The Weak In Rock

It was about 13 years ago that Dubya’s daddy declared the end to the Cold War and that the experiment of Communism had univerasally failed. Well ha ha on him. Evo Morales appears to have won Bolivia’s Presidential election. This means that Bolivia joins Chile, Venezuela and Brazil among the South American nations who have swung widely to the left in the past few years.

What’s this all about, I hear my fellow country-people saying, largely willfully ignorant of anything happening anywhere but Hollywood these days. What it’s about is the IMF and WTO policies totally backfiring on the US and European bankers who run both organizations. The IMF has repeatedly strong-armed third world countries into “reforming” their monetary policies, which has without exeception been disasterous for all but the very rich in these nations. The result is a swelling of the ranks of the working poor who find the concept of worker controlled industry and reallocation of national wealth very appealing.

The irony here is so thick you couldn’t cut it with a Ginsu. Reagan/Bush stomped the USSR into economic submission by forcing them into an arms race that bankrupted the Soviet system. The Berlin Wall fell, and eastern Europe has been remade into a source of cheap labor for European industry and the stability we’d come to enjoy in the third world due to the counter-balance of ideological conflict between the US and USSR went up in a puff of smoke.

Not only did the US create Osama bin Laden out of whole cloth in order to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan (in a very successful attempt to give the USSR their version of the Vietnam War) ultimately resulting the 9/11/01 attacks on NYC and Washington, but by eliminating Soviet global economic power as well and creating organizations like the IMF and WTO, that largely cater to US industrial interests, we’ve sown the seeds for Socialism to spread throughout South and Central America. It’s really amazing. What Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Mao could not accomplish Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush-Lite have managed to pull off rather rapidly.

Good grief. You know, I like the idea of Hugo Chavez a lot more than I like the actual real-life Hugo Chavez. I like there to be balance in the world politically. Venezuela having an ardent Socialist as President appeals to me.

Unfortunately the real deal is a wingnut. He cautioned his people the other day to be careful of Halloween because it has “terrorist” roots. I thought Cheney and Dubya abused that word beyond all meaning but I guess I hadn’t seen nuthin’ yet.

The really bad thing about this is that when ass-hats like this spout off their wingnutty ideas it gives socialists a bad name (or rather a worse name than they’ve already had).

Here’s an interesting article by Johann Hari about the prospect of drug legalization coming to the UK courtesy of a prominent Tory (for my fellow Yanks who aren’t hip to British political terminology, a Tory is a Conservative, with a definite capital C in the UK).

I guess this is a bit of an “only Nixon could go to China” sort of argument, and it’s one I tend to agree with. Traditional liberal reasoning behind drug legalization is shallow at best and tends to smack of hippie-dippie reasoning chock full of moral relativism. You know, the sort of stuff that gets gobbled up by urban intellectuals in NYC and Los Angeles but goes over like a KKK rally at the Apollo Theater in the rest of America.

I’m gradually realizing that the only hope of any progressive acheivements in American politics will have to come at the hands of some sensible, rational Republican. Now if we could only find a few of those.

Ever since the buttinski Christian Right hijacked the GOP it’s been dominated by slap-dicks like George W. Bush, Rick Santorum and Tom Delay. These are not conservatives, they’re fanatics.

What we need is another Teddy Roosevelt. Someone who understands what government is for and what it’s good at. There are plenty of solid conservative political reasons for legalizing drugs, allowing same-sex marriage and ridding the nation of abject poverty. But as long as the religious moralizers are in charge of the GOP none of this is possible.

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the link.

We’ve had two dubious anniversaries in the past week. It’s been 60 years since the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hiroshima was bombed on August 6, 1945. Nagasaki was bombed three days later and today is the anniversary of that second use of atomic weapons on a civilian population.

In the last four years Americans have been struggling to try to make sense of the 9/11/01 attacks on New York City and Washington. The question on the minds of most Americans is simply why. Why when we Americans generally regard ourselves as good people who do many good things throughout the world would someone decide to orchestrate attacks that resulted in the deaths of thousands of people (and that very easily could have killed many more than they did)?

The answer to that question is all about perspective. From the perspective of many people in the third world America seems monolithic and threatening. In school here we’re brought up seeing, for instance, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the quickest way to bring an end to war in the Pacific in 1945. The Japanese, we are taught, were prepared to fight down to the last man, woman and child to defend their homeland and that an invasion would have led to the deaths of around 1 million US soldiers and countless more Japanese and that buy dropping two bombs and killing around 200,000 people in both cities that millions were spared and the war was brought to a swift end. This is and has been the American perspective on the use of the atomic bombs on Japan.

While it is undeniable that Japan’s military and political establishment behaved heinously throughout their militarist expansion and campaign of conquest in the Pacific in the 1930s and 1940s being the only nation on earth to have been the target of atomic weapons almost instantly transformed the Japanese from aggressors to victims. The act of using these horrible weapons on two Japanese cities has made the Japanese something like the world’s atomic conscience. No one else in the world can describe first-hand what it was like to experience an atomic attack. In the United States these are stories that one rarely hears.

Imagine for a moment how the story of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki play in the third world and you begin to understand why someone might think the only way to deal with us would be to use our own jetliners as missiles on us. One of the legacies of the way WWII came to an end is the perception in a great part of the rest of the world that the USA is a dangerous thug. Before the end of the Cold War nations who feared the US or were in conflict with us aligned themselves with the Soviet Union and in so doing put themselves behind the USSR’s shield of nuclear weapons. The logic was (and it held up pretty well) that America would never use significant force against them out of fear that the Soviet Union would retaliate and that such retaliation would result in a nuclear exchange that would wipe out everyone on both sides - mutually assured destruction. With the Soviet Union gone and Russia largely an economic pawn of the west small nations whose objectives are in conflict with the US are turning to their own means of defense - some call it Fourth Generation Warfare, others call it terrorism.

The bomb ended WWII and ushered in nearly half a century of global stability and peace. But being in near sole possession of the bomb (the minor nuclear powers really don’t play into this dynamic much since none of them would ever be likely to use one of their bombs against the United States in order to force a political situation to turn in their favor) puts the United States effectively in the position of being the fastest gun in the west. Eventually some gunslinger’s bound to be a quicker draw.

Here’s a sobering image…