India: Maoist Leader on Fighting Modi-led Aggression

[The Times of India has claimed that the following excerpt is from a 2014 interview with the leader of the Communist Party of India (Maoist).  It gives some insight to the thinking of Maoists on the struggle against the aggressive Narendra Modi regime. — Frontlines ed.]

Interview with CPI(Maoist) General Secretary Comrade Ganapathy

 

Mohua Chatterjee,TNN | August 9, 2015

NEW DELHI:  In an interview to Maoist Information Bulletin (MIB), an internal journal of the CPI(Maoist), party general secretary Comrade Ganapathy, speaks of how Maoists hope to fight the Narendra Modi government’s aggressive offensive and how it is a priority to protect the party’s top leaders.

Chilean judge sentences murderers of US-American citizens Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi

[In the exposure of the murders, 4 decades ago, of Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, the US-spnsored Pinochet coup against Chilean President Salvador Allende, the role of the US and the terrorism master-minded by Henry Kissinger came into public view.  The fact that the murderers were not successfully prosecuted for 41 years is proof that US control  has been effective, even long after the fact.  And now the Chilean prosecution aims to put some of this embarassing history behind them as they sentence two of the murderous perpetrators.  —  Frontlines ed.]

Tlaxcala, 2/23/2015 Translated by  Richard Ferguson, Edited by  Supriyo Chatterjee

Almost 42 years after the events, Special Judge Jorge Zepeda Arancibia sentenced two intelligence officers for the murders of US-Americans Charles Edmond Horman, a 31-year-old journalist, and Frank Randall Teruggi Bombatch, a 24-year-old student, shot in the Estadio Nacional (National Stadium) days into the coup headed by Pinochet.

The 276-page judgment sentences Army intelligence official Pedro Octavio Espinoza Bravo, who serves several other sentences for assassinations, to seven years of prison for the murders,while Air Force officer Rafael Agustín González Berdugo will serve two years of probation as an accomplice to Horman’s homicide. Judge Zepeda’s exhaustive investigations confirmed the direct intervention of the United States in the coup through Operation Unitas, carried out in Valparaíso simultaneously with the offensive, and further revealed the ruthless persecution that the United States ordered the Chilean intelligence services to undertake against American radicals in Chile sympathetic to Salvador Allende, or simply interested in learning at close quarters and living among the peaceful revolutionary process led by the Head of State overthrown by it. In the Estadio Nacional up to 24 detained Americans were registered (Horman and Teruggi weren’t), both men and women, including students, academics, writers and two Maryknoll priests. Charles Horman                                                  Frank Teruggi The instigators of and accessories to this persecution of American citizens were their fellow countryman, Ray Elliots Charles, Marine Captain and chief of the American military mission, supported by the Ambassador Nathaniel Davis. Far from protecting their compatriots, they covered up the murders and detentions of Americans, going as far as providing false information to family members like Edmund Horman, Charles’s father, who moved to Chile in search of his son.

Inter-Imperialist Contention and Seeds of Opposing Blocs Forming

[We recently posted news of a recent study of the world’s imperialist system and China’s role as an imperialist power.  (See this post, https://revolutionaryfrontlines.wordpress.com/2014/05/05/should-anti-imperialists-oppose-only-us-imperialism/).  It seems that every day, new developments appear to verify the growing instability and inter-imperialist contention within the world system, as can be seen in the article below.  As such, this sets the stage for further growth of revolutionary and anti-imperialist movements and forces, but such growth can only take place if revolutionary peoples learn the full nature of the enemies they face, and forge genuine proletarian internationalist unity against all imperialism–and break with the all-too-common tendency to side with one imperialist against another. — Frontlines ed.]

China Calls for Security Pact with Russia, Iran

By Louise Watt, AP, May 21, 2014

SHANGHAI — China‘s president called Tuesday for the creation of a new Asian structure for security cooperation based on a regional group that includes Russia and Iran and excludes the United States.

President Xi Jinping spoke at a meeting in Shanghai of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-building measures in Asia, an obscure group that has taken on significance as Beijing tries to extend its influence and limit the role of the United States, which it sees as a strategic rival.

“We need to innovate our security cooperation (and) establish new regional security cooperation architecture,” said Xi, speaking to an audience that included President Vladimir Putin of Russia and leaders of Central Asian countries.

The Border-Industrial Complex Goes Abroad

“Nothing will stop our national security officials from making this country more secure from one of the least pressing dangers Americans face: terrorism.”

By Todd Miller | November 25, 2013

In this Nov. 12, 2013 photo, a Haitian man crosses into Haiti along the border with Jimani, Dominican Republic. In September, the Dominican Constitutional Court ruled that being born in the country does not automatically grant citizenship, including people born to non-legal residents going back to 1929. The ruling is a reflection of deep hostility in the Dominican Republic to the vast number of Haitians who have come to live in their country, many brought in to work in the sugar industry and their descendants. (AP Photo/Dieu Nalio Chery)

It isn’t exactly the towering 20-foot wall that runs like a scar through significant parts of the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. Imagine instead the sort of metal police barricades you see at protests. These are unevenly lined up like so many crooked teeth on the Dominican Republic’s side of the river that acts as its border with Haiti. Like dazed versions of U.S. Border Patrol agents, the armed Dominican border guards sit at their assigned posts, staring at the opposite shore.  There, on Haitian territory, children splash in the water and women wash clothes on rocks.

One of those CESFRONT (Specialized Border Security Corps) guards, carrying an assault rifle, is walking six young Haitian men back to the main base in Dajabon, which is painted desert camouflage as if it were in a Middle Eastern war zone.

If the scene looks like a five-and-dime version of what happens on the U.S. southern border, that’s because it is. The enforcement model the Dominican Republic uses to police its boundary with Haiti is an import from the United States.

“Senior” Imperialist’s Arrogance Resented by its “Junior” Partners

France and Mexico Angry With N.S.A.

By Brandon Cottrell
Impunity Watch Reporter, North America

WASHINGTON, D.C., United States – As U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in France today, Le Monde, an authoritative newspaper, published a report based on the secret documents leaked by Edward Snowden.  It is expected that France’s Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius will discuss this issue with Kerry during his visit.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius says the claims are “totally unacceptable” (Photo Courtesy BBC).

Adding already to the previous disclosures of the N.S.A’s worldwide surveillances in Germany, England. Brazil, and Mexico, today’s report stated that the N.S.A. recorded over 70 million digital communications in France over the span of one month.  It is believed that businesses, officials, and terror suspects were specifically targeted.

France’s American Ambassador, Charles Rivkin, stated that, “These kinds of practices between partners are totally unacceptable and we must be assured that they are no longer being implemented.”  Additionally Manuel Valls, France’s Interior Minister, called today’s report “shocking” and that it “will require explanation.”

Prof. Akinyele Umoja Discusses “We Will Shoot Back”

March 27.2013

Professor Akinyele Umoja, chair, African American Studies at Georgia State University discusses his new book: We Will Shoot Back: Armed Self-defense in the Mississippi Freedom Movement. This program was sponsored by the Stone Center and the Bull’s Head Bookstore of UNC at Chapel Hill.
This is part of the presentation Professor Umoja made at Chapel Hill,  length: 30:38
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We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement

 Prof. Umoja discusses why he wrote We Will Shoot Back

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The Book, by Akinyele Umoja

The notion that the civil rights movement in the southern United States was a nonviolent movement remains a dominant theme of civil rights memory and representation in popular culture. Yet in dozens of southern communities, Black people picked up arms to defend their leaders, communities, and lives. In particular, Black people relied on armed self-defense in communities where federal government officials failed to safeguard activists and supporters from the violence of racists and segregationists, who were often supported by local law enforcement.

In We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement, Akinyele Omowale Umoja argues that armed resistance was critical to the efficacy of the southern freedom struggle and the dismantling of segregation and Black disenfranchisement. Intimidation and fear were central to the system of oppression in Mississippi and most of the Deep South. To overcome the system of segregation, Black people had to overcome fear to present a significant challenge to White domination. Armed self-defense was a major tool of survival in allowing some Black southern communities to maintain their integrity and existence in the face of White supremacist terror. By 1965, armed resistance, particularly self-defense, was a significant factor in the challenge of the descendants of enslaved Africans to overturning fear and intimidation and developing different political and social relationships between Black and White Mississippians.

This riveting historical narrative relies upon oral history, archival material, and scholarly literature to reconstruct the use of armed resistance by Black activists and supporters in Mississippi to challenge racist terrorism, segregation, and fight for human rights and political empowerment from the early 1950s through the late 1970s.

Update on Tracking Police Murders: Every 36 Hours a Black Person is Murdered by the Law Enforcement

This episode of  Critical Insight we were joined by Kali Akuno of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement to discuss their 2012 report detailing the fact that every 36 hours (at least) a Black person is extra-judiciously executed by “Law Enforcement” within the United States. Please watch this episode to to hear Mr. Akuno discuss the more recent developments regarding this report, how the corporate media has tried to marginalize it, and what you can do to help make a positive impact. Your support is needed.

Sources:  Critical Insight, Navigating the Storm

US: After the elections, how will Obama’s liberals grease the “austerity” path?

[Glenn Greenwald, an analyst/journalist of progressive reform politics, reveals the likely path of Democratic/Obama/liberal cuts in major historic social programs such as Social Security and Medicare in the weeks ahead.  Many who supported Obama as the last, best defense against such cuts, will find, now, that the system, which has created the economic and fiscal crisis, has no means or will  to solve the problem it has made. — Frontlines ed.]

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Obama and progressives: what will liberals do with their big election victory?

With fights over social security, Medicare, ongoing war, and other key progressive priorities looming, what will they do with their new power?

by Glenn Greenwald, guardian.co.uk

Wednesday 7 November 2012

The greatest and most enduring significance of Tuesday night’s election results will likely not be the re-election of Barack Obama, but rather what the outcome reflects about the American electorate. It was not merely Democrats, but liberalism, which was triumphant.

To begin with, it is hard to overstate just how crippled America’s right-wing is. Although it was masked by their aberrational win in 2010, the GOP has now been not merely defeated, but crushed, in three out of the last four elections: in 2006 (when they lost control of the House and Senate), 2008 (when Obama won easily and Democrats expanded their margins of control), and now 2012. The horrendous political legacy of George Bush and Dick Cheney continues to sink the GOP, and demographic realities – how toxic the American Right is to the very groups that are now becoming America’s majority – makes it difficult to envision how this will change any time soon.

Meanwhile, new laws to legalize both same-sex marriage and marijuana use were enacted in multiple states with little controversy, an unthinkable result even a few years ago, while Obama’s late-term embrace of same-sex marriage seems to have resulted only in political benefit with no political harm. Democrats were sent to the Senate by deeply red states such as Indiana, Missouri and North Dakota, along with genuinely progressive candidates on domestic issues, including Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, who became the first openly gay person elected to the Senate. As a cherry on the liberal cake, two of the most loathed right-wing House members – Rep Joe Walsh of Illinois and Allen West of Florida – were removed from office.

So the delirium of liberals this morning is understandable: the night could scarcely have gone better for them. By all rights, they should expect to be a more powerful force in Washington. But what are they going to get from it? Will they wield more political power? Will their political values and agenda command more respect? Unless the disempowering pattern into which they have voluntarily locked themselves changes, the answer to those questions is almost certainly “no”.

Consider the very first controversial issue Obama is likely to manage, even before the glow of his victory dims, literally within the next couple of weeks. It is widely expected – including by liberals – that Obama intends (again) to pursue a so-called “Grand Bargain” with the GOP: a deficit- and debt-cutting agreement whereby the GOP agrees to some very modest tax increases on the rich in exchange for substantial cuts to entitlement programs such as social security and Medicare, the crown legislative jewels of American liberalism.

US Citizens to lead anti-drone march in northern Pakistan

Medea Benjamin in Tucson: “Obama’s Tuesday kill list responsible for assassination of 16-year-old from Denver”

By Brenda Norrell, Censored News
http://www.bsnorrell.blogspot.com

Thursday, August 2, 2012

TUCSON — President Obama’s Tuesday kill list is responsible for the assassination of a 16-year-old boy from Denver, Medea Benjamin of CodePink said here today. Describing the US program of targeted assassinations using drones, the CIA out of control, and the US Congress refusing to act, Benjamin said it is time for US citizens to show the world they do not support US drone assassinations in Pakistan and elsewhere.

Benjamin called for citizens in Tucson to join the march with Pakistanis in northern Pakistan, during the week of September 21, and show the world that the people of the US seek global peace and understanding, and do not support US drone killings.”President Obama signs off on the kill list,” Benjamin said, speaking at a public gathering in the downtown Tucson library. Obama meets with his advisers on Tuesday to review the list. “They decide who will live and who will die,” Benjamin said. Any male on the ground of military age is considered fair game. She said that in a signature strike, drone operators manning the computer screens can fire at anything that looks suspicious, on the other side of the world, without the suspect being given a chance to surrender, or defend themselves against charges. Benjamin, author of “Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control,” described the drone warfare that has killed both the US Constitution and innocent people, including children and teens, in Pakistan and Yemen.

During the Bush administration, drone strikes were every 40 days. During the Obama administration, the drone strikes increased to 1 every 3 days. Currently, there is a drone strike every 4 days.

US drone killing in western Pakistan.

Those drone strikes have killed 175 children. Few US citizens ever see the photos of those children who are disintegrated or burned by those drones. Sometimes only pieces of their flesh can be found for burial. A drone’s victim never hears the missile that kills him or her.

Benjamin described how one teenager, Tariq Aziz, attempted to take the case of a relative killed by a US drone to court in Pakistan. After meeting with attorneys, Tariq was assassinated by a US drone.

Benjamin pointed out that this type of US killing is counter-productive and driving people in other countries toward extremists out of despair and desperation.

Anwar Al-Awlaki was a 16-year-old from Denver. He was on Facebook and his friends said he was a normal teen, not interested in politics, who enjoyed rap and hip hop. He was enjoying an evening sharing a meal with his cousin in his family’s home village in Yemen, when he and his cousin were assassinated by a US drone strike.

Obama refuses to respond to questions about the US drone killing of Anwar Al-Awlaki of Denver.

“Barack Obama is responsible for this killing,” Benjamin said.

The US drone operations have been largely kept secret until now and operated by the CIA and Joint Special Operations.

America’s decline: Myth or reality?

At a recent summit in Colombia, Obama's assertion that US influence had not waned highlighted a particularly wide gap between rhetoric and reality.

[The growing debate between imperialist intellectuals, economists and politicians is not Democratic vs. Republican, but “declinists” vs. “ostrichists.”  —  Frontlines ed.]

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Reuters | Apr 21, 2012

WASHINGTON: Take note of a new phrase in the seemingly endless debate over whether the days of the United States as the world’s pre-eminent power are numbered: those who doubt the country’s economic decline are said to be holding an “intellectual ostrich position.”

The expression was coined by Edward Luce, author of a deeply-researched new book entitled “Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent”. It notes that the United States accounted for 31 percent of the global economy in 2000 and 23.5 percent in 2010. By 2020, he estimates, it will shrink to around 16 percent.Luce’s diagnosis of America’s decline descent, published in April, was the latest addition to a steadily growing library of books, academic papers and opinion pieces for or against the idea that the United States can maintain its status as the world’s only superpower. If we adopt Luce’s phrase, it’s a discussion between declinists and ostriches. The latter include President Barack Obama and his presumptive Republican rival in next November’s presidential elections.

“It means that we’re going to have a 2012 election where… both candidates will start on a false premise: that relative economic decline is simply to be ignored or dismissed,” Luce said in an interview with Foreign Policy magazine. “And I’d describe that as a kind of intellectual ostrich position.” The false premise, in this view, was set out by Robert Kagan, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank, in a lengthy analysis entitled “Not Fade Away: Against the Myth of American Decline”. One of the points Kagan made to support his argument was that the U.S. share of world gross domestic product (GDP) has held steady over the past four decades. Plain wrong, says Luce.

US/Israel threaten the existence of the UN if Palestinian rights, including statehood, are recognized

[New levels of imperialist and Zionist blackmail arrogantly introduced, telling the world with a sneer:  “If we can’t have the settler-colonial occupation of Palestine, you can’t have the UN.”  —  Frontlines ed.]

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US ‘could withdraw funding from UN if Palestine state is recognised’

The US could withdraw funding from the United Nations if its members decide to recognise an independent Palestinian state, a close ally of President Barack Obama has warned.

By Jon Swaine, New York and Adrian Blomfield

The Telegraph (UK), 24 June 2011

Susan Rice, US Ambassador to the UN

Susan Rice, the American ambassador to the UN, said there was “no greater threat” to US support and funding of the UN than the prospect of Palestinian statehood being endorsed by member states.

Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian authority, plans to ask the UN general assembly, which comprises all 192 members, to vote on recognition at its annual meeting in New York in September.

The US and Israel are pressing Mr Abbas to drop his plans. Mr Obama has strongly opposed the move, raising the prospect of a veto in the UN Security Council, which is expected to vote on a Palestinian statehood proposal in July.

But Palestinian officials have spoken of their determination to a circumvent a US veto by deploying a rarely used Cold War mechanism known as “Uniting for Peace” under which a two-thirds majority in the General Assembly can override the Security Council.

Japan building navy base in Africa, joining US; is China next?

US base in Djibouti is former French Foreign Legion base

DJIBOUTI, Djibouti, May 11 (UPI) — Japan plans to establish a $40 million strategic naval base in the Horn of Africa state of Djibouti, where U.S. and French forces are deployed to combat al-Qaida jihadists.

The facility, intended to boost the fight against Somali pirates preying on vital shipping lanes, will be Japan’s first foreign military base since World War II.

“This will be the only Japanese base outside our country and the first in Africa,” said Japanese navy Capt. Keizo Kitagawa, commander of the Japanese flotilla deployed with the international anti-piracy task force in the Gulf of Aden. He will oversee establishment of the base.