Traditional Remedy

I leave Stalybridge tomorrow after a short and unproductive stay, moving back to Manchester for another new start at another call centre the day after.  But first, I thought I’d share a local folk remedy for dealing with pay freezes and economic crises:

Blue plaque on the ruins of Stalybridge Town Hall

It says:

The first general strike (1842) originated in this area. It began as a movement of resistance to the imposition of wage cuts in the mills and was also known as the ‘Plug Riots’. It spread to involve nearly half a million workers throughout Britain and represented the biggest single exercise of working class strength in nineteenth century Britain.

It most certainly did…

At the root of the strike were the swingeing wage cuts that accompanied a downturn in trade, at a time when the economy had been in desperate straits for a full five years. But the strike grew into something far more than that as workers took up the political demands espoused by Chartism, leading to confrontation not just with employers but with the state…

My House, Our Home

This article was cross-posted at Lenin’s Tomb.

Shock Doctrine Comes to Manchester

This report was also posted on the new Manchester Left blog, of which I am to be a co-editor.

On Wednesday the 22nd of May, world famous activist and author Naomi Klein presented an audience of several hundred with a talk and a short film by director Alfonso Cuaron on the subject of her latest book Shock Doctrine: The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism.

Klein’s work examines the history of the radical capitalist movement that was called Thatcherism or Reaganomics in the ’80s, Globalisation in the ’90s, and Neoliberalism today.  In particular, it disputes the link between free markets and free people which, according to orthodox pundits and intellectuals, should go hand in hand.  Shock Doctrine takes examples from the past 35 years - Latin America in the 70s, China in the 80s, post-Soviet Eastern Europe in the 90s, and more recently Iraq, Sri Lanka and New Orleans - to show that privatisation and economic liberalisation has always relied on coercion; that far from being a corollary of democracy, it is a process carried out by predatory elites in open defiance of the democratic process.

Free Access to Slavery Records

UK citizens: today is your last chance to sign this petition:

A UK company is currently placing online colonial records of 3.000.000 Africans, relating to their enslavement. This is a corporate attempt to cash in on the increased interest during the bicentenary year. African people and descendants of slaves should not have to pay for such a service. This should be a free to view document, with all records being made public so the history can be known by all. Please sign this petition to get all govenment records made available free of charge to everyone.

Plutocrisy

How will the new taxation policy affect us?

LOSER: Call centre worker

Abolition of bottom rate tax band will hit a 24 year old who earns less than £18,000 a year, but must now pay £232 more tax a year

WINNER: Big business

Corporation tax has been reduced again – to just 28 percent – ensuring that Barclays’ £7 billion profits stay with the rich

At the same time, food prices continue to go up across the world. People will put up with a lot from their governments without overthrowing them, but when they can’t feed their families it’s often too much. I’ve already talked about the unrest in Egypt and Haiti, but that’s just the tip of a very hungry iceberg.

An important proximate cause for this particular crisis is the biofuels boom, which ties the markets for agricultural land into the volatile energy markets. That such things can still be described as “green” is sickening, really. However, biofuels can’t take all the blame:

The World Bank says food price inflation is not a short-term phenomenon but will likely persist through 2008 and 2009 before demand slackens due to high prices.

World financers have also contibuted to the food price problem.

Commodities have attracted investors looking for a safe haven from failing investments in the highly-leverage mortgage sector.

Amid this speculation, world wheat prices rose 70 per cent between 2005 and 2007.

So there you have it: food price inflation is just a part of the crisis, a manifestion of the catastrophe of capitalism.

It’s certainly not a result of excessive consumption, or at least, not public servants’ excessive consumption. For the other story is the emergence of soar-away class of the super-rich whose consumption is “relatively price inelastic” - in other words, who make caviar and private jet sales even when soaring prices and “crunching” credit stop normal people from buying more than the investors. Investors call this “plutonomy”, and suggest that the safest investments these days may be in the “plutonomy basket”.

So, to recap:

1. Price inflation is making life harder for working people and the poor,
2. Consumption is being kept up by a super-rich minority.

Which means that when Gordon Brown tries to tackle inflation by constraining consumption among the working class - through a strategy of holding down public sector pay (and thus, by a wave of the invisible hand, private sector pay), and now through tax “reforms” too - it is possibly the most bastardly trick he’s ever pulled on us (the other main contender in my mind being the creeping militarisation of our schools). Certainly Gordon’s crunch, and the resistance to it, will be what defines his short time in office; his Iraq, if you will, although let’s not forget his responsibility for the real Iraq.

This is why the public sector strike on the 24th of this month is so exciting. The teachers are seen to be leading it (and by the way: kids, make the most of your day off school, go down to the picket lines and show your support), but other unions are onboard from across the public sector. Up to half a million people could be stopping work; we haven’t seen the likes in a generation. And truth is, we need it. The boom that preceded this bust has often been described as “joyless”, as most people have seen almost none of the wealth that it (or rather, that we) generated. Now, as the bust sets in, it’s time to claim that wealth back.

Genocide Olympics and Frontier Capitalism

The Chinese, eh?

Enormous country. Industries churning out pollution like there’s no tomorrow. State engaged in violent repression of occupied ethnic minority, media whipping up paranoid hatred of same among law-abiding middle classes. Companies aggressively buying influence in the developing world, shamelessly colluding with mass-murderous regimes. It all sounds eerily familiar.

Plus, I mean, there’s loads of them.

Look, it’s right and just that events in Tibet are at the centre of media attention right now. They are, indeed, much more interesting than the other stories du jour: white English woman murdered in Jamaica, white English girl horribly murdered in Goa, white English girl murdered ages ago in Japan (almost as if the journalistic classes of the nation had some wierd collective obsession, some kind of fetish about dirty foreign types doing horrible things to helpless White girls in far off places). But, as usual, between the “extremes” of “my, aren’t the Chinese horrible” and “let’s just hope it doesn’t get in the way of the games” lies almost none of what needs to be said.

First of all, Americans and Brits who bleat on about the “Genocide Olympics” are utter hypocrites, either deluded or disingenuous to the point that literally no-one should be listening to them. China has been giving the Sudanese regime guns with which to pursue genocide in Darfur. I’m not saying that’s not terrible, but what about Britain giving the Indonesian regime guns with which to pursue genocide in West Papua? What about bankrolling Egypt and Saudi Arabia, what about the Israel of Latin America and what, especially, about Israel itself, which routinely puts Palestinians through what we’re now apparently calling “Cultural Genocide”? What of the invasion, via an Ethiopian proxy, of Somalia, for it is this and not Darfur which the UN considers to be the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa - second in the world to Iraq alone. And what, while we’re at it, about Iraq?

I’m all for opposing imperialism and oppression, but it surely starts at home. Terrible as China’s crimes may be, we have more than enough on our plates dealing with the greater crimes of our own ruling class. It’s very easy for a westerner today to criticise Beijing/Tehran/Khartoum, just as it would have been easy for a German citizen in the early 1940s to decry the bloodthirsty imperialist Winston Churchill. In neither case is it particularly constructive.

If some good has come out of Middle America’s hypocritical outrage, though, it is that the myth of the noble West against the savage East has only been further undermined. Forget the screeching of the lobbying minority, it seems likely that the silent majority also identifies far more closely with the liberation of the Tibetan people than with the smooth running of the games. The governments of the West could have scored an impressive propaganda victory by using their immense leverage to defend Tibet. Instead, they have shown that they identify less with the oppressed than with the oppressor, less with the Dalai Lama than with the Chinese Communist Party. And therein lies the real story.

In China, democracy and [neoliberal] economics were not proceeding hand in hand; they were on opposite sides of the barricades surrounding Tiananmen Square.*

The Chinese government has never been what I would call “Communist”, a word that deserves better than to be debased through application to every totalitarian regime with a spattering of cynical People’s Rhetoric in its nomenclature. Nevertheless the People’s Republic was ruled through the familiar Stalinesque system of State Capitalism until about 1980, when the ruling elite saw the potential to use their position to make it big on the free market. They weren’t wrong - while most Chinese get nothing from the current boom but longer and harder exploitation, a new class of millionaires is emerging among the sons and daughters of Communist party cadres - but nor were they naive. Some of their reforms were going to be popular, some of them were going to be unbearable.

Three years after the neoliberalisation of China began in 1980, with a propaganza starring none other than Milton Friedman himself, Deng Xiaoping created a new People’s Armed Police to clamp down on “economic crimes” (strikes, protests, and that), and a few years later it was clear that even that even that would not be enough. Freedom of capital did not bring freedom to the people; it brought price inflation, unemployment, inequality, and various far-from-liberating sensations. In ‘88, Friedman was brought back in for a second round of sermons, but in ‘89 China was nonetheless the scene of massive protests. And the rest is history.

The protestors in Tiananmen Square were after Democracy, but not in the narrow sense in which that word tends to be used around here. They weren’t risking (and, in a great many cases, losing) life and limb merely for the right to vote on which party cadre gets to announce horrible economic policies to them - they were more concerned about turning those economic policies around. They were fighting for not just for their ideas, but for the wealth and security that was being taken from them - and they could not be deterred by less than mass state terror.

Tibet is a new front in that same war. Of course, a combination of repressive government and nationalistic aspirations is always going to create resentment, and the build-up to the Olympics was always going to be a good time to get that resentment out. But, as Pankaj Mishra points out in an excellent CiF piece (h/t Fanonite), there is more at work here than the memories of the 1959 invasion. In fact, there’s something of a second invasion afoot, armies of colonists, coming in on new railways from the rest of China to modernise and industrialise the still rural province. Traditionally, freedom of worship has been a major bone of contention in Tibet, and Western punditry has been keen to see this as another clash between religious rights and cleric-bothering commies, but in fact

the Tibetans have had more [religious freedom] in recent years than at any time since the cultural revolution. Eager to draw tourists to Tibet, Chinese authorities have helped to rebuild many of the monasteries destroyed by Red Guards in the 1960s and 70s, turning them into Disneylands of Buddhism. Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism have even inspired a counterculture among Chinese jaded by their new affluence.

Industrialisation is rarely painless for those being industrialised (look at Victorian Britain), and the faster and more dramatic the industrial revolution the more intense the suffering (look at Stalin’s USSR). But there’s something particularly horrible about frontier industrialisation. Ask the Native Americans, whose genocide, cultural and otherwise, stands as a grim warning to the people of Tibet. Capitalism needs growth to survive, and nothing excites it like a new frontier, at which it can throw capital investment and population surplus on shiny new railways. Any natives who get in the way are stunned by the speed of it all, and by the time they come around the land they used to roam has been enclosed and privatised, made the domain of armed and hungry colonists. A monster of farms and factories has taken over their world, and they can either surrender and be ground down to nothing inside the monster or wither away outside of it.

This monster, incidentally, is no stranger to the Olympics. The modern games have a long history of turning people’s homes into shiny “opportunities for development”. From Atlanta to Barcelona, Sydney to Seoul, the Olympics have always brought tasty slices of corporate welfare to a wealthy few, enclosure and exclusion to many others. No wonder Beijing wants a bit of the action. I have to disagree with the Dalai Lama when he says that the protests have nothing to do with the games. The Olympics don’t just provide an opportunity to spoil the Chinese government’s fun, they also provide a very apt symbol for all that’s oppressing his Holiness’ people, for the aggressive expansion of a way of life that completely goes against his Holiness’ philosophy.

If you want to boycott the Genocide Olympics then, after all that, I think it’s probably a good idea. I’d be with you all the way, if my complete lack of interest in watching monotonous displays of the human body pushed to its limits in competition for competition’s sake (at least, it certainly doesn’t seem to be for entertainment’s sake) didn’t make such a boycott on my part totally meaningless; I’ll certainly join you in solidarity with the Tibetan people. But let’s be clear in what we’d be standing against: nothing so banal as the illiberality of the Chinese government. We’d be standing against the “frontier spirit” so beloved of Barack Obama. We’d be standing against the monstruous excesses of capitalism, against the ravenous drive for new profits and new markets that makes those excesses inevitable. And, obviously, we’d be standing against the games themselves, which are boring as fuck.

* Naomi Klein, in The Shock Doctrine, from which book most of the information in the subsequent paragraphs is taken. Read this book.

How Cool Is That? War, Robots and You

I spent a bit of time at home this weekend, where the toilet reading materials are a little different to those at my term-time address. One of my Dad’s PC magazines was running an article on military technology, basically gushing about the sheer sci-fi of it all. They reviewed the killer robots as they would the AI in a new game (I’m sure they all draw uncannily realistic blood when they shoot at people units) and warned that some of the “cooler” features on a super-soldier-suit in development might not reach the final model. “Think of it”, they cautioned [and, by the way, here I paraphrase from memory], “as you would the awesometastic prototypes at the car show”.

One little political aspect was raised: perhaps spending taxpayers’ money on developing ubermegadeathbots was a bit on the dodgy side, given that our boys in the field still lack some of the most basic equipment needed to kill and not be killed. Happily, they concluded that “defense” spending priorities do in fact seem appropriate to the murderous tasks at hand. I was put in mind of the time when another of his magazines reported on the UK’s new military satellite network - the only critical thinking in evidence was when the author noticed that it shared its name with a fictional military machine gone horribly wrong, and of a magazine called Popular Mechanics at the language centre where I used to work. The cover story was always some outlandish killing machine, the most memorable being the Battle Island and the Battle Blimp.

Anyway, the apolitik of tech magazines isn’t really what gets me. Much as I appreciate my Socialist Review, it would be a dull world where nought could be written without a sound and incisive political dimension and, having none of the pretensions of the Indy and the Beeb, PC Plus doesn’t really deserve the same degree of scrutiny. But as the sci-fi military becomes sci-fact, someone has to start asking a few questions.

The Killbot Factory

There are perhaps two things that stopped the Vietnam War: resistance, naturally, but also mutiny. An army of conscripts was sent to fight in Vietnam, an army of young men with no particular agenda of travelling, killing and dying for their national elites. Some of them were less adept than others at burying their personal needs and misgivings under the imperatives of their superiors, to the point of refusing to fight, of throwing their medals away in disgust, of punching upwards rather than sidewards in lethal attacks on the worst of their superiors.

The soldiers, disgruntled mutineers and enthusiastic war criminals alike, were all human, and humanity brings what the army call “morale problems”. In the field, this lack of morale could make the war unwageable; at home, it makes the war indefensible. There are those who’ll empathise readily with the victims of war in the target country, but antiwar only goes mainstream when our boys start coming home in our coffins draped in our flags, or at least ready to tell us tales of our traumas.

Thus I can’t help feeling that the real arms race here isn’t against the insurgents of Iraq and guerillas of Afghanistan; it’s against the conscience of America and the reservations of Britain. A mechanised army is an efficient army, in which one reliable career soldier and his trusty gadgets can do the killing of a hundred grumbling grunts with rifles. It’s a scientifically-manageable army, in which the division of labour at the production destruction line abstracts collective evil into individual banality. It’s a PG-13 army with clean hands and fewer flag-draped coffins; the top gun pilot carries less of a politically iffy mortality potential than the squad of troops it would take to wreak equivalent carnage from the ground, and less risky still is the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) remote-piloted from a base in Nevada.

I’m not saying that this is the army we have - most of the killing and dying in Iraq is still being done by humans - but it’s clearly the way things are going. Wikipedia tells me that the monstruous little Johnny Fives (TALON SWORDs, as they prefer to be known) in the left-hand picture are now active in Iraq, albeit on a limited trial basis, while UAVs with names like Reaper and Predator have been active in the Middle Eastern skies for a good couple of years now and have racked up a significant death toll. Their rampages take place out of sight and out of mind of the majority, and out of the hands of the increasingly obsolete conscripts.

Robots may or may not be substantially cheaperharderfasterstronger than human fighters, but they possess one intrinsic and inalienable advantage over the latter. Robots may have technological limitations, but you’ll never have to ask their consent.

Computers Don’t Argue

Finding some of the above links took me to look at a Popular Mechanics cover story for the first time in over two years. America’s Robot Army, no surprises there, but not much less disturbing is the how-cool-is-that reportage on Next-Gen Prison Tech; after a page on the glory of tasers we get to hear that

The National Institute of Justice has been working on a smaller prototype of its Active Denial System (ADS)—the “pain ray”—for law enforcement and correctional use. The current tractor-trailer-mounted system has been deployed in Iraq, but has yet to be fired at targets. By heating the subject’s skin enough to cause blinding pain, but no burns, the ADS could be an excellent riot-response tool.

That’s the same pain-ray that the BBC famously described as both “harmless” and “too painful to bear”. It’s a funny definition of harm, but then “non-lethal” is climbing up the list of code-words whose invocation can’t but cause a little shudder, along with democracy, secularism, flexibility, etc. In this case, the hidden meaning is “ready to be used on the likes of you“.

Musing on the various civvy applications of killer UAVs, PC Plus went so far as to voice a little concern about unscrupulous billionaires buying robots of their own and going on to cause damage to property and people (in that order). I surely distrust billionaires more intensely than that magazine’s editorial staff, but I’m less concerned about private killbots than they, for now at least. For, underneath all the rhetoric of ruthless individualism, the unscrupulous billionaires of this world know when to act collectively. They do indeed have their own police force, and it’s called the Police.

There’s a special body of armed men in every capitalist society, ready to defend the social order against any popular uprising. We rarely see the full power of that special body, because we are rarely in a position to seriously threaten the social order, but we catch glimpses, against the striking miners and, more recently, against anticapitalist demonstrators in Seattle and Genoa. Just last Tuesday I was in Liverpool, picketing Ann Widdecombe’s anti-abortion talk, and the police used dogs and horses (the latter apparently brought in especially from Manchester) to get us out of her way. Even seasoned demonstrators were surprised to see “Not the church, not the state, women must decide their fate” provoke such an aggressive response, but let there be no doubt that they’d use far more than that if they ever really needed to.

Truncheons and riot shields, tear gas and pepper spray, horses and dogs, it’s all there, and it’s all ready. Such things can, where necessary, be deployed. But when that runs out? The police couldn’t just start gunning people down, not yet. Well, ok, it happens, but we’re not politically ready for that kind of violence to be implemented en masse. But what if there were some way theycould shoot you down without the same political ramifications? What if there were some kind of pain ray?

There is, of course, no clear cut division between the lethal and the non-lethal. Something that superheats your outer skin is not something you want pointed at you, as I’m sure we’ll find out as soon as they’re actually deployed. Tasers can kill people too. They’re being rolled out across British police forces - including Greater Manchester and the Met - with nary an eyebrow being raised, on the understanding that they would all be set to stun. They’re not, but hey, the lack of raised eyebrows makes them so much easier to deploy than a gun would ever be.

Last week, a fifteen-year old boy was tased in North Wales. Amnesty International noted that

it seems a young person has been shot with the taser, a very dangerous weapon, for not being reasonable, or non-compliance.

In our view the taser should only be used as an alternative to lethal force where the situation presents immediate threat of death or serious injury to themselves or others.

Note the reason carefully: non-compliance. This kid was shot down for not doing as he was told. Remember too the kid tased down for talking sass to John Kerry; his “Don’t tase me bro!” was, along with “Por que no te callas?“, one of the flash in the pan catchphrases of 2007, but it’s one we should think on for a bit. It’s now easier than it’s ever been in history for the authorities to slap you down for stepping out of line.

I’m not saying we should all get Luddite. The world where all they had was swords was still a world where they could do you a lot of harm, and it’s also a world without penicillin or the internet. Given the alternative, I say bring on the robots and the pain rays. But technological changes are part of what shape our society, and we need to pay attention to the way in which the robots and the pain rays are tipping the balance of power even further against us. We are rightly worried about the surveillance state, about being FITted up and databased, but let’s not be so spellbound by the eyes of the state that we forget to watch its fist.

Soldiers without consciences or widows, socially acceptable off-buttons for the socially dangerous masses - that’s got to be worth more than just technoporn.

A Shower of Bankers

Long term readers of this blog probably remember me getting my knickers in quite a twist this time last year about the Iranian Oil Bourse, a venue for trading oil and petrochemicals well outside of America’s sphere of influence and in currencies other than the dollar. At the time, I thought it certain to bring the dollar and the U.S. hegemony crashing down, and the “real” reason for Bush’s warmongering.

With all that’s happened since then, perhaps it’s best to see the emergence of the IOB - and other significant institutions like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Banco Del Sur - as a reflection of America’s decline as well as a contributing factor. Still, I hope you’ll all be interested to learn that after many delays it finally came into operation yesterday. You can find plenty of interesting links on the subject at EnergyBulletin.net.

By a happy coincidence, this came just one day before the ruthlessly neoliberal New Labour government finally conceded that Northern Rock is now (”temporarily”) nationalised.

Ding Dong

Well, not really; Thatcher is still alive, and I daresay she’ll still have at least one more hated successor to endorse before slipping off the mortal coil.  The Left-wing Palestinian resistance leader George “al Hakim (the Doctor”) Habash did just die, aged 81.  He’d survived a decade of ill health watching Palestine’s political structures collapse and sell out, to the immense and visible detriment of the Palestinian people, and then finally succumbed just as a popular act of defiance swept away some of the most odious manifestations of Israeli oppression.  You almost feel like he’d been waiting.

On the same day, the former dictator of Indonesia, General Suharto, passed away peacefully, surrounded by the best doctors blood money could buy.  Predictably, the BBC wrote an obituary along the lines of “on the one hand, mass murder, on the other hand, economic progress: on balance, probably all for the best” - making no mention of Western complicity in the very worst of his actions.  John Pilger has now written about Our Model Dictator in the Guardian to set things straight, and there’s already so much correspondence on the Media Lens message board (type “Suharto” in the search box) that I’ve no doubt that this will be the subject of their next alert.

Before all that, but after a little prompting from RickB, I wrote a long and angry email to Aunty Beeb:

Dear BBC Online News Team,

In your article on General Suharto’s legacy, after a lengthy preamble of superficial observations about his personality, you get around to mentioning some of the appalling crimes by which he seized and maintained power. You also mention that “the United States was desperate for reliable allies in the region and willing to turn a blind eye to his human rights record.”

In reality, “turning a blind eye” was not the half of it. It would have been inappropriate enough as a description of America’s greenlighting and supply of arms for the Indonesian invasion of East Timor - an invasion which your article fails to mention, despite its remarkable ferocity - but Western complicity in the 1968 coup went far beyond even this.

John Pilger writes:

In 1965, in Indonesia, the American embassy furnished General Suharto with roughly 5,000 names. These were people for assassination, and a senior American diplomat checked off the names as they were killed or captured. Most were members of the PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party. Having already armed and equipped Suharto’s army, Washington secretly flew in state-of-the-art communication equipment whose high frequencies were known to the CIA and the National Security Council advising the president, Lyndon B Johnson. Not only did this allow Suharto’s generals to co-ordinate the massacres, it meant that the highest echelons of the US administration were listening in.

The Americans worked closely with the British…
(link)

Mark Curtis elaborates:

“I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change,” Sir Andrew Gilchrist, the British ambassador in Jakarta, informed the Foreign Office on October 5 1965. The declassified files show that Britain wanted the Indonesian army to act and encouraged it to do so.

British policy was “to encourage the emergence of a general’s regime”, one intelligence official explained. Another noted that “it seems pretty clear that the generals are going to need all the help they can get and accept without being tagged as hopelessly pro-western, if they are going to be able to gain ascendancy over the communists”. Therefore, “we can hardly go wrong by tacitly backing the generals”.
(link)

In particular, as both articles go on to detail, the UK and US were particularly instrumental in terms of propaganda, including the scaremongering of a communist takeover.

From the Pilger article:

British intelligence officers outlined how the British press and the BBC could be manipulated. “Treatment will need to be subtle,” they wrote, “eg, a) all activities should be strictly unattributable, b) British [government] participation or co-operation should be carefully concealed.” To achieve this, the Foreign Office opened a branch of its Information Research Department (IRD) in Singapore.

The IRD was a top-secret, cold war propaganda unit headed by Norman Reddaway, one of Her Majesty’s most experienced liars. Reddaway and his colleagues manipulated the “embedded” press and the BBC so expertly that he boasted to Gilchrist in a secret message that the fake story he had promoted - that a communist takeover was imminent in Indonesia - “went all over the world and back again”. He described how an experienced Sunday newspaper journalist agreed “to give exactly your angle on events in his article . . . ie, that this was a kid-glove coup without butchery”.

These lies, bragged Reddaway, could be “put almost instantly back to Indonesia via the BBC”. Prevented from entering Indonesia, Roland Challis, the BBC’s south-east Asia correspondent, was unaware of the slaughter. “My British sources purported not to know what was going on,” Challis told me, “but they knew what the American plan was. There were bodies being washed up on the lawns of the British consulate in Surabaya, and British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca Straits so that they could take part in this terrible holocaust. It was only later that we learned that the American embassy was supplying names and ticking them off as they were killed. There was a deal, you see. In establishing the Suharto regime, the involvement of the IMF and the World Bank was part of it . . . Suharto would bring them back. That was the deal.”

In addition, as the quote from Roland Challis implies, Suharto’s military legacy and his economic legacy were far from seperate. The Us and UK wished to smash Indonesian democracy and, with it, any burgeoning leftwing movements, not merely for a reliable ally in their warmaking, but also for profitable exploitation of Indonesia’s natural and human resources.

Noam Chomsky writes:

In 1958 US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles informed the National Security Council that Indonesia was one of three major world crises, along with Algeria and the Middle East. He emphasized that there was no Soviet role in any of these cases, with the “vociferous” agreement of President Eisenhower. The main problem in Indonesia was the Communist party (PKI), which was winning “widespread support not as a revolutionary party but as an organization defending the interests of the poor within the existing system,” developing a “mass base among the peasantry” through its “vigor in defending the interests of the…poor (2)”.

The US embassy in Jakarta reported that it might not be possible to overcome the PKI “by ordinary democratic means”, so that “elimination” by police and military might be undertaken. The Joint Chiefs of Staff urged that “action must be taken, including overt measures as required, to ensure either the success of the dissidents or the suppression of the pro-communist elements of the Sukarno government.”

The “dissidents” were the leaders of a rebellion in the outer islands, the site of most of Indonesia’s oil and US investments. US support for the secessionist movement was “by far the largest, and to this day the least known, of the Eisenhower administration’s covert militarized interventions,” two leading Southeast Asia specialists conclude in a revealing study (3). When the rebellion collapsed, after bringing down the last residue of parliamentary institutions, the US turned to other means to “eliminate” the country’s major political force.

That goal was achieved when Suharto took power in 1965, with Washington’s strong support and assistance. Army-led massacres wiped out the PKI and devastated its mass base in “one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century,” comparable to the atrocities of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, the CIA reported, judging “the Indonesian coup” to be “certainly one of the most significant events of the 20th century (4)”. Perhaps half a million or more were killed within a few months.

The events were greeted undisguised euphoria. The New York Times described the “staggering mass slaughter” as “a gleam of light in Asia,” praising Washington for keeping its own role quiet so as not to embarrass the “Indonesian moderates” who were cleansing their society, then rewarding them with generous aid (5). Time praised the “quietly determined” leader Suharto with his “scrupulously constitutional” procedures “based on law, not on mere power” as he presided over a “boiling bloodbath” that was “the West’s best news for years in Asia” (6).

The reaction was near uniform. The World Bank restored Indonesia to favour. Western governments and corporations flocked to Suharto’s “paradise for investors,” impeded only by the rapacity of the ruling family. For more than 20 years, Suharto was hailed as a “moderate” who is “at heart benign” (The Economist) as he compiled a record of slaughter, terror, and corruption that has few counterparts in postwar history.
(link)

This Paradise for investors was, of course, no accident; the bloody suppression of the Indonesians to the benefit of Western investors fit the pattern of US interventions in Latin America around the same period. Whatever benefits trickled down to the Indonesian people were incidental and, indeed, less substantial than implied in your piece. Chomsky goes on to document how Indonesian growth was exaggerated by a tiny, corrupt elite which reaped most of its benefits, while John Perkins’ book “Confessions Of An Economic Hitman” documents how American institutions actively colluded in this corruption to gain economic and political influence.

Small wonder that your description of Suharto’s economic legacy sits so ill with the popular conception of Indonesia as a land of sweatshop slaves working long hours in poor conditions for low pay to make trainers they will never afford. This phenomenon, too, is so well-documented as to be uncontroversial; try Naomi Klein’s “No Logo” for a start.

I frequently have issues with the BBC’s reporting, but the omission and distortion in this article were such that I could not let them pass without comment. There can be no justification for this kind of misrepresentation from a media institution of the BBC’s standing. Please correct the imbalance in this article, and the BBC’s similarly flawed “Indonesia ex-leader Suharto dies” (link).

Yours sincerely,

Dave Sewell, Manchester

Really, I should also have mentioned West Papua.  Anyway, the only reply I got was this, from the BBC News complaints department:

Thank you very much for your email.

The piece you refer to has been written by one of the BBC correspondents living in the area, and we would therefore defer to his judgement on the situation as he sees it.

Regards
BBC News Website

As you’ll see on Media Lens, a few people did get through to the author of the most offending article, Jonathan Head, with similar emails.  His response: the opinions of a few human rights nerds in the West is of less relevance than the opinions of the Indonesian people, many of whom remember Suharto quite favourably.  That nostalgia, however, is less a result of reasoned reflection than of the success of the cover-up of Suharto’s crimes (and the massive increase in food prices that followed his downfall).  The brutality of the anti-communist coup, the genocidal annexations of East Timor and West Papua, they barely register on the Indonesian consciousness precisely because of the likes of the BBC, airbrushing them out of history lest they tarnish the lovely neoliberal narrative.

It is worth looking at the real legacy of Suharto and his kind for an understanding of the true violence with which Western capitalist influence is maintained, for an understanding of the role played by the media in keeping this violence hidden, and for an understanding of just how serious the BBC are when they beg for your feedback.

Biofuels - Guess What?

We told you so.  In case anyone still reckons that biofuels are “green”, here’s what they’ve been causing: deforestation and food shortages.
It’s sick, really. In the free market, the lungs of the planet, and the bellies of the poor, can’t compete with the cars of the rich.