Imperialist "Democracy" at Work

U.S. Torture Machine

Amnesty International: "Gulag" and Anti-Communism

Part One

In the year and a half since the brutalization and abuse of detainees at the U.S. military’s Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq came to light, additional torture revelations continue to emerge from beneath the government’s prison walls of concealment and lies. Last month the Bush administration sent Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on a “charm offensive” to Europe to counteract the furor over the U.S.’ network of secret prisons in Europe and elsewhere, part of the policy of “rendition” of “terror suspects” to countries where they will be tortured. In classic doublespeak, Rice refused to confirm the existence of the secret detention centers while assuring that those detained there were being treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention’s proscription of torture. This while the Bush administration insists the U.S. is not bound to that provision! Rice lectured European leaders not to question American actions because they were for their benefit, even as she protested that the U.S. does not torture or outsource torture.

Even some CIA officials have been singing a different tune over the past few years. Telling of an Al Qaeda suspect transported to Egypt, the CIA’s former counter-terrorism director, Vincent Cannistraro, told Newsday (6 February 2003), “They promptly tore his fingernails out and he started to tell things.” Former CIA agent Bob Baer told the New Statesman (17 May 2004), “If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear…you send them to Egypt.”

Rupert Murdoch’s Fox TV network, where “The Shield” shows cops brutalizing “suspects,” and rabid Zionist Alan Dershowitz, who on CNN in March 2003 advocated “nonlethal torture,” are among those extolling the torture of “bad people,” including those deemed to have weapons that could blow up the world—with the exception of the U.S., Israel and other established nuclear powers.

Ten months ago, the London Guardian (19 March 2005) reported that the U.S. was holding an estimated 10,000 “ghost detainees” around the world. They have been held incommunicado in secret prisons—without charge or trial—and shuttled between jails covertly by air. A Washington Post (2 November 2005) article by Dana Priest described the secret prison network. Relying on classified government documents, Priest spelled out that beginning shortly after the September 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the CIA has been operating covert prisons in eight countries, including in East Europe.

Priest’s sources said that these “black sites” hold at least 100 terrorist suspects. Others have noted that nobody knows how many such prisoners there are, who they are or what’s being done to them. It has just been reported that Swiss intelligence services intercepted a fax from Egypt’s Foreign Ministry to its London embassy confirming that the U.S. was holding 23 Iraqi and Afghan prisoners at a “black site” in Romania. The fax also referred to secret detention centers in Bulgaria, Kosovo, Macedonia and Ukraine.

While the administration tried to palm off the torture at Abu Ghraib as the work of a few “bad apples,” such brutalization is meted out daily by Iraq’s U.S. occupiers. A 25 September 2005 report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) focusing on the 82nd Airborne quotes one sergeant on the torture: “In a way it was sport.” The report noted, “The torture of detainees reportedly was so widespread and accepted that it became a means of stress relief for soldiers. Soldiers said they felt welcome to come to the PUC [Persons Under Control] tent on their off-hours to ‘f--- a PUC’ or ‘smoke a PUC’.” Another sergeant explained, “To ‘f--- a PUC’ means to beat him up.... To ‘smoke’ someone is to put them in stress positions until they get muscle fatigue and pass out.” The horrors perpetrated by U.S. forces and their allies are no aberration but are typical of colonial occupiers. Down with the occupation of Iraq! U.S. and allied troops out now!

A number of bourgeois politicians in the U.S. and internationally have called on the Bush administration to shut down the Guantánamo camp and Abu Ghraib. And with the occupation unraveling and the torture revelations further undermining popular support for the military, Congress overwhelmingly adopted Republican John McCain’s amendment to a military appropriations bill ostensibly barring the use of torture. At the same time, Congress backed the administration by overwhelmingly passing a bill stripping federal courts of jurisdiction in lawsuits by detainees challenging their imprisonment and abuse. After weeks of resisting the anti-torture measure, Bush signed the bill on December 30 while issuing a “signing statement” laying out that he will interpret the measure in line with his role as Commander in Chief. Citing White House sources, the Boston Globe (4 January) reported, “This means Bush believes he can waive the restrictions.”

An insightful article on the U.S. military’s School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, by Naomi Klein in the Nation (26 December 2005) captures the hypocrisy of McCain and the Democrats in chastising the administration for its torture policy. Detailing the school’s role in training U.S. imperialism’s henchmen in Latin America and elsewhere in the use of torture, Klein wrote, “It’s not only apologists for torture who ignore this history when they blame abuses on ‘a few bad apples’—so too do many of torture’s most prominent opponents.” Indeed, torture by the U.S. military and its South Vietnamese puppets was rampant during the dirty imperialist war in Vietnam. Klein noted that what was “unprecedented” about the latest revelations was “not the torture but the openness.”

Imperialism’s Liberal Tribunes

Bush’s liberal critics in particular seized on a May 2005 report by Amnesty International (AI) condemning the U.S. for its mass detentions, torture, disappearances and elimination of the right to trial for those caught in the web of the “war on terror.” AI’s Irene Khan announced at the time, “Guantanamo has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the notion that people can be detained without any recourse to the law.”

In using the term “gulag,” Khan was invoking a timeworn anti-Soviet battle cry derived from the 1973 book The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. An archreactionary opponent of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, Solzhenitsyn has championed the tsars and Russian Orthodox Church, which organized anti-Jewish pogroms in prerevolutionary Russia. He also lashed out at American liberals for their concerns over the plight of the oppressed black masses in South Africa under the old apartheid regime.

The General Camp Directorate (Gulag) was the name adopted in 1934 by Stalin’s regime in the USSR for the apparatus that oversaw the vast prison system that resulted from the degeneration of the Soviet workers state under the Stalinist bureaucracy beginning in 1923-24. Solzhenitsyn’s book slandered the Soviet workers state as one giant prison from birth. It thus equated the early workers state under Bolshevik leaders V. I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky—a regime of workers democracy committed to the fight for international proletarian revolution—with the degenerated workers state under the nationalist Stalinist regime. Painting life in Stalin’s labor camps as an archetype of life in the USSR as a whole, the book became an ideological weapon in the imperialists’ drive to destroy the Soviet workers state.

Commenting about The Gulag Archipelag , historian Moshe Lewin pointed out in The Soviet Century (2005) that Solzhenitsyn “did not offer the slightest hint that by the time of its publication the Gulag as he had known it no longer existed. To have said as much would have been an act of political honesty.” AI’s analogy is equally dishonest—and ignorant. Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo are interrogation and torture centers; the gulags were labor camps.

For the anti-Communist liberals at Amnesty International to compare the U.S. to the Soviet Union was remarkable. This, after all, is an organization that in the past has offered only the meekest criticisms of repression in the U.S. For AI to use the “gulag” analogy was a form of shock therapy. And shock it did. President Bush called the report “absurd.” Defense Secretary Rumsfeld snorted, “To try to equate the military’s record on detainee treatment to some of the worst atrocities of the past century is a disservice to those who have sacrificed so much to bring freedom to others.” Even many who have criticized this or that administration policy objected. A Washington Post (26 May 2005) editorial declared, “We draw the line at the use of the word ‘gulag’ or at the implication that the United States has somehow become the modern equivalent of Stalin’s Soviet Union.”

From our perspective as Trotskyists who uphold the goals and program of the October Revolution and fought to the end in defense of the Soviet Union, AI’s equation of the USSR with U.S. imperialism—the biggest terrorist and mass murderer in human history—is an outrage. It must be answered by exposing the special role that AI and other liberals have played on behalf of imperialism by cloaking its depredations with the mantle of “human rights.” Their slanders of the October Revolution must be combatted in order to educate and politically arm a new generation of proletarian fighters.

“Human Rights” Imperialism

In biting the hand it usually licks, AI was motivated by concerns that Bush & Co. are harming the interests of U.S. imperialism. As AI put it in its report, “The rule of law, and therefore, ultimately, security, is being undermined, as is any moral credibility the USA claims to have in seeking to advance human rights in the world.” The liberals’ primary worry is that the Bush administration is ruining the ability of the imperialists to carry out their wars of conquest in the guise of “human rights” and “democracy.”

In the same vein, David Cole moaned in the Nation (21 November 2005), a bellwether of radical-liberal public opinion, that the torture practices “ultimately undermine our security, as they impair our legitimacy and create ideal recruiting tools for the enemy.” Cole continued, “If we are to prevail in the war on terror, we must do so by distinguishing ourselves from our enemy.” Thus Cole affirms the basis of the “war on terror,” which is a wholesale assault on civil liberties whose ultimate target is the left and labor movement.

It is such concerns that drive Bush’s opponents in the Democratic Party—the other party of racist U.S. imperialism. It was the Democrats who offered Bush a blank check to unleash U.S. imperialism’s killers—from Congress’ near-unanimous September 2001 military authorization to take whatever steps were deemed necessary to pursue the “war on terror” to the Democrats’ overwhelming support for the draconian USA Patriot Act and their vote in support of the Iraq war. Along with the capitalist media, the Democrats retailed Bush’s lies about Saddam Hussein’s supposed “weapons of mass destruction.” Now they look to take electoral advantage of the widespread disaffection and revulsion among the populace at the quagmire in Iraq and the torture revelations.

Bush’s bourgeois critics understand that even an imperialist power as militarily predominant as the U.S. should be able to sell the ideological pretenses for its military adventures. Former Democratic president Jimmy Carter complained in a November interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that the torture scandal “besmirches America’s position as the so-called former champion of human rights. There’s not a single major human rights organization in the world that’s not now condemning America as one of the foremost violators of basic human rights.” It was the Carter administration that launched an anti-Soviet “human rights” crusade in the late 1970s to “morally rearm” U.S. imperialism after its defeat by the workers and peasants of Vietnam. In doing so, it sought to overcome the population’s deep mistrust of the government and aversion to further military adventures.

In Defense of the
October Revolution

The 1917 Russian Revolution was the greatest victory for the working people of the world. The counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92, after decades of Stalinist misrule, was the working people’s greatest defeat. The October Revolution was the epochal event of modern history. For the first time, the program of proletarian revolution was given flesh and blood. Under the Bolsheviks’ leadership, the proletariat seized political power and created a workers state based on soviets (councils).

In its initial acts in power, the Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies decreed land to the peasants and pulled Russia out of the slaughter of interimperialist World War I. It demanded an immediate peace without annexations, including freedom for the colonies subjugated by the imperialists. The young workers state eliminated laws discriminating against women and homosexuals and recognized the right to self-determination of the myriad peoples oppressed under tsarist/capitalist rule.

The Soviet government proclaimed the right of working people to jobs, health care, housing and education. The regime went on to expropriate the holdings of the Russian capitalists and the foreign imperialists and repudiated tsarist Russia’s massive debt to foreign bankers. Production was organized and collectivized, aiming to satisfy human need. In the space of two decades, state ownership of the means of production and economic planning made possible the transformation of what had been an impoverished, backward, largely peasant country into an industrial and military powerhouse, even under the profoundly deforming bureaucratic means employed by the Stalinist regime.

The proletarian revolution in Russia was not made solely for Russia, but was seen as the opening shot of a necessarily international struggle of labor against the rule of capital. Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks understood the necessity of extending proletarian revolution internationally, particularly to advanced capitalist countries such as Germany, in order to lay the groundwork for a world socialist society. To that end, the Communist International was founded in 1919.

However, the defeat of the anticipated German workers revolution in 1923 greatly demoralized the Soviet working class. The proletariat had already been decimated by the destruction of industry and infrastructure wrought by World War I and the bloody Civil War of 1918-20, when 14 capitalist countries invaded the workers republic in a failed attempt to restore capitalist rule. With the end of the Civil War, bureaucratic tendencies in the party and state administration began to coalesce into a self-conscious caste. By 1923, Lenin was increasingly incapacitated. In the meantime, the burgeoning party bureaucracy, controlled by J. V. Stalin, was beginning to rise to self-consciousness.

Though it only became clear in hindsight, 1923-24 marked the beginning of the Soviet Thermidor, the decisive point at which the bureaucratic caste seized political power from the working class. From this point on, the people who ruled the USSR, the way the USSR was ruled and the purposes for which it was ruled all changed. The nationalist outlook of the bureaucracy was given expression in Stalin’s proclamation in the fall of 1924 of the anti-Marxist “theory” that socialism—a classless, egalitarian society based on material abundance—could be built in a single country, and a backward one at that. In practice, “socialism in one country” meant opposition to the perspective of workers revolution internationally and accommodation to world imperialism.

Despite the degeneration of the workers state, the fundamental conquests of the Bolshevik Revolution remained until the triumph of capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92. Those gains were embodied in the collectivized economy built by ripping the productive resources out of the hands of the capitalists and landlords. It was the Soviet Red Army that smashed Hitler’s Nazis and liberated Europe. And it was the military might of the Soviet Union that posed a counterweight to U.S. imperialism.

As Trotskyists—i.e., genuine Marxists—we fought to the end for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union and the East European deformed workers states against imperialist attack and capitalist counterrevolution. At the same time, we fought for workers political revolution to oust the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracies and replace them with regimes based on workers democracy and revolutionary internationalism. As Trotsky wrote in “Once Again: The USSR and its Defense” (1937), “Stalin overthrown by the workers—that’s a great step forward toward socialism. Stalin crushed by the imperialists—that’s the counterrevolution triumphant.” Today we apply the same program toward the remaining deformed workers states—For unconditional military defense of China, Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam! For proletarian political revolution!

The destruction of the USSR ushered in a global offensive against the working class and oppressed and an ideological climate dominated by widespread belief in the “death of communism”—the lie that the collapse of Stalinism represented the failure of Marxism and the struggle for socialist revolution. Pseudo-socialist organizations that occasionally spoke of the need for proletarian revolution have all but abandoned their Marxist pretensions, instead increasingly becoming mouthpieces for bourgeois liberal ideology.

It is in this context of political retrogression that a term like “gulag”—which only 20 years ago was a term associated with the more virulent anti-communists—has gained common currency. While in the mouths of Amnesty International it is meant as an anti-Communist slur, “gulag” has become a synonym for brutal state repression even among leftists. Our revolutionary Marxist organization has not been immune to such pressures. In an article on the conviction of leftist attorney Lynne Stewart, Mohamed Yousry and Ahmed Abdel Sattar in WV No. 842 (18 February 2005), we wrote the subhead “Mr. Gonzales’s Gulag,” referring to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the government’s wholesale attacks on democratic rights. This glib echoing of liberal opinion ran counter to our task of promoting the Marxist program and worldview against the pervasive ideological pressures of the post-Soviet world.

Amnesty International Covers for Imperialist Brutality

From its inception, Amnesty International has embraced the U.S. as the epitome of “human rights.” Under that rubric, AI has supported numerous U.S.-led imperialist military adventures, concerned solely that the pillage of dependent countries like Serbia or Iraq is carried out in conformity with “international law.” In its statement of “Core Values,” AI boasts of being part of a “global community of human rights defenders,” among whose principles are “impartiality and independence and democracy and mutual respect.” That “community of human rights defenders” includes fronts for the CIA such as Freedom House—a major sandbox for anti-Communist Cuban gusano exiles—and the National Endowment for Democracy, whose recent beneficiaries include the anti-Chávez coup plotters in Venezuela in 2002 and the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine in 2004.

Fundamentally, what defines AI is its ideology of liberalism. For such liberals, the highest pinnacle of human civilization is Western democracy. “Democracy” in the U.S., West Europe, etc. is a sham. It is especially in the most advanced capitalist countries that democratic forms of government serve to veil the nature of the state as a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie over the exploited and oppressed masses in a garb of “equality of all citizens.” In The State and Revolution, written in 1917, Lenin wrote, citing Karl Marx’s comrade Friedrich Engels:

“In a democratic republic, Engels continues, ‘wealth exercises its power indirectly, but all the more surely’, first, by means of the ‘direct corruption of officials’ (America); secondly, by means of an ‘alliance of the government and the Stock Exchange’ (France and America)....

“A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained possession of this very best shell...it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it.”

The capitalist rulers who claim the banner of “freedom” and “civilization” have carried out mass murder and torture on an immense scale in their drive to secure world markets, cheap labor and raw materials. Much of the wealth that laid the foundations of Western capitalism was acquired from trade in African slaves. As Karl Marx put it in Capital, capitalism was born “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”

From the Indian subcontinent to Africa and Latin America, European colonialists killed tens of millions, subjugating entire populations. Decades of barbaric British colonialism in Kenya culminated in the suppression of the nationalist Mau Mau uprising (1952-56), during which tens of thousands of men, women and children were imprisoned in concentration camps where forced labor was practiced and hangings were common. Belgian colonization of Congo included enslavement and mutilation of the native population, with estimates of the death toll reaching ten million. Trying to drown in blood the Algerian War of Independence in the 1950s-early ’60s, the French imperialists killed a million people—over a tenth of the total population. In Indochina between 1946 and 1954, between 800,000 and 2,000,000 were killed by French forces.

But it is the rulers of the United States whose hands are the bloodiest. Having built much of its vast wealth on the unpaid labor of black slaves, the U.S. made its appearance on the world scene as an imperialist power with the Spanish- American War of 1898, a time when black people in the U.S. were being lynched at a rate of one every other day. After driving Spain out of Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines, U.S. forces slaughtered up to half a million Filipinos between 1899 and 1902 to suppress a nationalist uprising. The U.S. is the only country to have used nuclear weapons, massacring hundreds of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Particularly after WWII, the U.S. has supported and armed murderous neocolonial rulers—from Mobutu in Zaire (now Congo) to Pinochet in Chile—to reinforce imperialist subjugation.

Determined to prevent social revolution, U.S. imperialism later killed three million in the Korean War and another three million more in Vietnam. The entry of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army into Korea in 1950 was decisive in throwing back U.S./UN forces, sealing the division of Korea between a deformed workers state in the North and a brutal capitalist police state in the South. And in South Vietnam, U.S. military defeat resulted in the overthrow of capitalist rule.

The 1917 Russian Revolution was a beacon of liberation for oppressed peoples around the globe. At its 1919 founding conference, the Comintern declared in its “Manifesto of the Communist International to the Proletariat of the Entire World”: “Colonial slaves of Africa and Asia! The hour of proletarian dictatorship in Europe will also be the hour of your own liberation!” That same year, the U.S. was known for its “red summer,” named for the blood of black people that ran down city streets in a series of racist pogroms across the country. The road to ridding the world of imperialist barbarism, racist oppression and savage inequality lies in the struggle for new October Revolutions.

[TO BE CONTINUED]