultures” to create a strain of smallpox “against which immunization by vaccination is not effective,” as a separate FBI report of a briefing from a Chemical Corps official at Dugway Proving Ground at the time described. The unusual nature of the plague bacteria pointed to possible BW origin. To buttress his suspicions surrounding the origin of the plague outbreak, Professor La Paz forwarded to the FBI a separate report provided to him by a Canadian official “in charge of investigating… the Japanese Paper Balloon offensive in the Edmonton [Alberta] district.” While the Hoover memo never mentions it, an Associated Press article dated August 11, 1949 reported two very uncommon cases of bubonic plague in New Mexico in 1949. According to the AP article, “Only 21 other cases of the disease have been listed in the United States during the last 25 years.” Both of the 1949 individuals infected ultimately recovered. Plague in Alberta, CanadaThe author of the Canadian report was redacted by the National Archives, but may have been Lieutenant Commander E. L. Borradaile, Chief of Canada’s Interservice Bomb Disposal Service, a wartime agency formed to keep track of the Japanese balloon onslaught. Until it was declassified by the U.S. National Archives from this author’s request, the Canadian report on a putative link between balloon landings and bubonic plague in Alberta had never been told before. Borradaile, or whomever wrote the Edmonton memo, described a similar set of ecological phenomenon to what La Paz had seen in the Sandia Mountains, namely the near total disappearance of expected numbers of small game (“rabbits, squirrels, small rodents, etc.”) in a region “north and west of Edmonton.” (Note the racist, pejorative terminology in the memo quoted below is kept intact here for historical reasons.) The absence of game mentioned… may be referable to a plague among the small game of the region resulting from B.W. agents carried in by a Jap paper balloon, which to my certain knowledge came to earth in the region in which the survival test was made. This concordance came to my mind when, in the summer of 1949, an outbreak of bubonic plague carried by rats and other rodents occurred throughout Alberta, but principally in the northern part of the province, precisely the area most heavily bombarded with Jap paper balloons. In this connection, it seems worth while to point out that as far as I know, the plague had never occurred before in the area in question. The photo below shows Lt. Cmd. Borradaile pointing to a map showing balloon landings in Western Canada. This September 1945 briefing map shows far more balloon landings in northern Alberta than any official or scholarly list of balloon landings in Alberta has ever documented, suggesting that some of these landings were purposely withheld from later public release. “Lt.-Cmdr. E.L. Borradaile… Officer Commanding the Inter-Service Bomb Disposal centre… points to a map of Western Canada which is covered with small flags, indicating where Jap balloons were recovered.” Sites in Northern Alberta are indicated inside red circle. - The Calgary Albertan, September 6, 1945, pg. 11 Coincidentally or not, in 1950 Alberta instituted a vigorous anti-rat campaign, in an effort to stop the spread of bubonic plague in the province. The effort led to the elimination of Norway rats in that part of the country. But the area under consideration concerned a portion of the eastern Alberta border from Cold Lake, not quite half way up the long eastern side of the province, down to the border with Montana, as the yellow portion in the map below shows. The rat control zone, or the area of feared zoonotic infection, was far south and east of the northern and western regions the Canadian official (likely Borradaile) had described as possible regions of balloon-related plague outbreak. While there were correlations between outbreaks of plague and areas of Japanese balloon penetration in both Alberta and New Mexico, the South Dakota balloon sightings also had at least one such possibly associated case, which concerned an anthrax outbreak in Haakon County, which contains a portion of Cheyenne Indian Reservation. According to a September 18, 1947 article in the Rapid City Journal, “Anthrax Strikes in Haakon County,” the outbreak of anthrax infection among a cattle herd in Grindstone, Haakon County was the first in the area since 1936. The article also mentions another outbreak in Lyman County, South Dakota, where no known balloon sighting or landing has ever been mentioned. Worth noting, there was another confirmed sighting of a Japanese balloon in Red Elm, South Dakota, which took place on March 30, 1945, ten days after the Cheyenne reservation incident discussed in Larsen’s essay. Red Elm lies within the boundaries of Cheyenne Indian Reservation. Denials of presence of bioagents in Fu-Go balloonsAccording to the October 2020 issue of Naval History Magazine, Japan launched some 9,300 high-altitude “Fu-Go” balloons against the U.S. and Canada in the last months of 1944 and through the spring of 1945. Approximately 300 balloons, many carrying high-explosive antipersonnel and/or incendiary bombs, were known to have touched land in North America. “The balloons were blown eastward from Japan at altitudes of 30,000 to 50,000 feet at speeds of 20 to 150 knots, and reached the United States and Canada from three to five days after launching,” the essay by Norman Polman stated. Japan’s balloon campaign was reportedly in response to the April 1942 Doolittle bombing raid on Japan, with the intent of retribution meted out upon the U.S. mainland. In May 1945, six Oregonians out on a hike, including five children, were killed when they approached a downed balloon with unexploded ordinance. After this, the U.S. censorship program was modified such that the public was allowed to be made aware of the balloon attacks, and warned to keep clear of any discovered strange apparatuses. In Canada, the censorship directives after the Oregon deaths, while modified for greater openness, insisted that “no mention should be made of the possible use of the balloon in biological warfare” (PDF pg. 11). The Naval History article notes that Imperial Japan’s secret biological warfare department, Unit 731, “looked into using balloons to spread germs. This was especially significant, because large balloons were developed and used to attack the United States.” Nevertheless, like all other histories on this subject over the past 79 years, this article accepted Japanese denials and stated that no biological agents were ever used in the balloon barrage. Unit 731 conducting an unethical biological weapons test on a human subject in Nong'an County, northeast China's Jilin Province, November 1940. Photo released from Jilin Provincial Archives on January 7, 2014. (Source: Xinhua News, Jan. 11, 2014; explanation of why this document is in public domain at Wikimedia.org) In concluding the Japanese balloons carried no biological or germ warfare agents, Polman relied upon the 1973 account by former Air Force pilot and curator at the National Air and Space Museum, Robert Mikesh. Mikesh’s conclusion that no biological agents were present in the balloons was based on his examination of extant military documents, as well as personal interviews, including with “former Major Teiji Takada, engineer for the balloon project, who provided invaluable material and insight from his personal observations” (p. v). In the most recent published study of Japan’s World War II balloon attacks, Fu-go: The Curious History of Japan's Balloon Bomb Attack on America (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), author Ross Coen writes, “Takada was lead technician on the balloon research program at Noborito Research Institute, and his article is an invaluable firsthand source of technical information” (p. 249). Mikesh, Coen, and other researchers have also accepted as good coin that no evidence of the presence of biological pathogens were ever found in the balloons retrieved by U.S. or Canadian government personnel. It is worth noting that some authorities are not totally convinced. In a November 1989 study for the Center for Naval Analyses, CNA Research Specialist Adam Siegel noted that the fears surrounding possible use of biological agents in the balloon attacks may not have been so easily dismissed if researchers had realized “the fact that one major site for balloon manufacture was on Okunoshima Island, the site of the Japanese chemical warfare factory” (pg. 28). Coen would in December 2017 publicly withdraw his earlier conclusion, based on Japanese officials “postwar denials,” that Japan “had never planned to weaponize the balloons with biological agents.” His change of mind came after reading a 1990 memoir by Noboru Kuba, an official at Japan’s Noborito Institute. Noborito and the Decision to Use (or Not Use) Bacterial WeaponsThe BW denials by Japanese scientists must be understood in the context of the wholesale destruction in the closing days of WW2 of all Japanese documentation relating to the balloon project, and other biological warfare research and operations more generally. Many of the postwar Japanese denials around biological weapons research and use have been debunked by recent scholarship. According to 1990 memoir by Noboru Kuba, “an army veterinarian assigned to the Army Ninth Technical Research Institute, which was commonly called the Noborito Institute,” Japanese scientists did intend the Fu-Go balloons to carry biological agents, particularly rinderpest, a virus that affects cattle. But the plans were called off at the last minute. (See Amanda Kay McVety, The Rinderpest Campaigns, Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 73, 75, 85.) Kuba maintained the Noborito-built balloons carried incendiary devices, self-destruct explosives, as well as radiosondes to transmit location, elevation and wind speed, but nothing more. At the same time, the extreme sensitivity of the Noborito-engineered balloon attack program meant, according to a history by a retired CIA officer, that in summer 1945, as Imperial Japan faced defeat, all evidence pertaining to the balloon barrage over North America was to be destroyed. On 15 August, Army Affairs Section ordered the destruction of all materials pertaining to the military’s ‘special research.’ First on the list was the Noborito Research Institute and its balloon bomb program. Also listed was the Kwantung Army’s Unit 731, which had conducted lethal experiments on captives to develop biological weapons. (Stephen C. Mercado, The Shadow Warriors of Nagano: A History of the Imperial Japanese Army’s Elite Intelligence School, Potomac Books, 2002, p. 176. Kindle Edition.) British journalists Peter Williams and David Wallace also described in their 1989 book, Unit 731: the Japanese Army’s Secret of Secrets (Hodder and Stoughton, London) how Japan’s War Ministry in the final days of the war “set about the systematic destruction of all military documentation. A ‘Special Research Conduct Outline’ issued on August 15th by the War Ministry’s Military Affairs Section reveals that particular attention was paid to Units 731 and 100, as well as Fu (the codename for balloon bombs) and other weapons created by the ‘secret weapons’ 9th Army Technical Research Institute” at Noborito (p. 87, parenthesis in the original). According to CIA historian Mercado’s 2002 review in the CIA house organ, Studies in Intelligence (vol. 46, no. 4), of a memoir by Ban Shigeo, a technician at the Japanese Army's 9th Technical Research Institute, Noborito, which worked on poisons and special weapons, and the Kwantung Army’s Unit 731, shared personnel. In addition, both were recruiting grounds for U.S. military and intelligence agencies at the close of World War II. Mercado stated, “One of his [Shigeo’s] book's contributions is to further tie Noborito to the Japanese Army's infamous Unit 731, which participated in biomedical research” (PDF pg. 3). Ban himself worked for both Noborito and, on temporary assignment, for Unit 731. He subsequently “led the ‘chemical section’ of a US clandestine unit hidden within Yokosuka naval base during the Korean War, and then worked on unspecified projects inside the United States from 1955 to 1959….” His memoir has not been translated into English. “Technical Major General Sueyoski Kusaha, director of Japans long-range balloon program, wears a medal on his right breast pocket for his leadership of the project,” “The Great Japanese Balloon Offensive,” MSgt. Cornelius W. Conley, USAF, in Air University Review, Vol. 19, № 2, Jan-Feb. 1968, pg. 70 The idea of using balloons to carry infectious organisms was not new for the Japanese military. Intelligence officer Ogura Yoshikuma told a Unit 731 Exhibition that toured Japan in 1993-1994 that Unit 731 had conducted “Q” operations against the Soviets across the Manchurian border a full year or more before the United States entered the war. We would fill balloons with nitrogen and suspend containers of bacteria below them. They would be released to drift over Soviet territory to disperse bacteria. We never found out what effects this tactic had. (Gold, Hal. Unit 731 (p. 237). Tuttle Publishing, 2011. Kindle Edition.) Yoshikuma was not the only former Japanese official to speak about the use of balloons for biological weapons delivery. Naoji Uezono, a printer who worked for four years for Unit 731, and was privy to “all the most secret documents as he printed them,” told Williams and Wallace in 1985 that Unit 731 had put “epidemic germs… cholera and typhus” into its balloon bombs. Moreover, Uezono believed there was a balloon factory at the Mukden industrial complex associated with the prisoner of war camp there (Williams and Wallace, p. 57-8). Williams and Wallace relied on Seiichi Morimura’s 1983 two volume book, Akuma no Hoshoku [The Devil’s Gluttony], to provide the epitaph to the balloon project. Citing Morimura, the British journalists wrote, “The balloon bombs once considered for carrying disease against the United States were never used, prohibited on technical grounds by the upper echelons of military command” (Ibid., p. 87). The decision to forego use of the biological weapons payloads in the Fu-Go balloons reported by Morimura and Williams and Wallace is consistent with Kuba’s narrative. One difference worth mentioning is that according to Kuba, the balloons were to carry rinderpest virus, but the plan was “quashed” by General Hideki Tojo. Interestingly, an October 25, 1946 article in The Edmonton Bulletin described the fears of both U.S. and Canadian scientists that the Japanese balloon attacks were meant to introduce rinderpest to North America, which was otherwise free from the disease. The article cited “intelligence reports,” claiming "neither American nor Canadian army chemical officers thought for a moment that they were intended foy [sic] any such futile purpose as setting forests on fire — the most prevalent lay speculation. The real purpose, they feared, was to introduce rinderpest germs on this continent.” Tojo allegedly told Noborito staff: “If we attack the U.S. by using balloon bombs that contain rinderpest, the U.S. will consider incinerating our rice plants in the harvest season. Therefore, the plan about the rinderpest attack is aborted” (McVety, p. 76). Nothing is mentioned about use of cholera or typhus, much less plague and anthrax. Also, Morimura had indicated the balloon BW operations were ended “on technical grounds,” while Noborito’s Kuba claimed fear of U.S. retaliation was the reason, at least for stopping the rinderpest project. Unfortunately, there is no access today to Uezono, who was 70 years old in 1985, and certainly has passed from the scene; or to Morimura, who died in July 2023. The latter’s book, The Devil’s Gluttony, was never translated into English either. Additionally, Noboru Kuba’s memoir has never been published, although it was apparently extensively quoted in Shigeo Ban’s book on Noborito. The small number of scholars who have written about Kuba’s document have appeared to take it as solid evidence. But Kuba’s memoir was written in 1990, forty-five years after the events he narrated. Even if we take the story as given, that Gen. Tojo had nixed use of rinderpest as a biological weapon for use in the Fu-Go balloons, that doesn’t mean that other pathogens weren’t considered or used. Tojo may have been correct in fearing retribution upon Japan for rinderpest attack, as there was no rinderpest in the United States, and a rinderpest outbreak would have been considered highly suspicious, and it was possible any outbreaks could be traced back to Japan’s long-distance balloons. On the other hand, plague and anthrax, not to mention cholera and typhus, were endemic to numerous areas in the United States. An outbreak inside the U.S. or Canada there could not so easily or quickly be determined as originating from foreign biological warfare attack. In fact, it was a historical lack of plague in Alberta, Canada that led to suspicions that balloon landings there were a causal factor in a plague outbreak in the area of the balloon landings in immediate succeeding years. During the research for this article, in June 2023 I sent a query to Japan’s embassy in Washington D.C. asking for comment on the new information about the Japanese balloons, in particular the assertions about the presence of anthrax in the 1945 FBI memo to Daniel Ladd. In December 2023, I wrote a similar request to the Public Affairs Office at Ft. Detrick. Neither responded. Author Jeff Kaye is a retired clinical psychologist. He's been researching and writing on US war crimes for over 15 years, and is the author of "Cover-up at Guantanamo: The NCIS Investigation Into the Suicides of Mohammed Al Hanashi and Abdul Rahman Al Amri." Currently he writes the blog "Hidden Histories" at Substack.com. Republished from Kaye's Substack Hidden Histories. Archives March 2024 Nietzsche’s philosophy has shaped theoretical debates on the Left ever since he died over 120 years ago. This is owed, at least in part, to Nietzsche’s popularity among working-class readers. According to surveys and sociological studies of German workers at the turn of the 20th century, Nietzsche tended to trump Marx in terms of popularity, a trend that likely remains true today. However, Nietzsche’s popularity has also split workers. Different methods of reading the philosopher have emerged. For some Nietzsche was anathema to their interest in greater equality and for a life beyond the degradation of wage labor, while others embraced Nietzsche’s aristocratic agenda in ways that would often divert them from the cause of working-class liberation.1 The question as to whether Nietzsche can be combined with Marx poses a philosophical conundrum, given that both thinkers offer up a political project that draws on similar social and political problems. But while the basis of Marx and Nietzsche’s political visions could not be more diametrically opposed, the reality of this difference has become a debate on the Left. Nietzsche’s politics are often interpreted as indeterminate and metaphorical, with Nietzsche scholars on the Left tending to claim that his unabashed anti-egalitarian, anti-revolutionary, and reactionary commitments are ultimately marginal to any assessment of his philosophy. This reading and method of interpreting Nietzsche has grown popular on today’s Left, and was set by the academic trends that emerged in French philosophy after the Second World War among philosophers Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. It was also brought about by Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche as a resolutely metaphysical, and thus not a primarily political thinker. The German American translator Walter Kaufmann suggested Nietzsche be read as an apolitical thinker completely decontextualized from the historical and political concerns that drove his thought. Kaufmann thereby removed Nietzsche’s deeply-embedded, reactionary political thought and whitewashed Nietzsche’s political inflections and intentions, even removing certain words that advocated the annihilation of the weak and the failed.2 Where Kaufmann emphasized the psychological and the aesthetic insights of the thinker to the total neglect of the political, the French readers of Nietzsche tended to reduce him to an indeterminate and metaphorical thinker, whose aphorisms can be read in multiple, even contradictory ways. Derrida famously dedicates several pages of writing to an in-depth analysis of the possible meanings of a random note in Nietzsche’s journal late in life, which read: “I have forgotten my umbrella.”3 The phrase could spell the secret key to the entirety of Nietzsche’s esotericism, or it could mean nothing. These methods of reading and interpreting have made any possible Marx-Nietzsche rapprochement a seemingly easy synthesis. The latest popular intervention in the field of Left-Nietzscheanism is Jonas Čeika’s How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Marx and Nietzsche for the 21st Century Left published in 2021 with Repeater Books. What distinguishes this book from the tradition of Left-Nietzschean interventions in the lineage of French theory (Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida) is that the author aims to reopen a more explicitly political core of Nietzsche’s thought to serve as the basis for a renewed, Marxist-Nietzschean Leftism. But the political core of Nietzsche that Čeika offers is not developed or unearthed in its full depth, and misses a serious confrontation with Nietzsche’s politics. This results in a lopsided combination of Nietzsche with Marx that risks incorporating certain Nietzschean political strategies that ultimately will prove to be a dead end for any 21st century socialism. The book develops what I call an “elective affinity” reading method by attempting to combine two radically divergent philosophies—Marx and Nietzsche—and proceeds to make their thought compatible around key points of supposed commonality. Elective affinity is a reading method that analyzes the philosophical concepts and ideas of Nietzsche as detached from the historical and social forces that drove his work. It then seeks to combine the insights of the two philosophers that could not be more dissimilar in political analysis and practice, thereby rendering these differences to be non-substantial or indeterminate. It is true that Marx and Nietzsche are driven by similar concerns over the division of labor, dialectics, socialism, and morality but upon further scrutiny, it becomes clear that their critiques and political visions could not be more divergent. Importantly, this is not to say that 21st century socialist philosophy should not draw from Nietzsche when considering socialist practice and theory; it is, rather, that in drawing from Nietzsche, we must not neglect or deny the central role that anti-socialism, political economy and undeniable political reaction plays in Nietzsche’s oeuvre. To neglect this radical reactionary core in Nietzsche will risk the development of a Nietzschean-Marxism that embeds certain Nietzschean orientations that may prove damaging to any 21st century thinking of socialism. Just as working-class readers developed their own singular methods of reading Nietzsche in the early 20th century, socialists today can benefit from reading Nietzsche without any apologetic agenda that seeks to cover over his reactionary radicalism. This is why books like Čeika’s, which combine a scholarly argument but are written for a broader popular audience, are important for thinking about socialist praxis in our time. But the Left can only truly learn from Nietzsche once we have more fully analyzed the extent of his aristocratic agenda and examined how this agenda influenced his major concepts. Can Nietzsche Be Synthesized with Marx? To frame his understanding of Nietzsche’s politics, Čeika says that “Nietzsche’s work lacks an explicit political program because he identified modern politics themselves as nihilistic; because he sought a world which transcended politics.”4 This is a contradictory account of Nietzsche’s politics: we are led to believe that Nietzsche did desire to transform the world beyond politics, and that his vision is in line with Marx’s vision of political transformation because both thinkers present a version of politics that is beyond the “cold abstractions of both commerce and the state.”5 But how can Nietzsche’s politics intend to bring about a “new-found, human” (or superhuman) “control over the Earth” (“the overman shall be the meaning of the earth!”)6 while holding an agenda that does not involve any explicit political program? Despite his admission that Nietzsche aims to invent a new man capable of exerting control over the earth, his praxis is to be understood as “anti-political,” by which Čeika means that for Nietzsche, politics are something to be superseded. With this idea of anti-politics, Čeika aims to influence a particular readership, namely a Left-Nietzschean readership who might suspend Nietzsche’s actual political agenda and envision a hypothetical, socialist Nietzsche. He says the book is written “not to a hypothetical Nietzsche that became a Marxist,” but to “today’s living Nietzscheans, who have perceived, more than Nietzsche could have, the full extent of capital’s dominating tendency and its globally destructive force.”7 But as we will come to see in our analysis of the function of Nietzsche’s anti-politics, when we consider the precise way that Nietzsche critiqued conservatives in his time, the sort of anti-politics Nietzsche preaches was specifically meant to shut down class-based politics and, specifically, to mute politics centered on working-class liberation. Unless we pay attention to the design of Nietzsche’s anti-politics, we end up reading his concepts in a dehistoricized way. We risk understanding his philosophy as abstract in ways that we would seek to avoid when analyzing Marx. We read Marx as a thinker whose ideas and concepts were engaged in the class struggle of his time, a struggle that we have inherited and continue to confront. When Nietzsche is brought into our analysis, however, his political thought is somehow de-linked from the struggles of his time and his insights are treated as purely philosophical. To his credit, Čeika is concerned with answering the question of whether Nietzsche’s reactionary views and anti-socialism are deeply central to his thought. Unfortunately, he answers that they are not central to his thought, thereby leaving the reader to assume that if they were to be judged this way it would risk shutting down the entire project of uniting Marx with Nietzsche in the first place. Regardless, the position of the book is that Nietzsche’s “anti-politics” are compatible with Marx’s political praxis, and that Nietzsche’s understanding of socialism was limited to the utopian socialist movements of his time as well as vulgar socialist philosophers such as Eugen Dühring. We are led to believe that Nietzsche, much like Marx and Engels—who also critiqued Dühring—waged his critique of socialism as a fundamentally moral doctrine, “defined in terms of equality, rights, and justice. But that is not the socialism of Marx, it is not our socialism.”8 On this basis, Čeika says we can align Nietzsche’s views on socialism with Marx’s views because both saw moralistic socialism as a “disguised religious fanaticism and life-denying asceticism.”9 But these assumptions avoid the extensive literature on Nietzsche and socialism as well as the numerous references to socialism in Nietzsche’s writings, which go far beyond a critique of moralistic socialism. Indeed, Nietzsche critiqued the socialists and the anarchists on the streets of Paris in the Paris Commune of 1871, and consistently wrote about the condition of the working-class during the Second Reich under Bismarck. Any attempt to fuse Marx with Nietzsche must seriously consider the ways in which both thinkers responded to the concrete events of the Paris Commune. Both Marx and Nietzsche derive distinct understandings of the problem of the liberation of the working-class from the events of the commune. For Nietzsche, the commune is referenced in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) as the rising of a barbaric slave class, and Nietzsche continues to develop a wide-ranging set of theories about the importance of pacifying the political agency of the working-class. But when we read Nietzsche via a model of elective affinity we might assume, as Čeika does, that Nietzsche’s insights into overcoming guilt in the Genealogy of Morality are somehow applicable to the liberation of the workers in the Paris Commune, or that Nietzsche might have supported the liberation of workers from what he calls their “miserable condition” in Daybreak.10 The fusion of contradictory philosophical insights completely untethered from historical or social contexts are a hallmark of the Left-Nietzschean, elective affinity reading method. As an example of the danger of elective affinity, Čeika argues that Nietzsche’s radical critique of the division of labor, had he only been familiar with Marx’s communist vision, would possibly have led him to align with Marx. He writes that the “forms of socialism [Nietzsche] was familiar with in his time were not radical enough to attack the division of labour itself.”11 This is highly misleading and it ignores any treatment of the elaborate discussions of socialism throughout Nietzsche’s oeuvre. It also refuses to grapple with his views on political economy, or the fact that Nietzsche possesses a reactionary agenda against the working class and its liberation. With this example, we are shown the strategy of Left-Nietzscheanism; it must dehistoricize Nietzsche by turning his politics into an open, indeterminate question so as to activate his philosophical concepts from the perch of a detached position. As Marxists committed to historical materialist treatment of ideas and concepts, we owe Nietzsche and Marx a more thoughtful consideration of how their ideas and concepts interact with the political contexts of their time. Thus, when dealing with Nietzsche’s political thought and seeking to forge it with Marx and Marxism, it is imperative that we understand the significance that anti-socialism played for Nietzsche. Moreover, we must understand that anti-socialism was not a marginal concern for Nietzsche’s philosophy, but a major thrust of his thought. The Problem of Moralistic Socialism for Marx and Nietzsche Let us approach the question as to whether Nietzsche and Marx align out of a shared critique of moralistic socialism, as Čeika and many Left-Nietzscheans assume. Marx and Engels offer arguably one of their most pointed critiques of moralistic socialism in the Communist Manifesto, when they take on “true socialists” such as the Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer, and the quasi-religious socialists Moses Hess and Wilhelm Waitling. These thinkers sought the conditions of socialism in the misty abstractions of universal truth, not in the practical force of the workers’ movement and proletariat. The problem with moralistic socialists owes not only to the absence of any serious critique of political economy in their work. It is tied to their failure to theorize a revolution of society from the standpoint of the proletariat. The true socialists err not only in their philosophical outlook; they err because they understand socialism as a purely-contemplative movement, detached from the working class. The true socialists leave no room for theory to actualize in social and political struggles because the basis of their theory is abstracted from the concrete struggles of workers, and they have no account of the way that the masses can be seized by revolutionary theory. At a superficial level of comparison, we might say that Nietzsche would critique the true socialists for their abstract, quasi-religious understanding of socialism. But this is not the core of what Marx and Engels claim is problematic in moralistic socialism; the core problem of moralistic socialism, again, is that the true socialists cannot locate the working class in any conception of revolutionary theory. With this in mind, let’s examine how Nietzsche’s political thought squares with this critique by looking at his extensive commentary on the very same class that Marx and Engels argue theory must galvanize towards revolutionary agitation, namely the working class. Unlike the true socialists, Nietzsche was a perspicuous reader in political economy, and he commented widely on the problem of the working class. As Dmitri Safronov has elaborated in his recent work Nietzsche’s Political Economy (2023), Nietzsche possessed a fundamental hostility towards any future revolution from below and to any changing of the condition of private property. For Nietzsche, the propertyless class represents the “greatest danger to society,” and any notion of a revolution that would be led by the working class’ demands would only promise the compounding of ressentiment and entrench new forms of psychological slavery on humanity.12 Without a fuller appreciation of the breadth of content in Nietzsche’s politics, it is hard to understand how Nietzsche’s vitalist insights, his embrace of amor fati, and aesthetic notions of becoming can truly offer a revolutionary view of the past in any substantive political register. But Čeika finds Nietzsche’s insights into history to be “essential to socialists” as they offer an affective strength to not be resentful towards the past. At the level of social and political memory, this remains a curious claim given Nietzsche’s profound skepticism over the legacy of the egalitarian revolutionary tradition that was opened in the modern period with the French Revolution, and which continued into the 1871 uprising of the Paris Commune, of which Nietzsche remarked it was among the saddest days of his life.13 For Nietzsche, the French Revolution was unequivocally seen as the first modern slave revolt, and he commented on the movements for the abolition of slavery in his time both in Europe and the United States, which was undergoing a bloody Civil War over the ending of chattel slavery.14 Safronov points out that for Nietzsche, “the abolition of slavery has little to do with moral enlightenment and more with perpetuating more subtle forms of impersonal and anonymous slavery.”15 Nietzsche thought the egalitarian movements from below, such as the universal movement for male suffrage and the abolition of chattel slavery, would give rise to new psychological forms of enslavement. But this assessment did not merely remain at the level of a written critique. Nietzsche’s critique of bourgeois morality is meant to be enacted, i.e., the Overmen are invited to introduce new types of inequality. Moreover, Nietzsche sought justification for newer forms of inequality, with which modern slave morality had allegedly lost touch. For example, Nietzsche redefines the notion of the “underprivileged” beyond political or economic forms of privilege with his emphasis on physiological inequality.16 In Beyond Good and Evil, when discussing the “multitude,” or the working masses, Nietzsche refers to the working masses as “unvollständige Menschen” (“incomplete individuals”) in the sense that their physiological flaws result in psychological frailty. Nietzsche’s critique of slave morality, as Safronov shows, is based on the idea that capitalism suppresses a spiritual hierarchy. Thus, part of what Nietzsche’s critique is meant to bring about is a new reality of rank and distinction bound up with differences in physiological disposition. The secret truths of this new ranking order are to be ushered in by a small group of individuals who force it upon an amorphous majority. Nietzsche’s obsession with physiology as the basis of the realization of his project is evident when we look at his more unabashedly reactionary followers such as far-Right internet personality Costin Alamariu (aka Bronze Age Pervert) who elevates Nietzsche as the modern prophet of superior breeding and racial difference. These insights may be useful for academic investigations into psychology and even psychoanalysis, but taken up as a political project, they have the practical consequence of adding psychological and physiological differences—not only economic and cultural differences—between individuals as the primary basis of inequality. Nietzsche’s political project is meant to restore a missing balance that modern slave morality has disrupted in physiological rank. This project only complicates and further weighs down the goals of class emancipation and the ending of wage labor. Moreover, Nietzsche’s entire political orientation is bent on retaining conditions of enforced labor for a subjugated class, and a profound skepticism over abolishing private property. Nietzschean Leftists, should they aim to incorporate Nietzsche’s insights into physiological and psychological ranking in their understanding of socialism, risk sidestepping Marx’s insights into the basis of class conflict at the center of social life under capitalism. Nietzsche’s emphasis on physiological difference adds new, ascriptive identity markers based in physiology to any understanding of equality, and this obscures the importance of overcoming the class-based relations of exploitation and domination that socialists should advocate. Nietzsche’s views on political economy make him diametrically-opposed to Marx and Engels in thought and practice. Without a serious and historically informed analysis of Marx and Nietzsche, the “Left-Nietzschean” project risks gleaning shallow insights from the two thinkers (at best) or incorporating reactionary concepts and frameworks from Nietzsche unbeknownst to the Left-Nietzschean (at worst). In What Way is Nietzsche Reactionary? Čeika suggests that any Nietzsche-Marx rapprochement hinges on whether Nietzsche can plausibly be understood as a reactionary. While he admits that Nietzsche held some reactionary views here and there, he suggests that these views are marginal to the wealth of insights that he offers to contemporary socialists. He further argues that Nietzsche overcomes any reactionary baggage if we isolate how he understood dialectics, particularly how Nietzsche appropriated the Hegelian notion of aufheben, or the idea that a form can be abolished while simultaneously preserving a core of its substance. Nietzsche’s dialectic involves an element of “lifting up” in the final negation, and this overcoming “is the reason Nietzsche is decidedly not a reactionary, at least if we understand a reactionary as being someone who wants society to return to a previously existing condition.”17 “Reactionary” philosophy is defined here very narrowly as simply any attempt to resurrect a glorified past. Nietzsche’s philosophy is thus exempted from this definition of reactionary because he apparently does not ascribe any romantic, historical glorification to the Greeks or any past historical age. Nietzsche is thought, rather, to offer an affirmative embrace of the future and of the present– amor fati! Despite the problems with this rather narrow definition of reaction, we are led to the view that Nietzsche possesses a dialectical understanding of capitalism, for which Čeika finds support in a passage from Twilight of the Idols entitled “In the ear of the Conservatives.” In this passage, Nietzsche speaks to the politicians and parties that aim to take humanity back to an earlier standard of virtue, and he warns, “no one is free to be a crab. There is nothing for it: one has to go forward, which is to say step by step further into decadence.”18 In Čeika’s reading of this specific passage, the kernel of Nietzsche’s aufheben of decadence is understood to be in line with Marx’s notion of aufheben, “according to which capital has to expand before it can be abolished.”19 In other words, Nietzsche’s understanding of overcoming decadence (aufheben) by stepping into it further is conflated and made to be in alignment with the general Marxist idea that capitalism as a system generates contradictions that undermine itself. This is the same move we saw before with the assumption that Marx and Nietzsche share a similar critique of socialism. Now they share a similar philosophical and political conception of dialectics as an overcoming of capitalism, as well. However, Nietzsche’s notion of overcoming decadence is not bent on any overcoming of capitalism, and this is evidenced when we analyze the precise aphorism in question, which Čeika claims does not express reactionary views. In what follows, we will demonstrate that Nietzsche’s “whispers in the ear of conservatives” were indeed expressive of a right-wing political position. We can realize this when we situate our understanding of Nietzsche as a philosopher working amidst the crisis of the bourgeois class following the Paris Commune, and the rise of imperial conquest and European colonization. In this milieu, the European bourgeoisie had lost all hope that they lived in the best of possible worlds, and these decadent social conditions gave way to what György Lukács, in The Destruction of Reason, calls “a complacent, narcissistic, playful relativism, pessimism, nihilism, et c.”20 In this context, Nietzsche’s philosophy performed a specific social task of rescuing and redeeming the bourgeoisie as a cultural and social class. Lukács shows how Nietzsche’s philosophy offered a road for the bourgeoisie of his time that avoided the need for any break, or indeed any serious conflict, with the class struggle.21 Thus, Nietzsche’s anti-politics, contrarily to how they have been defined in Čeika’s work, must be understood as a class project in line with furthering the material interests of the bourgeoisie, and designed to shut down proletarian consciousness and revolutionary possibility. We can further assess the intent of Nietzsche’s “whispers” by understanding his critique of Bismarck, wherein he broke with the German politician from an explicitly right-wing position. Lukács notes that Nietzsche’s break with Bismarck involved two points: the first was a break from the project of democratic representation, which Nietzsche saw as constituting an “increasing stultification of democratic man, and the consequent stultification of Europe and belittling of European man.”22 The second break stemmed from Nietzsche’s claim that Bismarck did not understand the true gravity of the coming age of imperial wars. Nietzsche held to the importance of upholding the Prussian military state in the face of the coming catastrophe: “The upholding of the military state is the ultimate means of adopting or sustaining the great tradition with regard to the higher type of person, the type that is strong.”23 It is hard not to read Čeika’s political account of Nietzsche’s thought as representing what Domenico Losurdo refers to as the “hermeneutics of innocence,” a reading method that makes Nietzsche’s political substance nonexistent or marginal, and based on this misreading seeks to then forge a Nietzschean Marxism.24 Nietzschean Marxism: A Lopsided Political Praxis Nietzschean Marxism can be problematic when it is built on a depoliticized understanding of Nietzsche. These problems are not merely philosophical; I want to argue that Nietzschean Marxism can have practical effects on the direction of socialist political thought and praxis. How are we, as socialists, to engage bourgeois forms of equality? How are we meant to transcend or incorporate aspects of equality in our conception of socialism and of a future socialist society? The way we understand and advocate for equality entails an engagement with philosophy, and this has direct bearing on the sort of demands that socialists advocate for the working-class. If socialist philosophers advocate a lifting of living standards for the working-class through expansion of the social safety net, are they succumbing to the slave morality of bourgeois morality? A Nietzschean Marxism will tend to cast profound skepticism on the raising of working class living standards due to this aversion not only towards equality, but towards rights as such. The Nietzschean suspicion of rights is a long-standing motif in Left readings of Nietzsche, and it can be seen in more recent Left-Nietzschean works by Deleuze and Foucault. Both read Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals as setting the bar for liberation based on a continual disobedience towards institutions. Čeika similarly urges the Left to eschew a commitment to rights: “the reason that such rights are required in the first place is evidence of a fundamentally alienated society, a society based on a gulf between the rulers and the ruled, consisting of citizens whose social powers are removed from their immediate control.”25 Such strong skepticism towards bourgeois rights is warranted to an extent, but the problem comes about in the way Left-Nietzschean skepticism proffers a skepticism over rights in the very notion of a communist society to come. As Igor Shoikhedbrod convincingly argues in his work on Marx’s interpretation of liberalism, “[it is] a mistake to conclude that the historical achievements of capitalism, including the granting of formal legal rights, would be annihilated under communism. Abolishing elementary formal rights would mean reverting to pre-capitalist social relations, in which the direct domination of the master, lord, or patriarchal community actively inhibited the free development of individuals.”26 Marx does not chide equality and rights as such, as we know from his commentary on the way that each mode of production implies a new legal relation. Marx saw that rights are necessary, but not sufficient for political emancipation. In Left-Nietzschean praxis, the necessary basis of rights is thrown out the window, and this has the practical consequence of making the Left vulnerable to anarchistic practice, untethered from institutions entirely. The downside to this individualist praxis is evident in Foucault’s statement in his famous debate with Chomsky: “individual members of the proletariat desire a proletariat revolution for their own sake, that they may have more power.”27 The Nietzschean praxis not only dissuades commitments to rights, it construes of revolution in a highly unmediated and individualist way; on offer is a ludic and joyful rebellion, but one that is detached from the development of working-class interests and skeptical of parties, institutions and leadership. This suspicion of rights has the practical effect of presenting a conception of liberation that risks forcing socialists to shift their demands away from the arena of the state entirely, and this in turn kneecaps large-scale political mobilization within the parliamentary or democratic system. Nietzschean Marxism can very often cast shade on the prospect of building a workers’ party, on forming leadership within the socialist movement, and it can often lead to libertarian-socialism and anti-institutional forms of anarchism. We should always remember that Marx consistently advocated for political demands such as that of limiting the hours in the working day. A deeper appreciation of the political core of Nietzsche produces different conclusions regarding how both Marx and Nietzsche relate to one another. For example, both thinkers consider the liberal-democratic version of equality as hollow. However, Nietzsche prefers the liberal bourgeois order to any socialist doctrine of equality. Nietzsche’s praxis is thus bent on social transformation in ways that are anathema to any direction of collective, egalitarian achievement. He is particularly wary of any threat to private property.28 The question for Left Nietzscheans, given they have absorbed so many elements of Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarian agenda but construed this agenda as tertiary to his core concepts and insights, remains this: Will the development of a Nietzschean-Marxist praxis fall sway to a formula for revolution that ultimately represents “a declaration of war on the masses by higher men,”29 as Nietzsche put it? In other words, when we make Nietzsche the primary philosopher for the Left, we risk forcing a type of elitist adhesion to political leadership, which moreover risks a form of leadership that retrenches existing elite hierarchies, and even celebrates the status quo in terms of class power, precisely by obscuring the truth of class oppression. Due to these problems, Nietzschean Leftism must be combined with a rigorous class analysis from a Marxist perspective, and after this has been done, the Nietzsche problem will become apparent to the Left. A socialist Left that has abandoned equality runs a risk of damaging the philosophical compass that shapes its commitments to institutions, and ultimately to the development of a strategic political vision. These days, the liberal discourse on equality, rights, and representation is already tarnished and rendered suspect. Liberals have abandoned any notion of equality other than equality determined on the market. The hollowness of liberal appeals to market equality is why the discourse on rights and equality are necessary for achieving forms of working-class emancipation such as the achievement of new forms of leisure, labor rights and increases in social welfare. Nietzschean socialists will often lead the Left to assume that bettering the material condition of workers will risk miring the proletariat in forms of ressentiment that are intractable. This argument forms the backbone to the widely-read essay “Telling the Truth About Class” by G.M Tamás, which re-casts Nietzsche’s notion of ressentiment in support for avoiding a conception of socialism that would aim to build working-class culture and equality. Even though Tamás does not espouse a Left-Nietzschean project as a Marxist, the influence of Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarian thought has been negatively absorbed into his core conception of socialism in problematic ways. We can benefit from Nietzsche’s politics as a theoretical surplus of insights only after we have carefully understood the reactionary agenda at the heart of his work. As Marxists, it is best not to apologetically gloss over the extent to which Nietzsche’s thought is forged in response to the revolutionary tradition, to anti-egalitarianism, and to a highly developed anti-socialist politics. When we miss that, we miss out on understanding how his indirect apologetics for capitalism and support for adhesion to status quo class relations truly works. We must develop a new reading method for Nietzsche, which avoids the apolitical and whitewashed versions of his thought that we have inherited from the post-war Nietzsche industry. This can only begin when we have a more historically-grounded confrontation with Nietzsche, one that makes no apologies for his sophisticated opposition toward the revolutionary tradition that he sought to extinguish, and in which we find our compass for political action. Notes
Author Daniel Tutt is a writer and philosopher based in Washington, DC. He is the author of How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche with Repeater Books. Republished from Cosmonaut Archives March 2024
There’s an infuriatingly common type of liberal who purports to oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza while also saying they support “Israel’s right to exist”, as though Israel’s existence is somehow separable from its genocidal murderousness. This is a state that literally cannot exist without nonstop violence and tyranny, as demonstrated by its entire unbroken history since its inception. It was set up as a settler-colonialist outpost for western imperialism from the very beginning, and that’s exactly what it’s been ever since.
History has conclusively established that it is not possible to drop an artificial ethnostate on top of an already-existing population in which the pre-existing population is legally subordinate to the new one without tremendous amounts of warfare, police violence, mass displacement, apartheid, disenfranchisement and oppression. This is not actually debatable. It is a settled matter (no pun intended). Is it possible to have a nation in which Jews are welcomed and kept safe? Of course. Many such nations exist outside of Israel, and the majority of the world’s Jews live in them. What isn’t possible is a Jewish ethnostate in historic Palestine in which the pre-existing population is treated as less than the Jewish population that does not necessarily entail nonstop violence, tyranny and abuse. This is self-evidently a direct contradiction in goals, but it’s what the liberals we’re discussing here pretend to believe is a reasonable possibility.
There absolutely could be a state in that region wherein Palestinians and Jews coexist peacefully, but it would be so wildly different from present-day Israel that you can’t pretend it would be the same state as the one we see now. It would entail such a radically dramatic overhaul of Israeli civilization, such a comprehensive dismantling of deeply ingrained racism, such a drastic restructuring of governmental and living systems, so much labor, sacrifice, humility, inner work and reparations, that to call it by the same name as the state that presently exists would be nonsensical.
And that isn’t what the liberals in question are talking about instituting when they say they oppose Israel’s atrocities in Gaza but “support Israel’s right to exist”. What they are saying is they want Israel to remain the unjust and tyrannical apartheid state that is has always been, but for the killing to stop. They want the injustice to continue, but they want its most overt manifestations to stop causing them cognitive dissonance. They want the status quo, without the murderous savagery that is necessary for the status quo’s existence. They want to pretend they live in an imaginary fantasyland where such a thing is possible. In order to make this fantasy seem more believable, liberals will pretend that the violence we are seeing can be blamed entirely on the Netanyahu government, as though things would be fine without Bibi in office despite the fact that Israel’s abusiveness began long before he showed up, and despite the fact that Israel’s atrocities in Gaza have the approval of the vast majority of Israelis. Israeli violence isn’t the product of Netanyahu, Netanyahu is the product of Israeli violence. He built his political career upon sentiments that were already in place.
They’ll also tell themselves fairy tales about a two-state solution to make their position seem more valid, ignoring inconvenient facts like that Israeli officials have been openly saying a Palestinian state will never happen, that Israeli Jews overwhelmingly oppose such a measure, and that Israeli settlements are being built in Palestinian territories with the explicit goal of making a future two-state solution impossible. Liberals subscribe to these fantasies as a kind of cognitive pacifier, which allows them to relax and feel okay with themselves despite the fact that they’re not actually endorsing any viable path toward justice.
And to be clear this isn’t just what liberals do with regard to Israel-Palestine; it’s their whole entire position on everything. On every issue their position is little more than “Maintain the status quo, but make it pretty and psychologically comfortable for me.” They never want to do what’s right, they just want to feel like they are right. Theirs is an imperialist, militarist, tyrannical oligarchic ideology with a bunch of feel-good social justice bumper stickers slapped on top of it. A boot on your neck and a flower in its hair. That’s who liberals are. It’s who they’ve always been. Phil Ochs released the song “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” in 1966, and they haven’t changed one iota ever since. The issues change, their arguments change, but their “maintain the status quo but let me feel nice about it” values system has remained exactly the same for generations. ArchivesMarch 2024 3/19/2024 Starvation Is a War Crime: Note From the Israeli Genocide Against the Palestinians. By: Vijay Prashad.Read NowSpeaking in Rome, Italy, the head of the United Nations World Food Program Cindy McCain said, “If we do not exponentially increase the size of aid going into the northern areas” of Gaza, “famine is imminent. It’s imminent.” Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza by the genocidal Israeli war, and the Palestinians in Gaza are on the verge of famine. Palestine’s Permanent Observer at the United Nations Riyad Mansour said that over half a million people are “one step away from famine.” “What it means for mothers and fathers to hear their babies and children cry of hunger day and night, no milk, no bread, nothing,” he added. Indeed, babies and children already have begun to die due to the famine-like conditions in Gaza. With Ramadan already begun, the situation is not only physically acute, but also mentally torturous. There are currently 2,000 medical workers who are trying their best to operate basic medical care in northern Gaza. They are working without access to any hospital facilities and often with no power or water, including very limited supplies of medicines. Now, the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza has said that these workers are themselves in a dire situation. The staff, said the Ministry, “will start Ramadan without Suhoor or Iftar meals.” “Doctors will die. The nurses there will die. And the world will witness the largest number of victims of hunger in the coming days,” said Ashraf al-Qudra, the ministry’s spokesperson. War Crime In June 1977, at a conference on humanitarian law in armed conflict, the member states of the United Nations extended the Geneva Conventions (1949) to add Protocol II. Article 14 of that protocol says that “[s]tarvation of civilians as a method of combat is prohibited.” The belligerent power is “prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless” any “objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works.” Two decades later, when the UN member states wrote up the Rome Statute (1998), they added in a section on starvation under the heading of war crimes (Article 8); “intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supplies” is a war crime. The Rome Statute is the treaty that formed the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has thus far remained silent on its obligations to act on its own founding document. On February 29th, trucks with humanitarian aid came into the northern part of Gaza. When desperate people rushed to these trucks, Israeli soldiers fired on them and killed at least 118 unarmed civilians. This is now known as the Flour Massacre. In its aftermath, 10 UN experts released a strong statement, which noted, “Israel has been intentionally starving the Palestinian people in Gaza since 8 October. Now it is targeting civilians seeking humanitarian aid and humanitarian convoys.” The UN special rapporteur for food, Michael Fakhri, who signed that statement, later expanded this accusation against Israel. “Israel,” he told the UN Human Rights Council, “has mounted a starvation campaign against the Palestinian people in Gaza.” These statements are very pointed. Words such as “intentionally” and phrases such as “starvation campaign” directly accuse Israel of war crimes based on Protocol II and the Rome Statute. Fakhri focused on Gaza’s fishing industry, which had provided important food security for the 2.3 million Palestinians who live there. “Israeli forces,” he said, have “decimated the Port of Gaza, destroying every single fishing boat and shack. In Rafah, only two out of 40 boats are left. In Khan Younis, Israel destroyed approximately 75 small-scale fishing vessels.” This destruction, Fakhri said, has pushed Gaza “into hunger and starvation.” “In fact,” he added, “Israel has been strangling Gaza for 17 years through a blockade, which included denying and restricting small-scale fishers access to their territorial waters.” At the UN General Assembly, Palestine’s Riyad Mansour said that Israel has bombed “every bakery and farm, destroying livestock and all means of food production.” In the first month of the bombardment, Israel bombed the major bakeries of Gaza City. In November 2023, Abdelnasser al-Jarmi of the Bakery Owners Association in the Gaza Strip said that bakeries have not been able to function for lack of fuel and flour. As a consequence of the absence of bread, families have begun to gather a weed called khubaiza (or Malva parviflora) and to boil this as the main meal. “We are dying for a piece of bread,” said Fatima Shaheen as she built a meal for her two sons and their children in northern Gaza. Crossings Israel has refused to fully open the crossings into Gaza at Beit Hanoun and Karem Abu Salem as well as refused to allow complete opening of the Rafah crossing the links Gaza to Egypt. Since these land crossings are closed, and since Israel destroyed the Yasser Arafat International Airport in 2001, there are no easy solutions to bring food aid into Gaza. Delivery of food and supplies through the air is not sufficient—indeed it is a drop in the ocean (which is where some of the aid packages landed). There is now talk of building maritime corridors, but since Israel has bombed the Port of Gaza this is not an easy option. That the U.S. has said that it would build a temporary pier off the coast of Gaza’s southern half is ridiculous. It would be so much easier to open the Rafah crossing to allow at least 500 trucks a day into Gaza. But Israel will not permit this option. International law is clear as daylight on the point of starvation as a war crime. There are no loopholes in Protocol II (1977) or in the Rome Statute (1998). Friends in Gaza are finding this Ramadan month to be more difficult than any previously. Starvation is their general condition. But, unlike with other Ramadans, there is no early morning meal (Suhoor) and no late-night meal (Iftar). There is only the perennial noise of Israeli fighter jets mirrored by the groans of hunger in their bellies. Author Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power. This article was produced by Globetrotter. Archives March 2024 When interest-bearing commercial and agrarian debt came to be incorporated into civilization’s economic structure in the third millennium BC, it was accompanied by clean slates that liberated bondservants and restored to debtors the rights to the crops and land that creditors had taken. By the second millennium BC in Babylonia these royal “restorations of order” became customary proclamations rescuing debtors whose family members had been reduced to bondage or who had lost their land to foreclosing creditors. Anthropologists have looked at surviving tribal enclaves for ideas of how the Bronze Age takeoff may have been managed. But no tribal communities in today’s world possess the outward-reaching dynamics of Mesopotamia during its commercial takeoff, which occurred in many ways that are alien to modern ways of thinking. The documentation describes an approach operating on different principles from those that most modern observers assume to have been primordial and universal. The Character of Bronze Age Debt That Made Royal Clean Slates Necessary The dynamics of interest-bearing debt are different from those of tribal gift exchange and related reciprocity obligations. Monetary credit arrangements bear a specific interest rate, and the date of payment is specified in advance rather than left open-ended. That requires debts to be recorded in writing and formally witnessed. Creditors may take foreclosure measures for non-payment, leading to the debtor’s bondage or the loss of land rights. Civilization’s earliest written records, from Sumer in the third millennium BC, provide the best evidence for civilization’s monetized debt relations “in the beginning.” Two categories of debt existed, each associated with its own designated monetary commodity. Business obligations owed by traders and entrepreneurial managers were denominated in silver, above all those associated with foreign trade. The agrarian economy operated on credit denominated in barley units, assigned a value equal to the silver shekel in order to strike a common measure. Money Loans and Long-Distance Trade Rules for money loans described in scribal training exercises are found almost exclusively in the commercial sphere, especially in connection with long-distance trade. These loans were denominated in silver at the equivalent of a 20 percent annual rate of interest, doubling the principal in five years. Under normal conditions merchants were able to pay this rate to their creditors and keep a profit for themselves. Lenders shared in the mercantile risk, taking what in effect was an equity position. If caravans were robbed or ships and their cargoes lost at sea through no fault of the merchant, the debt was voided. There is no indication that payment of such mercantile debts led to problems requiring royal intervention. Interest-bearing debt had initially arisen in the commercial sphere, taking the form of advances of assets by the large public institutions to entrepreneurial recipients, enabling them to make an economic gain in commerce and land management. But throughout all antiquity the most problematic debts disrupting the economy’s fiscal and social balance were in the agrarian sphere. The original objective of charging interest to sharecroppers and other cultivators, however, can hardly have been to reduce them to bondage or to expropriate them from their self-support land. Their labor was needed for the agrarian economy to function. Agrarian Debt and Land-Rental Agreements Rural usury and the consequent widespread forfeiture of lands seem to have derived from advances of land, animals, and tools to sharecroppers (or their manager intermediaries) by temples and palaces. Sharecropping land and agricultural inputs were advanced for a rent of one-third of the (optimistically) estimated normal crop yield 1. Interest was charged on arrears of this rent and other agrarian obligations not settled at harvest-time. The interest rate charged on these carry-over debts was the same as the sharecropping rental rate: one-third. Even arrears for unpaid debts for food or credit for other needs, such as priestly social services, were charged interest at the rate of one-third of the sum owed, simply mirroring the sharecropping rental return for creditors. Arrears on agrarian obligations must have been infrequent, given the ever-present risk of crop failure preventing anticipated crops payments from being paid. Researchers Alfonso Archi and Piotr Steinkeller show that agrarian interest rates denominated in barley are attested by the middle of the third millennium BC. Officials, collectors for the palaces and temples, and merchants often acted in their own private capacity to make interest-bearing loans to cultivators in arrears for arrears of fees owed to the large institutions. Rural usury thus emerged as well-to-do “big men” charged for arrears owed to the palace and temples, also lending food and other necessities to distressed cultivators. But agrarian interest-bearing debt, especially usury charged to borrowers in need, was always denounced as socially unfair. The question therefore arises as to just how such charges originated in the first place. Few types of barley debt involved actual loans of money. What often are called “loan documents” should more literally be termed “debt records” or simply “notes of obligation.” Even in the commercial sphere with its debts denominated in silver, textiles, and other handicrafts that temple and palace workshops consigned to merchants for trade were recorded as debts. And when contractual work was to be performed, craftsmen gave customers tablets of obligation when they were given materials to make into a finished product. The basic contractual formulae were well established by the end of the third millennium BC. Debt tablets state the sum owed, the due date, and the names of witnesses, with the appropriate seals. Additional stipulations might include the pledges involved, guarantees by individuals who stood surety, and the interest rate to be charged (often to accrue only if the debt were not paid on time). Some documents were given a title citing the reason why the debt was established. Agrarian debts mostly arose on rental agreements on land advanced by public institutions to intermediaries, who then subleased it to sharecroppers. Near East researcher Johannes Renger describes how land and workshops were administered directly by palace officials in Ur III (2111-2004 BC), but by the Old Babylonian period (2000-1600 BC) the palace franchised the management of its fields and date orchards, herds of sheep, brick-making workshops, and other handicrafts to “entrepreneurs” as Palastgeschäfte, “royal enterprises.” These managers were entitled to keep whatever they could produce or collect above and beyond the amount stipulated by their contract with the palace, but if the sums they collected fell short, their arrears were recorded as a debt and they were obliged to pay the difference out of their own resources. The rate of interest payable by cultivators on such debt arrears was, as described above, one-third, being the same as the rate charged for advances of sharecropping land. Cultivators were also charged this one-third rate of interest for unpaid arrears of charges for advances to buy food or beer or meet emergency needs on credit. If they lacked the means to pay out of whatever assets they had, they had to work off the debt charges in the form of their labor service or that of their family members (daughters, sons, wives, or house-slaves), and ultimately they had to pledge their land rights. How Agrarian Debt Transformed Land Tenure Barley debts had an annual character reflecting the crop cycle, falling due upon harvest. The accrual of such debts did not reflect a parallel growth in the cultivator’s ability to pay out of their harvest. Creditors obtained work at harvest-time by extending loans whose interest was paid in the form of labor service, as labor-for-hire was not generally available in this epoch. In addition to their labor, debtors were obliged to pledge their family members as bondservants, followed by their land rights. Self-support land had traditionally been conveyed from one generation to the next within families, not being freely disposable outside of the family or neighborhood. Land transfers did occur when families shrank in size and transferred their cultivation rights to distant relatives or neighbors. But starting with rights to its crop usufruct, subsistence land was pledged and relinquished to outsiders after 2000 BC. Debtor families initially were left on the land after they lost their crop rights, but were forced off the land as the new appropriators turned to less labor-intensive cash crops such as dates. Debtors often ended up as members of rootless bands or mercenaries after the middle of the second millennium BC. Instead of crop and land rights being lost only temporarily—being returned to their original owners by royal edicts that restored the status quo ante2—such forfeitures became irreversible by the first millennium BC, especially in Greece and Italy to the west. The Logic of Canceling Rural Debts and Reversing Land Forfeitures An inability to meet obligations was inherent in the risks to which agrarian life was subject throughout antiquity: drought, flooding, infestation, or an outbreak of disease, capped by military disruptions. The problem confronting rulers was how to prevent debts from mounting up to the point where they threatened to expropriate the community’s corvée labor and fighting force, dooming debt-ridden realms to defeat by outsiders. If the indebted rural citizenry were to survive along customary lines, priority could not be given to creditors. Mesopotamian rulers countered the rural debt problem not by banning interest outright, but by annulling barley debts. To restore the means of self-support, rulers issued edicts “proclaiming justice,” decreeing economic order and “righteousness.” These proclamations date from almost as early as interest-bearing debt is attested, starting in Sumer with Lagash’s rulers Enmetena circa 2400 BC and Urukagina and 2350 BC. Much as commercial debts were forgiven when the merchandise was lost through no fault of the merchant, Hammurabi’s laws (§48) provided that cultivators would not be obliged to pay their crop debts if the storm-god Adad flooded their field and the crop was lost. The operative principle was that debtors should not lose their economic liberty by being held liable for “acts of God.” And inasmuch as most barley debts were owed to the palace or royal officials, it was easy for rulers to cancel them. Letting officials and merchants keep the crops and labor of debtors would have deprived rulers of their ability to collect the customary royal fees and land rents for themselves and to obtain corvée labor and military service. There was no modernist thought that the dynamics of interest-bearing debt might be self-stabilizing by letting “market forces” proceed unimpeded. There was no thought of Adam Smith’s Deist god designing the world to run like clockwork, with checks and balances automatically maintaining equilibrium without any need for intervention by kings or priestly sanctions. Not even the wealthy voiced the ideology of modern free-market fundamentalism arguing that society’s wealth and revenue would be maximized by letting it pass into the hands of the richest and most aggressively self-serving individuals reducing hitherto free families to bondage. Notes 1. Although not clear from the records, it seems likely that agricultural inputs were advanced as part of a “package” with the land for a total rental of one-third of the crop.↩ 2. The classic studies of these edicts are F.R. Kraus, Königliche Verfügungen in altbabylonischer Zeit (Leiden, 1984); Jean Bottéro, “Désordre économique et annulation des dettes en Mesopotamie à l’époque paléo-babylonienne,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 4 (1961): pp. 113-164; J.J. Finkelstein, “Ammisaduqa’s Edict and the Babylonian ‘Law Codes,’” Journal of Cuneiform Studies, vol. 15 (1961): pp. 91-104; “Some New misharum Material and Its Implications,” in Assyriological Studies, no. 16 (1965); Studies in Honor of Benno Landsberger on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday: pp. 233-246; “The Edict of Ammisaduqa: A New Text,” Revue d’Assyriologie et d’Archéologie Orientale, vol. 63 (1969): pp. 45-64; and the works of Igor Diakonoff and Dominique Charpin.↩ AUTHOR Michael Hudson is an American economist, a professor of economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. He is a former Wall Street analyst, political consultant, commentator, and journalist. You can read more of Hudson’s economic history here. This article was produced by Human Bridges. Archives March 2024 A group of young people in Paris are enjoying a drink in a café on an unseasonably warm evening. The conversation drifts into politics, but—as one young woman says—“Let’s not talk about France.” The others nod their assent. They focus on the U.S. presidential election, a slight bit of Gallic arrogance at play as they mock the near certainty that the main candidates will be President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. Biden is 81 years old and Trump is 77. A Special Counsel in the United States has called Biden an “elderly man with a poor memory,” hardly the words required to inspire confidence in the president. Trying to defend himself, Biden made the kind of gaffe that is fodder for online memes and affirmed the report that he tried to undermine: he called President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi of Egypt the “president of Mexico.” No new evidence is required, meanwhile, to mock the candidacy of Trump. “Is this the best that the United States can offer?” asks Claudine, a young student at a prestigious Parisian college. These young people are aware enough that what appears to be comical on the other side of the Atlantic—the U.S. presidential election—is no less ridiculous, and of course less dangerous, in Europe. When I ask them what they think about the main European leaders—Olaf Scholz of Germany and Emmanuel Macron of France—they shrug, and the words “imbecilic” and “non-entity” enter the discussion. Near Les Halles, these young people have just been at a demonstration to end the Israeli bombing of the Rafah region of Gaza. “Rafah is the size of Heathrow Airport,” says a young student from England who is spending 2024 in France. That none of the European leaders have spoken plainly about the death and destruction in Gaza troubles them, and they say that they are not alone in these feelings. Many of their fellow students feel the same way. The approval ratings for Scholz and Macron decline with each week. Neither the German nor the French public believes that these men can reverse the economic decline or stop the wars in either Gaza or Ukraine. Claudine is upset that the governments of the Global North have decided to cut their funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN Palestine agency, although another young person, Oumar, interjects that Brazil’s President Lula has said that his country will donate money to UNRWA. Everyone nods. A week later, news comes that a young soldier in the United States Airforce—Aaron Bushnell—has decided to take his own life, saying that he will no longer be complicit in the genocide against the Palestinians. When asked about the death of Bushnell, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that the President is “aware” and that it is a “horrible tragedy.” But there was no statement about why the young man took his life, and nothing to assuage a tense public about the implications of this act. Eating an ice cream in New York, U.S. President Joe Biden said that he hoped that there would be a ceasefire “by the beginning of the weekend” but then moved it to “by next Monday.” The meandering statements, the pledge for a ceasefire alongside the prevarication, and the arms deliveries do not raise the confidence of anyone in Biden or his peers in Europe. With the Emir of Qatar beside him, France’s President Emmanuel Macron called for a “lasting ceasefire.” These phrases—“lasting ceasefire” and “sustainable ceasefire”—have been bandied about with these adjectives (lasting, sustainable) designed to dilute the commitment to a ceasefire and to pretend that they are actually in favor of an end to the war when they continue to say that they are behind Israel’s bombing runs. In London, the UK Parliament had a comical collapse in the face of a Scottish National Party (SNP) resolution for a ceasefire. Rather than allow a vote to show the actual opinions of their members, both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party went into a tailspin and the Parliament’s speaker broke rules to ensure that the elected officials did not have to go on the record against a ceasefire. Brendan O’Hara of the SNP put the issue plainly before the Parliament before his words and the SNP resolution was set aside: “Some will have to say that they chose to engage in a debate on semantics over ‘sustainable’ or ‘humanitarian’ pauses, while others will say that they chose to give Netanyahu both the weapons and the political cover that he required to prosecute his relentless war.” Global desire for an immediate stop to the Israeli bombing is now at an all-time high. For the third time, the United States vetoed a UN resolution in the Security Council to compel the Israelis to stop the bombing. That the United States and its European allies continue to back Israel despite the widespread disgust at this war—exemplified by the death of Aaron Bushnell—raises the frustration with the leadership of the Global North. What is so particularly bewildering is that large sections of the population in the countries of the North want an immediate ceasefire, and yet their leaders disregard their opinions. One survey shows that two-thirds of voters in the United States—including majorities of Democrats (77 percent), Independents (69 percent), and Republicans (56 percent)—are in favor of a ceasefire in Gaza. Interestingly, 59 percent of U.S. voters say that Palestinians must be guaranteed the right to return to their homes in Gaza, while 52 percent said that peace talks must be held for a two-state solution. These are all positions that are ignored by the main political class on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The qualifications of “lasting” and “sustainable” only increase cynicism among populations that watch their political leadership ignore their insistence on an immediate ceasefire. Clarity is not to be sought in the White House, in No. 10 Downing Street, or in the Élysée Palace. It is found in the words of ordinary people in these countries who are heartsick regarding the violence. Protests seem to increase in intensity as the death toll rises. What is the reaction to these protests? In the United Kingdom, members of parliament complained that these protests are putting the police under “sustained pressure.” That is perhaps the point of the protests. Author Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power. Source: Globetrotter Archives March 2024 In 2009, former Texas governor Rick Perry discussed secession from the federal United States government at an anti-tax rally. Today, the same threats are made by Texas governor Greg Abbot over the standoff between the state of Texas and the US federal government. Headlines swept the country that made this clash appear to be rooted in a division of political opinion on immigration between Republican and Democrat governed states. However, the two sides of this standoff are rooted in a deeper phenomenon that has left a split in interest between the federal government and the red state governments, namely southern state governments. To understand the standoff at Eagle Pass, we have to look at Governor Abbot’s Operation Lonestar from its beginning in March 2021, and the demoralization crisis among the Texas national guard members that’s plagued the operation throughout its three year existence. We have to examine its antagonistic first year with the broad Texas national guard membership. We have to look at its second year, where this membership does the historically unprecedented by organizing their own union, forcing the state of Texas into compromises. We have to examine its third year, where guard members defy their command, and refuse orders to commit human rights abuses against migrants. While examining these occurrences, we must also look at how this demoralization crisis creates a political split in the economic interest between the federal and southern state governments, and the private corporate donors that dominate them. The southern states consist of the largest private military industrial complexes, compared to the other states, that together, make up the most incarcerated country in the world. Migrants apprehended at the southern border make up a considerable portion of this prison labor force, whether it be at facilities designated for immigration or general population. The interest of the southern states, governed by the “America first” republican party, particularly relies on US prison labor for their mode of profit. These private corporate donors are compelled to use their governmental power to pull national guard members from their civilian lives, in order to maximize detainment of a prison workforce. In contrast, what the US federal government does is determined by a much larger, international private corporate interest. While the less free, southern states are inclined to maximize a prison work force as rapidly as possible, the US federal government has to consider its overall military strength in the long run. The US federal government doesn’t have an interest in declining its prison population. The Biden administration apprehended over four million migrants in the first two years of its presidency according to United, We Dream. ICE and CBP are federal programs specifically installed to maximize the apprehension of undocumented people in the United States. However, across all military branches, there has been a record low recruitment in the past several years. This record low in recruitment comes at a time after a record number of police officers in the United States resigned during the Black Lives Matter protest in 2020. The US federal government is in a tense point of its history, in conflicts for sanction power with major forces like China and Russia.. US congress members have even begun to draw up bills to invade Mexico. In order to maintain its massive military presence across the entire world, while maintaining a coercive grip on the working class at home, the US federal government can not allow for a demoralization crisis to plague the national guard in a state as critical as Texas, especially as the result of something as non-combative as Governor Abbot’s Operation Lonestar. It can not allow for Texas National Guard service members to gain practice in defying orders, like we have seen all throughout the duration of Operation Lonestar. “Political Pawns” Greg Abbot launched Operation Lonestar on March 6 2021, exactly two months into the Biden presidency. Now it’s become the largest deployment in the history of the Texas National Guard in size and duration. It began with the deployment of 500 guard members. By November, Greg Abbot boasted a total of ten thousand guard members deployed. However, records show that number never reached beyond 6,500. On January 5-10, 2022, ten months into Operation Lonestar, a survey was taken at a base near Brownsville, Texas. The survey was taken among 250 guard members, asking questions and taking direct quotes. The survey was published and distributed by the Military times and the Texas Tribune. The conductor of the survey has not been revealed, as they were not authorized to leak the survey. The survey found that more than half of the guard members “expressed skepticism and frustration with Operation Lonestar.” Nearly thirty percent “vented about the length, haste, and involuntary nature” of the mobilization. One in five members gave no response to “what they liked most about Operation Lonestar,” or stated that they disliked everything about it. Each of the following direct quotes come from separate guardsmen that took the survey. “Members feel like political [pawns] and do not feel like their [issues] are being heard.” “Most of us signed up to help Texas in times of need like hurricanes. This doesn’t feel like we are helping any Texans besides the governor and his ability to say he has activated the [Guard] to the border.” “Whether or not you agree with the politics and morals of [Operation Lone Star], the best thing you could do to improve morale would be to shorten [deployments]. I’ve spoken to very few people who plan on continuing their service in the Texas [National Guard], much less staying on [the border] any longer than they have to. Send people home.” “[Operation Lone Star] cares more about numbers than the impact on individuals and their families. It does greater harm to our members than good by putting their families and own lives at risk for an unclear mission.” “We are disposable in the eyes of top leaders, from the governor on down. The leadership failures of this mission will be a case study for military leaders for years to come.” In the year leading up to the survey, there are several instances that indicate demoralization among the guardsmen. In May 2021, a cavalry troop from Louisiana was temporarily disbanded for misconduct and command issues. This is noted to be a “rare occurrence.” Due to an arrest made for narcotic trafficking in McAllen, Texas, local law enforcement brought drug sniffing dogs to a hotel where many guardsmen were living in the deployment in September. A staff officer at McAllen was quoted by the press saying, “We are literally the biggest threat to ourselves down here,” One instance during the year, a guard member slipped away from her unit, and returned to her home territory of Puerto Rico to seek psychological treatment. On September 10th, 2021, an unknown guard member had slipped a manifesto under every door of his brigade quarter that said the following: “Someone please wave the white flag and send us all home. I would like to jump off a bridge headfirst into a pile of rocks after seeing the good ol’ boy system and fucked up leadership I have witnessed here.” On January 4th, 2022, it is reported four Texas guard members deployed to Operation Lonestar had committed suicide in the span of two months. In response, a retired Texas National Guard general made a public statement admitting that morale is low in the Texas National Guard. By December 31st, 2021, The National Guard had only 327 reenlistments, or roughly 65% of the target set by the National Guard Bureau. This can be compared to the reenlistment rate that occurred in the first three months of 2021, before Operation Lonestar, which reached expectations by 105%. Guard Members Unionize and Defy Orders On February 21st, 2022, the Texas National Guard held its first union meeting in the history of its existence. Talks to begin unionizing began in December, 2021. This came after January 25th, 2022, when the Department of Justice ruled that National Guard members can unionize as public employees when on state active duty, as the laws against military unionization exclusively apply to federal military members. Immediately following the union meeting, the Texas Military Department issued an urgent statement discouraging members from joining the historically unprecedented Texas National Guard Union. However, this came along with an obligation to reform the leadership of Operation Lonestar in the following month. In the face of this historically unprecedented act of defiance, Governor Abbot replaced the general and two other top officials overseeing Operation Lonestar. The Texas National Guard union leader made this public statement at the time of the first meeting: “It'd be one thing if they were like, ‘Hey, yeah, we mobilized too fast and we shortchanged on equipment,’ or ‘We're gonna rectify that.’ Instead, you've got leadership that's acting like a petty ex-girlfriend. Just not taking us seriously. You're not going to fool the guys who are actually here, you may fool your voting base back home, But we know better. And it's kind of insulting. This isn't some politically motivated endeavor, we're not out just to get Beto O'Rourke elected. That's not why we're doing this. We want better conditions, and we, you know, most of us want to go home.” The month after Pro-Publica released an investigation that revealed the number of fentanyl arrests that Greg Abbot credited to Operation Lonestar, actually included the entire number of fentanyl arrest made in the state of Texas away from Operation Lonestar, we see evidence that Texas National Guard members had began defying their command, and breaking orders to keep migrants from drowning in the Rio Grande. Unfortunately, this was revealed to us when tragedy struck at the same Eagle Pass location we see the standoff at today. Spc. Bishop Evans had jumped into the Rio Grande to save a migrant from drowning while not being supplied with a floatation device to do so. He and the migrant he was trying to save both drowned as a result. The Texas Military Department had issued orders for guard members to not enter the water under any circumstances, yet the death of Spc. Bishop Evans revealed that many guard members had been doing the same thing. This gives us a first indication of when guard members at Eagle Pass began to defy their orders from the Texas government, out of honest sympathy with migrants who would die as a result of the orders being carried out. The Texas National Guard union leader, Hunter Schuler, made this public statement in response, once again demanding the end of Operation Lonestar: “Our hope is that the new TMD command staff learns from this tragedy, listens to soldiers, and works cooperatively with leaders on the ground towards safer working and living environments. With the growing number of service member fatalities on Operation Lone Star, what more will it take for the Governor to end this political charade? It is long past time to let the thousands of involuntarily activated guardsmen and women return home to their families - before it’s too late for yet another soldier.” Fast forward a few months to July, the US federal government officially begins a probe into Operation Lonestar for human rights violations. This is followed by civilian protests against Operation Lonestar in the border cities of El Paso and Brownsville in August. On September 14th, Greg Abbot rolled back the number of Texas Guard members deployed from 6,500 to 5,000. On October 1st, the US federal government deployed 2,500 troops to the US border, replacing the 1,500 that Governor Abbot was inclined to roll back, at the demand of the Texas Guard union. On October 6th, 2022, it’s revealed that the Texas Department of Military issued a filing error that resulted in 96% of Guard Members to unexpectedly owe back hundreds to thousands of dollars in taxes to the federal government. This was due to the Texas department of Military not issuing pay stubs correctly. Guard members had been quoted saying that they were curious why their payment checks had been so high. Guard members began writing state representatives asking them to address the Texas Department of Military about the issue. “Made In The Image of God” After the Biden administration sent another 1,500 troops to the US border on May 2, 2023, Greg Abbot began deploying flotation devices into Rio Grande on June, 8th. However, these flotation devices are not the flotation devices that Spc. Bishop Evans needed it in order to survive his heroic attempt to save a drowning migrant. These deployed buoys hid razor wire underneath them, intentionally designed to maim drowning migrants reaching for somewhere to rest. This targeted migrants that guard members, like Bishop Evans, had been heroically diving in to save from drowning in the past year. At Eagle Pass, the same location that Bishop Evans made his heroic attempt, and at the same location we see our standoff between the Texas and federal government today, an email leaked that once again showed Texas national guard members defying their command for the sake of migrant survival. Nicholas Wingate, a trooper and paramedic for the Texas Department of Public Safety, wrote an email to his sergeant explaining why his fellow troopers defied their shift command: “While doing so (going on patrol- author’s insert) we came across 120 people camped out along the fence line. In this group there was several small children and babies who were nursing. The entire group was exhausted hungry and tired. We called the shift officer in command, and we were given orders to push the people back into the water to go to Mexico. We decided that this was not the correct thing to do. With the very real potential of exhausted people drowning. We made contact with command again and expressed our concerns and we were given the order to tell them to go to Mexico and get into our vehicle and leave.” He went on in the email to explain the type of damage that the razor wire had done to the people they came in contact with. He detailed a man who was severely bleeding from tearing his leg while freeing his small child from the razor wire, a 15 year old child who had broken his leg, and a 19 year old woman who was having a miscarriage from being stuck in the razor wire. He detailed a mother and her two children drowning as a result of the razor wire. “I believe we have stepped over a line into the in humane (sic). We need to operate it correctly in the eyes of God. We need to recognize that these are people who are made in the image of God and need to be treated as such,” He says in the last paragraph of his email, “The wire and barrels in the river needs to be taken out as this is nothing but a in humane trap in high water and low visibility. Due to the extreme heat, the order to not give people water needs to be immediately reversed as well.” On December 7th, 2023, the Texas Department of Public Safety concluded an investigation into itself in response to Nicholas Wingate’s leaked email, and cleared itself of any wrongdoing. The official report conceded that others besides Wingate had come forward with legitimate concerns. However, on January 2nd, 2024, the Biden administration, obligated to maintain the morale of the entire US military, petitions the US supreme court, to allow the federal government to concede to the demands of the Texas national guard membership, and remove the razor wire buoys that were deployed as a part of Operation Lonestar in June. The federal supreme court ruled that the Biden administration will be able to concede to the demands of the Texas national guard membership, and remove the razor wire from the river on January 22nd. Greg Abbot refuses to comply with the supreme court, which leads to the standoff at Eagle Pass, and the powerless threats of secession that we see today. Demoralization, Defiance, and the Standoff at Eagle Pass In order to understand the standoff at Eagle Pass, we have to understand Operation Lone Star in its three year existence. The standoff at Eagle Pass is not the result of a clash between the Democrat and Republican Party. It’s not the result of a clash between the state of Texas and the US federal government. It is the result of a clash between the broad membership of the Texas National Guard and the entire standing order behind their command. Before the federal government ever ruled for the razor wire to be removed in 2024, we find the Texas National Guard demanding the end of the entire Operation Lonestar as early as February 2022, through their new organized union. We saw heroic Texas guard members defy their orders from Austin for the sake of human dignity, and use their leverage against Operation Lonestar, until one side united economic interest between the federal and state governments was forced to cave into their demands. This is a critical issue to US politics, yet our major corporate media continues to duck from any further investigation into the source of this occurrence. This is why we have to explain everywhere we can to the working people in the rest of the United States, what really led up to the political standoff between the US and Texas governments at Eagle Pass. Author Ned Brown is a community organizer and writer. In the past, he has organized to overturn ICE policies in Arkansas. He is a contributor at CommunityParty.net and the Alienated Press. Archives February 2024 The way China engages in corporate governance and enterprise discipline has been subject to much scrutiny, particularly by the Left. Many in the Western Left claim that China’s corporate governance is far too lacking. This article is designed to go over the way China is able to exert its party influence over both state-owned and non-state-owned enterprises. It is the third part in our series of articles that conduct an in-depth investigation of China’s economy. Our first article of the series investigated the degree of state-control over China’s economy. The second article of the series investigated how finance, banks, and investments work in China, in addition to how China was able to survive the many financial crises mostly unharmed that many other countries - including the West - could not. Corporate Social Credit According to the Communist Party of China (CPC) document “The Planning Outline for the Establishment of a Social Credit System (2014 - 2020)”, the following is stated the establishment of a social credit system: “... must have advancing the establishment of creditworthiness in government affairs, commerce, and society and establishment of judicial credibility as its primary content; must have advancing the establishment of a culture of creditworthiness and establishing mechanisms to encourage trustworthiness and punish untrustworthiness as key points; must be supported by advancing the establishment of industry and region specific credit, and developing credit services markets; must have raising the entire society’s awareness and levels of creditworthiness, and improving the economic and social operating environment as its goals; and must put people first, to form an environment across all society in which trustworthiness is honored and untrustworthiness is shameful, and make honesty and trustworthiness the entire populations’ conscientious behavioral norm.” [1] What is credit worthiness? It is being able to comply with financial agreements and willingness to pay debts. And in the context of the social credit score, to ensure companies enact on their promises. The score is used to regulate the private sector and continue to clamp down on potential exploitative behavior that may be undergone. In other words, social “credit” can also be translated from Chinese as social trustworthiness. The score is given to private firms and there are real punishments and drawbacks for those who do not comply or fail to achieve a high score. The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) is pushing ahead with social credit-based supervision of all commercial entities from large firms to small, independently owned and operated businesses, which prompted complaints over corporate privacy and heavy-handed government intervention [2]. The social credit rating will include court rulings, tax records, environmental protection issues, government licensing, product quality, work safety and administrative punishments by market regulators [2]. In 2019, Lian Weiliang, deputy chairman of the NDRC, stated the following: “All the existing credit incentive and punishment measures listed in the memorandums are based on laws and regulations... For severe violations, especially those endangering life and property, harsh punishment will be adopted, such as a temporary or even permanent ban on market entry.” [2] While the China Blacklisting system is still in its early stages, it is already the most prominent system of its kind worldwide. China has already put this system into action, and has barred thousands of Chinese residents’ rights to buy plane tickets and travel either domestically or abroad. However, most of the blacklisting that has occurred to date has been as a result of violations or misbehavior of companies and the individuals working for them. [3] Individuals who end up on a blacklist due to mistreatment of workers or violating the laws around workers’ rights are given penalties. These penalties can be as severe as having their business license revoked or barring them from using social amenities and public services until they fix their social credit score. How the social credit score is measured according to CreditChina, the website responsible for openly publishing corporate social credit data lists the following reasons for a low social credit score:
A study found that the Corporate Social Credit System could be used in a way that signals “corporate fealty” to the Party. This incentivizes more corporate social responsibility programmes such as participating in poverty alleviation, strictly implementing deadlines for national industrial and environmental policies. The credit system itself does not award scores based on profitability, profitability is not a metric that is factored. [5] There is however a wide misconception that the social credit score is something that only impacts people. However, state owned enterprises and other government bureaucrats who work at state owned enterprises can be subject to the corporate social credit. The social credit system is ‘self-reflective’: Bureaucrats and politicians themselves will be subject to the regime, with the goal of reducing corruption. This core concept is known as “Government integrity” which is a part of Xi Jinping’s Anti Corruption crackdown. [3] Blacklists and Redlists As mentioned earlier, with the Social Credit System (SCS), there comes consequences to gaining low scores or high scores. This comes in the form of Blacklists and Redlists. The blacklist is negative while the redlist is positive. A blacklist is a type of public record which identifies companies and individuals found in violation of a predetermined set of regulations — for example, one blacklist may identify companies which have violated work safety regulations, while another identifies parties found in violation of patent laws. A redlist is the opposite: a roster of companies and individuals demonstrating consistent compliance with a specific set of regulations, such as consistent tax payment or low rates of import-export violations. [6] The majority of existing blacklists and redlists were created between 2016 and 2018. Since then, the announcement of new national-level lists has slowed dramatically. As of November 2019, forty established blacklists and eight redlists were in effect at the national level. Of these, about half have a broad scope, such as those targeting violations in the areas of environmental protection, import-export, social security, tax arrears, and e-commerce fraud. The remaining blacklists are only applicable to enterprises and professionals operating in specific sectors, such as financial services, transportation, insurance, salt production, domestic services, travel, real estate, food, agriculture, and medicine. [7] Companies found to have engaged in “seriously untrustworthy behavior” may have their business license revoked and credit irreparable. And of course, being subject to imprisonment. [8] These acts include:
A court case found the firm guilty in 2016, after which the directly responsible employees within the company were sentenced to prison and fined for the crime of producing and selling fake and inferior products, as were members of Shanghai Husi’s holding company OSI. [10] This had credit-related consequences: the local government revoked Shanghai Husi’s food production licenses, while the company was designated as a “seriously untrustworthy producer” and added to the food safety blacklist by Shanghai local government officials for a period of two years (2016-2018). Additionally, three key responsible parties (the quality supervisor, factory manager, and planning director) within the organization were personally blacklisted for a period of five years (2016-2021) [11]. The company reportedly lost RMB 6 billion in the year after the scandal, though how much of those losses resulted from Corporate Social Credit System (CSCS) penalties rather from the scandal more generally, is unknown [12]. The company did not repair their credit, and though OSI still operates in China, Shanghai Husi appears to have effectively halted operations. [13] In Regard to Foreign Enterprises Foreign enterprises are not free from the social credit score. Companies that do not comply or actively reject party building and the formation of party organizations within the enterprise (more on that later) will be penalized by the Social Credit System (SCS). A report published by the EU Chamber of Commerce estimates that multinational firms in China will be subject to approximately 30 different ratings under the Corporate SCS, the requirements of which will be dispersed across numerous government documents. Firms are also required to disclose to the Chinese government detailed data and other information about their operations and capabilities, which may include proprietary information or sensitive intellectual property. [14] An example of which is that 44 airline companies attempting to operate in China were required to follow the Chinese mainland designation of Taiwan; failure to comply would result in their corporate social credit score being deducted. Japanese retailer Muji was fined over $30,000 for describing Taiwan as the “country of origin” on 119 clothing hangars last year. [15] This further solidifies the state control over foreign enterprises inside China, where the terms are dictated by the state, and these corporations have to follow the line. When the Communist Party tells foreign entrepreneurs to jump, the response from these entrepreneurs is to ask how high and how far. According to the EU Chamber of Commerce, the corporate social credit score system will mean life or death for foreign enterprises wanting to operate in China. China’s Corporate Social Credit System is here to stay. Businesses in China need to prepare for the consequences, to ensure that they live by the score, not die by the score. [16] This further solidifies the fact that foreign enterprises cannot escape the grasp of the Communist Party of China. Corporate Party Organizations A study in 2008 looking into listed organizations found that for every listed enterprises’ board of directors, there is a parallel power structure known as the firm’s Party Committee, headed by a party secretary. In the large SOEs (state-owned enterprises), the Party Secretary appoints the top executives and directors, often simply relaying orders from the Communist Party of China’s Central Organizational Department, and effectively exercising a leading role in the company. Thus, significant overlap between the Party committee or group with traditional corporate structures. Where the two structures do not overlap, real power flows through the party channels, leaving the board and formal corporate top executives with scant real authority. The figure below visualizes this arrangement. [17] Corporate governance organization chart in China. Notice parallel structures and overlaps between the Party committee and corporate board. Note: CA = cross appointments; CA1 = chairman of the supervisory board; CA2 = chairman of the board -party secretary; CA3 = general manager-Party vice-secretary, head of the discipline inspection team + one to two other managerial deputies. CD = collective decision-making. “Sanzhong yida” (三重一大) = “Three Importants and One Big”, discussed later. [38] In the book, Capitalizing China, it was found that: Parallel to this corporate governance system, each (Listed) enterprise also has a Communist Party Committee, headed by a Communist Party Secretary. These advise the CEO on critical decisions, and are kept informed by party cells throughout the enterprise that also monitor the implementation of party policies. Indeed, the party secretary plays a leading role in major decisions, and can overrule or bypass the CEO and board if necessary. For example, foreign independent directors on the board of CNOOC reportedly first learned of that enterprise's takeover bid for Unocal, an American oil company, from news broadcasts. Directors often also learn of such major strategic moves, and of equally major personnel moves such as the rotation of oil company top managers described earlier after the fact. Despite their formal powers, CEOs and boards are thought to welcome party advice, and any directors likely to have reservations are kept out of the loop to preserve harmony-especially if issues the CCP views as strategically important are involved. [18] Furthermore, according to Article 33 of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China: Primary-level Party organizations in non-public sector entities shall implement the Party's principles and policies, guide and oversee their enterprises' observance of state laws and regulations, exercise leadership over trade unions, Communist Youth League organizations, and other people's group organizations, promote unity and cohesion among workers and office staff, safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of all parties, and promote the healthy development of their enterprises. [19] Most of the listed shareholder firms have a party secretary. A study on 4,104 listed firms was conducted between 2000 and 2004, which represents 68% of the total firms with A-shares in China during that period. Note, referring back to our previous article, A-Shares are shares of companies based in mainland China that are listed on either the Shanghai or Shenzhen stock exchanges that are off limits to foreigners. It was found in this study that only 11% of the firms said that they did not have a party secretary. In those firms with party secretaries, many of the secretaries hold other management positions as well: 5% also serve as both the chairman and the CEO; 18% also serve as the chairman; 6% also serve as the CEO; and 26% also serve as a supervisor, director, or executive. Thus, many party secretaries have a significant effect on firm management. [20] One example can be observed with the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), a central SOE holding group. As of October 2019, the Party group in CNPC had eight members (see Table below), six of whom simultaneously held top management positions: the chairman of the board, the general manager, the chairman of the supervisory board, the head of the discipline inspection office, the chief accountant (i.e. chief financial officer) and the chief safety monitor. With this level of insider control, the Party group dominates corporate decision making. In addition, many of these Party group members simultaneously held positions in the publicly listed subsidiary company – as board members and/or members of the subsidiary Party organization. For example, Liu Yuezhen was simultaneously a Party group member, chief accountant of the parent company and non-executive director of the subsidiary. Thus, to recap, the Party committee exercises strong horizontal control within the parent company’s top management through overlapping positions, but also exercises strong vertical control through SOE control of subsidiary enterprises and more overlapping positions. The result is more streamlined management as a result of how embedded the Party is in these enterprises. [38] In Taizhou, 39 listed firms in 2018 modified their charter to include party construction in their constitution. And the party organization’s role entails the party branch to have more say in the company's selection and employment of personnel, to play a core role in political leadership, as well as decision-making in other major corporate decisions. For instance, feedback/voice on the acquisition of other enterprises, which falls under having a role in corporate business decisions. [21] Interestingly, as a side effect of having Party Committees, a study found that Communist Party Committees actually improved enterprise value and reduced corruption within SOEs, indicating that they are not just a tool to enforce party leadership, but also assist positively in business decisions. [22] Another study found that while ostensibly cooperative enterprises (Township Village Enterprises) had private revenue rights, their control rights were not. In reality, collective enterprises are under close control of the government. Major investment and employment decisions could not be made without government direction or approval. [23] Enterprises which have party committees are much more likely to engage in “Green Innovation”, which refers specifically to inventing technologies or having processes which reduce environmental pollution. [24] The Three Importants and One Big But what does this entail specifically? How do party committees actually engage in their day-to-day management of enterprises? One of the largest key aspects of this is the ability to set performance indicators. The party’s pre-decision powers include the “three importants and one big” (sanzhong yida, 三重一大), which refers to:
First and foremost, party committees (party groups) at all levels are expected to actively reform and improve leadership methods, adhere to and improve democratic centralism, combine collective leadership with individual division of labor and responsibility, fully develop intra-party democracy, and strive to improve scientific decision-making, democratic decision-making, and decision-making in accordance with the law, ability and level. Moreover, party group members, especially the principals in charge, should correctly handle the relationship between democracy and centralism, work together with decision-making bodies, take the lead in implementing democratic centralism, ensure the correct exercise of power, and prevent the abuse of power. [27] Intra-Party regulations shall be decided by the shareholders' meeting, the board of directors, the management team without a board of directors, the workers' congress/union and the party committee (party group) matters. It mainly includes the major measures taken by enterprises to implement the party and the country's lines, principles, policies, laws and regulations, and important decisions of superiors, enterprise development strategies, bankruptcy, restructuring, mergers and reorganizations, asset adjustments, property rights transfers, foreign investments, interest allocation, organizational adjustments, etc. major decisions on corporate party building, security and stability, and other major decision-making matters. [28] Party Organizations in Foreign Enterprises Foreign enterprises and their joint-ventures are not free from party organizations. As the majority of foreign enterprises are actually joint-ventures ran with SOEs (State-owned enterprises), naturally there would be a spillover in terms of party committees. Party committees were first implemented in SOEs afterall and naturally their subsidiaries (which include joint-ventures with foreign companies) would be affected as a result. In 2018 an analysis prepared by the European Commission investigating the Chinese Party-State’s role in the domestic Chinese economy. It noted that Party organizations in both SOEs and private companies “can potentially wield significant influence, and allow for the CCP to directly influence the business decisions of individual companies.” [29] In May 2018, the US-China Business Council noted that certain SOE joint venture companies had asked some of their foreign partners to alter their articles of association to support Party groups within the joint venture, even going so far as to request that they be amended to allow critical matters to be approved by the party organization before they are presented to the board. [29] In one example, Mercedes-Benz established a Party organization in its local Chinese joint venture in 2013. The secretary of the Party organization participates in the company’s economic management meetings through the entire process and has full authority to participate in the company’s major decision making. This means that even in joint-ventures, party organizations still have sway in major decision making and economic management. [30] In 2018, a Samsung subsidiary had seven Chinese executives of the company who are all Party members and 74 percent of middle managers and above are Party members. The same article notes that 70.8% of all foreign enterprises have party organizations. In Pinpu Company given in the article, it was found that Party organizations play decisive roles in R&D decisions as well as decisions over production optimization. They also play a role of promoting party policies, such as for instance with Ford’s China subsidiary being convinced to start investing in New Energy Vehicles. In Nokia Shanghai, it was found that party organizations assisted heavily in human resources, especially in regard to employee management and development plans. [31] Another 2018 article on Nissan’s automotive joint venture Dongfeng Motor Co. notes that their Party organization has been written into the enterprise charter, with members of the Party organization playing a role in enterprise decisions. This includes ensuring the direction of business development, complying with national laws and regulations, ensuring legal operations, safeguarding the legitimate rights and interests of employees, and promoting corporate stability, especially in the selection and use of talents. [32] Control Via Shares Previous essays in the series have gone over how limited liability corporations (Multiple shareholders in one company) could be controlled/steered towards state directives via internal corporate governance through the use of a majority or controlling state shareholder that coordinates the enterprise alongside party directives. As mentioned earlier, it is not just SOEs that have implemented the Party Committees, but also limited liability corporations, some of which are listed on the stock market while others have a significant minority state share. Corporate groups in the People’s Republic of China, and by extension their subsidiaries and divisions, are therefore actually controlled by Party-State nomenklatura insider appointees working at the core holding company level, and as directors and officers of the subsidiary entities controlled by the core holding company. As Party-State bureaucratic political actors seeking advancement in the Party system, these individuals are perfectly responsive to Party-State policy (which necessarily includes national industrial policy), while at the same time they are content to ignore the interests of external minority shareholders in the listed subsidiaries they formally manage. [33] Consequently, there are also ways for the CPC to institute corporate governance within these mixed ownership enterprises without establishing a controlling/majority share in these companies, via something that is known as a golden share. A golden share is a type of share that gives its shareholder veto power over changes to the company's charter. One golden share controls at least 51% of voting rights and may be issued by private companies or government enterprises. [34] This concept was first introduced in 2013, to allow the CPC to exert more influence over private enterprises, particularly media conglomerates [35]. Between 2018 and 2022, several government entities took 1% stakes in popular news and content platforms, including US-listed Sina Weibo, 36kr, Qutoutiao and Kuaishou, according to company filings or public registration records. [36] The stakes in subsidiaries of Alibaba and TikTok parent ByteDance Ltd. have allowed the government to get in on—and police—the growth of the tech behemoths. Golden shares have become a useful tool to keep companies like these in line with party objectives without the need for the state being a major stakeholder. Companies that sell the government the much smaller stakes called golden shares are finding that even this way, the government is getting a lot of power over their businesses. The director whom China’s cybersecurity watchdog named to the board of ByteDance’s main subsidiary has veto rights over content on apps including Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, according to people close to the subsidiary. The director also can vote on corporate issues such as the subsidiary’s personnel decisions, compensation packages and investment or divestiture plans. [37] Conclusion In short, the idea that corporate entities, whether foreign, private or collective are somehow free from state influence, but more specifically party influence is untrue. Even companies with minority shares from the State have party committees onboard, let alone joint ventures with foreign enterprises. The Social Credit System is a means to hold corporations and their bosses accountable to certain standards to the benefit of the mass public. Corporate Governance in China is one that does not allow any corporate entities, SOE or non-SOE, to escape its grasp. Archives March 2024 3/19/2024 Applied geopolitics and the battle for peace and the right to development: Palestine as the focal point of the global balance of power. By: Bruno DrweskiRead NowIn his recent book, La défaite de l'Occident (The Defeat of the West), Emmanuel Todd observes that the United States and its associates react to every international crisis only in violent ways, which enabled them to give Israel an unlimited license to kill on October 8, 2023. This "reaction" noted by Todd in fact goes much further than an expression of the nihilism of a civilization in perdition, even if it testifies to the moral decadence of Western elites who keep on imposing their rules on the entire planet. But the bellicose moods of our leaders are also the result of the ever-growing weight of the private military-industrial complex that has developed in Western countries at the expense of civilian production committed to the economic and social progress of their populations. The result has been the relocation of civilian industries to low-wage countries, and the transition in the Western bloc towards the domination of its financial sector over its industrial sector. The fight for peace and against the militarization of our societies is therefore not just a moral imperative, it complements the necessary struggle to defend existing civilian enterprises and promote a policy of re-industrialization of our countries. This can only be done within the framework of an economic policy planned by a state power under popular control, favoring socially profitable, productive, and creative investments at the expense of merchants of death. The fight against sending weapons to Ukraine or Israel, against military interventions and the dispatch of soldiers or mercenaries to Ukraine and Israel, against the bombing of Yemen or other countries targeted by NATO, against the presence of foreign troops in Europe and elsewhere, against sanctions and blockade policies, is also the fight for the reconstruction of our productive forces, for the development of scientific research and for social progress. Only then will we be able to defeat the forces that serve the murderous interests of the merchants of death running around the world to increase their profits. Profits from which wage-earners, workers, the precarious and the unemployed, receive fewer and fewer crumbs, as the rate of profit continues to fall. Late globalized capitalism has reached the end of its road, since the whole world has been subjected to its rules and tariffs, and there are no longer any new markets to conquer. In reaction, local peoples and bourgeoisies have begun to promote development in the territories where they live, work, produce and create. This explains the emergence of counter-hegemonic powers such as China and Russia, and of ideologically very different states such as Cuba, Venezuela, (North) Korea, Nicaragua, Belarus, Iran, and Eritrea, all of which have chosen to oppose "capitalism without borders". The fight for peace therefore aims to disarm powers that have failed to fulfill their commitments, such as those expressed in the preamble to the French constitution, which is supposed to institute a "social republic", and those contained in the United Nations Charter prohibiting the use of force outside the right of self-defense, a right that should be interpreted solely within the framework of the United Nations system. Geopolitics as a method for analyzing international conflicts and social relations Initially, geopolitics was a method of analysis developed mainly by researchers working for certain colonial powers. Its aim was to analyze, on the basis of geographical and territorial data, the fundamental interests of each state, which was supposed to be either opposed to or, on the contrary, a partner of other states. This method tended to determine, in an initially rather mechanical way, conflicts seen as almost "natural" and inevitable, with the aim of controlling a "vital space". In its most extreme form, this led to the justification of Nazism, which sought to conquer "the vital space necessary for the German people". After 1945, geopolitics was delegitimized as a bourgeois, imperialist science, before that is, relevant elements of this method were gradually rediscovered in the USSR of the 1970s, as well as in the USA, especially if made dynamic through a class analysis of each state's politics. To use geopolitics dynamically, we must first determine the class basis of each state, in the knowledge that in our time, there is no such thing as a "chemically pure" system, since every state is confronted with trends either pushing it towards more capitalism and deregulated markets or, on the contrary, pushing it away from them to build alternative paths. It is in this context that the place occupied by each country in the era of globalization in the "international division of labor" combines with the territory it occupies and the economic potential this gives it. This explains why our era is one of a de facto Third World War between forces of unipolarity centralized around the USA, NATO and their allies, and counterforces of multipolarity. Today, however, this war is taking place in a "hybrid" form, with multiple "local" hot wars being waged by protagonists unable or unwilling to confront each other directly. This "pacifying" factor is all the more evident as the domination of the consumer society model and the triumphant individualism of neoliberalism have led a mass of people to reject the idea of risking their lives in the service of a higher cause. The dominant Western powers are controlled by bourgeoisies who can set commodity prices ("terms of trade") and derive wealth from them. Depending on the balance of power between countries and social classes, this wealth can be used to distribute crumbs in order to corrupt at least some of the working classes who would have an objective interest in breaking away from the capitalism organized around Wall Street and the City of London. In economically dominated countries, on the other hand, we have to deal with a comprador bourgeoisie that takes advantage of its role as local intermediary for foreign imperialist bourgeoisies. But there are also national bourgeoisies seeking to defend their national market, their territory, and to launch self-centered development policies to face up to the competitive pressures of those powers dominating the world market. In this context, wage-earners in dominated and overexploited countries, as well as those in "central" countries, act as a spur to greater independence for their national bourgeoisies and petty bourgeoisies. In this struggle, the popular forces and national bourgeoisies rely on the advantages of their national territory, in terms of resources and geostrategic position. Their aim is to conquer autonomous spaces that will enable them to launch policies of development, industrialization, and even socially progressive reforms. Geopolitics can therefore be a useful scientific method if it combines analysis of the territorial situation of each political entity, in terms of strategy, resources, historical links with its neighbors ("geo-economics" and "geo-culture"), etc., with analysis of the class base of each state formation. It is against this backdrop that, among the forty or so armed conflicts in the world, known or unknown, more or less active or "frozen", since October 2023, the conflict in Palestine has become the "central conflict" between the unipolar bloc and the "nebula" of countries and peoples manifesting counter-hegemonic tendencies. This conflict is a continuation of the wars and tensions we are witnessing in Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, the African countries of the Sahel, Taiwan, and the Korean peninsula - in other words, all around the Eurasian core. Geopolitics of Palestine If we look at the map of Palestine and the Israeli entity that took total control of it between 1948 and 1967, the first thing that stands out is the fact that its borders were drawn during the Anglo-French Sykes/Picot agreements following the First World War in such a way as to encompass the entire southern desert (Negev or Naqab), This enabled the territory to extend all the way to the Red Sea, giving whoever controlled Palestine a "dagger" cutting through the Arab nation, the Islamic world and the Afro-Asian space ("Third World" or "Global South") in two. These two parts, located on either side of the Palestinian territory redesigned by the English colonist, can no longer communicate directly without passing through Palestinian ("Israeli") territory. As a result, every Arab, every Muslim and every anti-colonial activist in Africa or Asia sees his or her territorial, national, cultural, religious or anti-colonial solidarity space - and therefore both his or her imaginary and political space - blocked or at least hindered in their movements. This was the historical reality of the Crusader state in the Middle Ages and, geopolitically speaking, it is exactly the same position occupied by the Israeli entity (see the geostrategic context of Zionism from the development of English colonialism). As a result, the Palestinian question has become the emblematic cause of all anti-colonial movements worldwide. Depending on their political and cultural sensitivities and class cleavages, each has been able to accentuate the anti-imperialist, nationalist, cultural or religious component of this state of affairs. So, in the geopolitics of Palestine, there is simultaneously an anti-Western geopolitical aspect, a social aspect aimed at promoting the struggle of the working classes against the bourgeoisie of the "collective West", and a symbolic and identity-related aspect that can take the form of Arab nationalism, Arab socialism, a more specific Palestinian nationalism or an Islam experienced as an element of affirmation in the face of the colonizer. For, as Thomas Sankara once said, "You don't read the Bible or the Koran in the same way if you're rich or poor, otherwise there would be two editions of the Bible and two editions of the Koran". This was amply demonstrated by the period that followed the dismantling of the socialist camp and the Soviet Union. Palestine at the heart of the contemporary world's geopolitical contradictions This central aspect of the Palestinian question, at once geopolitical, political and identity-related, explains why there is a particularly violent opposition between the Arab comprador bourgeoisies at the head of regimes that have little legitimacy and are therefore particularly authoritarian, and the "Arab street", the term used to designate the Arab masses, especially the Palestinians, including the Palestinian masses who have taken refuge in neighboring countries such as Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and the Gulf states. This situation also explains why all the conflicts in Western Asia, Northern Africa and generally elsewhere in the world have a more or less direct link with the Palestinian question. This is very clearly seen in the Arab-Islamic cultural area, but it is also evident in sub-Saharan Africa, in socialist countries, in Latin America and among the various layers of marginalized populations in the West. The exceptional mobilization visible today and in the past among the Irish in support of Palestine therefore appears extremely symptomatic of the objective and subjective reasons mentioned above, in connection with the national liberation struggle of the Irish people, for Ireland was geopolitically confronted with British imperialism as it still is today within the framework of the unipolar world centered on the Anglo-Saxon powers. Palestine and national liberation struggles Palestinian geopolitics is marked by the attempt made by Zionists since the beginning of the colonization of Palestine to "de-territorialize" the indigenous people, replacing them with imported colonial settlers who are supposed to "territorialize" in their place. And today, all the world's conflicts around the issue of globalization actually raise the question of territory and its role in the politics of right to development in the face of policies pushing for relocation of production and promoting "supranational" strategic and economic choices. This explains why "Israel" has been and remains perceived by all Arab peoples as a "foreign body" prevenitng any possibility of regional integration and development. This situation also explains why, until the demise of the USSR, the Palestinians were generally able to rely on socialist, non-aligned, and decolonized countries. After the crisis and the end of this "bipolar" world, the Palestinians found themselves on their own in an environment where, quite naturally, the comprador bourgeoisies of the Gulf, Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan tended to dominate the region. But more broadly, all the peoples of the world see the Palestinian cause as emblematic of their own relationship to the right to development, recognized in the 1970s by the UN, globalized capitalism, neo-colonialism and imperialism. The Iranian revolution, the rise to power of the People's Republic of China and the return to world politics of a Russia where a national bourgeoisie has partly asserted itself in opposition to the "oligarchs" (making up in fact the local comprador bourgeoisie) have been the cause of the development of the Eurasian integration process, which has led to the formation of the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. These organizations represent a counterweight that is helping to loosen the imperialist stranglehold on West Asia and Africa in particular. And as Euro-Atlantic imperialism has entered a deep crisis, particularly since 2008, fractions of the bourgeoisie in key countries such as the Gulf states, Turkey, Indonesia, Pakistan, Venezuela, etc. have been increasingly tempted to distance themselves from the unipolar center in favor of the "multipolar adventure". The latest episode is the accession of countries such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt to the BRICS. Against this backdrop of multiple global and social contradictions, we can see that, both objectively and indirectly, the process of asserting counter-powers around the world has given new impetus to the resistance of the Palestinian people as a consequence of the weakening of the Western pole. Today, the Palestinians, thanks to the military aspect of the action of October 7, 2023, and after the American-European defeats in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and at least in part in Ukraine, have been able to regain their central place on the dividing line between the "collective West" and the "global South", a new counter-hegemonic factor towards which the more independent "Eastern European countries" are also tending. For the first time since the 1970s, China has justified armed struggle as a legitimate and internationally recognized means of struggle for a colonized people. The new stage in the struggle of peoples, countries and states towards sovereignty The relocation and de-industrialization of countries in the NATO bloc centered on the USA, the Anglo-Saxon Five Eyes, the EU, and Japan, with Israel as their colonial outpost at the Afro-Asian crossroads, have reinforced the weight of the only non-relocated productive sector in these countries, the military-industrial complex. The emerging counter-hegemonic powers, for their part, are tempted to promote a more productive and therefore more peaceful economic development policy. This explains why Russia waited from 2014 to 2022 before reacting to NATO's eastward thrust threatening Ukraine, and why China and Iran favor diplomacy and economic ties over the use of force to alter the international balance of power. This is in line with the interests of the local national bourgeoisies, who are also organically reticent about any international tension that might push the popular masses to take direct control of the struggle for national sovereignty, and therefore for popular sovereignty and the democratization of social and economic relations, and political systems. The difference between the national bourgeoisie and the comprador bourgeoisie in the countries of the Global South is clearly perceptible when we observe the fear of the people that plagues the comprador bourgeoisies, while national bourgeoisies seek to retain the support of its people and wishing to retain a monopoly on power; in other words, betrayal on the one hand, opportunism on the other. In a context where social tensions tend to explode all over the world due to the relative and often absolute impoverishment of the masses, Palestine, and Gaza in particular, is the world's "pressure cooker", bound to explode following attempts by Western powers and conservative Arab and African regimes to bury the Palestinian question by putting forward less burning issues. This is one of the reasons why the military leadership of Palestinian Hamas has decided to take a proactive response to the despair of the people of Gaza and Palestine, as well as of neighboring countries and those further afield who feel humiliated. Indeed, it had long been preparing for the coup de force of October 7, which, whatever one may think in the specifics, fundamentally altered the international balance of power. This explains the extraordinary response to Gaza from people all over the world, including in Western countries. In the USA, for example, the mobilizations in support of the Palestinians represent the most massive demonstrations to have taken place in that country in the last two decades, to the point where 40% of Jews in the USA disassociate themselves from Israel and 30% of neo-evangelicals are now in favor of the Palestinians. This shows that prejudice aimed at essentializing one religious group, or another is counter-productive. In France, the Macron government's ban on demonstrations denouncing the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and the repeated aggressions targeting Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank, are not evidence of power strength, but, on the contrary, of its weakness. France's conservative authorities have been forced to adopt a particularly authoritarian stance, in keeping with what happened during the Algerian war, and gradually with the mass movement of the Gilets jaunes, in order to avoid a possible "convergence of struggles" between "pro-Palestinians", working-class neighborhoods largely populated by people of immigrant origin, the movement for decent pensions, farmers, outlying towns, Gilets jaunes, trade unionists, community activists, radical political activists, Muslims, Marxists, working-class priests and so on. For all progressives in France and elsewhere in the world, and regardless of what some may think of the Palestinian tool that is Hamas (supported by its secular or Marxist allies in Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq), this tool has been able to take into account the local and global contradictions of the moment. This qualitative leap explains why no Palestinian organization, including even the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, felt able to criticize this action. While we must always avoid the fetishism that leads to the adulation of certain organizations or, on the contrary, the demonization of others, we must also be in a position to observe how they are capable or incapable of modifying the balance of power in the long term. Organizations are merely tools which, sometimes consciously, sometimes less consciously so, can from time to time trigger a new process of struggle, turning things on their head and leading to the delegitimization of a whole bloc of powers. This explains the immense joy of the "Arab street", and more broadly of working-class neighborhoods and strata the world over, at the sight of young Palestinians storming the latest Israeli tanks. At a time when, in Ukraine, tanks sent by Western powers are being destroyed. To make us forget these extraordinary Palestinian feats of arms, we have been told about the horrors committed by these new fedayeen, even since certain Israeli witnesses and certain investigations by rare Israeli media remaining free have begun to cast at least some doubt on those horror tales. (see: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231030-report-7-october-testimonies-strikes-major-blow-to-israeli-narrative/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkHs7ZG7rFY/ https://www.chroniquepalestine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Hamas_our_narrative.pdf). All this reminds us of the article written by Karl Marx in the New York Daily Tribune describing the violence committed by the Indian Cipayan insurgents against British settlers responsible for prior, far more painful, violence and humiliations. So, even if the extreme pain we feel in the face of Gaza's martyrdom reminds us of other martyrdoms in history - the Paris Commune, the Warsaw Ghetto, the thousands Soviet, Yugoslav, Polish, Chinese, Greek, Algerian, Vietnamese, and Korean villages, etc. whose populations were exterminated to punish them for having given birth to rebels who might themselves have committed questionable or even reprehensible acts of violence, the essential historical fact is that the Palestinian question goes far beyond the question of Hamas alone, which is no more than a tool of the Palestinian people at a given moment in history. On the other hand, Hamas's action has put the Palestinian question back at the heart of the global contradiction, namely the pivotal issue in the balance of power between the imperialist pole and the various counter-hegemonic currents emerging around the world. This is what the peoples of the world have already remembered, and this is what world history will remember. (Note: For thoughts on the possible future of a reunited, multi-ethnic Palestine after the collapse of the "two-state solution", see my article in the 2020 Géostratégiques magazine.) The current "hybrid world war" situation therefore demonstrates that geopolitics is a useful method of analysis, to be combined with the analysis of social and economic relations. At this stage in human history, it is becoming essential to make an intellectual effort to understand the world as a whole, and to link the tragedy being experienced by the Palestinians with that being experienced by Ukraine, Syria, and all other countries at war or under economic blockade, in the face of a dominant capitalist world whose rotten nature is becoming ever more apparent. Author Bruno Drweski is an activist and a professor at the National Institute of Eastern Languages and Civilizations in Paris. He sits on the editorial board of 4 peer-reviewed journals and has published extensively (articles, chapters, and books) in history, political sociology, and geopolitics. Archives March 2024 In Anti-Dühring, Friedrich Engels writes the following on definitions: "From a scientific standpoint all definitions are of little value. In order to gain an exhaustive knowledge of what life is, we should have to go through all the forms in which it appears, from the lowest to the highest. But for ordinary usage such definitions are very convenient and in places cannot well be dispensed with; moreover, they can do no harm, provided their inevitable deficiencies are not forgotten."[1] This quote arises in the context of the chapter’s attack on Dühring’s philosophy of nature. Specifically, Engels wants to point out the inadequacy, or, in other words, the abstract character, of the ‘definition’ of life. To understand this perspective on definitions we must comprehend the Marxist distinction between the abstract and the concrete, since it is, properly speaking, the abstract character of definitions which are problematic. Today we hear the word abstract, and we conjure up images of mental abstractions, of generalizations which occur in our mind and are a disconnected reflection of the sensible things in the world. This is not, generally, the way our tradition understands the ‘abstract’. We, of course, see a necessary role for mental abstractions in the process of acquiring theoretical knowledge. Theory is, always, a form of abstraction. However, this ‘abstraction’ can itself be more or less abstract or concrete – in the sense in which we specifically use the words. Etymologically, the Latin concretus referred to that which is mixed, composite, fused. As Marx and Hegel have put it, the concrete is that which contains many determinations.[2] The concrete is the unity which contains the many, a unity of opposites. It is that which is most complex, the whole or totality. When we say, for instance, that Marx provides a concrete study of the capitalist mode of production, we mean that he has logically reconstructed the mode of production as a whole, comprehensively, on the basis of ascending from its germ (the commodity, the most abstract integral component of the whole) to the whole itself. In Hegel’s logic the absolute idea stands as the most concrete form of the concept, that last form the concept takes, precisely because it self-consciously contains within it the many determinations it has gone through to achieve this utmost moment of logical concreteness. Abstractus, in Latin, refers to that which has been withdrawn, removed, extracted, estranged or isolated. It is quite evident to see how this operates in abstract thinking… in abstract mental abstractions. As Ilyenkov writes, “thinking abstractly merely means thinking unconnectedly, thinking of an individual property of a thing without understanding its links with other properties, without realizing the place and role of this property in reality.”[3] But the abstract is not simply this flaw in disconnected thinking, there are also real abstractions operative objectively in the world, abstractions which themselves can be understood concretely. For Marx, for instance, this is operative in commodity exchange, where the “general value-form is the reduction of all kinds of actual labour to their common character of being human labour generally, of being the expenditure of human labour-power.”[4] As you find in the first four chapters of Capital Vol. I, the exchange value of commodities (which comes to dominate over its use-value) is a reflection of the abstract labor time that went into it. It is a quantitative metric of the socially necessary labor time needed to produce a specific commodity. For such quantifiability to take place qualitatively incommensurable activities must transmute themselves into being qualitatively commensurable. The labor that goes into making a shoe and the labor that goes into making a coat must lose their uniqueness and obtain an abstract form in which each is comparable, as qualitative equals, in terms of quantity. This is a real abstraction.[5] That which is the most concrete, i.e., the ‘wholes’ or ‘totalities’ to be examined, cannot be studied directly qua whole. The concrete, in other words, cannot be a point of departure. Treating it as such limits you to engaging with what Marx called an “imagined concrete,” a concrete object of study approached through abstract thinking.[6] Instead, to understand the concrete concretely, an ascension from the abstract to the concrete is required. Marx, for instance, does not deal with the capitalist mode of production as a whole until the third volume of Capital, i.e., until he has arrived at the whole through a “process of concentration,” through an ascension to the concrete.[7] This ascension, therefore, requires initially the descending from the concrete (the whole) to the abstract (its determinate components). We exist, for instance, within the capitalist mode of life as a concrete reality. But to study such a reality Marx had to descend from the immediate experience of the concrete to its abstract components in order to reconstruct them logically through this process of ascension to the real concrete. Descending from the concrete to the abstract is a means, an intermediary disappearing moment for the ascension to the concrete. Both of these movements, the descending from the immediate concrete to the abstract to reascend from the abstract to the concrete, thereby reconstructing the concrete whole in the mind, are integral to the process of mental concrete abstraction… the antidote to the one-sidedness and disconnection central to abstract thinking. Primacy, however, is given to the ascension to the concrete. It is, as Ilyenkov notes, “the principal and dominant [movement], determining the weight and significance of the other, the opposite one [descending from the concrete to the abstract],” which “emerges as a subordinate disappearing moment of the overall movement.”[8] So, what does this have to do with the Marxist tradition’s view of definitions? Well, definitions, though helpful for practical purposes, too easily lend themselves to abstract thinking – i.e., to completely misunderstanding the world. One cannot provide one-sentence textbook definitions for complex (concrete) things in the world. Even for the most elemental things in the world, a basic abstract definition tells me very little about such a thing. This approach to definitions attempts to freeze frame whatever is being defined – to remove it from its spatial-temporal context, from the web of relations it exists in, and to ignore how such context is the horizon for the form the defined thing takes. Definitions, in other words, force our thinking into seeing things statically, disconnectedly, and free from the contradictions which pervade a thing’s existence as a complex, heterogenous entity. This does not mean we condemn definitions. They are, after all, an integral component of communication. Human social life without definitions would be impossible. But it does mean that, when participating in scientific inquiry (as Engels mentioned), or, frankly, in any other activity, we should not treat definitions as these pure sacrosanct things reality must mold itself into (for instance, how the purity fetish outlook treats the pure ‘idea’, or ‘definition,’ of socialism as something which could be used to look at socialist countries and say, ‘that’s not real socialism because it is not an accurate representation of the pure idea, or definition, that exists in my mind’). We should be cognizant of the fact that the things ‘definitions’ define are themselves in constant motion, riddled by contradictions, and necessarily interconnected to a host of other things within a given totality… all of which must be grasped so that phenomenon, currently captured abstractly through a definition, could be understood concretely. I can, for instance, tell you about how capitalism is a system where the owners of capital are in power over the productive forces and the state apparatuses (ideological and repressive) of society, and where such dominance is used to perpetuate the process of capital accumulation rooted in the exploitation of the working class’s labor. This, for instance, is a somewhat helpful ‘definition.’ But could one say they understand this concrete reality (this ‘whole’ form of life) concretely on the basis of such a definition? Of course not! It is not without reason that Marx’s Capital remained an open, unfinished project… it’s object of study was itself unfinished, continuously developing, obtaining greater concreteness. Therefore, those (like Marx and Engels) attempting to concretely reconstruct the mode of life as a whole in writing, require an openness in their intellectual project that reflects the open dynamism of its object of study. This is why Marxism (dialectical materialism) is creative through and through. It holds as an ontological reality this incessant development of the world, and thus understands that to continue to know it concretely (and, of course, to change it in a revolutionary manner), its thinking must creatively develop with it. References [1] Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 2016), 81. [2] G. W. F. Hegel. Lectures on the History of Philosophy Vol. 2. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974., pp. 13. Karl Marx. Grundrisse. London: Penguin Books, 1973., pp. 101. [3] Evald Ilyenkov, The Dialectics of the Abstract and Concrete in Marx’s Capital (Delhi: Aakar Books, 2022), 27. [4] Karl Marx, Capital Vol I (Moscow: International Publishers, 1974), 57. [5] This is explored in Alfred Sohn-Rothel’s Intellectual and Manual Labor, which anticipates the argument from Richard Seaford in Money and the Early Greek Mind that the real abstraction found in the introduction of coinage (money commodity, universal equivalent) in Miletus was what sparked the development of philosophy, i.e., ideal concrete abstractions into the question of being. [6] Marx, Grundrisse, 100, [7] Marx, Grundrisse, 100. [8] Ilyenkov, The Dialectics of the Abstract and Concrete, 139. Author Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. Archives February 2024 2/28/2024 Another Lost Cold War Document: Zhou Enlai's March 8, 1952 Denunciation of U.S. Germ Warfare. By: Jeffrey S. KayeRead NowPicture of the “Northeast China Group of the Commission for Investigating the Crime of Bacteriological Warfare Committed by the American Imperialists,” taken at Shenyang, April 1, 1952. From 1952 pamphlet, “Exhibition on Bacteriological War Crimes Committed by the Government of the United States,” pg. 13, published by The Chinese People’s Committee for World Peace (author’s private collection) Introduction This is an updated version of the original post. The update is necessary, in my opinion, because claims as to the availability of the materials described in the bulk of the post must be amended. While the “lost” statement of Zhou Enlai has in fact been nearly unobtainable in the U.S. for decades, in January 2024, a pamphlet containing Zhou’s statement, and other important material, was posted for viewing and download at The Internet Archive. A description of this, and links to the material are included in the updated post below. — Jeff Kaye In February 2018 I published online the full 669-page Report of International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China (ISC Report), which corroborated the Chinese and North Korean claims that the U.S. had used biological weapons in an experimental fashion on civilian populations. I described it as a “lost document” from the Cold War. As I discovered later, the difficulty in tracking down a copy of the ISC Report was due to the fact that the U.S. government, utilizing a bogus interpretation of the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) had likely destroyed almost every copy entering the U.S. via shipment from abroad. The FARA law initially was passed on the eve of World War II, and was initially meant to stop the importation of Nazi propaganda. But with the onset of the Cold War, and with the beginning of the Korean War, the U.S. Attorney General interpreted FARA to claim that any foreign entity sending materials from “Iron Curtain” countries — books, pamphlets, magazines, recordings, etc. — were in effect acting as “foreign agents.” Accordingly, the U.S. Postal Service and Customs agency, as well as the FBI, were authorized to seize all third class mail from Communist countries and destroy it. Literally hundreds of thousands of pieces of mails were duly confiscated and destroyed monthly for years! In my article on the subject, I noted that this is why we did not have many materials from that period in our libraries or archives, including the ISC report, or printed materials that included, for instance, statements from North Korean and Chinese leaders about the biological warfare (BW) attacks then taking place. Later historians often cited these BW statements, but they were rarely quoted verbatim, possibly because the historians in question were working off secondary accounts and not the actual statements. Hence, along with the article on FARA censorship (which was ended by Supreme Court decision in 1965), I posted online for the first time ever, in English, a copy of then-Foreign Minister of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Bak Hon Yong’s, statement accusing the United States of using germ warfare attacks, while “openly collaborating with the Japanese bacteriological war criminals” of Unit 731. Bak’s statement, originally issued on February 22, 1952, was published in a 1952 pamphlet published by The Chinese People’s Committee for World Peace, which I privately obtained. Luckily, this copy of the document, “Exhibition on Bacteriological War Crimes Committed by the Government of the United States of America,” was somehow spared the wholesale destruction of such documents that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. If I had not found this document, then Bak’s statement would still be unobtainable, so far as I can tell. Perhaps it exists in UN archives somewhere. (Sadly, the format of the Exhibition on Bacteriological War Crimes document is too large for easy reproduction, but researcher Alice Atlas has written to tell me she succeeded in doing so.) A week after Bak’s statement, Zhou En-Lai (publishing as Chou En-Lai in the translation style then used for Chinese) issued his own statement on the U.S. warfare attacks. He was quite precise about the number of attacks and the kinds of pathogens dropped by the United States. Interestingly, his statement never mentions Unit 731 collaboration, although later Chinese statements and propaganda would. [Update: researcher Alice Atlas has informed me that a pamphlet of speeches, including Zhou’s March 8 statement, has been posted at Internet Archive. In an earlier February 24 statement of support for North Korean protests around U.S. germ warfare attacks, Zhou did specifically single out Unit 731’s “Shiro Ishii, Jiro Wakamatsu, Masajo Kitano and other Japanese bacteriological war criminals,” who have “carr[ied] out on the Korean battlefield experiments and manufacture of various types of lethal bacteria” (pg. 6).] Zhou’s document, like Bak’s, is not obtainable, so far as I can tell, in any online resource that I know of. [Except see paragraph above! - JK] Nor am I sure where one would find it in a library. As a service to the public, to historians more specifically, and for the readers of Hidden Histories, I’ve transcribed Zhou’s statement and am posting it here for what I believe is the first time online. So, hopefully, here is yet another “lost” document rescued from the U.S. censorship and book-burning campaign that lasted fifteen years of the early Cold War, as well as from the ongoing censorship that continues to suppress recognition of the U.S. war crimes described therein. Statement by Chou En-Lai [Zhou Enlai], Minister for Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, March 8, 1952 After launching large-scale, bacteriological warfare in Korea on January 28, 1952, the American aggressive forces, between February 29 and March 5, sent 68 formations of military aircraft, making a total of 448 sorties to invade China’s territorial air in the Northeast, and scatter large quantities of germ-carrying insects at Fushun, Hsinmin, Antung, Kuantien, Linkiang and other areas, and to bomb and strafe the Linkiang and Changtienhokow areas. The details of these incidents are as follows: (1) On February 29, American aircraft, in 14 formations, flew a total of 148 sorties over Antung, Fushun, Fengcheng and other areas and scattered insects over Fushun. An investigation on the spot showed that insects of a black colour were found within an area of 15-20 kilometers in Fushun County covering Takow, Lijen, and Fangsiao Villages and Lientaowan. (2) On March 1, American aircraft, in 14 formations, flew a total of 86 sorties to intrude over Fushun, Changtienhokow, Kuantien and Chian and scatter insects of a black colour resembling fleas over Makinchwang and other places in Fushun County. (3) On March 2, American aircraft, in 12 formations, flew a total of 72 sorties over Funshun, Antung, Tatungkow, Changtienhokow, Kiuliencheng, Chian, Kuantien and Changpai. They dropped large quantities of flies, mosquitoes, fleas and other types of insects over Takow and other parts of Fushun County and areas between Fushun and Shenyang. (4) On March 3, five formations of American aircraft, flying a total of 23 sorties, intruded and scattered insects over Antung, Langtou and Chian. (5) On March 4, thirteen formations of American aircraft flew a total of 72 sorties, to intrude and scatter insects over Antung, Langtou, Tatunkow, Kiuliencheng, Changtienhokow, Hsinmin, Chian, Hunkiangkow and Kuantien. At 11 a.m. of the same morning, six American aircraft were observed above Langtou. They dropped from a height of 5,000 meters two cloth receptacles which burst open some 2,000 meters from the ground; and then a swarm of flies was found near the highway. At 2 p.m., an American aircraft was observed over Paikipao and Jaoyangho in Hsinmin County. It dropped a load of flies. On the same day, American aircraft were active over Kuantien, and afterwards flies, mosquitoes, crickets and fleas dropped by American aircraft were immediately found east of Kuantien City and at Hunshihlatze and other places. (6) On March 5, ten formations of American aircraft flew a total of 38 sorties to intrude over Antung, Anpingho, Changtienhokow, Hunkiangkow, Tunghua and Linkiang. Of these, one group of 8 planes at about 8 a.m. indiscriminately bombed and strafed Linkiang, wounding 2 people and destroying 5 houses. In view of the fact that the United States government has dared repeatedly and openly to make air intrusions over China’s territory, spread germ-bearing insects and indiscriminately bomb, strafe and kill Chinese people at the same time as it is delaying the Korean armistice negotiations and obstructing a peaceful settlement of the Korean question in an attempt to prolong and extend the Korean war, I am authorised by the Central People’s Government of the People’s Government of China to protest solemnly against these most savage and brutal acts of aggression and provocation by the United States government. The open and direct acts of aggression of the United States government against the People’s Republic of China date from June 27, 1950 when U.S. President Truman announced the despatch of its navy to invade and occupy China’s territory of Taiwan. On August 27, 1950 the American aggressor troops in Korea began to send their military aircraft to intrude into the territorial air of Northeast China. From then on, the military aircraft of the United States government have many times intruded over Northeast China and carried out reconnaissance, strafing and bombing. Now, on the heels of its large-scale bacteriological warfare in Korea, the United States government is adding to its open violation of international law and all laws of humanity by scattering large quantities of bacteria-laden insects over Northeast China. This is an attempt by the criminal and vicious device of mass slaughter of peaceful people to further its aims of invading China and threatening the security of the Chinese people. These brutal crimes of the United States government will never be tolerated by the Chinese people. The opposition of the Chinese people in their wrath will assure the ignominious failure of these crimes. It is the view of the Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China that the United States government, pursuing its objectives of extending the Korean war and undermining peace in the Far East and other parts of the world, has employed bacteriological weapons, strictly prohibited by humanity and international conventions, against the peaceful population and armed forces of the Korean and Chinese peoples in Korea, and is even extending such crimes against the peaceful population in Northeast China by employing these unlawful bacteriological weapons in a brutal provocation. In its statement on February 24 [see pg. 5 at link], the Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China pointed out: “If the people of the world do not resolutely curb this crime, then the calamities befalling the peaceful people of Korea today will befall the peaceful people of the world tomorrow.” Now is the time for the peace-loving people of the world to rise and put an end to the maniacal crimes of the United States government. We are confident that human justice and peace will triumph. The Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China hereby makes it known that members of the American air force who invade China’s territorial air and use bacteriological weapons will be dealt with as war criminals upon capture. The Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China at the same time declares that the United States government must bear the full responsibility for all the consequences arising from air intrusions over China’s territory, the use of bacteriological weapons and the murder of the Chinese people by indiscriminate bombing and strafing. Author Jeff Kaye is a retired clinical psychologist. He's been researching and writing on US war crimes for over 15 years, and is the author of "Cover-up at Guantanamo: The NCIS Investigation Into the Suicides of Mohammed Al Hanashi and Abdul Rahman Al Amri." Currently he writes the blog "Hidden Histories" at Substack.com. Republished from 'Hidden Histories' Substack Archives February 2024 |
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