and how about a link?

It's behind a paywall but give it a shot. Usually LRB allows at least one a month.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n22/mike-davis/short-cuts

Expecting​  2008, Democrats got 2016 again, an unnervingly close election that Joe Biden appears to have won by razor-thin margins in a few states. If the blue wave has proved almost as illusionary as the blue wall four years ago, it is because centrist Democrats, as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren constantly warned during the primary debates, have refused to learn the lessons of 2016. Biden’s campaign was only a tweaked version of Hillary Clinton’s failed playbook. 

This was illustrated most forcefully by Republican gains among Latino voters in several states. It is not particularly surprising that wealthy Cuban and Venezuelan exiles, screeching about communists on the doorstep, managed to cut deeply into into the Democratic margin in Miami. But what happened in the seven major Texas border counties whose population of 2.6 million is 90 per cent Mexican in origin (Tejanos)? The national party has many neglected or abandoned constituencies, including Puerto Rico, Indian Country and Appalachia, but southern Texas has a unique strategic significance. This was acknowledged two days before the election when the chair of the Democratic National Committee, Tom Perez, visited the McAllen area, at the southernmost tip of the state. ‘The road to the White House,’ he declared, ‘goes through South Texas. Remember, Beto lost by about 200,000 votes in 2018. We can make up these votes alone in the Valley. If we take Latino turnout from 40 per cent to 50 per cent, that’s enough to flip Texas.’

But the Biden campaign failed to pave the road to power with campaign resources or to pay attention to local issues. Continuing a long tradition of electoral negligence, the national Democrats were confident that Biden would enlarge Clinton’s winning margin in the region even if they didn’t divert funds or personnel from the all-important suburban battlefields. The border, after all, is one of the poorest regions in the country, with a population routinely vilified in Republican propaganda as aliens and rapists. In any case, the polls were predicting historic Democratic victories; a blue wave along the Rio Grande was assured.

As the fantasy of great gains in Texas dissipated, Democrats were stunned to discover that a high turnout had instead propelled a Trump surge along the border. In the three Rio Grande Valley counties (the agricultural corridor from Brownsville to Rio Grande City), which Clinton had carried by 39 per cent, Biden achieved a margin of only 15 per cent. More than half of the population of Starr County, an ancient battlefield of the Texas farmworkers’ movement, lives in poverty, yet Trump won 47 per cent of the vote there, an incredible gain of 28 points from 2016. Further up river he actually flipped 82 per cent Latino Val Verde County (county seat: Del Rio) and increased his vote in Maverick County (Eagle Pass) by 24 points and Webb County (Laredo) by 15 points. The Democratic congressman Vincente Gonzalez (McAllen) had to fight down to the wire to save the seat he won by 21 per cent in 2018. Even in El Paso, a hotbed of Democratic activism, Trump made a six point gain. Considering South Texas as a whole, the Democrats had great hopes of winning the 21st Congressional District, which connects San Antonio and Austin, as well as the 78 per cent Latino 23rdCongressional District, which is anchored in the western suburbs of San Antonio but encompasses a vast swathe of southwest Texas. In both cases, the Republicans won fairly easily.

The explanation? As Congressman Filemón Vela (Brownsville) was quoted as saying in the Valley Morning Star, a Harlingen newspaper, ‘I think there was no Democratic national organisational effort in South Texas and the results showed. The visits are nice, but without a planned media and grassroots strategy you just can’t sway voters. When you take voters for granted like national Democrats have done in South Texas for forty years, there are consequences to pay.’

In the end it was the economy that sunk hopes of a Democratic landslide. It was a gigantic mistake to make the election a plebiscite on Trump’s bungling of the pandemic without making an all-out effort to convince voters that a Biden administration would sustain family incomes and small businesses until Covid was defeated. The 2.2 trillion dollar relief bill passed by the House should have been the basis for an aggressive campaign, but the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, allowed the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, to take it hostage and Biden, mumbling through the two presidential debates, never really crusaded to free it. Meanwhile, the third-quarter employment figures, however misleading, gave Trump an unexpected boost; they were proof, he claimed, of the shining future ahead. A new national lockdown would send that ‘recovery’ to hell. The Democrats underestimated the resonance this argument had with the shop-owning and entrepreneurial middle classes facing extinction or digestion by Amazon. It wasn’t so hard to convince bar owners, building contractors, franchise managers, small manufacturers and the like that closures were a greater evil than half a million more Covid deaths. (This is, of course, a global phenomenon: just look at the role played by hysterical small business owners in the violent protests against new lockdowns in Western Europe.)

As for working people, forced every day to choose between income and health, Biden’s vow to put science in charge of the pandemic was easily spun by Republicans as proof of a economic apocalypse overseen by the dread Dr Fauci. The Democratic counter-response was weak, in part because the union movement had even less prominence in the campaign than in 2016. The uncontrolled spread of Covid restricted the door-to-door canvassing that has always been the contribution of union members to electoral battles. The Biden campaign did give greater emphasis than Clinton to workers’ rights, collective bargaining and the $15 minimum wage, but it broadcast the same empty messages about job creation and the future of work. ‘Millions of green energy jobs’ is an abstraction that utterly fails to connect to the concrete circumstances of Rustbelt and inner-city communities. Mainstream Democrats have had more than a generation to respond to the simple question: what will you do to increase job opportunities here in Erie (or Warren, Dubuque, Lorraine, Wilkes-Barre and so on)? They have never offered a serious response. Concrete solutions would involve geographically targeted public investment, control over capital flight and financial outflows, and, above all, a massive expansion of public employment. These are avenues most Democrats are too terrified to go down.

Since Reagan, Republicans have always fought to turn institutional power against the Democrats, pushing them onto unfavourable terrain and disorganising their base. In winning the House Speakership in 1994, Newt Gingrich introduced the ruthless style of political combat and absolute oppositionism that McConnell has so exquisitely refined. The election of 2010 was an even more important turning point. That year the Republicans mobilised the full power of the network of billionaire donors, regional policy centres and political action committees that they had been building for thirty years to storm state legislatures and governors’ mansions across the heartland and sunbelt. They won 700 legislative seats and flipped twenty state legislative chambers, numbers that grew during the Obama years. Since in most states legislatures remain responsible for redistricting, the Republicans ruthlessly gerrymandered state and congressional seats to enshrine their majorities. That’s why winning back state legislative majorities in this census year should have been the highest Democratic priority after the White House and Senate. The most important target was Texas, where Democrats were confident they could take the nine additional seats needed to control the House. In the event, they didn’t win any, so Republicans will be free to conduct a new gerrymander.

The United States, as pundits hourly remind us, is now cleaved into two almost equal-sized political universes. But power abhors stalemates and clearly in the present world the evolution is towards differential experiments in post-fascist oligarchy and pseudo-democracy. A weak and court-enchained Biden-Harris White House, built on the betrayal of progressives and subservient to a donor class of Silicon Valley and Wall Street billionaires, will face a new depression without the wind of popular enthusiasm at its back. Where does this point except to total destruction in the 2022 midterm and the further triumph of the new darkness?

6 November

Year of the Plague: Danger of Fascism

By Chris Kinder 

http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/novdec_20/novdec_20_05.html

 

October 11, 2020–As you read this, the 2020 election day in the U.S. will have already passed, but is that the end of the story? All the signs say, no. During the delay between election day and the December 14th date for the electoral college to vote, many things can and will happen, and most of them are not good. States, for instance, will be inundated with mail-in ballots to count, and many of them are very poorly prepared for this task. And there will be sinister problems.

Enter Donald Trump and Co. The current unelected U.S. president has planned for months to stay in power without actually being re-elected. He has openly proclaimed that he will refuse to leave office. He has even projected the possibility of 12 more years, not just four. And he has ways to out-flank the popular vote completely.

Trump is arranging a coup

Trump’s poll numbers have increasingly been dropping as of this writing. It is becoming more and more likely that Biden will win the popular vote, perhaps even in a landslide. Trump is getting more and more desperate. Yet he continues to insist that his reelection is a forgone conclusion. 

In order to make this prediction come true, he and Republican allies have used a deep treasure chest of deceptive tricks to suppress the vote, especially in districts with a high percentage of Black, Brown and Asian voters. Trump also rants endlessly against mail-in voting, claiming that there will be thousands of fraudulent ballots, for which there is practically no evidence whatsoever.

 

 

 

 

I was under the impression laws were passed some time ago making it mandatory for electors to vote for the majority candidate in each state.

Now is not the time to engage with liberals -- they are tremendously emotionally invested in the out come of the election and not ready to face reality yet. 

Year of the Plague: Danger of Fascism

By Chris Kinder 

October 11, 2020–As you read this, the 2020 election day in the U.S. will have already passed, but is that the end of the story? All the signs say, no. During the delay between election day and the December 14th date for the electoral college to vote, many things can and will happen, and most of them are not good. States, for instance, will be inundated with mail-in ballots to count, and many of them are very poorly prepared for this task. And there will be sinister problems.

Enter Donald Trump and Co. The current unelected U.S. president has planned for months to stay in power without actually being re-elected. He has openly proclaimed that he will refuse to leave office. He has even projected the possibility of 12 more years, not just four. And he has ways to out-flank the popular vote completely.

Trump is arranging a coup

Trump’s poll numbers have increasingly been dropping as of this writing. It is becoming more and more likely that Biden will win the popular vote, perhaps even in a landslide. Trump is getting more and more desperate. Yet he continues to insist that his reelection is a forgone conclusion. 

In order to make this prediction come true, he and Republican allies have used a deep treasure chest of deceptive tricks to suppress the vote, especially in districts with a high percentage of Black, Brown and Asian voters. Trump also rants endlessly against mail-in voting, claiming that there will be thousands of fraudulent ballots, for which there is practically no evidence whatsoever.

He has also ramped up war-mongering against China, accusing it of interfering with fraudulent ballots. There is no evidence or likelihood for this, just as there is not for Russia, for that matter. Repeat a lie often enough, and some fools will believe it. In this case, that means his numerous white-supremacist allies.

Gangs of thugs 

Trump is openly urging far-right vigilantes like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Wolverine Watchmen, Three Percenters and others to intimidate voters en masse, and invade vote-counting centers to “challenge” (ie., reject) ballots from Black and Brown communities; and to cause enough chaos and violence in the vote-counting process to convince swing states and courts that the voting-counting process has been invalidated. 

These fascistic militias have already been prepared with events such as the “unite-the-right” torchlight mobilization in Charlottesville which killed one protestor, and set an example for violent attacks on demonstrations against police brutality and murders of Black people. These groups are egged on by Trump’s falsely blaming the left for the violence, refusing to denounce white supremacists, and asking the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” in the debate with Biden. The Proud Boys promptly took that slogan as their marching orders, and put it on their t-shirts. 

Many rightists are also mobilized to oppose anti-virus measures, also urged on by Trump. Most of these have been rallies, but the potential for dangerous violence was blatant when the Wolverine Watchers and others conspired to kidnap, and possibly kill, the governor of Michigan over her virus shutdown orders. This plot was exposed by the FBI in early October.

Crimes cloaked in a fraudulent legality

It is important to understand that the U.S. is not a democracy, and never has been. A court decision that the vote count is invalid could throw the election to state legislatures. In the Constitution, the state legislatures choose the electors, whose vote alone elects the president. The popular vote is never mentioned in the Constitution. In the early days, the legislature-appointed Electoral College was it. In modern times, the electors have generally followed the popular vote, but if that vote was invalidated, legislatures could pick whoever they want for electors. If enough Republican-dominated states do this, it could lock-up the “election” for Trump.

And Trump could declare a national emergency, which his loyal Attorney General Barr will support. This could send the decision to the Supreme Court, which Trump and his co-dictator in the Senate have stacked with rightist constitutionalists. The Court could send the decision to the House of Representatives, which is allowed one single vote for each state’s representatives, where Republican controlled states out number Democratic states by 26 to 23, thus electing Trump. Either way, Trump’s coup would be “legal,” according to the constitution.

How Adolf Hitler came to power

All this is remarkably similar to the way Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. Hitler’s party, the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP-Nazi) never won a majority in an election, as Trump has not and will not. In Hitler’s case, this includes even the election that was held shortly after Hitler was made chancellor, in 1933. In the 1932 elections, the Nazis actually lost a few seats in the Reichstag (parliament), though they remained the largest single party. Hermann Göring became the Reichstag president, but Hitler refused an appointment as vice-chancellor, saying he didn’t want to “play second fiddle.” 

Deadly clashes in the streets between Nazi Brownshirts and Communists were ramping up, as a severe depression was sweeping away jobs in Germany, as in the rest of the world. Göring promoted a bill in the Reichstag to strengthen penalties against “acts of political violence,” hoping that Communists could be rounded up. Instead, a major case was made against five Sturmabteilung1 (SA) Brownshirts for killings of Communists (who were the majority of victims of the violence.) Hitler served as a defense witness, but the Brownshirts were convicted and sentenced to death. Though Hitler’s dictatorship would soon change this scenario, it was not secure yet.

Hitler’s cloak of fraudulent
legality 

Hitler’s chancellorship in January 1933 was a appointment by the German President Hindenburg, based on the Nazi coalition with two small parties, which gave him a majority in the Reichstag. Nazis staged torchlight parades throughout Berlin. But Hindenburg was still in charge of the military as long as he remained alive (about one year,) and Hitler was unable to pass an “enabling act” to make him the supreme leader until he established a stronger majority in the Reichstag. 

The bombing of the Reichstag, planned and organized by the Nazis and blamed on the Communists, was key. Hitler got Hindenburg to sign off on a “Reichstag Fire Decree,” which declared an emergency that allowed Hitler to suspend most civil liberties, including habeas corpus, freedom of the press, and the right of free association and public assembly. Mass arrests Communists, and the banning of non-Nazi political parties soon followed. 

The “Night of the Long Knives,” which murderously beheaded the SA, the leadership of which had threatened the leadership of the military, was the final act. This, and the death of Hindenburg in August of 1934 solidified Hitler’s full dictatorship.

“Don’t forget how people laughed at me”

In 1934, Hitler was quoted saying, “Don’t forget how people laughed at me 15 years ago when I declared that one day, I would govern Germany. They laugh now, just as foolishly, when I declare that I will remain in power!”2 Does this remind you of anything? 

Even though Trump himself is a little short of being an actual fascist—he is more accurately a self-serving arrogant racist white supremacist, nationalist, opportunist, and know-nothing moron (one easily runs out of adjectives)—his actions are certainly moving the U.S. in the direction that Hitler mapped out. He has declared he will stay in power whatever the outcome. Although they are not centrally organized as were the Brownshirts, the hard-right militias and vigilante groups in the U.S. are coming together in a common cause to wreak havoc on the election process in support of Trump. 

Trump will probably not be able to fire-bomb Congress as the Nazis did the Reichstag. But he can foment violence, and is able to declare an emergency which would pretend to invalidate the election result. He and his thugs could possibly manufacture other atrocities to blame on the left. He has already gone overboard on blaming Black Lives Matter protestors for the violence which is actually caused by white rightists. This poses the question of, how ready is the U.S. for fascism?

QAnon, a hard-right threat

While this question is hard to answer, we see clear indications of a growing hard-right threat. Take the QAnon conspiracy theory. Starting as an obscure and totally bizarre internet discussion just a few years ago, it has exploded into a rapidly spreading Nazi-like cult. It claims there is a secret intelligence agent, Q, who is exposing a secret Satan-worshiping “deep state” cult which kidnaps white children, keeps them in secret prisons run by pedophiles, who slaughter and eat them to gain power from the essence in their blood. This cabal, Q claims, is financed by Jews, particularly George Soros, and Jews in the media. 

Trump’s mission, according to QAnon is to expose and destroy this horrific deep state cabal. Trump’s comment, so far? He said he doesn’t know much (no surprise there), but they “like me,” and this pleases him!

The QAnon “ideology” is not new. It is based squarely on an anti-Semitic tirade known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. These “protocols” were a forgery, probably written in the early 19th Century in Russia by elements in the Russian Orthodox Church, in response to the influx of Jews into Russia from its conquests in Poland and the Ottoman Empire. Central to its mythology was the “Blood Libel,” which claimed that Jews kidnapped and slaughtered Christian children, and drained their blood for use in the dough used to make matzos for Jewish holidays. 

Pogroms against Jews

Jews in Russia were confined to special villages called “pales,” and subjected to periodic deadly pogroms, or raids, carried out by Czarist military. The Czarist secret police may have had a hand in the Protocols as well, all used to justify the pogroms. The Protocols were published in the early 20th Century, translated and spread throughout Europe, including in Germany, which also had a long history of confining Jews to ghettos, and to certain occupations as well.

The Protocols were a gift to the Nazis. It was used in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and it was promoted in the Nazi newspaper, Der Sturmer (The Storm). It was also made into a children’s book, which was required in the curriculum of all primary schools! 

QAnon’s source material in the Protocols is also not that new in the U.S. Fascist lovers and supporters of Mussolini and Hitler’s Germany abounded in this country. Henry Ford echoed Nazi hatred of Jews, and had 500,000 copies of the Protocols printed and distributed in the U.S. The infamous Catholic priest, Father Coughlin, preached the Protocols on his national radio programs in the 1930s—one of the first mass uses of radio. And the Ku Klux Klan combined anti-Semitism with its white supremacist hate message.3

U.S. corporations supported Nazis

Many large U.S. corporations were also complicit in supporting Mussolini and the German Nazis, both before and during World War II. This included financial investment, supplying of resources, and industrial production. Oil supplies were critical to both Japan and Germany, and U.S. companies, chiefly Standard Oil, supplied both throughout the war, using round-about routes through South Asia, Central and South America, and Spain, which was a neutral power friendly to Hitler. U.S. directors of SKF—a huge trust financed chiefly by a Swedish bank—made sure that SKF’s production of ball bearings, critical for airplanes, were delivered to Germany during the war. Fifteen months after Pearl Harbor, U.S. aircraft production lacked a supply of new ball bearings, with the result that worn-out bearings caused crashes of U.S. fighter planes. This is just one example in a detailed ten-page story.4

After the war, fascism was an anathema throughout most of the world, but now it is out of the bottle again. Rightist populism and outright fascism is spreading. But what is the likelihood of fascism’s victory in the U.S. today?

Will Trump’s coup work?

Both Mussolini and Hitler came to power because they had ruling class support in the context of mass working class revolutionary movements which threatened to overthrow capitalism. Both fascist movements were based on violent organized bands, controlled from the top, and able to combat the workers movements and parties. Today’s fascists in the U.S. are a collection of dangerous armed bands who are capable of murderous attacks, and have the support of the right-populist president, but they lack a unifying national organization.

The ruling class’ power is not significantly threatened today. While still having many isolated struggles, and while ideas of socialism have been spreading, workers lack a revolutionary party, are not organized as a class, and so are not currently threatening the ruling class. Also, the bourgeoisie is showing serious doubts about Trump, as seen by the large increase of Wall Street financing for Biden rather than Trump. They liked the tax break, but did not really need it. What else do they have to gain from Trump? More chaos?

Democrats can’t solve anything

Biden will win the popular vote, and Trump and his thugs will try to disrupt it, that much is certain. But despite Trump’s legal resources in the undemocratic U.S. Constitution, and despite the surge in fascistic mobilization in the U.S., I think that Trump’s coup attempt will not succeed—this time. Trump will wind up in defeat, one way or another, but that will not be the end of it. While this prediction is tenuous, one thing is certain: a Biden victory will solve nothing.

The fascist mobilization is not going to go away, nor are the many problems of capitalist/imperialist rule in the U.S. and the world. The Democrats will not and cannot solve problems caused by the extreme wealth gap in the U.S., the unchallenged advance of climate change, the coronavirus pandemic, or the threats of fascistic gangs. Only the development of a revolutionary workers party, determined to overthrow capitalism, can solve the many problems we face. 

1 The Sturmabteilung (SA) literally “Storm Detachment,” was the Nazi Party’s original paramilitary wing. It played a significant role in Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in the 1920s and 1930s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung

2 It was at this time that Hitler declared that the “National Socialist movement will go on for 1,000 years!” “Germany: Second Revolution?” Time Magazine, July 2, 1934; quoted in “Hitler’s Seizure of Power, Seizure of Control (1931-1933),” wikipedia.org.

3 “QAnon is a Nazi Cult, Rebranded,” by Gregory Stanton, September 9, 2020.

https://www.justsecurity.org/72339/qanon-is-a-nazi-cult-rebranded/

(Stanton works with Genocide Watch, and the Alliance Against Genocide)

4 Anthony Gronowicz, “The history tells another story about the role of the U.S. in World War II,” on the action greens list. Professor Gronowicz teaches at the City University of New York, and is the author of several books.

Imperialist Attacks on Africa

And the genocide you never heard of

By Chris Kinder

The Holocaust was born at the meeting point of two traditions that marked modern Western Civilization: the anti-Semitic tradition, and the tradition of genocide of colonial people. —Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, New York 2004

In January of 2020, a conference called by Angela Merkel of Germany was held in Berlin to promote a cease fire in the on-going civil war in Libya, and an embargo on arms shipments to the combatants. Germany, Russia, France, Italy, Turkey, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) all signed on. But this was a big joke and they all knew it. On the very day that these “leaders” took their photo op at the conference, planes full of arms were heading to Libya from the UAE—backed by Russia and Egypt—to Khalifa Hifter’s forces in Benghazi, Libya. Turkey and Qatar were also deeply into arms shipments, including by sea, to the “UN recognized” government in Tripoli.1

Imperialist domination of Africa, and its oil wealth, is what is at the core of this. The overthrow, and murder, of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 is only the most recent event in this miserable saga today. This was done to protect U.S. and EU interests, and prevent Libya from using its oil proceeds to establish an African currency. The prosperous North African country was torn to pieces and divided up by gangs of Islamic extremists at the behest of European and U.S. imperialist powers. 

In order to fully understand this, we must examine Libyan history, including the virtually unknown genocide, from the beginning. It starts with Italy.

Genocide in Libya began with Italy

The claims of Italy over the Libyan portion of North Africa date back to the 19th Century. In the first Congress of Berlin (1878), France and Britain claimed Tunisia and Cyprus respectively. Later, in a series of secret treaties, these two powers supported Italy’s claims on Libya, as a way to weaken that country’s connection to its Triple Alliance with Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These agreements paved the way for Italy’s switch to the British-French-Russian Entente in the middle of the Great War. It was the only power ever to change sides in a major inter-imperialist conflict.

Imperialist contest for colonies 
in Africa

By the early 1900s, the imperialist regimes of Europe were on a move to prepare for what they knew was coming, a war for imperialist domination of the world. That meant the struggle for colonies, largely for possessions in Africa. Italy—like Germany—only fully united as a country in 1870, was behind on asserting its colonial ambitions in Africa compared to Britain and France...that is, until its war with Ottoman Turkey in 1911-12. 

This short war—a prelude to both the Balkan Wars and World War I—represented the beginning of the dismantlement of the Turkish-controlled Ottoman Empire, which at the time was still in control of North Africa.2 In it, Italy conducted a brutal massacre of thousands of civilians in Tripoli, systematically moving through neighborhoods with murders and destruction. It has been called the 1911 Tripoli Massacre. One of many such atrocities which accompanied European expansion into Africa for many decades, this slaughter included the burning alive of 100 refugees sheltering in a Mosque.3

Libyan resistance of colonization emerges

Italy won that war, and came into control of Libya...sort of. Libyans of differing ethnic groups united to oppose Italian occupation. The Kingdom of Italy never managed to conquer the resistance, and was forced to make agreements over territorial control with local groups. Groups such as the Sanusi, a Sufi-inspired reformist organization had developed into a social force, in the wake of the departure of Ottoman control in North Africa. While based on Islamic tradition and culture, the Sanusi, or Sanusiyya movement, organized social structure based on modernizing ideas such as education, promoting trade, and anti-colonial resistance.

The Italians shifted gears, organized Italian immigration to the colony, promoted cultural links with natives, including schools to teach Italian to locals and other cultural exchanges. But Italy directly controlled no more than the urban areas in the narrow coastal areas of Libya up to and during World War I.

Fascists defeat the Italian 
working class 

After the war, the Italian ruling class renewed their colonizing efforts, but to little avail. Largely, this was due to the Russian Revolution. The Revolution of 1917 inspired and created communist parties throughout Europe, and 1919 saw more rebellious movements throughout the world than any year before or since. Italy’s Communist Party was the biggest in Europe. 

Workers were rebelling in strike waves throughout Italy, and colonial ambitions were on the back burner. But the communist leadership failed to mount a sufficient defense against Mussolini’s Black Shirts. These gangs of fascist thugs broke up strikes in their march across Italy, attacked communists and unions, and soon brought Mussolini to power in 1922.

Once in power, the Italian fascists moved to remake Italy, and that included an aggressive colonial policy. Mussolini declared that he was creating a “New Roman Empire” in North Africa.4 Mussolini ramped up Italian settlement in Libya, but was still frustrated by local resistance. He ordered the abolition of the former policies of cultural interchange with local groups, and imposed a violent conquest policy. Schools to teach Italian to natives and other cultural contacts were dropped, and education for natives was banned above the sixth grade. Based on an ideology of racist supremacy in which Arab Muslims were seen as sub-human, Mussolini’s military used tactics unmatched in brutality at any other time during colonial wars in Africa. 

Fascist tactics target 
native resisters

By 1930, Barqa’s (Eastern Libya’s) tribesmen were well organized under tribal leadership, including that of Umar al-Mukhtar, who was a leading fighter for many years. Mukhtar was captured and publicly hanged in 1931 before a coerced crowd of witnesses. He is still recognized in Libya today as a hero. 

Italian tactics also included using tanks, closing borders, and dropping rebels to their deaths from airplanes. The fascists especially targeted civilians who provided food and other aid to the resistance fighters. 

The worst of this violent repression among civilians occurred in the Eastern region of Barqa, where the Sanusiyya movement had posed the biggest threat to Italian troops. The rebels had developed a network of spies in Italian controlled cities, and they conducted hundreds of guerrilla raids. The fascists engineered a forced march of 110,000 civilian families over three months from Barqa across desert lands to 16 horrifying concentration camps in the desert of Sirte. There, most in six of these camps were starved to death; by 1934, only about one third of these victims were still alive.

Mussolini’s crimes in Africa impressed the Nazis 

The Nazis were very impressed by this barbaric Italian repression, and looked at these genocidal policies as a model for success. The Nazis took in the lessons about forced transfer to concentration camps, and even the use of gas to kill people. The Italians mainly committed genocide by starvation, but they did develop the lethal gas method which the Nazis soon used massively in the Holocaust. 

Nazi leaders like Heinrich Himmler (head of the SS) and others also used Italian fascism as a model for moving about 15 million Germans into conquered territory in East Europe. They sent SS officers to Italian colonial schools for trainings, and accompanied boatloads of Italian immigrants with great fanfare, as they headed to Libya to occupy the stolen land of the natives.5

U.S. and European imperialism are complicit

The condemnation of the German Holocaust after the war was of course justified, but it was hypocritical at the same time. The U.S. made no serious effort to stop the Holocaust during the war. U.S. President Roosevelt, for instance, refused pleas to order the bombing of the rail lines in Germany known to be used for transporting Jews and other victims to the camps in Germany and occupied Poland. 

The U.S. itself was also guilty of genocide in the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, and with the UK, in the fire bombings of Hamburg and Dresden in Germany. All of these bombings took place very late in the war, when both adversaries were already clearly defeated (Japan had been appealing for peace as early as 1943); and all of these bombings were aimed at civilians, not war production. 

U.S. and UK genocidal atrocities

Before and during the war, there were financial and industrial connections in the 1920s with Germany by U.S. ruling-class elements, which continued right through the war. And under the guise of loans to help Italy pay its debts incurred under the Versailles Treaty of 1919 after World War I, J.P. Morgan bankers in the U.S., along with the Bank of England, decided in 1925 to help financially stabilize Mussolini’s regime in Italy. This was accomplished by the establishment of single central Italian bank, the Bank of Italy, in 1926.6

Italian fascism was minimized in western propaganda

In 1935, after the repression of Libyan resistance had mostly been completed, Mussolini expanded his imperial fantasies with the invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia). This invasion also included crimes against humanity, though not on the same scale. It got much more international recognition than the genocide in Libya, contributed to the demise of the League of Nations, and was an immediate prelude to the Second World War. 

At first, the lack of attention to the Libyan experience was due to the banning of all journalists except Nazis in Libya by the Italians during 1929-34. During this time, many public figures such as Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and poet Ezra Pound willingly added to that by expressing open support for Mussolini and Italian fascism.

Imperialist powers cover-up genocide…

After the war, U.S.-led Western attitudes toward Italian fascism was that it was moderate compared to German Nazism, and not capable of horrific genocidal crimes. These lies—a myth, actually—portrayed Italian fascism as not a serious problem. The post-war government of Italy went along with this. As late as 1981, a movie by Mustafa Akkad about the genocide in Libya made with real documentary footage—Lion of the Desert—was banned by Italy. 

A 1989 documentary made in the UK on the same subject—A Fascist Legacy—was given a similar treatment by the “democratic” Italian government: they bought it and shelved it. This film was based on the work American historian Michael Palumbo, who had discovered classified files showing a post-war cover-up of war crimes by both Italian fascist generals and officials of the war-time allies.7

...and pursue colonialism

Just as the U.S. in 1945 wanted to recruit German scientists for the next war against the USSR—despite the horrific mass murder of Jews and others in Nazi concentration camps—it also wanted to recruit Italian rightists into the new war against communism. From 1943, Libya was under British and French war-time occupations, followed by an imposed Sanusi Monarchy in 1951; and all of these regimes were willing partners in the cold war. 

This anti-communist entanglement helped prevent any exposure of the Libyan genocide. When post-war Libya demanded reparations from Italy for the genocide, Italy refused, arguing that Libya was part of Italy, and so ineligible for compensation. But Italy had earlier released all claims to Libya in a 1947 peace treaty with the Allies! The Italian denial of compensation was reinforced however, when the Allies allowed Italy to refuse demands for a war crimes trial by the Ethiopian and Yugoslav governments at the UN. The Libyan government formally maintained its claims due to pressure from the Shura (parliament), but didn’t push it because it needed financial support from the Allies.8

The occupying Allies also did little to stop the persecution—including quite a few murders—of Jews in Libya after the war. The Jewish population had mainly come from or aligned with Italy during the colonization; and many had remained there after the enactment of fascist anti-Semitic laws under Mussolini. Most of them fled to the new state of Israel in 1949-51 due to this pressure.9

U.S. domination of the world ramps up

After World War II, the U.S.—the only major nation in the war that escaped massive deaths and destruction—quickly moved to establish “the American Century” of world imperialist dominance. In an era of anti-colonial nationalist uprisings, particularly in Africa, the U.S. focused on capital penetration backed up with military support rather than outright colonial occupation. As Lenin explained in his seminal Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), the exportation of capital is at the core of imperialism. 

Africa was at the stage in which the U.S. taught a lesson of its dominance to its allies. In 1956, Gamal Abdul Nasser—the head of a military coup which toppled the British-backed King Farouk of Egypt in 1952—nationalized the Suez Canal. British and French troops, soon invaded Egyptian territory in an attempt to reverse this affront to imperialist interests. The Soviet Union offered military aid to Egypt, but the U.S. stepped in to support Egyptian ownership of the Canal, keep it open to trade, and provide military support to Nasser. There was a new capo in town. 

In the years since, this pattern of U.S. control of formerly colonial regimes expanded globally. NATO has been established as an instrument of U.S. control world-wide, first to threaten the USSR, and then to assert U.S. power everywhere on the globe. In 2006-08, AFRICOM was established to solidify that control in Africa.10

The regime of Muammar Gaddafi

Meanwhile, in Libya, the formal “independence” of that country was established with the imposition of the Sanusi King Idris under a UN-drafted democratic constitution in 1951. Idris kept Libya tied with Western imperialist powers by signing a 20-year treaty of friendship and alliance with Britain. This agreement allowed the U.S. and UK to establish military bases in Libya. Meanwhile, the monarchy rapidly chipped away at the democratic aspects of the constitution. 

All this began to change with the bloodless military coup under the leadership of then Captain Muammar Gaddafi, in 1969. Gaddafi began as an anti-colonialist populist, who was not loyal to the Western connections of the Idris regime. He told the imperialist military bases to get out, banished Italian colonials, and returned the land seizures to original owners. He established free education and healthcare, provided clean drinking water and basic foods with state subsidies, and built roads.11

In 1971-72, Gaddafi’s regime passed laws to reverse the previous regime’s reactionary Islamist oppression of women. Laws affirming equality of the sexes, and insisting on wage parity, as well as banning forced marriage of under-age women were passed. Libyan women soon took many professional positions, and outnumbered men in institutions of higher learning.

Well before the overthrow of his government in 2011, standards of living were much improved, and Libya was the most literate and most prosperous country in Africa.

Libya’s oil and world politics

Massive oil reserves had been discovered and developed in Libya by U.S. and European companies in the late 1950s. Libya’s oil attracted European companies particularly, due to its closeness to the European market, and its “light sweet” crude. The Idris Kingdom benefitted and began to grow rich, but the masses only felt the effect under Gaddafi, and the oil nationalization was key to that.

Gaddafi nationalized much of the imperialist companies’ oil holdings; and required production-sharing ventures with others. The Libyan nationalizations were, predictably, a slap in the face to the “seven sisters” of big oil. Libya “had let in the independents to challenge the sisters; and it was aloof from the cautious attitudes of the rest of OPEC. It was the outsider at both ends and by ignoring the rules it changed them.”12

In the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, most Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia and Libya, imposed an embargo on oil exports to any countries that supported Israel, especially the U.S. In March of 1974, the embargo was lifted by all except Libya. And by 1979, the example of oil nationalization set by Libya had been followed by Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. Again, the sisters were taking notes. The U.S. had already declared Libya a potential enemy of the U.S. in 1977.

Libya in the cross hairs

While imperialist powers saw North Africa as part of the Middle East, Gaddafi was trying to Africanize it. He promoted formation of the African Union, and he proposed to create an African currency using Libya’s oil surplus capital to set up an African Bank. This was yet another threat to the imperialists: it meant that African resources might come to be sold to the world market in African currency. The U.S., European Union and the French particularly—still the holders of many interests in Africa if not actual colonies—saw a serious threat to the Euro and the dollar in this project. 

The imperialist nations were also threatened by Gaddafi’s aid to pan-Arab, pan-African and third world national liberation movements. 

Accusing Libya of “terrorism,” and fearing its close relations with the Soviet Union, the U.S. under Reagan slapped an oil embargo on Libya in 1982, froze Libyan assets in the U.S. in 1984, and bombed Libya with a clear intent to liquidate Gaddafi personally in 1986. Two years later, while Reagan was still in office, Gaddafi struck back with a bombing of a U.S. airliner, which crashed in Lockerbie Scotland. Although Gaddafi had been targeted for death by the U.S., this was clearly an error for Libya. When proof of responsibility came out, the UN imposed a new round of sanctions.

Libya in decline and under attack

With its oil boom, Libya had a radical transformation from rural to urban. High-paying jobs in the oil industries attracted thousands to the urbanized coastal regions, flipping Libya from a primarily rural nation to primarily urban. But Gaddafi’s regime remained based on its tribal allies in the South. Furthermore, with the decline in oil prices on the world market, the regime became corrupt. Gaddafi made himself “Leader Brother” and president for life, while healthcare, education, and democratic institutions such as courts suffered. All of this weakened Libya’s response to the crisis in 2011. But the main problem was still imperialism.

In January 2011 there were uprisings in both Tunisia and Egypt. As the self-declared gendarme of Europe in Africa, France—under Sarkozy—moved first, planning, too late, to intervene in Tunisia. In March, the “Arab Spring” came to Libya, with mainly Islamic groups in Benghazi and other Eastern cities rebelling. France took the initiative for an intervention in Libya, by lining up Lebanon and the Saudis to support a no-fly zone over Libya in the Arab League. The U.S./NATO did the rest, with a devastating bombing campaign.

The U.S. war on Libya

In the U.S., a war on Libya was primarily promoted by Wall Street. This reflected the increased financialization of the energy markets under the Reagan administration. Financial control of the capitalist market is the determining feature of the imperialist stage of capitalism. With regard to Libya, this involved imperialist alarm at Libya’s use of its capital in promoting Africanization of North Africa.

Very few reports have linked the Libyan dominance in the Arab Banking Corporation to the seismic events in Libya. Those writers and analysts from Wall Street with links to the think tanks that Wall Street financed were front and center in the call for war.13

It was Hillary Clinton and other officials in the Obama administration—all with Wall Street connections—who primarily pushed for this war. The Pentagon generals were much more cautious, but the attack was launched on March 19th nevertheless. The seven-month U.S.-NATO bombing campaign demolished the most prosperous nation in Africa, and was the deciding factor in the elimination of Gaddafi’s regime. His brutal murder at the hands of Islamic rebels was the final note. Clinton said, “We came, we saw, he died,” in a disgusting rehash of an ancient Roman conqueror’s arrogant brag.

Now, Libya is a disaster. Its infrastructure is bombed to oblivion, and it is dominated by various cliques and militias, all in the service of various imperialist providers of weapons. 

The U.S. is the new Roman Empire, the driving force of capitalist imperialism—this time of the whole world. 

1 “Waves of Russian and Emirati Flights Fuel War in Libya,” New York Times, September 4, 2020.

2 Islamic domination in North Africa dates back to the expansion of Mohammedanism by armies coming out of Arabia in the late 600s and 70’s CE. The Turkish Ottoman Empire, beginning in the 15th Century, became the early-modern manifestation of the Muslim caliphates. The demise of this empire occurred with World War I, after which Turkey emerged as a modern nation, and Libya emerged out of two provinces of the Ottoman Empire: Tripolitania and Cyrenaica.

3 Italy’s lame excuse for this slaughter was the death of some of its troops at the hands of rebels fighting against Italian colonization. The Italian government ineffectively tried to keep it a secret.

4 Mussolini wasn’t the first to make this “Roman Empire” claim: The Kingdom of Italy had mouthed it first. The ancient Roman Empire encompassed most of North Africa after the defeat of Carthage, its main North African rival.

5 Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, Genocide In Libya, Shar, A Hidden Colonial History, Routledge, New York, August 2020. Ahmida is a professor at the University of New England, and the grandson of Libyan militants who fought in the resistance against Italian colonists. The book is very useful on research of this little-known history, and the Eurocentrism of political leaders, academics and others who have white-washed Italian fascism as “moderate.” The term “shar” in the title refers to the “evil, starvation, death and depression” of the Italian colonial concentration camps.

6 F. William Engdahl, A Century of War, Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, Wiesbaden Germany, 2011, p.93

7 Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, op cit, page 54. The author says he tried to obtain a copy of A Fascist Legacy through his university’s inter-library loan office, but was told he could not have it due to “legal arrangements.”

8 Eventually, Italy made a settlement for its genocidal actions, but it was little more than one fifth of what the Libyan government wanted, and it was mostly tied to Libyan purchases of Italian products. (see Ahmida, note 5, page 128).

9 Harvey E. Goldberg, “Rites and Riots: The Tripolitanian Pogrom of 1945,” Plural Societies 8 (Spring 1977): 35-56, referenced in “1945 Anti-Jewish riots in Tripolitania,” Wikipedia. (Goldberg was an ex-Communist Party socialist.)

10 Horace Campbell, Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya, Monthly Review Press, 2013

11 Libya could tap into the North African aquifer, which is the largest water resource in Africa. The Gaddafi regime built the infrastructure to do it.

12 Anthony Samson, The Seven Sisters: The Great Oil Companies and the World They Made, quoted in Horace Campbell, op.cit, p.86.

13 Horace Campbell, op.cit, p.115. See this and following pages for more on the financialization of the U.S. energy industries.

Cruelty of Capitalism

(posted to FB by Cedric Bedaitsch.)

... In my view, Trump represented a fraction of American capital that had it's base in capitalists whose primary source of accumulation lay in the domestic market: this included small businesses as well as larger real estate enterprises, developers, hospitality operators, retailers, residual manufacturers for local consumption - but mainly in the commercial / trading sectors.

And yet, the Trump accumulation 'strategy' was most empowering to:

* Wall Street

* the Military-Industrial Complex

* the fossil fuel majors

And the anticipated infrastructure program didn't happen so 'developer' capitalists, real estate and those seeking a Chinese(2009-13)-style building boom were surely disappointed.

Also, the commercial/mercantile elites were probably most disappointed insofar as trade/GDP ratios had been falling across the world since peaking in 2007, and that continued from 2017-19, in part because of Trumpian excesses in trade disputes and his paralyzing of the WTO.