“Roger Modjeski Has a Question,” by Alpha Unit

Until the transistor came along, electronic amplification was produced by vacuum tubes.

These tubes were in TV sets, radios, hi-fi sysytems, and guitar amplifiers, and were also vital components of military applications like radar. In almost all these devices tubes have been replaced by solid state technology – that is, semiconductors – except in some guitar amplifiers. And that’s because to a lot of guitarists, there’s no replacement for the sound produced by tubes.

A tube is just a vacuum-sealed glass bottle with an electrode that emits electrons when heated (cathode) and an electrode that attracts electrons (anode). It also contains a grid, which modulates the flow of electrons, and a filament, or heater.

Dave Hunter tells us that when a guitarist plucks a string on his guitar, the pickup sends a small voltage to the input of his amplifier, where it’s passed along to the grid of the first preamp tube. The grid creates an increase in voltage by causing electrons to “boil off” the cathode, making the sound bigger. This bigger signal is passed along to the output tube, which makes it even bigger. This is then carried to the speaker via the output transformer.

Some listeners can’t really tell the difference between a solid state amp – or transistor amp – and a tube amp. But for many guitarists, tube amps are the only way to do it. Danny says that a solid state amp produces a clean, crisp, accurate sound and that it’s quick and responsive to your playing. It requires less maintenance and can emulate many different amplifiers at the push of a button.

The downside of a solid state amp is that the sound lacks “warmth” – it’s usually cold and sterile. Distortion is too sharp sounding. There’s no individuality to the tone and all amps will sound the same with almost any player.

Tube amps, on the other hand, are best known for their warmth, he says. They are pleasing to the ear. Scientists can’t measure the warmth, which is probably why they haven’t been able to duplicate it in a solid state amp.

Also, each tube amp sounds different, with its unique tone. No two guitarists will sound the same through the same tube amp, as the amp will respond to each individual’s playing technique in a different way. Tube amps sound fat and thick, and will sound even fatter as the volume is turned up, creating that famous wall of sound.

Tubes distort sound, compressing the sound in a most pleasing way. The transformer can’t handle the signal peaks and softly rounds them off, causing even more distortion (a good thing, he insists).

There are disadvantages to having a tube amp, though. Danny says that it doesn’t sound good at low volumes; it’s best to play it loud. Tube amps also cost more than solid state amps. And you need a guitar pedal to create different sounds. They’re also very heavy.

Some features of tube sound can be produced in a digital filter. Engineers have developed transistor amps that emulate the sound of a tube amp. Tom Scholz, rock musician and mechanical engineer, introduced the Rockman, which used bipolar transistors but created a distorted sound that some musicians like. Rockman technology was used exclusively for Def Leppard’s album Hysteria. You can also hear it on Eliminator by ZZ Top.

And yet for many guitarists, nothing sounds like tube amps. Many of these purists are great fans of Roger Modjeski, who’s been designing tube amplifiers for almost his entire life. He says that his design career began at 11, but he gained his first knowledge of tube amps at the age of 5, watching his father build a Heathkit Mono hi-fi system. Modjeski himself built a dozen hi-fi sets from Heath kits while growing up. And then:

Around 1964, my interest and the industry’s turned to the new “miracle” transistors. I, in my basement shop, and the giants of the industry all did our best to design good-sounding amplifiers with these new devices, and we all failed.

But Modjeski continued experimenting with transistor circuits and invented a few of his own. In 1969 he went to the University of Virginia to get his degree in electrical engineering, learning that he was the only one in his program who had built his own amplifiers. After graduating he got a job at IBM but he saw it as a dead end. He opened an audio repair shop in his hometown of Richmond, Virginia.

In 1975 he went to Stanford to get a Master’s degree, but after a year he gave up on it and returned to Virginia. He got to know Harold Beveridge mainly by being his dealer in Virginia, even though he had met Beveridge at Stanford. Harold Beveridge was an electrical engineer who had attended McGill University and then worked for Raytheon before designing amplifiers.

In 1978 Modjeski went to work for Beveridge as a consultant and later as Chief Engineer. He designed tube amps there but left after 3 years, and by 1981 he decided to start his own company, Music Reference. On his website you’ll read that MR products are known for their ease of use, reliability, and longevity. His company Ram Tube Works was established in 1982 and was the first company to offer premium tubes tested by computer. You’ll learn that several other companies have tried to take their market and failed.

Roger Modjeski has a separate concern, however. He is asking, “Where is the next generation of audio engineers?”

He says that for 20 years he has put out the call for young people to come and work for him. A few have come, he says, but as the years go by, they are fewer and fewer. He has run ads in Stereophile to get the attention of young people interested in science and inventing, and done the same in his comments and on his website. He’s gotten little reply, he says.

He was an apprentice under Harold Beveridge and he has served as a mentor himself. But not enough people are showing interest in the field. “If you truly love audio, what else are you doing that is so much more important?” he wonders.

The industry needs new talent.

“At Risk and Still on the Line,” by Alpha Unit

Three years ago a lineman was electrocuted while working in an underground electrical vault in Benicia, California. He was employed by Pacific Gas & Electric Company. Two state investigations have held PG&E at fault for not having a supervisor monitor the work, and for other reasons.

In spite of the hazards of being a lineman, this 26-year-old man loved his job, according to his girlfriend. Since his death and two subsequent deaths, PG&E has expanded its apprenticeship requirements and required all existing linemen to take one or two weeks of refresher training. The work is indeed dangerous, so many linemen prefer to be with a union. Two popular unions are the Utility Workers Union of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

Linemen can spend up to five years in an apprenticeship program learning the skills of their trade. They have to know electrical theory, transformer theory, pole climbing and setting, rigging techniques, wire stringing techniques, and safety on the job. The time they put in to learn the trade includes training in handling electrical lines barehanded.

“Barehanded?” people must wonder. “You can’t touch a live power line barehanded.”

Yes. The term “barehanded” is sort of misleading. A lineman doing barehand work actually wears a suit consisting of a hooded jacket, bib-overall-style pants, socks, and gloves. The suit is made of 75% Nomex, a fire-retardant material, and 25% stainless steel fibers. The metallic mesh designed into the suit, as Rich Maxwell explains, serves as a Faraday Cage, putting the lineman at the same potential as that of the conductor on which he or she is working.

The Faraday Cage principle is that no electrical charge can be present on the interior of a charged cage. While the lineman is wearing the suit, the static electrical field connected to the suit redistributes the charge around the outside of the suit and not through the lineman.

Barehand work minimizes disruption to customers while companies work on the lines, which is why demand for it has grown over the years. A 15-year veteran lineman, Karl Townie, enjoys the challenge of doing live-line work. He gets a kick out of some aspects of it, telling one writer that on the higher voltages, they can often hear the electricity arcing between their fingers.

“One time when it got dark before we could get off the wire,” he said, “we could actually see the arcing between the fingers, too.”

As with so many other things, the thrill and the danger go hand in hand. Karl Townie’s company requires a stringent certification process, after which a lineman is assigned to a working crew for 60 hours of close supervision. He has to do at least 25 hours of barehand work a year to stay certified.

Barehand work is highly specialized. Generally, a lineman’s work is building and maintaining electrical power systems. They do it all: set towers and poles, maintain and repair overhead transmission lines, work in underground vaults and trenches, and install and maintain insulators and transformers. On occasion they’ll be working on city lighting or traffic signals.

A lot of linemen love what they do and say that it isn’t for everyone. There are the obvious dangers of working with high voltage. And if you’re afraid of heights, forget it. The job might require a fair amount of travel, which could mean a lot of nights away from home. And you’ll be doing a lot of work in unfriendly weather conditions. After thunderstorms, hurricanes, fires, ice storms, and the like, people want the power back on – and it can’t be done soon enough.

Guest Author: Stephen Soldz “The Psychodynamics of Occupation and the Abuse at Abu Ghraib: An Interpretation After One Year of Occupation”

Repost from the old site.

This blog is very honored to post a fine piece by a guest author, Stephen Soldz, The Psychodynamics of Occupation and the Abuse at Abu Ghraib: An Interpretation After One Year of Occupation.

Stephen, a Leftist psychoanalyst from Boston, is the founder of several antiwar and anti-imperialist organizations. He is a principled Leftist who doesn’t mince words, keeps a very consistent and honorable line, doesn’t compromise his ideals much, and usually has some measured, thoughtful and wise insight and advice to offer.

Stephen has given me valuable advice on my writing which I continue to employ. He seems to have also done some very interesting psychological research, though I haven’t looked into it much yet.

In an era when the Left is beset with sell-outs, compromise at any cost types, defeatism, muddled thinking, contradictory positions, confusion and hypocrisy, Stephen lights the way for an ideological position that lights a path between ridiculous ultra-pacifism and the mindless flailing rage of some anti-imperialist resistance movements. On to the piece!

There are various explanations for what went on at Abu Ghraib. The official US position is that a “few bad apples” among the reservist military police (MPs) there went out of control, violating orders to treat the prisoners humanely — “Animal House on the night shift,” as former defense secretary James Schlesinger described it.(1)

The MP defendants claim that they were following orders to soften up the prisoners as a prelude to interrogation. Investigative journalists have documented in detail the chain of memos, orders, and “advice” that led from the top reaches of the US administration to the actions of those MPs. To write about the psychological aspects of the Abu Ghraib horrors, one must have a theory of what actually happened.

So let me make explicit my view of what happened, derived from reading hundreds of newspaper and other accounts of abuse throughout the developing network of US detention centers in Iraq and elsewhere. After 9/11, decisions were made at the upper reaches of the US administration that detainees in America’s “War on Terror” did not deserve traditional protections.(2, 3)

Justified by the needs of developing intelligence, brutal methods of treatment of detainees — “tantamount to torture” as the International Committee of the Red Cross calls it(2, 4) — became routine.(1, 2, 5-18) The decision was made to adopt brutal techniques in order to “break” the detainees.

As one e-mail in August 2003 from a Military Intelligence officer put it: “The gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees, Col Boltz has made it clear that we want these individuals broken. Casualties are mounting and we need to start gathering info to help protect our fellow soldiers from any further attacks. I thank you for your hard work and your dedication.”(19)

The prison was put under the control of military intelligence.(2, 20) As recommended by Guantánamo commander Major General Geoffrey Miller, techniques of total control and torture in use at Guantánamo (4, 12, 19, 21, 22) were imported as Abu Ghraib was “Gitmoized.”(1)

As a former Army intelligence officer described Miller’s recommendation: “It means treat the detainees like shit until they will sell their mother for a blanket, some food without bugs in it and some sleep.”(23)

Waterboarding was imported and dogs were frequently used to instill fear in the detainees.(17) Pressure was put on the MPs guarding prisoners to “set the conditions” for interrogations, and to “manipulate an internee’s emotions and weaknesses.”(20) Typical of large bureaucratic organizations, the MPs were given no clear instructions, allowing for “plausible deniability.”

Thus, the official story of a “few bad apples” doesn’t stand up to scrutiny as abuse was typical of the treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib and at the myriad (over 20) other detention facilities in Iraq, as well as those in Cuba and Afghanistan.

Further, it is not plausible to believe that these MPs, unschooled in interrogation techniques, rediscovered so many of the CIA’s standard torture techniques, designed to humiliate and “break” detainees, as well as special forms of sexual humiliation that would be especially humiliating and degrading to Arab males.(2)

However, the official story isn’t totally false, either. While it is hard to be certain, testimony at the trials of the Abu Ghraib MPs designated as the “fall guys” suggests that they did their share of freelancing.

A number of these MPs were having quite a good time abusing the prisoners. As Pvt. Jeremy Sivits testified at the court martial of Spc. Charles Graner, “The soldiers were laughing, seeming to be having a good time” and Pvt. Ivan Frederick II testified, “everybody was smiling and carrying on.”(24)

While I have no doubt that torture was policy, we still are faced with the questions of why MPs not trained in interrogation and torture proved so willing to adopt these techniques, and enjoyed themselves along the way, and why soldiers throughout Iraq and Afghanistan engaged in repeated acts of torture and abuse.

What I want to focus on here are a few relatively underemphasized aspects of the war and occupation that contributed to the pervasiveness of abuse.

Like all wars, the 2003 Iraq invasion was preceded by a propaganda barrage. Fantasies of weapons of mass destruction were propagated repeatedly by the Administration, politicians of both parties, and the corporate media, despite serious doubts having been raised as to the existence of these weapons by numerous knowledgeable critics.(25-27)

Unstated, but understood by all, was that this war was to be revenge for 9/11; revenge for the death, but even more, revenge for the humiliation.(28, 29) When Saddam’s statue was toppled in Firdos Square in April 2003, the US troops draped it with an American flag. The desire for revenge, while unstated, suggested that anything visited upon the Iraqis was acceptable, as revenge creates its own logic.

Stated, rather, was the avowed aim to “liberate” Iraqis from an oppressive regime. Iraqis would greet the invading troops with flowers and open arms, it was claimed. Despite cute propaganda exercises like the stage-managed toppling of Saddam’s statue, the flowers and open arms never materialized. Iraqis were decidedly ambivalent about being invaded and occupied by a foreign power.

Within weeks American troops were firing into crowds of Iraqis, killing a number,(30, 31) and lying about the events. Deaths of civilians at roadblocks were a constant.(32-35) And the insurgency grew and grew, its supporters coming to number perhaps 200,000, as estimated by the head of the Iraqi Interim government’s intelligence service.(36)

So what do occupation soldiers do when the stated reason for their occupation of another country is to liberate the populace, but many of that populace regard them as invaders and either respond sullenly to their presence, or actively resist occupation? One coping strategy is to try and distinguish between the “good guys” and the “bad guys.”

As Staff Sgt. Riley Flaherty expressed it: “What’s really hard is the fine line between the bad guys and the good guys…. Because if you piss off the wrong good guys, you’re really in trouble. So you’ve really got to watch what you do and how you treat the people.”(37)

That is, the occupied population is split into its good and bad elements, with evil projected onto the bad, and the good construed as largely childlike and in need of protection, but also prone to turn bad at a moment’s notice.

However, the task of an occupation army is one of control of the populace. As Sgt. 1st Class Glenn Aldrich, from the same unit as Sgt. Flaherty, put it: “I’ve got 200,000 Iraqis I’ve got to control with 18 people… so I’ve got to command respect. And unfortunately, all that hearts and minds stuff, I can’t even think about that.”

He goes on to explain, “There are things I have to do out here that I can’t explain to my chain of command, and that the American people would never understand.”(37)

Given this requirement, the definition of a good Iraqi becomes one who aids the occupiers in their lonesome task, and there are precious few of them. As Sgt. Aldrich explains: “Because you aren’t helping me catch the bad guys, and if you’re not helping me, you are the bad guy.”(37) Given this definition, the distinction between good and bad easily breaks down and nearly the entire occupied populace can become bad.

Another characteristic of occupation is the difficulty the occupation troops have in viewing the occupied as adults, as individuals with wishes, dreams, and intentions of their own. Rather, they are essentially childlike, deserving protection when good, and a spanking when bad. The same Sgt. Flaherty, on a frustrating day, explained: “These people don’t understand nice… You’ve got to be a hard-ass.”(37)

The entire populace becomes the enemy, as expressed by Sgt. Aldrich: “The one thing you learn over here is that there are no innocent civilians, except the kids. And even them — the ones that are all, ‘Hey mister, mister, chocolate?’ — I’ll be killing them someday.”(37) Note, the absence of any pretense that the occupation is intended to help the occupied. Such illusions are left for the media and PR flacks.

War, including war of occupation, of course involves fear, a pervasive fear and an awareness that death is possible at any moment.

That fear, and that awareness, we are reminded by Terror Management Theory,(38) leads to a defense of one’s worldview, which in most cases means an increased attachment to the cultural norms of one’s society, and a rejection and punitive attitude towards those that threaten that worldview.

For the occupier, it is the natives, the occupied and their culture, which are rejected. Another aspect of war is its overwhelmingly masculine quality; war is an assertion of dominance over the other, perceived as weak, as cowardly, as a wimp.(39) Thus, the repeated description of the 9/11 attackers as “cowardly,” probably the characteristic least accurately descriptive of them.

As President Bush said that day: “Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward,”(40) attempting to remove the shame by describing the attackers with the most denigrating description.

By this means the attacker is made both morally depraved and weak, not really masculine. Yet, the rhetoric simultaneously betrays the fear that underlies it. For today’s women in combat, proving that they are “one of the guys” can be the key to survival.(41)

As the occupied are rejected and become the repository of all that which is rejected by the occupiers, it is but a step to portraying the enemy, those unwilling to meekly submit to occupation, as absolute evil, as was expressed by Lieutenant Colonel Gareth Brandl on the eve of the November, 2004 assault on Falluja: “The enemy has got a face. He’s called Satan. He lives in Falluja. And we’re going to destroy him.”(42)

Is it any wonder that Falluja was almost totally destroyed, with virtually no buildings left undamaged? Or that Fallujans who return to their city are treated as if they are concentration camp inmates?(43, 44)

Or that this new concentration camp was described as the “safest city in Iraq” by Marine Cpl. Daniel Ferrari,(45) while an anonymous soldier left a memento on a random household’s mirror: “Fuck Iraq and every Iraqi in it!”(44)

Now return to Abu Ghraib. A small contingent of ill-trained reservist MPs was in charge of guarding thousands of unruly prisoners who were enraged at being imprisoned, largely unjustly, and enraged at the squalid conditions in which they were kept, perhaps best symbolized by the bugs infesting their rancid food.(46)

The MPs didn’t speak the language of the prisoners, and had few translators; communication difficulties were so great that the guards evidently did not know that a prison riot was a response to the food situation. These guards were of low status in the military, being reservists, and were assigned to the undesirable task of guarding prisoners.

They lived in constant fear, as nightly attacks on the prison were complemented by riots and attacks from the prisoners. Their military comrades-in-arms were dying in large numbers from the growing insurgency.

The effort to generate intelligence out of the prisoners was especially difficult as, according to military intelligence sources, perhaps 70%-90% of them were innocent of any involvement with the insurgents,(19, 53) and just happened to be present at a checkpoint, or in their home, when one of the brutal “cordon and capture” raids occurred.(19)

Nonetheless, the response of top military leaders to their innocence was callous at best.

Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski is quoted as telling Brig. Gen. Janice Karpinski, the officer in charge of Iraqi prisons: “I don’t care if we’re holding 15,000 innocent civilians! We’re winning the war!”

The officer in charge of US forces in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, retorted: “Why are we detaining these people – we should be killing them.”(54) The nature of prisons is such that prisoners are usually presumed guilty by the guards.

If they didn’t commit the offense for which they were arrested, they must have done something wrong; why else would they be in prison? Under interrogation, those prisoners who refuse to divulge important information must be withholding, providing further evidence of their perfidy.

These dynamics must have been even stronger in the Abu Ghraib situation, where the MP guards felt in constant danger and under pressure to demonstrate their worth through breaking the prisoners.

To accept that many of the prisoners being kept in such abominable conditions were innocent could only be rationalized by dehumanizing them, by making them the embodiment of all that was unacceptable to the guards. If they weren’t guilty of serious offenses, they were, after all, only “hajis”(29) who, outside the prison, were kept in line with metal “haji-be-good sticks.”(37)

The very fact that these inferior hajis objected to their unfair imprisonment demonstrated that they were dangerous, and cried out for control. How could such dangerous inferior beings expect to be treated better once they were found guilty by reason of imprisonment? Surely the lowly MPs could demonstrate their worth by providing the punishment these unruly natives, the ungrateful occupied, deserved.

To do less was not to do one’s duty. As these guards did their work keeping the evil recalcitrant hajis in line, which, after all is a rather dirty task, it was not surprising that they tried to make the job interesting, even fun. How many of us can carry out an unpleasant job for months on end without finding ways to enjoy the work? Why should we expect that these poor prison guards in an alien land would do less?

The pressure built to generate actionable intelligence from the prisoners, so that the anti-occupation insurgency could be broken. General Miller visited and recommended that the prison be dedicated to the gathering of intelligence, and that the brutal torture techniques developed at Guantánamo(4, 12, 21, 47-51) be utilized. MPs were to “set the conditions” for interrogation(20) by abusing and terrorizing prisoners.

Military intelligence was placed in control of the prison by the head of US forces in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez.(20) Many arcane torture techniques, such as waterboarding and forced homosexual sex, developed by the CIA over decades, were put into general use.(3, 19, 52)

The message was communicated that senior officials, including Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, were very interested in the intelligence being generated at Abu Ghraib, that the work of these lowly reservists was truly important.(19)

Thus we see that the logic of war, the logic of occupation, the logic of imprisonment, and the post 9/11 logic of revenge all came together in an Iraqi torture center in 2003. The fact that similar actions have been reported in numerous other Iraqi prisons, as well as those in Afghanistan demonstrates that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were emblematic of the new American empire, indeed of empire itself.

Also emblematic of empire, is the denial with which this torture was met. The officials responsible ignored and denied numerous reports of prisoner abuse in newspapers and from non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International and the International Committee of the Red Cross.(55-59)

Within days of the release of the Abu Ghraib photos, I, a single concerned citizen with no special resources, had no difficulty detailing this long record of abuse claims.(14) The publication of the Abu Ghraib photographs and all subsequent revelations about the widespread nature of detainee abuse and torture were met with official denials that anything more than a “few bad apples” were to blame.(60)

Furthermore, denial, in the psychological sense of unconsciously ignoring the importance of a fact or event, has characterized the American public reaction. While the majority of Americans told pollsters that the torture was wrong and that the US government was lying about it, and also that those who wrote the legal opinions justifying torture bore some blame,(61, 62) there was no major public outcry over the issue.

It was hardly mentioned during the American elections by either major party candidate, or at either party’s convention. Those in charge when the torture happened were reelected, and many of those who developed and justified the policy of torture were promoted,(63-65) with little public outcry.

Torture is now out of the closet, it has become an accepted, however distasteful, aspect of American life. As Mark Danner puts it: “We are all torturers now.”(66) I’d like to close with words from Chris Hedges’ haunting meditation on war:

“Each generation responds to war as innocents. Each generation discovers its own disillusionment — often after a terrible price. The myth of war and the drug of war wait to be tasted…. Those who can tell us the truth are silenced or prefer to forget. The state needs the myth, as much as it needs its soldiers and its machines of war to survive.” (67, p. 173)

And we might add, it needs its torturers.

References

1. Carter, P. (2004) The Road to Abu Ghraib (Washington Monthly).

2. Barry, J., Hirsh, & Isikoff, M. (2004) The Roots of Torture: The road to Abu Ghraib began after 9/11, when Washington wrote new rules to fight a new kind of war (Newsweek).

3. Hersh, S. M. (2004) Chain of command: The road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (New York, Harper Collins).

4. Lewis, N. A. (2004) Red Cross Finds Detainee Abuse in Guantánamo (New York Times).

5. (2004) US Navy Seals Torturing Iraqis(ancapistan.typepad.com).

6. American Civil Liberties Union (2004) Federal Government Turns Over Thousands of Torture Documents to ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union).

7. American Civil Liberties Union (2004) Records Released in Response to Torture FOIA Request (American Civil Liberties Union).

8. Croke, L. A. (2004) Abuse, Torture and Rape Reported at Unlisted U.S.-run Prisons in Iraq (New Standard).

9. Croke, L. A. (2004) Iraq Torture Investigators Reveal Scores of New Cases (New Standard).

10. Croke, L. A. (2004) FBI Glossed Over Abu Ghraib Abuses (The New Standard).

11. Gat, Y. (2005) The Year in Torture (CounterPunch).

12. Lewis, N. A. (2005) Fresh Details Emerge on Harsh Methods at Guantánamo (New York Times).

13. Smith, R. J. & Eggen, D. (2004) New Papers Suggest Detainee Abuse Was Widespread (Washington Post).

14. Soldz, S. (2004) Abuse at Abu Ghraib, the psychodynamics of occupation, and the responsibility of us all (ZNet).

15. American Civil Liberties Union (2004) Torture FOIA (American Civil Liberties Union).

16. White, J. (2004) U.S. Generals in Iraq Were Told of Abuse Early, Inquiry Finds (Washington Post).

17. White, J. & Higham, S. (2004) Use of Dogs to Scare Prisoners Was Authorized: Military Intelligence Personnel Were Involved, Handlers Say (Washington Post).

18. Zernike, K. & Rohde, D. (2004) Forced Nudity of Iraqi Prisoners Is Seen as a Pervasive Pattern, Not Isolated Incidents (New York Times).

19. Danner, M. (2004) Abu Ghraib: The Hidden Story (New York Review of Books).

20. Borger, J. (2004) US general linked to Abu Ghraib abuse: Leaked memo reveals control of prison passed to military intelligence to ‘manipulate detainees’ (Guardian).

21. Cawthorne, A. (2004) Guantanamo men allege abuse (Reuters).

22. Lewis, N. A. (2004) Broad Use Cited of Harsh Tactics at Base in Cuba (New York Times).

23. Davidson, O. G. (2004) The Secret File of Abu Ghraib (Rolling Stone).

24. Serrano, R. A. (2005) Guard Enjoyed Beating Iraqis, Three Testify (Los Angeles Times).

25. Rangwala, G. (2003) Claims and evaluations of Iraq’s proscribed weapons (MiddleEastReference.org.uk).

26. Rangwala, G. (2003) Review of Hussein Kamel’s interview with UNSCOM of 22 August 1995 (MiddleEastReference.org.uk).

27. Ritter, S. (2003) Scott Ritter in His Own Words (Time Online).

28. Wood, P. (2005) Iraq war: two years on (BBC).

29. Rockwell, P. (2005) Army reservist witnesses war crimes: New revelations about racism in the military (Online Journal).

30. Reeves, P. (2003) At least 10 dead as US soldiers fire on school protest (Independent).

31. Wilson, S. (2003) U.S. Forces Kill Two During Iraqi Demonstration (Washington Post).

32. Burns, J. F. (2005) Checkpoint dangers too familiar for Iraqis (International Herald Tribune).

33. Faramarzi, S. (2003) Jittery U.S. Soldiers Kill 6 Iraqis (Associated Press).

34. Huggler, J. (2003) Family shot dead by panicking US troops (Independent).

35. Ciezadlo, A. (2005) What Iraq’s checkpoints are like (Christian Science Monitor).

36. Reynolds, P. (2005) Blistering attacks threaten Iraq election (BBC).

37. Dilanian, K. (2005) Soldiers sometimes rough despite risk of antagonizing friendly Iraqis (Kansas City Star).

38. Pyszczynski, T. A., Greenberg, J. & Solomon, S. (2003) In the wake of 9/11: the psychology of terror (Washington, DC, American Psychological Association).

39. Ducat, S. (2004) The wimp factor: Gender gaps, holy wars, and the politics of anxious masculinity (Boston, Beacon Press).

40. Bush, G. W. (2001) Remarks by President Bush from Barksdale Air Force Base , (American Rhetoric).

41. Grasso, G. (2000) Review of Hornet’s Nest: The Experiences of One of the Navy’s First Female Fighter Pilots by Missy Cummings (Minerva: Quarterly Report on Women and the Military).

42. Harkavy, W. (2004) Running Out of Patients: In our glorious crusade for democracy, we level a Falluja hospital (Village Voice).

43. Barnard, A. (2004) Returning Fallujans will face clampdown (Boston Globe).

44. Fadhil, A. (2005) City of ghosts (Guardian).

45. Niedringhaus, A. (2005) Tanks, Officers Impose Order in Fallujah (Associated Press).

46. Phinney, D. (2004) “Contract Meals Disaster” for Iraqi Prisoners (CorpWatch).

47. Al Jazeera (2005) New Guantanamo abuse cases surface (Al Jazeera).

48. Azulay, J. (2005) Guantanamo Abuses Caught on Tape, Report Details (New Standard).

49. Leonnig, C. D. & Priest, D. (2005) Detainees Accuse Female Interrogators: Pentagon Inquiry Is Said to Confirm Muslims’ Accounts of Sexual Tactics at Guantanamo (Washington Post).

50. Mickum IV, G. B. (2005) Tortured, humiliated and crying out for some justice: Four Guantánamo Britons are coming home. Don’t forget those left behind (Guardian).

51. Reuters (2005) Lawyer: Guantanamo detainees sodomised (Aljazeera).

52. McCoy, A. W. (2004) The Hidden History of CIA Torture: America’s Road to Abu Ghraib (Tomdispatch.com).

53. Associated Press (2004) Red Cross: Iraq abuse “tantamount to torture” (MSNBC).

54. American Civil Liberties Union (2005) Newly Released Army Documents Point to Agreement Between Defense Department and CIA on “Ghost” Detainees, ACLU Says (American Civil Liberties Union).

55. International Committee of the Red Cross (2004) Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on the treatment by the coalition forces of prisoners of war and other protected persons by the Geneva Conventions in Iraq during arrest, internment and interrogation (International Committee of the Red Cross).

56. Hanley, C. J. (2004) Early Iraq Abuse Accounts Met With Silence (Associated Press).

57. Beaumont, P. & Burke, J. (2004) Catastrophe (Guardian).

58. Miller, R. (2003) “Disappearing” Iraqis: Why Are So Many Citizens Arrested and Detained by the American Occupying Force? (River Cities’ Reader).

59. Riverbend (2004) Tales from Abu Ghraib. (Baghdad Burning).

60. USA Today (2004) How innocent Iraqis came to be abused as terrorists (USA Today).

61. Kull, S. (2004) Americans on Detention, Torture, and the War on Terrorism, (Program on International Policy Attitudes/Knowledge Networks).

62. Morris, D. & Langer, G. (2004) Terror Suspect Treatment: Most Americans Oppose Torture Techniques (ABC News).

63. Smith, R. J. & Eggen, D. (2005) Gonzales Helped Set the Course for Detainees (Washington Post).

64. Scheer, R. (2004) Tout Torture, Get Promoted (Los Angeles Times).

65. Anderson, J. R. (2005) Maj. Gen. Fast, former aide to Sanchez at Abu Ghraib, takes intelligence post (Stars and Stripes).

66. Danner, M. (2005) We Are All Torturers Now (New York Times).

67. Hedges, C. (2002) War is a force that gives us meaning (New York, Public Affairs).

Stephen Soldz is psychoanalyst and a faculty member at the Institute for the Study of Violence of the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. He is a member of Roslindale Neighbors for Peace and Justice and founder of Psychoanalysts for Peace and Justice. He maintains the Iraq Occupation and Resistance Report web page.

“Sailors Wanted,” by Alpha Unit

You mustn’t call a member of the United States Merchant Marine a marine. You call him (or her) a sailor, seaman, seafarer, or mariner – preferably a mariner. The Merchant Marine is the fleet of civilian-owned ships that moves cargo and passengers not only between countries but within the United States.

The fleet is privately owned but can be nationalized during wartime, when it becomes an auxiliary of the US Navy. During some other type of national emergency, the President can commandeer or seize a merchant vessel.

The Merchant Marine was always an excellent source of opportunity for men in this country regardless of their backgrounds. The US Maritime Service started training officers and crew members for the Merchant Marine in 1938. What’s remarkable is that the Maritime Service had a non-discrimination policy at a time when the US armed forces were segregated. Black men served in all positions in the Merchant Marine, from the lowest levels all the way up to captain, on integrated ships.

A 16-year-old can go to sea. That’s the minimum age to get a US Merchant Marine Credential (MMC), issued by the US Coast Guard in accordance with international standards. You’ll need a parent’s permission as long as you’re under 18, but the MMC allows you to work on a merchant vessel, whether it’s a cargo ship, an oil tanker, a ferry, or a passenger ship. You’ll work in either the deck, engineering, or steward’s departments.

The deck department oversees proper watchstanding and maintains the hull and cargo gear. Here you’ll find apprentices, Ordinary Seamen (OS). An OS doesn’t have to stand watch but he gets tested on his watchstanding and helmsman skills. He spends much of his time working on metal structures – removing rust, refinishing, and painting. He also secures cargo, does rigging, splices wire and rope, and launches and recovers lifeboats.

It’s the OS who gets swabbing duty – keeping excess water and salt off deck to prevent slipping and rust accumulation. It’s one reason an OS looks forwards to to working his way up to Able Seaman (AB).

An AB stands watch and acts as helmsman. He also performs general maintenance and repair and operates deck machinery and cargo gear. Some of his duties involve chipping, scraping, cleaning, and painting metal structures.

The senior unlicensed man in the deck department is the Bo’s'n (Boatswain). This is typically a senior AB. He’s in charge of of the able seamen and ordinary seamen, in a position between them and the ship’s chief mate. The bo’s'n is responsible for everything concerning maintenance of deck equipment and cargo. He also secures the ship for sea and oversees the loading and unloading of cargo.

A new seaman might instead find himself in the engine department. Seamen there handle the propulsion systems and support systems for the crew, cargo, and passengers. They maintain the electric power plant, lighting, water distillation, air conditioning, refrigeration, and such. The entry level position here is wiper. A wiper performs manual labor – cleaning, painting, and assisting with repairs.

An oiler’s main job is to oil the bearings of the main engine and auxiliaries. The watertender tends fires and maintains proper water levels in boilers. A fireman operates oil-burning systems to generate steam in boilers.

In addition to these crew members, the engine department might employ machinists, electricians, refrigeration engineers, or pumpmen – pumpmen are always found on oil tankers, operating the liquid cargo transfer system.

The other assignment is the steward’s department. Here sailors operate and maintain the ship’s galley and the eating and living quarters for the officers and crew. An entry-level position here is that of messman, also called a steward’s assistant (SA). The messman sets tables, serves food, and waits tables. He also cleans the galley, eating areas, and officers’ saloon. He might also have general housekeeping duties like cleaning living quarters.

The chief cook (or, cook) directs the preparation and serving of meals. The department is headed by the chief steward.

The US fleet of merchant vessels has been diminishing since the 1950′s. The pool of qualified mariners has been shrinking along with it. There is intense competition for skilled mariners, if you ask the operators of offshore supply vessels. But some mariners say that part of the problem is that companies don’t want to take on inexperienced sailors, creating a Catch-22: companies need qualified people but the trainees can’t get the experience they need to become qualified.

Because of international treaties, higher standards, and more required training and security rules, it can be hard to qualify for even entry-level jobs on a merchant vessel. The Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, which has represented mariners since 1891, has had programs to make sure new union members have the proper training to find work.

I found, in fact, that the ongoing claims of a mariner shortage are controversial. Some mariners say that cost-cutting measures in the industry are leading to increases in workload and fatigue; others point to industry shifting to non-union labor. Some say the work schedule, where you spend more time at sea than at home, isn’t acceptable to men with families.

Other mariners say the workforce is aging, with veteran mariners retiring and fewer young people interested in going to sea. One vice-president of the Seafarers International Union thinks the industry and government should do a better job of recruiting high school kids.

“We’re a strong alternative to joining the armed services,” he told the press.

“Coal Miners and Company Scrip,” by Alpha Unit

St. Peter, don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go;
I owe my soul to the company store.

Nobody’s sure who wrote “Sixteen Tons.” People usually attribute the song to Merle Travis, who recorded it in 1946. A singer-songwriter named George S. Davis claimed he wrote it during the Depression. I don’t know if there’s any way to settle that question. But the couplet above sums up what it felt like sometimes to be a coal miner in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century America.

Before labor reforms were enacted and enforced, the life of a coal miner, like that of sharecroppers and other laborers, was often just one step above slavery.

Coal mining was vital for the widespread industrialization that got underway in the nineteenth century. Before then, there were two types of coal mines: drift mines and bell pits. They were small-scale operations that yielded coal for homes and local industry. But the growing demand for coal due to industrialization made coal mines deeper and mining more dangerous. And there was a lot of money in consideration.

Mining operations were in remote, rugged areas, naturally, so mine owners had to provide housing for their workers. In fact they provided just about everything for their workers, typically. This was because paying the miners posed a problem.

You have to remember that this was before there was a national currency in the United States. Neither was there a sufficient supply of coins. Mining operations were far from banks and stores. Mining companies saw great advantage in the closed economy that resulted from creating the company store and paying in scrip.

Whatever a miner needed he could buy – and often had to buy – at the company store. The tools of his trade he bought there, along with whatever other goods he and his family needed. If the company store didn’t have it in stock, he had to do without it. The company store could charge whatever the mine owner wanted. If wages were increased, the company store could increase prices to make up for it.

Some companies paid exclusively in scrip. Others used scrip as a form of credit that miners could use between paydays. In this case, the scrip amount would be charged against the miner’s payroll account and deducted from his next pay. Some companies let their workers trade scrip for cash, but not always at full value. Some paid as little as 50 cents on the dollar; others paid as much as 85 cents per dollar.

Not only were the supplies for the miner and his family deducted from his pay, but so were his rent for company housing, utilities, fuel coal, and doctor’s fees.

Mining companies were creative in withholding as much money as they could from workers. One practice they engaged in was cribbing. A coal miner was paid per ton of coal that he brought up. Each car brought from the mines was supposed to hold a specific amount of coal – 2,000 pounds, for instance. But companies would alter cars to hold more coal than the specified amount, so a miner could be paid for 2,000 pounds when he might have actually brought up 2,500. Workers were also docked pay for slate and rock mixed in with coal. How much to dock was left at the discretion of the checkweighman – a company man, of course.

On payday, a miner was given a pay envelope with all the check-off deductions listed and any balance due him inside. Often the envelope contained a few pennies, or nothing at all.

The United Mine Workers, a merger of two older labor groups, was founded in 1890. This organization – whose first convention barred discrimination based on race, religion, or national origin – set about to make mining safer, to gain miners’ independence from the company store, and to secure collective bargaining rights. Among its specific goals:

• a salary commensurate with dangerous work conditions
• an 8-hour workday
• payment in legal tender, not company scrip
• properly working scales: improper or outright dishonest weighing was a big concern for miners
• enforcement of safety laws and better ventilation and drainage in mines
• an end to child labor: “breaker boys” as young as 8 would remove impurities from coal by hand – hazardous work that led to accidental amputations and sometimes death
• an unbiased police force: mine operators owned all the houses in a company town and controlled the police force, which would evict miners or arrest them without proper cause
• the right to strike

The UMW was able to secure an 8-hour workday for coal miners in 1898. During its first ten years the UMW successfully organized coal miners in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. It finally achieved some recognition in West Virginia in 1902. It spent the next several decades organizing strikes – some of which ended up being deadly – and getting involved, controversially, in politics to further its goals.

Labor contracts and legislation eventually outlawed the use of company scrip. World War II marked a turning point for scrip, and by the end of the 1950′s almost all coal mining operations were paying their workers in legal tender.

What a long haul.

“Counterfeit Cash,” by Alpha Unit

In Memphis, Tennessee, two early morning Black Friday shoppers were arrested for passing counterfeit bills. Police confiscated a total of about $1,600 in fake bills, computer equipment to make fake bills, and methamphetamine.

The circumstances are similar to earlier cases, such as the case in Oklahoma City in which two people were arrested after a raid at their home. Police found large amounts of marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamine, along with several sheets of counterfeit 20-dollar bills.

Materials and equipment for making fake currency were found in a home in Santa Rosa, California, during a raid. In addition to counterfeit bills the police found drug paraphernalia and methamphetamine.

Not that long ago counterfeiting was a difficult and expensive operation. The best counterfeiters were skilled printers who used heavy offset presses to turn out pretty convincing 20s, 50s, and 100s. Doing so required the ability to cut intricate designs by hand into metal plates. Not anymore. A lot of teenagers in this country can tell you that all you need to make fake money nowadays are a PC, a scanner, and color inkjet printer. (Of course, those teenagers are usually caught in no time, since it’s not easy to produce truly authentic-looking bills.)

In case after case of counterfeiting you will see drug use implicated – particularly methamphetamine. Meth addicts often steal mail and commit other property crimes to get their hands on the money they need for their habit. They can stay awake and focused on repetitive tasks for days, making them good at such crimes as forgery, identity theft, altering checks, and trying to perfect counterfeit currency.

Millions of dollars worth of counterfeit cash is supposed to be in circulation in the United States, and there’s usually an uptick in detection during the holidays. Counterfeiters see this as the ideal time to try to pass fake bills; that’s when they think they’re more likely to get away with it. A business that ends up with counterfeit bills doesn’t get compensated for the loss and usually raises prices to make up for it.

If you end up with a counterfeit bill, the US Secret Service wants you to tell them. They say to notify your local police department or the nearest Secret Service field office. There’s no financial compensation for turning it in, though. Central banks say that to do so would subsidize counterfeiting, providing a financial reward for counterfeiters’ criminal behavior. Turning it in is just another civic duty.

“India a Self Deluded Nation,” By Raghu Dayal

Great article about what a shithole India is which goes into the various reasons we have discussed in the past for India’s shitholeness.

One wonders, though, why.

Apparently India’s education fails completely. Even higher education does not function at all. The graduates are crap. The Indian state spends almost nothing on education, which means that society thinks it is a low priority. But why is it that one goes to a 4 year college and comes out with a defective education? What’s that all about? Why does so little learning take place even at the tertiary level?

Cheating is apparently endemic. India appears to be basically a society of cheaters. Not to mention liars and thieves.

When Indian immigrants come to the US, they bring the culture of cheating, lying and thieving into the workplace as employees or as business owners.

The reputation of Indian businessmen among US businessmen is very low. They are regarded with the same contempt Jews used to be. No one wants to negotiate with them or do business with them. “The Indian will take you for everything you’ve got.” I hear this a lot from people who do business with Indians, but then I hear similar things about Chinese “businessmen.”

We already know why India spends so little on healthcare. In a society without any conception of the common good, almost no money will be spent on health care.

This is also why so many are starving while the middle and upper classes get obese and diabetic. The starving are “those people,” and according to Hinduism, they deserve their fate. The Indian middle and upper classes seem like a nation of Mitt Romneys. “Let them eat cake,” the Indian bourgeois cries.

That the Indian political class is utterly corrupt goes without saying. But we wonder why once again. Does it go back to no conception of the common good once again. In a society with no conception of the common good, how does this lead to an ultra-criminal political class?

The justice system apparently does not even function at all, but why is this? Society doesn’t feel like spending any money to have a functional justice system? And why is this? Because society itself has no sense of justice whatsoever?

The blatant misogyny of course is culturally embedded, but it shows no signs of change, apparently because misogyny is so embedded in Indian culture that no one wants to change it.

All of the mess below is the product of a shit culture. Society flows from culture. If your society sucks, then quite probably it’s because your culture sucks. In conversations with Indians, they rarely want to change Indian culture. This is particularly true with Indian Hindus. Everything is fine, and nothing needs to change. It’s all good. Shining India and all that.

Change flows from self-reflection. In order to change your society, you have to face the fact that it’s crap and needs changing in the first place. It’s Stage One that Indians never get to.

India a Self Deluded Nation

By Raghu Dayal

A land of myths, India takes mythology rather seriously till some myth-buster jolts it down to reality. We have often deluded ourselves that we are intellectually up there with the best in the world till the OECD-conducted PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) of 15 year school children had Indian students scoring second from the bottom, only ahead of Kyrgyzstan, among half a million students from 73 countries.

While the PISA ranking laid bare India’s poor school education, the 2012 QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) World University rankings include none of Indian universities or institutes among world’s top 200. China has seven in the top 200 list. India has over 26,000 higher education institutes with 15 million students on rolls; a survey has found 92% of their graduates are deficient in programming or algorithms and 78% of them falter in English.

Although there are more children in school, they are now learning less. As per Annual Survey of Education 2011, only 48% of class V children are able to read a class II text, and less than 30% of those in class III can do a 2-digit sum. Some 1.25 crore students come to the job market every year who have no skills. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen is at pains to lament, “education in India is in peril”.

Mere enunciation of rights to education can be no solution. Andre Beteille termed the UPA move as “the Marie Antoinette Solution” – “they don’t have schools, so give them rights…” India’s high growth potential is largely predicated by its assumed demographic dividend.

This very demography appears likely to end up as the Achilles’ heel and worse, with country’s youth remaining inadequately educated and trained. There is serious dearth of employable technicians – plumbers, carpenters, electricians. India’s 1.4 million schools are in need of 4 million new teachers and 8 million more to be retrained.

Like education, health too has been a sad story. As many as 130 million of Indians have no access to basic health care; as Census 2011 shows, half of country’s population defecate in the open; 20% of households have to travel more than half a km for drinking water; more than two-thirds of houses (87% rural, 26% urban) use firewood, crop residue, cow dung, coal.

The number of physicians per 1,000 population for the world is 1.5, for India it is 0.6; the number of hospital beds per 1,000 population in India is 0.9, much lower than the world average of 3.3. Almost 2 million children die in India before reaching their first birth day.

The country boasts of more than 30 million tonne of grains stacked, some of which in open for want of warehouses; yet 40% of its children are underweight and 70% anemic. According to a WHO 2000 estimate, of the annual 529,000 maternal deaths globally, 136,000 or about 26% of them occur in India.

Although some pockets of the country have experienced material gains, and people now live longer, no fewer than 37.5% of countrymen are reported to remain malnourished, 41.6% of them subsisting on less than $ 1.25/day (The World Development Report, 2012).

While, on one hand, the Global Hunger Index 2007 by International Food Policy Research Institute ranked India 96th among 119 countries, well below all its neighbors except Bangladesh, on the other hand, it imported 1,100 tonne of gold last year, valued at Rs 3.5 lakh crore.

When the wide world around said India had all the basic wherewithal of an emerging global economic powerhouse, we started behaving as if we were already there. The Pew Research Centre survey of 21 major economies just conducted has revealed how Indians have had their optimism faded, how they have lost faith in the Indian economy and its future. Along with a dysfunctional Parliament, country’s polity is mired in sleaze; a bumper crop of robber barons mulct the national wealth.

Albeit a vibrant democracy it claims to be, India remains torn by language, region, caste, religion, no less than by pockets of wealth. We took pride in the steel frame of governance we had; today, it is left to be a creaking bamboo frame.

Symptomatic of a major myth, some erudite commentators have found in Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson a facile belief that India would ultimately outpace China by dint of its inclusive political institutions, China being pulled back, as they perceive, because of its extractive political institutions.

This pervasive myth of the delusion of democracy, as in effect it is practiced in India, engenders only derision. More and more of us keep striving to become more equal than others. Money and muscle rule the roost. An Election Commission analysis revealed that no less than 40 among Hon’ble MP’s and 700 MLAs among the legislators had suffered criminal indictment.

India lays great stores by the world’s largest democracy it is with constitutional freedom of expression, yet it has no qualms in slapping a young cartoonist with a incredible charge of sedition.

India’s parliamentarians, notwithstanding their hysterical avowals of its sovereignty, meddle in the minutiae of deciding which textbooks will have what text or which cartoons, exposing the hollowness of our democracy. With more than 30 million cases pending in courts, up to 26 years old, it takes an average of 17 years to get a judicial decision.

What better embodiment of our enduring myths than Delhi being touted as world’s “most beautiful city”, or Mumbai outshining Shanghai, or, better still, Kolkata soon transforming, Mamata di-style, into “better than London”!

We generally like to believe nice things about ourselves – a kind of collective mythomania. We fancy ourselves as a tolerant society and yet we have cases like Rushdie, Taslima, M F Hussain, et al. We hold the teaching profession in reverence, yet we kill a teacher who says no to cheating.

We similarly give our parents a pedestal just short of godhead but countless cases occur of old parents being dispossessed, cheated, even murdered in property disputes.

We respect womanhood as nothing short of devi or Mother (yatra naryastu pujyante, ramante tatra devata) but cases of rape and other crimes against women, shameful treatment of girl child (in embryo and after birth) and the fact that no woman considers herself safe after dark in the capital of India show that this is the biggest myth of all.

We believe in welcoming tourists and visitors to our country (atithi devo bhava) but few such guests would ever revisit after the harrowing time we give them.

Rabindranath Tagore’s Tasher Desh has a message wherein citizens, who had lost their vitality and elan, and their capacity to respond to the rhythm of life, were played a magic flute whereupon their vitality flowed back. Some similar transformation India needs, a leader to play that magic flute, to turn some myths into reality.

“Oil Patch Blues,” by Alpha Unit

The Williston Basin lies beneath parts of Montana, North Dakota, and Saskatchewan. A rock unit called the Bakken formation occupies about 200,000 square miles of it. Originally described in 1953, it’s named after Henry Bakken, a farmer in Williston, North Dakota. He owned the land where the first drilling rig revealed the rock layers in 1951. As you may have heard, there are significant oil reserves in the Bakken.

The US Geological Survey has estimated that there are about 3.65 billion barrels of oil in the Bakken. More recent estimates suggest there could be up to 18 billion barrels.

The oil is wrapped in layers of shale, which initially frustrated extraction attempts. But petroleum engineers devised a fracturing method that overcame this problem. What they do is drill down and then horizontally into the rock, then pump water, sand, and chemicals into the hole to crack the shale and allow the oil to flow up. It was first used in 2007, quite successfully.

The result has been a population boom as people from neighboring areas, other parts of the country, and even overseas have rushed into North Dakota and Montana in pursuit of oil field jobs. John McChesney paints a picture of how life has changed for some residents of North Dakota.

Imagine you live in a small rural town worried for years about depopulation, and suddenly, overnight, the population doubles, and the newcomers are thousands of young men without families. Imagine that you live in a tiny town with one main street that doubles as a state highway.

That’s the situation in New Town, N.D., population 1,500 – at least, it was a couple of years ago. Today it’s anybody’s guess how many people live here, and no one knows how many 18-wheelers roll through every day, either. They just know it never stops.

McChesney says that for the people of New Town, it seems that every big tank truck in America is on the road here, making tens of thousands of trips a day hauling water, fracking fluid, wastewater and crude oil – and tearing up the roads.

It’s been described by one county official as the complete industrialization of western North Dakota. And it’s placing an incredible strain on the community there. Dan Kalil, chairman of the Williams County Commission, told McChesney:

They’re consuming all our resources. They’re consuming all our people looking for jobs. All the employee base is used up. Our roads system is being used up. All our water is being used up. All our sewage systems are being used up. They’re overwhelmed. All of our leadership time as local public officials is consumed with this.

And for the newcomers, life in the Bakken isn’t exactly what they had in mind, either. They often arrive with no money and nowhere to live. There’s not enough housing for them. Homeless shelters and churches are taking in some of the job-seekers but the need is overwhelming.

Some of the men are sleeping in their cars. Some have sleeping bags they roll out in the woods or in abandoned buildings. There are camps where people park RV’s they’re living in. But the water pipes and waste tanks on standard RV’s can’t handle the freezing temperatures. Super-insulated campers and trailers are just as hard to find as actual housing.

And let’s not forget: this is North Dakota, after all. One taste of winter in the Bakken sends some job-seekers back to where they came from.

In the meantime, housing prices are higher than they’ve ever been. Some of the local residents can’t afford to pay rent anymore. And crime used to be nearly nonexistent. Now crime rates have spiked across western North Dakota and eastern Montana, with an increase in vagrancy, “drunken and disorderly” charges, burglary, assault, property crimes, and prostitution.

“Men need servicing just as much as their machines,” one oil patch worker told Adam Luebke.

There have even been a couple of violent crimes that have made headlines in the area. A hitchhiker was wounded in a drive-by shooting while on US Highway 2, a major route in and out of the oil patch. A teacher from the oil patch town of Sidney, Montana, was allegedly kidnapped and murdered by two Colorado men on their way to the Bakken.

The oil industry is aware of what locals are going through and is making some PR efforts to keep people on their side, but their efforts aren’t as successful as they’d like. As John McChesney explained:

Back in New Town at a gathering of a few local residents, we met rancher Donnie Nelson, who had just paid $7 for a gallon of milk, one example of a price inflation here. He says patience here is wearing thin.

“Just about anybody I talk to that’s a neighbor – and some of them are getting wealthy – are sick of it. It’s never going to be the same in this country, and they’re starting to realize that we had it kind of good, even though we weren’t No. 1 in oil and we weren’t the No. 1 state economically,” Nelson says. “We had a good life up here.”

“Washington and the Cuban Revolution Today: Ballad of a Never-Ending Policy. Part III: The Legacy of the Missile Crisis, 50 Years After,” by Ike Nahem

In Part 3, Nahem deals with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Absolutely fascinating! The stuff you never heard before in the lying US media. 50 years on, and they still have not told us the truth. Amazing! Warning: Long, runs to 71 pages on the web.

Washington and the Cuban Revolution Today:
Ballad of a Never-Ending Policy

Part III: The Legacy of the Missile Crisis, 50 Years After

By Ike Nahem

October 1962 marks the 50th Anniversary of the so-called “Cuban Missile Crisis.” The last two weeks of that October was the closest the world has come so far to a widespread nuclear exchange.

In August 1945, the United States government, having a then-monopoly on the “atom bomb,” unilaterally dropped nuclear bombs, successively, on the civilian inhabitants of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

At the time of this clear war crime, Japanese imperialism’s conquests and vast expansion that began in the 1930s had shrunk sharply. The Japanese rulers were retreating under intense attack from rival imperialists and indigenous independence forces in their remaining occupied lands, including parts of Manchuria in China, as well as Korea, Vietnam, and the “Dutch East Indies,” now Indonesia.

The Japanese navy was incapable of operations, and the Japanese merchant fleet was destroyed. The Japanese government had begun to send out “peace feelers,” fully aware of its hopeless situation. Washington’s utterly ruthless action finalized the defeat of the Japanese Empire in the Asian-Pacific “theater” of World War II…and sent an unmistakable shock and signal to the world.

The young leaders of the Cuban Revolution, now holding governmental power, were in the very eye of the storm during those two October weeks.

The diffusing and resolution of the Missile Crisis – in the sense of reversing and ending the momentum toward imminent nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union – came when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave way to US President John Kennedy demands and agreed to halt further naval shipments of nuclear missiles to Cuba and withdraw those already in Cuban territory.

Khrushchev further agreed to the removal of Soviet medium-range conventional bombers, very useful to the Cubans for defending their coastlines, and a near-complete withdrawal of Soviet combat brigades.

For his part, Kennedy made a semi-public conditional formulation that the US government would not invade Cuba (this was not legally binding or attached to any signed legal or written document) and also agreed, in a secret protocol to withdraw US nuclear missiles from Turkey that bordered the Soviet Union.

The Cuban government, which had, at great political risk, acceded to the Soviet proposal to deploy Soviet nuclear missiles on the island, was not consulted, or even informed, by the Soviet government, at any stage of the unfolding crisis, of the unfolding US-Soviet negotiations.

Furthermore, Cuban representatives were completely excluded, and the five points Cuba wanted to see addressed coming out of the crisis and included in any overall agreement, ignored altogether under US insistence and Soviet acquiescence. The entire experience was both politically shocking and eye opening for the Cuban revolutionaries.

They came out of it acutely conscious of their vulnerability and angered over their exclusion.

In a public statement on October 28, presenting the five points, Fidel Castro said:

With relation to the pronouncement made by the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, in a letter sent to the premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, to the effect that the United States would agree, after the establishment of adequate arrangements through the United Nations, to eliminate the measures of blockade in existence and give guarantees against any invasion of Cuba, and in relation to the decision announced by Premier Khrushchev of withdrawing the installation of arms of strategic defense from Cuba territory, the revolutionary government of Cuba declares that the guarantees of which President Kennedy speaks–that there will be no aggression against Cuba–will not exist unless, in addition to the elimination of the naval blockade he promises, the following measures among others are to be adopted:

1) Cessation of the economic blockade and all the measures of commercial and economic pressure which the United States exercises in all parts of the world against our country;

2) Cessation of all subversive activities, launching and landing of arms and explosives by air and sea, the organization of mercenary invasions, infiltration of spies and saboteurs, all of which actions are carried out from the territory of the United States and some other accomplice countries;

3) Cessation of the pirate attacks which are being carried out from bases existing in the United States and Puerto Rico;

4) Cessation of all the violations of our air and naval space by North American war planes and ships; and

5) Withdrawal of naval base of Guantanamo and the return of the Cuban territory by the United States.”

Washington Plans Direct Invasion

By April 20, 1961, the revolutionary Cuban armed forces, led by Fidel Castro, was victoriously mopping up, on the coastal battlefields and detaining survivors from the routed counterrevolutionary Cuban exile “army” organized by the US government and its Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs (Playa Giron to the Cubans).

The scheme to destroy the Cuban Revolution had been devised by the Dwight Eisenhower White House and carried out by the new Kennedy Administration in its third month after taking office.

Playa Giron was as humiliating and unacceptable for Washington as it had built confidence and was invigorating for the Cuban revolutionaries. It was certainly no secret to anyone paying the slightest attention that not even a nanosecond passed between Washington’s debacle at the Bay of Pigs and the planning for a new invasion, this time directly by US forces without the proxy agency of the mercenary “troops” of the former ruling classes of Cuba, who were by then ensconced in southern Florida.

Since October 1961 the Pentagon officers assigned to prepare for the US invasion of Cuba had been revising, updating, and “polishing” the concrete details. These “operational plans” were continually reviewed with President Kennedy.

Cuba faced an imminent, violent one-two punch: intensive aerial bombardment followed by large-scale invasion on multiple fronts.

It was less than ten years from the last major US war in Korea. The impact of US bombing on the northern Korean capital of Pyongyang in that country, artificially divided in the aftermath of World War II, could not have been encouraging to the Cuban leadership. Virtually the entire city was flattened by carpet bombings: 697 tons of bombs were dropped on Pyongyang along with nearly 3000 gallons of napalm; 62,000 rounds were used for “strafing at low level.”

According to Australian journalist and eyewitness to the carnage Wilfred Burchett, “There were only two buildings left standing in Pyongyang.” While the numbers of civilian deaths from the US assaults are inexact, well over 1 million Koreans in the north died, some 12-15% of the total population.

The “operational plans” for the US invasion of Cuba were to involve the initial dispatching of 90,000 troops and was projected to reach up to 250,000. This for a country of six million people.

For comparison, the population of Vietnam was around 40 million during the years of the US war in the 1960s and early 1970s. US troop levels reached 500,000. Massive US military operations, in the air and on the ground, killed millions of Vietnamese, perhaps 10% of the Vietnamese population.

There is no question that once “the dogs of war” were unleashed, with the accompanying propaganda onslaught, Washington would wage a war of annihilation under the rote cover of “democratic” and even “humanitarian” verbiage. Cuban resistance would be fierce. Mounting US casualties would, in the initial period, feed war fever and US aggression. In short: Cuba faced unheard of death and destruction. ..and the clock was ticking.

By this time President Kennedy’s “Operation Mongoose” was in effect. “Mongoose” was essentially a large-scale terrorist campaign employing sabotage, bombings, murder, and so-called “psychological warfare” inside Cuba.

Kennedy’s cynical purpose was to undertake any means deemed necessary to disrupt and demoralize Cuban society through constant, incessant violent attacks and economic sabotage to the point where the social and political conditions would be created for a full-scale US invasion.

But Kennedy and his civilian and military “advisers” continued to underestimate both the caliber of the revolutionary leadership and the capacities of the Cuban working people and youth they were terrorizing, as well as the Revolution’s determination and competence to organize their defenses.

Above all, the US rulers were not used to facing such a politically savvy enemy. The young Cuban revolutionary government, with the indefatigable Fidel Castro as its main spokesperson, was adept and quick on its feet in effectively exposing to world public opinion Washington’s anti-Cuba campaign through a vigorous, factually accurate and public counter-offensive based on what the Revolution was actually doing.

The logic behind “Operation Mongoose” was bluntly laid out in an internal memorandum of April 6, 1960 by L.D. Mallory, a US State Department senior official:

The majority of Cubans support Castro … the only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. … every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba.

Mallory proposed “a line of action that makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and the overthrow of the government.”

On July 26, 1961 – the national holiday declared by the revolutionary government commemorating the July 26, 1953 attack led by Fidel Castro and Abel Santamaria on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba – the CIA attempted to assassinate Fidel Castro, Raul Castro, and Che Guevara during the celebrations.

The CIA plan was, if the murders were “successful, ” to stage a provocation against the US base at Guantanamo and make it appear to be Cuban revenge for the murder of their top leaders. This would then be the pretext for a full-scale US invasion.

Here on full display is the cynical mendacity operating at the top of the US government in the drive to bring back the power of the landowners, rich playboys, segregationists, gangsters, and pimps – the full flower of “democracy” to the benighted Cuban masses suffering under literacy drives, free medical care, desegregated public facilities, and the crushing of the US Mafia.

During the next month of August 1961, the CIA organized one of its most pernicious campaigns against the revolutionary government. Its agents spread lies through a built-up rumor bill that there was a Cuban government policy to take all children away from their parents by force and raise them in “state institutions.”

Some 15,000 Cuban families, overwhelmingly from middle- and upper classes full of prejudice and hostility to the Revolution, panicked and sent their children mostly to the US in response to a Big Lie, under the CIA’s infamous “Operation Peter Pan.”

So, while all this criminal activity is going on, the Cuban Revolution advanced its program of social justice and human liberation for the oppressed and exploited majority as the most effective counterforce to the Yanqui aggression. On February 26, 1962 Cuba’s rejuvenated labor unions provided the people power for the campaign of Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Health to carry out a nationwide campaign of vaccination against polio.

By the end of the year the disease is completely wiped out on the island. It took the United Nation’s World Health Organization, then far more subject to pressure from Washington than now, 43 years to finally recognize that Cuba was the first nation in the Americas to accomplish this.

Things like this, and the full array of revolutionary advances taking place in the face of Washington’s mounting terrorist campaign, convinced General Maxwell Taylor, who oversaw Operation Mongoose with Attorney General Robert Kennedy at the White House, that the terrorist operation “mak[ing] maximum use of indigenous resources,” could not and would not do the job of overthrowing the revolutionary government.

“Final success,” Taylor explained in a March 1962 report to President Kennedy, “will require decisive US military intervention. ” US spies inside Cuba, at most, could help “prepare and justify this intervention and thereafter facilitate and support it.”

With the Bay of Pigs debacle still fresh in his mind, and without some of the blinkers of more gung-ho invasion advocates, Kennedy hesitated to give a green light to the invasion plans he has ordered up. It remained yellow-lighted however, and Kennedy directed that Mongoose terrorism continue and step up.

The terrorist anti-Cuba campaign was not limited to Cuban territory. On April 28, 1962 the New York offices of the Cuban Press Agency Prensa Latina was attacked in New York, injuring three staff members. More seriously, from May 8-18, a “practice run” for the US invasion of Cuba takes place. The full-scale “military exercise” is code named “Operation Whip Lash and sent an unmistakable signal of intimidation from the US military colossus to the six million people of Cuba.

All this mounting imperialist intervention had only one possible ending point – short of a Cuban surrender, which would never come. Events were coming to a head in Washington, Moscow, and Havana, events that ineluctably posed and placed the nuclear question in the equation.

In a major speech to a closed meeting of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) on January 25-26, 1968 reviewing the entire Missile Crisis, Fidel Castro’s stated that Cuba’s revolutionary leadership looked to the Soviet Union for, “…measures that would guarantee the country’s safety. In that period we had tremendous faith in the Soviet Union. I think perhaps too much.”

While the Cuban government and overwhelming popular majority were mobilized, armed to the teeth, and prepared to fight to the death, they wanted to live in peace and to enjoy the fruits of building a new society after a hard-fought revolutionary triumph. The Cuban leadership fully understood that a US invasion would kill many hundreds of thousands and destroy the Cuban infrastructure and economy. How to stop the coming US invasion was the burning question.

Khrushchev Rolls the Dice

Meanwhile in the Soviet Union, the Soviet leadership was facing a decidedly negative nuclear relationship of forces vis-à-vis Washington. This position of inequality (in the framework of the aptly acronymed Mutually Assured Destruction – aka MAD – nuclear doctrine) was perceived in Moscow as an impediment to carrying out political negotiations and maneuvering with Washington and the NATO powers, and defending Soviet interests in the “geopolitical” Cold War arena.

By April 1962 fifteen US Jupiter nuclear missiles had been installed and were “operational” in Turkey on the border of the Soviet Union. “Operational” meant ready to launch at any moment. Each missile was armed with a 1.45 megaton warhead, with ninety-seven times the firepower of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The official estimate of the “fatality projection” for each missile was one million Soviet civilians.

The Jupiter deployment in Turkey added to the overwhelming US superiority in quantity and quality in the “nuclear arms race” between Washington and Moscow.

According to Anatoly Gribkov of the Red Army General Staff (cited in the television program DEFCON-2 shown on the US Military Channel), “The United States had about 5000 [nuclear] warheads, the Soviet Union 300. And of those [300] only two or three dozen that could hit the United States.”

Khrushchev decided to alleviate this “imbalance” by placing missiles on the Cuban island if he succeeded in selling the idea to the Cuban leadership.

In the 1960 Presidential election, the liberal Democrat Kennedy shamelessly promoted as an important campaign issue a supposed “missile gap” – in the Soviet Union’s favor – between Washington and Moscow, a conscious fabrication. Kennedy also postured to the right of his Republican opponent, Eisenhower’s Vice-President Richard Nixon, on “getting tough with Castro.”

On this, Nixon had the disadvantage, as Kennedy was no doubt aware, of being unable to publicly tout the Eisenhower White House’s already advanced plans for the mercenary invasion at the Bay of Pigs, which Kennedy carried out three months after his Inauguration. )

Sometime in the spring (April-May) of 1962 the Khrushchev government of the Soviet Union proposed to the Cuban government that Cuba receive nuclear-tipped missiles on Cuban territory. In no other country (including none of its “Warsaw Pact” allies, who were all politically subordinate to the Soviet government) had the Soviet government located nuclear missiles outside of Soviet territory.

Washington, by contrast, had openly placed nuclear missiles in numerous western European countries as well as Turkey and secretly in Okinawa, Japan, aimed at China. (Both the United Kingdom and France, both US allies, also had nuclear arsenals by that time. China detonated its first nuclear bomb in an October 1964 “test.”)

Additionally US “strategic” nuclear armed aircraft were in the air ready for attack orders 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. US nuclear submarines were in similar mode, and even more difficult to detect. While Soviet capabilities undoubtedly lagged behind the US, it was not so much as to preclude inevitable reciprocal attack in response to any US “first strike.”

Soviet missiles in Cuba would theoretically be a further deterrent to any US “first strike” threat. Placing the missiles in Cuba was clearly seen by the Soviet government as a bargaining piece to advance Soviet strategic interests in the nuclear chessboard that animated US-Soviet “diplomatic” maneuvers and intrigue.

Khrushchev evidently presumed that, faced with a fait accompli, Washington would redress the imbalance to the benefit of the Soviet Union. The Soviet missiles, upon being fully operational, would be able to strike major population centers and whole geographic regions of the US, roughly equivalent to the potential death-dealing capacity Washington had through its missiles in Europe surrounding and targeted on the Soviet Union.

Of course, the big “if” in all of this reasoning was getting to the accompli. Given US technical proficiency this was a fantasy.

At the end of May 1962 the first direct presentation of the Soviet proposal was delivered to Fidel Castro and Raul Castro in Cuba by a Soviet delegation led by an alternate member of the Soviet Presidium (an executive decision-making body). The Soviet officials revealed to the Cuban leaders that their “intelligence” told them conclusively that a US invasion was being seriously prepared, to be implemented at any time over the next months.

Of course the Soviets were not telling the Cubans anything they did not already know in general, but there were new specific facts and details. But the proposal that measures to fortify Cuban defenses could include the deployment of Soviet nuclear missiles on the island leads to intense consultations within the top Cuban leadership (the chief ministers involved are Fidel Castro, Raul Castro, Che Guevara, Osvaldo Dorticos, Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, and Blas Roca).

The day after the proposal is received the Cuban leadership tells the Soviet delegation that the nuclear deployment is acceptable in principle.

In an interview with European journalist Ignacio Ramonet (from the book Fidel Castro My Life: A Spoken Autobiography, published in 2006 by Scribner and based on extensive interviews with Castro by Ramonet) Castro referred to the discussions within the Cuban central leadership saying that besides Khrushchev and the Soviet leadership’s

sincere desire to prevent an attack against Cuba…they were hoping to improve the balance of strategic forces…I added that it would be inconsistent of us to expect the maximum support from the USSR and the rest of the Socialist camp should we be attacked by the United States and yet refuse to face the political risks and the possible damage to our reputation when they needed us. That ethical and revolutionary point of view was accepted unanimously.

In a speech many years later in 1992 Fidel Castro said,

We really didn’t like the missiles. If it had been a matter only of our own defense , we would not have accepted the deployment of the missiles. But not because we were afraid of the dangers that might follow the deployment of the missiles here; rather, it was because this would damage the image of the revolution, and we were very zealous in protecting the image of the revolution in the rest of Latin America.

The presence of the missiles would in fact turn us into a Soviet military base, and that entailed a high political cost for the image of our country, an image we so highly valued.” (cited in October 1962 The ‘Missile’ Crisis As Seen From Cuba by Tomas Diez Acosta, Pathfinder Press)

Legality, Secrecy, and Lies: Losing the High Moral Ground

Having agreed in principle, Fidel Castro, Raul Castro, and Che Guevara, repeatedly argued with the Soviet leadership that the deployment should be open and public. The fact was that there was nothing in the Soviet-Cuban agreement to deploy the missiles that contravened any existing international law.

In any case, the Cuban leaders were certain that it would be virtually impossible for the shipment, site construction, and land deployment to remain concealed from the highly sophisticated US surveillance technology. Furthermore, that, on the face of it, given the US missiles in Turkey and Italy surrounding the Soviet Union, and with practically open US plans to invade Cuba, open and transparent was the way to go politically and morally.

All of this was rejected out of hand by the Khrushchev leadership, and the Cuban leaders chose not to push the point and deferred. In his January 25-26 speech, Castro goes into scathing detail on how shocking, given the Soviet insistence on secrecy, the lack of discretion on the Soviet side was, crossing into outright recklessness, in the actual deployment of the missiles.

The Soviet operation was the largest sea-borne operation in Soviet history. By the time of the missile detection and Khrushchev’s decision to remove them under US pressure, there were already 134 nuclear warheads in place and on the ground in Cuba. All three of the SS-4missile regiments were operational even as Soviet ships stopped moving towards Cuba.

In the book with Ramonet, Castro speaks of the” strange, Byzantine discussion” over the whether Soviet arms shipments to Cuba were offensive or defensive.

Khrushchev, in fact, insisted they were defensive, not on any technical grounds, but rather because of the defensive purposes for which they’d been installed in Cuba…[We felt there was] no need to go into those explanations. What Cuba and the USSR were doing was perfectly legal and in strict conformity with international law. From the first moment, Cuba’s possession of armaments required for its defense should have been declared.

We didn’t like the course the public debate was taking. I sent Che…to explain my view of the situation to Khrushchev, including the need to immediately publish the military agreement [on deploying the nuclear missiles in Cuba] the USSR and Cuba had signed. But I couldn’t manage to persuade him…

For us, for the Cuban leaders, the USSR was a powerful, experienced government. We had no other arguments to use to persuade them that their strategy for managing the situation should be changed, so we had no alternative but to trust them.

In the January 25-26, 1968 speech Castro bluntly expressed his viewpoint:

[Around July] we saw that the United States was creating an atmosphere of hysteria and aggression, and it was a campaign that was being carried out with all impunity. In the light of this we thought the correct thing to do was to adopt a different position, not to get into that policy of lies: ‘we are sending Cuba defensive weapons.’

And in response to the imperialist’ s position, the second weakness (or the first weakness) was not to stand up and respond that Cuba had every right to own whatever weapons it saw fit…but rather to adopt a policy of concessions, claiming that the weapons were defensive. In other words, to lie, to resort to lies which in effect meant to wave a basic right and principle.

Some 35 years later, in the Ramonet book, Castro returned to this crucial political approach, which is much more powerful than the usual technical cast of events when things had reached the stage of an actual nuclear standoff:

There was nothing illegal about our agreement with the Soviets, given that the Americans had missiles in Turkey and in Italy, too, and no one ever threatened to bomb or invade those countries.

The problem wasn’t the legality of the agreement – everything was absolutely legal – but rather Khrushchev’s mistaken political handling of the situation, when even though both Cuba and the USSR had the legitimate right, he started spinning theories about offensive and non-offensive weapons. In a political battle, you can’t afford to lose the high moral ground by employing ruses and lies and half-truths.

The revolutionary consciousness and organization of the popular masses, and their will and determination to resist aggression, was, and continues to be, the decisive factor in the defense of the Cuban Revolution. This objective political fact kept intruding into the subjective actions of both the US and Soviet governments during the October Crisis.

For the Cuban revolutionaries, the economic, military, and political ties forged with the Soviet Union had been an irreplaceable factor in their survival from the period after the January 1959 triumph of the Revolution through the Playa Giron defeat of the US-organized mercenary invasion.

Nevertheless, the unfolding of the Missile Crisis, and its ultimate resolution, left the Cuban leadership feeling vulnerable, insulted, and bypassed by the perceived highhanded behavior of the Soviet government led by Nikita Khrushchev.

In his January 25-26, 1968 speech, focused almost exclusively on the Missile Crisis and its lessons, Fidel Castro said, “I am sincerely convinced that the Soviet Party bears great responsibility in what happened and acted in a totally disloyal manner in its relations with us.”

Referring to the continuing terrorist attacks against Cuba that never stopped after Soviet missiles, planes, and combat troops were removed from Cuba at the “end” of the October Crisis, Castro stated,

Together with the pirate attacks and the U-2 flights, incidents began to flare up at the Guantanamo base [The military base on Guantanamo was ceded to the US government in the notorious neocolonial Platt Amendment of 1901 passed by the US Congress and has been maintained to this day against the demands for its return to Cuban sovereignty.]

The same Guantanamo base which, we are certain, would have been dismantled had there been a modicum of serenity and firmness during the October crisis. Had they had the presence of mind to have posed and demand correctly from a principled standpoint, had they said that they would withdraw the missiles if satisfactory guarantees were given to Cuba, had they let Cuba negotiate, the crisis might even have turned into a political victory…

All the rest are euphemisms of different kinds: Cuba was saved, Cuba lives. But Cuba had been alive and Cuba had been living, and Cuba did not want to live at the expense of humiliation or surrender; for that you do not have to be a revolutionary. Revolutionaries are not just concerned with living, but how one lives, living most of all with dignity, living with a cause, living for a cause…

Cuba did not agree with the way the issue was handled; it stated the need to approach the problem from different, more drastic, more revolutionary and even more legal positions; and it totally disagreed with the way in which the situation was terminated.”

“Uncontrolled Forces”

At the height of the crisis, the central Cuban leadership was certain that a full-scale invasion of the island was imminent. As shown above, preparations – “contingency plans” – for such an invasion had, for many months prior to the secret installation of the Soviet missiles, been in place.

This was the only conceivable basis for Khrushchev to make the missile proposal to the Cuban leaders. In fact, a US invasion of Cuba was on the hair-trigger of being ordered on several concrete conjunctures in the course of the Crisis.

The issue of carrying out a direct US assault was being furiously debated within the Kennedy Administration and the narrow circle of bipartisan Congressional leadership that was privy to the deliberations at the top.

As President and Commander-in- Chief, Kennedy had to choose whether to give the order to invade – again, everything was already in place for the execution of an invasion – the island where many nuclear warheads were already in place, targeting US territory and where Cuban armed resistance was certain to be massive, highly motivated, well-led, and creative.

The Cuban masses, having just experienced a profound social revolution, drawing millions into revolutionary struggle and consciousness, the immense majority of the Cuban population, would be fighting from their own territory against a foreign invasion force and massive bombing assaults. Thousands of Cuban civilians would have been instantly killed in these air strikes.

The political consequences of this carnage – against a sovereign people with the gall to make a Revolution, throw out a venal dictator, institute land reform, literacy campaigns, rent reduction, abolishing Jim Crow-segregation, etc. etc. – would certainly have been devastating for Washington even if nuclear warheads were never launched on either side, a dubious prospect at best.

Washington would lose the “moral high ground,” so crucial to concrete questions of world politics. Cuba would regain what had been eroded by the secretive, clumsy adventurism of Khrushchev’s “initiative” and its incompetent implementation.

The question of the nuclear weapons that were already on the island and the more that were en route would likely have been rendered secondary and the question of Cuba’s right to self-determination would have again risen to the fore. Kennedy was politically savvy enough to realize all of this and finally rebuffed the advocates of launching an invasion.

Uppermost in Kennedy’s considerations were the physical presence of thousands of Soviet combat troops and military personnel (there were some 40,000 Soviet mechanized combat divisions in Cuba, although the Kennedy Administration seems to have counted less than half the actual number).

This fact posed the question that Soviet casualties would be inevitable, further sharply posing the question of questions… would the US invasion inexorably lead to nuclear exchanges? Who would fire first becomes almost a moot, secondary question in the framework of such a political confrontation.

US “intelligence” estimates were that 18,500 US casualties would take place in the first period after a US invasion, according to declassified material obtained by the National Security Archive.

The presence of Soviet nuclear warheads and large numbers of Soviet military personnel, fighter jets, anti-aircraft gun emplacements, and so on, was another major factor leading Kennedy to repeatedly postpone the invasion plans and opt for a naval blockade (labeled a “quarantine” for legalistic purposes) surrounding Cuba, and the drama of a relatively slow showdown unfolding over days in the Atlantic while negotiations between Washington and Moscow intensified, negotiations that excluded the Cuban government.. .as if Cuba had nothing to do with what was happening.

It is always the case when war and combat is actually joined, that the “law of unintended consequences” would come into dynamic play. Or, as the historic revolutionary leader of the working-class movement, Frederick Engels, put it, “Those who unleash controlled forces, also unleash uncontrolled forces.”

The Letters

On October 26, 1962 Fidel Castro – at the most intense, dangerous point of the entire crisis – wrote a letter to Nikita Khrushchev, which stated:

Given the analysis of the situation and the reports which have reached us, [I] consider an attack to be almost imminent–within the next 24 to 72 hours.

There are two possible variants: the first and most probable one is an air attack against certain objectives with the limited aim of destroying them; the second, and though less probable, still possible, is a full invasion. This would require a large force and is the most repugnant form of aggression, which might restrain them.

You can be sure that we will resist with determination, whatever the case. The Cuban people’s morale is extremely high and the people will confront aggression heroically.

I would like to briefly express my own personal opinion.

If the second variant takes place and the imperialists invade Cuba with the aim of occupying it, the dangers of their aggressive policy are so great that after such an invasion the Soviet Union must never allow circumstances in which the imperialists could carry out a nuclear first strike against it.

I tell you this because I believe that the imperialists’ aggressiveness makes them extremely dangerous, and that if they manage to carry out an invasion of Cuba–a brutal act in violation of universal and moral law–then that would be the moment to eliminate this danger forever, in an act of the most legitimate self-defense. However harsh and terrible the solution, there would be no other.

Khrushchev responded, in a second round of letters with Castro that:

In your cable of October 27 you proposed that we be the first to carry out a nuclear strike against the enemy’s territory. Naturally you understand where that would lead us. It would not be a simple strike, but the start of a thermonuclear world war.

Dear Comrade Fidel Castro, I find your proposal to be wrong, even though I understand your reasons.

… As far as Cuba is concerned, it would be difficult to say even in general terms what this would have meant for them. In the first place, Cuba would have been burned in the fire of war….

Now, as a result of the measures taken, we reached the goal sought when we agreed with you to send the missiles to Cuba. We have wrested from the United States the commitment not to invade Cuba and not to permit their Latin American allies to do so. We have we wrested all this from them without a nuclear strike.

We consider that we must take advantage of all the possibilities to defend Cuba, strengthen its independence and sovereignty, defeat military aggression and prevent a nuclear world war in our time.

And we have accomplished that.

Of course, we made concessions, accepted a commitment, action according to the principle that a concession on one side is answered by a concession on the other side. The United States also made a concession. It made the commitment before all the world not to attack Cuba.

That’s why when we compare aggression on the part of the United States and thermonuclear war with the commitment of a concession in exchange for concession, the upholding of the inviolability of the Republic of Cuba and the prevention of a world war, I think that the total outcome of this reckoning, of this comparison, is perfectly clear.

Castro then responded:

I realized when I wrote them that the words contained in my letter could be misinterpreted by you and that was what happened, perhaps because you didn’t read them carefully, perhaps because of the translation, perhaps because I meant to say so much in too few lines. However, I didn’t hesitate to do it…

We knew, and do not presume that we ignored it, that we would have been annihilated, as you insinuate in your letter, in the event of nuclear war. However, that didn’t prompt us to ask you to withdraw the missiles, that didn’t prompt us to ask you to yield.

Do you believe that we wanted that war? But how could we prevent it if the invasion finally took place? The fact is that this event was possible, that imperialism was obstructing every solution and that its demands were, from our point of view, impossible for the USSR and Cuba to accept.

And if war had broken out, what could we do with the insane people who unleashed the war? You yourself have said that under current conditions such a war would inevitably have escalated quickly into a nuclear war.

I understand that once aggression is unleashed, one shouldn’t concede to the aggressor the privilege of deciding, moreover, when to use nuclear weapons.

The destructive power of this weaponry is so great and the speed of its delivery so great that the aggressor would have a considerable initial advantage.

And I did not suggest to you, Comrade Khrushchev, that the USSR should be the aggressor, because that would be more than incorrect, it would be immoral and contemptible on my part.

But from the instant the imperialists attack Cuba and while there are Soviet armed forces stationed in Cuba to help in our defense in case of an attack from abroad, the imperialists would by this act become aggressors against Cuba and against the USSR, and we would respond with a strike that would annihilate them.

Everyone has his own opinions and I maintain mine about the dangerousness of the aggressive circles in the Pentagon and their preference for a preventive strike.

I did not suggest, Comrade Khrushchev, that in the midst of this crisis the Soviet Union should attack, which is what your letter seems to say; rather, that following an imperialist attack, the USSR should act without vacillation and should never make the mistake of allowing circumstances to develop in which the enemy makes the first nuclear strike against the USSR.

And in this sense, Comrade Khrushchev, I maintain my point of view, because I understand it to be a true and just evaluation of a specific situation. You may be able to convince me that I am wrong, but you can’t tell me that I am wrong without convincing me.”

In the January 25-26 speech Castro explains his thinking as he drafted his first letter to Khrushchev “with the utmost care and scruples because what I was about to say was so audacious and daring that I had to present it well.”

He continues:

And there I was thinking, well, what could be done? …Of course we could never present our country as the aggressor or anything like that, but my opinion was that if they invaded we would have to open fire on them with a complete and total round of nuclear rockets. With the total conviction that in a situation such as that, whoever struck first would have a 99 percent advantage.

It would not have been a surprise attack, but only in the case of a concrete invasion, which would have involved the Soviet troops stationed here, and, since they would not have just stood by and watched them die here, what would they have waited for to settle the problem.

In fact, any advantage from such a strike would be quickly overwhelmed by the devastation from the inexorable waves of second, third, many strikes that would be unleashed. Would Kennedy, unable to resist launching the invasion, have resisted a massive and devastating retaliation on Soviet targets, after nuclear weapons had been dropped on invading US troops? By then all Hell, literally, would have broken loose.

Castro’s exchange of letters with Khrushchev assumes that given the forces in play and in motion – 300,000 Cuban combatants, 40,000 Soviet military personnel, the bulk in mechanized combat brigades, on the ground, confronting a US invasion force projected to quickly reach hundreds of thousands, all coming head-to-head while massive US air strikes and countering Cuban-Soviet anti-aircraft fire unleashed, and with the enormous naval forces, many armed with nuclear weapons, including torpedoes – that the US invasion, which he considered inevitable and imminent, would inexorably go nuclear.

Following this undoubtedly correct assumption, Castro’s logic and formulations in his initial letters becomes necessarily more abstract and algebraic. He presents, in the rush and incredible heat and speed of events, a post-invasion scenario where Soviet forces could strike, in a limited “tactical” use (although those terms are not specifically used), the US forces before the US could strike the Soviet forces.

The same technical, military logic of “pre-emption” would, of course, dominate the US side which had a clear superiority in both quantity and quality of nuclear weapons deliverance at that point, the full extent of which the Cuban leadership was not likely aware of the extent of.

Castro continued, “Keep in mind that back then there was not the unlimited supply of rockets that there is today. The Americans did not have too many rockets then, and we knew the speed of their planes and those things.” (In reality, the US supply of rockets was quite sufficient to destroy not only Cuba, but virtually all human life on the earth.)

The MAD doctrine was based on each side’s nuclear arsenal countermanding the others.

The seemingly absurd stockpiling of nuclear warheads and delivery system locations had the “rational” kernel of logic that after a “first strike” or pre-emptive launch of warheads the “other side” would still have enough of an atomic arsenal left to deliver a crushing response.

The idea, developed by “Dr. Strangelove” US theorists like Herman Kahn, and accepted by their Soviet equivalents, was to build up and protect a “second strike” capacity in order to obviate a “first strike.” Of course, Washington continued – and continues to this day – to develop a “decisive” first-strike capability, largely through anti-ballistic and “Star Wars” systems to intercept and eliminate the other sides “second strike” (or first, or any strike) giving the US a credible “first strike.”

The fact of a US invasion – that is, its actual occurrence – of Cuba would have set in motion a dynamic that would have rendered moot, useless, and ridiculous the question of who would “fire” the “first” nuclear weapon, if that could even be determined after the event (if indeed the word after would have any content).

Dozens and dozens of ships, planes, and launch sites on the ground, under the control of dozens and dozens of military officers subject to “orders” in what would have been an unimaginable chaos and breakdown inevitable in what would have been the first nuclear exchange in world history. Would anyone have even known who struck first? The key point – the only determinant fact – in whether nuclear holocaust would be unleashed was whether the US would invade Cuba.

New Facts

What is now known about the Missile Crisis is that a situation existed where, at the height of the confrontation, from October 25-28, literally dozens and dozens of military officers well below the executive political “decision makers” in a theoretical chain of command, on both the Soviet and US side, had the capacity and even the authority to push the nuclear button and pull the nuclear trigger.

We certainly know this to be true in the first-hand accounts by Soviet and US military officers and personnel on the ground, on the oceans, and in the air that have become public and from “classified” government documents on both sides. (see (Noam Chomsky’s Cuban Missile Crisis: How the US Played Russian Roulette with Nuclear War in the October 15 Guardian newspaper, which cites several harrowing moments of near disaster.)

The author Michael Dobbs in an October 18, 2012 New York Times op-ed piece (The Price of a 50-Year Old Myth) wrote,

While the risk of war in October 1962 was very high (Kennedy estimated it variously at between 1 in 5 and 1 in 2), it was not caused by a clash of wills. The real dangers arose from “the fog of war.” As the two superpowers geared up for a nuclear war, the chances of something going terribly wrong increased exponentially…

By Saturday, Oct. 27, the two leaders were no longer in full control of their gigantic military machines, which were moving forward under their own momentum. Soviet troops on Cuba targeted Guantánamo with tactical nuclear weapons and shot down an American U-2 spy plane.

Another U-2, on a “routine” air sampling mission to the North Pole, got lost over the Soviet Union. The Soviets sent MiG fighters into the air to try to shoot down the American intruder, and in response, Alaska Air Defense Command scrambled F-102 interceptors armed with tactical nuclear missiles.

In the Caribbean, a frazzled Soviet submarine commander was dissuaded by his subordinates from using his nuclear torpedo against American destroyers that were trying to force him to the surface.”

In his Guardian piece cited above Chomsky, referring to the famous (to some detractors, infamous) October 26 letter of Fidel Castro, states:

As this was happening and Washington was debating and Kennedy poised to decide on a US invasion, Fidel Castro wrote a letter to Nikita Khrushchev which has been interpreted, over Castro’s sharp objection, as advocating a Soviet nuclear attack – a so-called “first strike” against US territory if the US invasion were to actually occur.

Khrushchev himself took the necessarily and purposely algebraic and highly cautious words of Castro as such a call, and used Castro’s wording as practically a cover to carry out the retreat and concessions to Kennedy that diffused the crisis and reverse the momentum towards purposeful or accidental nuclear exchanges.

Extraordinary Gathering

Details on the Cuban leadership’s viewpoint on the origins, development, and “end-game” of the October Crisis, and their attitude to the actions and behavior of the Soviet leadership, were presented on January 25-26, 1968 cited above, when Fidel Castro gave an exhaustive 12-hour speech to the gathered Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC).

In a remarkable oration spread over two days, Castro painstakingly – combining great emotion with razor-sharp, cool logic – detailed how the “Missile Crisis” unfolded and how Cuba’s relations with the Soviet Union emerged out of the crisis different from what they had been before. The January 24-26, 1968 Central Committee meeting was perhaps the nadir of the downward spiral of Cuban-Soviet relations set in motion by the October Crisis of 1962.

The entire speech, previously unpublished in any public medium, was printed in 2002, for the first time, in the official Cuban Council of State English translation, in the book Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba’s Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis by James Blight and Philip Brenner published by Bowman and Littlefield Publishers.

The timing of the special, extraordinary meeting of the PCC Central Committee was not fortuitous. It was held just 107 days after the death of Che Guevara and the defeat of his guerrilla forces based in Bolivia, which was a real blow to the Cuban revolutionaries and would raise many challenges in the development of Cuba’s revolutionary foreign policy in a new objective reality. (This question will be returned to in detail in Part IV of this series.)

Fidel Castro and the Cuban leadership placed an important part of the responsibility for the defeat of Che’s guerrilla on the top leadership of the Bolivian Communist Party which supported the program and perspective of the Soviet Union in Latin America and opposed Che Guevara’s armed struggle and leadership in Bolivia (which was seen as the initial base for a continental revolutionary movement) reneging on previously given commitments.

Opposition to the Cuban revolutionary line in Latin America was opposed – with varying degrees of vehemence – by virtually all of the Latin American Communist Parties. This betrayal disrupted and undermined the formation and development of urban resistance forces crucial to supplement Che’s struggle, leaving the guerrillas exposed and vulnerable.

At the time of their April 1961 victory at the Bay of Pigs (Playa Giron to the Cubans) over US-organized Cuban counterrevolutionaries, Fidel Castro declared that the Cuban Revolution was a socialist revolution and that he was a “Marxist-Leninist.” Castro’s words wholly corresponded to the social and economic deeds of his revolutionary government and to the profound internationalism of the Cuban leadership team. (see Part II of this series)

The Cuban revolutionaries shared this terminology with the government of the Soviet Union (and the Chinese government as well, which was then engaged in a war of words with the Soviet leadership), but the Castro leadership team’s domestic policies and revolutionary internationalist foreign policy perspective stood in unspoken contrast to the outlook and program of the Soviet government and Communist Party, particularly in regard to the “road to socialism” in Latin America and other semi-colonial countries and the promotion of “détente” and “peaceful coexistence” with the advanced capitalist-imperialist powers.

Prior to the October Crisis these differences were subsumed in the alliance that was forged between the revolutionary government of Cuba and the Soviet Union and its allied Eastern European governments.

Prior to Fidel Castro’s speech, the Central Committee gathering had heard an extensive report by Raul Castro, the Chairman of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (Cuba’s President today in 2012). The report was a damning indictment of a secret faction of the PCC led by Anibal Escalante. Escalante’s faction, which was composed of former leaders, like himself, and cadres of the Popular Socialist Party (PSP).

Before the Revolution the PSP, which had a base in the industrial working class and trade unions, was connected to the dominant currents in the “world Communist movement” and Latin American Communist Parties that looked to the Soviet Union for political direction and program. The PSP initially opposed the July 26 Movement led by Fidel Castro, coming out in support and joint activity in the last period before the revolutionary triumph.

Over the next few years the majority of PSP cadres were successfully integrated into what became the PCC. In 1962 Escalante, who had been the top functionary of the Integrated Revolutionary Organization, an initial formation bringing together the currents supporting the Revolution, had come under fierce public criticism by Fidel Castro for “sectarianism” and “bureaucratism” in March 1962. See here.

Some thirty-five members of the so-called “microfaction” were expelled from the PCC and received prison sentences from two to fifteen years.

The most serious of the charges involved secret activity aimed at forging ties between the “microfaction” and officials and Communist Party leaders in the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), and Czechoslovakia in their common opposition to the revolutionary line of the PCC in Latin America and the position of the large majority of the PCC in domestic and foreign policies in general, going so far as to urge Soviet economic pressure on Cuba, for which they were charged with treason.

Escalante’s grouping never argued for their political positions openly within the structures and procedures of the PCC, which was their right.

In their secret functioning inside Cuba and intrigues with Soviet and Eastern European officials and diplomats, they portrayed Che Guevara as “Trotskyite adventurer” and the Castro leadership as “petty bourgeois” elements that seized control of the Revolution, holding the working class in contempt. Moreover, the Cuban revolutionary leadership was “anti-Soviet” and did not support Soviet “hegemony.”

The political lessons drawn by the revolutionary leadership in Cuba from the perceived Soviet “capitulation” to Washington were sharp and clear: they felt they were now and always would be in the final analysis “on their own.”

Or, more precisely, that the survival and security of the Cuban Revolution would ultimately be dependent not on powerful benefactors – who would no longer be prettied up in their minds to be more revolutionary than they actually were – but, rather, through the extension of the Revolution, especially across the Americas.

In fact, following the resolution of the Missile Crisis – which was hugely traumatic in world public opinion – led to increased propaganda for “peace” and “reconciliation” in both Moscow and Washington, with accompanying diplomatic maneuvering.

This culminated in the actual signing by the governments of the United States, United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (formally the Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space and Under Water, which was strongly welcomed in world public opinion when it went into effect in October 1963, one year to the month from the political drama and trauma of the Missile Crisis.

The treaty did not ban “underground” nuclear tests which could also lead to radioactive releases into the atmosphere as well ground water. The treaty put no limits on the production of nuclear warheads and their fitting onto missiles.

The aftermath of the Missile Crisis was that Soviet-Cuban relations over the next six years, politically deteriorated to nearly a bitter, breaking point. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963 and Khrushchev’s leadership in the Soviet Communist Party and Soviet state came to an ignominious end as he was pensioned off and replaced by Leonid Brezhnev and Alexi Kosygin In October 1964.

The new Lyndon Johnson White House abided by Kennedy’s verbal “pledge” and invasion plans were put in mothballs, although covert action, terrorism, and containment continued. Primary focus and attention shifted to Indochina where Johnson maintained continuity with Kennedy’s intervention and deepened it.

The immediate threat of US-Soviet nuclear exchange and war receded on October 28 with the announcement that Soviet ships had stopped advancing and that Soviet missiles would be withdrawn. But for Cuba the crisis and the pressure intensified.

Not even two weeks after the supposed resolution of the crisis the world’s “sigh of relief, 400 Cuban workers were killed when a Cuban counterrevolutionary sabotage team dispatched from the US blew up a Cuban industrial facility.

Right up until his assassination Kennedy was approving terrorist attacks against Cuba. US intervention by proxy never stopped and became systematic. US-backed counterrevolutionaries were defeated in the Escambray mountains in central Cuba in a campaign from 1963-65.

The six years that followed the end of the Missile Crisis saw Cuban-Soviet relations decline – in public as well as “private” state-to-state and party-to-party behind-the-scenes relations – almost to a breaking point, before formal and definite improvements after 1968 through the 1970s and 1980s until the Soviet government collapsed in 1991, setting off a huge economic depression and crisis in Cuba.

In this period of improved relations, fundamental contradictions remained and sharp policy differences emerged over questions like Soviet policies in Africa, military tactics in Angola, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which Cuba opposed. These questions will be returned to in future Parts of this series.

As this article gets ready to be launched into cyberspace, I came across an October 22 article written for the Cuban press by Fidel Castro. The article is entitled Fidel Castro is Dying and is written tongue-in-cheek is response to the later ridiculous and repulsive rumor-mongering – yes, this time he really is dying even dead, we’ve got a Venezuelan doctor who knows for sure this time – periodically engaged in by professional Castro-haters. It is a veritable cottage industry.

Fidel, with pictures, once again, combats the liars and the fools:

While many persons in the world are deceived by information agencies which publish this nonsense – almost all in the hands of the privileged and rich – people believe less and less in them. Nobody likes to be deceived; even the most incorrigible liar expects to be told the truth.

In April of 1961, everyone believed the information published in the news agencies that the mercenary invaders of Girón or Bay of Pigs, whatever one wants to call it, were approaching Havana, when in fact some of them were fruitlessly trying by boat to reach the yanqui warships escorting them.

The peoples are learning and resistance is growing, faced with the crisis of capitalism which is recurring with greater frequency; no lies, repression or new weapons will be able to prevent the collapse of a production system which is increasingly unequal and unjust.

A few days ago, very close to the 50th anniversary of the October Crisis, news agencies pointed to three guilty parties: Kennedy, having recently become the leader of the empire, Khrushchev and Castro.

Cuba did not have anything to do with nuclear weapons, nor with the unnecessary slaughter of Hiroshima and Nagasaki perpetrated by the president of the United States, Harry S. Truman, thus establishing the tyranny of nuclear weapons. Cuba was defending its right to independence and social justice.

When we accepted Soviet aid in weapons, oil, foodstuffs and other resources, it was to defend ourselves from yanqui plans to invade our homeland, subjected to a dirty and bloody war which that capitalist country imposed on us from the very first months, which left thousands of Cubans dead and maimed.

When Khrushchev proposed the installation here of medium range missiles similar to those the United States had in Turkey – far closer to the USSR than Cuba to the United States – as a solidarity necessity, Cuba did not hesitate to agree to such a risk. Our conduct was ethically irreproachable.

We will never apologize to anyone for what we did. The fact is that half a century has gone by, and here we still are with our heads held high.

October 22, 2012

Ike Nahem is a longtime anti-war, labor, and socialist activist. He is the coordinator of Cuba Solidarity New York (cubasolidarityny@ mindspring.com) and a founder of the New York-New Jersey July 26 Coalition. Nahem is an Amtrak Locomotive Engineer and member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, a division of the Teamsters Union. These are his personal political opinions. Comments and criticisms can be sent to ikenahem@mindspring.com

“Values and Education,” by Dota

Nice piece by guest poster Dota. Enjoy!

Values and Education

By Dota

I had recently gotten into an argument with my roommate’s Pakistani friend about the merits of education, but first some background details are in order.

My roommate had a friend over for a visit and the conversation inevitably steered towards the oft-treaded topic of Pakistan’s sorry state of affairs. After a series of banal observations were exchanged, my roommate’s friend (let’s call him S) made an argument that caught my attention. He claimed that education was sorely what Pakistan needed and that the country was comprised of uneducated peasants being led by uneducated peasants.

I’ve always found the South Asian obsession with education to be quite intriguing; a region of illiterates that revere education much more than would your average literate westerner. The Indian fears and reveres forces which he perceives as wondrous and mysterious; and what could be more mysterious and wondrous to the illiterate than a book?

A myriad of rituals revolving around book etiquette persist even today. My mother always taught me that an unread book must be closed and never left open as a mark of respect. If one drops a book to the floor, one must pick it up and kiss it before putting it away. One must never touch a book with ones feet, and so on.

The astute reader would have undoubtedly observed that the book has been deified and book etiquette may actually be a form of idolatry. This is unsurprising for just as the Chinese will eat anything, the Indian will worship anything. It is noteworthy to point out that both Hindus and Muslims participate in this ‘idolatry’ (including myself).

Having said all of this it is now perhaps not as surprising that S was an avid subscriber to the miracles of education. I said nothing as they spoke and continued to play my game of Dota in silence.

My roommate eventually turned to me and asked me for my opinion.

I told them that while education was extremely important, what was even more significant were the underlying values of a society. Values spelled the difference between an average education system and a superior one. I told S that merely building more schools would not transform Pakistani society into a modern and just society (although it would be a good start). What mattered most was the quality of education imparted and this would ultimately be shaped by the values of said society.

To illustrate my point I narrated what my roommate had observed about Norway several years ago on a trip there. He told me that schools would take children out on a field trip where the little children would then embark on the solemn mission of picking up litter from the streets. The key difference lies in values.

S disagreed and countered my argument by stating that these values were acquired in school, therefore Pakistan needed more schools. Like many South Asians, S was a passive receiver of his culture and practiced it religiously but with little understanding of it.

Like so many other Indians and Pakistanis I have known, S could sense the rot in his society but figured that these problems were external to him. Most South Asians do not see themselves as being part of the larger problems that plague them collectively. They are prone to bewailing the corruption of their leaders without observing everyday acts of corruption, such as bribing traffic cops. The problems are external and therefore so are the solutions.

Education is thus seen as being something that is external to society, and not a part of it. Therefore to S’s mind, if society is going off the rails, the only antidote is the magical elixir of education. While this may sound silly to Westerners, this silliness comes rather naturally to South Asians, and perhaps to South Asian Muslims in particular.

Muslims believe that the Quran literally descended from the heavens like a deus ex machina that promised to address the malaise that afflicted Arabian society (and the human condition in general). In similar fashion Pakistanis believe that this thing called education will descend from somewhere and save their society.

So how does education shape the average Indian/Pakistani?

On every visit back to Mumbai I’ve observed educated Indians driving the wrong way down a one way street and bribing traffic cops when pulled over. These college-educated Indians will run a red light on an intersection that isn’t policed. They will litter casually. They will seldom pay their taxes.

They have no notion of civic sense because Indian culture is traditionally rural and emphasizes segregation (via caste) over camaraderie and fraternity. They can read and they are reasonably good at math, and this is all that their education has imparted.

On his visits to Pakistan, Indian journalist Aakar Patel observes the same amoral behavior displayed by Pakistanis as well. A school in India made headlines because one of its teachers sprayed cow urine on Dalit students to ‘purify’ them. The story can be read here. Pakistani schools actually teach their students that Hindus are inferior mole people who relish darkness and confined spaces. This can be read here.

What sort of adults would such schools produce? Would they produce lucid minds capable of questioning the status quo? I doubt it. They will produce uncivilized individuals who are capable of doing algebra. South Asians are not equipped to see the failings in their shared culture. They seem to think that churning out additional schools will somehow increase their society’s level of civilization.

They do not comprehend that the average Westerner’s civic sense and general morality are the products of centuries of civilization. The radical and selfish egoism of Hobbes would eventually be tempered by the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, which would eventually give rise to the notion of public good that govern modern Western societies.

This is ultimately what I tried (in vain) to explain to S. That while South Asian institutions are capable of producing outstanding doctors and civil engineers, Western institutions are capable of making those doctors ethical and inculcating in those civil engineers a work ethic that is second to none.

In conclusion I’d like to say that the effects of education are immediately felt upon society through a general boost to the economy. But in the long run, it is the values of a society, those shared interpretations of reality reached through consensus that will ultimately play a vital role in its moral development.

Education is not the source of these values (as South Asians erroneously believe), but rather a vehicle through which these values are transmitted from one generation to the next. The source of these values is society itself, which is comprised of individuals that need to be worked on. John Stuart Mill stated in his essay on Liberty that “Among the works of man…the first in importance surely is man himself…” But this is difficult in a culture which eschews individualism in favor of collectivism.