20 February 2012. A World to Win News Service. With the approach of 8 March, International Women's Day, marked by revolutionary mobilizations in many countries, we are reprinting the following article which first appeared in the 7 March 2005 AWTWNS.
Prostitution is one of the fastest growing components of today’s world economy. Some NGOs and international agencies like to call women who engage in prostitution "sex workers" and refer to the "sex industry" as if prostitution were just another job, like working at a food stand, in a garment factory or at a call centre, but in fact most of the women are youths and children and little more than modern slaves. Workers create commodities, but like old-fashioned slaves these women are commodities to be bought and sold as if they were things, and not human beings. Many hundreds of thousands of women are trafficked every year from the world’s poorest areas to Western Europe, Australia, Israel, Japan, the US, the Arab Gulf states and other countries. This contemporary slave trade generates billions of dollars every year.
There are 400,000 to 500,000 child prostitutes in India. Many are trafficked from Nepal and Bangladesh. An estimated 200,000 women and children fall victim to human trafficking in Southeast Asia alone every year.
Many Southeast Asian villages have been emptied of their 13-19 year-old girls. The tourist industry in many of these countries revolves around prostitution to a large extent. Some 800,000 youth and teenagers in Thailand have been forced into prostitution. It is estimated that the "sex industry" earns 10-14 percent of the country's gross domestic product. While Thailand is the worst, according to an International Labour Organization report, the figures for the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia are similar.
The South-east Asian countries do not openly promote prostitution, but their economies are dependent on it to some degree and their policies have to take this into account. They know what brings many of the tourists and what the young women are being sent abroad to do. The hard currency helps pay their debts to the IMF and the World Bank, who in this sense can be considered the world’s biggest pimps. Governments thrive on the official and unofficial taxes (bribes) that come from issuing licenses for bars, restaurants, hotels and other centres that are covers for brothels, and the income these places earn enters into many other businesses and industries. In fact, prostitution is an integral component of the economy of these countries. Whole layers of capitalists directly engaged in this industry or indirectly benefiting from it have been created and fattened. Despite some talk about combating sex tourism by the governments in the region, they have done nothing real to limit it. In Thailand and Cambodia senior government officials are said to be directly involved, but even if they were not, any serious attack on prostitution would undermine the economy these officials are pledged to develop.
Most women engaged in prostitution have been forced into it by poverty and the malfunctioning of the economy of their country. The economic crisis that overtook South-east Asia in the late 1990s made the situation worse. The number of women driven to prostitution increased dramatically, and countries that earlier had not experienced large-scale prostitution were drawn in. Vietnam and Cambodia – which were largely closed to tourism just a decade ago – are now at risk of becoming established sex tourism destinations like Thailand, Sri Lanka and the Philippines.
The kind of development promoted by imperialist capital in these countries produces more prostitution, not less. For example, while capitalist industries have developed enough in some parts of Thailand to make that country a "tiger" admired for its economic growth, the collapse of the economy in rural areas that has accompanied this has made life in the villages near impossible, with few opportunities for the peasants to find work that will ensure their survival. In Thailand, prostitutes send $300 million a year to their families in the villages. In Cambodia, 98 percent of girls in prostitution are the main providers for their families. In a survey conducted by the NGO Escape, many women reported that if they gave up prostitution their parents and/or children would starve.
The collapse of the Soviet bloc produced another source of enormous profits for those who mine this human misery. Albania, Ukraine, Romania and Moldova, Europe’s poorest country, are the main but not the only source of countries from which women are abducted or tricked into enslavement in the West.
Each year many women from former Soviet-bloc countries like Slovakia, Russia, Georgia, Armenia and others whose social structures have imploded are exported to Western Europe and the US. Trafficking has become an integral part of the economies of these countries, too – often the forward edge of the emerging market economy. The prostitution of women and children has paid for many a new concrete tower block in Tirana (Albania) or Chisinau (Moldova). "It is estimated", says a report commissioned by Unicef, "that over the past 10 years, 100,000 Albanian women and girls have been trafficked to Western Europe and other Balkan countries." Some 30,000 prostitutes from Albania are said to be currently working in Western Europe. Documents produced by Unicef and "Save the Children" found "up to 80 per cent of those trafficked from some corners of Albania and Moldova to be children, with reports showing a decline in the average age of children/women being trafficked for prostitution."
Gangs hunt youth and teenage girls through direct contact with a relative, friend or friend of a friend, as well as by posting ads offering fake jobs as waitresses, babysitters or cooks – invariably jobs for women. Most are trafficked by criminal gangs or individual entrepreneurs promising them a better life and the chance to earn a lot of money. Once across the border, they will be auctioned and sold to their next owner. By now, they owe a vast amount of money to the trafficker for 'facilitating" their journey, and will be made to work off debts by servicing up to tens of customers a day, seven days a week. Their debts can never be cleared because they have to pay half of all they earn to the brothel owner and the rest to the trafficker. They are told that if they go to the police for help, they will be arrested and their families back home will have to pay the price.
Often they are threatened with torture and death if they try to escape; for most, finding their way home again would be impossible anyway. Some who dare to escape are re-trafficked quickly.
While South-east Asia and Eastern Europe are the main providers of teenage girls for Western consumers, now nearly every poor region in the world is a target for this profitable business. Some 1,000 Mozambicans aged between 14 and 24 are smuggled every year to Johannesburg, where they are forced to work in restaurants or as prostitutes. The UN estimates that in Brazil two million young people under the age of 18 are involved in prostitution. Thousands of Colombian women are lured to Japan with false job offers. The women do not know what is in store for them on arrival but the Japanese government knows very well what will happen when it issues them special visas as "entertainers".
Even Islamic countries like Iran, Morocco and Tunisia – where keeping women covered has been the most common open expression of their oppression and domination – have recently been drawn into global prostitution in a more hidden way. Most women forced into prostitution are meant for domestic consumption but some are exported to Arab Gulf states. According to the Iranian student agency Ilna, every day an average of 54 Iranian girls 16 -25 years old are traded in Karachi, Pakistan, mainly for re-export.
The international scale of this crime is difficult to quantify. The US State Department last year said it believed between 600,000 and 800,000 people are trafficked across borders annually. Profits are estimated to be in the billions of dollars.
At an Athens conference it was revealed that up to 20,000 foreign women, the majority from the former Soviet bloc, are working as sex slaves in a billion-dollar industry servicing more than a million men across Greece.
"There are now as many as 80,000 women working as prostitutes in the UK. In London alone, an academic study found that men spend £200 million a year on sex, almost half in massage parlours and saunas… Across the UK, the industry is believed to be worth about £770 million a year, with street prostitution accounting for only about five per cent…. about 600,000 people are illegally brought into the EU each year, the vast majority of them for sexual exploitation." (Observer, 18 April 2004)
"Last year, the [London] Metropolitan police's clubs and vice unit took 300 girls and women, including 10 children, out of brothels. Only 19 percent were British. The rest were from Eastern Europe (25 percent), South-east Asia (13 percent), Western Europe (12 percent) and Africa (2 percent). Country by country, the largest numbers were from Thailand, Russia, Brazil and Kosovo. Superintendent Chris Bradford said: 'It's like a slave market.'" (Guardian, 19 August 2004)
The situation is no better in France, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden.
Pornography is a sister to prostitution in its treatment of women, and can be considered a part of the "sex industry" in the broader sense. In the US it is estimated to be worth $10 billion a year. Porn movie revenues are bigger than Hollywood’s domestic box-office receipts, and the profits greater, thanks in large part to imported women from Eastern Europe. In the UK, the chief executive of one of the country’s many legal pornography magazine publishers has been identified by BBC as a major contributor to Blair's Labour Party.
This is the reality of today’s world. Two characteristics stand out in these horror stories. First of all, the process of globalisation that exploded after the collapse of the Soviet bloc is one of the main reasons for the new and unprecedented rise in the trafficking of women. Unemployment, poverty, a ruined economy and a torn social fabric are part of the real outcome of an ever more market-driven global economy, especially for people in the third world. In this distorted structure the poverty and misery of the majority is a rich source for the accumulation of capital in the hands of a few. And among them women are the first victims of this new phenomenon of capitalism. Millions of children and young women have been enslaved and robbed of their lives so that investors in the sex industry based in the US, UK, Netherlands, Germany, France, Japan, etc. can accumulate more and more capital.
The other characteristic of world capitalism revealed in the sex industry is the international division of labour. Certain countries are assigned to provide certain commodities in the service of world finance capital. Many of those assigned to provide human material for the so-called sex industry in the world market are poor countries that lack other "natural resources", or whose other products are not enough in high demand globally, or simply ones that have been plundered into devastation by imperialists and colonialists and ruined by years of war. This isn’t a matter of a conscious conspiracy; what happens is that certain countries have been assigned to supply whatever they can produce "best" (most competitively on the world market) by the objective workings of imperialist capital, and people do what they can to survive within this context.
It is undeniable that imperialism is creating global prostitution on a scale never before seen in history. The imperialists are unable to put an end to the trafficking in women, even if they wanted to – which is doubtful, though they might want to keep it more hidden – because their system is grounded in the oppression and exploitation of women. Prostitution can never be wiped out so long as this remains.
The US hijacked the recent UN conference on women's equality by insisting that it formally declare that abortion is not a right for women. Almost completely isolated, the American representative coupled this with a call for a worldwide ban on prostitution, which she called the only way to stop the trafficking of women.
The whole Bush-led crusade against abortion is the US and abroad by is a perfect illustration of the convergence of the rulers in the "advanced" imperialist West and the "backward" countries. Do women have the right to make their own decisions about their sexuality and reproduction, or are their bodies not really their own? Christian fascists and Islamic fundamentalists alike proclaim their "respect" for women while totally opposing the emancipation of women from male authority and the concrete measures that are necessary to change that situation.
Further, this debate at the UN and among NGOs on how to end prostitution has been fruitless. Some countries have made prostitution illegal like the US (in most states) and Sweden; and others have made it legal, like Germany and the Netherlands. But in all of these countries it continues to exist. Whenever these governments decide to crack down on the traffic in women they pass harsher immigration laws, target the prostitutes and pick up a few and deport them. Who can believe that such measures can help end this horror? Their main effect is to put more pressure on victims, who find themselves with even less hope of any acceptable way out of their situation and become more deeply enslaved to their owners.
The morality Bush and his ilk want to protect in opposing this traffic, whether hypocritically or not, seeks to preserve the oppression of women in another form. Under the slogan "family values", what their traditional morality seeks is to maintain women as the property not of many men but one, the woman’s husband. People (fathers and mothers who find themselves obliged to enforce patriarchal values) in impoverished villages and other places left hopeless by the global march of capital end up considering selling their daughters because imperialism has turned them into a hot commodity that men will buy in the rich corners of those countries and the world as a whole. Sellers and buyers alike share the view of females as fated to serve men in one form or another. This idea reflects the whole organisation of class society for several thousand years.
The globalisation of prostitution combines the inequality of nations and the inequality of the sexes in one hideous phenomenon. What kind of world is this where the more wealth is created and the more the world is drawn into a single whole, instead of human progress the result is greater tragedy for millions? Today's explosion in the traffic in human females is driven by the catastrophic convergence of two things, one new and the other very old: the destruction wreaked by an unprecedented development of global capitalism that is reaching deep into backward countries and pre-capitalist social systems and reducing everything in the world to something to be bought and sold, and the oppression of women that goes back to the earliest development of private property and the division of society into classes.
The oppression of women has persisted under every exploiting system and been justified by every traditional morality. There is no way to end these crimes without putting an end to the imperialist system and completely revolutionising all of the relations prevailing in today’s world.
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Donnerstag, 23. Februar 2012
Mittwoch, 7. September 2011
The massacre in Norway and the rise of fascist forces in the West
5 September 2011. A World to Win News Service. An aggressive demonstration by the English Defence League in London 3 September provided additional evidence, if any were needed, that the Norwegian fascist killer Anders Behring Breivik is a representative of a much wider phenomenon that is not about to go away.
Breivik had praised the EDL on his Web site, saying he had 600 EDL supporters as Facebook friends. Rather than pull back in the face of the public shock and repudiation that met Brievik's massacre of 77 people in July, the EDL has sought to violently, if only temporarily for now, impose "white" authority by invading immigrant communities in British cities to stop what it calls the "Islamisation" of the UK. Some people argue that the EDL is a "fringe group", but similar political goals are advocated by members of governing parties and other mainstream politicians in the UK, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy and other countries.
We are reprinting the following excerpts from an analysis of this event from the 28 August issue of Revolution, newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (revcom.us) as a contribution to the debate over how to understand and confront open fascist forces in the West.
On 22 July, Anrs Behring Breivik, a 32-year-old Christian fascist who described himself as "one of several leaders of dthe National and pan-European Patriotic resistance movement," set off on a brutal killing spree in Norway. By the end of the day, 77 people were dead, and Breivik was in police custody, reportedly looking forward to the next phase of his "project" – using the killings to publicize and organize around his extremely reactionary ideology.
Just before he set out, Breivik posted a YouTube video and a 1,500-page "manifesto" (2083: A European Declaration of Independence), which elaborated his world view and political program, and explicitly called upon the "tens of thousands of brothers and sisters who support us fully and are willing to fight beside us" to follow in his footsteps: "Follow the guidelines in this book and you will succeed!"
What motivated Breivik? Since he hated Muslims, why did he direct his attack at the youth of the social-democratic ruling party, mainly Christian Europeans? Was this a one-time aberration, or part of a rising tide of right-wing terror? How should people respond to such a terrible act in Norway, a small, well-off country usually insulated from the turmoil and violence that grips much of the rest of the world?
The mainstream media in the West and some representatives of the government in Norway rushed to address these questions, with their focus and answers tending strongly in the direction of saying that Breivik was "a madman"; that his connections to the large and growing extreme right in Europe and the U.S. were "all in his head," a "delusion"; that he was a lone wolf; and to treat the whole thing as a terrible tragedy which had nothing to do with any real contradictions in Norwegian, European or U.S. society. Norway would rally to its "liberal" traditions (which in truth rest on a prosperity derived from its privileged position in the worldwide system of imperialist exploitation, including the grinding exploitation of the immigrants who Breivik wants to drive out) and "normal life" would go on as before. In fact, in spite of the horrific and dramatic character of the massacres, the story essentially dropped out of the news within a week.
If one is to take a serious and scientific approach to understanding new, major and shocking developments like this, then it must be said that there is still much to learn about Breivik and his relationship to other reactionary forces in Europe and the United States, as well as the ideology expressed in his lengthy manifesto. But the rush to declare Breivik a "lone wolf" and to close the book on the whole incident is not only way premature (and contrary to much existing evidence), but it is aimed at covering up what the massacres began to expose.
Whether or not Breivik himself is legally and/or medically sane and whether or not these massacres were carried out as part of a larger organizational structure, the truth is that there is a multi-layered, powerful, and increasingly aggressive fascist movement with centres throughout Europe and the U.S., with a substantial popular base. And again, while there is much to uncover about this fascist movement and its exact connections with powerful ruling class circles, there are – as we will bring out – definite themes and directions that correspond between these fascists and major forces and figures in the Western ruling classes, and there are ways in which the actions of particular forces and individuals – like Breivik – within this fascist "universe" reflect and reinforce larger agendas of the ruling classes. Breivik was not only "inspired" by the overall ideological poison that this movement spews out, but very consciously saw his own actions as playing a strategic role in helping that movement advance to full political power.
Breivik's ideology and programme
Breivik claims that Europe and "Western civilization" are under attack and facing "Islamic colonization... through demographic warfare." He sees Europe and the U.S. as having an essentially Christian identity, and that the presence of large numbers of "unassimilated" Muslims – that is, Muslims who continue to practice their religion and, in many cases, are highly critical of the role of "the West" in the Middle East and the rest of the world – is undercutting that Christian identity and eroding European "civilization." Breivik says that "The problem can only be solved if we completely remove those who follow Islam. In order to do this all Muslims must 'submit' and convert to Christianity.... If they refuse to do this voluntarily prior to Jan. 1, 2020, they will be removed from European soil and deported back to the Islamic world."(1)
But Breivik also believes that this "Islamic colonization" is being facilitated from within European society, by what he refers to as "multiculturalism." As a philosophy, multiculturalism is basically the idea – held by many progressive people – that different peoples and cultures can and should coexist in society, each preserving its own culture and respecting and appreciating that of others. It is opposed to the idea of "assimilationism" – that people of the non-dominant culture should be forced to abandon their own ways and ideas and "assimilate" into the dominant culture – as well as to outright "exclusionism," which holds that cultural, religious and ethnic minorities should either not be allowed in or should be deported.(2)
Breivik sees the "multicultural" approach as leading to the destruction of Europe. But what he is railing against is not just the idea of multiculturalism, but the fact that for a number of decades, the dominant forces in the ruling class in most of Western Europe have themselves, and for their own reasons, allowed and even encouraged large-scale immigration. Breivik brands these ruling class forces as multiculturalists (sometimes he also refers to them as "Cultural Marxists" and says they are "traitors", betraying European civilization to the barbarian invaders.
It is important to understand that these ruling class forces have not embraced immigration out of internationalism, humanism, or anything else positive. Rather, the – partial and relative – opening of Europe's borders to immigrants has been driven by cold imperialist calculation. On the one hand, immigrants have filled a vital role in maintaining capitalist profitability in the West. Driven by desperate economic conditions (and often political repression) in their own – Western-dominated – countries, immigrants in Europe, as in the U.S., are now the backbone of large parts of the economy, from restaurants and grocery stores to hospital staffs and low-wage factories; their cheap labour is what makes the modern city hum and makes Western capital competitive in the world. On the other hand, money sent back home by these immigrants is an important stabilizing element in these third world countries which are, again, dominated by Western (and Japanese) imperialism and are a major source of their wealth and power. So for some time most of the Western ruling classes brought immigrants in, and while hunting and hounding them in various ways, also made some allowances for the existence of immigrant neighbourhoods where people can practice their own culture and religion, speak their own language, etc.
Breivik sees this policy as national and cultural suicide, and its political advocates as the main problem, the main obstacle to the survival of Christian Europe. So, "If they refuse to surrender until 2020, there will be no turning back. We will eventually wipe out every single one of them."
Breivik is also openly patriarchal and misogynist. Partly this flows from his view that Muslims are waging "demographic warfare," and that because European women, influenced by feminism, are "selfish" and put their own happiness and well-being above their responsibility as women to bear and raise more European children, the Muslims will overwhelm the white Europeans.10 But his patriarchy is not reducible to that – it is part of a broader view of what is needed to save Western civilization from destruction. "The female manipulation of males has been institutionalized during the last decades and is a partial cause of the feminization of men in Europe." He writes, "Men are not men any more, but metro sexual and emotional beings that are there to serve the purpose as a never-criticising soul mate to the new age feminist woman goddess.'" He bluntly states that the "fate of European civilization depends on European men steadfastly resisting Politically Correct feminism." When cultural conservatives seize control of Europe, "we will re-establish the patriarchal structures," and eventually, women "conditioned" to this "will know [their] place in society."
To "defend" against all of these threats to Europe, Breivik summons up the legacy of the Christian Crusades of the Middle Ages, when large armies were mobilized by various kings, popes and lords to make war on the Islamic countries of the Middle East. In particular, he claims to be part of a group that is resurrecting the Knights Templar (an elite military order during the Crusades) to initiate and lead the Christian "resistance". He explicitly poses the massacre he is about to commit as a model that should be taken up by others, saying "Knights" like him "will be role models... [who] should even be considered as candidates for official veneration." (He appears to mean Catholic "sainthood."
Breivik's ideology – in tune with major forces in the Western ruling classes
All of this has been presented in the media to cast Breivik as an isolated lunatic. But the core of Breivik's view is actually a major current of ruling class opinion in both the U.S. and Europe.
On 26 July, [prominent Republic Party ideologue] Pat Buchanan posted his article "A Fire Bell in the Night for Norway". After the requisite condemnation of the killings, he went on to articulate Breivik's outlook, point out that it is the outlook of major leaders in Europe, and then – in large measure – agree with him
"[Breivik] chose as his targets not Muslims whose presence he detests, but the Labour Party leaders who let them into the country, and their children, the future leaders of that party.... He admits to his 'atrocious' but 'necessary' crimes, done, he says, to bring attention to his ideas and advance his cause: a Crusader's war between the real Europe and the 'cultural Marxists' and Muslims they invited in to alter the ethnic character and swamp the culture of the Old Continent...." Buchanan then notes that this is not an extreme view and that "[Chancellor] Angela Merkel of Germany, [President] Nicolas Sarkozy of France and [Prime Minister] David Cameron of Britain have all declared multiculturalism a failure...
"As for a climactic conflict between a once-Christian West and an Islamic world that is growing in numbers and advancing inexorably into Europe for the third time in 14 centuries, on this one, Breivik may be right."
Buchanan's language wildly distorts reality. When he speaks of a "climactic conflict" between the Christian West and the Islamic world "for the third time in 14 centuries", he is referencing actual armies – the Moors of North Africa, who invaded and occupied what is now Spain and Portugal from the early eighth century to the late fifteenth century, and an invasion of south-central Europe by the Ottoman empire (based in what is now Turkey), an invasion that was defeated 400 years ago. And he is applying that template to what is in fact the desperate emigration of millions of ordinary people from their homelands, with the aim of feeding their families, getting an education, or escaping persecution. By presenting this in military terms, Buchanan is seeking to stir ultra-nationalist patriotism, and fear and hatred of immigrants in the white European population; this is an ideology that lends justification to Breivik's slaughter.
Buchanan is not a fringe element – he is an influential figure in U.S. politics. He was a senior advisor to Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Ford, a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 1972 and 1976, gave the keynote address at the 1976 Republican National Convention, and is a regular pundit on major news shows.
Moreover, Buchanan is correct to link other major leaders to the core of Breivik's views.
In February 2011, French President Sarkozy declared: "We have been too concerned about the identity of the person who was arriving and not enough about the identity of the country that was receiving him... If you come to France, you accept to melt into a single community, which is the national community." He continued, "And if you do not want to accept that, you cannot be welcome in France."
In September 2009, Theo Sarrazin, a former leader of the German central bank and prominent member of the ruling party, wrote: "I do not have to acknowledge anyone who lives by welfare, denies the legitimacy of the very state that provides that welfare, refuses to care for the education of his children and constantly produces new little headscarf-girls. This holds true for 70 percent of the Turkish and 90 percent of the Arab population in Berlin." This kicked off a huge public controversy; in its wake, in October 2010, German Chancellor Merkel told a meeting that "This [multicultural] approach has failed, utterly failed." It is important to remember that a few generations back, the German ruling class committed genocide against its religious and ethnic minorities for the crime of supposedly not fitting into the German ideal. Merkel's statement is the equivalent of the president of the U.S. declaring that "integration has failed; it is time for Black people to accept their inferior status, and only then can they live peacefully in the U.S."
We could also point to many examples on the U.S. political scene. Just a few weeks ago, Texas governor and Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry spoke at a "Christians-only" rally (which Perry called for in his capacity as governor) where he shared the platform with numerous Christian fascist preachers, and where Perry declared that "God has put me in this place at this time to do His will," and that people "proclaiming Jesus Christ as our Lord and Saviour" and "hand[ing] the fate of the U.S. "over to God" is the answer to the problems that beset the country. Or the targeting of abortion doctors, not only by Operation Rescue but also well-accepted mainstream fascist commentators like Bill O'Reilly on Fox News, and the murder of these doctors by "individuals" who, of course, are claimed to have nothing to do with Operation Rescue.
These trends, ugly and indeed criminal as they are, do not arise from the prejudices of backward and ignorant "citizens"; they are a major pole – a pole with great power and initiative – in the ruling classes of the Western imperialist countries, and these forces are using their control of media and other means to organize and unleash backward sections of the population around this. The above statements are from mainstream "conservative" leaders, but most or all countries in Europe (and the U.S.) also have more or less openly fascist mass movements and/or political parties with substantial legislative representation, who put out even more bluntly racist and chauvinist calls.
It is clear that Breivik sees himself as a heroic "knight" in this "clash of civilizations." And he sees his project in international terms, touting alliances with fascist organizations in other European countries, and quoting heavily from the Christian right in the U.S. He claims to have attended a meeting of nine representatives from eight European countries to re-establish the Knights Templar. He says that he worked with two other "cells" in Norway, that he had been in touch with and in fact was "recruited" by members of the English Defence League.(3)
But if Breivik's ideology is attuned to that of powerful forces in the ruling class, why did he unleash his murderous rampage on the Norwegian government and on the youth group of the ruling party? Again, further investigation and analysis is necessary. But it is an important fact that there is actually a sharp split in the ruling classes in the Western imperialist states (including the "smaller" and more "liberal" ones like Norway, Sweden, etc.)
Again, the situation in Europe is not identical to the U.S., nor is Norway the same as every other country in Europe. A close analysis of Norwegian politics is beyond the scope of this article, and more work needs to be done to uncover the actual relationships between the fascist forces in different countries. But there are some basic points that can be made.
Throughout Europe and the U.S., some ruling class forces – and the reactionaries they organize and unleash – argue that there is urgent necessity to restructure society on more openly fascist and theocratic terms in order to meet the challenges of the empire, while other sections – even while seeing the need for major moves in that direction, don't want to completely jettison all the traditional ideas and institutions of liberal democracy – political freedoms, secularism, cultural tolerance, the social safety net. These more "liberal" forces fear that their system will lose all legitimacy in the eyes of the people and that such an attempt to tightly "cohere" society will actually end up causing it to fly apart. Those sections of the ruling class are seen as a major obstacle by the more fully fascist section, and the struggle between them can be intense.
Bob Avakian addressed this in "The Fascists and the Destruction of the 'Weimar Republic'...And What Will Replace It"(4):
"...And, besides attacking people who are genuinely opposed not only to this fascism but to the capitalist-imperialist system as a whole, one of the main lines of their assault is (to use a very relevant analogy) viciously going after the Weimar Republic (the bourgeois-democratic republic in Germany after World War 1, which was replaced and forcibly abolished when Hitler and the Nazis came to power in the 1930s). We have to understand the meaning and significance of this, and the purpose behind it."
The shootings in Norway happened in the context and framework of this intense struggle within the ruling class over how to best preserve their system. The "liberal" forces are defending a social order that is built on the imperialist domination of the planet, the siphoning of the wealth produced by billions into the economies of a handful of wealthy nations, and the relative civil peace and civil liberties that can be made available to at least the better-off classes in these countries on that basis. The fascists who attack them argue that these niceties are no longer sustainable in the lean and mean world of the twenty-first century, and want to strip away even these limited rights, in favour of open patriarchy, white/European supremacy, and Christian fascist "values". And far too many people end up thinking that they have to choose between these two nightmares.
FOOTNOTES
(1) Note: In the U.S. a large majority of immigrants are from Mexico and Latin America, whereas in much of Europe the majority of immigrants are Muslims from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Serbia, Somalia, Turkey, North Africa and the Middle East. This difference influences the shape of fascist movements – in the U.S. the anti-immigrant movement is mainly focused on the Mexican border, and there is also an anti-Muslim movement that targets the (non-existent) "threat" of an Islamic takeover of the U.S. through the implementation of Sharia law.
These reactionary movements are distinct currents that swim together in a common fascist sea, with the "Tea Party" as a primary arena where they come together. In much of Europe the "anti-immigrant" movement is an anti-Muslim movement, and vice versa. The point in common is that in both cases these reactionaries – and the ruling class forces which back them – see "unassimilated" immigrants as a threat to the social cohesion and white/European supremacist character of their societies, and call for a return to the "traditional values" of patriotism, patriarchy and Christianity as the glue cohering the dominant society and excluding or crushing those who cannot or will not accept and conform to this.
(2) In fact, the question of multiculturalism is a complex one. Cultures are not unchanging things or identities that stand apart from the world. To the contrary, cultures reflect the ever-changing economic relations in any society and as such constantly change and develop more or less as those relations change. Moreover, in a society divided into classes, into oppressor and oppressed, most cultural practices and beliefs serve the maintenance of whichever class dominates – while at the same time there are cultural beliefs, practices, etc. which more reflect the strivings of the oppressed to get free.
The rise first of colonialism and then imperialism meant the domination of the vast majority of the globe by Europe, the U.S. and Japan. The capitalist-imperialist powers suppressed, vilified and held back the cultures of the peoples that they conquered (even as these conquerors also upheld, adapted, reinforced and/or utilized for their own ends some particularly backward or reactionary practices). For instance, enslaved and oppressed people were punished and even killed for speaking their own languages or maintaining their own religions, as the rulers deemed this to be evidence of rebellion – as indeed it sometimes was. This practice of outright cultural suppression is one that the likes of Breivik would like to bring back, with his program of forced conversion.
Communists strongly oppose the forcible assimilation of peoples and uphold the equality of languages – and there will be a flourishing of the language and culture of the oppressed in the future socialist societies, as shown in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic of North America (Draft Proposal). But multiculturalism, as it has come to be known, falls short as a full answer. There is an importance to criticism of that which is oppressive and reactionary within the cultures of the oppressed – for example, elements of patriarchal oppression of women. In this, it is crucial to rely on the masses of the oppressed nationalities themselves to carry forward the struggle to transform these cultures, in the overall context of revolutionary struggle. And there is great importance today to standing against the demonization and denial of equality to the languages and cultures of the oppressed, broadly speaking.
(3) The response of these fascist forces to the Norway massacre has been two-fold. On the one hand, they have tried to distance themselves from Breivik, claiming that he was a lunatic, "evil", that "there is no ideology there." Some, like Bill O'Reilly, have absurdly tried to claim that Breivik was not a Christian! Breivik himself anticipated and "understood" this distancing, stating in his manifesto that fascist political forces "have to condemn us at this point which is fine. It is after all essential that they protect their reputational shields."
But having done that, many – like the Pat Buchanan article already cited – have gone on to say that Breivik really made some good points, and that the real responsibility for the murders lies not with the Christian fascist right, but with Islamic radicals who "provoked" him. (See http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/29/internet-norway-killer-censorship-folly, for several such statements.) Some have gone further and expressed barely restrained sympathy for the murders – e.g., Pamela Geller's Atlas Shrugged blog posted this comment (taken from another site – Anti-Mullah) about the victims of the massacre: "The camp was run by the Youth Movement of the Labour Party and used to indoctrinate teens and young adults. Breivik was targeting the future leaders of the party responsible for flooding Norway with Muslims who refuse to assimilate, who commit major violence against Norwegian natives, including violent gang rapes, with impunity, and who live on the dole... all done without the consent of the Norwegians." [The leading US right-wing TV commentator] Glenn Beck infamously compared the camp to a "Hitler Youth" camp.
(4) Also see RCP Chairman Avakian's "The Coming Civil War", especially the section "The Pyramid of Power", both available at revcom.us. Though this work is mainly an analysis of developments in the U.S. itself, and there are significant differences between the political landscape in the U.S. and the various European countries, the basic analysis and challenge is extremely relevant.
Breivik had praised the EDL on his Web site, saying he had 600 EDL supporters as Facebook friends. Rather than pull back in the face of the public shock and repudiation that met Brievik's massacre of 77 people in July, the EDL has sought to violently, if only temporarily for now, impose "white" authority by invading immigrant communities in British cities to stop what it calls the "Islamisation" of the UK. Some people argue that the EDL is a "fringe group", but similar political goals are advocated by members of governing parties and other mainstream politicians in the UK, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy and other countries.
We are reprinting the following excerpts from an analysis of this event from the 28 August issue of Revolution, newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (revcom.us) as a contribution to the debate over how to understand and confront open fascist forces in the West.
On 22 July, Anrs Behring Breivik, a 32-year-old Christian fascist who described himself as "one of several leaders of dthe National and pan-European Patriotic resistance movement," set off on a brutal killing spree in Norway. By the end of the day, 77 people were dead, and Breivik was in police custody, reportedly looking forward to the next phase of his "project" – using the killings to publicize and organize around his extremely reactionary ideology.
Just before he set out, Breivik posted a YouTube video and a 1,500-page "manifesto" (2083: A European Declaration of Independence), which elaborated his world view and political program, and explicitly called upon the "tens of thousands of brothers and sisters who support us fully and are willing to fight beside us" to follow in his footsteps: "Follow the guidelines in this book and you will succeed!"
What motivated Breivik? Since he hated Muslims, why did he direct his attack at the youth of the social-democratic ruling party, mainly Christian Europeans? Was this a one-time aberration, or part of a rising tide of right-wing terror? How should people respond to such a terrible act in Norway, a small, well-off country usually insulated from the turmoil and violence that grips much of the rest of the world?
The mainstream media in the West and some representatives of the government in Norway rushed to address these questions, with their focus and answers tending strongly in the direction of saying that Breivik was "a madman"; that his connections to the large and growing extreme right in Europe and the U.S. were "all in his head," a "delusion"; that he was a lone wolf; and to treat the whole thing as a terrible tragedy which had nothing to do with any real contradictions in Norwegian, European or U.S. society. Norway would rally to its "liberal" traditions (which in truth rest on a prosperity derived from its privileged position in the worldwide system of imperialist exploitation, including the grinding exploitation of the immigrants who Breivik wants to drive out) and "normal life" would go on as before. In fact, in spite of the horrific and dramatic character of the massacres, the story essentially dropped out of the news within a week.
If one is to take a serious and scientific approach to understanding new, major and shocking developments like this, then it must be said that there is still much to learn about Breivik and his relationship to other reactionary forces in Europe and the United States, as well as the ideology expressed in his lengthy manifesto. But the rush to declare Breivik a "lone wolf" and to close the book on the whole incident is not only way premature (and contrary to much existing evidence), but it is aimed at covering up what the massacres began to expose.
Whether or not Breivik himself is legally and/or medically sane and whether or not these massacres were carried out as part of a larger organizational structure, the truth is that there is a multi-layered, powerful, and increasingly aggressive fascist movement with centres throughout Europe and the U.S., with a substantial popular base. And again, while there is much to uncover about this fascist movement and its exact connections with powerful ruling class circles, there are – as we will bring out – definite themes and directions that correspond between these fascists and major forces and figures in the Western ruling classes, and there are ways in which the actions of particular forces and individuals – like Breivik – within this fascist "universe" reflect and reinforce larger agendas of the ruling classes. Breivik was not only "inspired" by the overall ideological poison that this movement spews out, but very consciously saw his own actions as playing a strategic role in helping that movement advance to full political power.
Breivik's ideology and programme
Breivik claims that Europe and "Western civilization" are under attack and facing "Islamic colonization... through demographic warfare." He sees Europe and the U.S. as having an essentially Christian identity, and that the presence of large numbers of "unassimilated" Muslims – that is, Muslims who continue to practice their religion and, in many cases, are highly critical of the role of "the West" in the Middle East and the rest of the world – is undercutting that Christian identity and eroding European "civilization." Breivik says that "The problem can only be solved if we completely remove those who follow Islam. In order to do this all Muslims must 'submit' and convert to Christianity.... If they refuse to do this voluntarily prior to Jan. 1, 2020, they will be removed from European soil and deported back to the Islamic world."(1)
But Breivik also believes that this "Islamic colonization" is being facilitated from within European society, by what he refers to as "multiculturalism." As a philosophy, multiculturalism is basically the idea – held by many progressive people – that different peoples and cultures can and should coexist in society, each preserving its own culture and respecting and appreciating that of others. It is opposed to the idea of "assimilationism" – that people of the non-dominant culture should be forced to abandon their own ways and ideas and "assimilate" into the dominant culture – as well as to outright "exclusionism," which holds that cultural, religious and ethnic minorities should either not be allowed in or should be deported.(2)
Breivik sees the "multicultural" approach as leading to the destruction of Europe. But what he is railing against is not just the idea of multiculturalism, but the fact that for a number of decades, the dominant forces in the ruling class in most of Western Europe have themselves, and for their own reasons, allowed and even encouraged large-scale immigration. Breivik brands these ruling class forces as multiculturalists (sometimes he also refers to them as "Cultural Marxists" and says they are "traitors", betraying European civilization to the barbarian invaders.
It is important to understand that these ruling class forces have not embraced immigration out of internationalism, humanism, or anything else positive. Rather, the – partial and relative – opening of Europe's borders to immigrants has been driven by cold imperialist calculation. On the one hand, immigrants have filled a vital role in maintaining capitalist profitability in the West. Driven by desperate economic conditions (and often political repression) in their own – Western-dominated – countries, immigrants in Europe, as in the U.S., are now the backbone of large parts of the economy, from restaurants and grocery stores to hospital staffs and low-wage factories; their cheap labour is what makes the modern city hum and makes Western capital competitive in the world. On the other hand, money sent back home by these immigrants is an important stabilizing element in these third world countries which are, again, dominated by Western (and Japanese) imperialism and are a major source of their wealth and power. So for some time most of the Western ruling classes brought immigrants in, and while hunting and hounding them in various ways, also made some allowances for the existence of immigrant neighbourhoods where people can practice their own culture and religion, speak their own language, etc.
Breivik sees this policy as national and cultural suicide, and its political advocates as the main problem, the main obstacle to the survival of Christian Europe. So, "If they refuse to surrender until 2020, there will be no turning back. We will eventually wipe out every single one of them."
Breivik is also openly patriarchal and misogynist. Partly this flows from his view that Muslims are waging "demographic warfare," and that because European women, influenced by feminism, are "selfish" and put their own happiness and well-being above their responsibility as women to bear and raise more European children, the Muslims will overwhelm the white Europeans.10 But his patriarchy is not reducible to that – it is part of a broader view of what is needed to save Western civilization from destruction. "The female manipulation of males has been institutionalized during the last decades and is a partial cause of the feminization of men in Europe." He writes, "Men are not men any more, but metro sexual and emotional beings that are there to serve the purpose as a never-criticising soul mate to the new age feminist woman goddess.'" He bluntly states that the "fate of European civilization depends on European men steadfastly resisting Politically Correct feminism." When cultural conservatives seize control of Europe, "we will re-establish the patriarchal structures," and eventually, women "conditioned" to this "will know [their] place in society."
To "defend" against all of these threats to Europe, Breivik summons up the legacy of the Christian Crusades of the Middle Ages, when large armies were mobilized by various kings, popes and lords to make war on the Islamic countries of the Middle East. In particular, he claims to be part of a group that is resurrecting the Knights Templar (an elite military order during the Crusades) to initiate and lead the Christian "resistance". He explicitly poses the massacre he is about to commit as a model that should be taken up by others, saying "Knights" like him "will be role models... [who] should even be considered as candidates for official veneration." (He appears to mean Catholic "sainthood."
Breivik's ideology – in tune with major forces in the Western ruling classes
All of this has been presented in the media to cast Breivik as an isolated lunatic. But the core of Breivik's view is actually a major current of ruling class opinion in both the U.S. and Europe.
On 26 July, [prominent Republic Party ideologue] Pat Buchanan posted his article "A Fire Bell in the Night for Norway". After the requisite condemnation of the killings, he went on to articulate Breivik's outlook, point out that it is the outlook of major leaders in Europe, and then – in large measure – agree with him
"[Breivik] chose as his targets not Muslims whose presence he detests, but the Labour Party leaders who let them into the country, and their children, the future leaders of that party.... He admits to his 'atrocious' but 'necessary' crimes, done, he says, to bring attention to his ideas and advance his cause: a Crusader's war between the real Europe and the 'cultural Marxists' and Muslims they invited in to alter the ethnic character and swamp the culture of the Old Continent...." Buchanan then notes that this is not an extreme view and that "[Chancellor] Angela Merkel of Germany, [President] Nicolas Sarkozy of France and [Prime Minister] David Cameron of Britain have all declared multiculturalism a failure...
"As for a climactic conflict between a once-Christian West and an Islamic world that is growing in numbers and advancing inexorably into Europe for the third time in 14 centuries, on this one, Breivik may be right."
Buchanan's language wildly distorts reality. When he speaks of a "climactic conflict" between the Christian West and the Islamic world "for the third time in 14 centuries", he is referencing actual armies – the Moors of North Africa, who invaded and occupied what is now Spain and Portugal from the early eighth century to the late fifteenth century, and an invasion of south-central Europe by the Ottoman empire (based in what is now Turkey), an invasion that was defeated 400 years ago. And he is applying that template to what is in fact the desperate emigration of millions of ordinary people from their homelands, with the aim of feeding their families, getting an education, or escaping persecution. By presenting this in military terms, Buchanan is seeking to stir ultra-nationalist patriotism, and fear and hatred of immigrants in the white European population; this is an ideology that lends justification to Breivik's slaughter.
Buchanan is not a fringe element – he is an influential figure in U.S. politics. He was a senior advisor to Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Ford, a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 1972 and 1976, gave the keynote address at the 1976 Republican National Convention, and is a regular pundit on major news shows.
Moreover, Buchanan is correct to link other major leaders to the core of Breivik's views.
In February 2011, French President Sarkozy declared: "We have been too concerned about the identity of the person who was arriving and not enough about the identity of the country that was receiving him... If you come to France, you accept to melt into a single community, which is the national community." He continued, "And if you do not want to accept that, you cannot be welcome in France."
In September 2009, Theo Sarrazin, a former leader of the German central bank and prominent member of the ruling party, wrote: "I do not have to acknowledge anyone who lives by welfare, denies the legitimacy of the very state that provides that welfare, refuses to care for the education of his children and constantly produces new little headscarf-girls. This holds true for 70 percent of the Turkish and 90 percent of the Arab population in Berlin." This kicked off a huge public controversy; in its wake, in October 2010, German Chancellor Merkel told a meeting that "This [multicultural] approach has failed, utterly failed." It is important to remember that a few generations back, the German ruling class committed genocide against its religious and ethnic minorities for the crime of supposedly not fitting into the German ideal. Merkel's statement is the equivalent of the president of the U.S. declaring that "integration has failed; it is time for Black people to accept their inferior status, and only then can they live peacefully in the U.S."
We could also point to many examples on the U.S. political scene. Just a few weeks ago, Texas governor and Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry spoke at a "Christians-only" rally (which Perry called for in his capacity as governor) where he shared the platform with numerous Christian fascist preachers, and where Perry declared that "God has put me in this place at this time to do His will," and that people "proclaiming Jesus Christ as our Lord and Saviour" and "hand[ing] the fate of the U.S. "over to God" is the answer to the problems that beset the country. Or the targeting of abortion doctors, not only by Operation Rescue but also well-accepted mainstream fascist commentators like Bill O'Reilly on Fox News, and the murder of these doctors by "individuals" who, of course, are claimed to have nothing to do with Operation Rescue.
These trends, ugly and indeed criminal as they are, do not arise from the prejudices of backward and ignorant "citizens"; they are a major pole – a pole with great power and initiative – in the ruling classes of the Western imperialist countries, and these forces are using their control of media and other means to organize and unleash backward sections of the population around this. The above statements are from mainstream "conservative" leaders, but most or all countries in Europe (and the U.S.) also have more or less openly fascist mass movements and/or political parties with substantial legislative representation, who put out even more bluntly racist and chauvinist calls.
It is clear that Breivik sees himself as a heroic "knight" in this "clash of civilizations." And he sees his project in international terms, touting alliances with fascist organizations in other European countries, and quoting heavily from the Christian right in the U.S. He claims to have attended a meeting of nine representatives from eight European countries to re-establish the Knights Templar. He says that he worked with two other "cells" in Norway, that he had been in touch with and in fact was "recruited" by members of the English Defence League.(3)
But if Breivik's ideology is attuned to that of powerful forces in the ruling class, why did he unleash his murderous rampage on the Norwegian government and on the youth group of the ruling party? Again, further investigation and analysis is necessary. But it is an important fact that there is actually a sharp split in the ruling classes in the Western imperialist states (including the "smaller" and more "liberal" ones like Norway, Sweden, etc.)
Again, the situation in Europe is not identical to the U.S., nor is Norway the same as every other country in Europe. A close analysis of Norwegian politics is beyond the scope of this article, and more work needs to be done to uncover the actual relationships between the fascist forces in different countries. But there are some basic points that can be made.
Throughout Europe and the U.S., some ruling class forces – and the reactionaries they organize and unleash – argue that there is urgent necessity to restructure society on more openly fascist and theocratic terms in order to meet the challenges of the empire, while other sections – even while seeing the need for major moves in that direction, don't want to completely jettison all the traditional ideas and institutions of liberal democracy – political freedoms, secularism, cultural tolerance, the social safety net. These more "liberal" forces fear that their system will lose all legitimacy in the eyes of the people and that such an attempt to tightly "cohere" society will actually end up causing it to fly apart. Those sections of the ruling class are seen as a major obstacle by the more fully fascist section, and the struggle between them can be intense.
Bob Avakian addressed this in "The Fascists and the Destruction of the 'Weimar Republic'...And What Will Replace It"(4):
"...And, besides attacking people who are genuinely opposed not only to this fascism but to the capitalist-imperialist system as a whole, one of the main lines of their assault is (to use a very relevant analogy) viciously going after the Weimar Republic (the bourgeois-democratic republic in Germany after World War 1, which was replaced and forcibly abolished when Hitler and the Nazis came to power in the 1930s). We have to understand the meaning and significance of this, and the purpose behind it."
The shootings in Norway happened in the context and framework of this intense struggle within the ruling class over how to best preserve their system. The "liberal" forces are defending a social order that is built on the imperialist domination of the planet, the siphoning of the wealth produced by billions into the economies of a handful of wealthy nations, and the relative civil peace and civil liberties that can be made available to at least the better-off classes in these countries on that basis. The fascists who attack them argue that these niceties are no longer sustainable in the lean and mean world of the twenty-first century, and want to strip away even these limited rights, in favour of open patriarchy, white/European supremacy, and Christian fascist "values". And far too many people end up thinking that they have to choose between these two nightmares.
FOOTNOTES
(1) Note: In the U.S. a large majority of immigrants are from Mexico and Latin America, whereas in much of Europe the majority of immigrants are Muslims from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Serbia, Somalia, Turkey, North Africa and the Middle East. This difference influences the shape of fascist movements – in the U.S. the anti-immigrant movement is mainly focused on the Mexican border, and there is also an anti-Muslim movement that targets the (non-existent) "threat" of an Islamic takeover of the U.S. through the implementation of Sharia law.
These reactionary movements are distinct currents that swim together in a common fascist sea, with the "Tea Party" as a primary arena where they come together. In much of Europe the "anti-immigrant" movement is an anti-Muslim movement, and vice versa. The point in common is that in both cases these reactionaries – and the ruling class forces which back them – see "unassimilated" immigrants as a threat to the social cohesion and white/European supremacist character of their societies, and call for a return to the "traditional values" of patriotism, patriarchy and Christianity as the glue cohering the dominant society and excluding or crushing those who cannot or will not accept and conform to this.
(2) In fact, the question of multiculturalism is a complex one. Cultures are not unchanging things or identities that stand apart from the world. To the contrary, cultures reflect the ever-changing economic relations in any society and as such constantly change and develop more or less as those relations change. Moreover, in a society divided into classes, into oppressor and oppressed, most cultural practices and beliefs serve the maintenance of whichever class dominates – while at the same time there are cultural beliefs, practices, etc. which more reflect the strivings of the oppressed to get free.
The rise first of colonialism and then imperialism meant the domination of the vast majority of the globe by Europe, the U.S. and Japan. The capitalist-imperialist powers suppressed, vilified and held back the cultures of the peoples that they conquered (even as these conquerors also upheld, adapted, reinforced and/or utilized for their own ends some particularly backward or reactionary practices). For instance, enslaved and oppressed people were punished and even killed for speaking their own languages or maintaining their own religions, as the rulers deemed this to be evidence of rebellion – as indeed it sometimes was. This practice of outright cultural suppression is one that the likes of Breivik would like to bring back, with his program of forced conversion.
Communists strongly oppose the forcible assimilation of peoples and uphold the equality of languages – and there will be a flourishing of the language and culture of the oppressed in the future socialist societies, as shown in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic of North America (Draft Proposal). But multiculturalism, as it has come to be known, falls short as a full answer. There is an importance to criticism of that which is oppressive and reactionary within the cultures of the oppressed – for example, elements of patriarchal oppression of women. In this, it is crucial to rely on the masses of the oppressed nationalities themselves to carry forward the struggle to transform these cultures, in the overall context of revolutionary struggle. And there is great importance today to standing against the demonization and denial of equality to the languages and cultures of the oppressed, broadly speaking.
(3) The response of these fascist forces to the Norway massacre has been two-fold. On the one hand, they have tried to distance themselves from Breivik, claiming that he was a lunatic, "evil", that "there is no ideology there." Some, like Bill O'Reilly, have absurdly tried to claim that Breivik was not a Christian! Breivik himself anticipated and "understood" this distancing, stating in his manifesto that fascist political forces "have to condemn us at this point which is fine. It is after all essential that they protect their reputational shields."
But having done that, many – like the Pat Buchanan article already cited – have gone on to say that Breivik really made some good points, and that the real responsibility for the murders lies not with the Christian fascist right, but with Islamic radicals who "provoked" him. (See http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/29/internet-norway-killer-censorship-folly, for several such statements.) Some have gone further and expressed barely restrained sympathy for the murders – e.g., Pamela Geller's Atlas Shrugged blog posted this comment (taken from another site – Anti-Mullah) about the victims of the massacre: "The camp was run by the Youth Movement of the Labour Party and used to indoctrinate teens and young adults. Breivik was targeting the future leaders of the party responsible for flooding Norway with Muslims who refuse to assimilate, who commit major violence against Norwegian natives, including violent gang rapes, with impunity, and who live on the dole... all done without the consent of the Norwegians." [The leading US right-wing TV commentator] Glenn Beck infamously compared the camp to a "Hitler Youth" camp.
(4) Also see RCP Chairman Avakian's "The Coming Civil War", especially the section "The Pyramid of Power", both available at revcom.us. Though this work is mainly an analysis of developments in the U.S. itself, and there are significant differences between the political landscape in the U.S. and the various European countries, the basic analysis and challenge is extremely relevant.
Mittwoch, 27. Juli 2011
The "free media" and "free elections" – reflections on Murdoch and friends
25 July 2011. A World to Win News Service. A scandal has hounded the entire British political system, exposing much of the dirtiness and the depth of the corruption of a power structure often held up as a shining example of "the free world". The British ruling class's continuing efforts to thwart the widening of that scandal is a further exposure of the ugliness of that system.
After more than five years of suspicions and accusations, it is now certain that the phones of many hundreds and possibly even thousands of people (according to the police some 4,000 phone numbers were on the main hacker's list, but some reports say up to 12,000 may be involved) have been "hacked" (their conversations and messages listened into) in order to obtain and publish embarrassing or otherwise hurtful information about them. Most were celebrities – politicians, actors and models, sports stars and the British royal family. Some were ordinary people who had the misfortune to fall victim to violent crimes and then see the media feast on their misery.
The main organisation caught so far at this trafficking in human suffering is News of the World (NOTW), a British tabloid published on Sundays, the globe's biggest-selling English-language newspaper. NOTW is part of the News International group, along with the Sun (infamous for its combination of soft-core porn and "family values"), the respected Times of London aimed at the better-off crowd and British Sky Broadcasting (the UK's biggest pay TV channel). News International is in turn the British branch of the News Corporation, the second-largest media company in the US (after Disney), owner of Fox television and several influential American dailies, including the Wall Street Journal. The main owner and chairman of News Corp is Rupert Murdoch, sometimes called "the owner of the News" because of his power over media all over the world, especially in the US, UK, Australia and South-east Asia, and now bidding to expand his business in the Middle East.
So far, the UK scandal has brought down two of the country's most powerful police officials, chief UK police officer Sir Paul Stephenson, head of the Metropolitan Police (Scotland Yard), and Assistant Met Police Commissioner John Yates. It has led to the resignation and arrest of Andy Coulson, the Conservative Party's former chief spin doctor and Prime Minister David Cameron's spokesman, along with the resignation and arrest of Rebekah Brooks, News International chief executive, and the arrest and even imprisonment of at least ten of the newspaper's editors and reporters. It has also jeopardised Cameron's position and the future of his coalition government, and may produce more casualties if the ruling class is not able to put an end to it.
At the beginning, there was little sign that the arrest of NOTW editor Clive Goodman and the private detective Glenn Mulcaire for what the police declared was a minor and "isolated" incident would lead to such broad and deep disgrace for so many of the country's leaders and institutions.
Goodman and Mulcaire were listening in on the phone messages of British royal family advisers, looking for hot gossip fodder (unlike some countries, UK defamation law makes it risky for the media to just invent "news"). They were caught in November 2005 when they annoyed the royals by reporting Prince William's knee injury. In January 2007 Goodman was jailed for four months. Mulcaire, after pleading guilty to actually doing the hacking, was jailed for six months.
The affair continued to flare up and then damped down. Rival news organizations revealed that a list of the names of celebrities and other well-known figures whose phones Mulcaire had hacked were found in his home – 3,000 according to a 2009 article in the Guardian. Famous people, including former Labour Party Vice Prime Minister Lord John Prescott and the British-American film star Sienna Miller, complained and/or filed charges. Finally, the police confirmed a few of these cases. The Department of Public Prosecutions refused to widen the investigation, despite an internal report that there was a "vast array" of victims. The DPP head was later hired by Murdoch.
As recently reported by The New York Times, which along with the Guardian eventually brought the facts to light, for years "senior Scotland Yard officials assured Parliament, judges, lawyers, potential hacking victims, the news media and the public that there was no evidence of widespread hacking by the tabloid. They steadfastly maintained that their original inquiry, which led to the conviction of one reporter and one private investigator, had put an end to what they called an isolated incident."
Instead of investigating, the police sat on the evidence. When the investigator Mulcaire was arrested, his home yielded up 11,000 pages of notes listing 4,000 people whose phone lines he had presumably targeted, including top politicians and police officials. They were put in rubbish bags and left in a police locker, uncatalogued, unsorted and out of sight for four years.
The UK's top cop at the time was Sir Ian Blair. Blair was the man in charge when the police, mistaking the Brazilian plumber Jean Charles de Menezes for an Arab after the 2005 London bombings, chose to gun him down while he was seated in an Underground train. Instead of assigning the investigation to the special crimes division, Blair put the counter-terrorism unit in charge. The head of that unit was the now-resigned Yates. Yates proved his mettle as the officer in charge of Scotland Yard’s response to that incident, resulting in the vindication of the police. According to a source quoted by the NYT, it was felt that with Yates the affair was in "safe hands". In defending his decision to ignore the phone hacking evidence, Yates said, "I'm not going to go down and look at bin bags." Even after the 2009 Guardian report, he refused to reopen the investigation.
A parliamentary commission was formed to investigate the issue. After interviewing current and past NOTW editors and journalists, including Prime Minister Cameron's future press secretary Coulson, in February 2010 it published a report accusing the newspaper of "collective negligence" rather than criminal activity, because, the report said, there was no evidence that any of the newspaper's officials, including Coulson, had been aware of the hacking.
This was directly refuted by a former NOTW show-business reporter in September 2010, who told The New York Times that the practice of hacking was widespread at his newspaper and that Coulson actively encouraged his staff to intercept the calls of the targeted people. Coulson "totally and utterly" denied the charges, but the reporter continued to insist on his allegations and provided more details to the BBC and the Guardian until he was found dead in his flat on 18 July 2011, just as the scandal reached its feverish height. The police immediately announced that they were not treating his death as suspicious.
Meanwhile, faced with mounting pressure, the police had relaunched their enquiry in January 2011. All hell broke lose when it was revealed that NOTW had ordered the hacking of the voice mail of Milly Dowler, a 13-year-old girl abducted and murdered in 2002. Not only had the newspaper's private investigator Mulcaire tapped her mobile phone seeking salacious details, he had even deleted messages (he said to make space for new messages, but possibly also to keep other media outlets from following NOTW's example). This misled the girl's parents into thinking that the missing girl was still alive and using her phone.
The resulting storm of outrage – disproving the idea that Murdoch was just giving the public what it wanted – finally led to the resignations and arrests and prompted the formation of two investigating committees in the House of Commons, which questioned the police officials, Rupert Murdoch and his son James, head of the UK division of his father's empire, and others.
The cover-up continues
Now that the issue of phone hacking is no longer merely a matter of the privacy of the royal family, people are increasingly disgusted by the media's practices and even more by the involvement of the government in enabling and then covering up Murdoch's activities. At the same time, there is something of a battle going on between rival political parties, as reflected, among other ways, in the political allegiance of the two newspapers that broke the scandal.
The London-based Guardian is associated with the Labour Party, and The New York Times, itself associated with the Democratic Party in the US, has been a working partner of the Guardian in recent years. They took a joint decision to launch a full-scale crusading investigation into this affair, although they say that each paper carried out its work independently of the other. To some extent this situation is creating opportunities for different political factions to increase their share or influence in government at the expense of their rivals. However this has gone far beyond what they expected, and they are now trying hard to wrap it up and limit the damages to their system.
The ruling class and its representatives, including the Conservative-led government, the Labour Party, Parliament and the media as a whole, including even Murdoch and his corporation, are trying to reduce the issue to whether or not the law was broken by the hacking, and whether or not Coulson and other NOTW editors knew about it or authorised it. The spectre of a media empire like Murdoch's flagrantly and repeatedly flouting the law is already sufficient to outrage many – but this is far from the whole of the matter.
The role of the police in protecting Murdoch's newspaper and helping its snooping can no longer be denied. It has come out that top police and court officials have worked for NOTW and NOTW filled their ranks, that they exchanged information, and that there were long-term and very close personal relations between the leaders of the two organizations. It is now being alleged that Murdoch's editors paid individual police for information – and Rebekah Brooks already admitted as much in previous testimony, at the time she headed NOTW, though she retracted this later. But the relationship seems to have been based more on mutual strategic advantage rather than bribes. Murdoch provided the police with experienced opinion-manipulators and political cover, which they certainly needed, among other reasons because of their unrelenting brutalization and occasionally killing of protesters and other people whose rights they supposedly protect.
The links between the Murdoch family and top government officials and leaders of the Labour and now the Conservative Party have also become plain for all to see. It has been especially startling for people to learn that the Prime Minister had hired Murdoch lieutenant Coulson as his press secretary even after it had been established that at least some hacking had been going on when Coulson was at NOTW. In fact, Coulson had been a mastermind of Cameron's public relations strategy before he became PM, and it has been suggested that Cameron hired him precisely to ensure the Murdoch empire's support for the Conservative Party in the elections.
But Murdoch mud has landed on the faces of politicians of the Conservative and Labour Party leaders alike, although not everyone has taken proper notice. For instance it has come out that NOTW spied on Labour leader Gordon Brown for a decade, both when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer under Tony Blair and when he became Prime Minister himself. Brown suspected it all along, he now says. Murdoch's Sun even made public, to the privacy-minded Brown family's great distress, that their infant son had just been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. Yet Brown never said a word, and continued to maintain a close social relationship with Rebekah Brooks, who had been in charge of the Sun in 2006 when this incident occurred and who later became News Corp chief executive. He also continued to have close relations with the Murdoch family.
In fact, Brown and Cameron attended Brooks' 2009 wedding, and she attended the Prince of Wales' fiftieth birthday party. Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair also socialized with the Murdochs and their executives. Despite the spying on their private lives, leading figures in the power structure seemed to find Murdoch's role in society legitimate and useful.
The media in general have a very important role in forming the public opinion that the masses can supposedly freely express at election time. All the mainstream media have the financial ability to reach millions of people. By using this power and their expertise at connecting with various strata of society, they can frame the questions and problems of the day in a way that often leads people to think that the solutions posed by the ruling class are the only ones possible. They also train people in a certain mentality – and Murdoch has excelled at encouraging an unhealthy, self-centred, hypocritical and cynically exploitative outlook. In this general way, and sometimes very specifically, the "free press" help dictate to the "free people" what to think and what to do.
But at the same time the media can play an important role in the rivalry between the political representatives of different factions of the ruling class. It is important for these factions to win the support of the tabloids and other media (in the UK the print press is under fewer restrictions than broadcast media) and the business groups that own them, which in turn, of course, are generally owned by top monopoly capitalists like Murdoch.
As has been pointed out, the law, in its majestic even-handedness, permits rich and poor alike to sleep on the streets, and it also gives news peddlers and financial magnates an equal right to own media empires.
In the decades since Murdoch moved in on the British media, no party has won a general election in the UK without his support. Murdoch's support for Tony Blair in 1997 was an important advantage to the Labour Party that year. All the parties and politicians surely wanted to keep or get that support. In fact, the influence of the tabloids is so strongly felt by the politicians that Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock blamed his 1992 defeat, despite the opinion polls in his favour, on the campaign against him that Murdoch's Sun started in the days just before the election.
Tony Blair and his allies in the Labour Party had already established such a close relationship with NOTW and Murdoch with their “New Labour” project that Blair was invited to take part in the News Corporation conference in Australia in 1995. Brown appeared at Murdoch's side at the Davos World Economic Forum in 2007. The story was repeated in 2008 when the Conservatives' Cameron met Murdoch in Greece to win his support. It seemed that they reached some kind of agreement, because a month later the Sun shifted its support to the Tories (Conservatives) once again.
It has been revealed that all recent British prime ministers repeatedly met with Murdoch or one of his chief executives at Downing Street (although through the back door), the Prime Minister's residence or somewhere else. "Cameron admitted meeting Murdoch executives 26 times in 15 months – but it emerges there were more occasions, many others," Polly Toynbee wrote in the Guardian.
If the leadership of both major political parties and Murdoch got along so well together, so much so that the politicians decided to put up with the occasional stab in the back, what does that say about the supposed "choice" that these parties offer the people in the elections that are considered the ultimate definition of "freedom"?
But the relationship between the ruling class political system and the media is not limited to Murdoch. This is where rivalry between different financial and political groups seems to have played a role in this scandal, although policy differences seemed to have been largely absent in this affair despite the public controversies during this period (over the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and domestic cutbacks). Murdoch's News Corporation already owned 39 percent of B-Sky-B television, but he was planning to take complete control. This required government permission, and it would be hard to believe that Cameron and Murdoch and his executives did not discuss this during their meetings. Under questioning at an emergency House of Commons meeting Cameron was forced to admit it, though he insisted the conversations had been "appropriate".
This takeover, the most important move on News Corp's strategic agenda, would have brought Murdoch British media dominance, threatening even the position of BBC. There was opposition to this within ruling circles. Whether this played a role in encouraging the exposure and discrediting of Murdoch and his empire in the UK is not clear. But Murdoch has now withdrawn his bid.
In the end, probably for various different reasons, the British ruling class seems to have decided to try and cool down the issue in the hope of limiting further exposures. The appearance of Murdoch father and son and their top executives before the British Parliament's Culture, Media and Sports Select Committee might well be the final set piece. Contrary to the media description of Murdoch being grilled, in fact this was a tribune to allow Murdoch to deny any wrongdoing and justify his behaviour, portraying himself as a victim betrayed by a much-trusted employee, without being confronted with the more burning questions. There were no questions related to bribery, corruption and blackmail.
Like Murdoch, Cameron has refused to admit that he did anything wrong, which may very well be the case in the narrow legal terms within which both parties and the media are trying to confine the affair. He seems to have survived despite his deep involvement with Murdoch, but he does have the effective defence that all the political parties and many of the system's other pillars have been equally involved.
Opposition leader Ed Milliband might have gone a little bit further than others in his rhetoric, but he too has had to come to terms and led the parliament in taking a soft approach towards Murdoch and his gang, treating them as respected guests rather than criminals. It's worth mentioning that Murdoch supported Ed's brother David Milliband in their rivalry for Labour Party leadership, but Ed had his share of meetings with Murdoch's minions – and got caught failing to include them in his recently-released meeting log.
The House of Commons enquiry was not meant to get at the truth but on the contrary to cover up the crimes of the Murdoch empire and more importantly the complicity of a broad swath of the system's political institutions in pandering to and protecting a media empire that doesn't reflect public opinion but creates it, an empire whose goal is to delude and degrade the people, to dumb them and numb them, to spread the notion that because of elections and competing political parties, the rule of capital over the vast majority of people is somehow not a dictatorship.
This is the real picture that emerges from this scandal, and it gives the lie – or at least should – to the myth of a freely elected government and freely elected parliament, the free and fair media and the free market economy.
After more than five years of suspicions and accusations, it is now certain that the phones of many hundreds and possibly even thousands of people (according to the police some 4,000 phone numbers were on the main hacker's list, but some reports say up to 12,000 may be involved) have been "hacked" (their conversations and messages listened into) in order to obtain and publish embarrassing or otherwise hurtful information about them. Most were celebrities – politicians, actors and models, sports stars and the British royal family. Some were ordinary people who had the misfortune to fall victim to violent crimes and then see the media feast on their misery.
The main organisation caught so far at this trafficking in human suffering is News of the World (NOTW), a British tabloid published on Sundays, the globe's biggest-selling English-language newspaper. NOTW is part of the News International group, along with the Sun (infamous for its combination of soft-core porn and "family values"), the respected Times of London aimed at the better-off crowd and British Sky Broadcasting (the UK's biggest pay TV channel). News International is in turn the British branch of the News Corporation, the second-largest media company in the US (after Disney), owner of Fox television and several influential American dailies, including the Wall Street Journal. The main owner and chairman of News Corp is Rupert Murdoch, sometimes called "the owner of the News" because of his power over media all over the world, especially in the US, UK, Australia and South-east Asia, and now bidding to expand his business in the Middle East.
So far, the UK scandal has brought down two of the country's most powerful police officials, chief UK police officer Sir Paul Stephenson, head of the Metropolitan Police (Scotland Yard), and Assistant Met Police Commissioner John Yates. It has led to the resignation and arrest of Andy Coulson, the Conservative Party's former chief spin doctor and Prime Minister David Cameron's spokesman, along with the resignation and arrest of Rebekah Brooks, News International chief executive, and the arrest and even imprisonment of at least ten of the newspaper's editors and reporters. It has also jeopardised Cameron's position and the future of his coalition government, and may produce more casualties if the ruling class is not able to put an end to it.
At the beginning, there was little sign that the arrest of NOTW editor Clive Goodman and the private detective Glenn Mulcaire for what the police declared was a minor and "isolated" incident would lead to such broad and deep disgrace for so many of the country's leaders and institutions.
Goodman and Mulcaire were listening in on the phone messages of British royal family advisers, looking for hot gossip fodder (unlike some countries, UK defamation law makes it risky for the media to just invent "news"). They were caught in November 2005 when they annoyed the royals by reporting Prince William's knee injury. In January 2007 Goodman was jailed for four months. Mulcaire, after pleading guilty to actually doing the hacking, was jailed for six months.
The affair continued to flare up and then damped down. Rival news organizations revealed that a list of the names of celebrities and other well-known figures whose phones Mulcaire had hacked were found in his home – 3,000 according to a 2009 article in the Guardian. Famous people, including former Labour Party Vice Prime Minister Lord John Prescott and the British-American film star Sienna Miller, complained and/or filed charges. Finally, the police confirmed a few of these cases. The Department of Public Prosecutions refused to widen the investigation, despite an internal report that there was a "vast array" of victims. The DPP head was later hired by Murdoch.
As recently reported by The New York Times, which along with the Guardian eventually brought the facts to light, for years "senior Scotland Yard officials assured Parliament, judges, lawyers, potential hacking victims, the news media and the public that there was no evidence of widespread hacking by the tabloid. They steadfastly maintained that their original inquiry, which led to the conviction of one reporter and one private investigator, had put an end to what they called an isolated incident."
Instead of investigating, the police sat on the evidence. When the investigator Mulcaire was arrested, his home yielded up 11,000 pages of notes listing 4,000 people whose phone lines he had presumably targeted, including top politicians and police officials. They were put in rubbish bags and left in a police locker, uncatalogued, unsorted and out of sight for four years.
The UK's top cop at the time was Sir Ian Blair. Blair was the man in charge when the police, mistaking the Brazilian plumber Jean Charles de Menezes for an Arab after the 2005 London bombings, chose to gun him down while he was seated in an Underground train. Instead of assigning the investigation to the special crimes division, Blair put the counter-terrorism unit in charge. The head of that unit was the now-resigned Yates. Yates proved his mettle as the officer in charge of Scotland Yard’s response to that incident, resulting in the vindication of the police. According to a source quoted by the NYT, it was felt that with Yates the affair was in "safe hands". In defending his decision to ignore the phone hacking evidence, Yates said, "I'm not going to go down and look at bin bags." Even after the 2009 Guardian report, he refused to reopen the investigation.
A parliamentary commission was formed to investigate the issue. After interviewing current and past NOTW editors and journalists, including Prime Minister Cameron's future press secretary Coulson, in February 2010 it published a report accusing the newspaper of "collective negligence" rather than criminal activity, because, the report said, there was no evidence that any of the newspaper's officials, including Coulson, had been aware of the hacking.
This was directly refuted by a former NOTW show-business reporter in September 2010, who told The New York Times that the practice of hacking was widespread at his newspaper and that Coulson actively encouraged his staff to intercept the calls of the targeted people. Coulson "totally and utterly" denied the charges, but the reporter continued to insist on his allegations and provided more details to the BBC and the Guardian until he was found dead in his flat on 18 July 2011, just as the scandal reached its feverish height. The police immediately announced that they were not treating his death as suspicious.
Meanwhile, faced with mounting pressure, the police had relaunched their enquiry in January 2011. All hell broke lose when it was revealed that NOTW had ordered the hacking of the voice mail of Milly Dowler, a 13-year-old girl abducted and murdered in 2002. Not only had the newspaper's private investigator Mulcaire tapped her mobile phone seeking salacious details, he had even deleted messages (he said to make space for new messages, but possibly also to keep other media outlets from following NOTW's example). This misled the girl's parents into thinking that the missing girl was still alive and using her phone.
The resulting storm of outrage – disproving the idea that Murdoch was just giving the public what it wanted – finally led to the resignations and arrests and prompted the formation of two investigating committees in the House of Commons, which questioned the police officials, Rupert Murdoch and his son James, head of the UK division of his father's empire, and others.
The cover-up continues
Now that the issue of phone hacking is no longer merely a matter of the privacy of the royal family, people are increasingly disgusted by the media's practices and even more by the involvement of the government in enabling and then covering up Murdoch's activities. At the same time, there is something of a battle going on between rival political parties, as reflected, among other ways, in the political allegiance of the two newspapers that broke the scandal.
The London-based Guardian is associated with the Labour Party, and The New York Times, itself associated with the Democratic Party in the US, has been a working partner of the Guardian in recent years. They took a joint decision to launch a full-scale crusading investigation into this affair, although they say that each paper carried out its work independently of the other. To some extent this situation is creating opportunities for different political factions to increase their share or influence in government at the expense of their rivals. However this has gone far beyond what they expected, and they are now trying hard to wrap it up and limit the damages to their system.
The ruling class and its representatives, including the Conservative-led government, the Labour Party, Parliament and the media as a whole, including even Murdoch and his corporation, are trying to reduce the issue to whether or not the law was broken by the hacking, and whether or not Coulson and other NOTW editors knew about it or authorised it. The spectre of a media empire like Murdoch's flagrantly and repeatedly flouting the law is already sufficient to outrage many – but this is far from the whole of the matter.
The role of the police in protecting Murdoch's newspaper and helping its snooping can no longer be denied. It has come out that top police and court officials have worked for NOTW and NOTW filled their ranks, that they exchanged information, and that there were long-term and very close personal relations between the leaders of the two organizations. It is now being alleged that Murdoch's editors paid individual police for information – and Rebekah Brooks already admitted as much in previous testimony, at the time she headed NOTW, though she retracted this later. But the relationship seems to have been based more on mutual strategic advantage rather than bribes. Murdoch provided the police with experienced opinion-manipulators and political cover, which they certainly needed, among other reasons because of their unrelenting brutalization and occasionally killing of protesters and other people whose rights they supposedly protect.
The links between the Murdoch family and top government officials and leaders of the Labour and now the Conservative Party have also become plain for all to see. It has been especially startling for people to learn that the Prime Minister had hired Murdoch lieutenant Coulson as his press secretary even after it had been established that at least some hacking had been going on when Coulson was at NOTW. In fact, Coulson had been a mastermind of Cameron's public relations strategy before he became PM, and it has been suggested that Cameron hired him precisely to ensure the Murdoch empire's support for the Conservative Party in the elections.
But Murdoch mud has landed on the faces of politicians of the Conservative and Labour Party leaders alike, although not everyone has taken proper notice. For instance it has come out that NOTW spied on Labour leader Gordon Brown for a decade, both when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer under Tony Blair and when he became Prime Minister himself. Brown suspected it all along, he now says. Murdoch's Sun even made public, to the privacy-minded Brown family's great distress, that their infant son had just been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. Yet Brown never said a word, and continued to maintain a close social relationship with Rebekah Brooks, who had been in charge of the Sun in 2006 when this incident occurred and who later became News Corp chief executive. He also continued to have close relations with the Murdoch family.
In fact, Brown and Cameron attended Brooks' 2009 wedding, and she attended the Prince of Wales' fiftieth birthday party. Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair also socialized with the Murdochs and their executives. Despite the spying on their private lives, leading figures in the power structure seemed to find Murdoch's role in society legitimate and useful.
The media in general have a very important role in forming the public opinion that the masses can supposedly freely express at election time. All the mainstream media have the financial ability to reach millions of people. By using this power and their expertise at connecting with various strata of society, they can frame the questions and problems of the day in a way that often leads people to think that the solutions posed by the ruling class are the only ones possible. They also train people in a certain mentality – and Murdoch has excelled at encouraging an unhealthy, self-centred, hypocritical and cynically exploitative outlook. In this general way, and sometimes very specifically, the "free press" help dictate to the "free people" what to think and what to do.
But at the same time the media can play an important role in the rivalry between the political representatives of different factions of the ruling class. It is important for these factions to win the support of the tabloids and other media (in the UK the print press is under fewer restrictions than broadcast media) and the business groups that own them, which in turn, of course, are generally owned by top monopoly capitalists like Murdoch.
As has been pointed out, the law, in its majestic even-handedness, permits rich and poor alike to sleep on the streets, and it also gives news peddlers and financial magnates an equal right to own media empires.
In the decades since Murdoch moved in on the British media, no party has won a general election in the UK without his support. Murdoch's support for Tony Blair in 1997 was an important advantage to the Labour Party that year. All the parties and politicians surely wanted to keep or get that support. In fact, the influence of the tabloids is so strongly felt by the politicians that Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock blamed his 1992 defeat, despite the opinion polls in his favour, on the campaign against him that Murdoch's Sun started in the days just before the election.
Tony Blair and his allies in the Labour Party had already established such a close relationship with NOTW and Murdoch with their “New Labour” project that Blair was invited to take part in the News Corporation conference in Australia in 1995. Brown appeared at Murdoch's side at the Davos World Economic Forum in 2007. The story was repeated in 2008 when the Conservatives' Cameron met Murdoch in Greece to win his support. It seemed that they reached some kind of agreement, because a month later the Sun shifted its support to the Tories (Conservatives) once again.
It has been revealed that all recent British prime ministers repeatedly met with Murdoch or one of his chief executives at Downing Street (although through the back door), the Prime Minister's residence or somewhere else. "Cameron admitted meeting Murdoch executives 26 times in 15 months – but it emerges there were more occasions, many others," Polly Toynbee wrote in the Guardian.
If the leadership of both major political parties and Murdoch got along so well together, so much so that the politicians decided to put up with the occasional stab in the back, what does that say about the supposed "choice" that these parties offer the people in the elections that are considered the ultimate definition of "freedom"?
But the relationship between the ruling class political system and the media is not limited to Murdoch. This is where rivalry between different financial and political groups seems to have played a role in this scandal, although policy differences seemed to have been largely absent in this affair despite the public controversies during this period (over the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and domestic cutbacks). Murdoch's News Corporation already owned 39 percent of B-Sky-B television, but he was planning to take complete control. This required government permission, and it would be hard to believe that Cameron and Murdoch and his executives did not discuss this during their meetings. Under questioning at an emergency House of Commons meeting Cameron was forced to admit it, though he insisted the conversations had been "appropriate".
This takeover, the most important move on News Corp's strategic agenda, would have brought Murdoch British media dominance, threatening even the position of BBC. There was opposition to this within ruling circles. Whether this played a role in encouraging the exposure and discrediting of Murdoch and his empire in the UK is not clear. But Murdoch has now withdrawn his bid.
In the end, probably for various different reasons, the British ruling class seems to have decided to try and cool down the issue in the hope of limiting further exposures. The appearance of Murdoch father and son and their top executives before the British Parliament's Culture, Media and Sports Select Committee might well be the final set piece. Contrary to the media description of Murdoch being grilled, in fact this was a tribune to allow Murdoch to deny any wrongdoing and justify his behaviour, portraying himself as a victim betrayed by a much-trusted employee, without being confronted with the more burning questions. There were no questions related to bribery, corruption and blackmail.
Like Murdoch, Cameron has refused to admit that he did anything wrong, which may very well be the case in the narrow legal terms within which both parties and the media are trying to confine the affair. He seems to have survived despite his deep involvement with Murdoch, but he does have the effective defence that all the political parties and many of the system's other pillars have been equally involved.
Opposition leader Ed Milliband might have gone a little bit further than others in his rhetoric, but he too has had to come to terms and led the parliament in taking a soft approach towards Murdoch and his gang, treating them as respected guests rather than criminals. It's worth mentioning that Murdoch supported Ed's brother David Milliband in their rivalry for Labour Party leadership, but Ed had his share of meetings with Murdoch's minions – and got caught failing to include them in his recently-released meeting log.
The House of Commons enquiry was not meant to get at the truth but on the contrary to cover up the crimes of the Murdoch empire and more importantly the complicity of a broad swath of the system's political institutions in pandering to and protecting a media empire that doesn't reflect public opinion but creates it, an empire whose goal is to delude and degrade the people, to dumb them and numb them, to spread the notion that because of elections and competing political parties, the rule of capital over the vast majority of people is somehow not a dictatorship.
This is the real picture that emerges from this scandal, and it gives the lie – or at least should – to the myth of a freely elected government and freely elected parliament, the free and fair media and the free market economy.
Abonnieren
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