One of the striking features of late capitalism is its inability to meet any challenge except with savagery.
The former socialist states transformed themselves almost overnight and by and large bloodlessly into (more or less) liberal democracies. One cannot comprehend the reverse transformation without mass killing.
Let’s take a brief look back in history, less than a blink in time…
I recall watching the TV news during the 1980's Miners strike in “Britain”. One evening I watched with disbelief a report of a protest by striking miners in Poland.
Busloads of miners had driven up from the coal mining regions of Silesia to make their demands re pay and conditions to the central government in Warsaw.
Fascinated, I watched as the Polish miners sat down in the street and blocked the traffic in central Warsaw. I waited with anticipation, sure that the police would come in with batons swinging and break a few heads. No such thing happened.
Comparing this with the treatment meted out to striking miners by the British central government was most instructive.
Striking miners in a "liberal democratic" state were charged by horses and police with batons, shields and full riot gear. Miners striking in a "totalitarian, despotic" state were not. Subsequent events in the transformation of Eastern Europe seem to suggest that it was not the socialist states that were undemocratic and resistant to change.
It was the "liberal" democracies which ruthlessly used the mechanisms of the state to maintain the status quo and resist popular pressure.
Aside from the treatment of striking workers, the ability of nations to assert self-determination seems to have been so much more straightforward in the former socialist states. The Baltic republics negotiated a relatively trouble-free secession from the Soviet Union. Contrast this with the treatment of national minorities in France, Spain or "Britain".
Sadly for the peoples of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the transition from orderly socialism where ethnic strife had been suppressed for forty years..(surely the greatest triumph of Yugoslav socialism) opened the doors to blood letting on a scale not seen in Europe since the times of the Third Reich.
..when thieves fall out…the people pay the price….
Post-September 11th, the conduct of the western allies, gives no indication of liberal democratic values underpinning policy in the war against "terrorism"
The unfortunates captured by the western forces in Afghanistan or Iraq (or by any of the coalition client states) can expect to be hooded, shackled, flown halfway round the world to be kept in cages open to the elements and subject to military tribunals (the word "court" seems a misnomer, unless one juxtaposes the word “kangaroo”).
It would be unrealistic to expect the United States to act in any other way.
A nation notorious for the way in which it treats its own prison population is hardly likely to indulge what it describes as "unlawful combatants" from far-off places.
Sadly that is exactly the reason why the US and their western allies are hated. That is exactly why an attack like September 11th took the form that it did.
When your powerful enemy has the ability to buy off or bludgeon the political apparatus of your homeland, when your enemy is utterly immune to peaceful attempts to change its policy, then attacks like those of September 11th become a certainty.
There can be little doubt that the perpetrators knew the likely consequences of their actions.
In the inevitable fullness of time, Afghanistan was bombed. The spectacle of the mightiest nations of the world venting their spleen on the poorest one was unedifying to say the least. The war in Iraq rumbles on and will surely take an even greater toll. The Iraqis must thank their lucky stars that they had oil rather than cabbages as a cornerstone of their economy. How else would they have been "liberated"..?
The Intifada in Palestine grinds on. Palestinian suicide-bombers and stone-throwers ranged against the full panoply of a modern client state supplied with Missiles, Helicopter Gunships and Surveillance apparatus. The latest development, a Wall to physically separate Palestinians and Israelis and "coincidentally" separate Palestinian communities from water and land.
"Detainees" are hooded, shackled and otherwise sensorily deprived. It is not hard to see what this will do. These guys will hunger-strike to death. It doesn't take a genius to realise that.
Every prison struggle between politically motivated prisoners and a repressive prison apparatus is an unequal struggle, but these guys have nothing else to do.
The Republican Lord Mayor of Cork Terence MacSwiney said during his hungerstrike in 1920, "it is not those who can inflict the most, but those who can endure the most who will ultimately prevail."
Terence MacSwiney endured nearly 100 days on hunger strike and died despite concerted attempts to force-feed him.
Death for the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay is an incentive.
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