Recent issue
No 1296 17th July 2006
Zionism’s escalating slaughter and massacre of women, children and anything else that moves – whatever its connection or lack of it to resistance, anti-imperialist militancy or “terrorism”, - will only intensify the hatreds and determination that will eventually overturn its depraved Nazi collective punishment order. And the Bush-Blair knee-jerk approval for the Zionist outrages will teach even deeper lessons to the masses worldwide about the depraved reality of all imperialist “democracy and freedom”. The huge revolutionary transformations that were produced 20 years ago by Zionist monstrosity have bitten them now – and ten thousandfold changes will follow now. The need for Leninism grows more urgent.
Grotesque Bush and Blair “righteous justifications” for the monstrous Jewish-Zionist Nazi collective punishment bombings and blitzings of civilians and civilian infrastructure in Lebanon and Gaza, are a telling sign of how far western imperialism has slid down the slope into overt fascist warmongering, and utterly open callous indifference to humanity.
And the muted response of the western press, with their “even-handedness” and talk about “outbreaks of violence” or the slide to war, as if humans and class rulers have nothing to do with these murderous atrocities and state terrorisings, and that the “state of Israel” official statements should be calmly listened to and nodded at politely, tells an equally eloquent story of what the “free press” and media is – a lie machine for the interests of the imperialist ruling order.
Only the underlying fears of the massive boost to Third World anti-imperialist and ultimately revolutionary struggle, that the beserker behaviour will ultimately cause, is creating any kind of tepid “opposition”, fearful of the whirlwind of revolutionary struggle being sown on an ever larger scale throughout the Middle East.
The liberal intellectuals’ supposed “civilised standards” and “rules of war” have always been lying pretence anyway but even those goalposts have now slyly been slid to a level of publicly sanctioned barbarity that is on a par with anything Hitlerism ever dreamed up – (or that all of imperialism in fact has always done but has tried to hide, like the Vietnam atrocities or South America deathsquad terrorising).
Since when did anything – ever – justify deliberately blowing apart whole families of innocent refugees desperately trying to escape sudden mayhem, including teenagers, small children, women and old people, blitzed into burnt and unrecognisable fragments of flesh; or make reasonable the blitzing of basic infrastructure facilities and siege strangling of civilian existence, smashing generators, roads, water supplies, and so on which are crucial for very survival (and especially in a hot climate in the concrete hell-hole prison conditions that constitute “daily life” for the Palestinians in Gaza) - or allow for the imposing of calculated non-stop terror, fear of shelling and raids, non-stop sonic booming, and the desperation of trying to endure, almost without food, little water and services reduced to fragments for entire populations of people, let alone a decent life, employment, education and fundamental dignity?
Only the vengeance and aggression of a domineering and exploitative system that has now found itself increasingly under challenge across the whole planet for its centuries of genocide, torture, piratical plundering and endless slave-driving exploitation, the blood-soaked foundation of all its mighty wealth, “culture”, “technology” and “civilised lifestyle”, can go down this path to all out warmongering depravity.
It is no answer for George Bush to small-mindedly reply “but they started it” like a gauche teenage play-yard bully caught punching the living daylights out of a five year old a third his size.
Even if it were true, which requires a psychotic level of tunnel vision, deranged mental distortion and imbalance to even suggest, let alone believe, what has that shallow tit-for-tat-ism, petty but bloody, murdering vengeance got to do with the supposed “rule of law”, “peace, harmony and prosperity”, world juridicial standards, “democracy” (!!!), the Word of God(!!!!), freedom, “the right to a fair trial”, “fairness” “decency” and almost certainly Apple Pie as well for which he keeps proselytising???
Is not this overwhelmingly powerful and “reasonable” system the one supposed to take events in hand, calm the situation, and deal with things even-handedly and justly?
What a monstrous twisted lie!
As even the appalling strutting Bonapartist anti-communist Vladimir Putin – whose pathetic apeing of the west’s monstrous “war on terror”, in his own Chechnya territory, is as sick, bullying and depraved as anything the west has managed – was forced to sneer about this supposed “democracy” which Bush claimed to uphold. “Do you mean like Iraqi democracy?” he shot back to underline what the whole world has had made clear to it for three years of torturing, bludgeoning, colonialist invasion and arrogant criminality, that western democracy is a total joke, a lying Goebbels fraud, as shown by Iraq’s multiple stooge regimes, utterly in thrall to the imperialist occupation – and still failing achieve anything to carry through the pretence of “new stability” and “an end to tyranny”.
Capitalist bourgeois “democracy” has never been anything but a giant theatrical fraud, an illusion of “choice” and “ people power” developed by the ruling class over several hundred years of capitalist rule, with endlessly developed cynical sleight-of-hand methods pull the strings that really matter, to both fix the results and to anyway conceal the real truth of the system – that big money, as capital, rules everything via its privileged and powerful ruling class who have a total class dictatorship power over everything that happens, making “concessions” to “reform” and “progress” only under extreme duress, when revolution is brewing, and taking back everything when they can aided and abetted by the anti-revolutionist fake-”left” from the super-profits corrupted labour aristocracy of Labour and the “Official Trade Union Movement” to the petty bourgeois anti-communism and dunderheadedness of the Trotskyists and soft-brained revisionism.
They have nearly always been skilful enough to do it before the revolutionary truth of the situation is staring everyone in the face, dissembling on a world scale and over a long time span, even hunkering down for the long decades of the revolutionary ascendancy of the Soviet Union with notional “welfare provision”, “housing and jobs for all” and “national health” and other major reform gains, to kill and suppress any thoughts in the working class that only revolution can solve their problems.
It cannot last, was never intended to, and as capitalist crisis bites deeper and deeper with economic crash disaster staring them in the face – it has all been sold off again or is being sold off to keep the tottering profit system alive.
The reality of imperialism is the one overtly on show since the desperate Stock Market Crash reverberations of 2000 and the watershed turn to open warmongering - endless violent tyrannical suppression of all fairness and reason in the interests of the continuing squeezing of the world’s masses (Third World and western working class) to sustain the sweet and pampered luxury and power of the tiny minority ruling class, blitzing and destroying Iraq and Afghanistan and preparing more escalations with propaganda campaigns lining up ever more “rogue state” victims, to keep the atmosphere hot and plunge the world towards World War.
The deliberate warmongering mayhem on the planet is preparation for the world war sorting out “solution” that is all terrified and incapable capitalism knows as an answer to its intractable overproduction problems and the growing antagonistic contradictions that endlessly and eventually destructively accumulate within the profit system (see economic quotes).
Imperialist reality has always been on show in its barest and crudest form by the Zionist Rottweilers, who are a concentrated expression of the rawest imperialism. The colonialist artificial implant has no choice but to maintain its position by continual fascist smiting militaristic dominance because its entire existence is based on a lie, the aggressive theft of an entire people’s land by terror, Shin Bett “ethnic cleansing”, Stern Gang forced evacuations and the assertion that might is right. And only continual and ever expanding terror, smashing down and torturing suppression can sustain this grit in the Middle Eastern oyster, until the genocidal elimination or forced expulsion and dispersion of the entire Palestinian nation makes it “unnecessary” by this foul logic.
And it must do so with “disproportionate violence” (as the liberal intellectuals call it – as if there were some “fair” level of blitzing oppression!) because the brittle illusion of invincible dominance can never be threatened – or the entire ever developing hatred and justified, and increasingly sophisticated resistance of the Palestinian and Arab masses (and the Middle East and Third World beyond that) will sweep over them.
The resistance is obviously growing anyway. And it is growing in sophistication as the astonishing Hizbollah military attacks have shown.
But however crudely done some attacks may be – and no-one wants to see civilians killed and injured – it is the logic of a strutting Hitlerite to point at this as if it came “out of the blue”, unexpectedly and “unjustifiably” as the posturing Zionists hurtfully declare.
This has all the feigned innocence of a Nazi general declaring that the French resistance “initiated an attack and must be punished”, and the same sick and demented logic.
Who started it, George Bush??????
Capitalism “started it” with the twisted neo-colonialist “right” asserted by imperialism to seize and steal an entire people’s land in 1947 in expiation of the appalling 1930s Jewish pogrom massacre horrors by the Hitlerite order, which had been fed, sustained and encouraged by the entire west throughout the 1930s as a New Order (of working class disciplining), a “bulwark against communism” and the aggressive starter for the World War that the entire capitalist world desperately needed to get out of its 1930s slump catastrophe.
And the Jewish occupation has been subsidised and sustained as a blunt instrument ever onwards to permanently fragment and suppress the resource rich Arab world, to better allow its exploitation by the entire plundering gang of capitalist countries.
Without examining this conspiracy nothing can be understood about the festering Palestinian mess and the reasons for the unstoppably growing patient and determined resistance of its people.
The pretence at reasonable analysis and critical or controversial stances is maintained in “left articles” and “think pieces”. But exactly this utterly explosive question – the absolute basic issue of the origins of the conflict – is permanently kept off the agenda by all western intellectuals, and politicians, heavily reinforced by the endless pressure of the international Zionist lobby which is one of the few groupings within capitalism to impose its censorship across the board, having plays suspended, academic journals recalled and pulped, and books blocked from publication.
Look at these typical paragraphs of analysis from the Sunday press as the butchery was escalated in Beirut and Lebanon. It might be challenging Bush’s moronically simple “war-on-terror” inanities of “self-defence” but it won’t go to the bottom:
Beirut was silent yesterday morning. Smoke still hung in the blue sky like a vague threat, but after a night of violence - physical and verbal - the port city waited. A few shops in the centre warily raised their steel shutters, but the Shia Muslim areas in the south of the city were empty. Occasional cars worked their way around the rubble left by the air strikes of the evening before, some packed with families leaving, others filled with families going to funerals. Then came the blasts in the middle of the day, loud enough to rattle windows across the entire city. Plumes of flame and smoke spouted once more above the tattered buildings. And everyone knew that there would soon be more cars full of refugees, and more cars heading to funerals.
There were many funerals last week, and this weekend there were more. At least 13 Lebanese villagers, including women and children, were killed yesterday in an Israeli air strike on a convoy of vehicles evacuating a village near the southern border. And few expect the funerals to stop soon. Yesterday Israeli and Hizbollah leaders declared ‘open war’; bodies of four Israeli sailors were retrieved from a warship struck by a Hizbollah drone; beyond Beirut, bombing continued in the Hizbollah heartland of southern Lebanon and even reached the Syrian border; and dozens of Hizbollah rockets continued to fall randomly on civilian areas in northern Israel, reaching as far south as Tiberias, some 40km inside Israel’s borders, causing minor injuries and provoking panic. Further south, though the worst violence of the week had ebbed, the Gaza Strip, from where rockets have been fired into Israeli towns, remained tense, with reports of an Israeli air strike and two dead.
The questions are now manifold and evident; answers less so. How and why did the crisis explode so powerfully and so quickly? What are the regional ramifications? And what happens next?
As ever in the Middle East, the crisis can be traced back to a variety of causes. The timeline can start a few days ago - with a daring cross-border raid by Hizbollah militants on Tuesday that led to the capture of two Israeli soldiers and the deaths of eight more. Or it can start two weeks ago - with the kidnapping of another Israeli soldier by hardline Palestinian militants from the Hamas organisation in the Gaza Strip. Or it can start months, years or decades ago in the myriad interwoven causes that link Israel’s withdrawal from south Lebanon in 2000, the development (with Iranian assistance) of the Hizbollah militia in response to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon 18 years earlier, and even the Iranian revolution of 1979, or the Arab-Israeli wars of 1973 and 1967.
It could equally start several months ago with the total bullying siege strangulation imposed on Gaza by Zionism, the USA and the European Union simply because Hamas militancy and rejectionism of the Israeli “state” had legally, fairly, and overwhelmingly won a crucial election against the compromising, imperialist collaborating Arafatites and their discredited “two-state solution” humiliation for the Palestine people.
But this devastating and revolutionary victory turning imperialism’s “democracy” tool round on it is neither mentioned nor supported.
But much more significantly this list of possible starting points glaringly stops short in 1967, at the Yom Kippur war to suppress Nasserite pan-Arab ambitions in the region, one of "Israel's" major services to imperialism.
And tragically neither does the entire fake-”left” want to turn over this stone either, fearful of the difficult questions to be raised about the international “recognition” of the Israeli occupation by the Moscow Stalinist revisionist leadership which not only went along with the legalisation of the entire theft but even offered arms to the new Zionist regime to “help stabilise” the Middle East.
The immediate question can only be ‘from what flawed understanding did such an idiocy arise, with its help for 60 years of suffering and pain imposed on the Palestinian and Arab people’?
And the answer can only be ‘from an entire deluded world perspective of permanent peaceful coexistence with a supposedly moribund and declining imperialism’; the don’t-rock-the-boat inanities of the retreat from world revolutionary perspectives which had begun to set solid in the Moscow revisionist leadership and emerged in concrete form in Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism in 1952 (see EPSR Perspectives 2001).
Small wonder that the entire gang of revisionists - and notably the Brarite Lalkarites, (now skulking around in the newly launched “Proletarian” as another way of avoiding awkward questions, particularly their eight year’s of support for Scargill’s class collaborating trade-unionist SLP anti-communism) will make loud noises about a “return to the 1967 borders”.
There is zero prospect of the Zionists ever abandoning the continuous land grabs and colonising expansion which they pursue relentlessly year after year because the entire logic of their position makes it clear they have to ever push outwards “for protection”.
There is international posturing aplenty on this question. The United Nations and international juridicial lawyers have declared these war seizures illegal but the resolutions for withdrawal - lying on the table as the most critical UN resolutions of the entire late twentieth century – are safely and hypocritically ignored and buried by the entire west, which instead continues to fund and arm the Zionists to the teeth.
And they are anyway monstrous hypocrisy of course, part of the even bigger hypocrisy of the “two-state” solution which implicitly recognises the existence of the “state” of "Israel”, and the western intriguing which created it in 1947, by virtue of declaring the 1967 border as “valid”.
Which begs all the questions and allows the West to continue presenting justified resistance and struggle militancy against “Israel” and this Nazi fanatical occupation as “terrorist outrage” and “unprovoked”, (helped by the disgusting complicity of the fake-”left” rushing to “condemn terrorism” at every available opportunity)
The Zionists even have the astonishing chutzpah (to use one of their own words), to demand “international support” (which they have in bucketfuls) and the “implementation of UN resolutions” calling for the disarming of Hizbollah for supposed “border incursions”.
But the much earlier UN resolutions demanding withdrawal of Zionism from war occupied land are ignored of course.
All this fraudulent international “peacekeeping” - an impossibility ultimately in the warmongering system of capitalism is fraudulent posturing to keep the great world wide confidence trick of bourgeois “democracy and freedom” spinning a little longer and to distance the imperialists from the worst excesses of the Zionists, which can only, and do, endlessly continue and escalate, and will for as long as “Israel” exists and the ordinary masses resist it. Or are utterly slaughtered which is the inexorable “logic” of this neo-colonialism, which can never be negotiated or “settled” away.
Only total defeat for this festering genocidal occupation project will bring peace and a solution.
The question is an open one of what part this insanity now plays in the overall general descent of the imperialist crisis into world war three, the relentless pattern of the system since the turn of the century and the crash of the Stock Market (rebuilt only on massive dollar printing, the creation of never-before-seen levels of unsustainable imperialist indebtedness and the mighty success of the Chinese workers state controlled capitalist economic growth).
It is fed by the same contradictions and increasingly drawn into the general maelstrom of warmongering disaster which imperialism has unleashed in Iraq, Afghanistan and potentially against Iran, Sudan, and other “rogue states”.
But will the threatened smiting of Iran and Syria by the Zionist mad-dog – to follow on Lebanon – suit imperialism’s immediate interests, or even stampede it into the war escalation it has been threatening with its sinister anti-Iran campaigns (so ably supported by the fake-”left” diatribes painting all these regimes as “Islamo-fascist”)?
Does the tail wag the dog (to confuse the metaphor)?
Imperialism is capable of just as much barbarism and slaughter, and has been throughout the planet for its entire existence, not least in the 400 wars, coups, bombings, assassinations, death squad terrors, wholesale massacres and all-out blitzing of whole countries like North Korea, and Vietnam, carried out by US led imperialism in the post-war “peace” to install or keep in place compliant fascist stoogery and counter-revolution, (when thoughts of “democracy” are conveniently forgotten or back-burnered.)
But the complex juggling of imperialist domination has needed a network of bribery and petty bourgeois stoogery capable of presenting itself as “for the people” while holding back open revolt, anti-imperialist nationalism and communist revolution, and in the Middle East that always meant propping up a variety of Arab and associated regimes with enough “deals” and “aid” to keep them sweet and if not on side at least not too far off it.
“Clean(ish) hands” around the Middle East and the occasional posturing play-acting to “mediate” and “look for peaceful solutions” (swallowed whole by the two-staters,) have been essential ingredient for imperialist rule.
The EPSR has long speculated that the more out-of-control berserker behaviour of the Zionist religious fanatics might at some point go so haywire, as the world crisis pressures overall drive tensions and contradictions to new levels, that they would need reining in by an imperialism with more strings to its bow in manipulation and bullying control (not least a network of newly built military bases in the region from Iraq to Afghanistan) and that only the US imperialist power would have the capacity to do it, (as even some bourgeois press speculation was suggesting this weekend). It might even come to outright conflict was the possibility.
But a new question arises now about how much is left of that complexity for a west which is itching for war, and has already long past the early stages of whipping the world into a new warmongering atmosphere, from the 1998 blitzing of hapless set-up Serbia to the festering torture and tyrannising of the supposed shock and awe campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Part of its new nazi strategy to directly intimidate world wide proletarian and nationalist resistance, and most of all, the competitive resistance of other major imperialist powers, (whose very survival in the coming slump crisis will depend on out-competing and out-fighting rival powers) is the bizarre hoax of the “war on terror” with the “clash of civilisations” being used to terrify the western masses and drag them into a frenzy of chauvinism and hatred long enough at least to get into the next all-out destruction of capital and “surplus production capacity”.
But that has meant whipping up an endless terror campaign to scapegoat the entire Muslim world – which has helped feed the already deepening hostility and hatred of the masses across the planet for the imperialist system, now convinced that it is deliberately waging war on them.
Things have already been going disastrously wrong for this jackboot strategy of intimidation which has failed to shock and awe any of the masses, least of all in the bogged down Iraq and Afghan turmoils, where endless new troops numbers are being sucked in by an increasingly coherent resistance already displacing the warlordism of the immediate post-blitzing with ever more organised resistance.
Far from suppressing world “uppitiness” the blitzing mayhem - revealed daily to be a more foul, criminal, murdering, raping, torturing, ignorant nazi mess than could be though possible at the end of the last disgusting disclosure - has recruited tens of thousands more for the outright struggle against imperialism and set in train unstoppable transformations in understanding and determination that will eventually mature into fullscale revolutionary grasp by the billions who get the shitty end of the imperialist deal, enough to eventually end this appalling system.
But have so many boats already been burned from the old network of relationships which kept the world in thrall so long during the artificially sustained “stability” of the post-war credit fed boom, that there is no climbing back?
Is imperialism so up to its neck already that it has already alienated this entire section of the planet and will let itself be dragooned along behind the Zionist red-eyed frenzy into escalating the warmongering, intent on “smashing” the resistance?
The “accidental microphone on” conversation at the G8 meeting between Bush and Blair, plotting to use the onslaught to bully Syria and Iran certainly makes clear the general tone of the imperialist conspiracy but is a long way yet from out and out direct warmongering.
But Marxist analysis makes it clear that capitalism wants and is preparing further warmongering as its massive lie campaigns and CIA intelligence stunts against Sudan, Iran, Burma, Zimbabwe, North Korea, Bolivia, Venezuela, Cuba, and other demonisable victims repeatedly confirms.
But it would also be disastrous to be associated directly with the worst atrocities of the Zionist rampaging, multiplying yet again the already convinced anti-Zionist hatred of the masses that imperialism is the major enemy (as it is).
The chaotic uncertainty of the ruling class - personified by the imbecilities of the Bush Blair pantomime and the utter discredit they face as the warmongering strategy grinds on in incompetent chaos, makes it hard to call.
Things are complicated by the clear panic of others sections of the ruling class over how sourly bad things have gone and ready to scapegoat Blairism for it - possibly all the way to arrest and prison on corruption and sleaze charges.
But the state’s flexing of its muscle’s will change nothing for a ruling class which has hit the historical buffers long ago and which had already turned to Blairism in desperation.
What will they replace it with – more buffoonery by the upper class twits?
This is a class which is out of time, running a system which no longer has any relevance to the needs of human development anywhere on the planet and can only lead it further into war and destruction. And the full impact of crisis still has not broken.
The only certainties are that the fundamental revolutionary perspectives developed by Marx, Engels and Lenin are the tool for understanding the growing class balance complexities of the slide into warmongering chaos and with the fight for understanding creating the vital revolutionary theory and leadership with which the world cannot be fully transformed from tyrannical imperialism to rational planned and coherent socialist development.
Build Leninism
Don Hoskins
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World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).
President Fidel Castro reiterates his demand to Forbes magazine — We will continue to demolish their lies
By Granma daily staff writers Maria Julia Mayoral, Orlando Oramas, Jose A. De la Osa y Orfilio Pelaez
LIES were demolished again during a special presentation on Wednesday, May 24, when President Fidel Castro affirmed that the Bush administration was left with a “no hit, no run” situation after failing to provide any answer or defense against the irrefutable truths of the Cuban Revolution.
For six hours, Fidel and several guests revealed the maneuver used by Forbes magazine in its attempt to smear Cuba’s prestige, at a time when the country is attaining new victories and extending its help and potential to other peoples of the world.
“I know this people, its state of mind during each one of our battles, and it has never been this elevated; that is the result of the Revolution’s work,” affirmed the Cuban president, explaining why it was important to expose Washington’s conspiracy, via which Forbes claimed that Fidel had a fortune of $900 million.
“We must continue demolishing their lies. It is an ideological battle; all of this is the Battle of Ideas. They don’t have anything, they don’t have one word. They have no defense,” he emphasized.
Fidel explained that the special presentation was aimed primarily at international public opinion, because the Cuban people do not allow themselves to be deceived or manipulated, given that their awareness has multiplied. “That is a people that defends its Revolution, that understands lies and rejects them,” he noted.
Referring to his previous appearance, during which he urged the Bush administration and its intelligence agencies to prove their disgraceful claims, Fidel commented, “They are remaining silent.”
“Bush is staying quiet, just like the State Department, Congress and the cia. The only one defending (the lie) is El Nuevo Herald, the libelous newspaper of the terrorist mafia in Miami. Look at how weak and rickety the Bush administration is; it hasn’t been able to say one word.”
“That was how it was when we demanded that they say where Posada Carriles illegally entered (the country); they stayed absolutely silent then, too,” he added.
All of the country’s income is for the revolution
Fidel emphasized that all of the country’s income, whatever its source, is utilized to support the Revolution’s development, in a country that is blockaded but has carried out education and healthcare for the entire people; that has trained the human capital via which it resisted the Special Period and the fall of the socialist bloc, particularly that of the ussr.
“That is a fundamental reason that is not understood by those who advocated our end when we lost our markets and the U.S. blockade was intensified.”
The Cuban president noted that at that time, there were almost 30,000 students in the medical schools, almost all of whom graduated. Today, the country is educating 40,000 computer programmers, as well as thousands of other experts in services that the country is providing to. other nations, and charting a new economic course.
He affirmed that the income from tourism, from the hard-currency stores and from thousands of other enterprises during all of these years has been used to buy fuel, food and other necessary items to first be able to resist and then to advance toward new heights of development. The banking system is now administrating what was previously done by 3,000 entities that operated in hard currency. It receives, credits, and approves all investments. Here, spending is accounted for, and with increasing discipline.
Buckets over their heads
Fidel commented that Forbes and El Nuevo Herald should put buckets over their heads to cover up the discredit of their spurious arguments. With respect to the Miami newspaper, he commented on one article in it that refers to him as a murderer, terrorist and person guilty of acts of genocide.
“Let them find one war in the history of humanity, in the history of revolutions, where there was an army like our Rebel Army, which took thousands of prisoners without a blow; and during Girón (the Bay of Pigs invasion) it was the same: not one blow, we did not hit a single mercenary with the butt of a rifle.”
“Yes, we have punished in an exemplary way those who tortured and murdered the people. We promised justice, and justice was done, and the maximum sentence was given to those criminals, in accordance with the law, carried out by a country that did not have death squads, that even suspended the death penalty, and was subjected to a dirty war that killed thousands of its citizens,” Fidel affirmed.
He said that the criminals and those guilty of genocide are those who imposed the Torricelli and Helms-Burton laws on the Cuban people, those who paid Posada Carriles for his criminal actions and have not stopped carrying out assassination attempts during all these years of the Revolution.
“We knew they had prepared the assassination attempt in Panama, and we revealed it there, because we could not violate the sovereignty of that country by capturing him or eliminating him. We never would have done that. But yes, we have helped the Angolans, the Namibians and many other peoples; we have combated apartheid and contributed to other revolutionary causes, some of which took power.”
They cannot do what Cuba does
“We know down to the cent what the Henry Reeve Contingent has cost in Pakistan: every flight, every hospital. I never would have spoken if the president, foreign minister and prime minister had not spoken and asked for help from the world. For us, we were doing our duty, just like the 1,600 doctors we offered to the United States when (Hurricane) Katrina hit, or the hundreds we offered to Guatemala and Mexico after Stan,” Fidel said.
“If we had not had the doctors, we could not have helped Pakistan with anesthesiologists, surgeons and intensive-care experts and I maintain that the United States and Europe together could not do what Cuba has done, because their doctors are private property.”
In that sense, the Cuban president noted that Cuba is contributing to the training of doctors and other professionals from all over the world, and gave the example of the 1,600 Bolivians studying medicine in Holguín, or the 700 Cuban doctors lending their services in Evo Morales’ country, or who are turning their workplaces into universities in remote sites of Sub-Saharan Africa-, where 700 million people have fewer doctors than does Cuba.
In response to these realities, and because of the Revolution’s broad prestige, the conspiracy was created via which Forbes is repeating its lies. And this is the right moment for a response, at a time when, moreover, the book by Ignacio Ramonet has come out and has had a mayor impact, Fidel commented.
“Today, the empire’s discredit is greater than ever; they wage wars in the name of democracy; they are liars, shameless.”
“We are facing the challenge of the most complicated world ever, when there are perils that are endangering the existence of the human species, with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, and climactic changes associated with a disorganized world, in which a minority controls the wealth and dominates technology and scientific advances.”
“Many of these ideas are in Ramonet’s book, which does not contain a single lie or exaggeration,” the Cuban president commented. “If that were not the case, we would be betraying our conscience.”
With respect to the Forbes calumny and his demands for a U.S. response, Fidel said that perhaps they thought that he would not answer them. “They should be more prudent, and be quiet, and be a little more careful, because we are living in exceptional times.”
And he concluded: “That piece of garbage magazine should ask for an apology from world public opinion. I don’t have an account in dollars in any Cuban bank, nor do I have a single dollar. We will continue demanding an answer from them, and we are sure that many in the world are going to speak out against these lies.”
“Forbes should ask for an apology from the world for its lies and infamies,” Fidel emphasized.
Decorum and morale against the Empire’s lies
Francisco Soberón Valdés, president of the Central Bank of Cuba said that he had closely followed the international repercussions of Fidel’s presentation on May 14 regarding the well-known subject of the “poisonous list” published by Forbes magazine, claiming Fidel had a fortune of $900 million.
That analysis, he said, once again confirmed the incredible inability of our adversaries to expect the colossal moral force of our people, and he noted that the deceit that they tried to use against our nation and its top leader was so crude and so ridiculous that pulverizing it into the dust was a relatively simple task.
He commented that the weight of the blow dealt and the dignified demand made by Fidel was such that news agencies “had to dig deep” to find spokespersons for Forbes and reflect “fifth-string” assistants who ventured only to make timid commentaries on the issue.
Fortunately, while Forbes has no other alternative than to try to shield itself in oblivion to desperately escape from its own clumsiness and perfidy, our country is increasingly winning more sympathy and support throughout the world.
As a current expression of that growing recognition in international financial activity, he said, on May 25, the annual meeting of the Latin American Association of Financial Institutions for Development was to open in Havana, where more than 40 financial institutions from 21 countries were to participate. Their discussions will be focused on options for Latin America and the Caribbean in the current international economic situation and the function of development banking, he said.
The other side of the Forbes list
Cuban Culture Minister Abel Prieto likewise commented on Fidel’s challenge to Bush, the cia and U.S. intelligence agencies, which, he said, can provide the keys to this entire process.
Initially, he commented on the article by Argentine journalist Manuel Freitas, published by an alternative news agency, that analyzes the Forbes list from “the other side of the coin:” that spectacle of the wealthy elite, the fortunate of the Earth, that chasm of horror that exists so that Forbes lists can be published.
In his article, Freitas comments on the 2005 list of 587 multimillionaires, and notes that “on the other end of the pyramid,” there are 840 million people who lack basic food, offering chilling statistics on the number of extreme poor in Latin America, truly horrific percentages on Latin American children, with high levels of chronic malnutrition, which leaves its scars on the development and intelligence of those children.
The writer notes that it is useful for such a magazine to exist, which so vulgarly exhibits the millionaire elites of the planet, because when that is contrasted with the terrible statistics on marginalization, hunger, and poverty, that allows people to become aware and realize the cruelty of that system.
It is very important for people to see the capitalist system for what it is, its ferocity, the writer says.
Referring then to an article by Carlos Marti, Abel Prieto said that Forbes supports the U.S. healthcare system, which is privatized; the costs for medical treatment and health insurance are extremely high, and a large sector of the population is unprotected in terms of healthcare. He noted that the United States is an example of extreme inequality in terms of healthcare, which is the most important human right.
And the Martí article ended with this comment: Not very far from the United States, we find a small country in which this most important human right to life and health is guaranteed to all citizens equally. This magazine (Forbes) would do well, instead of lying about Fidel’s supposed patrimony, to add another paragraph to its advice: if you are poor and want medical treatment, it would be better to be born in Cuba.
Another intellectual, Emilio Marín, asks: Why are they attacking Fidel? And he responds: because they could not kill him, despite 637 assassination attempts. And other key may be found in the island’s victories, citing, among others, economic growth; the signing of the alba (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas); the revelations about the entry of terrorist Posada Carriles into the United States with that country’s knowledge; and the votes from 135 countries in the United Nations for Cuba’s membership on the Human Rights Council.
Fidel and Forbes are from two counterposed worlds, and that is why it is in the empire’s interest to try to tarnish -without any possibility of success - Fidel’s image.
Silence will not stop our accusations
...The latest concoction of this multimillionaire comes at a time when the anti-Cuban mafia and the current Republican administration are seeking to torpedo the growing prestige of the Revolution and doubly intensify the blockade.
He harshly criticized the bad intentions of Forbes magazine in trying to denigrate the Cuban president’s integrity while at the same time publishing nothing about Cuba’s successes as a country that is free of childhood malnutrition; or the 2 million Latin Americans who have learned how to read and write with the “I Can Do It!” Cuban literacy method; or the tens of thousands of patients who have benefited from Operation Miracle; nor does it refer to the fact that the United States has the second-worst infant mortality rate in the developed world, or that it has more than 2 million prison inmates.
Alonso commented on the more than 1,200 nights of meetings between leaders of the Young Communist League and Fidel from 1999 to date. During those long nights, there was never any talk about transferring money to any banks to inflate anybody’s accounts; rather, the discussions were about improving life for the people; prioritizing care for the disabled; providing more jobs for young people; boosting art and culture; graduating more doctors, implanting values.
...Rogelio Polanco, editor-in-chief of Juventud Rebelde newspaper, noted that perhaps many thought that Cuba could sue the magazine for defamation, but no; once again, she has appealed to the moral tribunal of the people’s sense of truth and justice. She did it openly, in the person of Fidel before the Cuban people and all of humanity. Noting that they have been able nor will they be able to present any proof, and charging that a much higher figure has been spent by them on counterrevolution and crime over almost five decades.
They were left without arguments
According to Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque..the tall tales published in Forbes shows once again that imperialism depends on unscrupulous lies, while socialism resorts to the truth; imperialism worships in the cult of money and selfishness; socialism implies the worship of justice and dignity.
While under imperialism, men and women are distinguished by having money, under socialism the paradigm is another: it is dedication, service to the collect project; that is why our people admire individuals like Conchita, a scientist whose efforts leading a group of specialists who developed the vaccine against meningitis Type b won her the permanent affection and respect of the Cuban people, even though she will never be on the list of multimillionaires in Forbes magazine.
The foreign minister emphasized that in Cuba, “we have created a society with values diametrically opposed to those of capitalism, where money is not the most important thing, something our enemies can never understand. Having exposed to public opinion this different way of looking at the world, with ideals and attitudes that are the opposite of those of Forbes’ and company, is another feature of this discussion, he noted.
“However, in my opinion, the most important thing is that neither Bush, nor the cia, nor the 33 intelligence agencies, nor anybody, has been able to respond to Fidel’s challenge. Ten days have gone by and they are not saying a single word. Our truth makes them give way,” he stated.
“Now Bush has a golden opportunity to get rid of Fidel if they can prove that he has a single dollar overseas, and he is staying quiet because they have nothing to say: it is a shameful silence. Forbes is staying quiet too; he does not have the courage to come out publicly. He is a miserable wretch standing in front of mountain of light that is dazzling him,” Perez Roque added.
“All they have done since that first presentation by Fidel is to put low-profile spokespeople up to saying nonsense with no substance: that they don’t have evidence that the Cuban president has money in foreign banks, but he could take $900 million with him if he fled the country, etc. What is certain is that the truth is triumphing, the balloon is deflating, the lies are hiding, and the challenge issued by our top leader is blazing like a flag,” he emphasized.
Forbes cannot sustain a serious debate
“Basically, the lies published by Forbes cannot be interpreted as a personal attack against the Cuban president. Fidel’s prestige cannot be damaged, and they know it; therefore, why do they insist on this campaign that is already doomed to failure?” asked parliamentary deputy and researcher Agustín Lage.
At the heart of this media orchestration is an attack on the validity of social property; the utilization of the fruits of the economy, in the hands of the people, to produce social justice and well-being for all, he affirmed. “That is why they invent lies about Fidel’s supposed personal fortune: to try to take away legitimacy from social property, spreading the false idea that there is no difference between capitalist practices and the Cuban experience,” he added.
“Here we know where the wealth goes: to thousands of schools; universal education; healthcare services, with the greatest public spending in all of Latin America; raising life expectancy to 77 years; reducing infant mortality; developing culture and science; municipal university sites; the energy revolution; internationalist cooperation; Operation Miracle; in a process led by the State, which accounts for his conduct before the people,” affirmed Lage, who is director of Havana’s Center for Molecular Immunology.
“It is we who can ask, where do the resources go from private capitalist companies? Who does that money benefit?” he said. In recent years, he noted, the U.S. pharmaceutical industry has been the most profitable, more than the companies considered to be the top 500, and the lever used by those pharmaceutical consortiums has been nothing other than the high prices of medicine, which is depriving millions of citizens from the treatment they need.
On a world scale, every year 11 million people die (30,000 every day), due to infectious diseases, given that they lack medicine, he said. That does not occur only in the Third World. The United States, with the most powerful economy in the world, is in 37th place in terms of the medical services it provides; there, some 50 million citizens do not have healthcare coverage.
From the viewpoint of production costs, he said, the current prices of medicines are not justified. The rising costs are caused by the control waged by monopolies, which put forward as their justification the supposed need to finance scientific investigation with their income. However, the truth is quite different: most of the money is used for marketing, for commercials. Spending on scientific activities does not exceed, on average, 11% of income, while 27% is used for advertising and commercial activity in general.
Moreover, according to the World Health Organization (who), only one-tenth of the percentage allocated for research in the pharmaceutical field is dedicated to studies on the diseases that cause 90% of deaths worldwide, because they are simply the most common diseases in the poorest countries, and research is focused on curing and relieving the health problems of people in rich nations, where the consortiums have markets and profits, Agustín Lage stated.
Comparing that excessive desire for money with the spirit of solidarity of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel explained that more than 230,000 Latin American and Caribbean people have received restorative vision surgery free of charge via Operation Miracle. It is no surprise, then, that the main enemies of that program are rich ophthalmologists, who charge thousands of dollars for their services. That is what is happening in Uruguay, where the Medical College filed a lawsuit against Cuban specialists who carry out diagnoses for numerous patients with vision problems.
That is not the position of the Uruguayan government, Fidel explained, noting that the authorities of that South American country are interested in offering free ophtalmalogical services to citizens who cannot pay for them. However, he warned, “they (ophthalmologists) are making war on the government, and now they want to send two of our specialists to jail for diagnosing needy people. This is a monstrous crime, an expression of where commercial ambitions lead,” he commented.
“Yankee imperialism is also bent on preventing the development of Operation Miracle,” the “Cuban president stated. “An illustrative example of that is the pressure brought to bear against another country in the region whose government, after receiving with pleasure Cuba’s possible aid, took a conflicting position given the prohibitions imposed by the White House.”
“That government has shown itself to be cowardly and indecisive, and I don’t know how it is going to explain to its people that it rejected 20,000 or 30,000 free operations over three years,” he added.
Agustín Lage commented, “We Cubans have the right to question how private companies make their fortunes, and who the individuals are that enrich themselves and benefit when, for example, a single executive of a large pharmaceutical company can earn $74.8 million annually in salary and compensation.” That amount of money could pay for the annual treatment of 15,000 aids patients when the products are bought at market prices, but could pay for many more when considering the real cost of pharmaceu-ticals, he affirmed.
“Is that legitimate and just?” asked the deputy, who noted that under capitalism, the enrichment of a minority is legal, and it is precisely those “successful” multimillionaires whose fortunes are highlighted by Forbes magazine.
There are alternatives to the logic of capital, he said. “Cuba, with Fidel at the helm, is demonstrating the viability of our socialist experience with its economic and social results. That is a danger for our ideological adversaries, represented by Forbes magazine. Neither the publication nor those behind it can sustain a serious debate on the legitimacy of capitalism, on private property in the international economic order.” •
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