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“Who did betray us …”
"Wer hat uns verraten
Sozialdemokraten"
In English:
"Who did betray us
Social-de-mo-crats"
The slogan above is still shouted these days during left-wing rallies in Germany. Few remember its historic background though.
In Munich, each year, at the end of April, the new summer season beer prices were announced. In 1844, a nearly 30% price hike from 5 to 6.5 pennies led to May 1 protests by workers and soldiers. For lack of clean drinking water, beer was a nessessary part of the local diet. All but two breweries were damaged in the uproar. Days later troops were brought in from outside the city to eventually end the protests. (Source in German. Sitenote: A page on the official City of Munich website mentions a "mere 2 penny hike". This, without giving the base price …)
On May 1 1886 labor unions in Chicago called for a general strike to achieve an 8 hour workday. During clashes at the picket line, police forces killed some of the workers. This escalated over the next days into the Haymarket riot.
In 1929 the, by then, traditional May 1 labor rallies in Berlin were declared illegal by the Prussian secretary of the interior and the Berlin mayor. Both were socialdemocrats. The unions supported by the communist party took to the street anyhow. The police was ordered by the above mentioned authorities to stop the peaceful rallies and eventually shot 32 demonstrators and bystanders. Like in Chicago, the rally leaders, but no policeman or politician, were prosecuted. In Chicago, four of them were killed.
After 1929 (and up to today), the split between socialdemocrats and left labor in Germany and elsewhere was never fixed. The Nazis, and the highly concentrated capital funding them, did explorated this weakness to get into power. On May 1 1933 Hitler declared May 1 to be the permanent "national day of labor". On May 2 1933 he declare all labor unions illegal and to be abolished. Today May 1 is still an appropriate reason for commemorating clashes in Berlin.
Tomorow, cities in the U.S. will see large rallies and boykotts (i.e.strikes) by immigrants. I regard these to be in the tradition of labor fighting for its rights. Please support them.
As the global class war and feudalistic capitalism expand, a reasoned voice in economy science, John Kenneth Galbraith, decided to no longer take part in the discussion. But you can hear him in this 1999 interview and don’t miss his son James’ thoughtful writing about The Predator State:
But if the government is a predator, then it will fail: not merely politically, but in every substantial way. Government will not cope with global warming, or Hurricane Katrina, or Iraq—not because it is incompetent but because it is willfully indifferent to the problem of competence. The questions are, in what ways will the failure hit the population? And what mechanisms survive for calling the predators to account? Unfortunately, at the highest levels, one cannot rely on the justice system, thanks to the power of the pardon. It’s politics or nothing, recognizing that in a world of predators, all established parties are corrupted in part.
Another fitting piece here is William Pfaff’s recent reasoning on Why Europe should reject U.S. market capitalism.
In the United States, the new model of corporate business has evolved toward a form of crony capitalism, in which business and government interests are often corruptly intermingled, the system resistant to reform because of the financial dependence of both major political parties on contributed money.
Frequently described by its supporters as a progressive step in the development of a new international economy, the political-economic system that has evolved in the United States has proved regressive in crucial respects, as well as inefficient and abusive of the public interest.
Pfaff is right, but why should only Europe reject this model. China, India, Japan and, most important, the U.S. itself should reject this pervers predator market capitalism.
As you take up the proud May 1 tradition in one way or another, please keep in mind the slogan cited at the begin of this creed.
It’s a never ending long war the Rumsfeld puppet openly declared on global labor and any kind of social responsibility. We the people will win, but on that way, we may be betrayed even by a party we think we can trust.
I don’t normally read much less respond to posts full of invective but short on facts because when I do, if what is being said I find particularly poisonous, eg dividing a nation up by race and culture then generalising and ascribing certain attributes to that race/culture then my responses are going to also be heavy on invective.
Trouble is if a post strikes as sufficiently noxious the send button is a lot more likely to be hit in the heat of the moment
I don’t deny that I spewed invective across the board after I read JJ’s post. Probably if it were the first time that a poster put up a post that judged others by their race/language or sexual orientation I would have let it ride.
I don’t believe it was. Yet a post outlining the actions that result in crimes against humanity committed by the US in the name of amerikans is dismissed as being anti-american.
Like the charge anti-semitism which zionists and their supporters level at those people who question, decry, or attack Israel’s actions, the anti-amerikanism charge strikes one as a hypocritical attempt to ignore protests about the crimes committed in the name of the US and recast the people of the US in the role of victim rather than perpetrator by misappropriating the language of the oppressed.
A call for leadership is fine, but should only be made about oneself; that is there is something inappropriate about telling others to find a leader. The second thing about a call for leadership is it is best made while committing action and doesn’t work as a replacement for action. If enough people in the US take meaningful action against the war-mongering and lies, leaders will surface. Unlikely to work the other way around.
Another comment was made about the ridiculousness of the statement that the “US is currently murdering raping and burgling it’s way around the planet”.
Put this debate into 2 parts; firstly is the US actually doing this?, and secondly why would someone describe whatever the US is up to in such emotionally loaded and prejudicial terms?
Rape is such an integral part of warfare that if you google “war and rape” you will find hundreds of theories about why this is so. Ruth Seifert particularly puts up some compelling theories, a lot more sophisticated than the “sex and death” theories used by the military presumably to try and justify acts of violence on non-combatant women.
Of course it is always the other side who commit these rapes, normally the losing side,
given history is told by the victors. So the ‘losers’ are the ones guilty of these rapes. Germany after WW2, the allies’ story was that it was the Russians who raped. Yet a Berliner that I worked with a long time ago, who was in her middle teens when Berlin fell told me she didn’t find the Russians soldiers were any worse or any better than the allies. Russian, Ukranian, Lithuanian, Jewsish women copped it from whatever army was around at the time, especially if it wasn’t the nationality of thwe woman being assaulted.
Many of those raped ended up as refugees in Australia and the US, some chose to discuss it later.
Many rapists were cruel, others attempted politeness as if that could make rape other than what it is. That variable was a function of the individual not his nationality.
Most was heterosexual adult rape but much was not once again this wasn’t a function of nationality.
I seem to remember one of the My Lai eyewitnesses described an act of paedophillia followed by the murder of the infant victim.
For the majority of the 50+ years I have been on this planet the US has been in an armed conflict somewhere around the globe. For a while Jon Pilger was touting a figure of something like 208 armed conflicts involving the US in the 215 years from the declaration of Independence to 1991. All were fought off US soil!
Many different reasons have been given to explain why the US went into conflict in these other nations, yet like Iraq close examination usually rules out any motive other than controlling the source or transport lane of some resource. Burglary is the act of entering someone else’s place then stealing from the owner/s.
Therefore murdering raping and burgling their way around the planet is not an altogether unreasonable way of describing what it is that the US military and it’s leaders have been doing.
So why put it in those terms, knowing full well that some amerikans are going to go straight into anger and denial?
As stated above this has been going on for at least as long as MoA users have been alive, yet nothing even looks like stopping it. Iraq may be an extreme example, the most extreme since Vietnam, yet between the two there have been many many others Panama, Nicuragua, Lebanon, Palestine, Sudan to name but a few.
If on occasion ( a very rare occasion) US involvement may construed as altruism, there is never a time when bombing a city or other population can be justified/is not a war crime.
Yet despite protests, nothing fundamental has changed in 50+ years, it has become worse.
Given that US citizens have been indoctrinated from an early age into believing there is something special, something perfect about their country and knowing full well that as much as one may try to consciously acknowledge that history demonstrates that nowhere is better or more ethical than anywhere else perhaps a consistent and continual dose of the anger that many who live on the rest of the planet feel toward US crimes against humanity may, just may, cause someone somewhere in the US to do more than the usual preaching to the converted or token action which achieves little other than allowing the person taking the action to feel at least he or she isn’t part of the horror. One thing is for sure nothing else is working.
One of the 99% of the diatribes produced and never posted was about the $800+ billion this war will cost. It included dates the US was working to; 2011 and 2016. This was a bi-partisan figure. The objection from the dems wasn’t about the dates or the massive amounts, much less the wrongheadedness of the invasion, just whether or not it’s more sensible to draw the sums down once anually, rather than in lots of diverse appropriations.
The obscenity currently spreading out like a runny malodourous turd across 104 acres of land on the banks of the Tigris, called an embassy but really an imperial outpost has been concealed from the public by both parties, not just the rethugs.
Therefore voting for either one of the scum running in US national elections will do nothing to stop the slaughter in Iraq or anywhere else.
Imagine if the dems don’t win, when a drovers dog should piss it in, maybe, just maybe
it will inspire them to consider that the way to the power they crave is for them to be substantially different to the rethugs.
There isn’t much else on offer. History teaches that Empires end in one of two ways, either by failure from within as the empire’s population loses faith in the aims of empire, chiefly because the population is deriving little benefit from empire, or, by the victims of empire organising themselves sufficiently well to attack the empire en masse.
Neither alternative is pleasant but the second is far less pleasant than the first since it almost inevitably involves invasion and forcing the population of empire into submission. The uprising of the oppressed scenario, almost inevitably results in the formation of a new Empire, led by opportunists amongst the former oppressed.
No one can really know how they would react if faced with such a stark choice, so there won’t be any “I would’ve/ you should’ve” but however stark that choice may be, ignoring the obvious will only make things worse.
Cutting jj slack and accepting her remark about dying of cancer was genuine and not some bitchy rejoinder, it occurs that whatever shape any of us are in it is not nearly as bad as that of however many civilians in far flung corners of this planet who will die as a direct result of US military action over the next 24 hours.
And yes some will die as a result of other’s military action, but evidence suggests that in the last 50 or so years the chances are greater that it will be a US inspired bomb, bullet or bayonet than they are of it being of any other nation’s inspiration.
I neither need nor desire any ‘slack’. Cut some for the Iraquis because the current administration ploy of blaming the abbattoir that is contemporary Iraq on Iraqis and the inability to form a ‘balanced puppet government is increasingly finding it’s way into US activist blogosphere.
Sectarianism was a nasty glint in Rummy’s eye until Negroponte pulled his notorious ‘death squad caper’ yet one is far more likely to see those on the left alluding to the division between Iraqis as providing bushco with an excuse for keeping troops in country than any suggestion that sectarianism is a deliberate tactic of the occupiers.
Some people come to this site to express views, ideas, theories about the current appaling place that corporatism/capitalism/greed/imperialism or whatever other label one puts on it, has taken humankind to.
Obviously people with frequently similar view are likely to bond, but for some that just cannot be the primary reason for coming here.
Not if it means tempering the views, ideas, theories so as not to put the bonding at risk.
Having no desire to re-run old arguments, I won’t raise the subject that caused me to feel I couldn’t interact with some MoA habitues at the most fundamental level but that is what happened.
there was no animus toward the people involved just an acknowledgement that the cultural indoctrination had gone too deep for the person/people to ever truly be free of it.
Surely the message matters more than the messenger so an unsigned post should still say the same but relieves the neccessity for engagement.
However people are social animals so unsigning (this was never an attempt at anonymity ie concealing the identity of the poster, it was an attempt at disengagement) merely provokes more dialogue completely unconnected with the people suffering in order for us to find our existence more convenient.
Evden worse any attempt to ‘come back’ will provoke even more discourse, some of which will be about this poster’s particular circumstances. More skating around the edge of the elephant, avoiding acknowledgement of it or it’s horror show.
Posted by: Anonymous | May 2 2006 10:04 utc | 41
@anonymous poster #41:
Now this, I can work with. Thank you!
Just to get it out of the way: it may relieve your mind somewhat to hear that I, at least, neither cut you extra slack for a medical problem nor castigate you for it. (After all, turnabout is fair play: I have no doubt that there are physical ills amongst the Bush admin, Cheney in particular, and I don’t want to have to cut slack for them, either.)
Now then:
Another comment was made about the ridiculousness of the statement that the “US is currently murdering raping and burgling it’s way around the planet”. Put this debate into 2 parts; firstly is the US actually doing this?, and secondly why would someone describe whatever the US is up to in such emotionally loaded and prejudicial terms?
Actually, I don’t dispute either that this is happening, or your right to describe it as such. I dispute your conflation of “America” and “America’s military”. So there’s a third part which you are not stating, which to me is central to any discussion that seeks to assign responsibility, namely “to what extent can the U.S. public (or anyone else, for that matter) be blamed for the actions of the military?”
It is very tempting to say “the U.S. public is universally guilty of the crimes of the U.S. military, because even those who were not actively involved in said crimes acted as enablers for those who were.” (And the corrolary is “nobody outside the U.S. is guilty of the crimes committed by the U.S. military.”) That makes it all very simple, and thus appealing. The problem is that this viewpoint does not hold up to scrutiny either.
Yes, there are a lot of outright guilty Americans (I’d say roughly 95% of national-level elected officials necessarily fall in this group; the other 5% might or might not). And there are even more Americans who are direct enablers for the outright guilty ones, because they had every evidence of the guilt of the first group and yet still went along with them — every single person who voted for Bush is automatically, in my view, in one of these two groups, although they aren’t alone. Then there’s an even larger group who could still probably be called enablers, because they saw what was happening and although they did not directly go along with the first group, they did not make enough of an effort to oppose them. But I don’t think anyone who really examines the facts would claim that even those three groups really encompass the whole of America. All along, there have been people taking stands. They are in the minority, it is true, and they haven’t had much effect, but they are there. (At least, they don’t seem to have had much effect — maybe they have; maybe without them America would have descended into a fascist dictatorship decades ago. The problem with history is that there is no control group.) Look, just for a start, at the number of Americans here at MoA.
Of course, you could claim that to live in America (unless you live on a completely self-sufficient farm) is to be a consumer, and to be a consumer is to give money to the multinational corporations which are, if not at the root of the problem, very low on the stem. But if you go that route, then the same can be said of everyone who lives in a society technologically advanced enough to have access to this website. Sure, it’s possible that the goods manufactured for use in Europe and Asia are made out of organic rice cakes by elves, obtained via fair trade, and transported using pixy dust, while the goods going to America are the more familiar ones created by exploiting the poor and stealing resources around the world. But I don’t think it’s very likely, do you? If that’s happening, why aren’t the fair trade elves selling guilt-free goods to Americans? Surely there would be a market for them amongst the left. If some amazing accounting whiz were to examine what becomes of the prices paid for manufactured goods in first-world countries outside America, I suspect they would find that a tidy fraction of the price goes to the same nefarious purposes which are more explicit in America. To sum up: the only real difference between the guilt absolutely inherent in just being alive in America and the guilt inherent in just being alive in, say, Europe is that the people in Europe have a more sophisticated mechanism for denying their own involvement, and a scapegoat in the form of America.
That’s really why I objected to your post. I’m not denying that the American military does all the vile stuff that is attributed to it — unlike the fair-trade elves and pixy dust, the military stories are all too believable. But the American military and the government associated with it does not equal America, just like Tony Blair’s government does not equal Great Britain, Berlusconi’s does not equal Italy, Howard’s does not equal Australia, and so forth. The American military and its masters have merely been more adept at selling a picture of domestic unity (both domestically and abroad) than the others have.
Posted by: The Truth Gets Vicious When You Corner It | May 2 2006 18:10 utc | 45
@Groucho:
Although you obviously aren’t expecting a serious answer here, why not: no, that would not be called a -1-sum game. In game theory, any game where the outcomes have a constant sum is equivalent to a zero-sum game, because game theory does not distinguish between positive and negative outcomes, only between “more desireable” and “less desireable”. A zero-sum game is any game in which:
1) A better outcome for one player means a worse outcome for one or more other players, and
2) When comparing any two possible outcomes A and B, the total increase in numeric rankings from A to B for players who have increases is exactly equal to the total decrease in numberic rankings from A to B for players who have decreases.
Suppose I have 10 $10 bills (or 10€ bills, or whatever), and I’m going to give them away to you (Groucho) and Slothrop, and that both of you will be exactly as happy, on a scale of 0 to 100, as the amount of money you get from me. (You have no emotional baggage, in other words.) This is a zero-sum game even though the worst possible outcome is that you are not made any happier.
Zero-sum games are very rare in the real world, precisely because an honest application of game theory requires that rankings take EVERYTHING into account, not just monetary gain or loss. To go back to the example: suppose you and Slothrop both decide that if you win more than half the money, you will be so saddened by the inequality of the outcome that you will never be happier than 90 on a 100-point scale. Then the game is no longer zero-sum, because moving from the outcome where one of you wins everything to where you split the bills 50-50 increases the total of the rankings from 90 to 100. But it’s difficult both to figure out what the outcomes will be like in advance and to be so detatched from your own feelings as to be able to quantify them that you very seldom see an analysis of a real-world situation which is reasonably close to reality.
As far as I know, there is no term for a game in which all players inevitably lose — in fact, I’m not sure it’s possible to design a game, even in theory, where all players inevitably lose, because “losing” in game theory just means “getting the worst possible outcome” and in order for there to be a worst possible outcome, there must be at least one possible outcome which is better than the rest, which means that losing is not inevitable because a better outcome is possible. (Although for that better outcome to actually occur, at least one other player might have to adopt an irrational strategy — which you usually assume can’t happen in game theory, but does in fact occur in real life. Look at Bush.)
There is, however, a definition of an unfair game: an unfair game is one in which some specific player can, by following the proper strategy, always win, regardless of the strategies adopted by other players.
Oh, and by the way: originally the obese people with cell phones were going to be in spandex, too. Your keyboard would never have survived.
Posted by: The Truth Gets Vicious When You Corner It | May 3 2006 2:22 utc | 51
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