Down with imperialist aggression against Syria! USA, hands off Syria!

[The following is a recent statement from revolutionary Maoists in Brazil, detailing their analysis of the ever-growing civil war in Syria as a proxy war by contending imperialist powers for control of the Middle East.  It is an important contribution to the international debate among revolutionaries, over the shifting relations and aggressions, direct and indirect, by leading powers in the world imperialist system. — Frontlines ed.]

Proletarians and oppressed people of the world, unite!

Declaration of the Revolutionary Front for the Defence of the People’s Rights – Brazil

About the recent situation in Syria

In the last months, the imperialist Yankee has intensified its manipulations and provocations to justify its military invasion in Syria. The US propaganda machine is once again creating smokescreens to justify to the world public yet another predatory war. “To defend democracy,” “human rights”, “stop use of chemical weapons and weapons of mass destruction;” these are the new smokescreens of the Yankee imperialism in its counter-revolutionary offensive, reviving the “War on Terror”. These were also the same pretexts used to justify the aggression towards Afghanistan, Iraq, Mali, Libya, and many other countries. by the very forces  who are the most responsible for countless massacres and use of weapons of mass destruction in human history; imperialism, mainly Yankee.

Since 2011, the people in Syria are subjected to imperialist predatory war that currently is conducted in the form of a civil war. The armed forces of Assad’s regime (sustained politically, economically, and militarily by Russian imperialism) and the self-proclaimed ‘Free Syrian Army’ (mercenary forces directly controlled by the USA through their intelligence services and regional allies) are the contenders of this inter-imperialist dispute on the Syrian territory. In this war all kinds of horrors against the masses have been practised, without this having motivated attention or outcry from the well know”international institutions”.

After the US Civil War, former slaves were the first universal health care advocates

[After the Civil War in 1865, former slaves sought to restructure society through newly elected legislatures throughout the South, in what was known as Black Reconstruction.  The suppression of these democratic initiatives, and the expulsion of black activists from the statehouse legislatures, unleashed a reign of terror, lynchings, reimposition of plantation stoop labor, and a health care crisis which led to as many as a million deaths of “liberated” slaves (re-enslaved by another name).  This week, the New York Times reviewed a new book, “Sick from Freedom”, which described the health care crisis but failed to mention how this related to the crushing of Black Reconstruction.  In this way, the Times implies that the Emancipation Proclamation was a step backward, and that Black people were “better off” under slavemaster rule. — Frontlines ed.]

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New York Times: “Liberation as Death Sentence”

By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER, New York Times, June 10, 2012

When Civil War History published a paper this spring raising the conflict’s military death toll to 750,000 from 620,000, that journal’s editors called it one of the most important pieces of scholarship ever to appear in its pages.

The historian Jim Downs, the author of “Sick From Freedom,” at Grant’s Tomb.

But to Jim Downs, an assistant professor of history at Connecticut College and the author of the new book “Sick From Freedom,” issued last month by Oxford University Press, that accounting of what he calls “the largest biological crisis of the 19th century” does not go nearly far enough.

To understand the war’s scale and impact truly, Professor Downs argues, historians have to look beyond military casualties and consider the public health crisis that faced the newly liberated slaves, who sickened and died in huge numbers in the years following Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.

“We’re getting ready to celebrate 150 years of the movement from slavery to freedom,” he said in a recent interview at a cafe near his apartment in Chelsea. “But hundreds of thousands of people did not survive that movement.”

This illustration shows a group of freedmen in Atlanta, Georgia, circa 1865, holding a “street convention” to discuss their political status in the wake of the Civil War and emancipation.

“Sick From Freedom,” at 178 pages (not counting 56 pages of tightly argued footnotes), may seem like a bantamweight in a field crowded with doorstops. But it’s already being greeted as an important challenge to our understanding of an event that scholars and laypeople alike have preferred to see as an uplifting story of newly liberated people vigorously claiming their long-denied rights.

“The freed people we want to see are the ones with all their belongings on the wagon, heading toward freedom,” said David W. Blight, a professor of history at Yale and the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. “But the truth is, for every person making it there may have been one falling by the way.”

Professor Downs, 39, is part of a wave of scholars who are sketching out a new, darker history of emancipation, Professor Blight said, one that recognizes it as a moral watershed while acknowledging its often devastating immediate impact. And the statistics offered in “Sick from Freedom” are certainly sobering, if necessarily tentative.

At least one quarter of the four million former slaves got sick or died between 1862 and 1870, Professor Downs writes, including at least 60,000 (the actual number is probably two or three times higher, he argues) who perished in a smallpox epidemic that began in Washington and spread through the South as former slaves traveled in search of work — an epidemic that Professor Downs says he is the first to reconstruct as a national event.

Libyan east hails “freedom”

REUTERS, Feb. 23, 2011

By Alexander Dziadosz

BENGHAZI, Libya (Reuters) – Libyans celebrated the liberation of the east of the country from the rule of Muammar Gaddafi, who has vowed to crush the revolt and on Wednesday was trying to assert his grip on the capital Tripoli, in the west.

Lying between Egypt and Tunisia, where a wave of Arab unrest has unseated two veteran presidents, the desert nation of six million which Gaddafi has ruled for 41 years seemed split in two, trapping thousands of foreign workers, jeopardizing oil exports and raising fears of tribal conflict and civil war.

The United States, which once branded Gaddafi a “mad dog” but had joined European powers in reconciliation to exploit Libya’s oil wealth, said it might impose sanctions to help end violence which one European minister said may have killed 1,000.