Michael James : Baseball in Moscow and 'Turf Accountant' in Belfast

Turf Accountant, a betting parlor in Belfast, Northern Ireland, August 7, 1990. Photo by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.

Pictures from the Long Haul:
Playing baseball in the USSR and
drinking Guinness in Belfast

In Belfast we drive to the battlefield called the Falls Road, working class and traditionally socialist. I shoot pictures of buildings and people, and a betting parlor that is called 'Turf Accountant.'

By Michael James / The Rag Blog / June 26, 2013

[In this series, Michael James is sharing images from his rich past, accompanied by reflections about -- and inspired by -- those images. This photo will be included in his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.]

I have to go through Shannon, Ireland, to get to the Soviet Union in 1990 -- both going and coming -- and both ways I observe people drinking Guinness early in the morning, when getting off planes and before boarding planes. Another observation: I like the Soviet/Russian planes, particularly that the armrest on the aisle goes up, freeing you to turn and talk to your neighbors, put your legs in the aisle somewhere over Poland, to move around.

In the USSR our delegation of already aging left-wing Athletes United for Peace plays baseball at Moscow State on a beautiful baseball diamond built by the Japanese. In Donetsk we play ball in a soccer stadium, run a baseball clinic, meet with striking miners, and run in a race with striking miners, many running barefoot.

We visit Sochi and Leningrad too. The husband/dad of the family I stay with in Leningrad was a member of the Soviet Olympic Volleyball team He takes me to a wonderful ancient bathhouse, and -- being Jewish -- fills me in on some Soviet realities.

On the trip I bond with comrade brother Mike Klonsky; we are roommates and share some swell activities and observations. We are tovarischs -- comrades -- forever. On the plane back are lots of Cubans; I trade them my rubles for their pesos. In Shannon, I say goodbye to Klonsky and others, and head off with Guy Benjamin and Dan Goich, retired pro football players.

We rent a car and head for the Fitzgerald's in Tullah. Relatives of my longtime friend and business partner Katy Hogan, they treat us to nips of whiskey and sandwiches. Then on toward the West Coast, Galway, and a place to stay in Ennis, a bed and breakfast owned by Mary Monahan. I just assume she is a relative of the Monahan's in my Chicago neighborhood, the so-called Peoples Republic of Rogers Park. We fall out by 9:30.

In the morning Mary nourishes us, and then we're off. Guy stops in town for a Guinness at Mahoney's thatch-roofed pub. I buy film, and two tapes, one by my man George Jones, the other a collection of Tulla bands, 1946-1986. We stop by the water in Galway, and then drive to a town called Westport. My hometown is Westport, Connecticut, so I buy saltwater taffy that says Westport on it, and drive the next leg to Sligo by the Atlantic. Driving while sitting on the right side of a blue Ford, and driving on the left side of the road, is very strange.

We stay in Sligo, but backtrack a bit to a place we learn about, Kilcullen's Seaweed Baths in Enniscrone, Sligo County. They were great: a big tub of seaweed and hot seawater -- plenty of it with a cold freshwater shower overhead the middle of the tub.

We cross into Northern Ireland. I had spent two weeks in the USSR and saw zilch for guns and weaponry. Crossing into Northern Ireland there were machine gun turrets, barbed wire, cement barriers, zig zag-driving lanes, and guys in full-bore combat outfits. Whoa and wow. Wow and whoa.

In Belfast we drive to the battlefield called the Falls Road, working class and traditionally socialist. I shoot pictures of buildings and people, and a betting parlor that is called "Turf Accountant." Back in Belfast center Dan buys us a big steak lunch at a nice place.

We make our way south, through another checkpoint, drive over to the Irish Sea at Clogherhead, and find a bed and breakfast around sunset that's run by the McEvoy family, in a place called Termonfeckin. That's Termonfeckin! We settle in, take a walk on the beach, and then go for more Guinness at a local pub.

Jim McEvoy turns out to be a masters 800-meter champion. He knows the Irish running scene, and I tell him about my Loyola track coach pal Gordon Thomson. Jim also raises barley for Guinness, and raises Belgium Blue cattle. In the morning we hang out with Jim, his nine-year-old daughter Bernette, and a humongous 16-month-old bull, who acts like a cute, passive, and loveable puppy.

On to Dublin, we walk around this urban energy city, have coffee at Brawley's, see a store called Chicago, and have big lamb chops at The Old Stand in the financial district. We take in Trinity University, dig its' ancient vibe, and then head out. By evening we're on the bank of the River Shannon near Limerick, staying at the Anchor Inn, sleeping upstairs from Irish Molly's traditional music pub. The music and revelry goes on late into the night.

In the morning its cereal, sausage, Irish bacon, eggs, cooked tomatoes, OJ, toast and coffee. Before you know it, we're in the Shannon airport. Guy gets another Guinness, we board, and after two weeks in the USSR and 96 hours in Ireland, we cross the blue waters to New York and west, back to life in the good old US of A.

[Michael James is a former SDS national officer, the founder of Rising Up Angry, co-founder of Chicago's Heartland Café (1976 and still going), and co-host of the Saturday morning (9-10 a.m. CDT) Live from the Heartland radio show, here and on YouTube. He is reachable by one and all at michael@heartlandcafe.com. Find more articles by Michael James on The Rag Blog.]

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Harry Targ : From the Bay of Pigs to the Missile Crisis / 3

Front page of New York Daily News, October 23, 1962. From the Mitchell Archives.
The Cuba story, Part 3:
The Bay of Pigs to the missile crisis

The Cuban missile crisis suggests that the United States would go to any extreme, even nuclear war, to defend the interests of capitalism.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / October 17, 2012

"In the missile crisis the Kennedys played their dangerous game skillfully... But all their skill would have been to no avail if in the end Khrushchev had preferred his prestige, as they preferred theirs, to the danger of a world war. In this respect we are all indebted to Khrushchev." (I.F. Stone,“What If Khrushchev Hadn’t Backed Down?” in In a Time of Torment, Vintage, 1967)

[Part three of three.]

The Kennedy Administration goes to the brink of nuclear war

The period between the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, the announcement of the Alliance for Progress economic assistance program, and the Cuban Missile Crisis was one of escalating hostilities. Fidel Castro declared Cuba a Socialist state. The United States pressured members of the Organization of American States (OAS) to expel Cuba.

The CIA began campaigns to assassinate the Cuban leader and President Kennedy initiated the complete economic blockade that exists until today. In addition, Castro warned that the U.S. was continuing to plan for another invasion. The Soviet Union began providing more economic and military support to the Cubans, including anti-aircraft missiles and jet aircraft.

In October 1962, U.S. spy planes sighted the construction of Soviet surface-to-air missile installations and the presence of Soviet medium-range bombers on Cuban soil. These sightings were made after Republican leaders had begun to attack Kennedy for allowing a Soviet military presence on the island. Kennedy had warned the Soviets in September not to install “offensive” military capabilities in Cuba. Photos indicated that the Soviets had also begun to build ground-to-ground missile installations on the island, which Kennedy defined as “offensive” and a threat to national security.

After securing the photographs Kennedy assembled a special team of advisors, known as EXCOM, to discuss various responses the United States might make. He excluded any strategy that prioritized taking the issue to the United Nations for resolution.

After much deliberation EXCOM focused on two policy responses: a strategic air strike against Soviet targets in Cuba or a blockade of incoming Soviet ships coupled with threats of further action if the Soviet missiles were not withdrawn. Both options had a high probability of escalating to nuclear war if the Soviet Union refused to back down.

High drama, much of it televised, followed the initiation of a naval blockade of Soviet ships heading across the Atlantic to Cuba. Fortunately, the leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, sent notes to the President that led to a tacit agreement between the two leaders whereby Soviet missiles would be withdrawn from Cuba and the United States would promise not to invade Cuba to overthrow the Castro government. In addition, the President indicated that obsolete U.S. missiles in Turkey would be disassembled over time.

Most scholars argue that the missile crisis constituted Kennedy’s finest hour as statesman and diplomat. They agree with the administration view that the missiles constituted a threat to U.S. security, despite Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s claim in EXCOM meetings that the missiles did not change the strategic balance between the United States and the Soviet Union. Most of these scholars have agreed that the symbolic value of the installation of Soviet missiles could have had grave consequences for U.S. “credibility.”

Given the importance of the missiles, leading social scientists have written that the Kennedy team carefully considered a multitude of policy responses. EXCOM did not ignore competing analyses, as had been done in the decisional process prior to the Bay of Pigs. The blockade policy that was adopted, experts believe, constituted a rational application of force that it was hoped would lead to de-escalation of tensions. All observers agreed that the United States and the Soviet Union had gone to the brink of nuclear war. Even the President estimated that there was a 50 percent probability of full-scale nuclear war.

In the end the Soviets withdrew their missiles. Analysts said the Soviet Union suffered a propaganda defeat for putting the missiles on Cuban soil in the first place and then withdrawing them after U.S. threats. Khrushchev was criticized by the Chinese government and within a year he was ousted from leadership in the Soviet Union.

In the light of this U.S. “victory,” Kennedy has been defined as courageous and rational. The real meaning of the Cuban Missile Crisis, however, is different, even 50 years after the event. The crisis actually suggests that the United States quest to maintain and enhance its empire would lead it to go to any extreme, even nuclear war, to defend the interests of capitalism. To avoid serious losses, whether symbolic or material, for capitalism, any policy was justified.

Further, in terms of U.S. politics, Kennedy was calculating the effects of the missiles on the chances for his party to retain control of Congress in 1962. A second “defeat” over Cuba (the Bay of Pigs was the first) would have heightened the opposition’s criticisms of his foreign policy.

Finally, in personal terms, Kennedy was driven by the need to establish a public image as courageous and powerful in confronting the Soviets. Khrushchev had spoken harshly to him at a summit meeting in Vienna in 1961 and Castro had been victorious at the Bay of Pigs. The President’s own “credibility” had been damaged and a show of force in October 1962, was necessary for his career.

Because of imperialism, politics, and personal political fortunes, the world almost went to nuclear war 50 years ago. As I.F. Stone suggested shortly after the crisis, nuclear war was avoided because the Soviet Union chose to withdraw from the tense conflict rather than to engage in it further.

National Security Archives files referred to in an earlier blog suggest, "the historical record shows that the decisions leading to the crisis which almost brought nuclear war have been repeated over and over again since the early 1960s." The danger of the unabashed and irresponsible use of force and the legitimation of the idea that diplomacy can be conducted using nuclear weapons and other devastating weapons systems still represents a threat to human survival.

This is the third of three articles that address U.S./Cuban relations that culminated in a crisis over Cuba that almost led to nuclear war. These essays are adapted from my book, Strategy of an Empire in Decline: Cold War II, 1986.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical -- and that's also the name of his book from Changemaker Press which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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INTERVIEW / Jonah Raskin : Steven Halliwell, To Russia With Love

To Russia with love:
A Rag Blog interview with Steven Halliwell

What Russia shows us is that there’s no easy fix. Getting to a common global discussion is the biggest challenge of the 21st century.

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / June 1, 2012

Steven Halliwell might be our ambassador to Russia -- had there been a revolution in the U.S.A. in the 1960s.

A member of SDS, and a protester arrested at Columbia in the spring of 1968, Halliwell has long been an outlier. In his SDS days, while most of his friends and comrades were gazing at China, Cuba, and Vietnam, Halliwell learned Russian and turned his eyes on Russian history, the Soviet Union, and the Kremlin.

Revolutions -- Russian and American -- have occupied his thoughts ever since 1963, when he traveled to the U.S.S.R, as part of the first student exchange program between the U.S. and the Soviet Union that helped, albeit in a small way, to end the Cold War.

The names have changed, of course. It’s not the U.S.S.R. or Leningrad anymore. Still, over the course of the past 50 years, Halliwell has gone back to the same familiar and yet not so familiar places dozens of times as a student, tourist, and entrepreneur.

Few Americans in or out of academia and in or out of the diplomatic service know Russia as well as he does, and few are as emotionally and intellectually connected as he is to the land of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, perestroika, Putin, and the new generation that’s demanding human and individual rights.

Born in New Jersey in 1943, Halliwell attended Wesleyan and Columbia, taught college in Vermont, and worked at the United Nations when Andrew Young was President Jimmy Carter’s UN Ambassador. In 1985, he joined Citibank and helped to open the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to American enterprise.

In 1994, he left Citibank to become the Chief Financial Officer of a U.S. Government-backed investment fund for Russia. From 1997 to 2010, he ran his own investment firm, River Capital International.

With his wife, Anne, he lives outside New York, not far from his children and grandchildren. I’ve known the Halliwells since the 1960s, and, while they’ve moved on from their days in SDS, they’re as much a part of SDS history as the SDS members, such as Mike Spiegel, Bob Pardun, and Carl Davidson, who served with Steve on SDS’s National Interim Committee in 1967-1968.

On the cusp of 70, he might be too old to serve as the U.S. Ambassador to Russia. Moreover, the current U.S. Ambassador, Michael McFaul, is a friend. Behind the scenes, and at meetings, as well as over the Internet, he provides a living link between New York and Moscow, Americans and Russians, and between the land of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and the land of Herman Melville and Walt Whitman.

Steven Halliwell: To Russia with love.
Jonah Raskin: For decades, I’ve been listening to you tell memorable stories about Russia. What really sticks in your mind?

Steven Halliwell: Some moments are fun, others are sad. Lots of people died in the 1990s, including a banker who was a friend. The head of a company I knew was shot leaving his apartment and his seven-year-old daughter was killed. Early on, I took Russians through a Citibank trading floor -- a real market in action -- and inevitably they’d say, “it’s too noisy for anyone to work!”

You were in SDS and part of the New Left. How did that experience help you to understand Soviet communism?

Complete disconnect. Communism was a way to force industrialization and the modernization of agriculture. The New Left was about post-industrial society, and how to manage the incredible surplus created by technology in a democratic order. I found U.S.A. "Communists" – members of the Communist Party and Progressive Labor – to be troglodytes.

How did your New Left experience blind you to Russia?

Despite my training in Russian history in the 1960s, I thought that perestroika could lead to a new democratic political order and a market economy. Russians were more practically minded. They focused on surviving the collapse of the Soviet system and getting goodies -- TV's, laptops, pretty clothes, makeup, and credit cards -- from what they call the "civilized" world.

In 1968 and 1969, when activists and protestors thought of Russia they thought about the Russian Revolution, Lenin, and the Winter Palace. Now, if they think about Russia it’s probably about corruption, vast fortunes, and alcoholism. What’s the real Russia?

Alcohol was always an issue, and Russia has always been corrupt, including during the Soviet period. If a Politburo member needed surgery in London, they’d have an Aeroflot jet ready in hours. Same old same old.

As a student of history in the 1960s what drew you to the history of Russia and the Soviet Union?

Growing up in a WASP family in the 1950's, there was something liberating about Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and the big questions they posed in their writing. At the same time, Russia was the Enemy in the Cold War. I found the tension fascinating and started to learn Russian at 14.

It must be difficult to obtain accurate information these days from Russians about their own society because it’s closed in many ways. How do you do it?

I could tell you... but then I would have to kill you. But seriously, the blogosphere in Russia is very active. Of course, you never use Putin's name in a phone or Skype call because that's what the monitors are listening for.

I’ve heard you talk about the “backwardness” of Russian society. What do you have in mind?

Russia is so backward it might be forward. Russia, because of its geographical location, has been working for hundreds of years on how to reconcile Confucian, Greco-Roman, Islamic, and Judeo-Christian traditions. What Russia shows us is that there’s no easy fix. Getting to a common global discussion is the biggest challenge of the 21st century.

How would you describe the Obama administration’s policy vis-à-vis Russia?

Michael McFaul, Obama's ambassador to Russia and a friend, is smart, pragmatic, and youthful. He and Hillary Clinton have the right mix of pressure and conciliation. The missile shield in Eastern Europe is the most volatile and hardest issue to address.

Is the ruling class of Russia essentially like the American ruling class?

I don't believe there is an American "ruling class." Russia's current rulers are heavily skewed toward ex-KGB people who only know how to take value, not add it. There’s a heavy criminal element at the top.

What does recent Russian experience tell you about democracy as a political system?

The most common slogan in the recent Russian demonstrations was "We are not cattle" -- an indication of the growing sense of individual rights. Russia has no history of incremental reform, which will make getting to democracy very difficult.

What do you love most about Russia and Russians?

Anne and I have met many beautiful, talented, dedicated people. There’s a creative intensity that goes hand-in-hand with hard-nosed survival in a dysfunctional world.

What do you most detest about Russians?

"Detest" is the wrong word. A young Mexican Sovietologist wrote an insightful article entitled "Russia as a Borderline Personality." The damage done by so many years of terror, corruption, absolutism, and murder is still very pervasive.

Did the fall of the Soviet Union influence the lives of ordinary Russians?

It's given the urban younger generation a chance to see how the rest of the world looks. Forty percent of 18 to 24 year olds say they’d like to emigrate. For poorer rural and industrial working people, the loss of the old subsidies (which were unsustainable) has been a nightmare. Essentially, power based on political standing has been traded for power based on money.

Do you see parallels between American and Russian radicals?

The history of the Russian Revolution, which I was studying at Columbia during the heyday of SDS, showed me that a student movement that idealized the downtrodden (in the 1860's) could turn to underground violence (in the 1880's). The same kind of cult-like idiocy in the U.S. destroyed a broad-based movement.

Is it possible for western investment in Russia to benefit Russian society as a whole and not simply a small elite?

There has already been a huge increase in the standard of living in Russian cities, thanks in large part to Western investment. The Russian elite has benefited, not from Western investment, but from stealing export dollars. Russia exports seven million barrels of crude oil every day. At $100 per barrel, that's $700 million dollars a day of hard currency. There are a handful of decent Russians managing profitable businesses that raise the standard of living, but most of the oligarchs with access to the huge flood of resource dollars use it to buy respectability in Europe and the U.S.

How do you feel when you see images and read stories about Russian citizens protesting Putin and his policies?

I hope it continues. Putin can’t tolerate widespread middle class dissent. He will crush the Internet if that proves to be an organizing tool. There are reports that Putin plans to create a National Guard of 300-400,000 troops answerable directly to him. He has also moved the former head of emergency response into the governorship of Moscow. Not good signs.

What kinds of legacies still exist from the days of the Cold War and the U.S./ U.S.S.R. rivalry?

As long the U.S. is a global power, there will always be issues and rivalries. At some point, the overseas Russian communities will play a seminal role in changing the place. As we learned in the civil rights movement, you can never break a police state from the inside alone. Overseas Russians will at some point take on the challenge of bringing Russia into the 21st century.

If you could be in Moscow next week what would a day in your life look like?

I have partners there and there are always interesting projects to consider. Business meetings are pretty much like here, as long as you stay away from government toadies. There are great restaurants now -- when I went to Moscow for Citibank in 1987, there was only one privately owned restaurant in the whole city. Now there are thousands.

You’ve known New York bankers and Moscow bankers? Are bankers more or less the same here and there?

Bankers are people -- some are good guys, some are rotten. During the 1990's, there was much more gangster-type banking in Moscow with automatic weapons at the doors. Today, the biggest growth area is consumer finance -- home mortgages, credit cards. There is still a very stunted corporate lending market, because companies are very opaque and lending is politicized.

What is it that links the Steve Halliwell of SDS days with the Steve Halliwell who has invested money in the Soviet Union and Russia? Are you the same person?

The main link is Anne, my partner and love of 44 years. We came to SDS from very different backgrounds and personal agendas, but somehow it has worked. She and I have evolved in our views over the years, as have our former comrades, but at the core we’re still the same people who fell in love inside the movement. It's been and continues to be a fascinating journey.

[Jonah Raskin is the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman, and editor of The Radical Jack London: Writings on War and Revolution. A former Yippie, he is a a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Jonah Raskin : Schneir's 'Final Verdict' on Rosenbergs Offers No Such Thing

Walter Schneir's 'Final Verdict':
New book on Rosenbergs fails to deliver

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / November 6, 2010

[Final Verdict: What Really Happened in the Rosenberg Case by Walter Schneir; Preface and Afterword by Miriam Schneir (Melville House, 2010); Hardcover; 203 pages; $23.95.]

Final Verdict, the book Walter Schneir was writing when he died, and before he could finish it, came to me highly recommended and I can understand why. For students and scholars who have followed the case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg -- the New York Jewish couple who were executed in 1953 as spies for the Russians -- this book offers tantalizing stories and anecdotes.

It certainly keeps the case alive, but in no way does it close the book on the Rosenbergs, and in that sense the title is misleading. So is the subtitle: “What really happened in the Rosenberg case.” Whatever did happen, this book never makes clear. Let me explain.

There is no “final verdict” in Final Verdict; there are only more questions, more doubts, and more disquieting revelations. Here are some of the words that Schneir uses that reflect his perspective on the Rosenberg case: “baffling,” “mystery,” “frustrating,” “incomplete,” “presumably,” and more.

All too often, he writes phrases such as “I cannot resist wondering,” “for reasons unknown,” and “I have often pondered the question.” While they might be taken as the author’s own authentic disclosures about his troubled journey, they hardly inspire confidence about his methods and his conclusion. Final Verdict is a jumble and a mumble.

Reading Walter’s Schneir’s last book -- it comes with a preface and an afterword by his widow, Miriam Schneir -- led me to the conclusion that there will never be a complete and satisfactory explanation of who the Rosenbergs really were and what they might or might not have done.

As Walter Schneir himself points out, the U.S. Government lied about the Rosenbergs from the time they were arrested in the summer of 1950 until the time they were executed in 1953. The U.S. government refused to release their files for decades. Lies were piled on top of lies on top of lies until truths were buried probably forever. The Russians kept files too, but they’re hardly more credible or reliable than those of the FBI.

The Rosenbergs, Schneir says, lied too. They affirmed their innocence, and denied their guilt, though all of the evidence today makes it clear that Julius Rosenberg was a spy for the Soviet Union in the 1940s.

Julius Rosenberg lied, and so did Ethel. That they didn’t steal the secret of the atomic bomb -- the crime they were accused of committing -- is clear (as well as the fact that there was no single “secret” of the bomb) and has been for a long time.

That they were framed, and then wrongly and unjustly executed has also been apparent for a long time and is hardly new, or news, though Schneir tries hard to frame his story as a final revelation, the key that finally unlocks the Rosenberg riddle

Sadly, Final Verdict is a book by a scholar so caught up in his own scholarship that he becomes obsessed with it and buried under the weight of it. He is a cliché of the man who searches frantically for a needle in the proverbial haystack. In his case, the haystack or haystacks, are KGB and FBI files.

Schneir’s flawed reasoning leads him to believe that the truth is to be found somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of documents about the case. In fact, the documents are false; they are compounded of lies, untruths, half-truths, suppositions, fabrications and fictions.

Having lied in public before, during, and after the trial of the Rosenbergs, there was no legitimate reason to believe, as Schneir did, that the U.S. government would tell the truth in its own files. A romantic, and an idealist, Schneir believed that the dogged reporter would inevitably find the truth, ferret it out, and publish it for all humanity to see, read, and understand. If only it were so.

There is no clear narrative in Final Verdict; no straight story we can follow; only a mish-mash of dates and names and Schneir’s reflections and observations about his own work. Moreover, he becomes the main character in the story and the Rosenberg’s become the minor characters. I don’t believe that was his intent; but, unfortunately, in these pages, Ethel and Julius recede into the background while he emerges into the foreground.

No doubt about it, Walter Schneir was a kindly, humane man. But in these pages, he is guilty of a kind of intellectual arrogance. Moreover, he tends to belittle the very individuals he set out to defend. That too is an all-too frequent problem with scholars who spend so much time with and feel so intimately connected to their subjects that they come to loathe them, or feel superior to them.

At the start of a long paragraph about Julius Rosenberg’s politics, Schneir writes, “I can well imagine that the next two years were the most exciting and fulfilling of Julius Rosenberg’s life.” Schneir goes on to say, without providing the source of his information and without a single footnote, that “Julius was a man with a head full of the fantasies about the Soviet Union then current among the far left, a blind faith in the goodness of a land he had never seen.”

How Schneir knew what was in Julius’s “head” he never says. How he knew that Julius had “blind faith” he never says either. The fact that some members of the U.S. Communist Party had blind faith in the Soviet Union does not mean that Julius Rosenberg did, and it is unfair to link Julius to those trends and patterns without evidence.

Schneir goes on to say that “Rosenberg was no great shakes as an engineer,” as though that was further proof he could not have been guilty of the crime for which he was executed.

About three-quarters of the way though the book, Schneir writes that, “it would be interesting to have a clearer picture of what Julius was up to in the postwar years, but, unfortunately, a scarcity of hard evidence makes it impossible.” The lack of hard evidence does not prevent him, however, from writing that Julius Rosenberg’s “devotion to the Soviet Union and the cause of communism never wavered.” Perhaps Julius communicated with him secretly, or perhaps Schneir was channeling Julius.

If you want to read about the Rosenberg case, read Walter and Miriam Schneir’s earlier book, Invitation to An Inquest, or We are Your Sons, by Michael and Robby Meeropol -- the sons of Ethel and Julius. Or read Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar that begins, "It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."

Or ponder the telegram that Allen Ginsberg sent to President Eisenhower in the White House in the summer of 1953: “Rosenbergs are pathetic! Government Will Sordid! Execution Obscene. America caught in crucifixion machine. Only barbarians want them burned. I say stop it before we fill our souls with death-house horrors.”

There is one very good reason to buy Final Verdict and that is the superlative black-and-white photos of the principal figures in the case. The documents in the case lie; the memories of those who lived then are no longer to be trusted. The photos are the closest things to the truth that exist.

The photos provide as real a story as we will ever know. Look at them and judge for yourself: Ethel and Julius; Ethel’s sister-in-law Ruth and her brother David; Judge Irving Kaufman who presided over the trial; Irving Saypol, the U.S. Attorney, who prosecuted, and his assistant Roy Cohen; Emmanuel Block, the Rosenberg’s lawyer. So many Jews! Indeed, the trial of the Rosenberg was all about Jews, Judaism, and anti-Semitism.

Finally, in Final Verdict, there is the amazing photo of the crowd of courageous New Yorkers who gathered on West 17th Street in Manhattan on June 19, 1953, the day of the execution, to bear witness to the deaths of Ethel and Julius and to this immense psychic and political wound to the body of America itself that has never healed, that won’t go away, that haunts this country to this day.

[Jonah Raskin is a professor of communication studies at Sonoma State University and has been writing about the Rosenbergs since 1962.]

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Bob Feldman : A People's History of Afghanistan /12

Soviet troops leaving Afghanistan, 1988. Photo by Mikhail Evstafiev / Wikimedia Commons.
Part 12: 1987-1992
A People’s History of Afghanistan

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / June 21, 2010

[If you're a Rag Blog reader who wonders how the Pentagon ended up getting stuck "waist deep in the Big Muddy" in Afghanistan (to paraphrase a 1960s Pete Seeger song) -- and still can't understand, "what are we fighting for?" (to paraphrase a 1960s Country Joe McDonald song) -- this 15-part "People's History of Afghanistan" might help you debate more effectively those folks who still don't oppose the planned June 2010 U.S. military escalation in Afghanistan? The series so far can be found here.]

In 2010 more than 600 individuals were still imprisoned by the Democratic Obama Administration at its Bagram detention facility in Afghanistan, and many of these Bagram prisoners have apparently been held without access to lawyers or an opportunity to legally challenge the basis of their imprisonment for as long as six years.

Yet none of the U.S. government officials responsible for escalating the covert and overt U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan since the 1970s have ever been held legally accountable for the morally disastrous humanitarian effects their policies have had on the history of people in Afghanistan.

Yet in April 1986, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA)-Parcham faction leader who had been installed in late December 1979 by Soviet troops as the head of the PDPA regime in Afghanistan -- Babrak Karmal -- was replaced by the former head of the PDPA regime’s secret police, Dr. Mohammad Najibullah, after Najibullah was elected by the PDPA’s Central Committee to be its new general secretary.

Subsequently, on January 1, 1987, the new PDPA regime head of state attempted to bring peace to the people of Afghanistan and negotiate an end to the 1980s Afghan war by announcing a “program of `national reconciliation’ comprising three key elements: a six-month unilateral cease-fire, the formation of a government of `national unity’ and the return of over 5 million refugees from Pakistan and Iran,” according to Angelo Rasanayagam’s Afghanistan: A Modern History. The same book also recalled:

An "Extraordinary Supreme Commission for National Reconciliation" was set up and branches were opened all over the country. Their job was to make contact with refugees... in exile or fighting with resistance groups, pass on the message of peace, and distribute essential relief items for the use of returning refugees. Other inducements offered were tax concessions, the return of confiscated property and the deferment of military service.

Radio Kabul started calling the Mujahideen fighters "angry brothers" rather than "bandits." Some 4000... prisoners were released. Six months later, just before the expiring of the 6-month ceasefire, Najibullah was able to claim that 59,000 refugees had returned; tens of thousands of men were negotiating with the government; 4,000 representatives of the opposition had been included in the reconciliation committees; and coalition governments had already been formed in several villages, sub-districts, districts and provinces.”

But the alliance of seven U.S., Pakistan, and Saudi government-sponsored anti-feminist Afghan political parties apparently “turned down with disbelief and contempt” the January 1987 peace proposals of the PDPA regime in Afghanistan. As the same book explained:

The Islamic parties... claiming to represent the Mujahideen resistance had developed into vested interests that were not receptive to power-sharing arrangements. They and their Pakistani sponsors, replete with funds and weapons generously contributed by "the international community," developed their own agendas for a post-Soviet Afghanistan…The parties owed their "influence" to the fact that they served as somewhat porous conduits for the U.S. and Saudi funds and weapons channeled to the resistance fighters inside Afghanistan by Pakistan’s ISI [Inter-Service Intelligence]...

Ironically, “a survey among Afghan refugees conducted in 1987 by one of Afghanistan’s outstanding academics and intellectuals, Professor S.B. Majrooh, found that less than half a percent of those polled would choose one of the seven” Afghan Islamic political party “leaders to rule a free Afghanistan,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History. Coincidentally, the Union of Mujahideen (a coalition of these seven unpopular Islamic parties) apparently then arranged for Professor Majrooh to be assassinated in his office in Peshawar on February 11, 1988, shortly after his survey results were made public.

Yet despite the rejection of its January 1987 peace proposals by the U.S., Pakistani and Saudi government-sponsored Islamic parties, the PDPA regime extended its unilateral January 1987 ceasefire in Afghanistan for another six months in June 1987, and it invited its right-wing Afghan political opponents to suggest changes in the draft of a proposed new Afghan constitution which it published in July 1987.

The proposed new Afghan constitution -- that set up a democratic, multiparty parliamentary political system in Afghanistan in which Islam was the state religion -- was then formally approved by the PDPA regime’s parliament (jirga) in November 1987.

On February 8, 1988, the Gorbachev regime in the Soviet Union next announced that on May 15, 1988, it would start to withdraw the 85,000 Soviet troops still in Afghanistan, and that it would have all Soviet troops pulled out of Afghanistan by March 15, 1989.

Parliamentary elections were then held in Afghanistan in April 1988 in which the National Fatherland Front [NFF] and other newly formed Afghan parties won more seats in the new, democratically-elected Afghan parliament than did the PDPA -- which just won 22 percent of the parliamentary seats. In addition, 25 percent of the seats in the lower house of the new Afghan parliament were left vacant for representatives of the Islamic opposition parties in Afghanistan- -- that were still unwilling to negotiate an agreement in 1988 that would finally bring peace to Afghanistan.

A peace agreement between the Pakistani government and the Afghan government -- guaranteed by both the Reagan Administration and the Gorbachev regime in the Soviet Union -- was, however, signed on April 14, 1988. But after the withdrawal of all Soviet troops from Afghanistan was completed in February 1989, Pakistan’s “ISI drew up the battle plans and arranged the logistics, the intelligence and the communications,” for a March 7, 1989, attack from Pakistan by its Afghan Mujahideen units, according to Afghanistan: A Modern History.

Although the Mujahideen quickly “captured the government base of Samarkhel, 12 miles south-east of Jalalabad,” their march to the local airport “ran into heavy resistance.” As Afghanistan: A Modern History observed, “despite human wave assaults and a heavy bombardment of the city that cost over 2,000 mostly civilian lives, the Muhajideen could not advance any further. And in July 1989 the Afghan government military forces were able to easily retake its Samarkhel base, where they found that 70 captured Afghan army officers had been murdered by the ISI-organized Mujahideen.”

Without the support of any Soviet troops, the army of the Najibullah regime’s Afghan government in 1989 was also able to defend Jalalabad “against the most massive attack ever undertaken by the Mujahideen during the whole war,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History.

And, despite a failed coup attempt by the Minister of Defense of the Afghan government regime in March 1990, Najibullah’s regime did not collapse until there was a successful 1992 Afghan military coup which, according to Dator Zayar’s October 2001 “Afghanistan: An Historical View” article, was “planned by the CIA and ISI” and “prepared the way for the capture of Kabul by the Islamic fundamentalists.”

Afghan President Najibullah then announced in early April 1992 that he would resign as part of a UN-brokered transition of power and “Kabul now became the scene for a power struggle between four main armed” Mujahadeen “groups,” according to Afghanistan: The Mirage of Peace by Chris Johnson and Jolyon Leslie.

By April 1992, the commanders of the various Mujahideen guerrilla groups were also deriving a major source of their personal income from Afghanistan’s lucrative drug trade. As Trinity College Professor and International Studies Program Director Vijay Prashad wrote in his “War Against The Planet” article that was posted on the CounterPunch website:

The opium harvest at the Pakistan-Afghan border doubled between 1982 and 1983 (575 tons), but by the end of the decade it would grow to 800 tons. On June 18, 1986, the New York Times reported that the Mujahideen "have been involved in narcotics activities as a matter of policy to finance their operations."

In his Killing Hope book, William Blum also wrote:

...Mujahideen commanders inside Afghanistan personally controlled huge fields of opium poppies, the raw material from which heroin is refined. CIA-supplied trucks and mules, which had carried arms into Afghanistan, were used to transport some of the opium to the numerous laboratories along the Afghan-Pakistan border, whence many tons of heroin were processed with the cooperation of the Pakistani military. The output provided an estimated one-third to one-half of the heroin used annually in the United States and three-quarters of that used in Western Europe...”

Next: “A People’s History of Afghanistan—13: 1992-1998"

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s.]

• Previous installments of "A People's History of Afghanistan" by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog can be found here.

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Bob Feldman : A People's History of Afghanistan /10

Deputy Premier Hafizullah Amin (on right) is shown in this series of frames swearing his allegiance to Premier Noor Mohammad Taraki in 1979, shortly before arranging to have him assassinated. Image from BBC.
Part 10: 1979-1981
A People’s History of Afghanistan

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / June 14, 2010

[If you're a Rag Blog reader who wonders how the Pentagon ended up getting stuck "waist deep in the Big Muddy" in Afghanistan (to paraphrase a 1960s Pete Seeger song) -- and still can't understand, "what are we fighting for?" (to paraphrase a 1960s Country Joe McDonald song) -- this 15-part "People's History of Afghanistan" might help you debate more effectively those folks who still don't oppose the planned June 2010 U.S. military escalation in Afghanistan? The series so far can be found here.]

In 2010 the Democratic Obama Administration is spending another $95 billion on the Pentagon’s endless war in Afghanistan . Yet many viewers of PBS-affiliated television stations or readers of Rolling Stone magazine in the USA still probably know more about the history of rock music since the 1950s than about the hidden history of Afghanistan since 1979.

In September 1979, for example, supporters of People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan [PDPA]-Khalq Premier Noor Mohammad Taraki discovered that PDPA-Khalq was plotting to kill Taraki -- after political disagreements between the two PDPA-Khalq government leaders developed between March 1979 and July 1979, and Amin apparently began appointing just members of his own family to fill important Afghan government posts.

But Amin was still able to force Taraki to resign as Afghan prime minister on September 15, 1979, following Taraki’s return from abroad after attending a conference of leaders of non-aligned nations. And Amin apparently then arranged for former PDPA-Khalq leader Taraki to be killed on October 8 or 9, 1979.

When Taraki had visited Moscow in March 1979 to first request that Soviet ground troops be sent into Afghanistan to help his government’s Afghan army defeat the anti-feminist Mujahdeen guerrillas, the Brezhnev regime had refused at that time to send large numbers of Soviet troops across the border into Afghanistan.

But Taraki -- who, along with Amin, had personally signed in Moscow the December 5, 1978, Treaty of Friendship between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan -- had apparently been considered friendlier to the Soviet Union than the Columbia University Teachers College and University of Wisconsin-trained Amin

So after Taraki was killed, the Brezhnev regime in the Soviet Union apparently decided that the PDPA-Parcham faction leader that Amin had demoted in late June 1978 -- Babrak Karmal -- should replace Amin as Afghan head of state (if large-scale Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan was required to prevent the U.S. and Pakistani-backed Afghan Mujahideen militias -- which by then controlled 23 of Afghanistan’s 28 provinces -- from quickly overthrowing the increasingly unpopular government that had been established by the April 1978 Saur Revolution).

On December 12, 1979, the Brezhnev regime did decide to order large numbers of Soviet ground troops to cross the Soviet-Afghan border and march into Afghanistan on December 23, 1979. One result of this internationally unpopular December 1979 decision was that 13,369 members of the Soviet military would subsequently be killed (and 35,578 troops would be wounded), according to official Soviet government casualty figures.

On December 27, 1979, 300 Soviet commandos then surrounded and attacked Amin’s residence at 7 p.m.-- at the same time that other Soviet troops seized Kabul’s radio station. An apparently recorded message from PDPA-Parcham faction leader Karmal, announcing that he was the new head of the Afghan government, was then broadcast over the radio -- while Amin and Amin loyalists unsuccessfully fought until 1 a.m. against the 300 Soviet commandos who were attempting to arrest Amin. After being taken to Soviet military headquarters in Kabul, Amin was apparently then executed.

The Democratic Carter Administration next used the Brezhnev regime’s internationally unpopular military response to the Pakistani and U.S. governments’ covert support for regime change and the right-wing Mujahadeen insurgency in Afghanistan as a pretext for once again requiring U.S. men between 18 and 26 years of age to register for a future U.S. military draft. As Democratic President Carter explained in his January 23, 1980 State of the Union speech:

The region which is now threatened by Soviet troops in Afghanistan is of great strategic importance: It contains more than two-thirds of the world's exportable oil. The Soviet effort to dominate Afghanistan has brought Soviet military forces to within 300 miles of the Indian Ocean and close to the Straits of Hormuz, a waterway through which most of the world's oil must flow. The Soviet Union is now attempting to consolidate a strategic position, therefore, that poses a grave threat to the free movement of Middle East oil.

This situation demands careful thought, steady nerves, and resolute action, not only for this year but for many years to come... It demands the participation of all those who rely on oil from the Middle East...

I believe that our volunteer forces are adequate for current defense needs, and I hope that it will not become necessary to impose a draft. However, we must be prepared for that possibility. For this reason, I have determined that the Selective Service System must now be revitalized. I will send legislation and budget proposals to the Congress next month so that we can begin registration and then meet future mobilization needs rapidly if they arise...

Former Columbia University Professor and then-National Security Affairs Advisor Brzezinski then visited Pakistan in February 1980 and “met with General Akhtar, the ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] chief, as well as with [then-Pakistan] president Zia-al-Haq and with CIA station chief in Islamabad John J. Reagan,” according to John Cooley’s Unholy War: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism.

But because covert CIA aid to the Afghan resistance fighters violated international law, “both Washington and Islamabad went to extraordinary lengths to cover up their” increased military “assistance to the Afghan Mujahideen,” according to Angelo Rasanayagam’s Afghanistan: A Modern History. The same book also noted that “for this reason it was decided that only Warsaw Pact weaponry would be delivered, as such weapons could not be traced back to the US...”

So “the Cold Warriors in Langley, Virginia” then “developed... a top-secret program, codenamed SOVMAT,” which “was probably unknown even to President Zia al-Haq and the holy-war commanders in Pakistan’s ISI,” according to Unholy War. The same book also described how the CIA’s secret SOVMAT program of the early 1980s operated:

Working with a vast army of phony corporations and fronts, the CIA under the SOVMAT program would buy weapons from East European governments and governmental organizations... Their acquisition and testing by the U.S. military and the CIA facilitated development of counter-measures, such as improved anti-tank weapons used by the Mujahideen...

“Officials running the CIA’s SOVMAT program provided wish lists for CIA and ISI officers operating from Pakistan, who sent their Afghan mercenaries to ransack Soviet supply depots... Some Afghan fighters were taught in their CIA-managed training by the ISI in Pakistan to strip Soviet SPETZNAZ or special forces soldiers of their weapons...

Next: “A People’s History of Afghanistan—11: 1981-1987"

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s.]

• Previous installments of "A People's History of Afghanistan" by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog can be found here.

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U.S. in Afghanistan : 1979-2009

Afghanistan: Mujahedin in 1984. Photo from U.S. Foreign Policy in Perspective.
The thirty years war:
The United States in Afghanistan

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / December 27, 2009

When the Soviet Union sent 85,000 of its troops to Afghanistan in late December 1979 President Carter declared that the United States was forced to return to Cold War military preparedness. But, in fact, the Carter administration had been escalating military commitments and operations throughout 1979, months before the Soviet action.

In a brief televised address two weeks after the Soviet invasion, the President denounced it as “a deliberate effort by a powerful atheistic government to subjugate an independent Islamic people.” He said it threatened “both Iran and Pakistan” and was “a stepping-stone” for the Soviets' possible control “over much of the world’s oil supplies.”

The President followed his brief condemnation with a lengthy State of the Union address to the American people on January 21, 1980. In it he announced some extraordinary changes in United States foreign policy that constituted a decisive return to Cold War with the Soviet Union.

The changes Carter initiated included the following: reduction of grain sales to the Soviet Union; curtailment of high technology trade with them; postponement of ratification of the SALT II arms control agreement; enlarging strategic forces; beefing up NATO forces; establishing a Caribbean Joint Task Force Headquarters; unleashing the CIA; installing a program of draft registration; and providing more military assistance to Pakistan, South Korea, and Thailand.

Perhaps the most important policy change was the establishment of a 100,000 person military “rapid deployment force” which could be instantly mobilized in crisis situations. And he proclaimed that the Persian Gulf was vital to U.S. security interests and would be protected; this became known as the Carter Doctrine.

All these announced changes were billed by administration spokespersons as a response to the duplicitous Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Ultimately, the Soviets wanted to invade Iran, secure Persian Gulf oil, secure warm water ports, and expand their Asian empire. The U.S., they said, had to respond to this expansion of the Cold War.

But a careful examination of the events of 1979 prior to the Soviet invasion suggests a different timeline and interpretation. In January 1979 the Shah of Iran, the closest of U.S. allies, was toppled in a revolution. Carter's aides initially had urged him to send troops to Teheran to save our Persian Gulf cop from ouster but the revolution came too fast to save the Shah.

After Iran, in the Caribbean and Central America revolutions occurred in tiny Grenada (March 1979) and historically anti-Communist Nicaragua (July 1979). There was a coup by military reformers in El Salvador (October 1979). In early November 1979 Iranian students took approximately 70 U.S. government representatives hostage.

The administration perceived itself as being threatened by the spread of hostile regimes and movements and the collapse of the vital ally in Iran was deemed the most critical to U.S. interests. As a result of all these crises, Carter began military rearmament, secured new bases, tried to undermine the changes occurring in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and allowed the Shah of Iran to enter the United States in October 1979 for medical treatment.

Inside the Carter administration, foreign policy decision makers feared the collapse of U.S. power around the world. However, they felt the United States could not respond because of the so-called “Vietnam Syndrome.” That is, decision makers believed that most Americans opposed a return to militarism and interventionism.

Then, fortunately for the Carter team, the Soviet Union, fearful of the collapse of an allied regime in Kabul and increasingly seeing itself as encircled by China in the East and a beefed up NATO in the West, sent troops into Afghanistan. The Soviet Union fell into a trap set by the Carter Administration.

What was the nature of this trap? Well, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in an interview given to the French newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur in January 1998, said that official CIA accounts which say the United States began to support rebels in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion were lies. In fact, he said, “…it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul.” The National Security advisor said he wrote the President “…that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.”

Brzezinski told Carter that the Soviets would probably intervene in Afghanistan if we funded rebels and that they, the Soviets, would then be buried in their own Vietnam. In retrospect, he said, the Soviet incursion led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and its “empire.” He suggested that the rise of Islamic fundamentalism was of minor concern compared to the threat of international communism.

Reflecting back 30 years, the following conclusions seem justified. First the United States returned to an aggressive Cold War policy not after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan but before it.

Second, President Carter announced a broad array of aggressive policies toward the Soviet Union after the Soviet invasion but these were in place or in the process of development before the Soviet moves of December 1979.

Third, the United States began funding the various fundamentalist groups to fight against the secular and modernizing regime in Kabul before the Soviets sent troops. And that led subsequently, as the Center for Defense Information estimated, to the United States funneling $2 billion to rebel forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Fourth, the war on the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul destroyed efforts to modernize the tradition-bound country. Women, who had become active participants in public life and the economy in the 1980s lost control of their lives after the pro-Soviet regime collapsed. In general, an estimated one million Afghans died in the 1980s from war and repression and some five million fled the country.

We know about what happened after the troubled 1980s in Afghanistan. The Soviet troops withdrew. After a time, the secular regime in Kabul was ousted from power. Competing fundamentalist militias vied for control of the state. The Taliban consolidated their power by 1996. Then the United States launched its public war on Afghanistan in October 2001. But, the record suggests, the United States initiated its war on the country as far back as July 1979.

The pain and suffering of the peoples of Afghanistan has a long history before and since the United States intervened in their political lives in 1979. Many outside powers share responsibility for their plight. But today’s situation directly relates to the covert war the United States encouraged and funded from the summer of 1979.

[Harry Tarq is a professor in American Studies who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical, where this article also appears.]

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BBC Poll on Capitalism : Where's the Love?

Global survey on free market capitalism:
Majority say fix it or ditch it

By James Robbins / November 9, 2009

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new BBC poll has found widespread dissatisfaction with free-market capitalism.

In the global poll for the BBC World Service, only 11% of those questioned across 27 countries said that it was working well. Most thought regulation and reform of the capitalist system were necessary.

There were also sharp divisions around the world on whether the end of the Soviet Union was a good thing.

Economic regulation

In 1989, as the Berlin Wall fell, it was a victory for ordinary people across Eastern and Central Europe. It also looked at the time like a crushing victory for free-market capitalism.

Twenty years on, this new global poll suggests confidence in free markets has taken heavy blows from the past 12 months of financial and economic crisis. More than 29,000 people in 27 countries were questioned. In only two countries, the United States and Pakistan, did more than one in five people feel that capitalism works well as it stands.

Almost a quarter -- 23% of those who responded -- feel it is fatally flawed. That is the view of 43% in France, 38% in Mexico and 35% in Brazil. And there is very strong support around the world for governments to distribute wealth more evenly. That is backed by majorities in 22 of the 27 countries.

If there is one issue where a global consensus seems to emerge from the survey it is this: there are majorities almost everywhere wanting government to be more active in regulating business. It is only in Turkey that a majority want less government regulation.

Opinion about the disintegration of the Soviet Union is sharply divided.


Europeans overwhelmingly say it was a good thing: 79% in Germany, 76% in Britain and 74% in France feel that way. But outside the developed West it is a different picture. Almost seven in 10 Egyptians say the end of the Soviet Union was a bad thing and views are sharply divided in India, Kenya and Indonesia.

Source / BBC News

Thanks to Common Dreams / The Rag Blog

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History as Politics : Remembering the Berlin Wall

Man straddles Berlin Wall in 1989. Photo from photosfan.com.
History as politics, Politics as history:
Remembering the Berlin Wall

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / November 9, 2009

...you are Americans and are meant to carry liberty and justice and the principles of humanity wherever you go, go out and sell goods that will make the world more comfortable and more happy, and convert them to the principles of America.

-- Woodrow Wilson shortly after the Russian Revolution quoted in L.S. Stavrianos, Global Rift, 1981, 492.

There are two great evils at work in the world today, Absolutism, the power of which is waning, Bolshevism, the power of which is increasing. We have seen the hideous consequences of Bolshevik rule in Russia, and we know that the doctrine is spreading westward. The possibility of proletarian despotism over Central Europe is terrible to contemplate.

-- Secretary of State Robert Lansing shortly after the Russian Revolution in Stavrianos, 494.

Daniel Barenboim, who was in town the night the Berlin Wall came down in 1989,” ... said that “the fall of the wall ‘has changed so much of Europe for the better,’ Barenboim said in an interview at the Berlin Staatsoper, where he is chief conductor. ‘It has given so many thousands, probably millions of people, a better existence’

-- Catherine Hickley, Washington Post, November 8, 2009

Debasing the Socialist vision

Reflections on the anniversary of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 should stimulate a reexamination of the pain and suffering of the twentieth century.

It was a century in which over 100 million died in wars all around the globe (60 million alone in the two World Wars). Nazis killed six million Jews and six million others in Europe: liberals, communists, gays, opponents of genocide of every persuasion. And, during the Cold War years (1945 to 1991) approximately six million Vietnamese and Korean peoples died in wars and hundreds of thousands in Central Europe, Latin American, and South Asia.

The great revolutions of the twentieth century promised a different outcome for humankind: peace, justice, and democracy. Perhaps the biggest disappointment, the gap between the dream and the practice, resulted from the failures of the former Soviet Union. Masses of its citizens died in campaigns to collectivize agriculture and the purge of dissidents.

The regime developed an omnipresent dictatorship and following the revelations about Stalinism evolved into an autocratic state driven by top down bureaucracy. In addition, the Soviet Union would not tolerate political independence from the Socialist states of Eastern Europe, invading both Hungary and Czechoslovakia to crush reform movements. So from this vantage point, the tearing down of the Berlin Wall was cause for celebration.

But history is complicated

However, as the sentiments of President Wilson and his Secretary of State suggest, the United States as superpower emerged from World War I to embark on a global campaign to crush the new Soviet Union economically. As we know, the United States, along with a dozen other nations sent troops into the Soviet Union to help counter-revolutionaries overthrow the new Bolshevik regime.

In subsequent years, until 1933, the United States refused to recognize the Soviet Union. Western powers watched as Germany rearmed and expanded its control across the heartland of Europe. Italian fascist armies and German airpower were used to destroy democratic Spain, again with the United States and the British on the sidelines.

After the war, the Truman Administration launched a “cold war,” against the Soviet Union. It transferred resources to Western Europe to rebuild the capitalist part of it. It unleashed covert operators to infiltrate trade unions and political parties in Europe and Latin America and began beaming propaganda and sending operatives into Eastern Europe to undermine Soviet influence.

Germany was the centerpiece of this new global struggle. As the source of military forces that killed 27 million Soviet citizens in World War II, the status of Germany became most critical to the Soviets. And for the United States a reindustrialized, remilitarized Germany would constitute the centerpiece of the campaign to fight Communism and promote capitalism on the world stage.

Ironically, the Cold War started over Germany and could have ended there with a mutually derived agreement to create a neutralized and united Germany (much as was agreed to in Austria). But western diplomats ignored Soviet offers to negotiate the creation of such a Germany.

Without revisiting all the critical points of contestation between the East and the West, it is important to make clear that the Soviet Union, the weaker of the two “superpowers,” was targeted for challenge and defeat by every United States administration from 1917 to 1991. This cost both countries and their allies trillions of dollars in military spending and millions of lives.

The Soviet Union had something to do with social change

There were some positive developments during the Cold War years for which the Soviet Union may have made a contribution.

In 1945 most of Africa was still living under the yoke of colonialism. The British, French, Dutch and others still controlled territories and peoples in Asia. The Chinese were mired in a violent civil war. And all of Latin America was “in the backyard” of the United States. Within thirty years all this had changed. Africa achieved its independence, the Communist movement came to power in China, Indochina was freed from French and then American colonialism, and the Cuban revolution provided a beacon of hope for peoples living in the Western Hemisphere.

The Soviet Union provided arms, economic assistance, technical assistance, and inspiration for those seeking independence and economic development. Further, and this may be the most important point, the Soviet Union served as a check on the unbridled expansion of military and economic power of the United States and the Western alliance.

What if the Soviet Union had not collapsed?

Of course, we can never know what might have happened since 1991 if the Soviet Union, after its Eastern European allies, had not collapsed. But we do know what has happened. And we can make educated guesses about what might have happened in a world in which a power competitive in military, economic, and ideological resources with the West still existed.

First, the Gulf War might not have occurred in the way it did, (While the Soviet Union did collaborate with President George Herbert Walker Bush in the fall, 1990, on Gulf War policy, the collaboration was from a position of considerable marginalization). For sure, the Soviet Union would have waged a propaganda war against the U.S. military operation and the economic embargo of Iraq and bombing campaigns that continued throughout the 1990s and, particularly, the second war on Iraq in 2003.

Probably, in the bipolar world of the Cold War, the United States would not have been able to launch a war on Afghanistan and continue it for eight years.

And what about the global economy? Neoliberal globalization, initiated in the 1980s but expanded to every corner of the globe in the 1990s, would have been checked by Soviet influence and arguments about overweening reliance on the “free market.” The mal-distribution of wealth and income might not have been as grotesque as it has become if there had been a Soviet Union critiquing International Monetary Fund and World Bank policies.

Without exaggerating the influence or good intentions of a surviving Soviet Union, I would argue that the world since 1991 might have been different; particularly given the hundreds of thousands who have died in war since 1991 and the devastating impacts of growing economic inequality.

And back to Germany

Bruni de la Motte in the Guardian, Nov. 8, 2009, reported that the collapse of the former German Democratic Republic and its integration into West Germany led to social breakdown of society, widespread unemployment, “crass materialism,” the privatization of public enterprises, farms and forests, and two million lost homes. Hundreds of thousands of professional workers including teachers and professors lost their jobs and were blacklisted because they had been credentialed in the old regime.

There is no question, as one U.S. trade unionist once said to me, the former Soviet Union and the GDR were not “workers’ paradises” but they provided basic economic security to workers. That has long since been lost most places around the world.

And about history

It is a common place now to repeat the old adage: “History is written by the winners.” Old adage or not, the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall is being orchestrated by the same kinds of imperial voices that have been raised for almost one hundred years now.

As contentious as it might be, it is time for progressives to revisit the history of the Cold War in a way that is not chauvinistic and self-serving and does not justify current and future wars.

[Harry Tarq is a professor in American Studies who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical, where this article also appears.]

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