tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34588400280957940612024-03-05T02:16:57.248-08:00Ruff TalkCommentary on the state of the world, political and historical observations and an occasional tale.Allen Ruffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18310195276315827048noreply@blogger.comBlogger40125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458840028095794061.post-78857606622248312532021-01-06T10:29:00.002-08:002021-01-06T11:11:10.646-08:00Review: The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins <p><span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;">[The following initially appeared in <i>Against the Curren</i>t #210, </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">January-February 2021.]</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: black; color: white;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Review</span>:<i> <span style="font-size: 18px;">The Jakarta Method: </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade </span></i><span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>& the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World</i>. (</span></span><span style="background-color: black; font-size: 18px;"><span style="color: white;">New York: Public Affairs/Hatchett, 2020)</span></span><span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 18px;"> </span><span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 18px;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 18px;"> </span><span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: 18px;">-Allen Ruff</span></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgM3uF9mwsgih1jizyW_OOmZFna-VS9RM9n0NFVRShwDkVvr437nRnuyoeksijYCbb7zgGHTaR6ujcKRUTLiV_MthXlWUyjcz4Eh2HVHz2-fonMMkD3Hu1Wr8U32frsLxD6-Yu2lhUcE8II/s499/Jakarta-Method.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></a></div><span style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><div><span style="font-size: 18px;"><br /></span></div>AT THE START of October 1965, a U.S.-aided and abetted military coup overthrew <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkXdH8Uxet1aWVwXC55LJtkteO-5HhglCJWHnTEycdumNTBhu4X0h-9z-4A42r2myhIL7QlcTGwZP_ecqX5E3RhmzITOv3iQsYlUOz0Xh_HYEHPdASjnRatqt9DNvylzmuNQ9q30w9vMWw/s499/Jakarta-Method.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="323" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkXdH8Uxet1aWVwXC55LJtkteO-5HhglCJWHnTEycdumNTBhu4X0h-9z-4A42r2myhIL7QlcTGwZP_ecqX5E3RhmzITOv3iQsYlUOz0Xh_HYEHPdASjnRatqt9DNvylzmuNQ9q30w9vMWw/s320/Jakarta-Method.jpg" /></a></div>Indonesia’s left-leaning Sukarno government. Not just an account of that tragic episode and the subsequent slaughter of a million or more actual and alleged communists and the horrific imprisonment of another million, veteran journalist Vincent Bevins’ The Jakarta Method is something far more.</span></span><div><span style="font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span><div><span style="background-color: black; caret-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); color: #cccccc; font-family: arial; font-size: 18px;">This book recounts how what transpired across the sprawling archipelago nation became a model for U.S.-assisted rightist terror across the Global South. It explores how the blood-drenched annihilation of Indonesia’s left provided a blueprint for, in the author’s words, a “monstrous international network of extermination” that laid foundations for future U.S.-led capitalist “globalization.”</span></div><div><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: black; font-family: arial;"><span style="color: white;">Simply put, the resource-rich and strategically located country of 140 million, deemed too valuable to be left to its own devices, had to be reined in and integrated into the U.S. imperial orbit.</span></span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: black; font-family: arial;"><span style="color: white;">With the Cold War rhetorical threat of an expanding “communist menace” providing the pretext, Washington sought out, trained, and directly assisted the willing executioners at all levels while providing them international cover through a concerted disinformation campaign in the Western press.</span></span></p></div><div><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial; letter-spacing: -0.0415625em;"><span style="color: #6aa84f; font-size: large;"><b>Transgressions Against Empire</b></span></span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The country’s first president and a long-standing leader of the national liberation movement that successfully resisted post-World War II Dutch attempts to reinstall colonial rule, Sukarno had to be overthrown.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">His major transgressions as a non-communist anti-imperialist were several, as viewed in Washington and CIA headquarters in Langley.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Among them was the fact that he set out on a course of neutrality as an initiator of the “non-aligned movement.” He certainly overstepped by hosting the April, 1955 “Asia-Africa Conference” at Bandung with representatives from 29 decolonizing nations looking to forge “Third World” development paths independent from the Cold War’s East-West binary system of Moscow satellites and U.S.-dominated “Free World” neocolonial dependency.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The “Bandung Conference” drew Washington’s attention and led, in 1958, to an unsuccessful CIA attempt to destabilize the regime from the outside that included the arming of outlying-island insurgents and U.S.-piloted air assaults launched from the Philippines. (Striking a familiar note, the operation was exposed when one of the planes was shot down and the American pilot captured.)</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">When that stratagem failed, U.S. assistance already underway to internal anti-communist forces and regime opponents, most notably in the Indonesian military, increased.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Sukarno’s second major offense was that he provided space in his ruling coalition for the public and unarmed Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). By the early 1960s, the PKI was the third largest CP in the world after China and the Soviet Union, with 3.5 million members and a popular base of some 20 million non-members organized into a broad array of popular mass organizations.</span></p><h3 style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: "lnum"; font-variant-numeric: lining-nums; letter-spacing: -0.0415625em; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: large;">The Overthrow</span></h3><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">While Sukarno sought to govern through a delicate balancing act that recognized the country’s major power blocs — the PKI, a Muslim establishment, and the military — there certainly was internal opposition. It included old colonial elites alarmed by the nationalization of extractive industries and the redistribution of large land holdings; more conservative anti-communist Muslims opposed to a range of social reforms including women’s rights; and elements of the military command looking to expand their own political authority and increased control over varied nationalized sectors of the economy.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">So what happened in 1965 and after? As Indonesia historian John Roosa has put it, “Almost overnight the Indonesian government went from being a fierce voice for cold war neutrality and anti-imperialism to a quiet, compliant partner of the U.S. world order.”</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">It did not come from nowhere, of course, as the groundwork was laid well in advance. Already in the mid-1950s, Indonesian army personnel had begun training at various U.S. bases, most notably at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">By 1965, up to a quarter of Indonesia’s Army command, some 2,800 officers, had come to receive not only technical instruction and ideological indoctrination but importantly, Bevins tells us, some intoxicating taste of the “American good life” at off-base bars and clubs.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">In addition and continuing through the Kennedy and early Johnson years, on-the-ground U.S. advisors instructed the country’s national police as the country became the second largest recipient of police funding, behind South Vietnam.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Such “assistance” provided not only weapons but also the technologies of surveillance, record keeping and communication that would come to play a vital role in 1965 and after.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The catalyst came on the night of September 30 when a group of regime-loyal junior army officers kidnapped and murdered six rightist generals plotting to overthrow Sukarno and impose a military junta. (Five of the six had trained in the United States.)</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">While the actual role of the PKI in the counter-coup would later become a topic of debate, the immediate response by the military led by the future dictator Suharto was to depose Sukarno and to open a year-long terror campaign that targeted the PKI and all those somehow associated with it, actual or alleged.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Carried out by the army, police, paramilitaries, civilian death squads and Muslim youth gangs, the wave of horrific violence also took aim at the country’s ethnic Chinese, rumored to be communist.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Among those targeted by the repression were the members of Gerwani, the country’s three million-strong women’s organization.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">As part of a U.S.-assisted propaganda campaign to incite anti-communist hysteria, military psychological warfare specialists circulated the story that a satanic, communist, witch cult of emasculating Gerwani women had assassinated the September 30 generals after mutilating and castrating them in some bizarre orgiastic ritual.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">As a result, innumerable Gerwani members were rounded up, raped and executed, at times with their entire families, while countless others faced years of brutal imprisonment.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The direct U.S. role in the PKI’s annihilation, long minimized or denied, was central. The Pentagon and CIA rushed in logistical support of all sorts, including communication systems that aided in the coordination of the persecution and mass slaughter across the archipelago.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The U.S. Jakarta Embassy’s “political officer” provided Suharto’s forces with long-compiled lists that targeted for execution thousands of known PKI members in the unions, peasant and student organizations, and among the intellectuals. As Bevins described it:</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">“(T)he U.S. government helped spread the propaganda that made the killing possible and engaged in constant conversations with the Army to make sure the military officers had everything they needed, from weapons to kill lists. The U.S. embassy constantly prodded the military to adopt a stronger position and take over the government, knowing full well that the method being employed to make this possible was to round up hundreds of thousands of people around the country, stab or strangle them, and throw their corpses into rivers. The Indonesian military officers understood very well that the more people they killed, the weaker the left would be, and the happier Washington would be.…”</span></p><h3 style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: "lnum"; font-variant-numeric: lining-nums; letter-spacing: -0.0415625em; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: large;">The Murder Export Trade</span></h3><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Importantly, what occurred was immediately viewed in Washington as a major victory in Asia at a time when far more costly and escalating “boots on the ground” efforts in Vietnam had already long soured.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Bevins goes so far as to argue that while the Vietnam War dominated U.S. domestic politics for many years, “it achieved exactly nothing;” in contrast, the mass killings in Indonesia, done on the cheap, were possibly the biggest “win for the West” in the entire Cold War.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The lessons of the Indonesian “‘scorched earth” approach, what came to be known as the “Jakarta Method,” were well-heeded as the “national security state” ratcheted up support for slaughter of unarmed civilians and backing of authoritarian capitalist regimes elsewhere.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Bevins tells us that some seven years after the genocide began in Indonesia, mysterious graffitied slogans “Yakarta viene” and “Jakarta se acerca” began appearing on walls across Santiago, Chile. Postcards marked with the arachnid logo of the far-right Pátria y Libertad began arriving at the homes of members of socialist Salvador Allende’s government.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Foretelling the September 1973 U.S.-backed “General’s Coup” and mass arrests, disappearances and killings to come, the cards simply read “Jakarta is coming.”</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">In Brazil during the same period, security state officials plotted their own “Operação Jacarta” to execute suspected “subversives.” While that plan never materialized, the military dictatorship — in power since the 1964 overthrow of the moderate João Goulart — arrested, jailed and tortured thousands.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The country’s “security services” played a key role, along with their Argentinian counterparts, in the U.S.-backed murderous campaign of cross-continent state terror, “Operation Condor.”</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Clearly, by the early-mid ’70s, as Bevins informs us, the “Jakarta Method” had morphed into an international state-terror network under U.S. tutelage.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">While researching the proliferation of “The Method” across South America in the ’70s and Central America in the ’80s (where in Guatemala, the primary target became entire Indigenous peoples deemed “subversive”), Bevins counted a total of 22 countries in the “U.S. camp” where murderous state terror was employed against unarmed, innocent civilians. He actually discovered use of the term “Jakarta” as a code word for such rightist violence in eleven of them.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">While the bulk of the Indonesian mass murder occurred within a year of the 1965 coup, arrests and jailings continued for a decade as Suharto’s “New Order” regime became an exemplar of an inherently corrupt, crony capitalist state and an IMF-backed “favorable investment climate.”</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The mass murder also continued as the military, with a U.S. “green light,” invaded neighboring East Timor in December, 1975. The resultant 25-year occupation, amplifying the full range of “Jakarta Method” genocidal techniques, led to the death of perhaps a third of the tiny nation’s population.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">A savvy multilingual journalist who traveled worldwide to uncover the story of “The Method,” Bevins interviewed survivors of the horror on several continents. Their stories, interwoven with the historical narrative, bring an extraordinary, human dimension and some glimpse of the long-lasting personal and collective trauma to the account.</span></p><h3 style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: "lnum"; font-variant-numeric: lining-nums; letter-spacing: -0.0415625em; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: large;">Human Dimensions</span></h3><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">In one of the most moving parts of the book, Bevins pays a visit to Magdalena, an aged woman who, as a 17-year-old in 1965, was picked up and interrogated, accused of being a Gerwani “witch,” tortured, repeatedly raped and imprisoned for years.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Her only crime? As a worker in a Jakarta T-shirt factory she, like all her co-workers, became a member of the PKI-associated union association.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">When Bevins met her, she was surviving on meager charity and living all alone in a small shack, cut off from her family and ostracized by the local community. Why? Her life was still stigmatized by her alleged association with “communism.”</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">In another passage, Bevins speaks with a witness to the mass butchery and burial on a beach in Bali, a local killing field that became the site of a luxurious resort. The island’s tourism boom centered in that very location, we learn, started soon after the violence as the Suharto regime turned to encouraging foreign investment in today’s “island paradise.”</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Toward the end of the book, Bevins recounts his conversation with Winarso, at the time of the interview the head of an organization for survivors of the 1965 genocide. He asked the lifelong activist who won the Cold War.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The man answered succinctly that the United States won; that capitalism had won. Bevins then asked how that took place. Winarso’s answer poignantly went right to the heart of it all. “You killed us,” he replied.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: arial;">While it has some minor flaws (the absence of an index being one), Bevins’ “Jakarta Method” is important. It should be read by anyone seeking a handle on the nature of the contemporary global system and the ubiquitous violence underlying its construction.</span></p></div></div>Allen Ruffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18310195276315827048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458840028095794061.post-61808394061340074152018-11-12T05:59:00.000-08:002019-02-02T14:08:01.410-08:00Marking The Centenary: The End of the "Great War" & Its Effects<div class="Apple-Mail-URLShareWrapperClass">
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">-Allen Ruff</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">[The following, slightly revised and with graphics added, initially appeared in<a href="https://solidarity-us.org/atc/current/"> </a></span><a href="https://solidarity-us.org/atc/current/">Against the Curren</a><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://solidarity-us.org/atc/current/">t</a> #197 (November-December 2018).]</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">WORLD WAR I drew to a close a hundred years ago with the cease-fire on Europe’s Western Front, the Armistice of November 11, 1918. It then came to a formal conclusion with the German signing of the Allied-dictated “Treaty of Versailles” in late June, 1919 and subsequent Paris accords imposed upon Berlin’s co-belligerents, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Turkey and Bulgaria.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">At its end, the war left old class-based social and political antagonisms and national grievances unresolved and created massive new ones. As such, it would have immense impacts on social and political currents down to the present — making the study of the war’s events much more than some academic pursuit.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">Celebrating the Armistice, London, November 1918</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The “Great War” had come about as a result of imperialist rivalries and, in the view of historian Arno Mayer and others, parallel attempts by various ruling circles to divert or blunt increasing domestic, internal class tensions — decades of mounting class conflict and increasing challenges from the organized labor and socialist movements.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The class struggle, temporarily derailed as it were in 1914 by chauvinist calls for “national unity” and defense of respective homelands, did not go away, but revived in one country after another as the prolonged cataclysm inflicted ever increasing tolls upon the popular classes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The conflict marked the appearance of modern “total war,” protracted warfare that targeted not only each belligerent’s combatants but their productive capacities and resources. As such, it exacted an unprecedented toll on the laboring classes at “the rear” while necessitating their full social and economic mobilization and sacrifice.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">A monstrous zero-sum game demanding “total victory” — the unconditional surrender of the vanquished and a vindictive penal “peace” — it precluded the chances of a lasting, stable postwar world.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Harnessing the latest in scientific development, technological innovation and mass production techniques for military ends (the airplane, the tank, the submarine, poison gas and the machine gun), the war’s industrialized mass slaughter resulted in an estimated 40 million casualties, dead and wounded, the majority of them civilian. (By 1914, to be sure, each of Europe’s dominant “civilized nations” had long engaged in the mass murder of millions deemed racially inferior and expendable worldwide.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Contagious disease, especially typhus and influenza, continuing into the postwar years, took perhaps the heaviest toll, numbering in the tens of millions among populations weakened by hunger and exposure. Leaving entire societies<span style="color: rgba(0 , 0 , 0 , 0);"> </span><span style="color: inherit;">physically devastated, the war and its aftermath additionally created millions of displaced — an estimated four to five million refugees set in motion between 1914 and ’22.</span></span></div>
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Massive Transformations</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Nowhere among the European belligerents (except perhaps in England) did the war’s destruction, deprivations and forced movement of populations allow the prewar social order to remain unscathed as the conflict telescoped and intensified pre-existing social cleavages.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Well before its conclusion, the issue had become not whether the war would change the political and social face of Europe — but how extensive and deep the transformations would be. It ended with not only a major power reshuffling of the global order, but also societies torn by internecine conflicts, many of which took on the character of protracted civil wars with varying degrees of political and class violence.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The war additionally exacted far more than the immense physical and material toll. Unrelenting suffering and loss, especially during the conflict’s latter two years, affected the perceptions, thoughts and desires of Europe’s masses.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">As the cataclysm plodded on, fanning flames of resentment and desperation, it forced countless millions to think about fundamental issues involving war and peace, justice and oppression and the folly of their leaders’ wisdom in ways that had never before seemed possible or required. As a result, the world would never be the same. (Kolko, 105).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Various classes fared differently in different countries, of course. Those cushioned by old accumulated wealth and class privilege, and the beneficiaries of industrial and finance capital, did well as war demand, as usual, generated immense profits.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">So too, did black marketeers and profiteering middling merchants even as war-induced inflation, scarcities and rationing of necessities gnawed at the wellbeing of urban middle and white-collared classes — those rentiers, shopkeepers, civil servants on fixed incomes and petit professionals, layers that would soon display widespread receptivity to reactionary postwar political currents.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Berlin food line, winter 1916-17</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">And while those remaining in the countryside, at least in those agricultural regions not laid waste or stripped of resources, fared better in general than those in the cities, the laboring classes as a whole faced the greatest hardships, both as military fodder and as hard-pressed home-front toilers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The war’s devastation, dislocations and hardship, most significantly, paved the way for the Russian Revolution — the regime change of March (February) 1917 and then the November (October) Bolshevik-led soviets’ seizure of state power, in class terms the first successful social revolution since 1789.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The October Revolution and the opposing counterrevolution shaped the way the war ended and the contours of the immediate postwar era.</span></div>
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War’s End and Social Upheaval</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The war moved toward a conclusion not solely because of the often attributed Allied counteroffensive following a failed last-ditch German effort to take Paris in Spring 1918. The end had already come into view by mid-1917 as war weary battered troops on all sides, encouraged by news of Russia’s February Revolution, proved increasingly reluctant to fight any further.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Following a disastrous failed offensive that April, for example, mutinies and associated disruptions occurred among nearly half the French infantry divisions deployed on the Western Front. In Germany, a harbinger of later events came that August in the form of a short-lived mutiny of 4000 sailors in the northern port of Wilmershaven.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">German Sailors marching under the red flag, Wilmershaven, August 1917</span></td></tr>
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<span style="color: inherit; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">On the Austro-Italian front at Caporetto in that fall, some 250,000 hard-pressed Italian troops surrendered to the enemy in what amounted to a mass desertion.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">Mass surrender/desertion of Italian troops, Caporetto, fall, 1917 </span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Paralleling such rising discontent in the military, ongoing strikes and mass demonstrations in cities such as Berlin, Turin and Vienna took on an increasingly political character. In Eastern and Central Europe especially, military rebellions and left-organized home front demonstrations and strikes demanding bread and peace increasingly doomed the Central Powers’ further prosecution of the war.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">In Berlin in January, 1918 a demonstration organized by radical shop stewards, largely employed in the city’s munitions factories and independent of the trade union and Social Democratic (SPD) leadership, brought out some 400,000 workers and touched off solidarity demonstrations by millions nationwide. Protesting not just deteriorating conditions, they called for “peace without reparations” and democratic reform in what amounted to a dress rehearsal for later events.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">That same month witnessed a mass general strike against the war in Budapest, again a preview of things to come. Mass strikes by hundreds of thousands in Vienna and surrounding industrial towns during the same period also made increasingly political demands. A February 1918 sailors’ mutiny aboard Austro-Hungary’s Adriatic fleet, though brief, sent its own signals.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">Mass political strike, Vienna, January 1918.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">In Allied Italy, strikes in war industries, unrest among the white-collared middle classes, women-led protests in food markets and rural peasant mobilizations surged in the late spring.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">In Germany by the following fall, the Reich’s high command faced an untenable situation — the threat of a U.S.-bolstered Allied offensive threatening a push into the German heartland, an incredibly hard-pressed, famished and radicalizing working class at home, and increasing rebelliousness in the military, especially in the navy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">With initial armistice discussions already underway in early October, the German leadership finally capitulated as the growing threat of revolution, kicked off in early November by a mass rebellion of sailors throughout the country’s northern ports, spread among workers in Berlin and beyond.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">By the 9th, with workers’ and soldiers’ councils forming in numerous locales, the Kaiser abdicated and the reigns of government passed to a conservative SPD leadership fearful of communist-lead dual power forming from below. The Armistice came two days later.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Revolutionary soldiers, sailors and civilians - Berlin, November '18:</span></td></tr>
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The Absent Presence at Paris</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">While representatives from 24 nations and additional aggrieved peoples convened at the Paris Peace Conference beginning on January 18, 1919, several major players remained conspicuous in their absence.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The defeated Central Powers, denied any say in the deliberations, awaited the victors’ terms. Technically denied a presence since it had already signed a “separate peace” with Berlin, the infant “Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic” was also excluded. The threat its very existence posed to ruling classes everywhere nevertheless pervaded the conference deliberations and framed the outcomes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">What transpired at Paris did not take place in a vacuum but was shaped by widespread and still-contested social and political ferment set in motion by the war and the Bolshevik example.The Soviet regime’s calls for international revolution aside, its immediate actions had already made it an absolute pariah guilty of committing a host of crimes against the capitalist order.</span></div>
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<span style="color: inherit; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">On November 8, 1917, the day after it took power, the Revolution issued a “Decree on Land” that formally passed crown, church and private estates to the peasantry and erased its debt. </span><span style="color: inherit; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">A Lenin-authored “Peace Decree” that same day announced Russia’s intention to withdraw from the war and appealed for an immediate armistice and transparent peace negotiations “involving representatives of all peoples or nations…involved in or compelled to take part in the war.” Significantly, it called for peace without territorial annexations or reparations</span><span style="color: inherit; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Days later, the Revolution began publishing a host of secret Entente treaties signed by the Czarist and Provisional governments retrieved from the Russian Foreign Office. Soon distributed abroad, those compacts for the postwar division of territorial spoils exposed the Allies’ actual war aims and discredited the various “defensive war” justifications of the alliance.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Included among them were a 1915 agreement between Paris, London and St. Petersburg which established that upon victory, the Czarist Empire would receive Constantinople, France would recover Alsace-Lorraine and London could take control of Persia.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Revealed as well was that April’s “Treaty of London” signed by Russia, Britain, France and then-neutral Italy, promising significant territorial gains to the latter for joining the war against Austria-Hungary.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Other revelations included accords defining the future division of the Ottoman Middle East. Among these was a copy of the Anglo-French “Sykes–Picot Agreement,” the basis for postwar partitioning which, along with double-dealing British promises to both Arab and Zionist leaders, mapped the region’s coming century of conflict.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The trove also contained an August, 1916 promise for territorial aggrandizement that brought Romania into the war; a July 1916 Russo-Japanese accord for the “mutual defense” of their holdings in China; an Anglo-French-Belgian agreement divvying up Germany’s African holdings, and much more.</span></div>
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<span style="color: inherit; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Russia’s foreign debt, already the largest in the world in 1913, had more than tripled during the war. The Bolsheviks suspended payments on it in early January, 1918. </span><span style="color: inherit; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The next month, sending shock waves through the international capitalist order, Petrograd repudiated billions of dollars of pre-existing and war-incurred private and state-to-state debt primarily owed French, as well as British, Italian and Japanese creditors and investors.[For Eric Toussaint’s detailed discussion of Russia’s revolutionary debt repudiation, see </span><a class="" href="http://www.solidarity-us.org/atc/195/rr-tzarist-debt/" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">www.solidarity-us.org/atc/195/rr-tzarist-debt/</a><span style="color: inherit; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> — ATC eds.]</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Entente indignation then became apoplexy with the Bolsheviks’ signing of a formal “separate peace” with the Central Powers, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of March 3, 1918. While assuring the survival of the infant Revolution at immense material and territorial cost, it enraged the Allies as Russia’s exit allowed the German high command to shift major forces westward for their massive push on Paris.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: small;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(48, 63, 80); font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;">Map: Treaty of Brest Litovsk, March 1918. (Image: </span><span style="caret-color: rgb(48, 63, 80); font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;">http:</span><span style="caret-color: rgb(48, 63, 80); font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;">//slideplayer.com/slide/4453652/)</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">To the horror of ruling classes worldwide, word of Brest-Litovsk — initially the negotiations and an accompanying months-long cease fire, and then the actual agreement — galvanized increasing demands for peace among the war-weary everywhere.</span></div>
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Peace and Specters of Revolution</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Still swirling as the Peace Conference convened, the German Revolution that began the previous November provided a key backdrop for the deliberations at Paris. The smoke and rubble from Berlin’s premature communist-led “Spartacist Uprising” of January 4-15, 1919 had barely cleared when the attendees first convened days later.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Berlin, 1919: German Communist Party (KPD)/'Sparticist" fighters</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The revolt was crushed with the approval of now-governing SPD reformists by well-armed Frei Korps militias deployed by the military command, but news of Berlin’s class war did not escape the dignitaries’ notice. Neither could word of additional revolutionary insurgencies.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The short-lived Bavarian or “Munich Raterepublik” (soviet), soon defeated by German reaction, was established in April 1919. The month prior, the Hungarian Soviet Republic led by Bela Kun took power in Budapest, lasting until the following August when it was overthrown by a French-backed Romanian invasion. All this deeply intensified concerns at Paris.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">The Hungarian Soviet's Bela Kuhn</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Events in Italy, enveloped at the time in the social and political post-war “Biennio Rosso” (Red Biennium, 1918-1920), added to the bourgeois attendees’ unease as did a global spike of social unrest — in Britain, Egypt and India for example.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Beginning well before the Armistice, in the summer of 1918 and continuing during and after the Paris conference with its endless talk of “the right to self-determination,” some fourteen countries (among them Britain, France, the United States, Japan, Poland, Canada, Greece, Serbia and Romania), all present at the peace conference, sent an estimated 180,000 troops to assist the counterrevolution against the Soviet Republic.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">US troops at Vladivostok, Summer, 1918</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">As part of the Armistice agreement, the Allies even allowed Germany, overnight a counterrevolutionary ally, to keep its troops in those Russian territories ceded at Brest-Litovsk in order to keep the Soviet government from retaking them. (In the west, in contrast, disarmed German forces were required to withdraw east of the Rhine.)</span></div>
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<span style="color: inherit; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">That attempt to strangle the Revolution would continue until the Red Army proved victorious in late 1920. (A Japanese occupation army would remain in eastern Siberia until 1922.) </span><span style="color: inherit; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Accompanied by mass famine, the civil war took more Russian lives than the World War, an estimated 1.5 million combatants and eight million civilians.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Additional realities shaped the Paris deliberations as the end of the war left no old government standing between the French border and the Sea of Japan. (Hobsbawm, 29) Various conservative nationalist movements and diverse democratic and revolutionary forces looked to fill the resulting power vacuums.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">“Self-determination” had come to hold different meaning for various movements of nations and peoples, ethno-linguistic and confessional groups and classes often pitted against each other. Demands for independence and republican rule and statehood, hopes for some new order versus the restoration of reconfigured ruling class power, and the question of dictatorship versus popular democracy and the extension of franchise reverberated globally.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Such evolving facts on the ground impacted upon the results at Paris.</span></div>
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Versailles Results and Consequences of the Peace </span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The major terms of the Versailles Treaty were ultimately decided during numerous closed deliberations among the “Big Three” — Britain, France and the United States. (Initially, there had been a “Big Five” but a rebuffed Japan withdrew and Italy sporadically played a junior role.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Their agreements were then distributed as accomplished facts for the other delegates’ ratification and for the signatures, under threat of resumed hostilities, of Germany’s representatives. While the “Big Three” had differing priorities regarding Germany and its co-belligerents, they were joined in their determination to overthrow the Bolshevik regime or to at least halt the revolution’s spread.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">The "Big Three": Britain's Lloyd George, France's Clemenceau and Woodrow Wilson</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The Treaty’s final version included a “war guilt clause” that tagged Germany, alone among the imperial powers, with responsibility for the conflict.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Under threat of a resumption of open hostilities and the continuation of a “starvation blockade” by the British navy, Germany’s representatives signed the “Versailles Dictat” which burdened the nation with impossible reparation payments, loss of territory east and west that left millions of German speakers beyond newly imposed frontiers, French troops on its soil, the drastic reduction of its military, and forfeiture of all its colonial possessions.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">In order to approach paying off the onerous reparations (approximately $442 billion in today’s money), the SPD-led Weimar Republic would soon take to printing vast sums of fiat money to finance the purchase of exchangeable hard currency. The result was a disastrous hyperinflation that prolonged popular class hardship and compounded national resentments across the ideological spectrum.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">In brief, what British economist John Maynard Keynes, present at Paris, labelled a doomed “Carthaginian peace” created new resentments and grievances that fanned the smoldering coals of ultra-nationalism and eventually, support for Nazism.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Allied Italy also came away from Paris a loser, denied the territories promised it upon joining the Entente cause in 1915. As a result, the perception that the country paid a heavy price in a meaningless war and had come away with a “mutilated victory” (vittoria mutilata) became an important element of ultra-nationalist grievance and fascist propaganda.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Other results included a cobbled-together Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia comprised of diverse ethno-linguistic and confessional groups — a future source of gnawing social and political conflict — an enlarged Romania, a resurrected Poland, Baltic states and Finland, and a greatly diminished Austria and Hungary.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The war’s outcome also energized nationalist demands and often conflicted anti-colonial movements of subject peoples in India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Iraq, the Philippines, China, all across the former Ottoman Empire, Africa, Central Asia and elsewhere.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Imperial Japan, offering to join the Entente in exchange for German territories in China and the Pacific, had entered the war in August 1914. It proceeded to seize German holdings in China and the Pacific, and in 1917 made secret agreements with Britain, France and Italy that promised annexation of those territories at war’s end. But as Japanese imperialism sought to expand on the mainland, it came head up against British, and especially U.S. strategic interests in the Asia/Pacific.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Long aware of the discriminatory treatment and racist exclusion of its citizens in the U.S. and British “white dominions,” and determined to win recognition as an equal among the imperial powers, Tokyo’s Paris representatives not only laid claim to the former German possessions but introduced a motion to include a “racial equality” provision in the Covenant of the League of Nations, then under deliberation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The proposed stipulation would have granted “…to all alien nationals of states, members of the League, equal and just treatment in every respect making no distinction, either in law or in fact, on account of their race or nationality.” That would have conceded the major powers’ recognition of Japan as an equal. But Britain and especially the United States, with Woodrow Wilson playing a key role, blocked its passage.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">To placate Tokyo, Wilson then voiced support for Japan’s China and Pacific territorial claims which, in turn, were included in the final peace treaty. Nonetheless, the rejection of the racial equality clause subsequently strengthened the hand of the nation’s ultra-nationalists and militarists looking to grab even more of China.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Additionally, word of the Japan concessions set off widespread nationalist and anti-imperialist demonstrations, beginning at Beijing on May 4, 1919. What became the “May Fourth Movement” laid foundations for the coming of Chinese communism and the nation’s 20th century history.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The Paris treaties designated compulsory postwar “exchanges of populations” by states forced millions to move: 1.3 million Greeks repatriated to Greece from Turkey while 400,000 Turks went eastward; 200,000 Bulgarians moved to their “national home,” and upwards of two million Russian nationals escaping the revolution found themselves homeless. (Hobsbawm, 50-51)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The mandated expulsions and displacement of ethnic and national minorities occurred on such a scale that a new term, “stateless people” came into being. “Genocide” would enter the vocabulary to describe that first modern attempt to eliminate an entire population under cover of the war, the Turkish annihilation of perhaps two million Armenians.</span></div>
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Imperialism’s New World Disorder</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">A major result of the war, the Bolshevik Revolution inspired numerous class insurgencies and anti-colonial struggles worldwide as it simultaneously induced reactionary responses among the defenders of the bourgeois order.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">With the defeat of the postwar revolutionary upsurge in Europe, most significantly in Germany but also in Italy, Hungary, Austria and elsewhere in 1918-1920, that first audacious attempt to build a new society from the ruins of the war was forced to go it alone, made to face the immense obstacles inherited from the harsh legacies of uneven and combined backwardness, made worse by the War’s devastation, civil war, encirclement and economic blockade.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Relatedly, the unsuccessful Civil War attempt to overthrow the revolution by force marked the turn by Britain, France and the United States toward differing strategies of containment. Indeed, it was the Bolsheviks’ understanding and perceived necessity to internationalize the Revolution and the imperial powers’ determined hostility and direct intervention against it — long before the outcome of the Second World War — that marked the true beginning of the Cold War. (Morrow, 305)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The United States came out of the war positioned to challenge Britain not only as a center of the global capitalist order but as a leading counterrevolutionary bulwark. Already looking toward an enhanced postwar position, it had entered the conflict not as a formal member of the Entente, but as an autonomous “Associated Power” not bound by pre-existing Allied agreements and free to pursue its own strategic objectives.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">On January 8, 1918, Woodrow Wilson outlined his proposed terms for a postwar peace process, his “Fourteen Points,” often lauded as the failed initiative of an idealist liberal statesman hampered later by British and French vindictive priorities at Versailles and by stateside Republican opponents.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">That Wilsonian vision called for the removal of all economic barriers,“free trade,” while maintaining U.S. interventionist prerogatives; diplomatic transparency, self-determination for Europe’s national minorities, and a “League of Nations” to mediate international disputes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">This package can best be understood as a liberal counter to Lenin’s November, 1917 “Peace Decree” and an attempt to frame a postwar environment favorable to U.S. interests. Espousing the rhetoric of “self determination” for national minorities and the equality of nations, Wilson at Versailles in essence played various nationalist cards against the Bolsheviks’ class-based appeal.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The creation of a zone of small Eastern European nation-states, a conservative “quarantine belt” against the “Bolshevik bacilli,” did become a shared goal among the often contentious imperialist powers at Paris and indeed a reality after 1920.</span></div>
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<span style="color: inherit; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">But while the major Allied powers agreed with the goal of overturning or isolating the Soviet heresy, the British, and especially the French, in no rush to resuscitate and reintegrate the historic rival and capitalist dynamo at the heart of Europe, remained committed to exacting retribution and blocking future German ambitions. </span><span style="color: inherit; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">They remained leery, as well, of war-enhanced U.S. power wrapped in the rhetoric of liberal Wilsonian internationalism.</span></div>
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Towards New Catastrophe</span></h4>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">“Free of foreign entanglements,” the United States never ratified the Versailles Treaty nor joined the League of Nations, but signed separate peace treaties with Germany, Austria and Hungary only in 1921. Not part of the reparations regime, it continued to do business with Germany, and it was American short-term loans and private capital investment that assisted the Weimar’s economic recovery in the mid-1920s.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">That returned economic stability allowed the country to meet reduced reparations payments owed Britain and France, which then used the funds to pay down their war debts to the United States — a circular system that worked well until the crash of 1929. (Morrow, 293)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The ascent to superpower hegemony and “American Century” aspirations would have to wait until after 1945. But under the rhetorical haze of “self determination for oppressed peoples” and a “liberal internationalist” right to intervene anywhere, U.S. policy became the determined opponent of independent nationalist and anti-colonial efforts, and all movements even remotely tainted by the communist virus, whether in reality or in the imaginings of Washington and Wall Street.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The two interwar decades, largely due to the conflict’s outcomes, were marred by incessant instability. They witnessed horrific civil wars, bitter class conflict, the international capitalist crisis that was the Great Depression, the Soviet turn toward the building of “socialism in one country,” and fascism’s reactionary assault upon both socialism and liberal democracy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Years filled with crises, they witnessed the reemergence of imperialist rivalry and aggression as competing powers, the First War’s emboldened winners and aggrieved losers alike, readied and rehearsed for what amounted to the next round of what has been called the “Second Thirty Years’ War” of 1914-45.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Among the contenders, were a revived expansionist Germany and Italy, and the United States and Japan. The latter had both come out of the First War already situated to challenge Britain, which would never be the same afterward for leadership of the capitalist order. The past became prelude.</span></div>
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Selected Readings</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The historiography on the World War and its aftermath is massive, of course. Below are several titles, older and more recent, that contain valuable insights.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes — A History of the World, 1914-1991 (Pantheon/Random, 1995)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Gabriel Kolko, Century of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914 (New Press, 1994)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Mark Mazower, The Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (Random/Vintage 1998/2000)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Arno Mayer, The Politics and Diplomacy of Peace making — Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918-1919 (Knopf, 1967)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">John H. Morrow, Jr., The Great War — An Imperial History (Routledge, 2004)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Adam Tooze, The Deluge — The Great War, America, and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 (Penguin, 2014)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Enzo Traverso, Fire and Blood —The European Civil War, 1914-1945 (Verso, 2016)</span></div>
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Allen Ruffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18310195276315827048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458840028095794061.post-29911374714072488472017-11-28T07:05:00.001-08:002019-02-02T13:29:35.766-08:00World War I & Afterward: Upheaval, Repression & Terror<div class="print-logo">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">— Allen Ruff</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">[The following is a revised version, with graphics added, of a piece that originally appeared in <i><a href="http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/atc/191">Against the Current</a></i> (#191, November-December 2017), the second installment of a longer treatment, the first part of which appeared in the <a href="http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/5060">preceding issue</a></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">. -AR]</span><br />
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; background-color: black;"><span style="color: #cccccc; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> AFTER WORLD WAR I began in 1914, the cross-Atlantic flow of immigrants fell off dramatically and New York harbor’s Ellis Island, since 1892 the entry point for millions coming to the US, fell into disuse. Then, following US entry in the war in April 1917, the celebrated entrepôt for those “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” became an offshore detention center for “enemy aliens,” largely crewmen from German-flagged ships seized in US east coast ports that spring. The number of such detainees actually dwindled within the year, however, as those detained were sent elsewhere to sit out the war. But then, in the year or so following the November, 1918 Armistice, the island’s population went up again as the place became a holding pen for a different category of suspect non-citizens. This time, a variety of foreign-born radicals - anarchists, socialists and alleged Bolsheviks — administratively held incommunicado and denied legal recourse as they awaited deportation. </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #cccccc; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: black;">The symbolic irony of being imprisoned on Ellis Island presumably was not lost upon those being banished. The island’s conversion from a gateway to a guarded compound, a holding pen for political prisoners detained primarily not for any overt criminal act but for their beliefs and associations, served as an illustrative metaphor for where the country had come during the war and </span><span style="background-color: black;">the reactionary post-war direction in which it was headed.</span></span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: #222222; color: #888888; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: left;">Suspected "radicals" awaiting deportation hearings.<br /> Ellis Island, January 1920</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Following the 1917 U.S. entry into World War I, a massive months-long strike wave occurred as workers in those industries, booming with wartime orders demanded improved conditions and better wages that were rapidly being outstripped by war-bred price increases. In that climate of whipped-up nationalist fervor, xenophobia and racism, such worker militancy along with all antiwar activity was successfully cast by the state, the corporations and a compliant mainstream press as a “pro-German” threat to the war effort and national security.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Then, in the midst of ongoing labor agitations and following Russia’s “October Revolution” (November 7th), wartime propaganda mills advanced the claim, widely held by war’s end in November 1918, that Germany had deliberately fomented, even engineered the Bolshevik seizure of power to undermine allied Russia’s war effort. In that way, an ideological line defining “the enemy within” rapidly shifted from “pro-Kaiser” to the “Bolshevik menace.”</span></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuCrzLtGV7aKi8vqkI4Wd179B39VAUrmZuZr9PwMapaOJOmE0vs0vwK2NC7GGE95NsDDOJMOzBlhzYZW8Az6AGIXCVXfwZRrsdttb17Rh2o6lj0uYWpYLiRTuRrSf9V2Iu3wqf-j3p3KZU/s1600/1918+-%253E1919.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="788" data-original-width="668" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuCrzLtGV7aKi8vqkI4Wd179B39VAUrmZuZr9PwMapaOJOmE0vs0vwK2NC7GGE95NsDDOJMOzBlhzYZW8Az6AGIXCVXfwZRrsdttb17Rh2o6lj0uYWpYLiRTuRrSf9V2Iu3wqf-j3p3KZU/s400/1918+-%253E1919.png" width="338" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The ideological line defining “the enemy within” rapidly shifted from “pro-Kaiser” to the “Bolshevik menace”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-weight: normal; text-align: center;">That anti-communist animus, stoked by news of the dispossession of Russia’s old ruling classes, continued to deepen after the Revolution took Russia out of the war by concluding a separate peace with Germany in early March 1918. News of revolutionary upheavals in Germany, Italy, Hungary, Austria and ongoing anti-colonial revolts worldwide deepened ruling circle anxieties, and the founding of the Communist International in March ’19 seemed to substantiate such fears of an expanding “international conspiracy.”</span></span><br />
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Postwar Strike Wave</span></h3>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Fanned by the administration’s war propaganda agency, the Committee on Public Information (CPI) and a reactionary press, mass public sentiment rapidly came to label any and all radical activity — that of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), antiwar socialists and anarchists, and Black resistance to increasing white supremacist violence throughout the period — as the result of Bolshevik subversion. The reality, of course, was that the revolutionary Left did not create the unrest.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The immediate postwar period witnessed one of the greatest strike waves in the country’s history — a veritable “epidemic of strikes” far greater than that of 1917 with over 3,630 recorded stoppages (an average of nearly ten a day) involving more than 4,000,000 workers, or nearly a fifth of the non-agricultural work force, during 1919 alone.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That insurgency resulted from a number of factors, all related to the rapid but unplanned industrial reconversion to a “peace economy;” most significant among them the decline in real incomes due to continuing cost of living increases. Though workers in manufacturing had doubled their average earnings between 1914 and 1919 and real wages were 19% higher in 1919 than in 1915, industrial workers were only able to keep up with increases in the cost of necessities through full employment supplemented by overtime pay and bonuses. (Food prices, for example, more than doubled between 1915 and 1920, and clothing costs more than tripled.)</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But with rapid postwar retrenchment, such alleviating factors were eliminated as employers embarked on a gloves-off militant offensive to roll back workers’ wartime gains. (Montgomery, 1984)</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">With underemployment and layoffs on the rise and overall living conditions worsening, the rapid demobilization of the military further aggravated the situation as millions of returning veterans found themselves locked in competition in a tightening job market. Those returnees not only forced out working-class women who had moved into various better-paying industrial jobs during the war, but displaced already hard-pressed Black workers, among them hundreds of thousands who had migrated from the rural South to an increasingly ghettoized urban industrial North during the first “Great Migration.” (See: Ruff, <a href="http://allenruff.blogspot.com/2015/01/a-world-made-more-unsafe-african.html">“A World Made More Unsafe”</a>)</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In response to the 1917 strikes, concessions had been made in war-related industries under the auspices of a host of federal wartime regulatory agencies, among them the War Industries Board (WIB) established that July and charged with coordinating production and labor relations.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The National War Labor Board (NWLB), created in April 1918, encouraged American Federation of Labor union growth as a counter-weight to strikes and antiwar sentiment. While granted no power of enforcement, its joint corporate/AFL leadership drafted a “principles of labor peace” that actually included recognition of workers’ collective bargaining rights, the eight-hour day, equal pay for equal work for women, and the right of workers to a living wage, in exchange for the “open shop.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Through Board mediation, skilled workers belonging to AFL affiliates abiding by “no-strike” understandings, less than 15% of the industrial work force, won various concessions. With shop committees assisting in resolving disputes over conditions, wages and hours, such new union power stimulated increased union membership in railway, streetcar and maritime unions, and the building trades.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Importantly, union membership and demands for recognition also increased greatly among a mass of semi- and unskilled, largely immigrant workers in meatpacking, clothing, textiles and the metal trades. (Montgomery, 1984)</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But hopes for the continuation of such improvements quickly withered as the Army and Navy Departments and various federal procurement agencies began canceling war orders within 24 hours of the November 11, 1918 Armistice and employers, eager to assert unchallenged control, rapidly began scaling back by ending additional pay for Sunday work and overtime.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Workers in various sectors soon experienced wage reductions of up to 50% despite continued cost of living increases. (Between June 1919 and June 1920, the cost of living index, using a 1913 base of 100, rose from 177 to 216.)</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Simultaneously, the Wilson administration began dismantling the various regulatory and oversight bodies. The WIB, for example, largely ceased to function by the end of November, 1918. The NWLB became largely ineffective with the Armistice and was finally dissolved on May 1919. At the same time, federally regulated price controls on food and fuel were relaxed or came to a halt as the Fuel Administration, created in August 1917 and charged with coordinating the allocation and price of fuel and coal, began liquidating its activities four days after Germany’s surrender.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Strikes and job actions in numerous sectors had continued throughout the later war period but had largely diminished by late 1917, after the IWW, the major organizing force outside the labor “war consensus,” was all but smashed by vigilante violence, raids, jailings and costly mass trials. Additionally, a “work or fight” order handed down by the Selective Service in May, 1918 declared unemployed men susceptible to the draft. Seen as a threat to strikers, that edict, along with state intervention and wartime wages, worked to enforce a modicum of “labor peace.” But as the ripple effects of the rapid “reconversion” deepened and a postwar recession set in, worker militancy accelerated.</span></span><br />
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Labor Upheaval, 1919</span></h3>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The result was the massive strike wave of 1919, not led by the AFL but overwhelmingly propelled by a base of non-unionized, largely immigrant industrial workers demanding not only wages and hours but union recognition, the right to organize and the continuation of federal protections and oversight.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Demands for an industrially-organized “new unionism” as well as “industrial democracy,” a hope for a better world of work deferred or repressed during the war, also informed worker militancy as numbers of exclusivist AFL affiliates joined in demands for progressive reforms, regulation and nationalization of key industries.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In January in New York City alone, some 75,000 garment workers, 15,000 streetcar men, 14,000 painters, 40,000 tobacco workers and 20,000 harbor workers walked out. Between 17,000 and 30,000 immigrant textile mill hands, self-organized among 20 different ethnic groups, walked out at Lawrence, Massachusetts on February 3rd and stayed out until May.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The self-organized Seattle General Strike of February 6-11, involving some 65,000 workers in a coalition that included independent AFL and IWW locals, set a radical tone for what was to come. Though nonviolent, the strike for wage increases to keep pace with soaring inflation and defense of wartime gains set off shock waves of anti-Red hysteria as the national press portrayed it as the work of Bolshevik agents infiltrated from Siberia.</span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5pybdQyrmfe8_XDqUof_Pyshi_xn1Y_tn0RasHm47VDVh8l1m5se9kvXeP7gQb4RDuSutnvuVxrsfrbZCtoOF0NR26kD4qnXgw_bcfQB8x3xCY8yroC6TfkG7es8-TMY3aju6WJeZZbzl/s1600/Seattle_General_Strike.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="217" data-original-width="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5pybdQyrmfe8_XDqUof_Pyshi_xn1Y_tn0RasHm47VDVh8l1m5se9kvXeP7gQb4RDuSutnvuVxrsfrbZCtoOF0NR26kD4qnXgw_bcfQB8x3xCY8yroC6TfkG7es8-TMY3aju6WJeZZbzl/s1600/Seattle_General_Strike.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Early April witnessed a national wildcat strike, opposed as much by the existing union leadership as the bosses, of a quarter million railway workers battered by inflation and frozen wages. Starting as a walkout of some 700 switchmen in Chicago’s rail yards on April 2nd, the strike spread across the country from New York to San Francisco and Los Angeles by April 9th as engineers, conductors and firemen joined in.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The yards, vital to the entire economy, were still under control of the Federal Railroad Administration and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, attacking the strike leaders as IWWs and “Reds,” had 38 arrested following nationwide raids as scabs were imported with the assistance of the established railway union “Brotherhoods.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Kicking off what became a major “fall offensive,” 65 job actions involving 300,000 workers in 20 states took place on Labor Day, August 31. Then, on September 9, 80% of Boston’s police force struck for union recognition, a livable wage and improved work conditions.</span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9N24rZtfJnHBRFbIOL168QrBjktucp60bsh0sadQdSKJmMv0FH0NiB-LRtI4mSvj1fQs786O9Iyf_8PY8Hv1kR3q0NPEy6AygWCQBbB_RVbVobdFCof6qHNBXmFVzeccSW3A-nhzCQk2i/s1600/Boston+1919.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9N24rZtfJnHBRFbIOL168QrBjktucp60bsh0sadQdSKJmMv0FH0NiB-LRtI4mSvj1fQs786O9Iyf_8PY8Hv1kR3q0NPEy6AygWCQBbB_RVbVobdFCof6qHNBXmFVzeccSW3A-nhzCQk2i/s320/Boston+1919.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">With the cops labeled as “deserters” and “agents of Lenin” amid exaggerated reports of widespread “lawlessness,” the stoppage created a national furor. The strike was broken as Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge dispatched the state militia to restore “law and order,” and most of the 1,100 strikers were summarily fired and replaced by unemployed war vets.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">With the state’s U.S. Senator, blue blood Henry Cabot Lodge, claiming “If the American Federation of Labor succeeds in getting hold of the police in Boston it will go all over the country, and we shall be in measurable distance of Soviet government by labor unions,” Congress soon allocated $400,000 for increased domestic military surveillance and Coolidge, portrayed as a staunch defender of “law and order,” became Republican Warren Harding’s vice president in 1920 (becoming President when Harding died in 1923).</span></span><br />
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The Fight in Steel and Coal</span></h3>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">With war orders curtailed and government mediation at an end, steel magnates with U.S. Steel’s Elbert Gary in the lead stepped up the rate of exploitation in an industry infamous for its absolute anti-union intransigence. By late summer 1919, 50% of the largely unskilled work force earned well below the poverty level despite 69-hour weeks while working and living in atrocious conditions.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Demanding shorter hours, wage increases, improved conditions, the right to collective bargaining and reinstatement of fired organizers, some 376,000 largely unskilled workers drawn from 50 nationalities went out during the third week in September. The industry responded with repression of monumental proportions involving some 25,000 special police and militiamen in the Pittsburgh region alone, federal troops and intelligence agents and labor spies.</span></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVUcwyF4_TrsaVMaQBr7qIkZpvVx6uXu0x091t5KYzkmorqUavut1553_c7EUQ6F7KW2TeD1M5WXv5s41VhNavGvgyTTY-82OucTAeeiPEpCRD9K8adhWqk10FrYtURQsR4O2rI7IiloII/s1600/steel+strike+1919.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="947" data-original-width="1268" height="297" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVUcwyF4_TrsaVMaQBr7qIkZpvVx6uXu0x091t5KYzkmorqUavut1553_c7EUQ6F7KW2TeD1M5WXv5s41VhNavGvgyTTY-82OucTAeeiPEpCRD9K8adhWqk10FrYtURQsR4O2rI7IiloII/s400/steel+strike+1919.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: #222222; color: #888888; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: left;">Striking steel mill workers, Chicago, September 22, 1919.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Meetings were banned as workers were clubbed and shot by mounted police and deputies, arrested without cause and held without charges. At Gary, Indiana U.S. Steel cynically imported thousands of Black workers as federal and state troops enforced a “modified martial law,” barred public assemblies and raided homes of alleged “Reds.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Two thousand troops patrolled Youngstown, Ohio where organizers were arrested under “criminal syndicalist laws” and meetings were outlawed. Meanwhile, the dominant press described the strike as a Bolshevik revolutionary plot and the steel bosses and their public relations hirelings exploited anti-immigrant animus. With hundreds of immigrant strikers detained for possible deportation, some 20 workers killed, and an unknown number injured throughout the fall, the strike petered out by January 1920.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In coal, a wartime wage freeze imposed in September 1917 remained in effect. Workers had assumed that it would come to an end with the Armistice, but company owners contended it still applied since a formal peace treaty had not been signed with Germany.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Pushed by the rank-and file, the United Mine Workers called for a nationwide strike and some 425,000 miners in five states went out on November 1. The bosses, labelling the strike an insurrectionary plot, refused to negotiate and the union was hit with a federal injunction based on the revived wartime Lever Act that criminalized interference with the production and transport of food and fuel.</span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6oXsdu25B-vhle9emQyCUBSO8_VR95A7-DKaxYGNSa7w-Os3uwcFesU_9_iwViRU5-okJ5lm2nYORmO-AgjAiZB_6WwtOacaZx9T8ktjPy5c6wrsJbOFz1d_3w0O8H1jEIHpDMYzedfOs/s1600/Coal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6oXsdu25B-vhle9emQyCUBSO8_VR95A7-DKaxYGNSa7w-Os3uwcFesU_9_iwViRU5-okJ5lm2nYORmO-AgjAiZB_6WwtOacaZx9T8ktjPy5c6wrsJbOFz1d_3w0O8H1jEIHpDMYzedfOs/s320/Coal.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Facing criminal charges, the UMW leadership called off the strike after 10 days, but strikers in numerous mining districts remained out in defiance of the injunction. With coal supplies running low and the mainstream press parroting the operators’ claim that Lenin and Trotsky were behind the strike, those miners not blacklisted trickled back to the pits after three weeks as winter set in.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In sum, the series of major postwar labor defeats took a heavy toll as the number of monthly strikes dropped to a six-year low by December 1919. Effectively utilized by employers and the state, the constant nationwide red-baiting of the workers’ movement in tandem with the realities of multi-tiered, massive repression had proven formidable.</span></span><br />
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The “Red Menace”</span></h3>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Undeniably, the 1919 upsurge was inspired in part by the Bolshevik Revolution and successive short-lived revolutionary insurgencies across Europe and elsewhere. And there indeed were consciously radical elements — socialist, early communist and syndicalist — among the strikers as evidenced by calls for the creation of workers’ councils, shop committees, “workers’ control,” “democratization of industry” and demands for the freeing of political prisoners.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Their presence, however, provided the pretext for stepped-up surveillance and repression aimed at the entire workers’ movement as the whipped-up fear of the “Bolsheviki bacillus” allowed capital to combat the strike wave and smash workers’ organizations.</span></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS84I8WdgEZFu3MTjZyJMZRgwUVHrdOUiqPhu9WOVhS1yzv0zgxH3OaHrYsLaDE3WeGkQvQKTGNooobXLFg1PB5iAk6K_T3Byf0WMlfJwV5fd0CGWXD65FWhH0JzTY_sGODRpr6SfNLaqG/s1600/Anti-red+Cartoon%252C+1919+.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="544" data-original-width="422" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS84I8WdgEZFu3MTjZyJMZRgwUVHrdOUiqPhu9WOVhS1yzv0zgxH3OaHrYsLaDE3WeGkQvQKTGNooobXLFg1PB5iAk6K_T3Byf0WMlfJwV5fd0CGWXD65FWhH0JzTY_sGODRpr6SfNLaqG/s400/Anti-red+Cartoon%252C+1919+.jpg" width="310" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Anti-Red cartoon, 1919 </td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That “Red Menace” fear became increasingly palpable within middle and dominant class circles as a series of events throughout 1919, paralleling the year’s labor upheavals, fueled support for stepped-up multileveled repression. The actions attributed to a small circle of Italian immigrant anarchists furthered such demands by setting off shock waves of fear and anxiety across the country.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In late April some 36 bombs, most of them detected before they exploded, were mailed to anti-radical public figures around the country including Wilson’s Postmaster Albert Burleson; Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, immigration overseer Anthony Caminetti, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan. With the perpetrators unknown, Palmer charged that the bombs were part of a discovered “Bolshevik plot” to overthrow the government on May 1st.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That May Day, police and mobs led by patriotic war vets attacked socialist parades, rallies and meetings in Boston, New York, Chicago and elsewhere. In New York, soldiers and sailors raided a gathering at the Russian People’s House where they beat attendees and burned books and papers in the street.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A patriotic mob trashed the socialist New York Call offices and forced a large gathering there to sing the national anthem. In Cleveland, police and soldiers drove trucks and a tank into the assembled crowd. Two were killed, 100 were badly beaten or shot and 125 were arrested, among them not a single anti-radical. The press blamed the “riots” on “the Reds” and “foreign agitators.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Then, on June 2nd simultaneous anarchist bombings occurred at the homes of public officials and businessmen in eight cities, including the Washington residence of Attorney General Palmer who promptly initiated the planning for a nationally coordinated “anti-red” campaign. He soon announced the discovery of another impending “Red insurrection” to begin on July 4th.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">While the day passed without incident, the moment served to heighten the anti-radical mood as thousands of troops, police and civilian auxiliaries placed on “red alert” were visibly deployed in a massive nationwide show of “homeland security.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That August, the Justice Department announced the creation of a special Bureau of Investigation unit, what became the General Intelligence Division (GID) headed by 26-year-old J. Edgar Hoover. Under the future FBI director and in coordination with other intelligence and police agencies, the new office soon assembled some 200,000 dossiers on organizations and individuals to be used for “future enactments.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Concerted state-level anti-red campaigns had already been underway as states in the West such as Washington, Oregon, Montana and California utilized newly passed criminal-syndicalist laws and innumerable localities passed additional ordinances banning radical activity targeting remnants of the IWW.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">During 1919, 16 additional states passed criminal syndicalist laws and 12 enacted “anarchy” and “sedition” legislation promoted by business and industrial interests, resulting by 1920 in the arrest of some 1400 people, 300 of whom were convicted. In that same year 28 states and two territories outlawed the public display of red flags.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In New York State, the authorities’ primary concern focused on the spread of radicalism among New York City’s recent immigrants. Early in the year, police raided the Chinatown branch of the IWW and offices of the Union of Russian Workers. In March, the state legislature created the Lusk Committee on “Seditious Activities,” which carried out its own lengthy investigations and numerous raids on socialist institutions and offices while exchanging intelligence with Hoover’s office. Its voluminous reports focused not just on the revolutionary politics in the “enemy alien” press, but evidence of “Red” attempts to organize the city’s African Americans.</span></span><br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">
Additional Weapons of Repression</span></h3>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Dissent had already been criminalized during the war by a succession of federal measures including the Espionage and Seditions Acts, which in turn fostered the unparalleled expansion of domestic surveillance by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation (BI) and the Army’s Military Intelligence Division (MID), augmented by hundreds of thousands of citizen spy auxiliaries organized in such groups as the American Protective League. That repressive apparatus not only remained in place following the Armistice, but actually expanded and evolved further. (See: Ruff, <a href="http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/5060">“Dawn of ‘Total War’</a>…”)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Added to the arsenal, the Immigration Act of October 16, 1918, became law just weeks before the Armistice. It authorized the Department of Immigration to administratively and without due process deport any aliens viewed as advocates of a broadly defined “anarchism”; meaning foreign-born antiwar activists, members of the IWW and subsequently those with Bolshevik sympathies.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It not only criminalized activity but membership in any organization advocating the forceful overthrow of established government. (Since the Bolsheviks had overthrown Russia’s Provisional Government, their supporters were deemed culpable.) The enactment superseded previous law that made those immigrants residing in the country for more than five years exempt from deportation and opened the door to denaturalize those already naturalized. Significantly, it made guilt by association a punishable offense.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Armistice had only marked a truce between the belligerents and not a formal end of the conflict. Not a signatory of the Versailles Treaty of June 1919, the United States did not conclude a formal end to hostilities with Germany until August, 1921. That meant that the Federal wartime measures used to silence dissent largely remained in effect.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The multileveled repressive apparatus, barely altered, now turned its full attention to the suppression of those “enemy aliens” and “Bolshies” cast as the sole cause of postwar unrest. (In May 1920, Woodrow Wilson vetoed a bill which would have terminated the measures.)</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Supplementing the work of the various Federal policing agencies, a number of voluntary civilian organizations, acting basically as auxiliaries of the BI and the MID, played a significant role not only as spies and provocateurs but on occasion as anti-radical shock troops. During the summer and fall of 1919, for instance, war vets in the newly formed American Legion carried out armed attacks on Wobbly halls. Most infamous among these, a July 4th assault on the IWW at Centralia, Washington resulted in the castration and lynching of Wob militant Wesley Everest.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Unknown at the time, the Legion contained numbers of MID agents, some of whom sought to model the organization after elements of the Freikorps, the counterrevolutionary paramilitaries set against the period’s German Revolution. With the American Protection League officially disbanded shortly after the Armistice, numbers of its volunteers went into various formations, which assisted the BI and MID by providing ground troops during the 1919-20 anti-red raids. Anti-communist, xenophobic and racist, such patriots provided cadres for the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. (Jensen, 1991)</span></span><br />
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Race, “Red Summer” and Palmer Raids</span></h3>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The postwar deterioration of conditions and heightened tensions, when combined with the constant combustible of racism, led to a “Red Summer” of 26 “race riots” that began in June and extended into the fall. Racist white mob activity had increased during 1917 and spiked once again postwar as competition for already crowded and contested urban living space and jobs intensified.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In Charleston, Washington, Chicago, Omaha and elsewhere, white mobs often containing active servicemen and veterans intent on enforcing the era’s supremacist order carried out unimaginable atrocities, among them the gunning down and lynching of recently returned Black vets still in uniform.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In response, in numerous instances Black returnees and others mounted armed self-defense. That in turn fueled racist imaginings that framed such “fight backs” as the beginnings of a Red-inspired insurrection, the result of covert Bolshevik use of Blacks to foment revolution.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As mainstream newspapers ran headlines claiming “Reds Incite Negro Rioters,” Woodrow Wilson expressed the belief that Black veterans returning from Europe posed a threat as the “greatest medium in conveying Bolshevism to America.” (<a href="http://allenruff.blogspot.com/2015/01/a-world-made-more-unsafe-african.html">Ruff, “A World Made More Unsafe”</a>)</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">One result of the “Red Summer” was that the BI and the MID received additional Congressional allocations. The MID’s special section on “Negro Subversion” ramped up its ongoing surveillance, initiated during the war, of a long list of civil rights leaders and perceived radicals. BI weekly field office reports on “Negro Activities,” the “Negro Press” and the “Negro agitation movement” funneled to the GID’s Hoover were exchanged with those from Military Intelligence, the State Department, the Post Office, and state and local “red squads.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">At Chicago in early September 1919, two separate communist parties, both vying for recognition from the Comintern, split off of the Socialist Party. A reflection of the moment’s revolutionary hope and the increasing strength of labor militancy and forming just prior to that fall’s immigrant-led mass strikes in steel and coal, the Communist Labor Party with roughly 10,000 mainly English speakers and the Communist Party with a predominantly immigrant base approaching 60,000 immediately became the main targets of state surveillance and repression.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">With the fall’s strike wave as backdrop and the broader “Red Scare” well underway, on November 7th federal agents assisted by local police in some 18 cities raided gatherings commemorating the second anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. In New York, they roughed up and arrested 650, including 180 at the Union of Russian Workers hall, of whom 43 deemed “enemy aliens” were held for deportation.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The following night, Lusk Committee deputies raided 21 additional left-wing socialist and anarchist gathering places and arrested hundreds more. The arrest of domestic radicals aside, the ongoing nationwide dragnet sent 249 “illegals” to “administrative detention” on Ellis Island. Arrested without warrants, denied due process and with some held for months, the detainees, among them 51 anarchists including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, were placed aboard the passenger freighter Buford, dubbed the “Red Ark,” and deported to then Soviet Russia on December 21, 1919.</span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9aVdOsxKhs98rlZ85W7C_8H-CRnqwsfPJ10teqMXRp7yh8Gx_Bx2EWxnd14gM7EuAJEUh3By0WBoNNBjHp46ldJkJr3fGW8pBIPfyUvhdMiuBlWTf-a8si8j9kh0ZxJIaZ3KXPo1euNZO/s1600/Buford.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="416" data-original-width="396" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9aVdOsxKhs98rlZ85W7C_8H-CRnqwsfPJ10teqMXRp7yh8Gx_Bx2EWxnd14gM7EuAJEUh3By0WBoNNBjHp46ldJkJr3fGW8pBIPfyUvhdMiuBlWTf-a8si8j9kh0ZxJIaZ3KXPo1euNZO/s400/Buford.jpg" width="380" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A week later, in the second “Palmer Raid” of January 2, 1920, Federal agents under the direction of J.Edgar Hoover and assisted by local police carried out coordinated raids, largely without warrant, in 33 cities and 23 states. Descending on radical offices, left-wing meeting halls, hang-outs and innumerable private homes, they scooped up virtually every local or national leader and more than 10,000 alleged members of the CP and CLP.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The mass roundups in various localities overwhelmed detention facilities. In Detroit, for example, some 800 detainees were crammed into a windowless corridor for five days. Many in custody were threatened and beaten as those coming to post bail or searching for friends or family were also arrested, as were innocent onlookers at various sites.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">While citizens were released or handed over to local or state agencies, non-citizens were held without charges to await possible deportation. For many, that came to involve lengthy detention without bail, warrants filed after the fact, denial of counsel until late in the process, and an administrative hearing rather than a day in court.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Of some 3,500 held in that fashion, 556 were deported under the October 1918 Immigration Act. Many more would have been expelled, but their cases were dismissed on technical grounds by the acting Secretary of Labor charged with oversight over deportation proceedings, the progressive Louis F. Post.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The “Red Scare” soon ebbed as Palmer became increasingly discredited as a politically aspiring opportunist. The general anti-radical and anti-immigrant animus continued, however, and spiked once again with the September 16 bombing on Wall Street that killed 38 and injured hundreds.</span></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOko9D3eITVJ6XeFgE7iJI_BBcTCPMlfFC9QR4A6NS5-1hyphenhyphen8bzvVZmWRt6ySq19_MYGaoDuUSv5opTjbpPf4HkswTp3SIHahiL8EBByuLd-JL5Oh1d_tR4KMoNZg9_vVuN9e-tLrPGT3n9/s1600/wall-street-bombing%252C+1920.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="333" data-original-width="448" height="296" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOko9D3eITVJ6XeFgE7iJI_BBcTCPMlfFC9QR4A6NS5-1hyphenhyphen8bzvVZmWRt6ySq19_MYGaoDuUSv5opTjbpPf4HkswTp3SIHahiL8EBByuLd-JL5Oh1d_tR4KMoNZg9_vVuN9e-tLrPGT3n9/s400/wall-street-bombing%252C+1920.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: start;"> Wall Street bombing, </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: start;">September 16, 1920</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Now attributed to members of the same Italian anarchists circle that had carried out the round of bomb attacks the year before, it seemingly came as a reprisal for the arrests of group members Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, then being held for robbery and murder in a Massachusetts jail and destined for a 1927 execution.</span></span><br />
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1920s: The “Normalcy” of Roaring Reaction</span></h3>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The defeat of the 1919 strike wave and the Left was compounded by an early 1920s deep recession. In retreat, the entire labor movement declined sharply as private company surveillance and enforced industrial discipline and control dramatically increased. Though isolated militant strikes continued in textiles, coal and elsewhere, they too met with severe repression and “red baiting” onslaughts.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Additionally, the revolutionary upsurge abroad had long ebbed and the organizations capable of providing any potential leadership to the U.S. movement — the IWW, the Socialist Party, and the two fledgling CPs — were left devastated. With the Communist leadership underground for two years and with others deported, in jail or indicted and facing costly trials, its membership declined to perhaps 5,000.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The often idealized “Roaring Twenties” marked a decade of uneven development and social regression for the working classes — a reactionary era of anti-union and anti-communist repression; heightened racism, immigrant exclusion and “100% Americanism”; and a pro-business “prosperity decade” of conservative Republican rule and Ku Klux Klan national influence.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It became the decade of the “American Plan” — an increasingly mechanized system of “open shop” mass production that disciplined and deskilled the work force while offering cultural escapism, diversion and new patterns of consumption for those with the disposable incomes or access to “installment buying” and credit.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Despite all that, the deeply planted seeds of war-era resistance and rebellion and organizing experience survived. The lessons were not lost, and would come to inform the resurgence of radical organizing and revived labor insurgency in the following decade.</span></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8gvMiHFANihLkO2bYPUpifoQ4560iLlLLDjCXlhJsChy4vW6Mikp60aLCps0PHCORtYo_XKPpnUYsfYfZAerL1TNcRJlac7hGii3fSykyWtMBRZLTP6dRoZJyoQJ7smMOSW_S-nysAe44/s1600/Harding+Campaign+poster+%25232.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="328" data-original-width="260" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8gvMiHFANihLkO2bYPUpifoQ4560iLlLLDjCXlhJsChy4vW6Mikp60aLCps0PHCORtYo_XKPpnUYsfYfZAerL1TNcRJlac7hGii3fSykyWtMBRZLTP6dRoZJyoQJ7smMOSW_S-nysAe44/s320/Harding+Campaign+poster+%25232.jpg" width="253" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 11px;">"The Big Red Apple," LA Times</span><span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 11px;">, April 19, 1923</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Suggested Readings:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Paul Avrich, <i>Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background</i> (Princeton: Princeton, 1991).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Melvyn Dubofsky, <i>“We Shall Be All” — A History of the Industrial Workers of the World</i> (1969), Part IV.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Philip S. Foner, <i>History of the Labor Movement in the United States</i>, Vol. 8: <i>Postwar Struggles 1918-1920</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Ann Hagedorn, <i>Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919</i>. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Joan Jensen, <i>Army, Surveillance in America, 1775-1980 </i>(New Haven: Yale, 1991) Part III: Legacy of World War I.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">David M. Kennedy, <i>Over Here —The First World War and American Society</i> (2004/1980).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., <i>“Seeing Red: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919-1925</i> (Bloomington: Indiana, 1998).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Alfred W. McCoy, <i>Policing America’s Empire The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State</i> (Madison: Wisconsin, 2009) Chapter 9: “President Wilson’s Surveillance State.”</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">David Montgomery, “Immigrants, Industrial Unions, and Social Reconstruction in the United States. 1916-1923,” <i>Labour/Le Travail</i>. 13 (Spring 1984), 101-113.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">William Preston, Jr., <i>Aliens and Dissenters — Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903-1933</i> (1995/1963).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Allen Ruff, <a href="http://allenruff.blogspot.com/2015/01/a-world-made-more-unsafe-african.html">“A World Made More Unsafe: African Americans, World War I & the Shaping of the 20th Century”</a> (January, 2015)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Ruff, <a href="http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/5060">“Dawn of ‘Total War’ and the Surveillance State”</a> (September, 2017)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Ruff, </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://allenruff.blogspot.com/2016/11/us-entry-in-world-war-i-reluctant.html"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">"</span>US Entry in World War I & the "Reluctant Belligerent" Myth"</a> (November, 2016)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">William H. Thomas Jr., <i>Unsafe for Democracy: World War I and the U.S. Justice Department’s Covert Campaign to Suppress Dissent</i> (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008).</span><br />
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Allen Ruffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18310195276315827048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458840028095794061.post-53204804345174793922017-09-10T11:18:00.000-07:002019-02-02T13:29:35.944-08:001917: The US Joins the Slaughter<h1 class="print-title">
Dawn of "Total War" and the Surveillance State</h1>
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— Allen Ruff </h3>
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[Slightly edited and with illustrations and URLs added, the following originally appeared in <a href="http://www.solidarity-us.org/atc/current">Against the Current #190, Sept.-Oct., 2017</a> as part of my ongoing series marking the centenary of World War I. -AR]<br />
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UNITED STATES ENTRY in World War I a hundred years ago set in motion a series of domestic transformations that continue to reverberate. In its efforts to mobilize society for “total war,” a still nascent corporate liberal state expanded its scope and authority and in doing so laid foundations and set precedents for the expansion of executive power and the rise of the national surveillance state.<br />
That “war at home” was waged on numerous fronts as a federally coordinated ideological campaign shaped a hyper-nationalist climate of anti-foreign and anti-radical intolerance, coercion, extralegal violence and state repression that hammered all dissent. A brief survey of that early war period tells us much about how ugly, indeed dangerous, it can become for those deemed “disloyal,” “subversive,” “illegal” or “alien” in times of “national emergency” when conformity becomes a test of loyalty.<br />
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The “European War” had already been underway since August, 1914 when president Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for a formal declaration of war against Germany on April 2, 1917. (See: Ruff, on <span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://allenruff.blogspot.com/2016/11/us-entry-in-world-war-i-reluctant.html">US Entry in World War I...</a></span>) With that turn to war, the country’s ruling circles faced an immense set of challenges. They not only had to mobilize war production and allocate, raise and provision what became a four million-strong military force, but had to overcome widespread popular opposition and reluctance to join in the murderous, far-off bloodletting.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Come on in, America... The Blood is Fine!"</td></tr>
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U.S. entry came on the heels of over a half century of recurring social upheaval and class conflict, the result of unregulated capitalist expansion, unbridled competition and the concentration of economic and political power. As the country went to war, immigrants and the children of immigrants comprised a third of the population.<br />
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Approximately twelve million newcomers had arrived during the latter 19th century, another eighteen million came prior to 1914 and those of German heritage made up the country’s largest single ethnic group. Millions of those “new immigrants” provided the labor at the base of the industrial economy but with the war, large numbers of them, hailing from the German and polyglot Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, the “Central Powers,” remained far from eager to take up arms against their homelands.<br />
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Additionally, with Tsarist Russia still part of the “Triple Entente” until after the 1917 "October Revolution," masses of Poles, Finns, Balts and Eastern European Jews also remained unsympathetic to the Allied cause. A sizable portion of the Irish American population, with the Dublin “Easter Rising” of 1916 and execution of its leaders fresh in its memory, also felt, at best, marked ambivalence regarding any support for the British. Besides, a great many of these pre-war numbers had immigrated not just for work and opportunity but to avoid military conscription.<br />
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Such were the social divides — not just of class, but race, ethnicity, gender and regional differences — that in his 1916 reelection campaign Wilson simultaneously campaigned on the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War” while promoting war “preparedness.”<br />
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A Southern-bred Democrat steeped in a white supremacist world view of American mission and racist notions of a civilizational hierarchy of peoples, he also played to deep-seated “old stock” anti-immigrant bigotry. Wilson repeated nativist calls for “100% Americanism” — the programmatic assimilation of “hyphenated-Americans,” those Southern and Eastern Europeans widely viewed as “inferior stock.” They were seen as the cause of the era’s social ills, labor strife and purveyors of “European radicalism.”<br />
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The war abroad intensified social tensions. Beginning in early 1915, some $2 billion in Entente orders for war-related commodities set off a boom, an expansion of investment, productive capacity and output and a related demand for labor. (The original triple Entente powers were France, the British Empire and the Russian Empire.)<br />
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That demand, already heightened by the war’s disruption of an annual cross-Atlantic flow of some 250,000 migrant workers, provided new leverage for the exclusivist skilled craft union affiliates of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the railroad brotherhoods and the industrially organized United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), as well as those unorganized mobile workers able to sell their labor to the highest bidder.<br />
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It also presented new opportunities for the revolutionary unionists in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), veterans of more than a decade of struggles to organize the supposedly “unorganizable” among the largely immigrant “unskilled” of the industrial Northeast and Midwest and masses of itinerant workers engaged in timber, metal mining and agriculture across the Upper Plains and far West.<br />
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Northern labor demand also helped stimulate the first African-American “Great Migration” from the rural South, central to an understanding of the period. (See: Ruff, <a href="http://allenruff.blogspot.com/2015/01/a-world-made-more-unsafe-african.html">"<span style="font-family: inherit;">A World Made More Unsafe: African Americans & World War I..."</span></a>)<br />
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Accelerating after U.S. entry, that war-induced boom not only brought immense corporate profits, but also fueled an inflationary spiral in the cost of living as prices for basic necessities outstripped wage increases. (Between 1913 and August, 1917 wholesale food prices rose 80% while the average retail price increased by 49%).<br />
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Living and working conditions declined as employers, encouraged by the initially relaxed enforcement of existing federal and state labor laws, eroded or ignored already minimal standards and protections. Varied and combined grievances — speedups, longer work weeks, deskilling of trades through mechanization, the introduction of “scientific management,” a lack of grievance procedures and union recognition, the “open shop” and increasingly perilous work conditions — provoked increases in union membership and a major upsurge in strike activity.<br />
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The period between April and early October 1917 witnessed some 3,000 documented walkouts by unionized and non-union workers in numerous industries, several of which involved upwards of 10,000 strikers and took on the character of city- or region-wide general strikes. That upsurge triggered a rapid response from a Washington establishment determined to prosecute the war, and by those corporate leaders eager to assure “industrial peace” and unprecedented profits.<br />
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With U.S. entry came a torrent of Executive Orders and Federal legislation that led, by early 1918, to the expansion or creation of some 5,000 wartime agencies, regulatory committees, oversight boards and federally-run corporations routinely headed by business elites dedicated to boosting and coordinating the war effort.<br />
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As a result, those elite “dollar-a-year men” succeeded in derailing those limited prewar Progressive Era regulatory initiatives curbing monopolies and the power of financial and industrial capital. As a result, the corporations dictated the terms of wartime mobilization as the war propelled the integration of the modern corporate liberal state.<br />
<h3>
Opening Rounds</h3>
Woodrow Wilson consistently set the national tone for what took place. In his December, 1915, Congressional call for military “preparedness,” he stated that the “gravest threats” to the nation were coming from foreign-born U.S. citizens busy spreading “the poison of disloyalty” and that “…such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy” should be “crushed out.”<br />
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In his April, 1917 Congressional message, in which he defined the U.S. war aim as the liberal interventionist mission to make the world “safe for democracy,” he vowed that any “disloyalty” would meet with “a firm hand of stern repression.” That June, he charged that “German masters” were using socialists and the “leaders of labor” and “employing liberals in their enterprise” to “undermine the Government.”<br />
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The day war was declared and with anti-German hysteria already at a feverish pitch, Wilson resurrected the Alien Enemies Act, part of the “Alien and Sedition Acts” of 1798, to order the registration of all adult male German nationals. Broadened that fall, the measure barred all “enemy aliens” 14 years and older from places of “military importance” including Washington, D.C. and required them to seek permission to travel within the country or change residence.<br />
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The order was extended to include women the following April. Under its authority by war’s end, some 600,000 German citizens, regardless of their length of stay in the country or beliefs, would come to report to local post offices and police stations where they were fingerprinted, photographed, filled out forms and swore a loyalty oath. Denied due process and held under Justice Department administrative authority, some 6,300 of them were detained as a “deterrent” and 2,300 were confined to military prison camps, some until well after the war ended.<br />
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Importantly, the decree fanned the flames of generalized anti-German intolerance as state-sanctioned volunteer “home guard” patriots stepped up campaigns to ban German language music and books. Vigilante mobs increasingly attacked and on occasion lynched German Americans and others suspected of “disloyalty.”<br />
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The Selective Service Act of May 18, 1917 required all males between the ages of 21 and 31 (later expanded to 18 and 45) to register with local draft boards. The law proved less popular than the actual decision to go to war and led to protests, some of which were attacked by soldier-led mobs, in cities around the country and in locations in the South and elsewhere, to armed defiance.<br />
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The draft also fueled anti-foreign resentment as it exempted aliens. The Act also propelled the rapid expansion of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation (BI), charged with apprehending some three million men who never registered and another 338,000 “deserters” who failed to report.<br />
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The centerpiece of a broader set of repressive legislation, the Espionage Act of June 15, 1917 outlawed any attempts to obstruct the war effort, including opposition to conscription. Ostensibly designed to impede the operations of German agents, it primarily was used to silence antiwar opposition.<br />
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Of the more than 2,000 individuals charged by the DoJ and 1,055 convicted under the act, not one was prosecuted as a spy. (Still on the books, the Espionage Act has been used more recently in the prosecution of Chelsea Manning and other whistleblowers exposing U.S. war crimes and torture.) A section of the Act made it illegal to mail any materials “advocating or urging treason, insurrection, or forcible resistance to any law of the United States.” It gave the Post Office Department under the conservative Texas Democrat Albert Burleson broad discretionary powers to rule as “unmailable” any publication critical of the draft, the sale of war bonds and taxes, or which suggested the government was controlled by Wall Street or munitions manufacturers.<br />
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Its supplement, the Sedition Act of May, 1918 basically outlawed all criticism of the war and the government. It made the “uttering, printing, writing, or publishing any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language intended to cause contempt, scorn, contumely or disrepute” for the government, the Constitution, the flag, or the uniform of the Army or Navy punishable by up to 20 years in prison and a $20,000 fine. It banned “any language intended to incite resistance to the United States…” or that urged “any curtailment of production of any thing necessary to the prosecution of the war.”<br />
<h3>
Hearts and Minds</h3>
On April 13, 1917 Wilson signed an executive order that created the Committee on Public Information (CPI) composed of the Secretaries of State, War and Navy and headed by a progressive Democrat, George Creel. The “Creel Committee” immediately launched an ideological offensive, a nationally coordinated propaganda campaign that assembled a sizable staff and some 75,000 volunteer writers, artists, advertisers, academics, entertainers and the early motion picture industry to shape public opinion. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">CPI Liberty Bond poster, 1918</td></tr>
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It successfully mobilized war support, military enlistment and the sale of war bonds through patriotic spectacles and exhibitions while feeding carefully tailored war “news” to a compliant press. Its propagandists specifically tailored appeals to middle-class and working-class women, African Americans and the young as its volunteer educators and academics fashioned college and public school curriculum and texts.<br />
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It organized “Loyalty Leagues” to accelerate immigrant “Americanization” while a corps of its bilingual watchdogs, often university professors, monitored foreign language publications in search of Espionage and Sedition Act violations. The CPI also created and bankrolled the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy (AALD), headed by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) president Samuel Gompers, to keep organized labor “industrious, patriotic, and quiet” and combat the anti-war labor Left. (Kennedy, 72)<br />
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Significantly, the CPI promoted a climate of fear, suspicion and nationalist hysteria that resulted in countless incidents of intimidation and abuse of those suspected of disloyalty or insufficient war enthusiasm. It also urged the public to report anyone spreading defeatism and “cries for peace” to the Justice Department.<br />
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While promoting patriotic duty and self-sacrifice, its magazine articles, poster campaigns and millions of pamphlets demonized the enemy as an inhuman beast and barbaric “hun” and reproduced accounts of German atrocities, some of which were the work of British propagandists.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">CPI posters <span style="text-align: start;">demonized the enemy as an inhuman beast and barbaric “hun”</span></span></td></tr>
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Following Russia’s October Revolution, it rapidly labelled any stateside pro-Bolshevik activity as the work of “German agents.” Dovetailing with the period’s repressive measures and expanded policing powers, the CPI’s efforts were manifold as they dubbed all dissident opinion as “unpatriotic” and linked any antiwar or radical labor activity with “pro-Kaiserism.”</div>
<h3>
Homeland Security</h3>
The war measures provided new authority and expanded budgets to a number of federal agencies charged with policing the home front, central among them the Justice Department (DoJ) and its Bureau of Investigation (BI, forerunner of the FBI) and what became the Army’s Military Intelligence Division (MID).<br />
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Established in 1908 as the DoJ’s investigative arm, a rapidly expanded BI not only pursued draft evaders and suspected enemy agents but became the prime wartime monitor of antiwar activity. With only two officers and clerks in April 1917, a relatively autonomous and largely clandestine MID would have, by November 1918, 1300 officers and civilian employees, a national network of undercover regional offices and field agents that coordinated the operations of unknown numbers of local police, private detectives, railroad employees, paid labor spies, traveling salespeople and numerous patriotic groups.<br />
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Joan Jensen, the historian of domestic military surveillance, noted the result:<br />
“What began as a system to protect the government from enemy agents became a vast surveillance system to watch civilians who violated no law but objected to wartime policies or to the war itself. Agents considered such dissenters from government policy to be disloyal, pro-German, and generally malcontent. They became the enemy at home.” (Jensen, 160)<br />
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“Those surveillance bureaucracies rapidly developed a life of their own. In their world view the public was not to be trusted but in need of being controlled.” (Jensen, 166)<br />
<h3>
Volunteer Vigilantism</h3>
Thousands of local organizations assisted the BI and MID. The largest and most notorious of such “home guard” groups was the American Protective League (APL), initially formed and funded by Chicago business leaders in early 1917. Its agents operated as a surveillance arm for the BI and, secretly at the time, an adjunct of the MID.<br />
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With 100,000 members in six hundred cities that June, APL would come to have some 250,000 volunteers in fourteen hundred localities by the end of the war. Provided by the DoJ with badges falsely identifying them as “Secret Service,” its operatives slandered and illegally detained citizens, opened mail and intercepted telegrams, infiltrated peace, civil liberties and labor organizations, burglarized offices and tapped phones, and forwarded upwards of three million reports of suspected disloyalty to their BI handlers.<br />
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Coordinated by DoJ agents and working alongside soldiers and sailors and local police, the APL also provided the ground troops for “slacker raids,” citywide dragnets and interrogations between April and September 1918 that detained thousands caught without draft cards.<br />
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In New York City alone on September 3-5, a task force of some 25,000 including 3,000 military personnel and thousands of APL members interrogated up to 500,000 men and detained 20,000 without draft classification cards in local jails and armories. Of the total, approximately one percent turned out to be “slackers.”<br />
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In 1919, the group’s chronicler proudly noted that what began as an effort to detect German agents had turned to rooting out “Bolsheviki, socialists, incendiaries, IWWs, Lutheran treason-talkers, Russel-lites [Jehovah’s Witnesses], Bergerites, all the other-ites, religious and social fanatics, third-sex agitators, long haired visionaries and work-haters from every race in the world.”<br />
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At the state level, by1918 local “councils of defense” were coordinating with the Army-funded Washington-based Council of National Defense and its 184,000 affiliates to enforce home front conformity. Local branches, with the assistance of women’s clubs and compiling records the whole time, canvassed door-to-door to boost food conservation, scrap drives and war bond subscriptions.<br />
On occasion they paid intimidating night-time visits to the noncompliant, published “rolls of dishonor” of “bond shirkers” or splashed stigmatizing yellow paint on the nonconformist’s properties. Council members also assisted in the hunt for “slackers” and reported instances of “disloyal utterances” and alleged “pro-Kaiser” activity to the Feds.<br />
<h3>
The Left Under Attack</h3>
While the infant surveillance state network went after an array of religious and secular pacifists, its primary target was the organized Left — first and foremost the IWW, the resolutely antiwar Socialist Party, the agrarian radical Non Partisan League (NPL) on the Northern Plains and various anarchist circles. The war after all provided “a cloak of patriotism,” the “ideal camouflage” for those reactionary economic and political forces that had long sought federal assistance in their attempts to stamp out unionism and working-class radicalism, often viewed as synonymous. (Peterson & Fite, 72)<br />
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Even before the BI and MID had fully mobilized, various state and local governments dominated by business and professional interests passed anti-syndicalist ordinances and utilized sheriffs’ departments, innumerable deputized volunteers, company cops and private detectives to deepen an all-out offensive, long underway, against the workers’ movement.<br />
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In practice, stepped-up federal action then gave increased license to extralegal abuses as radicals and strikers, branded as “pro-Kaiser” and increasingly after October 1917 as “Bolsheviki” (or both) were threatened, held incommunicado, forcibly run out of industrial districts, injured, tarred and feathered, murdered and lynched by boss-backed vigilantes.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;">The IWW branded as “pro-Kaiser”</span></td></tr>
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In response to the mid-1917 strike wave, the Administration unleashed a two-pronged offensive. While extending offers of concessions, inclusion, mediation and initially ineffective efforts at regulation and price and profit controls to those AFL unions under Samuel Gompers’ leadership, it ratcheted up its offensive against the labor left.<br />
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Those AFL affiliates under Gompers’ sway largely agreed to what amounted to a “no strike pledge” in exchange for promises of improved conditions, wages and mediation contingent upon acceptance of the open shop. While that cooperation signaled a new “place at the table” for those participating unions, it also exposed the Left’s unyielding war opponents in the IWW and the SP to full-bore repression.<br />
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Following an “Emergency Convention” in St Louis the week war was declared, the SP issued a resolution voicing its “unalterable opposition” to it and called for “continuous, active and public opposition” to conscription, war appropriations and “vigorous resistance to all reactionary measures.” In response, party membership jumped by 12,000 in two months and votes for its candidates running on antiwar platforms in municipal and state elections spiked that November.<br />
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Suppression of the party escalated after those electoral gains as the BI and MID, aided by APL spies, ramped up surveillance and harassment. Its national leaders, among them Eugene Debs, were soon indicted and imprisoned under the Espionage Act. Its gatherings came under mob attack, the party’s Chicago headquarters was raided, and some 1500 of its 5000 party locals across the country were destroyed. The movement’s diverse press, essential to national organizing efforts and communications, was excluded from the mails.<br />
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With its revolutionary class perspectives, determination to build inclusive industrial unions across lines of race and nationality among the “unorganizable” and its tactical reliance on direct action, the IWW’s membership went from around forty to a hundred thousand between 1916 and late 1917. And as the overall number of war-boom strikes increased nationwide through mid-1917, the “Wobblies” stepped up their efforts long underway in precisely those sectors now deemed vital to the war effort — in Montana and Arizona copper, in Northwest timber, California and Upper Plains agriculture and elsewhere.<br />
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Wobbly activists had long preached the class struggle, anti-militarism and international solidarity but the organization had no official antiwar stance. With the passage of the Espionage Act, its National Executive actually counseled toning down any talk of sabotage and opposition to conscription. That cautious response did not protect it as their continuing struggles against the bosses were now branded as seditious attempts to impede the war effort.<br />
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Three days before war was declared, the Wobblie’s headquarters in Kansas City was destroyed by “off duty” Marines and militiamen. Similar assaults took place Duluth, Detroit and Seattle. The Chicago national office was broken into, its records stolen. Then, through that spring and summer, Wobblie organizers and rank-and-file “rough necks” across the West were subjected to a reign of terror executed by an array of commercial clubs, safety committees, and loyalty leagues.<br />
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Throughout the Northwest, Montana, and in Oklahoma following the <a href="https://monthlyreview.org/2010/11/01/dreams-of-revolution-oklahoma-1917/">“Green Corn Rebellion”</a> offices and print shops were destroyed. Those arrested were denied the right of attorney or legal protection, were confined to “bull pen” stockades and subjected to vigilante violence. In the Fall 1917 about 125 Wobblies were jailed at Fresno, a third without charges, as branch secretaries at Los Angeles, San Pedro and Sacramento were indicted for conspiring to intimidate employers by threatening to strike for higher wages.<br />
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In late June, some 4700 largely immigrant, IWW-led, copper miners struck at Bisbee, Arizona. On July 12th over 2000 sheriff’s deputies armed and paid by the Phelps-Dodge mining company herded some 1200 suspected strikers, portrayed as “disloyal” and “pro-German,” onto cattle cars and “deported” them into the New Mexico desert. For months afterward, the copper bosses’ Citizen’s Protective League ruled the region and issued “passports” to enter the town and work. And that was before Federal troops, remaining in the region until well after the Armistice to protect production, had arrived.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiS__cImM7yqBxFfccTce9_MebqHZF7m-QsEaOPJws0Ea8S5iE1DO330VtcS6H8tVVO3_RlUeaiusnaQ1Lll4P1eTpbPcFe267ICaJBF_7TuZ0BCsjHJA7_EjQocvu96EvlUbkvWjJKTDvA/s1600/Bisbee+deportation%252C+1917.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="576" data-original-width="1024" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiS__cImM7yqBxFfccTce9_MebqHZF7m-QsEaOPJws0Ea8S5iE1DO330VtcS6H8tVVO3_RlUeaiusnaQ1Lll4P1eTpbPcFe267ICaJBF_7TuZ0BCsjHJA7_EjQocvu96EvlUbkvWjJKTDvA/s400/Bisbee+deportation%252C+1917.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bisbee, AZ, 1917: Armed sheriff's deputies load strikers on boxcars (Univ. of Arizona Special Colletions) </td></tr>
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<br />
In Butte, Montana on August 1st, vigilantes mutilated and lynched the Wobblie organizer and irrepressible antiwar voice Frank Little, who had come to assist a protracted struggle against Anaconda Copper.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSB5zAzXbHVfQAFLdJT2wOnj36rjKJwkYM4FB8gLHP_QcZLNMWQQs2UjScHybvM7D05HJPMeVh_EXYjCv16qfsFRbgqRf2KeC_1XqwkZqIH72Kkp49gJXCyY-E4Odmm1PEFck3Ehl3arGS/s1600/Little+%25232.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="732" data-original-width="553" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSB5zAzXbHVfQAFLdJT2wOnj36rjKJwkYM4FB8gLHP_QcZLNMWQQs2UjScHybvM7D05HJPMeVh_EXYjCv16qfsFRbgqRf2KeC_1XqwkZqIH72Kkp49gJXCyY-E4Odmm1PEFck3Ehl3arGS/s320/Little+%25232.jpg" width="241" /></a></div>
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In response to ongoing Wobblie-led militancy in the Pacific Northwest, the Army created the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumberman (“4L”), what amounted to a “yellow dog union” in some 500 lumber camps throughout the region. Built around a core of 30,000 soldiers and some 100,000 lumber workers who in order to work had to pledge support for the war and identify “Reds” to the MID, the 4L effectively barred recalcitrant radicals who, unemployed, then became subject to the draft under “work or fight” regulations. 4L members also assisted the MID with surveillance.<br />
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Then on September 5, 1917, nationally coordinated BI-led raids ransacked 48 IWW halls and additional homes in 33 cities. In an attempt to link the organization to the German War office, the Feds seized five tons of material from just the Chicago national office. The result was three mass trials at Chicago, Kansas City and Sacramento in which several hundred men were charged under the Espionage Act with hindering the war effort, inciting rebellion in the military, opposition to the draft and the bizarre charge that strike activities had infringed on the rights of employers.<br />
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In Chicago, following a four-month 1918 trial during which 101 defendants were portrayed in the press as anarchist bomb throwers, pro-German saboteurs and “Bolsheviki revolutionists,” they were found guilty after an hour deliberation. All were sentenced to up to 20 years with $2 million in fines.<br />
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All the while, nationwide defense committee efforts were virtually paralyzed by government harassment. Members of the Sacramento defense committee were themselves indicted. Twenty-seven of those arrested in Kansas and Oklahoma languished in a Wichita jail for two years while awaiting trial.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnwR9H20ibiuVSeGT5-g_AHVLHyx97o9brqhfRz1x1jTWfjRn-imJ-vImm65TZ8Uf0AloEnxcykPYuTJ9c7Ld0gs37x78G0jnrSHP34pBJjehx9I6XwG9N7MiZyWoOk0-i1H0Nbjo18UAR/s1600/Chaplin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="265" data-original-width="201" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnwR9H20ibiuVSeGT5-g_AHVLHyx97o9brqhfRz1x1jTWfjRn-imJ-vImm65TZ8Uf0AloEnxcykPYuTJ9c7Ld0gs37x78G0jnrSHP34pBJjehx9I6XwG9N7MiZyWoOk0-i1H0Nbjo18UAR/s320/Chaplin.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">IWW artist and political prisoner Ralph Chaplin's reminder...</td></tr>
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These raids, arrests, trials and costly defense efforts effectively crippled the organization during the most promising time in its history. The same held true for the SP. That lesson was not lost on the Justice Department. The use of indictments and trials became a regular weapon in the arsenal used to cripple radical organizations for decades to come.<br />
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Clearly the above brief sketch of what occurred in the early months after the United States entered the “Great War” suggests a great deal about the fragility of democratic rights and civil liberties during periods of national emergency. These developments were a prelude of things to come in the immediate postwar period, as the country continued to reel from the wars’ dislocations, unresolved contradictions and social tensions. That story will be taken up in a subsequent article.<br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">Suggested readings:</span></h3>
Melvyn Dubofsky, <i>“We Shall Be All” — A History of the Industrial Workers of the World</i> (1969), Part IV.<br />
Philip S. Foner, <i>Labor and World War I 1914-1918, History of the Labor Movement in the United States</i>, Vol. 7 (1987).<br />
John Higham, <i>Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925</i> (2002/1955) Chaps. 8-9.<br />
Joan Jensen, <i>Army Surveillance in America, 1775-1980</i>, Part III: Legacy of World War I (1991).<br />
Jeanette Keith, <i>Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South During the First World War</i> (2004).<br />
David M. Kennedy, <i>Over Here —The First World War and American Society</i> (2004/1980).<br />
David Montgomery, <i>The Fall of the House of Labor</i>. Chapter 6: “This Great Struggle for Democracy” (1987).<br />
H. C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite, <i>Opponents of War, 1917-1918</i> (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957).<br />
William Preston, Jr., <i>Aliens and Dissenters — Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903-1933</i> (1995/1963).<br />
Harry N. Scheiber, <i>The Wilson Administration and Civil Liberties, 1917-1921</i> (1960).<br />
William H. Thomas Jr., <i>Unsafe for Democracy: World War I and the U.S. Justice Department’s Covert Campaign to Suppress Dissent</i> (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008).<br />
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Allen Ruffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18310195276315827048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458840028095794061.post-86947759039802814692016-11-04T19:00:00.000-07:002019-02-02T13:29:36.251-08:00US Entry in World War I & the "Reluctant Belligerent" Myth <h1 class="print-title">
<span style="font-size: small;">-</span><span style="font-size: large;">Allen Ruff</span></h1>
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<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">[Slightly revised here and with photos added, the following originally appeared under the title, "How Woodrow Wilson Entered World War I," in <a href="http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/4813"><i>Against the Current</i> (November/December 2016, No. 185</a>)]</span></h1>
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<span style="font-size: small;">WORLD WAR I</span> <span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;">had already been raging across Europe and elsewhere for two and a half years when Woodrow Wilson went before a joint session of Congress on April 2nd, 1917 to request a declaration of war against Germany.</span></span><br />
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The President began his address with a casus belli indictment against the “Kaisereich” centered primarily upon the continued violation of U.S. neutrality that Wilson had declared at the very start of the war in August, 1914. Overriding limited but vocal opposition, the Senate and House quickly complied with his request and the United States formally entered the “Great War” on April 6th.<br />
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Despite heightened interventionist sentiment by that spring of 1917, there was diverse and widespread resistance against U.S. direct involvement. Wilson had been inaugurated to a second term less than a month before, having barely defeated his Republican opponent the previous November in part by campaigning on the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.”<br />
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So why did the United States enter? The dominant narrative regarding the decision has long focused on the violations of that proclaimed American neutrality, and regularly describes the country as the “reluctant belligerent” finally drawn into the conflict due to Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare — the February 1st resumption of previously-suspended U-Boat torpedoing of Entente-bound shipping. (The Triple Entente — Russia, France and England — faced off against the Central Powers — Austria-Hungary, Germany and the Ottoman Empire.)<br />
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The prevailing claim has held that some deep-seated “isolationist impulse” and an animus toward Old World “foreign entanglements” had predominated until then, but finally gave way due to the resumed German attacks on the rights of “free passage” on the high seas. A closer examination reveals, however, that the United States had become a significant party, far from neutral in the war against the Central Powers, long before that spring.<br />
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In reality, Wilson’s 1914 call for neutrality “in thought, as well as action… as well as upon every transaction” had rapidly gone by the boards as American industry and agriculture, facilitated by the giants of finance capital, rapidly became the prime providers of hundreds of millions, then billions of dollars of war-related materiel of every sort for the Allies.<br />
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By early 1915, Entente demand lifted the U.S. economy out of a severe recession, the second in less than a decade, which had begun in 1913 and deepened during the early months of the war. That cross-Atlantic trade not only stimulated a stateside economic boom but in so doing, tethered U.S. economic wellbeing to the fortunes of the Anglo-French led coalition.<br />
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All that, in tandem with nationalist imperial ambitions and broader Anglophile historic and cultural ties, especially among dominant elites along the Eastern Seaboard, made U.S. involvement all but inevitable.<br />
<h3>
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<h3>
War and Empire</h3>
The immediate events of early 1917 must be viewed in a broader, layered context. First off, the United States was never truly “isolationist,” in that it had long been a fully integral part of the British-dominated Atlantic economy. Despite periods of antagonism and open conflict dating back to the Revolution, the War of 1812 and the Civil War, overseas trade — especially that of slave-grown cotton in exchange for British capital goods, technologies, and investment — had enabled the country’s first industrial revolution and “takeoff.”<br />
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Facilitated by well-established institutional ties between the City of London and Wall Street, trans-oceanic circuits of credit and investment continued to evolve and deepen. While Britain’s position as the “workshop of the world” gave way to U.S. productive might and an ascendant Germany before 1900, the City of London with its financial and commercial services still functioned as the “switchboard” (Marxist global historian Eric Hobsbawm’s term) for the world’s business transactions.<br />
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All that would begin to change dramatically with the “Great War” as the UK went deeply into hock to its major provider and those already entangled cross-Atlantic conduits of finance and trade were rewired.<br />
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The United States’ non- and then belligerent involvement in the war must be viewed in the context of the country’s rise as an economic powerhouse of industrial and agricultural productivity, a competing center of world capitalist development, and an ascendant global power during the preceding half century — a period of increasing nationalist ambition and inter-imperialist rivalry spurred by crisis-ridden capitalist expansion that Hobsbawm called the “Age of Empire.”<br />
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Overall U.S. industrial productivity skyrocketed in that last third of the 19th century. For example, by 1896 this country became the world’s leading producer of steel as its manufacturers, increasingly concentrated and employing ever greater economies of scale, actually came to undersell British steel in the UK despite shipping costs.<br />
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Production of cotton, the leading U.S. export, doubled from the early 1880s to 1900 while wheat increased by a third. By 1900, nearly 20% of the country’s total agricultural production including two-thirds of its cotton and nearly 40% of its wheat went abroad, primarily to Great Britain. By then, the country was also exporting half of its domestic production of oil and copper while competitors in the UK and France were raising concerns about an “American invasion” of a vast array of mass-produced consumer goods.<br />
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Concurrently major industrial firms and banking houses, flush with capital and never constrained by national boundaries, turned their sights to international markets, opportunities for direct foreign investment, and the development of U.S.-owned companies in Europe, Latin America, the Asian Pacific and elsewhere. Such ventures increasingly turned to diplomatic assistance and direct interventionist protection when needed, as business interests abroad increasingly became capitalist state “national interests.”<br />
<br />
Never truly isolationist, the United States embarked on its own imperialist course in its 1898 war with Spain by snatching Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean and the Philippines and Guam in the Pacific — which along with Hawaii, formally annexed the same year, had long been coveted as strategic way stations to a long-pursued “China market” on the Asian mainland.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi31Z9bHEtzgK4RkvX7slcY7cnpw0S3BzXvPIqRVD0xPw3X-xMSmQIyuxokf-YQibR4h9Rr2yf2L7T5r9QNsZFuuFI50wYpnRQ_ob8RD7gWkGZ30qkIcLqGsyy8LGi70R4poIkB2ifREe-o/s1600/American+Empire+1900.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="296" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi31Z9bHEtzgK4RkvX7slcY7cnpw0S3BzXvPIqRVD0xPw3X-xMSmQIyuxokf-YQibR4h9Rr2yf2L7T5r9QNsZFuuFI50wYpnRQ_ob8RD7gWkGZ30qkIcLqGsyy8LGi70R4poIkB2ifREe-o/s400/American+Empire+1900.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Republican campaign publicity, 1900: Empire "For Humanity's Sake" </td></tr>
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Subsequently, presidents from McKinley through Wilson repeatedly sent troops and occupation forces to combat anti-colonial insurgencies, impose “order” and “civilization” and safeguard U.S.-owned property and investments in Mexico, Haiti, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Honduras, Panama, the Philippines and China, all prior to 1917.<br />
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Importantly, that overseas expansion was never pushed merely by economic imperatives, but was ideologically propelled by an evolving complex of secular and religious belief in the exemplary character of the American “experiment;” its “manifest destiny” to reform the world. Resting upon late 19th century racialist assumptions of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant superiority, and seemingly preordained and verified by material success and Social Darwinist “survival of the fittest” claims, that “civilizational” mission — ultimately but one nationalist ideology among many — informed the imperial project. It oozed from the speeches, writings and visions of the country’s intellectual and political elites perhaps best epitomized by Woodrow Wilson.<br />
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During the 1914 “July Crisis” preceding the start of the Great War, as diplomatic solutions dimmed and various opposing armies mobilized, jittery European investors began to unload their securities in exchange for the safety of gold. But the governments of Germany, Austria, France and Britain halted the conversion to the “universal medium of exchange.”<br />
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Those holding American securities, still redeemable in gold, then looked to cash in. That threatened gold drain, in tandem with the potential selling off of billions of dollars of American securities held abroad, further unsettled the Euro-Atlantic economy.<br />
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With war imminent, every major European exchange shut down. The last to close, the London Stock Exchange did so on July 31st and the New York Stock Exchange followed suit within hours, not to reopen until late November. The result was a deepening of the recession already underway since the previous fall as employers, caught in the banking and credit crisis, laid off workers.<br />
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With many factories operating at 60% capacity, and with the number of unemployed doubled from the year before, observers began comparing conditions in some cities, worsened by a dramatic increase in food prices, to those during the explosive depression winter of 1893-1894. But the recession began to lift as the new year got underway, primarily due to the promise and then the flow of Entente war orders. Already, during the first month of the war, both Britain and France sent agents to the United States to purchase materiel for their respective armies.<br />
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Within the year, other Allies — among them Russia, Italy, Belgium, Serbia and Greece — sent representatives to procure U.S. goods. In October, the British ordered some 400,000 rifles from American manufacturers just as the Royal Navy was busily driving German merchant ships from the Atlantic.<br />
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<h3>
Bankers, Guns and Money</h3>
Following several hectic months in which the various Allies separately competed for U.S.-made materiel, in January 1915 the British government signed a “Commercial Agency Agreement” with the Wall Street giant of finance capital, J.P. Morgan & Company. The compact designated the company as the official purchasing agent, at a 1% commission, of U.S.-produced war goods. It gave Morgan a dominant role in financing the Allied war effort and made Britain the Entente’s prime paymaster.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9qF881rsMi3wAAuhDx0H9HIUCzxnsCIYvh9rvOcul0O87wBkEKbThoKnCLjBzpSpl95Tfh60XZ0dToeUKEwpSNMQl270oK6k7c2LZWHyApPRHBcd67aTSK1Q-5FloJ9JnzEQ2DQxgNZ53/s1600/anti-war+cartoon+%25231.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9qF881rsMi3wAAuhDx0H9HIUCzxnsCIYvh9rvOcul0O87wBkEKbThoKnCLjBzpSpl95Tfh60XZ0dToeUKEwpSNMQl270oK6k7c2LZWHyApPRHBcd67aTSK1Q-5FloJ9JnzEQ2DQxgNZ53/s400/anti-war+cartoon+%25231.jpg" width="288" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Various critics pointed to war-related Big Business interests<br />
(Click on image to read caption) </td></tr>
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To manage what soon became a torrent of British purchases, Morgan created a dedicated Export Department staffed by 175 handpicked specialists which, at its height, handled 4,000 prime contracts for purchasing, insuring and shipping as much as $10 million in goods per day — everything from canned beef to locomotives, wheat, copper, chemicals, cotton, explosives, machine tools and especially, weapons and ammunition. As a result, between January 1915 and April ’17, Morgan became the world’s largest single purchaser of goods as it procured more than $3 billion (in 1913 dollars) in war-related materials for the Allies, with 60% of that total going toward arms and munitions.<br />
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The Export Department not only coordinated contracts, credit arrangements and payments. It organized subcontractors and facilitated cooperation between on-site Allied ordnance experts and American munitions and arms makers. By April 1917, Britain had opened numerous purchasing missions with some 10,000 operatives in the United States. British agents actually supervised the construction and retooling of American factories and traveled with shipments of materiel to East Coast ports to oversee security. In 1916, when the Brits experienced delays in the shipments of rifles and ammo from Connecticut manufacturers, Morgan intermediaries even helped engineer a deal that allowed British supervisors to assume de facto operation of some arms plants.<br />
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At the beginning of the First Battle of the Somme in late June 1916, British guns bombarded the German positions for 10 days with some 1.5 million shells. By that time, U.S. firms were supplying the British Army with three quarters of its light artillery rounds. By the spring of 1917, U.S. plants were producing 15,000 British and Russian rifles daily and were producing machine guns, artillery shells, small arms cartridges and gunpowder on a staggering scale.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRN4bBYgJ8e9K7Dp3PMF5mFmTtK0_11ondH_YstioQzP06IXX6DGIpsdO13EuFKcolAQOb2pfKQzrBBO1iDrBbtFLy85dHp_sr15uO9D2w0Mb_BhyFgOzTb9GEir1f2Pu650NNdL_0l_wE/s1600/Spent+shells+at+Somme.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRN4bBYgJ8e9K7Dp3PMF5mFmTtK0_11ondH_YstioQzP06IXX6DGIpsdO13EuFKcolAQOb2pfKQzrBBO1iDrBbtFLy85dHp_sr15uO9D2w0Mb_BhyFgOzTb9GEir1f2Pu650NNdL_0l_wE/s400/Spent+shells+at+Somme.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Spent shells at the Somme, June1916: Provided<span style="font-size: x-small;"> by US manufacturers? </span></td></tr>
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At the start of the war, the Wilson administration had blocked the U.S. sale of war bonds by belligerents as a violation of “neutrality,” but through 1915 Morgan and other houses succeeded in persuading the Executive that public subscription loans, loans to the general investing public, did not violate the spirit of American neutrality. (At the beginning of the year, Wilson reportedly gave J.P. Morgan Jr. approval for any action “in furtherance of trade.”)<br />
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That September, after meeting with an Anglo-French financial delegation, Morgan representatives forged a syndicate of some 2200 banks that extended a $500 million loan to France and Britain, at that point the largest single loan in financial history, supported by a five-year, five percent bond issue. By the spring of 1917, the British had borrowed some $2.7 billion in such manner.<br />
<br />
Initially, the British liquidated overseas investment and sent gold to the United States to pay for its war orders. But after the beginning of German submarine attacks on their merchantmen, shipments of bullion declined. In its place, Morgan and other houses extended commercial credit to the Allies; Morgan, by 1917 was carrying a half billion dollars in unsecured British “short term” debt.<br />
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The trade in war-related materiel proved extremely profitable for manufacturers. (For example, iron and steel exports quintupled from 1914 to 1917, with average rates of profit going from 7.4% to 28.7% between 1915 and1917.) Allied demand also opened up tens of thousands of relatively high wage industrial jobs, primarily in the North, just as the war disrupted the cross-Atlantic flow of European immigrant labor. By doing so, it helped stimulate the first “Great Migration” of African-Americans from the South. [See my "<a href="http://allenruff.blogspot.com/2015_01_01_archive.html">A World Made More Unsafe: African Americans, World War I & the Shaping of the 20th Century</a>"]<br />
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The “war boom” and its connection to continuing prosperity was not lost on those in power. Wilson and his advisors certainly understood how war trade boosted the economy. They also understood how expansion of American finance at the expense of the Brits created the potentialities for a post-war “new world order.” What informed that vision was the fact that the country, prior to its formal entry in the war, had gone from being a debtor to a creditor nation for the first time.<br />
<br />
<h3>
The Pivotal Year: 1916</h3>
Mainstream historians have argued that economic interest in support of the Allied effort was not the driving force, or even a significant factor that led to U.S. entry into the war. Germany’s military command, however, understood from early on what U.S. material and financial assistance to the Entente meant. Reluctant to draw the country into the war on the Allied side, it tread carefully, going even so far as to curtail or greatly scale back submarine attacks on Allied shipping, especially after the sinking of the British liner Lusitania in May, 1915. But through 1916, that command faced a series of mounting crises created by the ever more costly toll of “total war” waged by an enemy increasingly well-provisioned by the still “neutral” United States.<br />
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At the beginning of the war, Britain inaugurated a long-planned naval blockade of Germany, in part to confine the Imperial Navy to port, but also to stop merchant carriers, including neutrals like the United States at the time, from providing the Reich with essential war materiel. In early November, 1914 Britain declared the entire North Sea a “military area,” possibly mined, as a warning to merchant shipping and soon included food stuffs on its list of “contraband” war goods. (At that point, the Wilson administration officially protested the British disruption of the American carrying trade.)<br />
In response, with only nine U-Boats in total to start, the German command inaugurated its first round of submarine attacks in an attempt to drive British merchantmen into port.<br />
<br />
By the beginning of 1916, the British naval siege, what had become a “starvation blockade,” played a major impact in deepening a German home front crisis. As ever-diminishing food rations, precipitous declines in daily intakes, and scarcities of basics worsened by black market profiteers battered day-to-day popular class existence, food riots spread across German cities, including Berlin, crucial to war production.<br />
<br />
That deteriorating home front situation paralleled Western Front stalemate battles of Verdun, from February to December, and the Somme, July-October. Incredibly costly in material terms and exacting millions of casualties, that year’s carnage deepened German desperation. So too did the naval Battle of Jutland at the end of May, in which the German fleet failed to break the blockade’s strangle hold and gain access to the Atlantic — a setback that informed the subsequent January, 1917 decision to gamble on the resumption of submarine warfare.<br />
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<h3>
From “Preparedness” to War</h3>
U.S. developments informed the German decision, as well. From early in the war, an elite cohort of pro-Allied political figures such as Theodore Roosevelt, prominent business leaders and military figures headed a well-orchestrated and financed “preparedness campaign” to move the country toward direct involvement.<br />
<br />
Sold to the public as a matter of “defense” and “deterrence,” that pro-war movement achieved a major victory with the June, 1916 passage of the National Defense Act which included an expansion of the Army and the National Guard and the creation of a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. The act expanded the presidential authority to federalize the National Guard and changed the duration and circumstances under which it could be called up. It funded the creation of an Army aviation wing with the allocation of over $17 million for 375 new airplanes, while the government took steps to ensure the immediate availability of war equipment by contracting in advance for the production of gunpowder and other materiel. Subsequently, the Naval Act of August 1916, promoted by “big navy” globalists, provided for the construction of ten battleships, sixteen cruisers, fifty destroyers, seventy-two submarines and fourteen auxiliaries.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNKVw-LF-LpHzEjJ5vWZV2Eodi0IdXRS2dB0pjfUtury5K_shYSu1aC5PJP5INXltACh4NJAsDEihlc_rWmVwdAh_kySAN-2cjfdNx8v4Td5g_ppOCc04KYlKcOgSxf4253Zxz4Nl1QrM9/s1600/Wilson+preparedness.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNKVw-LF-LpHzEjJ5vWZV2Eodi0IdXRS2dB0pjfUtury5K_shYSu1aC5PJP5INXltACh4NJAsDEihlc_rWmVwdAh_kySAN-2cjfdNx8v4Td5g_ppOCc04KYlKcOgSxf4253Zxz4Nl1QrM9/s400/Wilson+preparedness.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"He Kept Us Out of War!"</td></tr>
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By January 1917, an important part of the German military command’s strategic and tactical calculations came to rest on the assumption that it would be but a matter of time before the United States would formally enter the war. Imperial Navy strategists convinced the military high command and the Kaiser that a resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare could help defeat Great Britain within five months. Countering the concern that resumption of U-Boat attacks would draw the United States into the war, they argued that Washington actually was not neutral and had waived its neutrality by acquiescing to the Allied “starvation blockade.”<br />
<br />
German submarine attacks resumed on February 1st and the United States broke diplomatic relations on February 3rd. The U.S. war boom was at its peak, but as a now-enlarged U-Boat fleet started taking a heavy toll on Allied shipping, the cancellation of Atlantic crossings began and goods started piling up in Eastern ports. That led to concerns over increased plant closings, an end to the war prosperity, and an ever-looming specter of social unrest.<br />
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On February 26 Wilson asked Congress to authorize the arming of merchantmen, in the name of “armed neutrality.” But antiwar Senators, correctly arguing that the placement of deck guns and naval personnel on civilian ships constituted an act of war, filibustered the measure. Wilson then proceeded to arm the ships by executive order. By then, “neutrality” existed in name only and after the sinking of several U.S.-flagged merchantmen in March, Wilson went before Congress on April 2nd for a war declaration.<br />
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Several other developments had played a role in moving the United States toward open belligerency, or made it easier for Wilson to win Congressional and broader public support. One was the coming of the Russian Revolution weeks earlier, as the abdication of the Czar on March 15th (February 27th) allowed Wilson to rhetorically redefine the conflict as one between “democracy” and “autocracy.”<br />
The second involved public disclosure of the “Zimmerman Note,” a secret communiqué from the German Foreign Minister instructing the German Ambassador to Mexico to convey an offer to Mexico’s President Carranza: that upon U.S. entry in the war, Berlin would assist Mexico in recovering Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.<br />
<br />
British intelligence had intercepted and decoded the cable in mid-January, but did not immediately share it with U.S. officials. But with the February resumption of submarine warfare taking its toll, the British finally forwarded the intercept to Wilson on February 24 in the hope that it would move the country toward formal entry. The American press carried the story the following week and stoked the increasing pro-war clamor.<br />
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<h3>
War and Myth</h3>
Narrow claims that the United States was reluctantly drawn into the World War solely due to German violations of its neutrality do not stand up under close scrutiny. There certainly was widespread popular antiwar opposition coming from numerous quarters from pacifists, socialists, progressives, recent immigrants and workers. But that opposition was never simply based on some deeply ingrained “isolationist impulse.” It reflected a nation deeply divided along economic and social fault lines of class, race, ethnicity and gender.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTbrGoDd3DJQi3dOpdO9dL5U1YPjZVADpBI9-RGV_2EEILd5qGUegBxSPCQcxnVaVIdPjOZqAIWQ_QNRkYtGSEG35PmahJTyA9eb8eplDYKQNWLSncf8xbHZW6Lu2laPFoWrB3SX8Hn5PQ/s1600/Antipreparedness_protest_1916.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="328" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTbrGoDd3DJQi3dOpdO9dL5U1YPjZVADpBI9-RGV_2EEILd5qGUegBxSPCQcxnVaVIdPjOZqAIWQ_QNRkYtGSEG35PmahJTyA9eb8eplDYKQNWLSncf8xbHZW6Lu2laPFoWrB3SX8Hn5PQ/s400/Antipreparedness_protest_1916.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Socialists demonstration in opposition to Preparedness Movement, New York City, May Day, 1916</td></tr>
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For example, a third of the population in 1910 was foreign born or first generation American-born. Millions of them were of German or Austro-Hungarian descent and remained far from enthusiastic in their support for a war against their respective “homelands.” Additional millions were of Irish ancestry, reluctant to side with the British, especially after the repression of the 1916 Easter Rising.<br />
Besides, there were additional millions of people, already aware of the war’s devastation and carnage, who would soon become the victims of intolerance, coercion, and conscription to make “the world… safe for democracy.”<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Come on in, America, the Blood is Fine!" M.A Kampf, <i>The Masses </i>(1917) </td></tr>
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<br />
World War I was an imperialist war. The United States became involved not as some “reluctant belligerent,” a nation wronged and its sovereignty violated, but as an aspiring, ascendant imperial power. The war destabilized an old global order and opened new opportunities, short term and long.<br />
Beyond the rhetorical and ideological trappings, the understanding of what involvement could accomplish for U.S. standing in the world was not lost on those sitting at the “commanding heights” of the economy or the state, well before a single U.S. soldier died in the trenches of the Western Front.</div>
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Allen Ruffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18310195276315827048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458840028095794061.post-56974738364910649392016-07-14T15:12:00.000-07:002019-02-02T13:29:35.967-08:00Review Essay: Understanding World War I<div class="print-logo">
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The following first appeared in <a href="https://www.solidarity-us.org/site/epublish/1">Against the Current</a>, <a href="https://www.solidarity-us.org/site/epublish/1/140">July-August 2016, No. 183</a><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Understanding the Cataclysm</span></h1>
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<span style="font-size: large;">— Allen Ruff </span></h1>
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Cataclysm 1914 —<br />
The First World War and the Making of Modern World Politics<br />
edited by Alexander Anievas<br />
Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2015, 412 pages + bibliography,<br />
Haymarket Books edition, 2016, $36 paperback.</blockquote>
WITH THE CENTENARY of World War I well underway, numerous books and articles on the causes, conduct, and consequences of the “Great War” have appeared. Outstanding among them is Cataclysm 1914, the collection of new perspectives and reappraisals on the war’s origins and outcomes, edited and introduced by the Cambridge-based Marxist historical sociologist Alexander Anievas.<br />
<br />
The First World War, truly global in scope and impact, brought to an end 100 years of relative European peace, the absence of a Continent-wide conflict following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. It consigned four long-standing empires — Austria-Hungary under the Habsburgs, Romanov Russia, Hohenzollern Germany, and the Ottoman — to the dust bin of history and thereby altered the geopolitical and social terrain not just of Europe, but much of the globe.<br />
<br />
The war gave impetus to national struggles and revolutionary movements across the Continent and far beyond while simultaneously furthering the ascent of the United States and Japan to “Great Power” status. An unprecedented act of “creative destruction,” it accelerated transformations in every sphere of human existence — economic, political, cultural, intellectual, scientific and technological. It “totalized” modern warfare by mobilizing entire societies as it slaughtered, maimed and displaced tens of millions.<br />
<br />
The war set the stage for much that followed across the subsequent century by creating the conditions for the October Revolution, the birth of the Soviet Union, and the protracted “anti-communist crusade” against what was no longer merely a specter haunting Europe. As R. Craig Norton, the historian of the war’s left opposition pointed out elsewhere, “it was the war itself that became the crucible within which the conceptual paradigms and underlying assumptions that would come to dominate twentieth century socialist and communist thought were forged.”<br />
<br />
At that level alone, the “Great War” ushered in a new epoch in world history and politics.The war also called into question, at least temporarily, liberal imperialist claims of “civilizing mission” and a corresponding notion of “progress,” often shared by socialists, that capitalism would bring “civilization” to the imperialized.<br />
<br />
The conflagration and the punitive treaties that followed created the preconditions for the unevenly experienced boom and bust of the 1920s, the Great Depression of the ’30s and the related rise of fascism, which must be understood first and foremost as the highest stage of counter-revolution.<br />
Ultimately, the antagonisms left unresolved and new ones unleashed by the war set the stage for World War II, in many ways best viewed as the final round of the century’s “Thirty Years’ War.”<br />
<h3>
Locating the Causes</h3>
Conservative and liberal explanations of the war’s causes have all too often focused upon the tangle of balance-of-power alliances among the major and lesser European powers that quickly unravelled following the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in late June, 2014.<br />
<br />
Even while considering “imperial ambition” in the abstract and earlier conflicts in the Balkans or Africa as factors, innumerable works have described in minute detail the resulting “July Crisis” — the failure of “Great Power” diplomacy amidst parallel national mobilizations, the preceding military buildup on all sides, and the German high command’s miscalculated plans for a “preventive war” against Russia and France — to explain the catastrophe.<br />
<br />
Some have even defined the plunge into the abyss as irrational, a seemingly inexplicable detour from the course of “progress”; the descent of “civilization” into some atavistic multi-nationalist mass hysteria.<br />
<br />
Others, upholding the punitive verdict of the victors at Versailles, have long argued Germany’s primary, if not sole responsibility for the conflagration. Those maintaining that “war guilt” thesis have sought to explain what happened by weighing the Kaiserreich’s domestic, “internalist” antagonisms versus its “externalist” pressures and expansionist ambitions.<br />
<br />
In contrast, the Cataclysm collection places the destabilizing dynamics of capitalist development in the pre-war decades front and center. The bulk of the essays do so by reassessing and expanding upon the analyses of Lenin, Trotsky and Bukharin.<br />
<br />
These revolutionary Marxists, in the midst of the war and afterward, deepened earlier perspectives on the structural connections between capitalism, imperialism and war to explain not just the mass slaughter and the Second International’s overall failure to resist the patriotic gore, but as the basis of understanding for what became a refounding of revolutionary politics.<br />
<br />
Numerous Marxist observers have long viewed the war as not just the failure of a liberal “international order,” the collapse of an established “balance of power” or merely the result of bad or miscalculated policy. Rather, it was seen as the direct outcome of a competition, propelled by capitalist imperatives, that accelerated during the 19th century “age of capital” and intensified during the globalized “Long Depression” of the century’s last quarter.<br />
<br />
Not understandable merely in economic terms, that “new imperialism” of the prewar era, enshrouded in nationalist notions of destiny, “civilizing mission” and supremacy, also provided a hoped-for set of “spatial” and “temporal” fixes for increasingly concentrated, but crisis-prone and conflict-ridden class societies.<br />
<br />
A number of the Cataclysm chapters employ the theory of uneven and combined development for understanding the political economy of the war’s causes and effects. Several of the authors including Anievas, historians Adam Tooze, Peter Thomas, and historical sociologist Neil Davidson expand upon Trotsky’s initial insights on the international dynamics of the era’s capitalist development; the unevenly experienced disruptions stimulated by the increasingly global flow of capital.<br />
<br />
The pieces explore the material bases of the conflict rooted in the development of the “late arrivals” to the international “great game” — most notably Germany and Russian, and to a lesser extent, Japan — as well as the attempts of the then leading but increasingly challenged imperial powers, Great Britain and secondarily France, to maintain their global advantages.<br />
<br />
They illustrate how financial capital, and transfers of technology, organizational forms and expertise from the more advanced capitalist centers, propelled industrialization and the construction of infrastructure, railroads and armaments that allowed the “arriviste” powers to accelerate, foreshorten and “leap frog” stages of capitalist development.<br />
<br />
In such fashion, the essays illustrate how capital “cemented” and undergirded the Great Power “strategic alliances” that ultimately faced off in August, 1914. We learn, for example, of French capital’s financing of Russian industrial and military production; of German backing of a Turkish navy and railroad construction, and Serbia’s massive dependency on one creditor, France, in the decade prior to the war.<br />
<br />
As Adam Tooze points out, foreign loans came with decisive strategic entanglements which in turn affected domestic politics while harnessing the most and least advanced economies together in dynamic and destabilizing combinations.<br />
<br />
That skewed, crisis-generating development of specific sectors, grafted upon and coming at the expense of others, also accelerated the growth and ascent of capitalism’s contending classes, which in turn challenged the vested interests of the old absolutist order — the land and peasant-based nobility, gentry and military castes in Prussia, Austria-Hungary, Russia and elsewhere.<br />
<br />
The resulting internal social and political tensions, heightened by the era’s increasingly frequent and severe global downturns, fanned nationalist and revanchist ambitions and imperialist expansion, conceived by various class elements as their antidote for social and political crises.<br />
<h3>
Revolution Unleashed</h3>
Historical sociologist Sandra Halpern’s “War & Social Revolution: WWI and the Great Transformation” notes that the war unleashed a social revolution that began to shift the balance of class power in Europe. This in turn would make the post-World War II transformation of European societies possible.<br />
<br />
On the war’s origins, Halpern shows the interconnected dynamics of internal repression and external expansion that characterized the globalizing pre-war system of capitalist production, exchange and accumulation. The combined effects of the “Long Depression” of 1873-1896 and the resultant “rising red tide” of heightened class struggles — the militant upsurge of diverse socialist, anarchist and syndicalist movements, of organized left political parties, popular institutions and left-led trade unions — increased pressures within states as well as rivalries among the imperial powers that ultimately led to the war.<br />
<br />
Halpern’s piece goes on to argue how the belligerents’ mass conscription of bodies (“levée en masse”) for the military and war industries, unprecedented “totalized war,” exponentially increased pre-existing social tensions in Europe, resulting in the threat and reality of revolution and ultimately the “great divide in modern European history.”<br />
<br />
She reminds us that the working classes were not necessarily won over to the nationalist cause, and how mounting unrest on the home front and within the military ranks on all fronts escalated as the mass slaughter and deprivation dragged on. Then came the inspiration of the worker and peasant-based October Revolution, occurring not in the advanced centers of the imperial system but in its “weakest link,” and Russia’s subsequent exit from the war.<br />
<br />
The wartime and postwar labor upsurge and the specter of the “Bolshevik menace” gave rise to ruling class reaction, a drive to contain and eradicate the revolutionary “virus” by ruling circles everywhere — and especially among those more conservative elements who, as Halpern points out, eventually came to view a rearmed and eastward-looking Germany as an advance bulwark against Bolshevism.<br />
<h3>
Racial Coordinates of Imperialism</h3>
London University sociologist Alberto Toscano, through a reexamination of W.E.B. Du Bois’ wartime essays, reengages the renowned scholar’s insights on the “racial coordinates” of capitalist imperialism with its racist, white supremacist dynamics.<br />
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Surveying Du Bois’ May 1915 “The African Roots of War,” Toscano conveys its probing analysis of the conflict not just as the result of capitalist competition and territorial ambition, but as a contest over who would get to further exploit black and non-white labor globally.<br />
For Du Bois, “it was the competition for the labor of yellow, brown, and black folk that was the cause of… the War.”<br />
<br />
Du Bois, Toscano reminds us, pointedly viewed the war as “a return onto (white) European soil… of the systematic violence and repression” that was long ongoing on the other side of a globalizing “color line” in the colonies; what Toscano calls the “boomerang effect” of imperialism. As Du Bois saw it, the “right to own and exploit darker peoples” had set the European powers to “fighting like mad dogs.”<br />
<br />
At a time when Entente voices were condemning the German invasion of “poor little Belgium,” he noted the country’s “rubber horror” under King Leopold and that, “what Belgium suffers now is not half, not even a tenth what she [sic] has done to the Black Congo.” Imperialism in Africa, for Du Bois, exposed the true nature of European “civilization.”<br />
<br />
Du Bois saw the roots of war in the “jealousies engendered by the recent rise of armed national associations of labor and capital” in the “white metropolis” as well as a quest for the “safety valves” of imperial depredation. Surveying his arguments as they evolved through the war period, Toscano importantly points to a “global wages of whiteness,” psychological as well as material, and the role that a white supremacist cross-class social imperialism played before and during the conflict.<br />
<br />
Examining the April, 1917 essay “Of the Culture of White Folk,” Toscano shows how Du Bois’ thinking on the war underwent a subtle shift in emphasis from that focus on a “democratic-despotic alliance of white labor and white capital” to a racialized “hyper-exploitation of a non-white global proletariat.”<br />
<br />
Toscano situates Du Bois’ thinking by drawing parallels with Lenin’s and Bukharin’s materialist analyses of social chauvinism/imperialism and the formation of a “labor aristocracy” said to be “bribed” by the “crumbs” (Lenin) or, in Du Bois’ framing, the “loophole” of racial capitalism coming from the superprofits extracted from the colonized.<br />
<br />
Toscano focuses upon Du Bois’ understanding of the crucial role of race in the development of social chauvinism among the more privileged strata of the white working class, and the part it played in impeding wartime working-class unity.<br />
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<h3>
East and West</h3>
Tracking the continuities between Germany’s prewar and the postwar Weimar years, historian Shelly Baranowski traces the interwoven connections between national ambitions and domestic social pressures extending across the period.<br />
<br />
Rather than viewing the history through an “internalist” vs. “externalist” binary, she illustrates how heightened and accelerated domestic class antagonisms and expansionist projects intertwined.<br />
German expansionist desires for “Lebensraum” or “living space” made infamous by Hitler had their origins well prior to WWI, as the taking of territory to the east became a perceived necessity within various ruling circles — the absolutist state bureaucracies, the military, and the “commanding heights” of German capital — who saw their overseas ambitions impeded by British imperial power.<br />
<br />
The combination of defeat in the war, the postwar crises of civil war and economic disaster, and related resentments over the imposed peace, Baranowski tells us, sustained the dreams of “living space” and fueled a radical nationalism, culminating in the Nazi seizure of power in 1933.<br />
<br />
Also taking a longer view, political philosopher Domenico Losurdo examines the differing impacts of the war and October Revolution, in 1914 and 1917, on the origins of two distinct strands of Marxism, “Eastern” and “Western.” The conditions and changing conceptions of the revolutionary process shaped the trajectories of the communist movement in the Global South and North.<br />
<br />
He identifies two “struggles for recognition” with distinct protagonists — one in the advanced capitalist “West” carried out by the working class and the popular masses; the other in the “East” carried out by national movements in India, Vietnam, Russia and China, etc. — attempting to shake off the oppression and dehumanization of colonialism.<br />
<br />
The “East” and “West” occupied two distinct political moments and different inequalities, internal and external. The war and revolution had very different impacts on the development of revolutionary socialist strategy, which Losurdo illustrates in a discussion of the Chinese and Russian revolutions.<br />
While the communist movement in the “West” developed within sovereign and privileged nations, the parties and movements in the East evolved within dependent and semi-dependent nations challenged by the combined legacies of the ancien regime and imperialism.<br />
<br />
The longer-term effect was a “Western Marxism” that, in Losurdo’s estimation, was no longer able to challenge the existing order and stimulate a process of emancipation, and an Eastern variant deprived of valuable theoretical contributions.<br />
<br />
Pointing out how the October Revolution fostered different strategic understandings, he argues that, for example, in the West science and technology came to be viewed as an integral part of the war-bred “New Leviathan” employed by the bourgeoisie to increase profit. But in the East, in Russia and China plagued by underdevelopment and “backwardness,” such forces of production came to be understood as essential for developing resistance against subjugation and oppression.<br />
<br />
While noting the “trauma” of imperialized China well before 1914 and pointing to its “reawakening” stimulated by the Russian Revolution, Losurdo reminds us that as a result of Versailles, Japan took Germany’s concession in Shandung. That, in turn lead to mass student protests which then gave rise to the nationalist May Fourth Movement and ultimately, the founding of the Chinese Communist Party and what followed.<br />
<br />
Independent scholar Lars Lih presents a provocative reevaluation of Lenin’s thinking during war by arguing that the Bolshevik leader’s position marked no departure or break with the pre-war position of the Second International, but was actually a reaffirmation of the “pre-war consensus of revolutionary Social Democracy” abandoned in 1914.<br />
<br />
In Lih’s terms, Lenin employed a “rhetoric of aggressive unoriginality” in the years 1914-16 to show the essential continuity between the Bolshevik program and a pre-war Marxist consensus based upon Kautsky’s formulations of a “new era of war and revolution.”<br />
<br />
Lih points out that as Lenin understood it, the failure of the International’s major parties was based upon the “betrayal” of the 1912 Basel Manifesto, in which the International members parties had pledged to use the outbreak of war to engage in revolutionary action or at least to work in that direction.<br />
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Several of the other Cataclysm essays stand out; among them, Neil Davidson’s examination of the war’s impact on classical Marxism’s “stage theory” of capitalist development, and the “end of the bourgeois revolution” in Europe marked by Lenin’s post-Bolshevik victory pronouncement that Russia would begin the transition to socialism. This piece, well worth a close reading, traces the evolution of Lenin’s thinking and Trotsky’s wartime influence upon it, induced of course by the conjunctural crisis that was the war.<br />
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There is no way in a brief review to do justice to all of Cataclysm’s diverse and provocative pieces. Some readers might find the writings somewhat dense or academic. But a close reading will prove rewarding for anyone seeking to understand those forces that shaped the last century, and the causes and effects of the Great War that continue to ripple and resonate to the present.</div>
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Allen Ruffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18310195276315827048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458840028095794061.post-17377610748174456102016-01-11T13:49:00.001-08:002019-02-02T13:29:35.694-08:00Debs for His Time and Ours<div class="print-logo">
[The following book review first appeared in <a href="https://www.solidarity-us.org/site/atc/current">Against the Current, January/February 2016, No. 180</a>]</div>
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— Allen Ruff </h3>
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<i><span style="font-size: large;">Eugene V. Debs Reader<br />Socialism and the Class Struggle</span></i><br />
Edited by William A. Pelz with a new introduction by Mark Lause, and an original introduction by Howard Zinn,<br />
London: Merlin Press, 2014, 256 pages, $25 paperback.</blockquote>
THIS NEW RELEASE of selected writings and speeches by Eugene Victor Debs (1855-1926) could not be more timely. It’s especially salient for those on the socialist left engaged in discussions and debates regarding Bernie Sanders’ bid to win the Democratic Party nomination for president.<br />
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The most well known figure of early 20th century American socialism, Debs conveyed his class-conscious anti-capitalist message, most famously through his celebrated oratory, to countless hundreds of thousands during his years as labor militant and five-time Socialist candidate for president. Viewing those campaigns primarily as educational vehicles, he forwarded a critique and positions on numerous social and political questions, many of which remain with us a hundred years later.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgF1PRLuStcO3MubiN_qHKlEQwb24jBlPqfUhozvwbAtovLq_hyphenhyphen_mMHR9Vtm4o4IyBUPKa9CX7SHxvuWxNbCu60wvrNNU_7FB8GgEpBrniFJwrxH3xtiuYzYf1wptbXKdHcozc45hchvROb/s1600/debs+speaking.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgF1PRLuStcO3MubiN_qHKlEQwb24jBlPqfUhozvwbAtovLq_hyphenhyphen_mMHR9Vtm4o4IyBUPKa9CX7SHxvuWxNbCu60wvrNNU_7FB8GgEpBrniFJwrxH3xtiuYzYf1wptbXKdHcozc45hchvROb/s320/debs+speaking.jpg" width="177" /></a><br />
Taking as a given that today’s political culture and social terrain are in many ways vastly different than what they were back then, Debs’ outlook on a range of fundamental issues, arrayed chronologically in this collection, remain surprisingly alive.<br />
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His internationalist class perspective, his critique of the two major “capitalist parties,” and his stance regarding independent political action still speak volumes. His strategic commitment to building a working-class movement, firmly based upon the two pillars of militant, inclusive unionism and electoral work, remains vitally important.<br />
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In addition, Debs’ principled class-based anti-racism, opposition to immigration restriction, his demands for gender equality, as well as his unswerving opposition to imperialist war still stand as exemplary guides.<br />
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As summarized in the book’s introduction and preface, Debs’ socialist understandings of the nature of the capitalist beast grew out of his lived experience as an American heartland son of the working class.<br />
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His thinking continually evolved. Shaped by harsh U.S. realties as well as a deep awareness of the country’s radical traditions, it was imbued with democratic and egalitarian values, and a sharp awareness of the glaring contradictions between that democratic promise and the chasm of social and economic disparities during the “Age of the Robber Barons” and the “Progressive Era.”<br />
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<h3>
“The Man from Terre Haute”</h3>
Debs was born in November, 1855, the son of French Alsatian immigrants. His father, as historian Mark Lause tells us in his introductory portrait, had crossed the Atlantic after the defeat of the revolution of 1848. Debs’ parents named him Eugene Victor after the French anti-clerical writer Eugene Sue and the popular novelist Victor Hugo.<br />
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Coming of age in the western Indiana town of Terre Haute, an increasingly industrial railroad terminal on Wabash River, he went to work on the railroad at 14. A coal shoveler on a locomotive at 16, he joined the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, a fraternal mutual aid society in that pre-union era. Largely self-educated, Debs rose through the BLF’s ranks while dabbling in local Terre Haute politics, even doing a one-term stint as a Democrat in the Indiana legislature.<br />
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Mainstream politics and conservative railroad mutual aid could not hold him, however. Those decades when he matured as a labor militant were years of recurrent economic crisis, resultant class violence — often bitter railroad strikes and vicious lockouts waged by those industrial titans determined to keep the railroads, then the vital circulatory system of industrial capitalism, free of unions.<br />
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In 1893, just as the country entered what became the deepest capitalist crisis and depression up to that time, Debs helped organize the American Railway Union (ARU), an industrial union attempt to bring the various railroad brotherhoods and trades and workers regardless of skill under one national organization. He quickly became the union’s articulate voice.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxNLD9rkl_atT2qCE3mn3AROjoMWyskfppZP-1YgOslB0iswx6JQ60I3Hx_RbLv3wrRs6_-94-Q4WTBoGUXi-tKuJK5a5kczsalB-34VIj8lRdVEl3BNjZ1beY-Z2N9g-KcLRzPCYnSdLh/s1600/pullman+cartoon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxNLD9rkl_atT2qCE3mn3AROjoMWyskfppZP-1YgOslB0iswx6JQ60I3Hx_RbLv3wrRs6_-94-Q4WTBoGUXi-tKuJK5a5kczsalB-34VIj8lRdVEl3BNjZ1beY-Z2N9g-KcLRzPCYnSdLh/s320/pullman+cartoon.jpg" width="320" /></a>The young ARU was soon called upon to assist the besieged workers at Pullman, Illinois, victims of a 28% wage cuts who were still expected to pay exorbitant rents in that company-built town, home of the Pullman Palace Car Company.<br />
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Debs called for the union’s members to refrain from operating any trains containing the Pullman sleeping cars. With uncoupled or sidelined trains halted and backed up all along the vital industrial arteries of the Midwest and beyond, boss George Pullman and his industrial magnate cronies immediately called upon President Grover Cleveland for help.<br />
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Cleveland’s Attorney General, the former railroad lawyer and future Secretary of State Richard Olney, proceeded to break the ARU strike by serving up several injunctions, enforced by federal troops and deputized thugs who fired on crowds at Chicago and elsewhere, killing 13 and wounding hundreds.<br />
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<h3>
Becoming a Socialist</h3>
That capacity of the “captains of industry” to enlist the power of the state to break the strike left an indelible impression on Debs and hammered home the need for class-based political action. As he later put it, the state’s response also provided him, though he didn’t fully understand it at the time, with his first “practical lesson in Socialism” as “the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle [revealed] the class struggle…” (“How I Became a Socialist,” 1902).<br />
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For his role as an ARU leader and his defiance of the federal injunctions, he wound up behind bars at Woodstock, Illinois. It was in jail during the latter half of 1895 that Debs, reading voraciously, deepened his understandings.<br />
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While plumbing not only the works of radical populists and utopian socialists, he also took a deep plunge into writings by the Second International’s German theoretician, Karl Kautsky. The story, often repeated since, was that he spent part of his time in Woodstock jail reading a volume of Marx’s Capital, brought to him by Milwaukee’s Social Democratic Party leader Victor Berger.<br />
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Leaving Woodstock, he soon went on to declare himself a socialist and participated in organizing a succession of socialist party formations. He played a central role in forging the coalition that became the Socialist Party of America in 1901.<br />
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Already a nationally known labor militant by the beginning of the century, Debs ran as a Socialist Party presidential candidate on five occasions between 1900 and 1920. Present at the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905, he would soon go on to disavow the IWW’s singular syndicalist focus on “direct action” and rejection of electoral strategies.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6H2tJzrmmAUzxcYN2aa3zd5NzRwlLK_bUmt_9Cduxi8df-6jyPQAA123oQd_6xK93E5ybIBwXobxniL8jUzy1UadzA6OnR-bZyOjEpPJ4H8beLmhe3AjELLHyg9JsDKkLBruC72_UN6Ua/s1600/debs+campaign+button.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6H2tJzrmmAUzxcYN2aa3zd5NzRwlLK_bUmt_9Cduxi8df-6jyPQAA123oQd_6xK93E5ybIBwXobxniL8jUzy1UadzA6OnR-bZyOjEpPJ4H8beLmhe3AjELLHyg9JsDKkLBruC72_UN6Ua/s200/debs+campaign+button.jpg" width="200" /></a><br />
By that time, as well, he had already developed a detailed critique of the exclusionary “pure and simple” skilled craft unionism of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the class collaboration of its leader Samuel Gompers. He remained unwavering in his support for industrial unionism, the organizing of all workers in an industry regardless of skill, not only as the best form of workers’ defense but as a means of building “revolutionary class unionism.”<br />
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<h3>
Black Lives Mattered</h3>
Never static, Debs’ socialist consciousness evolved over time. Nowhere was that more evident than in his take on what was then referred to as “the Negro question.” Reprinted in this collection, his “The Negro In The Class Struggle” appeared in the Chicago-based International Socialist Review (ISR) appeared in 1903, shortly after W.E.B. DuBois published his famed The Souls of Black Folk boldly asserting that the “problem of the 20th century” was the “problem of the color-line.”<br />
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Commissioned by the ISR, the piece was intended as a response to the platform of the Socialist Party of Louisiana that called for the “separation of the black and white races into separate communities, each race to have charge of its own affairs.”<br />
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Debs also took the opportunity in the column and subsequent exchanges to critique what he considered as the backward section on “The Negro Question” of the SP’s 1901 program.<br />
Debs began the piece by criticizing socialists who “either share directly in the race hostility against the Negro, or avoid the issue, or apologize for the social obliteration of the color line in the class struggle.”<br />
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While taking up a position critical of those within the movement who held racist positions, the piece still maintained a kind of economist or class determinist position that subsumed or collapsed the issues of race into those of class.<br />
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While saying that “properly speaking, there is no Negro question outside of the labor question — the working-class struggle,” he clarified his point by noting that, “capitalists, white, black and other shades, are on one side and the workers, white, black and all other colors, on the other…”<br />
Debs argued that when Marx said “Workingmen of all countries unite,” he meant, “regardless of race, sex, creed or any other condition whatsoever.” He called upon the Socialist Party to “receive the Negro and all other races upon absolutely equal terms.”<br />
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“We are the party of the working class, the whole working class,” he proclaimed, “and we will not suffer ourselves to be divided by any specious appeal to race prejudice…” He concluded by arguing that “Socialists should with pride proclaim their sympathy with and fealty to the black race, and if any there be who hesitate to avow themselves in the face of ignorant and unreasoning prejudice, they lack the true spirit of the slavery-destroying revolutionary movement…”<br />
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The collection also contains an additional important read on race, class and socialism that Debs, interestingly, gave before a diverse New York audience at Harlem’s Commonwealth Casino in October 1923, 20 years after the “Negro In The Class Struggle.”<br />
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Speaking directly to his Black listeners in a Harlem which at the time was the center of post-World War I African-American radicalism, he urged those present to break with the “equally corrupt” Republican and Democratic parties and roundly endorsed A. Philip Randolph’s partner, Lucille Randolph, then running as a Socialist Party candidate for the New York state legislature.<br />
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Debs’ lengthy speech called attention to the prison system of the era as “the poor man’s institution” and speaking of his time in the Atlanta Federal pen for his opposition to the World War, noted how a third of the prisoners were people of color.<br />
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Railing against the mainstream press, he endorsed The Messenger, the Harlem paper inaugurated years earlier by the Black socialists A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen as a “champion of colored workers” (sic). He seemed to reference the then popular currents of Black self-reliance, self determination and agency, suggesting “You have got to build your own press; you have to develop your own [industrial and political] power; you will never count until you do….”<br />
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He called upon those in attendance to sever ties with either Democratic or Republican politicians who sought Black votes with false praise and promises during elections but who made themselves scarce otherwise.<br />
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Debs praised the young Soviet Union before that Harlem crowd. Though he remained in the Socialist Party and did not enter the communist movement as so many of his comrades did in 1919, he still made it a point to raise the “great beginning” of the Soviet Union, which by then had “stood for five years against the combined capitalisms of the world…”<br />
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[For a nuanced discussion of Debs’ perspectives on race and class and subsequent misreadings of his actual positions, see: Will P. Jones, “Something to Offer,” <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/debs-socialism-race-du-bois-socialist-party-black-liberation/">https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/debs-socialism-race-du-bois-socialist-party-black-liberation/</a>.]<br />
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<h3>
“No” to Immigration Restriction</h3>
The Socialist Party certainly contained elements infected with white supremacist ideologies. Similarly, there were those in the Party who tailed after or were affiliated with exclusionist AFL unions that stood opposed to immigrant “cheap labor,” not only but especially Asians on the Pacific Coast.<br />
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From the SP’s inception there were those who looked to pass convention resolutions calling for immigrant exclusion on various grounds. That debate on the “immigrant question” flared during the 1910 Party Congress, during which three different motions, supporting some form of restriction, came up for consideration.<br />
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Responding, Debs bitterly denounced all the proposals in a widely circulated letter, published in the ISR that July. Arguing against what amounted to the opportunism of those party leaders concerned with alienating any support within the AFL craft unions, he criticized the proposals as reactionary and antithetical to socialist principles:<br />
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“If Socialism, international, revolutionary Socialism, does not stand staunchly, unflinchingly, and uncompromisingly for the working class and for the exploited and oppressed masses of all lands, then it stands for none and its claim is a false pretense and its profession a delusion and a snare….”<br />
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The present collection displays but a representative sampling of Debs’ class perspective on a diverse array of additional social and political issues. Included is “Woman — Comrade Equal” that appeared in the November, 1909 issue of a socialist-feminist magazine, <i>Progressive Woman</i>.<br />
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The book also contains essays on John Brown as revolutionary, and the remarkable “Gunman and the Miners,” a call for miners’ armed self defense in the aftermath of the horrific “Ludlow Massacre” of 1914, the murder of striking miners’ families, women and children by state militia at Rockefeller-owned Ludlow, Colorado.<br />
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<h3>
No to Imperialist War!</h3>
The anthology contains an abridged version of Debs’ June, 1918 anti-war speech at Canton, Ohio; the address for which, at age 63, he was indicted and sentenced to 10 years in Federal prison under the war-induced Espionage Act that criminalized opposition to U.S. involvement in World War I. The book also includes his summation to the jury delivered at his subsequent trial and the words he spoke upon sentencing. Read together, the three still stand as a classic socialist indictment of militarism and war under capitalism.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWXm0jXjS1-rBRrMHYqkAPI6VqioKAsOjuQ2c9t0Y6Taq3GWC5jMhlPt1wES1fia39Gjfnw-sewo5MyN5N4p9SIasnc179jffSpPEntq30bJvC9YO-01R0MFmKbenV9RQJPwAxyic4ZU9s/s1600/Debs+campaign+button+1920.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWXm0jXjS1-rBRrMHYqkAPI6VqioKAsOjuQ2c9t0Y6Taq3GWC5jMhlPt1wES1fia39Gjfnw-sewo5MyN5N4p9SIasnc179jffSpPEntq30bJvC9YO-01R0MFmKbenV9RQJPwAxyic4ZU9s/s200/Debs+campaign+button+1920.jpg" width="200" /></a><br />
<span style="background-color: black; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Helvetica, Arial, Lucida, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><span style="color: #f3f3f3;">In the Canton speech, he assailed not only the class nature of the war as one benefitting the ruling classes at the expense of those sent to fight and die, but also indicted the servile mainstream press and the pro-war churches: “…When Wall Street says war the press says war and the pulpit promptly follows with its Amen.”</span></span><br />
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Berating the Democratic and Republican parties as the “gold-dust lackeys of the ruling class,” he urged his listeners “to join a minority party that has an ideal, that stands for a principle, and fights for a cause …” Saluting those in and outside the SP already behind bars for their antiwar work, he castigated the “Wall Street Junkers” and others whom he saw as responsible for the war.<br />
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It was in his statement to the court prior to sentencing that Debs made his best remembered lines, words that should preface any discussion of today’s “prison industrial complex.” Perhaps reflecting back on the time, decades before when he sat it out in Woodstock jail for his earlier defiance of a Federal edict, he told the court:<br />
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“Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”<br />
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The book’s new introduction, while certainly informative, could have used a better editing job and some of the included pieces could have benefited from some introductory context. But those are minor flaws, since so many of the questions and concerns Debs addressed regarding the nature of capitalism and how to best struggle against it are still with us.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWjDQiz9dNsAwOVplLI40cesevAttO2nxmQmyJGRGALJ8XCpk_ODYbpRg9fF634lA_xLaohT8MynAQXWl3t-wREF04lnE3DHRYY74LOXUk7CVg5GUgZT295faBFVh66-mm-geRUt2tBIVf/s1600/Debs_released_from_prison%252C_1921.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="245" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWjDQiz9dNsAwOVplLI40cesevAttO2nxmQmyJGRGALJ8XCpk_ODYbpRg9fF634lA_xLaohT8MynAQXWl3t-wREF04lnE3DHRYY74LOXUk7CVg5GUgZT295faBFVh66-mm-geRUt2tBIVf/s320/Debs_released_from_prison%252C_1921.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Debs upon release from Atlanta Federal penitentiary in 1921</td></tr>
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Allen Ruffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18310195276315827048noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458840028095794061.post-10749369480156868502015-01-24T10:51:00.001-08:002019-02-02T13:29:35.658-08:00A World Made More Unsafe: African Americans, World War I & the Shaping of the 20th Century— Allen Ruff<br />
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[The following is a slightly revised version of an article that first appeared in <a href="http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/4331">Against the Current</a> (#174, January-February 2015). Illustrations have been added. The original ATC piece also had two sidebars that readers might find of interest: one on the deeper <a href="http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/4341">reasons for US entry</a> in the war, and a second on the <a href="http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/4330">racist nature of Woodrow Wilson's administration</a>. -AR]<br />
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THE WORLD WAR I ERA was a pivotal period in African-American history. Changes on numerous fronts --social, political, ideological, and cultural -- engendered by that global conflict reverberated through the rest of the 20th century and continue to do so a hundred years later.<br />
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Stating that, “the world must be made safe for democracy,” president Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany on April 2, 1917. The United States formally entered World War I four days later.<br />
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To some extent by that time, all of U.S. society had come to experience the effects and impacts of what already was a global conflagration, underway since August 1914. Among those directly and profoundly affected by the “Great War” from its start were millions of African Americans. Their lives, for better and worse, would be dramatically affected if not utterly transformed by the war and its aftermath.<br />
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In 1910, nearly 90% of some 10 million African Americans lived in the South, four-fifths of them in rural areas. That would begin to change dramatically between 1914 and 1921 as the war in Europe set forces in motion that would convulse the social order of the entire region.<br />
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The coming of the war immediately disrupted trans-Atlantic credit flows resulting in a 50% drop in the price of cotton, the number one U.S. export. Across the South, that decline deepened a severe recession underway nationally. Affected most were millions of Black families — largely sharecroppers, tenant farmers and agricultural laborers already coerced and victimized by a corrupt crop lien credit system and ceaseless debt peonage.<br />
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Evicted and destitute, some tens of thousands migrated northward or joined an already swollen surplus labor pool in the region’s cities. The stage was set for the “Great Migration,” the most significant internal demographic shift in US history resulting from the war.<br />
<h3>
War and the “Great Migration”</h3>
Demand for war-related commodities, primarily from Britain, ended the recession of 1913-14 and stimulated a major industrial boom. The war, at the same time, reduced the Atlantic flow of cheap industrial labor from Europe — from over 1.2 million in 1914 to just over 326,000 the following year. (By 1918, it fell to barely 10% of pre-war levels.)<br />
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In response, Northern industrialists turned southward to fill the bottom rungs of war-related heavy industries — in meatpacking, auto, steel, shipbuilding, and railroad construction, etc.. In search of hands, Northern railroads and other industries sent labor agents south with promises of decent wages and, initially, offers of free or “go now, pay later” passage north.<br />
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It didn’t take much persuasion by recruiters to induce what became a mass exodus. While war demand improved cotton prices, whole areas of the “Cotton Belt” were hit by devastating floods, drought and the crop-damaging boll weevil during the summer of 1915. Severe storms also laid waste to tobacco and subsistence crops. Seen by some as a providential sign, the weevil and the weather contributed to the exodus.<br />
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Economic “push” and “pull” factors aside, the migration also included hundreds of thousands who consciously took the opportunity to “vote with their feet” and leave behind the injustices, political disenfranchisement and institutionalized racist violence of “Jim Crow” and “Judge Lynch.”<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQdNGOi0rxQcrvxmQYerbhb9z4-ddxdnr7w0CsFndQFFfZ-coz15Y2rmEc31lQ1knRqADWRDyAeR1iZp7KIxXA04SrQgtKCgUoOo9Xucvk6mqn82aVwZP64rCjstikJA04m08VzffwYENw/s1600/the+reason.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQdNGOi0rxQcrvxmQYerbhb9z4-ddxdnr7w0CsFndQFFfZ-coz15Y2rmEc31lQ1knRqADWRDyAeR1iZp7KIxXA04SrQgtKCgUoOo9Xucvk6mqn82aVwZP64rCjstikJA04m08VzffwYENw/s1600/the+reason.gif" width="317" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"The Reason" (NAACP's <i>Crisis,</i> March 1920)</td></tr>
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While heaviest migration came from those areas where cotton predominated, the movement included workers with “New South” industrial experience — in Mississippi Delta lumber, on regional railroad work gangs, in Birmingham iron and steel, and construction of all sorts.<br />
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For instance, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, a rail hub and center for the region’s lumber industry, was almost depopulated. People from other Southern cities also left. Jackson, for example, experienced an outflow of small business and professional men and ministers. Across the region, white homeowners complained about the sudden disappearance of their domestic help.<br />
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Initially young single men, and eventually whole kin networks and communities, pulled up stakes as word of northern “Promised Land” opportunities spread. The movement often took the form of a “dual migration” as many first relocated to the region’s cities; while their Black populations also increased, such urban centers with their railway hubs also became way stations for those “leapfrogging” north.<br />
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Out of white view, the bulk of those heading north collectively organized themselves through informal family and community networks, with churches and fraternal lodges playing a key role. Letters home or appearing in the Black press from those leading the way encouraged others.<br />
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That press, most notable among them the <i><a href="http://www.blackpast.org/aah/chicago-defender-1905">Chicago Defender</a></i> published and edited by the race-conscious entrepreneur <a href="http://www.aaregistry.org/historic_events/view/robert-abbott-founder-chicago-defender">Robert Abbott</a>, played an essential role. The paper’s weekly “national edition” specifically targeted a Southern Black readership. Beckoning people to “join the flight from Egypt to Canaan,” its pages featured headline coverage of horrific racist mob atrocities across the South while its editorial cartoons, photos, and poetry promoted the exodus.<br />
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The <i>Defender</i> carried job ads and constant letters that spoke of opportunity up north, worsening conditions in Dixie, and a constant stream of inquiries from those eager to make the journey. Numbers of Southern towns soon prohibited The <i>Defende</i>r’s sale and authorities seized its bulk delivery shipments. Two of its correspondents were murdered.<br />
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In response, Abbott and his staff organized a clandestine railroad network that enlisted Pullman car porters, “red caps,” and traveling entertainers to pick up the weekly’s bundles in Chicago and carry them southward where they were passed along to local distributors or handed out to audiences in segregated movie houses and night spots.<br />
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Abbott also devised various strategies to propel the movement including a publicized call for a mass “Great Northern Drive” on May 5, 1917, which led thousands to congregate at railway depots across the South in anticipation of trains to carry them north. With awaiting crowds dispersed by local sheriffs, that “day of deliverance” did not materialize but the succeeding week witnessed the heaviest rush northward up to that time.<br />
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There is no telling how many actually received the <i>Defender</i>’s message as single copies were passed along hand to hand and read aloud to the illiterate. But with weekly circulation approaching 300,000 by 1920, two-thirds of which was distributed outside Chicago, Abbott became what the Great Migration historian <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1985/10/19/nyregion/florette-henri-is-dead-at-77-historian-of-us-racial-bias.html">Florette Henri</a> described as a “black Joshua blowing trumpet call of jobs through a rolled up Defender.”<br />
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Estimated numbers of those who left vary greatly, primarily because so many people, transient throughout the period, went uncounted. Contemporary estimates for 1915-1921 range from 500,000 to beyond 700,000.<br />
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With the vast majority arriving during the war years, Cleveland’s Black population went from around 9,000 in 1910 to some 35,000 in 1920. New York’s rose from 91,000 to 152,000; Chicago’s from 44,000 to 109,000; and Philadelphia’s from 85,000 to 135,000. With Ford opening its factory gates to Black workers for the first time in 1914, Detroit’s African-American population went from around 5,000 in 1910 to some 41,000 a decade later. (It reached 120,000 by 1930.)<br />
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Reshaping the social geography of major cities across the North, that influx and the white response to it accelerated the formation of racially defined “ghettos” as housing discrimination confined African Americans, regardless of class, to what would eventually be dubbed the “inner city.”<br />
<h3>
The White Man’s War at Home</h3>
White elites across the South moved to halt the migration as it accelerated through 1916-1917. After all, the movement imperiled the region’s economic base while it fundamentally threatened to upset white-defined physical and social notions of African-American “place” in the dominant order.<br />
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In hopes of slowing the flight in 1916-1917, some Southern newspapers actually editorialized for a reduction in lynch mob violence, and the region as a whole apparently experienced some decline, though never a cessation, in the number of reported lynchings just prior to U.S. entry in the war.<br />
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That entry then unleashed a wave of fear and hyper-nationalism, as well as unprecedented levels of state surveillance, repression and vigilante violence that targeted any and all activity deemed “disloyal.” Formal involvement in the war in turn provided those eager to halt the exodus and its related disruption of the “racial status quo” with additional weapons, as any perceived assertions of African American personhood became equated with “disloyalty” and “subversion.”<br />
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Federal war measures, in force until the United States signed a separate peace treaty with Germany in 1921, defined and criminalized that “disloyalty.” The <a href="http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=3&psid=3904">Espionage Act of June 15, 1917</a> made it a federal crime to “willfully urge, incite, or advocate any curtailment of the production” of anything deemed essential to the war effort. <a href="http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=3&psid=3903">Sedition Act</a> amendments in 1918 made it illegal to “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of the government of the United States… or the military and naval forces, the flag or the uniform” of the Army or Navy.<br />
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Passed ostensibly to deter German enemy activity and used extensively against white pacifist and leftwing war opponents, those federal enactments and subsequent ones directly imperiled anyone who appeared to challenge white supremacist rule.<br />
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As the Great Migration stepped up, recurrent rumors spread across the South that clandestine German agents were to blame. Tales of German agitators stoked white fears of an impending “race war” and provoked often violent responses as the migration continued. Unable to admit its causes rooted in Black oppression and exploitation, white Southerners citing “German subversion” meanwhile turned to Washington.<br />
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The Administration established a coordinated federal effort ostensibly intended to impede any “pro-German” activity. That revved-up surveillance apparatus from its inception monitored potentially “subversive” African-American activity. In that way, the “war for democracy” shaped the decades-long federal response to “Black militancy” as the dominant white agenda — maintenance of white supremacist rule — became a “national security” priority of the federal government.<br />
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In 1917 the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation (BI), the future FBI, stepped up preexisting surveillance of African-American organizations, publications and individuals, and compiled regularly updated files on “Pro Germanism Among the Negroes.”<br />
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Aided by state and local authorities and the <a href="http://www.holocaustianity.com/hysteria/german-spies.html">American Protective League</a> (APL), a volunteer civilian army of some 250,000 super-patriotic spies, the BI’s agents tapped phones, opened mail, made warrantless searches, infiltrated organizations, and employed intimidation, threats and disinformation to curtail Black dissent.<br />
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In tandem, the Army’s Military Intelligence Branch (MIB), later expanded as the Military Intelligence Division (MID), carried on its own surveillance and investigations of suspected African-American “disloyalty.” The MIB compiled separate “Negro Subversion” files that it regularly shared with the BI and other agencies, including the Navy and State Departments. They, too, conducted intelligence and surveillance operations, as did Treasury and Post Office Department censors.<br />
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The MIB in particular recruited Black operatives to infiltrate and report on various African-American organizations. In coordination with the Committee on Public Information, the government’s wartime propaganda agency, those MIB agents also worked to influence Black public opinion. Today’s “national surveillance state” had origins, in part, in that coordinated effort to monitor Black political activity.<br />
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In the years before U.S. entry into the war, the hard-pressed majority of African Americans largely remained indifferent to what was widely understood as a “white man’s war.” Some Black activist intellectuals, best known among them W.E.B. DuBois, early identified the “<a href="http://scua.library.umass.edu/digital/dubois/WarRoots.pdf">African roots of the war</a>” in imperialist rivalry.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEik18gB2OCGo5gLARQht8cKIYa5LxFMdXGNDvuMVL_tIuHOA6SGWllFOxwhShg2bw5EzLmi3Eqgi0XogpRpDdbNVZHZM0GAPFcu-sGbSNzoMopRBFku3RkcSx6nQohZelZJWm_gqx-zV1Bi/s1600/Hubert_Henry_Harrison.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEik18gB2OCGo5gLARQht8cKIYa5LxFMdXGNDvuMVL_tIuHOA6SGWllFOxwhShg2bw5EzLmi3Eqgi0XogpRpDdbNVZHZM0GAPFcu-sGbSNzoMopRBFku3RkcSx6nQohZelZJWm_gqx-zV1Bi/s1600/Hubert_Henry_Harrison.jpg" width="241" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hubert Harrison</td></tr>
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In lectures during 1915-16, the race- and class-conscious Harlem socialist <a href="http://www.blackpast.org/perspectives/hubert-harrison-voice-early-20th-century-harlem-radicalism">Hubert Harrison</a> clearly described the war as a conflict between the nations of the “white race” competing to decide “who shall be the inheritors of the lands of Africa and Asia and dictators of the lives and destinies of their colored inhabitants.”<br />
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The run-up and entry into the war elicited varied responses. There were those of a more “accommodationist” stripe who fully supported the war effort. More prevalent were those who understood the hypocrisy of Wilson’s proclaimed war aims but nevertheless offered degrees of support in hope of some reciprocal improvements in civil and human rights. There also were those who thought the war would provide opportunities for advancement and quicken the pace of reform. (Roundly criticized for it and regretting it afterward, in a July 1918 editorial in the NAACP’s Crisis, Du Bois called upon African Americans to <a href="http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-180591564.html">“Close Ranks”</a> in support of the war effort. At about the same time, he had been offered a captain’s position in the Army’s Military Intelligence Division through the white co-founder of the NAACP, Joel Spingarn, himself already an officer in the MID.)<br />
<h3>
East St. Louis and Houston</h3>
Two pivotal events, coming shortly after U.S. entry, deepened a general Black disaffection. First came the horrific <a href="http://www.blackpast.org/aah/east-st-louis-race-riot-july-2-1917">“race riot” at East St. Louis</a>, Illinois on July 1-3, 1917. The second, on August 23rd, involved a mutiny of African-American soldiers at Houston, Texas. Both events and the federal response seared the consciousness of Black people nationwide.<br />
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East St. Louis, across the Mississippi from St. Louis, was a booming industrial slum run by corrupt local officials and a police force that safeguarded its absentee-owned aluminum and iron ore works, meat processing plants, and some 376 saloons, gambling dens and flourishing sex trade.<br />
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Ten percent of the total in 1910, the city’s Black population nearly doubled to some 13,000 by 1917. Some 2400 arrived in 1916-17 alone. A major Mississippi hub for some 27 rail lines, the town also experienced a constant flow of Great Migration transients that fanned white racist fears of an increasing Black “invasion.”<br />
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Already a de facto Jim Crow town, the city became the site of intensified class and race antagonisms as war production picked up. Bosses imported Black workers to smash strikes by “whites only” unions through 1916. Tensions — heightened by sensationalized newspaper accounts of a Black crime wave and “Negro gun toters,” and claims that Republican politicians had “colonized” Black voters to defeat Democrats — first exploded on May 28th in an initial white rampage.<br />
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Largely unprotected by the National Guard brought in to “restore order,” Black residents armed themselves. Then, on July 1-3 white mobs frenzied by the shooting of two white detectives indiscriminately shot, stabbed, burned and mutilated Black men, women and children and torched their homes and businesses while local police stood back or actively joined in the mayhem.<br />
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In what contemporary Black writers described as a “pogrom” and “massacre,” half the city’s Black population fled as some 6000 were left homeless. While official findings listed 39 Black and eight white dead, the actual tally of Black victims remained unknown as people were incinerated in their homes or drowned in the river. Estimates ranged as high as 250 killed, with over 1000 injured.<br />
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The incident stunned and outraged Black America. Speaking before a church crowd of 1000 on July 4th, Harlem militant Hubert Harrison called for armed self-defense while pointing to the central contradiction of Wilson’s “war for democracy” abroad and increasing racist terror at home.<br />
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In an NAACP-organized silent procession on July 28, ten thousand Black men, women and children marched down New York’s crowd-lined Fifth Avenue, with signs among them reading “MR. PRESIDENT, WHY NOT MAKE AMERICA SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY?" and “YOUR HANDS ARE FULL OF BLOOD.” Calls by civil rights moderates for a federal investigation and White House condemnation of mob violence meanwhile fell on deaf ears.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-G2m9chQ0TK-LQCqJPf9a6evWhJGPp1HoggoJN4htnEduDb3_6OdGfuKnvNX01nAgcABvtRnJTTcja_TVXRChs2zYMLwNHsbtJXh0ulDxwy_0v9qyDBXmnY4RSsERMhLogJPax2XBa_bj/s1600/silentmarch.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="252" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-G2m9chQ0TK-LQCqJPf9a6evWhJGPp1HoggoJN4htnEduDb3_6OdGfuKnvNX01nAgcABvtRnJTTcja_TVXRChs2zYMLwNHsbtJXh0ulDxwy_0v9qyDBXmnY4RSsERMhLogJPax2XBa_bj/s1600/silentmarch.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">NAACP-organized Silent March protests racist pogrom at East St. Louis - New York City, July1917</td></tr>
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The <a href="http://www.tbhpp.org/riots.html">Houston incident</a> involved members of an all-Black regular Army battalion sent to nearby Camp Logan three weeks after East St. Louis. Incensed by continual racist abuses in the Jim Crow town and outraged when racist cops beat and jailed two fellow soldiers, the men seized munitions, marched into the city and randomly shot white civilians, killing 17 and wounding 11.<br />
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In actuality a rebellion against Jim Crow, the act of Black men in Army uniforms shooting white civilians could not pass without severe retribution. The military indicted 118 with conspiracy to mutiny and murder under the Articles of War, then in effect. In three trials, the largest courts martial in U.S. history, and without any witnesses ever confirming the identity of any of the accused, 110 men were found guilty. Sixty-three received life sentences and 29 were sentenced to death.<br />
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Following the first court martial, <a href="http://www.executedtoday.com/2008/12/11/1917-thirteen-black-soldiers-of-the-24th-us-infantry-regiment/">13 defendants</a>, denied any right of appeal or review, were summarily hanged in secret and buried in unmarked graves three days after the verdicts came down. Though Wilson, giving in to public outcry and various political calculations, commuted the death sentences of ten later defendants, he approved the execution of six others.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGH-ktd7S9pSwXw3o8YNFcSmjOgSL0WjKBlar1ijQGcUVyKemYqGYIgGjPxg1I7O0UCWNlgLWjrMBSkxXJSFOSvGhq4ZW1FOdYV3nWzb16V7sW2VON-O-IIbulttJ72RmFjW9fZvnl4vwC/s1600/camplogantrial22.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="236" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGH-ktd7S9pSwXw3o8YNFcSmjOgSL0WjKBlar1ijQGcUVyKemYqGYIgGjPxg1I7O0UCWNlgLWjrMBSkxXJSFOSvGhq4ZW1FOdYV3nWzb16V7sW2VON-O-IIbulttJ72RmFjW9fZvnl4vwC/s1600/camplogantrial22.gif" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: small;">The largest courts martial in U.S. history: Black defendants at the first of three military trials, November, 1917.</span></span></td></tr>
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The specter of a Black soldiers’ armed revolt ignited a white public outcry across the South in opposition to the training of Black troops at the region’s bases. The Houston “mutiny” also sent shock waves through every level of the military. The War Department shipped existing all-Black regular units to Hawaii and the Philippines for the duration of the war, and slowed the commissioning of Black junior officers from a segregated Officers’ Training Camp at Des Moines, Iowa. It halted the call-up of Black conscripts from mid-September through the following spring, and accelerated the shipment of barely trained and ill-equipped irregulars to France.<br />
<h3>
Resistance to the “White Man’s War”</h3>
The Selective Service Act of May 18, 1917 required all able bodied men, ages 21 to 31, to register. It gave each state a quota based upon its proportion of the total population. African Americans who complied wound up getting drafted at higher percentage rate than that for eligible whites; of 2.3 million who registered, 370,000 were called up.<br />
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At the same time, Black men failed to register at a rate three times greater than that of whites. Those in the South comprised the majority of the region’s “deserters” — those who failed to show for induction or went AWOL afterward — an estimated 100,000 of them. When inductions were halted after Houston, unknown numbers took the opportunity to disappear in the Great Migration flow.<br />
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Clearly, a significant number made conscious decisions to abstain from the “white man’s war.”<br />
The mere thought of arming and training African-American men met with intense opposition in the White South well before Houston. Others, however, argued that white men alone should not shoulder the burden while Black men remained at home. Underlying all this was a concern for “regional safety,” resting upon the deeply seated historic fear of armed retribution and, ever present in racist imaginings, the need to protect white Southern womanhood.<br />
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In the Cotton Belt low country, influential planters finagled deferments for “their” hands. That, in turn, fanned poor white resentment as up-country men were called in greater numbers to fill state quotas for what many of them viewed as “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” Displaced onto African Americans, that class resentment deepened as the call-up of Black men was put on hold following Houston.<br />
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As war-bred animosities, insecurity and fears increased, so did the number of reported lynchings — from 36 in 1917, 60 in 1918, to 76 in 1919, an average of more than one a week. In response, federal law enforcement agencies stepped up surveillance and harassment of those who campaigned against the racist lawlessness.<br />
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The indefatigable anti-lynching crusader <a href="http://people.duke.edu/~ldbaker/classes/AAIH/caaih/ibwells/ibwbkgrd.html">Ida B. Wells</a>, for instance, came under increasing Bureau of Investigation scrutiny when she launched a campaign to protest the legal lynching of the thirteen soldiers executed after Houston and ongoing white mob atrocities.<br />
<h3>
Jim Crow “Over There”</h3>
Some 400,000 Black conscripts and enlistees served. They went for numerous reasons ranging from a sense of duty and obligation to “no choice.” The opportunity to leave the South and elsewhere certainly was a factor. The promise of $30.00 per month marked a material improvement for many.<br />
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The Army they entered was totally “separate and unequal.” Under white officers, Black troops received substandard training, inadequate equipment and provisions. They endured often abysmal living conditions and not uncommon physical abuse. Some were murdered, even lynched in the service.<br />
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Making up a third of the Army’s labor force and made to wear blue denim rather than regular army uniforms, 80% of the 200,000 sent abroad were relegated to labor battalions, virtual chain gangs without chains often headed by former work gang overseers. They labored as stevedores, built roads, railroads and warehouses, or worst of all, were detailed to exhume and rebury the dead from temporary battlefield graves.<br />
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At the same time, service in France gave the Black soldier a glimpse of life outside the confines of the American racial system. Some fraternized on occasion with white civilians and troops from France’s Africa colonies. In effect, the American Expeditionary Force became but one crucible for the molding of a “New Negro” as Jim Crow “Over There” radicalized a significant cohort of young men.<br />
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Troops from two all-Black divisions, the 92nd and the 93rd, the only U.S. army Black units to see combat, did so under French command. Not allowing Black soldiers to fight alongside whites, U.S. commander Gen. John J. Pershing gave them over to the French with instructions that its army and civilian officials not treat African Americans in a friendly fashion or commend them, “especially in front of white Americans,” and to segregate them and prevent any intimacy with French women.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIl-aDhfAmFEA105aNEvoiBJKAV7xc_kzWTtzws3GxhoPBA0XfTd9ZLuhMT0kgdVvTCQsQxtBGwKb7-eh0DiDEkTNGrcmo8WlovTDB9lIj1HOC24YeuvTpXtUW8lQwpjz37xxrdk3yNU18/s1600/Hellfighters.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIl-aDhfAmFEA105aNEvoiBJKAV7xc_kzWTtzws3GxhoPBA0XfTd9ZLuhMT0kgdVvTCQsQxtBGwKb7-eh0DiDEkTNGrcmo8WlovTDB9lIj1HOC24YeuvTpXtUW8lQwpjz37xxrdk3yNU18/s1600/Hellfighters.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">French-equipped "Harlem Hellfighters" in the trenches, 1917</td></tr>
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<b><span style="color: #6aa84f; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The Return Home</span></b><br />
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Upon returning to New York in February 1919, the 93rd Division’s highly decorated 369th Infantry Regiment, the “Harlem Hellfighters,” received a huge welcome from millions as they marched up Fifth Avenue on the way home to Harlem.<br />
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Returning at the beginning of one of the most turbulent, violent years in U.S. history, and foreshadowing what was to come, the regiment’s “Hell Fighters Band” did its own nuanced rendition, layered with meaning, of the 1919 hit song, “How You Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm After They’ve Seen Paree.”<br />
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While returning vets provided a deep source of pride for African-Americans, they also posed a threat to white supremacy. Innumerable Black vets came home with expanded vistas and ambitions. Not about to resume their old “place” in the rural Southern order, some 100,000 moved to cities north and south. Many then faced de facto Jim Crow abuse as the “color line” increasingly defined the physical and social boundaries of the urban North.<br />
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The mere presence of those returnees ramped up racist reaction and violence, South and North. The mere sight of Black men in uniform was enough to incite depraved white attacks as at least 19 vets, some of them armed and defiant, were lynched in 1918-1919. Two were burned alive.<br />
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Rapid demobilization following the Armistice plunged the country into crisis as the war boom evaporated. Unemployment, worsened by the return of millions from the military, increased as price inflation battered declining real wages. As a result, 1919 witnessed a massive upsurge of post-war labor militancy, an unprecedented strike wave, heightened left-wing radicalism and heated class struggles.<br />
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The entire political environment was filled with talk of revolution inspired by events in Russia and anti-capitalist and anti-colonial upheavals worldwide. Ruling-class response came in the form of “Red Scare” repression lasting well into the early 1920s.<br />
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Not coincidentally, 1919 also witnessed some 38 broadly defined “race riots” during the <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-11-18/entertainment/sc-ent-books-red-summer-mcwhirter-20111118_1_black-labor-black-people-racial-violence">“Red Summer,”</a> in which vicious white mob attacks on Black communities north and south were met by African-American armed resistance from returned veterans, among others. Spurred on by local and national press accounts that blamed Black perpetrators for the violence, white mobs rampaged in Charleston, <a href="http://www.nebraskahistory.org/publish/publicat/history/full-text/NH2010Lynching.pdf">Omaha</a>, <a href="http://www.appalachianhistory.net/2011/07/knoxvilles-red-summer-of-1919.html">Knoxville</a>, Washington, D.C., Chicago and elsewhere.<br />
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In Wilson’s <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/2000/raceriot0301.htm">Washington</a>, following sensationalized newspaper accounts of a Black crime wave and rumored attacks on white women, white Marine and sailor-led mobs randomly attacked Black residents from July 18-21. Veteran-led members of the Black community fought back. The riot, described by some as the start of a long-anticipated “race war,” left hundreds injured and 15 dead.<br />
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<a href="http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4978/">Chicago</a>’s Black population increased by upwards of 50,000 after 1916. Individual attempts to move from the city’s immensely overcrowded South Side “Black Belt” through 1918 were met by a series of bombings of Black homes in previously all-white neighborhoods as organized “athletic club” gangs and others attacked African Americans who crossed invisible “color lines.”<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXfywcdfcfJxdzoiSPhuxYE1LioM76JEXMrtLtuc5bk_eqIW-S9kMtoxXyl184K0KEOLDEhOnqJDGf37epgBrbYDBpwBoLMa7Ts3Y6U-P8jMAHMbieaFctxP9CeR6Ata3ASDUmTgGuJfdm/s1600/Chicago+1919.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="221" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXfywcdfcfJxdzoiSPhuxYE1LioM76JEXMrtLtuc5bk_eqIW-S9kMtoxXyl184K0KEOLDEhOnqJDGf37epgBrbYDBpwBoLMa7Ts3Y6U-P8jMAHMbieaFctxP9CeR6Ata3ASDUmTgGuJfdm/s1600/Chicago+1919.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Washington, D.C., 1919: White mob pulls Black man from street car</td></tr>
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Intensified competition for work and urban space, feeding a generalized climate of racist fear, ultimately touched off two weeks of violence that left over 500 injured and 38 dead, among them 23 African Americans, and some 1000 Black families homeless.<br />
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The “Red Summer” was long. In one of the year’s worst episodes, in October in rural Phillips County, Arkansas, an organizing meeting of a Black sharecroppers’ union ended in a gun fight in which a white detective died. That touched off a three-day indiscriminate “hunt” for Black people throughout the county by up to 1000 armed vigilantes assisted by the Army and American Legionnaires. The “<a href="http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=1102">Elaine Massacre</a>” resulted in the murder of, according to one estimate, over 800 Black men, women and children.<br />
<h3>
Red and Black</h3>
Anti-communist “Red Scare” hysteria immediately replaced anti-German animus at war’s end, as not just the specter but the reality of revolution haunted ruling classes worldwide. Determined to halt the spread of the “Bolsheviki virus,” the U.S. surveillance state turned its gaze toward the period’s increasing levels of African-American resistance, defiance and militancy and its obvious cause — “Bolshevik agitation.”<br />
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There certainly was a widespread influence of left-wing ideas and a mass anticipation of a better postwar future partly inspired by the Russian Revolution. And numerous African Americans, radicalized by the war at home and abroad, moved toward anti-capitalist and revolutionary positions. But in the white supremacist mind, any perceived challenges to the racial status quo or Black opinion deemed “subversive” had to have been “Bolshevik inspired” and therefore a legitimate target of the nation’s first anti-communist crusade.<br />
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In August 1919 a young J. Edgar Hoover became head of the Bureau of Investigation’s new General Intelligence Division (GID) dedicated to pursuing generic “Reds.” That anti-radical campaign readily melded anti-communism and racism. “Bolshevism,” after all, not only threatened the capitalist order but raised the unimaginable specter of “social equality,” i.e. “race mixing.”<br />
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Weekly BI field office reports on “Negro Activities,” the “Negro Press” and the “Negro agitation movement” funneled to Hoover were exchanged with reports from Military Intelligence, the State Department, the Post Office, and state and local “red squads.”<br />
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Not about to identify racism as the cause of the Red Summer’s violence, those reports portrayed virtually all African-American activism as “communist inspired” or the work of manipulated dupes. As a result, “redbaiting” born in that period became an ongoing tactic used to delegitimize African-American struggles for political and civil rights and an end to mob violence and lynch law.<br />
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There of course were African-American radicals attracted by the early communist positions on national minorities and self-determination, anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism. There were those such as the left-socialists <a href="http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5125/">A. Philip Randolph</a> and <a href="http://www.blackpast.org/aah/owen-chandler-1889-1967">Chandler Owen</a>, editors of the militant <a href="http://www.blackpast.org/aah/messenger-1917-1928">Messenger</a>; and the highly influential <a href="http://www.jeffreybperry.net/disc.htm">Hubert Harrison</a>, said to be “the most class conscious of the race radicals and the most race conscious of the class radicals,” who never became communists.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaoE7MPGtsp_8-t5joZbu4ONsBs9aGnCRbVNEII9Z8jve64lAaSWPP-_hxGyHM0HMKjJ8RR3tljSk09ILP7r4W5Y9DqSFid5vpc28iw2slz6PhrB5ZaaiXzyteNSv-bPB6bzQNF7frf_HU/s1600/new+crowd.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="370" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaoE7MPGtsp_8-t5joZbu4ONsBs9aGnCRbVNEII9Z8jve64lAaSWPP-_hxGyHM0HMKjJ8RR3tljSk09ILP7r4W5Y9DqSFid5vpc28iw2slz6PhrB5ZaaiXzyteNSv-bPB6bzQNF7frf_HU/s1600/new+crowd.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">(From <i>The Messenger</i>, September, 1919)</td></tr>
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Such was the case of Jamaican nationalist and revolutionary socialist <a href="http://www.blackpast.org/aah/domingo-wilfred-1889-1968">Wilfred Domingo</a>, soon to become a major critic of Marcus Garvey’s brand of pro-capitalist Black separatism. There also were those who eventually did move into the Communist Party. Notable among them was <a href="http://www.blackpast.org/aah/briggs-cyril-1888-1966">Cyril Briggs</a>, the editor of the militantly uncompromising monthly <i>Crusader</i> (1918-1922).<br />
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An advocate of armed self-defense, at the height of the Red Summer Briggs founded the clandestine <a href="http://www.marxists.org/history/usa/eam/other/abb/abb.html">African Blood Brotherhood</a> (ABB), soon to recruit Black veterans nationwide with its call for those willing to “go the limit.” Joining the ABB inner circle were a number of influential Caribbean emigres, many of whom would also move into the early CP.<br />
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<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-95tzi_dJd2QAZxuZ5RU93CAlDP8CBYorJxaw9cfpe1bwPXgL_bzrr06IwDJU97YDMmjmVIfOU_DbX_8zGXffa3dyY2iGzKdcP5RN3fvFPvWKy9F-dExl4T58KnN22IA-2VO3yA7BrYJG/s1600/ABB+application.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-95tzi_dJd2QAZxuZ5RU93CAlDP8CBYorJxaw9cfpe1bwPXgL_bzrr06IwDJU97YDMmjmVIfOU_DbX_8zGXffa3dyY2iGzKdcP5RN3fvFPvWKy9F-dExl4T58KnN22IA-2VO3yA7BrYJG/s1600/ABB+application.jpg" width="392" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , "arial" , "helvitica" , sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #f3f3f3;">African Blood Brotherhood advertisement and membership application, published in the The Crusader, 1918-1922. Source: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture </span></span></span></td></tr>
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Among others, that group included the radical poet <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/claude-mckay-9392654">Claude McKay</a>; army veteran <a href="http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/h/a.htm#haywood-harry">Harry Haywood</a>; the Socialist Party left-winger <a href="http://socialhistory.org/en/today/11-05/black-bolshevik">Otto Huiswoud</a>; Briggs’ associate <a href="http://www.blackpast.org/aah/moore-richard-benjamin-1893-1978">Richard B. Moore</a>, described in BI files as “the most outspoken, daring, and radical of all the negro (sic) Reds;” and behind-the-scenes organizer <a href="http://www.blackpast.org/aah/campbell-grace-p-1883-1943">Grace Campbell</a>, the first African-American woman to join the Party.<br />
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Propelled by developments during and immediately after the war and influential across a much broader spectrum of Black activists, such left wing militants infused what became the war era’s “New Negro” movement with their radical political perspectives.<br />
<h3>
The “New Negro”</h3>
The World War at home and abroad spawned a new international awareness not only among Black middle-class intellectuals but a broader mass. It stimulated a growing Pan African and diasporic consciousness in tandem with revolutionary politics, inspired not just by the Russian Revolution but by the massive anti-colonial stirrings by peoples of color worldwide.<br />
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War and reaction forged the “New Negro” generation, an ideologically diverse and often overlapping array of Black nationalists, integrationists and separatists, Pan-Africanists, socialists and early communists not about to step backward in time. Its center was Harlem during and especially after the war, a vibrant “Black Mecca” of intermeshed radical politics, a reclaiming of history, identity and cultural expression, blossoming in the 1920s as the “Harlem Renaissance.”<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEmD5Bq_b6p2bhpif5_YzlY8E99-nolqLovMVfrFPvzZrfDJ16n1aapyP9nk4qTNKaf6_yUa1RM1V7ysf83Fy5jQrxmIRnOb1owNoJyRzLPHOl_3hgBlUs5ybt6q4Boab8D8tZ9GMPngsm/s1600/If+We+Must+Die.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="299" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEmD5Bq_b6p2bhpif5_YzlY8E99-nolqLovMVfrFPvzZrfDJ16n1aapyP9nk4qTNKaf6_yUa1RM1V7ysf83Fy5jQrxmIRnOb1owNoJyRzLPHOl_3hgBlUs5ybt6q4Boab8D8tZ9GMPngsm/s1600/If+We+Must+Die.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Claude McKay, "If We Must Die" (1919)</td></tr>
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“New Negro” militancy spurred the growth of organized responses to the era’s racist onslaught as diverse as the NAACP and <a href="http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/twenty/tkeyinfo/garvey.htm">Marcus Garvey</a>’s separatist United Negro Improvement Association. The NAACP, with its demand for civil rights and an end to white mob murder, saw its rolls grow from 9200 in January 1918 to over 91,000 by the end of 1919 as new members, often more militant than the national leadership, flocked into nearly 300 local branches.<br />
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Garvey first arrived in Harlem in 1916. His UNIA by late 1919 had become the largest mass movement of African Americans in the country’s history, with a membership of several hundred thousand.<br />
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During the presidential race of 1920, Republican Warren Harding promised to take the country back to its pre-war state, a “return to normalcy.” That campaign promise certainly sent different messages across the “color line” as Harding took the White House with over 60% of the popular vote.<br />
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The Great Migration continued through the 1920s, as worse-than-prewar agricultural prices and relentless “normalcy” of Jim Crow violence ravaged the South. So did nationwide reaction, fear and fundamentalism which lashed out against all those not belonging to the White Republic.<br />
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For many African Americans, the decade began with the worst urban “race riot” of the postwar period, at <a href="http://www.blackwallstreet.freeservers.com/">Tulsa, Oklahoma</a> from May 31-June 1, 1921. It resulted in upwards of 300 African-American deaths and the torching of 35 city blocks of Greenwood, formerly the wealthiest Black community in the country.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwddZvE3PUcEUIbgg3bqZVJ1E_kSWOWuAb_E3VxTfhjebkZfHQLdEaZKMrUbmpC79kIHKbQjbi2MW7lCgpkwRVhzgumyEU-e1GSPyheWKYKiOMs3u_-7I-zMgaGkdwXbHDZaoOXb60UKBt/s1600/Tulsa.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwddZvE3PUcEUIbgg3bqZVJ1E_kSWOWuAb_E3VxTfhjebkZfHQLdEaZKMrUbmpC79kIHKbQjbi2MW7lCgpkwRVhzgumyEU-e1GSPyheWKYKiOMs3u_-7I-zMgaGkdwXbHDZaoOXb60UKBt/s1600/Tulsa.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tulsa's Greenwood district following the White racist attack, 1921.</td></tr>
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Apparently, that attack on the entire community reached the ferocity it did because armed and organized Black men, among them numbers of veterans, defied the white mob rule and fought back. Rather than pointing to the local Ku Klux Klan chapter with its estimated 3200 members, federal investigators at the time attempted to blame African Blood Brotherhood for inciting the violence.<br />
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Regardless of the reaction that set in during the “Roaring Twenties,” the war period transformed the outlook of an entire Black generation not about to return to the subjugation of the pre-war era. While in no way making the world safe for African Americans, the World War I era planted the seeds deep in the furrows of popular memory for what eventually would become the modern civil rights movement and a deeper Black liberation struggle.<br />
<h3>
Recommended Reading</h3>
*Adrianne Lentz-Smith, <i>Freedom Struggles — African Americans and World War I</i>, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011)<br />
*Chad Williams, <i>Torchbearers of Democracy — African-American Soldiers in the World War I Era</i> (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2013)<br />
*Jeannette Keith, <i>Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South during the First World War</i> (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2004)<br />
*Nan Woodruff, <i>American Congo —The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta</i> (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2012)<br />
*Theodore Kornweibel, <i>“Investigate Everything!” Federal Efforts to Compel Black Loyalty During World War I</i> (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003)<br />
*Mark Ellis, <i>Race, War, and Surveillance</i> (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001)<br />
*Barbara Foley, <i>Spectres of 1919: Class & Nation in the Making of the New Negro</i> (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008)<br />
*<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #eeeeee; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Cameron McWhirter, <i>"Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America" </i>(New York: Henry Holt, 2011)</span></span></div>
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Allen Ruffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18310195276315827048noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458840028095794061.post-21932683100984247502014-08-01T08:19:00.001-07:002019-02-02T13:29:35.719-08:00World War I and Its Century<h1 class="print-title">
<span style="background-color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #f3f3f3;">As the centenary</span><span style="color: #cccccc;"> </span></span></span><span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">of World War I begins...</span></h1>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">[The following is a slightly revised version, with photos added, of a piece that I wrote for <i>Against the Current </i>(#171, </span></span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">July/August 2014)]</span></span></h1>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">In his </span><i style="font-weight: normal;">Age of Extremes</i><span style="font-weight: normal;">, the great Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm marked the start of World War I in August, 1914 as the beginning of the “short twentieth century.” In his account, that short century ended with the reunification of Germany and the breakup of the Soviet “East Bloc” in 1989-90. The “Great War” of 1914-1918, he argued, was the defining event of the century.</span></span></h1>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">With the dismemberment of Yugoslavia underway in the early 1990s as he wrote, Hobsbawm observed that the inter-communal strife reignited in the “Balkan tinderbox” represented the “old chickens of Versailles once again coming home to roost” — meaning that the repercussions of the punitive peace imposed outside Paris in 1919 were reverberating over 70 years later. Were he alive today, he certainly would note how some of the wounds of that “war to end all wars” continue to fester.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The first generalized “total war” among industrialized imperial powers, WWI took millions of lives — estimates of total casualties, military and civilian, go as high as 40 million — injured far more and caused inestimable destruction.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The war brought an end to centuries of dynastic rule by Kaiser, Czar, Emperor and Sultan in Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East; set the stage for the eventual demise of the British Empire; and further relegated France to secondary power status. It finished off the crumbling “sick man of Europe,” the Ottoman Empire at Constantinople which had once ruled much of southeast Europe, western Asia and North Africa. It furthered Japan’s aspiration to become East Asia’s dominant imperial power.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The war’s devastation created the conditions for Russia’s revolutions in February and October 1917, and the resultant first attempt to “construct the socialist order” as Lenin boldly proclaimed to the Congress of Soviets. Simultaneously it foreshadowed the coming of a new imperial order as the United States, already established as a powerhouse of productivity, transformed from being a debtor to a creditor nation set on its course to eventually replace Britain as capitalism’s reigning superpower.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #6aa84f; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Imperial Rivalry at the Core</span></h3>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">If the spark that ignited it all was almost accidental — the assassination at Sarajevo of the heir to the Austrian throne, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, shot by an ultra-nationalist Bosnian Serb in late June, 1914 — the root causes of the war clearly went far deeper.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Primary was inter-imperialist rivalry, understood by Marxists as including, but also going beyond, a set of specific factors — the capitalist drive for markets, raw materials, cheap labor, outlets for static investment, or a solution to periodic overproduction crises.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">That first global conflagration in some sense was indeed the result of uneven and combined capitalist development on an international scale. Both sides contained the most advanced capitalist societies. Foremost on the Entente or Allied side were Great Britain as well as France and Japan, later joined by the United States. Leading the Central Powers was a unified Germany, by 1914 the strongest, most advanced economy on the European continent.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The respective war coalitions also included semi-industrial old order regimes already penetrated by French, German and British capital. Russia joined the Allied side while Austria-Hungary and Turkey, already in imperial decline, aligned with Germany. Once underway, the war also provided opportunities, real and illusory, for lesser “sub-imperial” powers such as Italy, Serbia, Bulgaria and Rumania to assert their national identities and irredentist territorial ambitions.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">At the war’s conclusion, in pursuit of punitive reparations the victors at Versailles in 1919 would force Germany to concede sole responsibility for the war, an imposition that led to the rise of the Nazis and Adolph Hitler. But there was plenty of “war guilt” to go around.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Ruling circles in pre-war Germany were certainly eager to expand the country’s Weltpolitik “place in the sun.” Already the Continent’s major military power second only to the United States in manufacturing might, Germany set out to challenge Britain, which was no longer “the workshop of the world” but still the reigning financial, commercial and insurance center of world capitalism.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Understanding that the key to Britain’s supremacy lay in its ability to “rule the waves,” not just Germany but the United States and Japan had already set to building their own navies as a way to project global power and prestige. Long underway, a major power scramble to take and hold formal and informal colonies, “spheres of influence” and previously partitioned or coveted territories also fueled a related “land arms race” and war plan contingencies among the contenders.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Importantly, imperial ambitions were propelled not just by economic imperatives but by strikingly symmetric nationalist ideologies — inflated notions of national superiority, “destiny” and god-ordained “mission.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The age was rife with “scientific” racism — ideas regarding racial hierarchies of peoples and variants of Social Darwinism, that false doctrine (which Darwin himself never proclaimed) of the “survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence,” projected onto entire nations.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Each of the major belligerents had its own military establishment or “military caste” promoted, always in the name of “defense,” by imperial strategists, industrial “lobbies,” conservative political parties, a jingoist press and a masculinist mystique of militarism wedded to “manly virtues.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The idea of war as a legitimate vehicle of statecraft and a purifying force vital for the health of the nation was disseminated through the schools and universities, popular culture and pulpit at a time when vast numbers still believed in the divine right of their royal rulers.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">At one level, the war came as an attempt to settle old nationalist scores — like those of France in regard to resource rich provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, seized by the Prussians in 1871. At another, it became but one defining round in a longer succession of multi-powered contests for control of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Caucasus, and the Black and Caspian Sea regions — areas still coveted today for their geo-strategic importance, hydrocarbon wealth and other “vital” resources.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In some ways, the war also arose out of attempts by all the belligerents to resolve internal class antagonisms and social upheavals, at their base the result of capitalist transformations and increasingly severe cyclical crises. It’s not that the various ruling classes uniformly looked upon war as a pathway to national unity and social peace. But there certainly were those who conceived of imperial expansion as a remedy for class turmoil at home.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In addition, numbers of politically influential industrial and financial firms, unrestrained by national boundaries, played a hand in destabilizing long-established structures and norms of inter-imperial relations. As Hobsbawm put it:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“…The characteristic feature of capitalist accumulation was precisely that it had no limit. The ‘natural frontiers’ of Standard Oil, the Deutche Bank or DeBeers Diamond Corporation were at the ends of the universe, or rather at the limits of their capacity to expand.” (Age of Empire, 318)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The war came on the heels of two preceding Balkan wars and inter-imperial disputes in North Africa and elsewhere, which led to the formation of the power alignments of 1914. It also came in the wake of earlier conflicts and social upheavals that altered the perceptions and realities of power in Europe.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Most notably, Russia’s 1905 defeat at the hands of Japan and the resultant “rehearsal” for the Russian Revolution had emboldened Viennese ruling circles to assert Austrian regional power at the expense of Russia’s “South Slav” Serbian cousins — a key source of Balkan tensions.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #6aa84f; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Total War, Total Horror</span></h3>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Caught up in nationalist fervor and believing they would be “home before Christmas,” young middle-class men by the droves — from France, Germany, England, Austria-Hungary and elsewhere — readily rushed to enlist in August. Others, especially from the working classes, showed less enthusiasm, while in Russia and elsewhere, the mobilized cannon fodder was largely comprised of ill-equipped peasant conscripts.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">By November 1914, as devastating land battles raged to the east, stalemated armies in eastern France had already entrenched, dug in for what became over four years of indecisive mutual slaughter.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The War exacted an increasingly horrendous toll, mainly among the popular classes. Certainly underestimated, the gross statistics convey some sense. Some 65 million men were mobilized to fight. Of those, some 6.8 million died from combat-related deaths while maybe another 3 million died from disease. Another 7.7 million went missing, presumed dead while approximately 8 million were left permanently disabled.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjO1l99BuAtOZ55geg_hlk6gcJS2z9_ZXFQQRX2PlrELJLKgI6DR0zZKzhqy9TIYqr-mrjQX-ud8PbfksJmuaXmZ7Qhc5sRPK2s4G5OKl4AW6dHVKZBrgIH63ha2TJZkdOvT0F_e4mqMcF/s1600/Dix,+Wounded+Man.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjO1l99BuAtOZ55geg_hlk6gcJS2z9_ZXFQQRX2PlrELJLKgI6DR0zZKzhqy9TIYqr-mrjQX-ud8PbfksJmuaXmZ7Qhc5sRPK2s4G5OKl4AW6dHVKZBrgIH63ha2TJZkdOvT0F_e4mqMcF/s1600/Dix,+Wounded+Man.jpg" height="281" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Otto Dix, <i>Wounded Soldier, 1916</i></td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Interspersed by a succession of horrific but indecisive battles, the war on the Western Front became a living hell, what the German soldaten would come to call the “Blut Mühle,” (blood mill) and British “Tommies,” the “great sausage machine.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">One victorless mutual slaughter alone, the First Battle of the Somme of July-November, 1916 resulted in an estimated 1.2 million casualties, dead and wounded. During the engagement’s first day, the Brits alone suffered some 60,000 casualties, a third of them dead, and the first of over 400,000 total. The Germans suffered some 500,000 casualties, killed and wounded. Often overlooked, total numbers of casualties, military and civilian, in the East — Austria-Hungary, Russia, the Balkans and Ottoman lands — were even greater.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #6aa84f; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">War State Capitalism</span></h3>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">How does one begin to grasp the nature of that first truly internationalized “total war”? John H. Morrow, one of the best recent historians of the Great War, encapsulates it:</span></div>
<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;">“The war engendered mass indiscriminate slaughter. The various fronts constituted the slaughter house; the military commanders, the butchers; and the civilian governments, whether authoritarian or democratic, the mobilizers of the fodder and the implements for the slaughter. The industrialists and masters of science and technology supplied and created implements of destruction in astounding quantity; intellectuals, the press, the cinema, and the arts prepared their subjects psychologically for the butchery. The eligible male population became the fodder; the rest of adult males, women and youth, the labor to manufacture the implements to kill them; and the children, potential participants in future wars to socialize through patriotic instruction. The war enmeshed entire societies.” (</span><i>The Great War — An Imperial History</i>, 72)</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">All belligerents resorted to some form of war state capitalism, where ownership of the means and forces of production remained in private hands but the state purchased war materiel paid for primarily through loans, credits and inflation, the costs of which were passed on to the popular classes during and after. With the economy on war footing, distribution was coordinated in varying degree either by the military or civilian-headed planning bodies, or both.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Militarized state capitalism harnessed all available technical, engineering and scientific expertise for the war. As a result and precursor of worse to come, state-subsidized research and development induced a rapid succession of technological advances in the era’s weapons of mass destruction — improved machine guns, long range artillery and firearms, the introduction of flamethrowers and tanks, war planes, the submarine and poison gas.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/British_55th_Division_gas_casualties_10_April_1918.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/British_55th_Division_gas_casualties_10_April_1918.jpg" height="247" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">British soldiers, victims of gas attack, 1918. </td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">If imperialism by the early 20th century represented the most advanced stage of capitalism, then war state capitalism bred the highest stage of catastrophe.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Initially, war demands provided labor with new leverage, at least for those in war-related skilled and semi-skilled trades in Britain, France and Germany. In the United States, war production helped pull Black workers in “The Great Migration” to the northern industrial centers.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">As the mass mayhem continued, millions of experienced industrial workers fell subject to the draft. Their places in the war plants were taken by unskilled, among them women, youth and older workers, war zone refugees, colonial conscripts and war prisoners.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">All endured increasing rates of exploitation as the owners of increasingly militarized factories retooled and accelerated the adaptation of American-style mass production techniques, what Antonio Gramsci dubbed “Fordism.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The war at home also imposed new disciplines on the population at large. All the belligerents legislated or decreed “homeland security” measures that criminalized dissent. Domestic surveillance and censorship proliferated — sound familiar? — as the state not only expanded its agencies and mechanisms of control and repression, but enlisted informants and patriotic groups to report “suspicious behavior” and impose conformity.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQwnHMbxc2sxmtMXGNyYGdX-TwbDR5TIp_2XPq6XYIntGNfgzN9Zw5iNpiVaOYCxuh2E8Mk67qsh-AnDY7nodEAaGGZ38Vp0Fe25ifLl2RSBp2E4ltRJyI6On05ocP57q_XCPMiKFp3MFL/s1600/Women+munitions+workers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQwnHMbxc2sxmtMXGNyYGdX-TwbDR5TIp_2XPq6XYIntGNfgzN9Zw5iNpiVaOYCxuh2E8Mk67qsh-AnDY7nodEAaGGZ38Vp0Fe25ifLl2RSBp2E4ltRJyI6On05ocP57q_XCPMiKFp3MFL/s1600/Women+munitions+workers.jpg" height="360" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Women workers in a British munitions factory, 1917 <span style="background-color: black;">(<span style="color: #999999; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15px; text-align: start;">Photo: </span><span itemprop="author" style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; color: #999999; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: start;">Getty/Time Life Pictures)</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #6aa84f; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Attrition and its Costs</span></h3>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">As another part of their “total war,” the British and French utilized troops and conscript labor from their colonies, men of color from across Africa, India, Indochina and the Caribbean, in their war for “civilization.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">At times used by French and British commanders on the Western Front as expendable assault troops so that white soldiers would not be “wasted,” such colonials in turn experienced levels of racism, segregation and discrimination at the rear, whether they were fighters shipped by the hundreds of thousands from French colonial Africa or an estimated 1.2 million Indian combatants and corvée labor who served the British in every theater of operations.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjj6iKFtz9waD_Zr4R22KPjvNFYtvHEmFnYi5CWT_AD2C0RiERIQ2n-jbOz4Ytr5ZTZ1jM3Xjb0WP-E8Jmtpv7XMYCnKPLQuvN4_gZCHTBmFMw-jTIagqC9XwNu8N0q7OXs7jjGRfk7YcFw/s1600/Senegalese-troops.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjj6iKFtz9waD_Zr4R22KPjvNFYtvHEmFnYi5CWT_AD2C0RiERIQ2n-jbOz4Ytr5ZTZ1jM3Xjb0WP-E8Jmtpv7XMYCnKPLQuvN4_gZCHTBmFMw-jTIagqC9XwNu8N0q7OXs7jjGRfk7YcFw/s1600/Senegalese-troops.jpg" height="291" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><strong style="background-color: #333300; color: #cccccc; font-size: medium; text-align: -webkit-left;"><span style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"> France sent half-a-million colonial troops, including these from Senegal, to the Western Front.</span></strong></td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Colonial troops also paid the price as the French and British moved to seize German holdings across Africa. Britain also sacrificed men from what were then its “White Dominions” — Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">With neither side able to win a decisive “breakthrough” battle, the total war became one of attrition aimed at eroding the enemy’s capacity and will to fight. As such, the war on all fronts often obliterated distinctions between combatants and non-combatants as civilians came to be targeted, if not directly then by the deprivations and hardships that resulted.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Early on, the British admiralty imposed a blockade of Germany’s North Sea ports, in part to hem in the German war fleet, but more so to halt the import of any war-related materiel, including foodstuffs. The Germans responded with submarine warfare on British merchantmen, but the ability of the western Entente to draw from the immense resources — in finances, raw materials, agricultural products and person power from all their possessions and the United States — ultimately provided the material advantage.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The blockade’s attritional effect deepened as large numbers of rural males and draft animals, especially horses, were conscripted. Their absence contributed to dramatic declines in overall agricultural production, especially grain, throughout Central and East Europe. What remained available was prioritized for the armies busy laying waste to whole farming regions East and West.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">With food supplies diminished in the industrial cities crucial to war production, the state imposed rationing. Black markets flourished as price inflation by 1916-1917 eroded the purchasing power of the popular classes.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In the War’s third year, weekly per capita consumption of basic foodstuffs plummeted across Germany. As a result, the mortality rate for women and small children went to 50%; deaths attributed to tuberculosis increase by over 70%. The birth rate declined by 50% and the German Health Office attributed some 730,000 deaths to the “Hunger Blockade.” And conditions in Austria, especially in Vienna, were far worse.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZ6ARIMYkoNXDctaisdB1qXgD9AnrNU3VHOOcA_KAzUlcC8iS8vis6Zf8svRJNvANg9Z-6zH1RvlnX4CmLHr_zFoPb4KBBZUkZYWMulCpmzcs5bC_nfvrppAkFw2oe8A-oYSI2dY9mysuQ/s1600/hungry-Germans-butchering-a-horse_1917.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZ6ARIMYkoNXDctaisdB1qXgD9AnrNU3VHOOcA_KAzUlcC8iS8vis6Zf8svRJNvANg9Z-6zH1RvlnX4CmLHr_zFoPb4KBBZUkZYWMulCpmzcs5bC_nfvrppAkFw2oe8A-oYSI2dY9mysuQ/s1600/hungry-Germans-butchering-a-horse_1917.jpg" height="307" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica;"><span style="color: #f3f3f3; font-size: x-small;">The "Hunger Blockade," 1917: Berliners butcher a dead horse for food</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Malnutrition became widespread and starvation not unusual while contagious diseases, typhus and cholera, mowed down the vulnerable across Eastern Europe — over three million in Russia and additional millions in Rumania, Poland, Serbia and Asia Minor.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">As many as five million people in the Ottoman Empire, 25% of the population, perished. The overwhelming majority were civilians, killed by disease or starvation; among them were millions of Armenian, Assyrian and Greek victims of Turkish ethnic cleansing.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #6aa84f; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Revolutionary Consequences</span></h3>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">As conditions continued to deteriorate, threats of conscription or imprisonment could no longer deter strikes and mass demonstrations, increasingly led by hard pressed and underpaid working class women, often lone family providers forced to spend additional hours each day in search of food.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A nationwide mass strike that started in Berlin in late January 1918 involved over a million people demanding not just food, but peace and political change — the precursor of things to come. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Such home front unrest came to parallel sizable mutinies by war weary soldiers, described as the mass strikes of industrialized warfare. One of these in April 1917, informed by word of Russia’s February Revolution, a collective refusal to continue further murderous senseless offensives involved troops in 44 divisions, half the French army, and demands for “an end to the butchery,” “justice,” and “peace.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Historians argue that the arrival of large numbers of fresh U.S. troops and materiel on the Western front proved decisive in Germany’s defeat. But the linchpin Central Power was already exhausted. The actual refusal of soldiers on all fronts to endure the slaughter, and tandem civilian strikes for bread and peace across Europe, clearly played their historic role. This was especially important in what occurred as the armies in Russia and Germany collapsed from within and the war weary “voted with their feet” in 1917-1918.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The War’s unimaginable hardships and mass mayhem ushered in the Russian Revolution of February, 1917. With Russian absolutism dead and a Provisional Government in place willing to continue the war, Allied rhetoric changed as Woodrow Wilson redefined the purpose of the war to “make the world safe for democracy.” </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Then came the Bolshevik seizure of power in October, 1917. Already faced with an enormity of revolutionary challenges and determined to save the young revolution, the Bolsheviks in March, 1918 concluded a costly separate peace with Germany at Brest-Litovsk. While the dispossession of Russia’s ruling class sent messages of revolutionary hope to oppressed peoples worldwide, that agreement in tandem with the revolution’s expropriation and nationalization of private property simultaneously evoked the eternal enmity of war-time Russia’s capitalist allies.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The October Revolution immediately and ever after made counterrevolution the paramount goal of ruling classes everywhere as a key Allied goal immediately became the war to make their world safe from the Bolshevik “bacilli.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Inspired by the Revolution’s promise, but also propelled by both the horrific conditions and the historic conjuncture of possibilities, class conflict ignited across the globe in 1918-1919. To a large extent spontaneous risings catalyzed by the War’s devastation, all were beaten back by the forces of reaction. Most disastrously, that was the fate of the German revolution of 1918-23. (That story is obviously too complex to detail here. For some background see Charlie Post’s review essay on the writings of Paul Levi, <a href="http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/4075">http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/4075</a>.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Certainly, the world would have been a different place if the German Revolution and working class upheavals in Italy, Hungary and elsewhere had succeeded in providing some breathing room for the Russian revolution. In their place, however, came counterrevolution and the seeds of Italian Fascism and German Nazism, the latter nurtured by the resentment and protracted social, political and economic crises assured by the vindictive conditions imposed at Versailles.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Meanwhile, the Allies’ armed intervention in the Russian civil war of 1918-20, aided early on by covert U.S. funding, gave the lie to Woodrow Wilson’s wartime rhetoric of self-determination and made Soviet concerns with hostile “encirclement” an issue that still resonates in post-Cold War U.S.-Russian relations.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Meanwhile, new nations rose or old ones revived out of the rubble in Eastern Europe, among them Poland, Lithuania, Finland and inherently unstable Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. An estimated 30 million people wound up on the wrong side of newly drawn frontiers, a source of friction for decades to come.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The victors, France and especially Britain worked to reorder imperial holdings and redraw the map, not just of Europe but in the Middle East, Africa and beyond.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Denying the Arab peoples the nationhood they had been led to expect for their wartime efforts, they divvied up the Ottoman Middle East. Defining the boundaries of what would become today’s Syria and Iraq, Lebanon and the eventual “mandates” of Palestine and Trans Jordan, they gave no regard to the ethnic, confessional or communal concern that remain at issue today.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i style="text-align: start;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-size: small;"> German soldiers in Jerusalem (c. 1916) marching by Arab and Jewish children. (German Bundesarchiv).</span></i></td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The seeds of the region’s key antagonism had already been planted with the wartime Balfour Declaration, the British promise to facilitate “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” provided that “…nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine…”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The War’s lessons informed ongoing struggles to end European colonialism as troops from India, Africa, southeast Asia and the Caribbean returned home to demand rights and “self-determination.” Among those who came way from Paris schooled by the gulf between liberal democratic rhetoric and imperial realities were a young Vietnamese militant Ho Chi Minh and members of the Pan African Congress, ignored at Versailles.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Entente ally Japan, rebuffed by Britain and France in its attempts to include a clause condemning racial discrimination in the League of Nations Covenant, abruptly left Versailles. Having seized Germany’s Chinese concessions during the war, it soon would look to expand imperial interests on the mainland. Italy, denied the territory promised for joining the Entente, also left the conference, and soon turned to Mussolini to “right the wrongs” of Versailles.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The United States, ascendant in the wake of the war, turned to economic measures that assured future global financial instabilities. Very briefly put, in the mid-1920s it provided loans to Germany in an effort to stabilize the postwar economic crisis convulsing the young Weimar Republic. Berlin used the money to pay reparations owed France and Britain. Those payments were then used by the latter to pay down massive wartime U.S. loans.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">With interest accruing all along the way, relative stability and confidence was restored as gold moved across the Atlantic and direct investment flowed into Germany. That “Dawes Plan” worked — that is, until 1929 when the U.S. stock market crash forced banks to call in their loans, countries defaulted, and international credit dried up.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The rest is history, as they say.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiP4uvblkRomxLXZiSl4eqIPlRQUn_VrYN_0Qj6Uihjd3UeTT8LIdqqN5Q-LH_fr9JswS0vthcMdCeJ0hhxpyhzFi5OYA9Iy0QD1T3-BSrD5QGeqgtlZjk9HePOcSxzdCHG7d0xWXk86se6/s1600/Otto-Dixs-Skull-from-his--001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiP4uvblkRomxLXZiSl4eqIPlRQUn_VrYN_0Qj6Uihjd3UeTT8LIdqqN5Q-LH_fr9JswS0vthcMdCeJ0hhxpyhzFi5OYA9Iy0QD1T3-BSrD5QGeqgtlZjk9HePOcSxzdCHG7d0xWXk86se6/s1600/Otto-Dixs-Skull-from-his--001.jpg" height="400" width="297" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: black; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15px; text-align: start;"><span style="color: #f3f3f3;">Otto Dix's Skull, from his 1924 set of first world war drawings, Der Kreig Photograph: British Museum</span></span></td></tr>
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Allen Ruffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18310195276315827048noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458840028095794061.post-81081927172649361362014-04-07T14:46:00.001-07:002019-02-02T13:29:36.179-08:00Missed by the Mainstream: Observations on the Ukraine Crisis<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: center;">
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">[The following is a somewhat revised version of a piece that first appeared on the <a href="http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/4141">Solidarity Webzine</a> site on April 3, 2014 -AR]</span>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A great deal has been written regarding the Ukraine events of February and March leading to the overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych. In their attempts to explain the upheaval, most of those weighing in have primarily focused on the internal dynamics - the domestic political terrain, the east/west ethnic divides, some inchoate desire to join the EU and “the West,” the influence of organized fascists, and the corrupt and oligarchical nature of the ousted leader.<span style="font-size: 12px;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">With Yanukovych ousted, the ever myopic US press rapidly shifted its attention to Russia’s response, or more accurately to the behavior of Vladimir Putin. Dutifully describing the Russian moves in the Crimea as an outright “invasion” or “act of aggression” in violation of international norms and sovereignty, mainstream commentators resorted to to-be-expected simplistic explanations focused primarily on Putin. All context and understanding of even the very recent history disappeared, only to be replaced by facile talk of a “new Cold War” and “good” versus “evil” framing<span style="font-size: 12px;">s.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">So how do we begin to decipher recent developments?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Ukraine currently straddles a complex fault line on the tectonic plates of Russian and US imperial concerns — geo-strategic, energy-related and economic. Numerous forces and competing interests, in play well before the demonstrations in Kiev’s Maidan, led to the recent seismic tremors along that geopolitical fault.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Through February and into March, all the “news” networks parroted the line that the protests in Kiev were solely the result of Yanukovych’s refusal of an offer to join the EU, rather than the “conditionalities,” the strings attached to the $15 billion financial assistance package. Rejecting what turned out to be “an offer he couldn’t refuse,” the Ukraine leader pivoted instead toward a Moscow “bail out,” actually an extended credit line free of EU-style “economic reform” demands. Casting the regime as nothing more than a clique of kleptocratic oligarchs, and the opposition gathered at the Maidan as an indistinguishable mass yearning for EU inclusion as the road to “freedom,” the dominant media disregarded some essential contemporary history.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Breadbasket cum Basket Case</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Once the “breadbasket of Europe,” Ukraine has been an economic basket case pretty much since the implosion and 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union. Privatization of what were formerly socialized assets and the handing over of key economic sectors, technically still state owned, to politically connected insiders, left whole segments of the society exposed and dispossessed. That system, rife with graft, “grey market” corruption mafia-like patron-client politics and rival political clans, gave rise to competing sets of oligarchs, many of whom remain at the “commanding heights.” </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/transparency-international-slams-ukraine-as-most-corrupt-in-europe-332965.html">Transparency International</a></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> in 2013 listed Ukraine as the most corrupt country in Europe, tying globally with Cameroon, Nigeria, Iran and the Central African Republic. The <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/03/ukraine-and-russia"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Ukrainian shadow economy</span></a> is one of the biggest in the world—at around 50% of GDP, according to the IMF, and Ukraine’s new prime minister early in March estimated that $37 billion had gone missing during Yanukovych’s time at the top. (It should be noted that many of Yanukovich’s Party of Regions colleagues, not to be left out in any reshuffle, distanced themselves from their former leader.) </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The plight of the popular classes had been worsening for some time as their purchasing power and standard of living continued to decline. Following a deplorable situation throughout the 1990s, <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/07/the-ukraine-economic-crisis/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">per capita income improved somewhat</span></a>, but fell precipitously following the “Orange Revolution” of 2004-05. Then came the global downturn of 2008. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The “Great Recession,” from which the Ukraine economy has never recovered, dried up credit and investment from abroad, raised the price on imports, slowed exports, depleted the country’s hard currency reserves, increased the national debt, and resulted more recently in the devaluation of the nation’s currency by 20% in relation to the dollar. All segments of the society — the under- and unemployed, the youth, pensioners, and working class families — experienced diminished buying power. All, that is, except the nouveau riche robber barons and politicos at the top or those somehow connected to them.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Clearly, it was the worsening conditions in the country, compounded by graft and political corruption at all levels but especially by the unregulated piratical capitalists at the helm, that fueled the discontent leading up to Maidan. The mass demonstrations and the state’s tough response to the protests, in turn, opened the door for parties and organized formations of ultra-nationalists able to inflame the deteriorating situation on the ground and thereby veto any resolution of the crisis short of Yanukovych’s ouster and a changing of the oligarchic guard. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It must be understood, as well, that the IMF had a hand in creating the volatile situation. (One could construct an argument, based upon a close reading of the record, that the aim of its strategy all along was to draw the country into the Western orbit.)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the country since the early 1990s, in October 2008 the IMF granted Ukraine a $16.4 billion loan to be doled out over period of years. It froze installments in late 2009 after Ukraine raised minimum wages and pensions in violation to IMF “conditionalities”. </span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In late July 2010, the financial consortium approved another 29-month $15.15 billion loan, conditioned on putting an end to long-established consumer price subsidies for natural gas. (The government, incidentally, had been charging consumers a quarter of the price being payed to providers, primarily Russia’s Gazprom.) The country’s trade unions warned at the time that resulting 50 percent increases on household gas utility prices would “<a href="http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/gas-price-hike-to-raise-tension-in-ukraine-75957.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">stoke social unrest</span></a> and uncontrolled inflation.”</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">According to the since deposed Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, it was "the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/23/world/europe/ukraine-blames-imf-for-collapse-of-accord-with-european-union.html?_r=0"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">extremely harsh conditions</span></a>" of a renewed November, 2013 IMF loan offer that set the stage for the Yanukovych government's decision to put off signing an the “Association Agreement” between Ukraine and the European Union. The November turn away from the EU became a catalyst for the Maidan protests.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“It’s the Energy, Stupid…”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">While some have described the heightened tensions over Ukraine as the possible beginning of a “new Cold War”, the dispute may best be understood as but one salvo of what <a href="http://michaelklare.com/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Michael Klare</span></a> writing on the geopolitics of energy, has described as a globally intensifying “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A61rKqvK1-s"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">race for what’s left</span></a>” -- or,more accurately, the increasing major power and corporate competition over all aspects of the production and distribution of plentiful energy sources. </span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">That heightening international scramble for control of the world’s vital resources, essential among them the hydrocarbon fuels vital for the operation and stability of the world's major economies, provides an important backdrop for the Ukraine events. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Not to be overlooked, “energy security” has moved to the fore as a central strategic concern, not just of the major multi-national energy corporations - Exxon Mobil and the rest - but for capitalist state and private sector planners, and development strategists at the IMF, the World Bank and other IFIs. Innumerable think tanks and NGOs, and of course, the military, industrial and intelligence establishments of all the major powers, The US and Russia first and foremost among them, are all now deeply invested in the race. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the particular scramble for control of oil and, increasingly, natural gas, the major capitalist states and corporations have sought to influence those regimes sitting atop known reserves and as of yet untapped sources of hydrocarbon wealth, whether in the Middle East, Central Asia, or elsewhere. In addition, a number of countries with pipelines or ports, key transit and distribution points, have acquired increased in “strategic value” as the rush for “black gold,” gas and other strategic minerals (notably coal, uranium, and gold) continues to intensify.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Russia is a gas and oil rich hydrocarbon state. A high percentage of its recent development and relative prosperity has been fueled by the high price of gas and oil exported to energy dependent Central and Eastern Europe, and more recently <a href="http://in.rbth.com/articles/2012/10/19/russian_natural_gas_to_flow_to_india_18487.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">India</span></a> and <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/21/us-ukraine-crisis-russia-insight-idUSBREA2K07S20140321"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">China</span></a>. The country’s development, hampered by the decline in energy prices following the 2008 global slowdown, has benefitted more recently from the rebound in international demand.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Russian exports currently account for nearly a third of European gas imports. Upwards of 80 per cent of that supply has flowed through Ukraine enroute to other Eastern European states and points West. As of 2009, two-thirds of annual revenue of Russia’s state-owned <a href="http://www.twq.com/09winter/docs/09jan_ChowElkind.pdf"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Gazprom</span></a> came from the sale of gas transiting through Ukraine.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjewa1bWydNwRyREg3z68c2AYdArUv-tuLh30itc22BPPQ7F9iT5Hd0kVYlDf-vOuFnTSGv6qU0Bv-kS5dLyby9h126RsWgVikjywD-9gk8ZD3nSD9UsDgY7WnAEzb7Uu3I-POGmg2EquhO/s1600/Ukraine+pipelines.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjewa1bWydNwRyREg3z68c2AYdArUv-tuLh30itc22BPPQ7F9iT5Hd0kVYlDf-vOuFnTSGv6qU0Bv-kS5dLyby9h126RsWgVikjywD-9gk8ZD3nSD9UsDgY7WnAEzb7Uu3I-POGmg2EquhO/s1600/Ukraine+pipelines.png" height="250" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Gas lines transiting through Ukraine</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Ukraine, itself, has been dependent on those same gas lines for upwards of 60 percent of its domestic needs. Russia has consistently sold that gas to Naftogaz, Ukraine’s national gas company at subsidized prices, up to 30 percent below the international market price, as part of the transit agreements. Fuel has also been handled by <a href="http://csis.org/files/publication/twq09januarychowelkind.pdf"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">opaque, for profit go-between firms</span></a>, apparently serving no other purpose than to skim off earnings through speculation and gray market trading.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Despite favorable conditions, Kiev has consistently been unable to pay its gas bill, in part because of the general state of its economy, but also because of the billions of dollars siphoned off annually by well-connected kleptocrats lording over the energy sector, at times in collusion with their Russian counterparts. In 2006, Russia cut off the flow after it determined that the state owned gas company, <a href="http://www.naftogaz.com/www/3/nakweben.nsf/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Naftogaz</span></a>, had been diverting Europe-bound supplies to domestic use. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Due to unpaid gas bills, Russia again cut off the country’s flow during January, 2009. In response, Ukraine again drew supplies for domestic consumption from the European stream. That, in turn led to severe fuel shortages or diminished supplies in a total of <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/01/07/uk-russia-ukraine-gas-factbox-idUKTRE5062Q520090107?sp=true"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">eighteen countries</span></a>, among them Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Greece, Austria and Germany. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">That month-long situation sent serious <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/another-winter-of-discontent-europe-fails-to-wean-itself-off-russian-gas-a-600822.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">signals to the EU</span></a>, its members still unevenly caught in the vice grips of the “Great Recession.” The immediate Russo-Ukraine crisis then subsided as Kiev borrowed the money to start paying what it owed (by borrowing from Russian banks!) and the “special relationship” resumed, built upon a mounting Ukranian debt owed Gazprom and other creditors. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Partly in response to that vulnerable situation but also as part of a <a href="https://csis.org/files/publication/1009_EChow_LHendrix_CentralAsia.pdf"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">broader strategy</span></a> already long underway, US and EU state strategists, IFIs, allied energy company “majors,” and mega construction firms accelerated plans for various east-west gas line projects extending from as far away as Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan in Central Asia. Carried on in cooperation with numerous regimes of Russia’s “near abroad,” those projects have been consciously planned, in part, to wean Central and Eastern Europe away from a dependency on Russian energy. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Ukraine took its first major step away from dependency on Russian gas imports when it signed a $10 billion <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/24/shale-ukraine-idUSL6N0ATER320130124"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">shale gas deal</span></a> with Royal Dutch Shell in mid-January 2013. That 50-year production sharing agreement at the time marked the biggest contract yet to tap shale gas in Europe and the largest direct foreign investment in the former Soviet republic.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">(Partly out its own concern over the unreliability of Ukrainain and other Eastern European transit routes, Russia’s Gasprom in turn has proceeded with the construction of its “<a href="http://www.nord-stream.com/about-us/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Nord Stream</span></a>” gas pipeline running under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany. With Gazprom holding a 51 percent interest, the Swiss-headquartered joint stock company heading up the project, <a href="http://www.nord-stream.com/about-us/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Nord Stream AG</span></a>, is comprised of a number of Western European energy and construction companies as well as German, French and Russian investment banks.)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As energy politics journalist <a href="http://www.desmogblog.com/2014/03/17/exxonmobil-russia-rosneft-gas-export-weapon"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Steve Horn</span></a> has shown, amidst all the hubbub regarding the Maidan demonstrations, the Kiev coup, and subsequent Russian response in the Crimea, multibillion dollar joint shale gas exploration ventures between Exxon-Mobil and other energy “majors” and the Russia’s Gazprom and oil giant <a href="http://www.rosneft.com/about/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Rosneft</span></a> have continued full bore in Siberia, the Gulf of Mexico and yes, the Black Sea off Crimea, unimpeded by limited Washington sanctions.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">To NATO or not to NATO…</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">While barely scratching the economic undercurrents of the Ukraine story, mainstream Western media have consistently given short shrift to any possibly legitimate Russian concerns. Key among them, certainly from Moscow’s perspective, has been the eastward march of NATO, understood primarily as a US led military alliance. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Founded in 1949 for the “collective defense” of Western Europe against improbable “Soviet aggression”, the alliance in the Russian view has always been a US-led offensive force. (The Soviet bloc’s mutual defense Warsaw Pact came about in 1955, well after NATO’s formation.) </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="background-color: black; color: white;">As the Cold War came to end, Germany reunified in 1990, making the former East Germany an ipso facto part of NATO. In exchange for his assent to the reunification, Mikhail</span> <span style="color: #6fa8dc;"><a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-s-eastward-expansion-did-the-west-break-its-promise-to-moscow-a-663315.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Gorbachev received a US promise</span></a> </span><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: white;">from then US Secretary of State, James Baker that the alliance would expand “not one inch to the east”. </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #f3f3f3;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In 1999, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined the organization, despite Russian opposition. Expansion continued as seven Central and Eastern European countries — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia,</span><span style="font-size: 12px; letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania — were integrated into the organization in March 2004. Albania and Croatia joined in April 2009, while Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Georgia have the stated goal of eventually joining.</span></span></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF-DA6CWnl4_axYj-qMpTu436HF3-pK_OENhBd3ksFTlf_nNaswerDqszzgugksXbGDEHRqK_uorUEqyooCckoDm-EGLRTIilLkGw4WSemC3RimUdHLqJ5r7TAWR8YYTjHx318pyckC4lk/s1600/NATO+Expansion.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF-DA6CWnl4_axYj-qMpTu436HF3-pK_OENhBd3ksFTlf_nNaswerDqszzgugksXbGDEHRqK_uorUEqyooCckoDm-EGLRTIilLkGw4WSemC3RimUdHLqJ5r7TAWR8YYTjHx318pyckC4lk/s1600/NATO+Expansion.jpg" height="380" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: right;">(Source: Agence France Press, 2008)</td></tr>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #f3f3f3;">In addition, virtually all the former Soviet republics now have some form of bilateral military cooperation with the Organization, under its </span></span><span style="color: #6fa8dc;"><span style="background-color: black;">“</span><a href="http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/topics_50349.htm"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Partnership for Peace</span></a>” </span><span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #f3f3f3;">(PfP) program.</span></span></span><span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; letter-spacing: 0px;"> Ukraine became the first former Soviet republic to join the PfP initiative in February 2005, after deepening its ties through a November, 2002 “NATO-Ukraine Action Plan”. It soon entered into the “Intensified Dialogue” program with NATO.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In March 2008, under then President <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Yushchenko">Viktor Yushchenko</a> and his Prime Minister </span><span style="color: #120506; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yulia_Tymoshenko"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Yulia Tymoshenko</span></a></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">, Ukraine sent an official letter of application for a Membership Action Plan (MAP), the first step in joining NATO. Facing objections from his opposition, Yuschenko at the time guaranteed that membership in any military alliance would not take place without a public referendum. Russian leaders at the time made clear their opposition to Ukraine membership. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdGUr751QL_uICA5AMtMHx5_C1PQvb0qsej7caN8f6zRP12x-SsdV7A55GOEBB1-kaHg3dWLiEfxx4eKFrihvKjvJWPp0jYwlLwxr_bSunEKAzNpWn4_aa4MOhaVnP77_ehhmOq7SyW5Qq/s1600/yushchenko+at+nato.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdGUr751QL_uICA5AMtMHx5_C1PQvb0qsej7caN8f6zRP12x-SsdV7A55GOEBB1-kaHg3dWLiEfxx4eKFrihvKjvJWPp0jYwlLwxr_bSunEKAzNpWn4_aa4MOhaVnP77_ehhmOq7SyW5Qq/s1600/yushchenko+at+nato.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Yushchenko at NATO, 2008</td></tr>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">At the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, to which </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin" style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Vladimir Putin</a><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> was invited, he listed his </span><a href="http://www.unian.info/world/111033-text-of-putins-speech-at-nato-summit-bucharest-april-2-2008.html" style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Russia’s grievances with NATO</span></a><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">, among them deployment of a “defensive missile shield” on the country’s western frontier. He at the time called Ukrainian membership "a direct threat" to his country. The then NATO Secretary General nevertheless declared shortly afterward that Ukraine, along with Georgia, would someday join the alliance, but that their respective MAPs were deferred to some later date.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">According to numerous independent polls conducted since 2002, Ukrainian public opinion on NATO membership was split, with the majority of those polled generally opposed to joining the alliance. A Pew Research Center poll in March 2010 showed that opposition was particularly high, at 74%, among ethnic Russians while earlier polls among the entire population reflected general disfavor. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The 2010 election returned Yanukovych as President and marked a turnaround in Ukraine's relations with NATO. In February 2010, he stated that there was "no question of Ukraine joining NATO” and later that year announced that Ukraine would remain a "European, non-aligned state.” </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">On June 3, 2010 the Ukrainian Rada rejected the goal of "integration into Euro-Atlantic security and NATO membership" as part of the country's national security strategy. The enactment forbade Ukraine's membership in any military bloc, but allowed for bilateral co-operation.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Yanukovych’s February ouster signaled a possible change back in the direction of at least western Ukraine's association with the EU, and by extension NATO. Russia’s annexation of Crimea reshaped the political terrain even further, however.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The US-favored, newly-installed Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, in an apparent attempt to assuage Russian concerns, on March 18 stated that Ukraine was not seeking NATO membership. U.S. President Barack Obama echoed that position a week later, while nevertheless calling for a greater NATO presence in Eastern Europe. But NATO head Anders Fogh Rasmussen stated afterwards that Ukraine membership was still an option.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Writing in <i>the Nation</i> on February 11, noted Russia scholar <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/178344/distorting-russia"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Stephen Cohen</span></a> stated that the “most crucial media omission” in all the mainstream analyses of the recent situation had been “Moscow’s reasonable conviction that the struggle for Ukraine [was] yet another chapter in the West’s ongoing, US-led march toward post-Soviet Russia.” </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Cohen went on to note the following: “Whether this longstanding Washington-Brussels policy is wise or reckless, it—not Putin’s December financial offer to save Ukraine’s collapsing economy—is deceitful. The EU’s ‘civilizational’ proposal, for example, includes ‘security policy’ provisions, almost never reported, that would apparently subordinate Ukraine to NATO. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Vilified in conservative quarters as a Russian dupe for his utterances, Cohen dared to point out that that encroachment began in the 1990s, despite the Gobachev-era US agreement to hold the line NATO eastward movement. Russia’s civilian leadership and national security apparatus, witnessing that US-led “Drang nach Osten” and not about to imperil its warm-water Black Sea port at Sevastopol, drew a line in the sand of the Crimean peninsula.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Then again, Russian perceptions regarding conceivable threats from “the West” and encroachments into its sphere of influence, especially in what it considers its “near abroad,” may just be a bit paranoiac. After all, there really hasn’t been much of a military threat from the west for some time. Not since Napoleon marched on Moscow. (That is, if one were to overlook the First and Second World Wars!)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“I’ve Seen the Future, Brother… It Is Murder”?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Ukraine’s woes will continue to deepen. The country currently owes Russia billions for its gas bill and has a national debt equaling at least 40 percent of its GDP, and Russia immediately canceled its long standing discount on gas prices following Yanukovych’s ouster. If internal social and political turmoil and tensions with Russia continue to mount, the situation in the country could deteriorate further as a significant portion of its industrial capacity is located in the east; in areas with a higher percentage of ethnic Russians, more favorable to Russian advances. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As a result, living conditions of its subordinate classes are not likely to improve and will more than likely deteriorate further as projected EU and IMF assistance will not come without deepened “economic reform” austerity demands. A mere $1 billion in US aid will barely matter. (An amount far exceeding that annually gets paid out in bribes in the country!)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The country certainly is not about to become some liberal capitalist democracy. Certainly not as long as the state and the economy are dominated by bands of oligarchs and certainly not as long as Svoboda and Right Sektor members head key domestic ministries and their militants rule the streets. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A rapacious primitive accumulation will continue unabated in the meantime, while much of the nation’s dwindling wealth finds its way to IFI ledgers and sheltered accounts in “the West”. The situation will continue to deteriorate for Ukraine's popular classes despite the feeble sanctions and posturing of the US and its erstwhile allies, feigning indignation over Russia’s <i>real politik</i> assertions of its own national interests.</span></div>
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Allen Ruffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18310195276315827048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458840028095794061.post-71049541728818300312013-12-26T18:49:00.002-08:002019-02-02T13:29:36.065-08:00“Operation Enduring America”: The US in Central Asia After Afghanistan<div style="font-family: 'Arial Unicode MS'; font-size: 14px;">
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[This is a re-postimg of my piece in the January, 2014 edition of Z Magazine, with slight alterations, images and links added. -AR]<br />
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<span style="color: #f3f3f3;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">“As we reassure our partners that our relationships and engagement in Afghanistan will continue after the military transition in 2014, we should underscore that we have long-term strategic interests in the broader region... As the United States enters a new phase of engagement in Afghanistan, we must lay the foundation for a long-term strategy that sustains our security gains and protects U.S. interests...” --US Senator John Kerry, Chair of Senate Foreign Relations Committee, December, 2011.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">…A fuller reflection on the last eleven years should include the perverse twist about how in its almost single-minded effort to promote state-building, political tolerance and good governance in Afghanistan, just next door the West [sic] has left a trail of repression, graft and unfulfilled commitments to Central Asia’s fledgling civil society. — Central Asia analyst Alexander Cooley, <a href="http://blog.oup.com/2012/05/afghanistan-regional-casualty-central-asia/"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">“Afghanistan’s Other Regional Casualty”</span></a></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Despite the projected 2014 “drawdown” of most of its troops from Afghanistan, the US is not about to exit strategically vital and resource-rich Central Asia.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Afghan war and occupation created whole new sets of unparalleled opportunities and possibilities for increased US influence across the “post-Soviet space” often referred to as “the Stans”. Propelled by the war-driven expediencies of “Operation Enduring Freedom,” broader strategic ambitions, and a heavy dose of imperial hubris and arrogance, Washington sought and bought support from the repressive and corrupt regimes in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In turn, it gained varying degrees of previously unimagined regional access, not about to be relinquished. It also in the process planted seeds of future instability in a region already simmering with potential conflicts.</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Strategic Tinderbox</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">With the Caspian Sea to the west, the vast Central Asia steppes to the north and mountains to the east and south, the region half the size of the lower forty-eight United States sits at the strategic pivot where Russia, China, South Asia and Iran come together. That alone informs US “national interest”. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The area’s former Soviet republics had their independence thrust upon them with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The old system’s disintegration set loose massive dislocations as state subsidies for industry, health care, education and social protections collapsed or disappeared entirely while socialized property was looted and privatized.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the process, the region increasingly became a tinderbox mix of endemically corrupt authoritarian states lorded over by a “new class” of ex-Soviet officials and ascendant entrepreneur, those best positioned to grab control of formerly state-run enterprises, assets and the levers of power. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Each of the fledgling states started out on a different footing, with varying levels of development and resources. Sprawling Kazakhstan, suddenly the ninth largest country in the world, with its inestimable wealth in oil, uranium and other strategic minerals, immediately dwarfed its southerly neighbors Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, currently two of the poorest orphans of the ex-Soviet space. Turkmenistan, with vast stores of natural gas, rapidly became a closed society while Uzbekistan, with the largest population and military in the region, would look to rival Kazakhstan as the dominant regional power. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The diverse area is characterized by often disputed porous borders, peoples divided by those boundaries, inter-state rivalries, and percolating conflicts over water rights and other resources. Ascendant nationalisms, ethnic antagonisms, and an ongoing revival of long-suppressed Muslim identities also contribute to simmering social and political tensions. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At times flaring into open conflict, those tensions have been exacerbated by increasingly vast economic disparities between rich and poor glaringly visible in the contrasts between the region’s major cities with their post-Soviet nouveau riche and the continuing impoverishment of the countryside. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Expanding economic and social chasms have been compounded by endemic “misgovernance” -- oligarchic rule through patronage systems rife with corruption, nepotism and the “<a href="http://www.silkroadstudies.org/new/docs/Silkroadpapers/0610EMarat.pdf"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">criminalization of the state</span></span></a>” involving the symbiotic role of organized crime syndicates in politics; in the case of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, the morphing of “crime bosses” into “political bosses” now seated in parliaments and heading key ministries and agencies. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In impoverished Tajikistan, for instance, half the population lives on less than two dollars a day while remittances sent home by nearly half of the country’s male work force laboring in Russia provide the country’s largest source of GDP. But the capital, <a href="http://livepage.apple.com/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Dushanbe</span></span></a> is “awash with cash, construction and flashy cars,” the visible results of a huge “<a href="http://www.silkroadstudies.org/new/docs/Silkroadpapers/0610EMarat.pdf"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">shadow economy</span></span></a>” largely rooted in the massive drug traffic passing through the country from Afghanistan to Russia.</span><span style="color: #e63b7a; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">According to a 2012 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime <a href="http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/Studies/Afghanistan_northern_route_2012_web.pdf"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">(UNODC) report,</span></span></a> some <a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/65240"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">90 metric tons</span></span></a> of Afghan heroin and 30 to 40 more tons of raw opium passed across the region in 2009-10. Netting an estimated $1.4 billion profit that year alone and involving the paid-for complicity of state actors at all levels, the <a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/65425"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">heroin traffic</span></span></a> courses its way through every country in the region. Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan have been classified as <a href="http://origins.osu.edu/article/building-new-silk-road-central-asia-new-world-order/page/0/1"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">"narco-states"</span></span></a> where the state representative from top to bottom are implicated in the trade, corrupted by it. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The ‘Stans also have their share of radicalized Islamist insurgent groups, most notably the now regionally dispersed Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), often accused of being responsible for the drug trade by the region’s corrupt regimes, complicit themselves. Attributed by some to be the result of decades of war and occupation in Afghanistan and a broader transnational Islamic revival, the various insurgencies, limited in scope, have been propelled more so by indigenous inequities and state intolerance and repression.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Adding to the tinder box mix, the specter of succession crises and resultant instability currently looms over the region. Party chiefs of their respective republics at the close of the Soviet era and in power since, neither Kazakhstan’s “Leader of the Nation” <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8171617/Nursultan-Nazarbayev-the-shepherds-son-who-became-Kazakhstans-Emperor.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Nursultan Nazarbayev</span></span></a>, nor the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w097rPWM7M"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">brutal</span></span></a> “Hero of Uzbekistan,” President <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503543_162-20067420-503543.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Islam Karimov</span></span></a>, now both in their mid-seventies, have shown any sign of relinquishing supreme authority. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Their neighboring autocrat, <a href="http://www.objectivemind.org/en/portraits/tajikistan/emomali-rahmon/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Emomalii Rahmon</span></span></a>, said to run Tajikistan’s <a href="http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/regions/asia/central-asia/tajikistan/162-tajikistan-on-the-road-to-failure.aspx"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">“near-failed” state</span></span></a></span><span style="color: #4c4c4c; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">for his own and his family’s profit since he consolidated power following a mid-‘90s civil war, is not about to step down, as well. Nor is Turkmenistan’s increasingly authoritarian <span style="color: #3d85c6;"><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/240618?guni=Article:in%2520body%2520link"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow</span></span></a>,</span> successor to the country’s initial post-Soviet dictator, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/21/AR2006122101653.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Saparmurat Niyazov</span></span></a>, who died suddenly in 2006.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">To one degree or another, all the region’s states have long been cited for their widespread human rights abuses and ceaseless <a href="http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/01/31/central-asia-widespread-rights-abuse-repression"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">repression</span></span></a> of dissent and political opposition. Arguing that economic development must come before openness, transparency and “good governance,” elites across the region have come to view democracy as a gateway to instability.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The 2013 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report on <a href="http://www.hrw.org/europecentral-asia/kazakhstan"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Kazakhstan</span></span></a> noted that its human rights record had “seriously deteriorated” in 2012. <a href="http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/nations-transit/2012/kazakhstan"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Freedom House</span></span></a>, <a href="http://livepage.apple.com/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Transparency International</span></span></a>, <a href="http://livepage.apple.com/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Reporters Without Borders</span></span></a>, <a href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/kazakhstan-no-accountability-entrenched-torture-2013-07-11"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Amnesty International</span></span></a>, and others including the <a href="http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/2010/sca/154481.htm"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">US State Department</span></span></a> have long chronicled the Nazarbayev regime as a serial abuser of basic rights and freedoms.</span><span style="font-size: 12px; letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Its 2013 HRW report described</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> <a href="http://www.hrw.org/europecentral-asia/uzbekistan"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Uzbekistan</span></span></a></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> as a country with an “atrocious” human rights record; a nation where horrific torture remains “endemic” and freedom of expression is severely limited. The survey noted an intensified crackdown on civil society activists, political opponents, and journalists, and persecution of religious groups not registered with the state. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Karimov regime, of late an increasingly close US ally, </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0px;">has consistently banned all opposition political parties, severely restricted freedom of expression, forced international human rights </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0px;">monitors</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0px;"> and NGOs out of the country, and takes as many as two million children out of school to work, along with their families, as forced labor during the annual cotton harvest. Thousands of dissidents have been jailed and many hundreds have been killed, some of them literally <a href="http://www.rferl.org/content/uzbekistans-house-of-torture/24667200.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">boiled alive</span></span></a>.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov, increasingly a US allie</td></tr>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Significantly, this year’s HRW Uzbekistan appraisal pointed out that, “Despite the government’s persistent refusal to address concerns about its abysmal human rights record, the United States and European Union continued to advance closer relations with Tashkent in 2012, seeking cooperation with the war in Afghanistan.”<br />
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HRW described</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> <a href="http://www.hrw.org/europecentral-asia/turkmenistan"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Turkmenistan</span></span></a></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> as one of the most repressive and closed countries in the world. While pointing to “some small, positive steps on human rights in</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> <a href="http://www.hrw.org/europecentral-asia/Kyrgyzstan"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Kyrgyzstan</span></span></a></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> and</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> <a href="http://www.hrw.org/europecentral-asia/Tajikistan"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Tajikistan</span></span></a></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">,” it noted that their poor records had not really improved despite government pledges to tackle the problem of torture and other abuses. Described as “near failed states” honeycombed with corruption, both have provided the prime transit routes for those massive amounts of Afghan heroin and opium headed northward. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">While not speaking directly to the broader regional impacts of “Operation Enduring Freedom,” HRW’s Europe and Central Asia director, <a href="http://www.hrw.org/bios/hugh-williamson"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Hugh Williamson</span></span></a> noted how, “...the EU and the US have largely muted their public concern over the appalling rights records of all Central Asian governments at exactly the time when victims of government repression needed them to speak out on human rights.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Importantly, the point has not so much been the fact that the US and its allies have been barely audible regarding the abuse of human and political rights. More so, by rewarding those assisting with the Afghan war and occupation, the US has certainly had a direct hand in aiding, abetting and furthering the region-wide corruption, nepotism, ongoing repression and assaults </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">on basic rights</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">While the cooperation of the ‘Stans became crucial for the prosecution of the war to the south, US attention on the region has never solely or simply been about Afghanistan.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Underway before September 11th, the US is now enmeshed in a new “Great Game” in Central Asian remotely evocative of the 19th century one that pitted imperial Russia and Great Britain against each other for control of the “Eurasian core”. Its main competitors include Russia, vying to maintain influence in its historic underbelly, and an ascendant China, already the dominant “outside” economic developer and investor in the region.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Both Russia and China have maintained varying but extending economic, military, and political ties to the region. Viewing the area as part of its “sphere of influence,” Russia has maintained an ongoing military presence, at times in close proximity to US operations in Kygyryzstan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">With their own distinctive stakes in the game, the Stans have joined in as well. Each has worked to maximize its own “bargaining power” by playing off the interests of the major contenders.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Writing in 1998, at a time when the US was still the world’s unchallenged superpower and well before the “War on Terror”, imperial strategist <a href="https://csis.org/expert/zbigniew-brzezinski"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Zbigniew Brzezinski</span></span></a> could speak of the vital importance of Eurasia as “the globe’s central arena,” an area “of decisive importance to America’s global primacy and to America’s historical legacy.” </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The former National Security Advisor argued that the US must strategically focus on the region “to prevent the emergence of a hostile coalition that could eventually seek to challenge America’s primacy." The most immediate task, he asserted, was “to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitration role...” (Brzezinski,</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Grand-Chessboard-American-Geostrategic-Imperatives/dp/0465027261"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives</span></span></a><span style="color: #646363;">, </span></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1998.)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">With the Afghan war in full swing four years later, in February 2002 then- Secretary of State <a href="http://2001-2009.state.gov/secretary/former/powell/remarks/2002/7857.htm"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Colin Powell</span></span></a> could tell the House International Relations Committee that the United States “will have a continuing interest and presence in Central Asia of a kind that we could not have dreamed of before.” Since then, statements regarding the importance of the region, either from State Department officials or from think tank specialists and policy makers have remained on message. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In December, 2009, <a href="http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/biog/166373.htm"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">George Krol</span></span></a>, at the time a State Department hand on South and Central Asian Affairs and presently the US ambassador to Uzbekistan, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC) that the Obama administration did not view the region as “a forgotten backwater” peripheral to national concerns, but as one “at the fulcrum of key U.S. security, economic, and political interests.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A December 2011 staff report for the SFRC, chaired at the time by the current Secretary of State John Kerry, articulated a clear set of US regional priorities. The report on <a href="http://www.foreign.senate.gov/press/chair/release/foreign-relations-committee-releases-comprehensive-report-on-central-asia-and-the-transition-in-afghanistan"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">“Central Asia and the Transition in Afghanistan”</span></span></a> pointedly stated that the ‘Stans would continue to play a critical role, post-2014, in the US strategy for the far wider area extending westward across the Caspian and Caucuses, eastward to China and to Pakistan and India in the southeast. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In his <a href="http://www.foreign.senate.gov/press/chair/release/foreign-relations-committee-releases-comprehensive-report-on-central-asia-and-the-transition-in-afghanistan"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">remarks</span></span></a> marking the release of that report, Kerry noted that, </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #f3f3f3;">“Central Asia matters;” that its </span></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #f3f3f3;">countries were critical not only to the outcome in Afghanistan but to regional stability: </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #f3f3f3;">“As we reassure our partners that our relationships and engagement in Afghanistan will continue after the military transition in 2014, we should underscore that we have long-term strategic interests in the broader region... As the United States enters a new phase of engagement in Afghanistan, we must lay the foundation for a long-term strategy that sustains our security gains and protects U.S. interests...” </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Addressing post-2014 security concerns and “fear” of “abandonment” articulated by the area’s regimes, the staff report also asserted that, “Washington should repeatedly stress that its engagement is not ending” and that the US “will protect [its] long-term interests in the region.” </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Underlining those US strategic interests, the report referenced Russia’s historic connections to Central Asia, past and present, and its recurring “encirclement” concerns with a US presence in its “backyard.” It pointed out how China also was “leery” of US bases and an extended presence on its borders. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The report noted, in passing, how the United States in its efforts to build region-wide political support and cooperation for the Afghan war, had been “forced to rely on highly corrupt, authoritarian governments in countries whose populations are suspicious of [our] intentions.” It did not go into what that has meant for the present or the implications for enduring US operations.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Eurasian Atlanticism</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In specific regard to Central Asia, a November, 2010 <a href="http://www.acus.org/images/files/publication_pdfs/403/112210_ACUS_AstanaAtlantic.pdf"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">report from the Atlantic Council</span></span></a> (<a href="http://www.acus.org/about/history"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">ACUS</span></span></a>) laid out US concerns and strategic interest in the region. The highly influential think tank for the “Atlantic community” (i.e., the US and its major European allies) at the time was chaired by <a href="http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/news/press-releases/atlantic-council-chairman-chuck-hagel-confirmed-as-24th-us-secretary-of-defense"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Chuck Hagel</span></span></a>, the future Secretary of Defense. Hagel also headed the Council’s “Eurasian Task Force” that issued the paper. (He concurrently was a member of the <a href="http://progressive.org/why-progressives-should-oppose-hagel"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">board of directors of Chevron</span></span></a> Corp., at the time Kazakhstan’s largest direct foreign investor.) </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRaib9gpAuwhm6s1n9t2e4ciT2BoHHRoldkynoydyTFVKa2eyYtrb-xh3HSJaovlg_HVK0vmuHhptGnVlk6JcU7Ctl2UyQ9wr8ETMjoV7pJNRF3jycT2_I3IF0yvceVtxjVl20u0-spklb/s1600/hagel+at+ACUS.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="231" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRaib9gpAuwhm6s1n9t2e4ciT2BoHHRoldkynoydyTFVKa2eyYtrb-xh3HSJaovlg_HVK0vmuHhptGnVlk6JcU7Ctl2UyQ9wr8ETMjoV7pJNRF3jycT2_I3IF0yvceVtxjVl20u0-spklb/s320/hagel+at+ACUS.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Chuck Hagel, chair of the Atlantic Council, 2009-2013</td></tr>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Released in advance of a December, 2010 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) <a href="http://www.osce.org/cio/74233"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">summit in Astana</span></span></a>, Kazakhstan (hosted, incidentally, by that country’s autocrat, Nursultan Nazarbayev), the ACUS paper called for President Obama to take advantage of the upcoming conference “to plant the flag of the United States in Central Asia.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The report began by stating that, “an arc of potential disorder and instability looms over Central Asia.” Nevertheless viewing the region as one “important to U.S. national security interests” where the “transatlantic community [sic], the Far East and South Asia come together...,” it called for a “new approach” that “should feature sustained engagement to promote an attractive long-term vision.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Interestingly, the ACUS study candidly pointed out that the “military/Afghanistan component” of US engagement in Central Asia had “overwhelmed other parts of the American agenda.” In the view of the ACUS authors, “the nonmilitary aspects of US engagement in the region [had] languished - or at least were seen to diminish in local eyes.” </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">That, ACUS suggested, had enabled a climate where demands for improvements in democratic and human rights had come to be seen as “politically threatening and humiliating” by those very same oligarchs assisting the “war on terror” campaign further to the south.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Along similar lines, a preliminary draft of Obama’s <a href="http://www.utexas.edu/lbj/sites/default/files/file/news/National%2520Security%2520Strategy%25202013%2520(Final%2520Draft).pdf"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">National Security Strategy 2013 </span></span></a>, while noting the “new international environment in the aftermath of the “Arab Spring,” prioritized the need to protect “critical global strategic interests”. It noted that “supporting greater human rights and democracy, while an ultimate aim, nonetheless must be balanced with how our [sic] actions may lead to uncertainty.” </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">While some regional observers have suggested that Obama’s 2011 “Asia/Pacific pivot” -- a shift in the geopolitical center of gravity away from the Atlantic towards the Pacific and ascendant China -- will reduce the strategic importance of Central Asia, others have argued that the concern with China has given the region added importance as a “western flank” in the military “repositioning” aimed at containing the rising power.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Antebellum</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The initial US footholds in Central Asia came soon after the Soviet Union’s collapse as Washington moved immediately to recognize the newly independent states. As the State Department opened consulates and embassies across the region long closed to US interests, international financial institutions such as the US-centered <a href="http://www.worldbank.org/en/region/eca/brief/central-asia"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">World Bank</span></span></a>, the <a href="http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/survey/so/2013/car052113b.htm"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">International Monetary Fund</span></span></a>, and subsequently the Asian Development Bank and the <a href="http://bankwatch.org/our-work/who-we-monitor/ebrd"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">European Bank for Reconstruction and Development</span></span></a> followed suit. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">With their sights primarily set on the potential returns from largely untapped natural resources unevenly dispersed among the ‘Stans, US-based multinationals and direct foreign investors simultaneously clamored for access wherever they could -- especially in oil- and mineral-rich <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/europe/caspian100698.htm"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Kazakhstan</span></span></a>, and initially in phenomenally gas-rich but largely closed-off <a href="http://crudeaccountability.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/20090116-ReportTurkmenistansCrudeAwakening.pdf"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Turkmenistan</span></span></a>. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Under purview of the State Department, various small scale “security assistance” programs coordinated through military attaches at the various embassies were initiated throughout the decade, as well.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">By 1995-’96, for example, Kyrgyz, Tajik and Uzbek soldiers were participating in military maneuvers in Louisiana and North Carolina under the auspices of an expanding NATO’s “Partners for Peace” (PfP) program. Other PfP <a href="http://www.isn.ethz.ch/Digital-Library/Articles/Detail/?ots783=4888caa0-b3db-1461-98b9-e20e7b9c13d4&lng=en&id=53373"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">maneuvers under US supervision</span></span></a> took place in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan in 1997. Targeting hypothetical "dissident elements," that exercise in “force integration” and “interoperability” involved Kazakh, Uzbek and Kyrgyz paratroops trained at Fort Bragg, North Carolina as well as some 500 soldiers from the US 82nd Airborne Division.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Enduring Freedom’s Footprints</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The overall US presence, especially on the military end, deepened exponentially after September 11. With the coming of the Afghan invasion that October, the US sought and literally bought varying degrees of logistical support for “Operation Enduring Freedom” from the region’s dictatorships. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Pentagon quickly secured regional overflight rights or refueling agreements from all the ‘Stans and “transit center” air bases for Afghanistan-bound troops and weaponry such as the one inaugurated in October 2001 at <a href="http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/centralasia/khanabad.htm"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Karshi-Kanabad</span></span></a> (a.k.a., K2 or “Camp Stronghold Freedom” by its US occupants) near Uzbekistan’s Afghan border. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Central Asia specialist <a href="http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/61202/alexander-cooley/base-politics"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Alexander Cooley</span></span></a> reported that in addition to paying $15 million for use of K2 as a tacit quid pro quo, the Bush administration in 2002 provided $120 million in military hardware and surveillance equipment to the Uzbek army, $55 million in credits from the U.S. Export-Import Bank, and $82 million to the country’s security services. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In March of that year, Bush and supreme leader Karimov signed a broader strategic cooperation agreement calling for a partnership in the “war on terrorism” and deepened ties between U.S. and Uzbek military and security </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">agencies</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Importantly, as part of the K2 deal, Washington turned a blind eye to the steady increase in political jailings that those very same security services were carrying out in the name of “counter-terrorism”. The Bush administration, as part of its practice of “extraordinary rendition,” meanwhile ordered dozens of terrorist suspects shipped to Uzbekistan with the full knowledge that Karimov’s police state routinely employed unimaginable torture.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimEacddeqVZFBCngrqsgzTTMQeGOwZ8D1NXJobhpythuXfaI6tH3YgAecGT5f2g_8MZptOpGCScCTf6N4gFk_PTXywBOPoPp7HjX0JX1ne9hIMfjNNeLMMWMgG_noR_GrhzS97FsbRCUbM/s1600/global-10-30-09-military-bases.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimEacddeqVZFBCngrqsgzTTMQeGOwZ8D1NXJobhpythuXfaI6tH3YgAecGT5f2g_8MZptOpGCScCTf6N4gFk_PTXywBOPoPp7HjX0JX1ne9hIMfjNNeLMMWMgG_noR_GrhzS97FsbRCUbM/s400/global-10-30-09-military-bases.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 13px; text-align: start;"><span style="color: #f3f3f3;">U.S. servicemen sit inside a C-17 Globemaster waiting to take off for Afghanistan at Manas Air Base near Kyrgyzstan's capital Bishkek, Feb. 13, 2009. (Shamil Zhumatov/Reuters)</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">An additional regional “air transit hub” at <a href="http://www.manas.afcent.af.mil/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Manas</span></span></a> outside Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek, acquired major logistical importance in 2005, after Karimov evicted the US from K2 following mild criticism from Washington in the aftermath of the May massacre of upwards of 800 protesters at <a href="http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/05/11/uzbekistan-no-justice-7-years-after-andijan-massacre"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Andijan</span></span></a>.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Manas soon became the <a href="http://www.manas.afcent.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123121927"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">“premier air mobility hub”</span></span></a> for Afghan operations - the main entry and exit point for coalition troops. (In 2011 alone, some 580,000 troops went to and from Afghanistan via the base.)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Initial rent for use of the Kyrgyz airfield started out at $2 million plus and additional $17,000 for each flight landing and taking off from the base in 2001. The rent went up to $17.4 million in 2005 following the closure of K2. Bizhkek then upped the rent $63 million in 2009. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The latter deal, negotiated between the US and the kleptocratic <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/apr/08/kyrgyzstan-second-tulip-revolution"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Kurmanbek Bakiyev</span></span></a> regime also included an additional $117 million “aid package” to the government with $36 million earmarked for airport improvements, $21 million for ostensible “drug interdiction” and counter terrorism efforts, and $20 million for “economic development.” </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Much of that made its way into Bakiyev family overseas accounts. (As the head of several firms subcontracted to provide Russian-sourced jet fuel for the US military aircraft at the base in the mid-2000s, Bakiyev’s son, <a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/60966"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Maxim</span></span></a>, a.k.a. “the Prince,” siphoned off unknown sums from the $2-3 billion doled out by the Pentagon for the vital fuel.)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Accelerating after September 11th, a high percentage of US military assistance came under the rubric of “security cooperation.” It went most notably to the training and equipping of domestic special forces units and national police, but also included direct materiel transfers, “military-to-military” joint exercises, and funds for “retooling” - the replacement of Soviet-era equipment and systems upgrades.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In pursuit of such assistance, and playing into US strategic ambitions and the massive logistical demands of twelve years of war and occupation, the region’s regimes developed their own particular “War on Terror” gambits. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Chief among them has been an over-exaggerated threat of an Islamist insurgent <a href="http://www.ponarseurasia.org/memo/spinning-spillover-why-nato-withdrawal-afghanistan-does-not-pose-threat-central-asia"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">“spillover”</span></span></a> from Afghanistan. That “specter” of Islamist insurgency and “extremism” has been used both as an effective hook for procuring US aid, primarily military assistance, and as a way of justifying the relentless repression of political opponents, critical journalists and human rights activists.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In turn, those on the US side promoting the continuation of “partnering relationships” with the region’s regimes have reiterated such claims, highly disputed, to thwart public scrutiny and Congressional strictures on the flow of military assistance to Karimov’s <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/uzbekistan/8953457/Nato-ignoring-alleged-torture-by-Uzbek-ally-says-human-rights-group.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Uzbekistan</span></span></a>, Rahmon’s <a href="http://www.centcom.mil/press-releases/centcom-tajikistan-expand-security-partnership"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Tajikistan</span></span></a> and elsewhere.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As a result, US assistance and training earmarked for “counterterrorism” and “security” has been used to bolster existing regimes against internal opposition and criticism from those promoting democracy and civil society, regularly classified as “terrorists” or “extremists” bent on “regime change”.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As regional “war on terror” cooperation increased, the State Department sought and received “national security” waivers from Congressionally-imposed restrictions on military funding and assistance to serial human rights violators such as the Uzbek, Tajik and Kazakh regimes. The Bush administration and Congress also acted to speed up the fulfillment processes for funding and military transfers. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Obama administration followed suit. As the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/world/asia/23kyrgyz.html?_r=0"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">New York Times</span></span></a> phrased it in mid 2009 in regard to Kyrgyzstan, “...the Obama administration has emphasized pragmatic concerns over human rights in dealings with autocratic leaders in Central Asia.” In January, 2012, the White House sought and received a waiver from a Congressional ban prohibiting military assistance to Uzbekistan, in place since 2004 due to the Karimov regime’s horrific human rights record. (Islam Karimov, it should be recalled, acquired an infamous reputation just prior for <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/columnists/article-228241/Our-new-best-friends-boil-dissidents-alive.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">boiling</span></span></a> political dissidents alive.)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Fueling the region’s endemic corruption, unknown sums of military assistance came to be channelled through often unaccountable “opaque” Pentagon funding streams outside Congressional and public purview </span><span style="color: #f3f3f3;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">as US “security priorities” increasingly trumped</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">human rights concerns.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A 2010 <a href="http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/OPS-No-1-20101015_0.pdf"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Open Society study</span></span></a> </span><span style="color: #f3f3f3; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">on</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="color: #f3f3f3;"> </span>aid to regional militaries and police between 1999 and 2009 showed that the Department of Defense (DOD) established so many new military and police assistance programs during the decade that it outdistanced the Department of State (DOS) as the traditional funding source of U.S. military assistance. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Significantly, the study pointed out that DOD gained “unusual autonomy” in distributing its assistance -- that a succession of leading generals at US Central Command (CENTCOM) had charge of unknown hundreds of millions of dollars of what they, the commanders, referred to as “walking around money” dispensed “almost at their discretion” for training and equipment.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The report’s author, <a href="http://www.ipsnews.net/2010/10/central-asia-us-military-aid-far-outpaces-democracy-assistance/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Lora Lumpe</span></span></a> pointed out that, </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #f3f3f3;">“Nobody really knows how much military aid the U.S. government is giving the Central Asian states” and that actual amounts of total assistance dispersed through CENTCOM remained classified.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Pentagon also developed a parallel system of “security cooperation.” While the State Department continued to maintain some authority over funding to the region’s regular armed forces with their largely conscript base, CENTCOM moved to training and equipping “special forces,” comprised of national police and intelligence unit successors of the Soviet-era KGB. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Such special units came to have “dual use” -- for “counter-terrorism,” however defined by regimes brooking no opposition, and for “<a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/64736"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Praetorian Guard</span></span></a>” units protecting the likes of Kyrgyzstan’s former kleptocrat, Kurmanbek Bakiyev and Tajikistan’s Emomali Rahmon. (In the case of Bakiyev, the personal security unit commanded by his brother, elements of which received US training, proved inadequate as he was ousted by a popular uprising in April, 2010.)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In addition, US-provided equipment has also been used by the regional oligarchs to suppress demonstrations and strikes. In December, 2011 in Kazakhstan, for example, state security forces deployed US-provided <a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/64896"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Humvees</span></span></a> as they attacked and gunned down striking oil workers, killing at least 15, in the Caspian region company town of <a href="http://observers.france24.com/content/20111222-kazakhstan-lockdown-video-police-shooting-protesters-oil-workers-zhanaozen-aktau-independence-day-killed-riot"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Zhanaozen</span></span></a>.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Writing in 2012 of the Afghan war’s “other regional casualty,” Central Asia analyst <a href="http://blog.oup.com/2012/05/afghanistan-regional-casualty-central-asia/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Alexander Cooley</span></span></a> aptly framed the issue of US “security” assistance”:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A fuller reflection on the last eleven years should include the perverse twist about how in its almost single-minded effort to promote state-building, political tolerance and good governance in Afghanistan, just next door the West [sic] has left a trail of repression, graft and unfulfilled commitments to Central Asia’s fledgling civil society.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> The Northern Distribution Network.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">US assistance to the ‘Stans fell off in 2003 as the Bush administration turned its “War on Terror” attentions toward attacking and occupying Iraq. Levels spiked again in 2009 as the new Obama administration fixed its sights on the “right war” in Afghanistan and the Pentagon revved up its “<a href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/military/july-dec09/obamapeech_12-01.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Afghan surge</span></span></a>.” </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">That escalation heightened and accentuated the importance of the <a href="http://csis.org/program/northern-distribution-network-ndn"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Northern Distribution Network</span></span></a> (NDN), primarily a matrix of overland truck and rail routes shuttling “non-lethal” materiel and provisions southward to the occupation army. </span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="font-size: 14px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVxck5MXeBt9GlDwzfuvrMdwsKUWV8nt66oFsUszYk4yb045QaR8Z2TSQbn99cSG_9XbxSKqBxEq77UMVpCbIc404b04Jlbqy-lA8wWeOX12_MHSKpENnESGVN4B0gGWgR7b4tKNgZBnbB/s1600/ndn-map.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="273" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVxck5MXeBt9GlDwzfuvrMdwsKUWV8nt66oFsUszYk4yb045QaR8Z2TSQbn99cSG_9XbxSKqBxEq77UMVpCbIc404b04Jlbqy-lA8wWeOX12_MHSKpENnESGVN4B0gGWgR7b4tKNgZBnbB/s400/ndn-map.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 21px;"><span style="color: #f3f3f3; font-size: x-small;">The NDN. (David Trilling, “The Northern Distribution Network Nightmare,” Foreign Policy, December 6, 2011)</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Initial NDN routes came about as insurgent attacks on truck caravans coming from Pakistan stepped up in mid-2008. They came to follow various lengthy paths, such as the one extending from the Baltic port at Riga, Latvia, through Russia (a “frenemy, after all, in regard to the “war on terror”), and down through Kazakhstan and Karimov’s Uzbekistan to Afghanistan. Another would pass from the Georgian Black Sea port of Poti by ferry and rail to Baku, Azerbaijan, across the Caspian Sea to Kazakhstan and southward. Also originating in the Baltic, an additional route came to enter Afghanistan via Tajikistan. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Network took on increased importance in 2011 when over-the-road convoys from Karachi came under increasing attacks by Pakistani militants in retaliation for mounting US drone strikes. Then, in November of that year, Islamabad closed the supply route entirely in protest over air strikes on its territory that killed 24 of its soldiers. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">With the Pakistani route shut down through July, 2012, the ‘Stans soon came to handle all overland shipments. Uzbekistan -- the “front line state” with the best railroads in the region (in large part initially constructed by the Soviets during their 1980s Afghan War) and a US-facilitated rail link running from the “<a href="http://www.dvidshub.net/news/70309/why-hairatan-gate-matters#.UoP7Y5ETu8o"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Hairaton Gate</span></span></a>” border crossing at Termez to Mazar-e-Sharif in north central Afghanistan -- came to handle upwards of 90 percent of the cargo traversing the Network. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The NDN clearly came at a highly <a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/64969"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">inflated price</span></span></a>. The first routes in 2008-2009 immediately more than doubled what it had cost to transport supplies through Pakistan. By 2012, the cost increased another two and a half times.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In February 2012, the DoD estimated that it cost $17,500 per shipping container to transit the network.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; vertical-align: 8.0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At an average of 750 containers per week, that amounted to a weekly outlay of $13.125 million, $682.5 million per year. By mid 2013, over a <a href="http://www.andrewgrantham.co.uk/afghanistan/tag/ndn/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">hundred thousand cargo containers</span></span></a> had passed through the complex. On top of that, the DoD paid each regime undisclosed flat sum “transit fees” for “use of the infrastructure.” </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">To assure the uninterrupted NDN flow, the US Central Command stepped up its dispersal of unaccountable “walk around money” and additional cash through numerous DoD agencies and programs. A good part of that went to commercial carriers and private construction companies with insider connections to the ruling oligarchs. Related contracts regularly received “national security” <a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/insightb/articles/eav012610.shtml"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">waivers from Congressionally mandated “Buy American” stipulations</span></span></a> requiring the Pentagon to purchase goods and services from US firms.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Pentagon funds also ended up going to venal regime middle men and local lesser officials extorting <a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/64330"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">regular bribes</span></span></a> from truckers along the routes -- “the cost of doing business” in order to assure the movement of vital fuel and other materiel to its occupation army.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #f3f3f3;">Money and materiel aside,</span></span><span style="color: #202020; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #f3f3f3;">regimes along the route have exacted other benefits. </span></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In exchange for their cooperation and access, the State Department under Hillary Clinton, then-Senator John Kerry and other Congressional leaders continued to mute, if not totally silence their criticism in regard to the repressive practices, abysmal human rights records and rife corruption across the region. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">For example, when the Defense Budget Authorization Act passed by Congress in December, 2011 removed restrictions on military funding to Uzbekistan in place since 2004, Clinton asserted that there had been “progress” on human rights and political freedoms. Central Asia analyst <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/29/opinion/americas-uzbekistan-problem.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Jonathan Kucera</span></span></a> at the time tactfully noted that her claim was “not a realistic assessment of the situation.” </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Offering a similar claim of improvements, the 2011 Kerry Senate Foreign Relations Committee report on Central Asia contended that Uzbekistan would require “a careful balancing of priorities, given its central role in supporting the Northern Distribution Network....” </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The report noted “significant human rights concerns, including torture in pre-trial detention facilities, imprisonment of human rights defenders, forced child labor in the cotton fields, and government restrictions on religious freedom....” It nevertheless maintained that it was “in the United States’ interest to engage with such admittedly authoritarian countries on the full range of bi-lateral priorities, including security, good governance, human rights, trade, and investment.” “Security” remained the top priority.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The NDN’s US planners initially expressed hopes that the web of military transport routes would encourage regional economic growth by stimulating broader regional trade. Asking if ordinary Central Asian citizens were benefitting from the Network trade, a <a href="http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/OPS-No-8-20121019.pdf"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">critical 2012 study</span></span></a> found that,</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“...the NDN is not performing in practice as was expected in theory. There is little evidence to suggest that the NDN is increasing regional cooperation, and in some cases, it may be causing rises in border fees. Indirectly, the NDN also appears to be stimulating corruption in Central Asia. It has done little to improve the efficiency of regional trade, and its revenues flow overwhelmingly to opaque state coffers rather than to ordinary citizens.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In addition, it appears that US-promoted highway and rail improvements <a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/66871"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">along the NDN</span></span></a> have facilitated the northward flow of Afghan heroin and opium to Russia and beyond.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Citing an October 2012 report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Central Asia journalist Joshua Kucera has reported on how the vital CENTCOM-brokered rail line running between southern Uzbekistan to Mazar-e-Sharif in Afghanistan has become a transport route for northward bound opium and heroin.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The <a href="http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/Studies/Opiate_Trafficking_and_Trade_Agreements_english_web.pdf"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">2010 UN investigation</span></span></a> pointed out that most of the drug seizures made on Uzbekistan's rail network (a minuscule percentage of the amounts shipped) arrived via Tajikistan. A detailed <a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2009/06/28/70849/us-built-bridge-is-windfall-for.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">2009 report</span></span></a> on the drug traffic flowing across the US-built $37 million, Army Corps of Engineers designed “Friendship Bridge” crossing the Panj River between Tajikistan and Afghanistan, chronicled the complicity of corrupt Rahmon regime officials in the trade. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As Kucera put it, “It stands to reason that making transportation easier would make illicit trafficking easier -- especially in countries where border officials are notoriously corrupt. Why go through the trouble to cart the drugs by pack animal through remote, unguarded border areas when you can bribe the border officials on a much faster a highway or railroad?” </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Regardless, with 2014 fast approaching, the Pentagon is looking to remove thousands of vehicles and other equipment of every description brought in over the course of the twelve-year Afghan occupation. Attuned to increasing such “reverse transit” demands and the fact that the NDN cash bonanza will be coming to an end, the various regimes have recently jacked up transit fees and other costs paid out by the Pentagon cash cow. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Karimov’s Uzbekistan, a prime beneficiary of NDN/DoD open spigots, has already increased transit fees for rail shipments to and from Afghanistan by 150 percent.</span><span style="font-size: 12px; letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Karimov’s people have also been engaged in discussions regarding the <a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/66667"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">amounts and types of war materie</span></span></a>l -- vehicles and helicopters, night vision goggles ,etc.— to be left behind as yet another form of compensation.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The NDN has laid the foundation for what Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pronounced in July, 2011 as a “</span><a href="http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/article/2011/07/20110722170121nehpets0.8173639.html%2523axzz2ijmkQs18" style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">New Silk Road Initiative</span></span></a><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> (NSRI) -- the construction of a trans-regional east-west matrix of roads, railways, electric grids, pipelines and assorted commercial ventures intended to economically integrate greater Central Asia -- the five ‘Stans, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. As part of the NSRI, the State Department has proposed the </span><a href="http://www.rferl.org/content/new-silk-road-initiative-update-afghanistan-central-asia/24709869.html" style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">resumption of the TAPI pipeline</span></span></a><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> project — the construction of a natural gas line running from Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan to India — long delayed by Afghan instability. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">NSRI proponents have argued that it will bring longer term stability to Afghanistan the broader region. Planners have also viewed the network, with its east-west and southerly transport corridors and pipelines, as a way to wean the largely landlocked ‘Stans away from their long-standing dependency on Russia-routed trade and further integrate the region to “the West.” The project has also been viewed as a counter to Chinese economic influence, already well advanced, across the region. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">After Afghanistan?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The success of the NSRI is far from assured. And while the exact course and direction for US involvement in Central Asia is unclear, most observers assume that the region, post-2014, will garner far less US attention once the Afghanistan drawdown concludes. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Revenues from the NDN and basing agreements have not been unsubstantial, especially in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, but war effort US largesse is expected to decline dramatically. In tandem with all the preexisting social tensions and national rivalries already in play, the impending decline of “war on terror” economy cash flows will likely assist in increasing instability across the region.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Inter-state rivalries and tensions are likely to increase as the construction of hydroelectric dams in resource poor Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan threaten the water supply need for Uzbekistan’s cotton cash crop. (Uzbekistan has already threatened war if Tajikistan proceeds with its<span style="color: #3d85c6;"> <a href="http://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/central-asia-tajikistan-rogun-vakhsh-river-dam-impoverished-uzbekistan-worldbank-UN"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Rogun Dam</span></span></a></span>.) </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Succession struggles are anticipated with the passing from the scene of Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev, Karimov in Uzbekistan, and Rahmon in Tajikistan while a wave of democratization or at best, “good governance” is unlikely. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If prior patterns hold, with their contempt for “good governance” and distrust for democracy, whatever cliques in remaining in power will more than likely resort to the same modalities of repression against all dissent. Internal disputes along class, ethnic and religious lines will likely intensify and overshadow any threat of some “spillover” from Afghanistan, even if the Taliban was take control in Kabul once again.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Defense Department strategists in the meantime have developed longer, post-2014 designs for future “military-to-military” relations across the region. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Pentagon planners have consistently cited the US “transit center” at Manas, as a model “<a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0810/p06s02-wosc.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">lilly pad</span></span></a>”-- a “reduced footprint,” regionally-oriented base, part of an updated “forward basing” strategy and newly restructured “global defense posture.” With its lease not renewed by the current Bishkek regime, the base is scheduled to close down in mid-2014. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">That conceivably could change since the Pentagon payments for access to the airfield currently are the second largest formal contributor to the country’s GDP. Regardless, discussions of opening other regional logistical air hubs either in <a href="http://en.tengrinews.kz/military/US-may-relocate-air-base-from-Kyrgyzstan-to-Kazakhstan-22091/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Kazakhstan</span></span></a>, <a href="http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2013/05/23/u-s-military-base-in-uzbekistan-would-destabilize-region/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Uzbekistan</span></span></a> or as far away as <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/18/us-usa-defense-romania-idUSBRE99H14D20131018"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Rumania</span></span></a> have been ongoing. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As part of its developing <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/25/opinion/global/rethinking-us-security-strategy.html?_r=0"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">“forward partnering” strategy</span></span></a> -- a combination of continued but scaled-back US “forward force projection” and increased “inter-operability” with allied “regional stabilizers” -- the Pentagon throughout the course of the Afghan war has also continued to hold major joint maneuvers with regional forces, NATO allies and US troops, most notably the annual <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Steppe-Eagle-2013/207771102720233"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Operation Steppe Eagle</span></span></a> held in Kazakhstan on nine occasions through 2013. Such maneuvers are not about to end.</span><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1-pICgUdiMQdGyTGdU5HLsnL9dhSvbfKwMqX4STVSSCCsVIetr1TSCinL3BI0_WIbjHw1dgkdxwYkh7u9z19V-0lXkENb1nRxoaDgAGajh4QFbTFqv5vylfy9eHingHeYSuPy445Ku60U/s1600/Steppe+Eagle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1-pICgUdiMQdGyTGdU5HLsnL9dhSvbfKwMqX4STVSSCCsVIetr1TSCinL3BI0_WIbjHw1dgkdxwYkh7u9z19V-0lXkENb1nRxoaDgAGajh4QFbTFqv5vylfy9eHingHeYSuPy445Ku60U/s400/Steppe+Eagle.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: black; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-style: italic; line-height: 14px; text-align: start;"><span style="color: white;">U.S. Soldiers march during the closing ceremony of </span><a href="http://www.army.mil/article/91785/"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Steppe Eagle 2012 at Camp Illisky, Kazakhstan</span></a><span style="color: white;">, Sept. 20, 2012. </span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">* * * * * *</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The twelve year war and occupation in Afghanistan has clearly taken a particular toll on the broader Central Asia region. In its “throw money at it” haste to obtain and insure continuing logistical support for its military effort in landlocked Afghanistan, the US has pumped billions of dollars, much of it largely unaccounted for, into countries where corruption and bribery have long been considered part of “business as usual”.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In what has amounted to a spree of bribery and unprecedented grand scale graft, unknown amounts of Pentagon “walk around money” and other US assistance has gone to the region’s authoritarian regimes as compensation for their cooperation. The results have been manifold as injections of war chest cash and credits have also gone to line the pockets of ruling oligarchs, their well-connected cronies, and other “rent takers.” </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Unevenly distributed and largely siphoned upwards and abroad, the vast amounts of military and other forms of aid have assisted in widening preexisting social and economic chasms, the key sources of insecurity and resentment. Much of the funding, doled out for “security assistance,” in turn has gone to bolster repression rather than democratization.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Enabling the corruption and ongoing human rights abuses endemic to the region, US operations have actually benefitted the few at the expense of the many and thereby made all but guaranteed future instability and increased the likelihood of blowbacks yet to come after Afghanistan. </span></div>
Allen Ruffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18310195276315827048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458840028095794061.post-30295958394264250222013-11-22T10:29:00.001-08:002019-02-02T13:29:35.790-08:00Forging the Capital Security State <div class="print-content">
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<span style="font-size: large;">-Allen Ruff</span><br />
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[The review below originally appeared in <a href="http://www.solidarity-us.org/atc">Against the Current</a>, November/December 2013, 167. -AR]<br />
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<blockquote>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeBEgr5TLFouvb-sGx5kOncBI2WoIga-idUkU7Wce2ti7NxJ0PhC8fY4BSZi8sCfkd7TqXMGVy18HzxB2LbKiomBwcKTdkERzZFWd16qeyPMEwe-QWM_yBT9iY4fNcCYnaUJwNAHYXISe4/s1600/Making_of_Capitalism.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeBEgr5TLFouvb-sGx5kOncBI2WoIga-idUkU7Wce2ti7NxJ0PhC8fY4BSZi8sCfkd7TqXMGVy18HzxB2LbKiomBwcKTdkERzZFWd16qeyPMEwe-QWM_yBT9iY4fNcCYnaUJwNAHYXISe4/s1600/Making_of_Capitalism.jpg" /></a><b>The Making of Global Capitalism<br />The Political Economy of American Empire<br />by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin<br />Verso, 2013, 456 pages, $29.95 hardback.</b></blockquote>
THE MAKING OF Global Capitalism presents a sweeping history of the century-long U.S. ascendancy to the “commanding heights” of the global economy. <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/profile/leo-panitch">Leo Panitch</a> and <a href="http://jacobinmag.com/2013/02/sam-gindin-on-the-crisis-in-american-labor/">Sam Gindin</a> recount how the United States came to rule and continues as the primary architect, coordinator and essential guarantor of the present empire of capital.<br />
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This is an immense work, complex in its numerous themes and detailed arguments regarding the centrality of the U.S. state as the main bulwark and backer of accumulation on a world scale.<br />
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Not solely a historical narrative, the book offers interventions on a number of central questions for the left. Among other concerns, Gindin and Panitch map out a position regarding the meaning of “empire.” They take up issues of stagnation, U.S. “decline,” and the question of challenges to U.S. hegemony, recent and present. They explain the post-1970s “neoliberal turn” not as a retreat from state intervention, but as a state-guided economic restructuring.<br />
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Much of their enquiry focuses on class forces, domestic and international, and the division of labor within and among the nation states that came to shape the U.S.-anchored global order. The book also provides a layered historical understanding of the contemporary global crisis.<br />
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Placing the U.S. state at the center of the story, the work stands as an important counter to those who posit the existence of some extra-territorial stateless “empire” or supra-national global state. Their analysis also critiques the view of those “horizontalists” or “quasi-anarchists” who imagine a better world is possible without wresting power from “the state.”<br />
<h3 style="text-align: center;">
Informal Empire of a New Kind</h3>
Revising and expanding upon the decades-old understanding of the United States as an “informal empire,” without the need for extra-territorial colonies and a cumbersome colonial administration, the book recounts the long quest for the free movement of capital through the creation of an “empire of a new kind.”<br />
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Gindin and Panitch note straightaway that theirs is a work on the political economy of a “quite distinctive imperial state,” in which “the Pentagon and CIA have been much less important to the process of capitalist globalization than the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve.” Leaving to others the oft-repeated focus on direct “hard power” interventionism, the “national security state” and the “Imperial Presidency,” the authors place U.S. finance and “financialization” of the economy, and state-guided development and control of key financial institutions, at the heart of their interpretation of the process known as “globalization.”<br />
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The book hones in on the role of the U.S. state not as something separate from “the market,” but as the overall “superintendent of global capital” — the agency concerned first and foremost with facilitating and safeguarding the flow of credit, investment and accumulation; the international “lender of last resort” in periods of crisis, and the ultimate “firefighter-in-chief” coordinating the flow of vast streams of liquidity from behind a “firewall of failure containment.”<br />
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The authors explore the ways in which the “informal empire” developed. They trace the origins, evolution and centrality of the Treasury and the Fed and related state agencies in response to successive capitalist crises at home and abroad, economic nationalism and protectionism, and the subsequent wars and revolutions that convulsed the first half of the 20th century.<br />
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The heart of the book is the triumph of U.S. capital in the post-World War II decades. To set the stage, the early chapters survey the course of unparalleled U.S. economic expansion up through World War I and the 1920s (a decade now imagined as an era of “isolationism”).<br />
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While noting that the United States emerged as the leading capitalist power by the end of the 19th century, and that World War I saw the country turn from being a debtor to a creditor nation, Gindin and Panitch highlight the U.S. structural and institutional incapacity to manage or rearrange the global economy in its own image during that earlier period.<br />
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Those initial incapacities, they tell us, were gradually overcome, first by the varied institutional New Deal responses to the Great Depression, the often experimental economic interventions of the liberal state (later to be “internationalized”), and then by the experiences in managing the economy during World War II.<br />
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With other capitalist centers in shambles, at war’s end the United States readily stepped up as the economic leader for those parts of the globe remaining within the capitalist sphere at the time.<br />
<h3 style="text-align: center;">
An American “Proposal”</h3>
As an example of how conscious the effort was, the authors point to “An American Proposal,” the product of a series of “Roundtable” discussions among prominent businessmen initiated in 1939. Widely circulated in the spring of 1942 by the editors of Fortune, Life and Time, the “Proposal” projected a global U.S. role to follow the war.<br />
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Already confident that “America will emerge as the strongest single power in the postwar world,” those corporate leaders set their sights on replacing an older “dead and dying imperialism,” with a system of “universal free trade” under the aegis of the United States.<br />
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The conscious design and construction of that postwar agenda came to be led not by Wall Street but by the state, centered not by the State Department but rather by the Treasury.<br />
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As the leading postwar power, one very much concerned with a return of the Depression as well as a postwar leftward turn in Western Europe (as opposed to a Soviet threat from the east), the United States mobilized its resources to restore Western European and Japanese capitalism.<br />
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It did so with loans and aid, most notably via the Economic Recovery Program (the Marshall Plan), accompanied always by sets of preconditions, expertise, policies and institutional mechanisms fashioned at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference and beyond — a system of global investment and “free trade,” the unrestricted movement of capital, and the primacy of the dollar described as the “American way of doing capitalism.”<br />
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Gindin and Panitch importantly describe the increased presence of U.S. capital and accompanying practices in postwar Western Europe and elsewhere as a kind of “imperialism by invitation,” never simply imposed but actively welcomed by those national bourgeoisies seeking to rebuild as they fended off their respective challenges from the Left.<br />
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Understanding that the resuscitation of the major capitalist economies and the revival of competition was essential for the system as a whole, U.S. economic planners and state policy makers readily took on that “burden” of imperial leadership.<br />
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Recounting the construction of this “empire of a new kind,” our authors interweave an “inside” and “outside” story — as domestic class concerns affected global economic initiatives, and vice versa.<br />
Certainly the specter and reality of labor militancy at home shaped the thinking, resultant policies and institutional/structural innovations of those gazing abroad throughout the postwar decades. Both the fear and the reality of labor and working class militancy, while seemingly subdued on occasion, would repeatedly come to the fore to play a role in shaping capitalist class strategies at home and abroad.<br />
<h3 style="text-align: center;">
Stagnation and Decline or Restructuring?</h3>
A good portion of the book centers on how U.S.-led capital reshaped the global economy in response to working class demands from the late 1960s on. In contrast to those who would argue that the U.S. economy has been in a state of “stagnation” and decline ever since the early 1970s, it paints a different portrait.<br />
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The authors bracket several distinct periods: the postwar “golden age” running from 1950 to 1967 whose contradictions gave rise to the extended crisis of 1968 to 1982 — an era characterized by a “profit squeeze” inflation largely brought on, they argue, by near full-employment labor militancy and popular demands placed on the Keynesian social state. That era was then followed by one of stepped-up profitability, productivity, investment and overall economic growth between 1983 and 1999, a period that entailed an “astonishing” restructuring propelled by state fiscal and monetary policy and the “neoliberal turn” from the social state — a conscious class offensive that, among other things, left real private-sector wages lower in the latter year than in 1968.<br />
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The authors describe what they dub a “second golden age” for capital, between 1983 and 2007, during which “the material base of the American empire was reconstituted.” They chronicle a set of major transformations of the U.S. economy and social relations that were “crucial for the way global capitalism was ‘made’ in the final decades of the twentieth century.”<br />
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While others have pointed to the “hollowing out” of the U.S. “real economy” to “deindustrialization,” to “outsourcing” and the loss of well paying jobs to “overseas competition” as indicators of U.S. decline, Gindin and Panitch call attention to capital’s success, the international leadership and profitability of its multi-national corporations as world leaders in new growth sectors — in information technologies, pharmaceuticals, and aerospace.<br />
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A key transformation had to do with the restructuring of manufacturing, most notably in the “core industries” — steel, auto, and machinery — buffeted by imports and job losses through the 1980s and beyond. By the end of the century, a combination of geographic shifts in production, especially in auto, to the (non-union) South, direct foreign investment (Japanese and other) and plant reorganizations typified by “lean production,” outsourcing, and the adoption of high-tech, computerized equipment altered the industrial terrain.<br />
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Importantly, the last two decades also witnessed the growth of a diverse range of highly profitable “professional and business services,” and exported American “best practices” in everything from consulting, law, accounting, market research, engineering, computer software and systems analysis.”<br />
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All of the above was facilitated, assisted or subsidized by the corporate state, and ultimately by the continuing U.S. position as key creditor and international negotiator and “consumer of last resort.” They highlight a “new age of finance” that witnessed a broadening and deepening of U.S. financial markets and the “financialization” of non-financial corporations that enabled the massive reallocation of capital involved in the restructuring of the economy during the period.<br />
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Refuting suggestions of an overall decline at the base, Gindin and Panitch point to the massive increase in productivity, shored up by those high-tech driven sectors. They point out that by the end of the century, of the top dozen global firms by sector, the United States accounted for 77 per cent of the world’s aerospace sales, 75 percent of all sales of computers and office equipment, and 91 percent of software sales and 62 percent of pharmaceuticals.<br />
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That exceptional productivity and expansion, they note, came about despite (or because of) the periodic downturns and recessions marking the period. All along, the entire restructuring was spearheaded by the dramatic “downsizing” of labor in manufacturing, a shrinkage in the size and strength of organized labor, a decline in wages and benefits, a corresponding increase in the number of hours worked, a mounting dependence of low -paying and precarious jobs in the service sector.<br />
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They describe a dramatically altered, disciplined and integrated working class, “more individualized and fragmented, [with] its collective capacity for resistance severely atrophied” (192) that increasingly turned to individuated survival strategies, most notably a dependence on “easy” consumer credit, made more accessible by government policy and low interest rates. The burden of household debt, most notably in the form of home mortgages bundled, “securitized” and speculated upon internationally, of course, became clear when the highly financialized housing bubble collapsed in 2007-2008.<br />
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Gindin and Panitch point out that the making of global capitalism has entailed the making of a global proletariat as the production of such commodities as textiles and garments, electronic components, etc., moved to low-wage export-oriented countries. While the ongoing global crisis was rooted in the volatility of finance and not in a crisis of production, a significant factor in generating the conditions that led to it was what happened to the world’s working classes since the crisis of the 1970s.<br />
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The growth of the global proletariat, essential to capitalist globalization, has produced what they describe as tendencies toward narrowing the differences in wages and conditions between developed and developing countries which, in part, explains the “continuing travail” of trade unionism in the developed capitalist countries.<br />
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“The very financialization through which global capitalism was realized,” they tell us, “was also the means through which workers were disciplined; and the political and organizational defeats they had suffered since the 1980s were closely linked to the recovery of corporate profitability — albeit a recovery characterized by new vulnerabilities...”<br />
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The End of Hegemony?</h3>
The authors take issue with much of the contemporary literature on U.S. decline and loss of hegemony in regard to an ascendant China. While noting China’s rapid rise to become the world’s second largest economy, especially after its entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001, they show how it remains an export-oriented society dependent upon the United States as the “consumer of last resort.”<br />
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A fully integrated part of the global system, China’s political economy is increasingly penetrated by “Western” capital, fraught with its own growing class contradictions and tensions, incapable of taking on the role of capitalism’s global guarantor.<br />
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Rather than inter-imperialist rivalries, Gindin and Panitch portray a global system based on the cooperation of the dominant capitalist powers joined together in such bodies as the G7 and the G20, still under the practical leadership of the United States.<br />
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In this “empire of a new kind,” the authors see inter-imperialist rivalry as eliminated or at least contained. The system’s inherent contradictions, rather than playing out between various capitalist nation-states, are increasingly coming to the fore within them. The new fault lines of antagonism, made worse by the exactions of austerity demanded by overlords of capital, continue to surface from Cairo and Wisconsin to Athens, from Istanbul to Rio.<br />
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The book, it could be argued, is somewhat “Eurocentric” in that its primary focus is on the economically intertwined capitalist centers of the “Atlantic community.”<br />
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There is some discussion of the defeat of earlier Third World import-substitution strategies, the 1980s “debt crisis,” the 1997-1998 “Asian crisis” and the rise of a new international division of labor, but little if any concerning the diverse roles played by an unevenly developed Global South in Gindin and Panitch’s capitalist order.<br />
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Africa and Latin America barely appear. Nor do those oil producers of the Middle East and Central Asia rich in energy and petrodollars vital to the economies of “the West” and the viability of the global system.<br />
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The volume tells us how the contemporary global system, guided primarily by U.S. state institutions, came about and how it functions. It would have been helpful if the authors had explored how those institutions at the “commanding heights” get reproduced. After all, they are filled with human actors connected through their social relations, class ties and shared values who came from somewhere.<br />
While smartly focusing on the central role of the state, they give little if any sense of the constantly “revolving doors” between the corridors of power at the Treasury and Fed, say, and the boardrooms of the “private sector” corporate giants on Wall Street and elsewhere.<br />
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The book also gives too short shrift to state spending on “defense” and “national security” at all levels. The national security state’s economic role as sponsor of research and development generating numerous spinoffs (the internet, for example), as provider of innumerable procurement contracts and as a significant employer (civilian and military, alike) cannot be ignored. Neither can the weapons sales to junior partner ruling regimes worldwide.<br />
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All that and much more continues to have all sorts of positive and negative “multiplier effects,” at home and abroad. It seems that if U.S. state-run financial institutions underpin the global economy and provide cover for the major loan sharks and bail bondsmen of the world, then some accounting of the globalized “protection and security” racket providing “defense” against the increasing number of global indignados must be included.<br />
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Gindin and Panitch’s complex but rewarding history will nonetheless take its place as a serious and sobering contribution to the lengthy literature on the workings of the U.S. empire, the realities of “globalization,” and the severity of the most recent capitalist crisis. If our goal is not only to understand the world, but ultimately to change it, then a close read of their account should be of inestimable help. That certainly is the authors’ expressed concluding hope.<br />
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Allen Ruffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18310195276315827048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458840028095794061.post-57872758083450064982013-09-27T20:39:00.001-07:002019-02-02T13:29:35.991-08:00Review: Re-Writing History: A Graphic History of the Vietnam War<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">[The following appeared on September 27th, posted on the web page for <a href="http://adastracomix.com/2013/09/27/re-writing-history-review-of-a-graphic-history-of-the-vietnam-war/">Ad Astra Comix</a></span><span style="font-size: 14px;"> up Toronto way. One of the editors asked me to write a guest column review of this odd right wing spin on what the war on Vietnam was about. My take was prefaced by one of the Astra folks, "NMG," who wrote: </span></span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Some discussion has come up around Ad Astra Comix and a recent addition to our stock list– a graphic history of the Vietnam War. Not only does the book gloss over major historical events, like the Gulf of Tonkin incident (and the fact that it never happened, yet was a major cause for the war to escalate). The historical narrative, which has had 40 years of time for reflection, comes to some very troubling conclusions. As a new generation looks back on Vietnam as the war of their Grandmothers and Grandfathers, and as a generation that has been raised far too comfortably around operations in Iraq and Afghanistan being “business as usual“, there is a serious need to dispel this re-write of history in the comic record. -NMG.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">]</span></span></i><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A Review:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Vietnam War -A Graphic History</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Written by Dwight Zimmerman; Illustrated by Wayne Vansant</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">New York: Hill & Wang, 2009. 143pp</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As the U.S. aggression in Vietnam escalated in the mid-1960s, the liberal Cold Warrior Walter Rostow, an advisor to John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, spoke of the need of “winning hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese, at least those under the control of the US client regime in Saigon, if US force was going to prevail. As the barbarity of the venture -- the toll in lives destroyed and the devastation exacted -- spread, the invaders not only failed on that front in Vietnam, but also lost the campaign for political support, the battle for hearts and minds back in the States.</span></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Some 400,000 assembled at the Washington Monument during the November, 1969 "March on Washington." "Winning hearts and minds" at home, by then, was out of the question since the turning point in the war had come more almost two years before with the January, 1968 Tet Offensive.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">The war makers of course suffered a humiliating defeat despite their firepower. Failing to defeat militarily what was primarily a peasant-based anti-colonial and nationalist movement already decades old, it also lost the war on the political, ideological and cultural levels. Never having them in the first place, it never won the bulk of the Vietnamese people. The war machine murdered, maimed and debased too many and destroyed too much for that ever to happen. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Those that survived, after all, were not about to buy the nonsense about “freedom” and “liberty” churned out by US propaganda specialists and parroted by a succession of corrupt, murderous regimes in Saigon. All the claims of the American “Free World” mission to save the country from “Communist Peril” rang hollow as that tiny land was scorched by what amounted to in a massive fly-by shooting.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">June 8th, 1972. Survivors flee the napalmed village of Trang Bang, </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Defeat in some sense became inevitable, a done deal, when the Washington war makers simultaneously lost large swaths of political support at home. They lost the battle of ideas, the claims and justifications, and explanations of what the war was about as the body counts and war costs mounted. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">That loss of domestic political support for the war has never been forgotten, especially by those intent on winning future wars abroad who have come to view that home front defeat as a significant “lesson” of the conflict, not to be repeated.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In their ongoing efforts those still imagining that Vietnam could have been won and those already invested in current and future interventions have utilized every available means at their disposal to revise and reframe the story. At that level, the portrayals and accounts in the popular culture - television and film, in music, art and print media, even the comic book press - have long been been utilized in the campaign to mold “hearts and minds”, especially among the young and the impressionable, the potential recruits and fodder for future imperial campaigns.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Few recent examples illustrate that fact better than Zimmerman and Vansant’s graphic rewrite of the Vietnam war’s history. Well-illustrated by the clearly talented Vansant and shrewdly scripted by Zimmerman to include the actual words of participants, the book in some ways has more to do with the present than it does with some approximately accurate portrayal of what the US did to Southeast Asia.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Now, of course, it can be rightly argued that the writing and depictions of history are always selective and that all historians make choices and have an agenda, an axe to grind. and that a graphic history could not possibly be comprehensive in any sense of the term. That all remains true since the agenda of this rightward revision of the war on ‘Nam comes clear right in the opener, in the foreword written by the retired Air Force General, Chuck Horner.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A combat pilot during Vietnam,</span></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span> </span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Horner later commanded the U.S. and allied air assets during Desert Shield and Desert Storm. According to the publisher’s boilerplate accompanying his account of the Gulf War co-authored with fiction writer Tom Clancy, he, Horner “was responsible for the design and execution of one of the most devastating air campaigns in history.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Horner, in one page casts Vietnam in terms clearly pitched to the novice, the young high schooler or working class kid, perhaps.“Like other wars,” he tells us, America’s war in Vietnam, “began with a premise of good versus bad and which was which depended on whom you side with.” Well, okay for the obvious, war as some shape shifting morality play. </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">He then proceeds to explain that,“As the conflict dragged on, those views changed into the reality of a dedicated, committed North Vietnamese enemy and the committed-but-not dedicated US led-coalition.” The implication is simple (and simplistic): The US and its junior “coalition” partners (Who they were, he doesn’t say) lost because they weren’t dedicated enough, didn’t have the endurance or the will to win. Or, by implication, one running throughout the book, that their determination was undermined not so much by the tenacity of the Vietnamese adversary but by the falling away of support at home.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">He goes on: “President Kennedy had committed our nation, but then President Johnson instituted polices that lacked dedication.” Here, immediately, one of the main themes of the conservative accounts creeps in: the war came to be lost because the civilian leadership, especially the politicians back home lacked the guts and the determination to see it through.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Following Johnson, “President Nixon became dedicated to getting us out of our commitment (to whom or what, Horner doesn’t say), but at “great cost to our honor.” Apparently even Nixon, known during the height of the war as the “Mad Bomber,” is viewed by this former Air Force lifer as aiding and abetting the commission of that sin of sins among the military, dishonor. (In some sense Nixon ended up getting a dishonorable discharge, but not for the major war crimes for which he should have been tried.)</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What might be drawn from all that? Horner lays it out: “Years later, in Desert Storm, our politicians and our military, remembering the lessons of Vietnam, set goals and conducted operations that deserved our unqualified commitment and dedication.” That matter of dedication and steadfastness, once again.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Horner then raises a second read on the history commonly forwarded by the right: “In the case of the Vietnam War, the divergence of political will and goals resulted in constraints on our military operations.” Disregarding or not knowing that war is the extension of politics, he seems to suggest that the whole thing could have been “winnable.” If only the military didn’t have to fight with “one hand tied behind its back” and they weren’t “stabbed in the back” by the peace movement and their allies in the “liberal” media. The old canards die hard.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Horner all tells us, as well, that “our South Vietnamese ally’s leadership could not rally the dedication of it’s own people.” As venal, repressive and as illegitimate as the US-bolstered Saigon sham of a government was, could it have been any different? Horner may think so, but few others versed in the history appear to hold that peculiar line.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Good General asserts, in closing, that Zimmerman and Vansant have come together to present the history, “in a clear and comprehensible way.” He concludes his foreword by describing the work’s present day purpose: “It serves to enlighten those for whom Vietnam is only academic history, so that we may be armed against making the same mistakes in the future.” </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Interspersed with occasional accounts of heroic efforts by troops on the ground, the bulk of the narrative is loaded with half truths and craftily retooled tellings. Parts of it read as if it was selectively scripted by someone with the suppressed memory of a sleepwalking amnesiac. </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This tale -- an illustrated comic after all -- might seem “comprehensible” to the novice, those unfamiliar. After all, if Vietnam was nothing but a series of mistakes made mainly by a civilian leadership at home unwilling to fight to win, then a further mistake, perhaps, might be made by one looking to this work for some understanding, today, of what that criminal enterprise perpetrated against the people of Southeast Asia actually was about. </span> </span><br />
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Allen Ruffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18310195276315827048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458840028095794061.post-60252034996039555892013-09-16T05:42:00.000-07:002019-02-02T13:29:36.016-08:00Guilt by Association Abroad? The University of Wisconsin in Kazakhstan<br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-size: 12px; letter-spacing: 0px;">[The following originally appeared on </span></span><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/allen-ruff/guilt-by-association-abro_b_3922185.html" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">Huffington Post</span></a><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-size: 12px; letter-spacing: 0px;"> on September 13. It came in response to </span><span style="font-size: 12px;">University</span><span style="font-size: 12px; letter-spacing: 0px;"> of Wisconsin-Madison Poli. Sci. Prof Howard Schweber, who took issue with an earlier article written by Yale's Jim Sleeper. Since Steve Horn and I wrote <a href="http://allenruff.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-wisconsin-idea-gone-bad-at.html"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">earlier pieces </span></a>from which Sleeper drew information </span><span style="font-size: 12px;">regarding Wisconsin's dealing with the Nazarbayev regime, I thought Schweber's words demanded a riposte. -AR]</span><span style="font-size: 12px; letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The good professor Howard Schweber’s recent criticism (<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/howard-schweber/innocents-abroad-the-univ_b_3880797.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">Innocents Abroad? The University of Wisconsin in Kazakhstan</span></span></a></span><span style="color: #101010; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">)</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> of Jim Sleeper’s <a href="http://livepage.apple.com/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">piece</span></span></a> on the questionable international dealings of a number of our major universities demands some response. Especially since he, Mr. Schweber, returned not long ago from two years at Kazakhstan’s recently launched Nazarbayev University (NU). </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Schweber actually avoided the central question of the ethics and propriety of such “partnering relationships” by our universities, all self-proclaimed bastions of the “liberal tradition,” with outright authoritarian, anything-but-democratic regimes. He did so by finessing the University of Wisconsin’s involvement at NU, named for Kazakhstan’s “Leader of the Nation” and “President for Life”, the ex-Soviet boss, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/06/nursultan-nazarbayev-kazakhstan-president-fairy-tale-hero-_n_891356.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">Nursultan Nazarbyev</span></span></a>.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Pointing out that the University of Wisconsin-Madison in its involvement at the NU School of Humanities and Social Sciences is but one of ten major universities engaged at Astana, he stated that each of the partners “offer advice, consultation, and services in the form of specified deliverables based on contracts with limited terms.” He did not mention that unlike <a href="http://livepage.apple.com/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">Duke</span></span></a>, with its “brand” closely associated with the NU Graduate School of Business, or the National University of Singapore with its long-term “strategic partnership” with the <a href="http://admissions.nu.edu.kz/wps/portal/!ut/p/b1/04_Sj9CPykssy0xPLMnMz0vMAfGjzOKdLD19nZwMHQ0szHwNDTydLI1cLQNdDC0szIEKIoEKDHAARwNU_e7mlm4GnkHmYX5mBgZGBkZGUP14FBCwP1w_CqzE2d3Rw8Tcx8DAwsfd1MDT0SM0yDLQ2NjA0RiqAI8T_Tzyc1P1C3JDIwyyTBQBiyEUHA!!/pw/Z7_B9IMBB1A086M10IB92E9QD18O1/ren/p=CTX=QCPenQCPannouncementsQCPannounce_1/-/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">NU Graduate School of Public Policy</span></span></a>, Wisconsin as a public institution had to forge a different “fee-for-service” relationship with the Nazarbayev state, the developer of the NU.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">All the fine points aside, Prof Schweber, clearly is a believer in America’s liberal “democratizing” gospel and the accompanying mission of his home university’s <a href="http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/turningpoints/tp-036/?action=more_essay"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">“Wisconsin Idea”</span></span></a>. And certainly, it must be granted that some NU students, busy on their way to becoming the next generation’s professional-managerial and technical elite, might indeed imbibe some of those “Western values” along the way. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But the evidence strongly suggests that Kazakhstan, with its well-ensconced and fortified kleptocracy, its state-run development plans, and its current trajectory as a rising star in the constellation of energy-rich capitalist dictatorships, is not about to become the center of some Central Asian version of the “Arab Spring” . </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Eager to defend Wisconsin’s presence at the NU School of Humanities and Social Science and apparently convinced that it will help plant the seeds of some future liberal democratic reform, Prof. Schweber avoided discussion of the actual repressive anti-democratic and illiberal nature of the Nazarbayev regime. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Every major international monitor of human rights, political freedoms and corruption has consisterntly criticized Kazakhstan as a major serial abuser. <a href="http://www.hrw.org/europecentral-asia/kazakhstan"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">Human Rights Watch</span></span></a>, <a href="http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/nations-transit/2012/kazakhstan"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">Freedom House</span></span></a>, <a href="http://livepage.apple.com/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">Transparency International</span></span></a>, <span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://livepage.apple.com/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">Reporters Without Border</span></span></a>s</span>, <a href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/kazakhstan-no-accountability-entrenched-torture-2013-07-11"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">Amnesty International</span></span></a>, etc., and the <a href="http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/2010/sca/154481.htm"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">US State Department</span></span></a> have long chronicled the repressive and intolerant character of the Nazarbayev dictatorship. In their recent reports, they all have documented the fact that the record of abuses has actually gotten worse in the aftermath of the December, 2011 massacre of striking oil workers in the Caspian town, <a href="http://exiledonline.com/the-massacre-everyone-ignored-70-striking-oil-workers-killed-in-kazakhstan-by-us-supported-dictator/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">Zhanaozen</span></span></a>. Occasional news stories from independent journalists confirm that reality on a regular basis.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We’re basically talking about a one party-state based on rigged elections where all authentic political opposition is systematically stifled and repressed. We’re talking about a society where the dominant media system is owned directly by Nazarbayev family members or close cronies; where any critical opposition papers and websites have been <a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/66340"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">closed down</span></span></a>, their editors and <a href="http://dankennedy.net/tag/kazakhstan/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">reporters beaten, jailed and fined</span></span></a> under the nation’s all encompassing anti-<a href="http://www.cpj.org/2011/02/attacks-on-the-press-2010-kazakhstan.php"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">defamation laws</span></span></a>. (Laws that basically make it illegal to say anything critical of Nazarbayev or his family, or the ruling party, etc..)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We’re talking about a country where judges are hand picked by those in power; one where the broader legal system is <a href="http://www.business-anti-corruption.com/country-profiles/europe-central-asia/kazakhstan/corruption-levels/judicial-system.aspx"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">honeycombed with corruption</span></span></a>, and bribery is a fact of life. It’s a country in which police regularly act with <a href="http://www.dzhakishev.org/616/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">impunity</span></span></a> and those taken into custody or imprisoned are routinely subjected to physical abuse and<span style="color: #c27ba0;"> <a href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/EUR57/001/2013/en/59bb8a7c-0717-4e71-8e99-32eb440ceaee/eur570012013en.pdf"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">torture</span></a></span>. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We’re speaking of a state that has recently stepped up its <a href="http://www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=1870"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">persecution</span></span></a> and prosecution of those congregations practicing their religious faith without first registering with the proper authorities. (Such regulations, ostensibly stepped up to stem the growth of “Islamist extremism,” recently have been used to <a href="http://www.persecution.org/2013/03/04/baptist-seminary-liquidated-in-kazakhstan/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">shut down Baptist</span></span></a> congregations!) </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Prof. Schweber did not mention that the major university involvement in the creation of NU came about through the coordination of the <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/13/the-world-bank-brings-nazarbayev-university-to-kazakhstan/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">World Bank</span></span></a>, currently branding itself as the <a href="http://www.ellerman.org/Davids-Stuff/Memos/KM-Models.pdf"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">“Knowledge Bank”</span></span></a>. WB “education reform” specialists, intent on coordinating the restructuring the Kazakh education system to bring it in line and integrate it with those in the West, shepherded Kazakh Ministry of Education types on <a href="http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTEDUCATION/0,,contentMDK:22050158~menuPK:617592~pagePK:148956~piPK:216618~theSitePK:282386~isCURL:Y~isCURL:Y,00.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">a round-the-world tour</span></span></a> of potential “partnering institutions” in 2009. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">While stopping off at Cambridge and University College of London in the UK, and crossing the Atlantic for campus visits in Boston and elsewhere, the group also stopped off in authoritarian Singapore for a visit and meetings at the National University of Singapore. Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev and the Singapore city state’s emeritus autocrat, </span><span style="font-family: Tahoma; letter-spacing: 0px;">Lee Kuan Yew</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> have had a long <a href="http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2010/06/09/in-nazarbayevs-legacy-echoes-of-singapores-lee-kuan-yew/%23axzz2edFISD8c"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">association</span></span></a>. Lee actually encouraged the Kazakh kingpin to make <a href="http://82.200.130.64/k/1152243624/2011-03-02"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">English</span></span></a> the main instructional language at NU. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The delegation then proceeded on to Qatar, lorded over by the petrodollar drenched Bin <a href="http://www.hrw.org/middle-eastn-africa/qatar"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">Khalifa autocracy</span></span></a>. There, they</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">visited the <a href="http://www.qstp.org.qa/home/about-us"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">Qatar Science and Technology Park</span></span></a> at <a href="http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/420/index.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">“Education City”</span></span></a> outside Doha, the home of a cluster of joint projects with US-based universities including <a href="http://www.cornell.edu/visiting/qatar/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">Cornell</span></span></a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN_2bfBsoYM"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">Georgetown</span></span></a>, <a href="http://www.qatar.northwestern.edu/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">Northwestern</span></span></a>, <a href="http://www.qatar.tamu.edu/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">Texas A&M</span></span></a>, <a href="http://arts.vcu.edu/programs/vcuqatar/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">Virginia Commonwealth</span></span></a> and <a href="http://www.qatar.cmu.edu/history"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">Carnegie Mellon</span></span></a> created <a href="http://siteresources.worldbank.org/KFDLP/Resources/QatarKnowledgeEconomyAssessment.pdf"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">through World Bank</span></span></a> assistance. It was a model in some sense of things to come in Astana.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Importantly, a number of former World Bank operatives came to occupy key positions at Naz U. Most notable has been <a href="http://www.centennial-group.com/?page_id=1140"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">Shigeo Katsu</span></span></a>, currently the NU Rector. Aslan Sarinzhipov, just recently appointed by Nazarbayev to head the Kazakh Ministry of Education and Science, previously worked as the Bank’s in-country liaison before becoming a key figure in the NU’s administration. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Another long-time World Bank hand, <a href="http://www.resultsfordevelopment.org/experts/dennis-de-tray"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">Dennis DeTray</span></span></a>, was the former head of its operations in Indonesia during the latter years of the Suharto dictatorship. He subsequently became an apologist for that regime before taking a post as an adviser to Nazarbayev on the NU project. (When a high-level Kazakh delegation headed by Deputy Foreign Minister and former Nazarbayev aide</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 13px; letter-spacing: 0px;"> <a href="http://bnews.kz/en/persons/show/14355/"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">Yerbol Orynbayev</span></span></a></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> came to Madison in March, 2010 to finalize the first of a series of partnering contracts with Wisconsin’s then-Chancellor Biddy Martin, DeTray was there.) </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Wisconsin’s Schweber not very long after took his two year sabbatical to go forth on Wisconsin’s mission. In his response to Jim Sleeper, he spoke of the new laws, granted by a parliament dominated by Narabyev’s Nur Otan party, which have granted NU its own “autonomy” thereby granting students and faculty “academic freedom” and freedom of expression. He failed to mention that numerous legal protections and guarantees, already on the books, are systematically and regularly violated and abused in practice across the country.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Does this professor of political science imagine that an authentic opposition movement encouraged by the teachings of the good missionaries from Wisconsin will be tolerated? What does he expect will happen to those who take seriously those “Western values” that he and others lecture on at NU ? </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Schweber wrote of his ability to speak of liberal values and the need for democracy openly and candidly at various fora sponsored by the national Parliament, Nazarbayev’s Nur Otan party, the Ministry of Education and Science, and other Kazahkstani universities. As an American, he was afforded that luxury, clearly an example of “repressive tolerance” in extremis.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">After all, the regime certainly would not want to generate some cause celeb and international press by possibly manhandling and bouncing out some well-intentioned Mid Western academic who happened to speak a bit too much truth to power. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Nazarbayev & Co. at this point in time certainly is not about to alienate the US, now seen as a strategic counterweight to Kazakhstan’s Russian and Chinese neighbors and an important and growing source of direct foreign investment. (While keeping a tight lid on things at home, Nazarbayev has gotten what he wants from each of the major powers by skillfully playing his “multi-vectored” foreign policy.) </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Overarching all, the real “partnering relationship,” not to be tampered with, is the strategic one between the energy rich, strategically located regime at Astana and those in Washington who have already defined the country as vital to short and long term US “national interest”. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the same period that reps from various American universities were busy setting up shop and designing “liberal” curricula and “best practice” governance at Naz. U, US military personnel were busily coordinating military-to-military programs, providing equipment (some of which was <a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/64896"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">used against the strikers</span></span></a> at Zhanaozen in 2011); and carrying out <a href="http://livepage.apple.com/"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">joint maneuvers</span></span></a>. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In much the same way that the US, in the name of “national security,” can turn a blind eye to the abuses of university-sponsoring dictatorships in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere, Uncle Sam is not about to push for meaningful reform, democratic rights and protections in Kazakhstan. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the meantime, those traveling from Madison intent on globalizing the gospel of some distorted “Wisconsin Idea” can say what they want at home or while “stylin’” in Astana. In the meantime, the US strategic dalliance with the corrupt and repressive Nazarbayev regime will take continue to take precedence.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirZlr1tQkG0qzVVp-NUuJVDfGuJhyphenhyphenxEqZKYEJCBjyz6YzKb2yLAfdqUwmBDUqDR6kjWa6e7A2dytiaOJXrdaJDS3t2k5fHuPUbX_l5gxSYrazbVett9pMXrkEjA9k34Dwj8t8UDOPoSTLt/s1600/Schweber+at+Naz+U.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirZlr1tQkG0qzVVp-NUuJVDfGuJhyphenhyphenxEqZKYEJCBjyz6YzKb2yLAfdqUwmBDUqDR6kjWa6e7A2dytiaOJXrdaJDS3t2k5fHuPUbX_l5gxSYrazbVett9pMXrkEjA9k34Dwj8t8UDOPoSTLt/s400/Schweber+at+Naz+U.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stylin' at Naz U.: The Good Professor Schweber takes a brief pause while bringing "liberal values" to the Kazakhstan steppes.</td></tr>
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Allen Ruffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18310195276315827048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458840028095794061.post-2319834036195858762013-06-25T13:17:00.000-07:002019-02-02T13:29:35.742-08:00The End of 'Open Records' at the UW-Madison?<div style="border: 0px; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 9px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3; font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">-Allen Ruff and Steve Horn</span></h1>
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[The following piece originally appeared in the <a href="http://host.madison.com/news/opinion/column/allen-ruff-and-steve-horn-the-end-of-open-records/article_139980ec-48d1-5543-93f5-9897429f791b.html">Capital Times</a>, (Madison, WI) June 5, 2013]</div>
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The University of Wisconsin-Madison <a href="http://m.jsonline.com/more/news/education/208693301.htm" style="border: 0px; color: #437c56; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">has requested that the state Legislature grant it an exemption</a> to Wisconsin's long-standing <a href="http://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/statutes/statutes/19.pdf" style="border: 0px; color: #437c56; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">open records law</a>. The proposed legislation, if passed, would directly limit public access to university records and sources of information and diminish independent scrutiny at a time of increasing privatization and corporate influence over the state's flagship university.</div>
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In pursuit of the exemption, either as a separate bill or via insertion in the state budget, UW-Madison officials have <a href="http://media.jsonline.com/documents/Open+Records+Research+Exemption+Language.pdf" style="border: 0px; color: #437c56; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">circulated proposed language</a> to a list of Republican-only legislators.</div>
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The two-pager contained a lead paragraph with desired language for a bill. It also contained a range of arguments for the increased protection of “intellectual property,” primarily the growing proportion of on-campus research and development now bought and paid for by major pharmaceutical, agro-tech and other corporations.</div>
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The proposed legislation is overly broad. If passed, it would inevitably lead to abuse. It states that an “authority,” undefined at present, “may withhold data, records or information produced or collected by or for faculty or staff of public institutions of higher learning in the conduct of or as a result of study or research on commercial, scientific or technical subjects, whether sponsored by the institution alone or in conjunction with a governmental body or private concern, until such data, records or information have been publicly released, published or patented.”</div>
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The UW-Madison sponsors argue that the special provision is needed to deter the theft of valuable research before it can be patented.</div>
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Their bottom-line argument? If a corporation was to lose anticipated returns on its investment because a competitor gained access to key information through an open records request, then that funder and others would take their money elsewhere — to a private institution unconcerned with public access. Researchers would follow suit, to the detriment of the UW and the state.</div>
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Wishing to curtail the number of records requests — especially by those raising ethical concerns about specific “public-private partnerships” — the proposal’s sponsors also argue that current procedures are too cumbersome and expensive.</div>
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In the course of our <a href="http://truth-out.org/news/item/15691-wisconsin-idea-gone-bad-at-kazakhstans-nazarbayev-university" style="border: 0px; color: #437c56; font-family: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">recent examination</a> of the ethically questionable <a href="http://allenruff.blogspot.com/2013_04_01_archive.html">relationship between UW-Madison and the dictatorial regime in Kazakhstan</a>, we obtained records that could easily have been denied us if the current proposed changes existed. Some of what we received, including contracts with the Kazakh regime, had to be vetted and approved by the university’s legal office before it was released. Some of the material was redacted to protect privacy and security concerns.</div>
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Clearly, the existing procedures and safeguards work well, perhaps overly so. As it exists, the UW office in charge of fulfilling requests never has, and is not about to, give away any scientific or trade secrets.</div>
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Further strictures on access to records at the still partially public, but increasingly privatized, UW-Madison will not serve the public interest.</div>
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If the details of various “public-private partnership” deals can be withheld by some “authority” based on a subjective and over-reaching interpretation of the law, then what becomes of legitimate inquiry regarding the ethics and propriety of such ventures?</div>
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If requests for information can be denied, “until such data, records or information have been publicly released, published, or patented,” then the university’s proclaimed commitment to openness, transparency and citizen access, a key tenet of the “Wisconsin Idea,” will be rendered meaningless.</div>
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><br /></span>Allen Ruffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18310195276315827048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458840028095794061.post-72179550147452562622013-05-08T14:29:00.000-07:002019-02-02T13:29:36.103-08:00American Borat? Greg Palast on the Steppes of Kazakhstan's Dictatorship<span style="font-size: small;">-<span style="font-size: large;">Allen Ruff</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">(This piece originally appeared at <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/07/palast-on-the-steppes-of-a-dictatorship/">Counterpunch</a>. It appears here, with photos added<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"> and</span> </span>slightly revised, for your reading pleasure... -AR) </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">The title of Greg
Palast’s piece, “<a href="http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/boston-bombs-and-borat-kazakhstan-truth">Boston,
Bombs and Borat</a>: From Kazakhstan with Truth,” initially posted online on April 28, immediately struck an intriguing note. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After all, it’s not very often that a seemingly
critical journalist with lots of muckraking cred pens an article from tightly
controlled </span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Kazakhstan</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">, the massive resource-rich
authoritarian state at the strategic heart of </span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Central Asia</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">. </span></h1>
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<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Rather
than giving some rare exposure to the dictatorial regime headed by the
country’s “Leader of the Nation,” Nursultan Nazarbayev as hoped, Palast instead
explained that,</span><span style="font-size: small;"> “<span style="font-weight: normal;">When the bombs went off at the Boston
Marathon, I grabbed… a plane for </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Kazakhstan</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">.” </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Telling us
nothing about Kazakhstani realities, the article instead turned into a rather
conjectural conspiratorial piece about how the FBI, pre-9/11, shut down an
investigation of a group running a Florida summer camp for Muslim-American
teenagers encouraged to join the late 1990s anti-Russian Chechen jihad.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">So why a
trip to </span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Kazakhstan</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">, quite far removed from </span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Chechnya</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> and the </span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">North Caucasus</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">? Was the highly-touted news hound on
the trail of some hot lead? He offered up an explanation in his intro: “I thought
it would be worthwhile to find out something about this part of the planet
beyond what we've got thus far from Fox TV and <i><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Borat</span></i>.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">So what was
the ever self-promoting sleuth reporter up to? A sentence from his article, uploaded
from a hotel in the country’s glitzy new capital, Astana, immediately suggested
another evasive truth: “In </span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Kazakhstan</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">, I’ve joined a meeting of fellow
journalists brought here by the government of this newly-born oil giant.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">A couple
of minutes’ search and a careful read of Palast’s Face Book posts soon clarified
what he was up to. He reveals that it wasn’t until his flight landed in Astana
that the reportorial sleuth found out about the two Kazakh students now alleged
to have aided the Tsarnaev brothers after the </span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Boston</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> bombing. So he hadn’t set off in
pursuit of that lead. </span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">In </span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Kazakhstan</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> from at least the 24<sup>th</sup>,
he had flown there not in search of some blockbuster story, but had gone to speak
at the April 25-27 “<a href="http://www.multivu.com/mnr/60656-eurasian-media-forum-astana-kazakhstan">Eurasia
Media Forum 2013</a>,” an international confab staged by the regime and bought
and paid for by a host of international corporate media and energy giants. He
addressed the gathering on “<a href="http://eamedia.org/en/programms/">Information
Security. Impact of the Media and Social Networks on Global Politics</a>”</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> </span><span style="color: #17365d; font-size: xx-small; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIg1kI3lK3AdtDVdh7SaxkDRG3CV1xcEppxviI9CG_-GaWeKi0LYj_3gAR-H2sCoc4-a5Suy_KMYtgeHguvijR2LFzj4ZydZyb_xIZZPmqgCpWpevSSVSijqJOSCZ3drhi7UfLNgnmramf/s1600/Greg_Palast.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIg1kI3lK3AdtDVdh7SaxkDRG3CV1xcEppxviI9CG_-GaWeKi0LYj_3gAR-H2sCoc4-a5Suy_KMYtgeHguvijR2LFzj4ZydZyb_xIZZPmqgCpWpevSSVSijqJOSCZ3drhi7UfLNgnmramf/s320/Greg_Palast.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Panelist Palast at Nazarbayev's Eurasia media fest </span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">So what’s
the big deal? Regardless of what he might have said, by taking the rostrum at
such a media dog-and-pony show, Palast wound up providing cover for the autocratic
Nazarbayev regime now busily looking to burnish its global image as a somehow
respectable and responsible member of the “community of nations” and a land
loaded with investment opportunity, a worthy ally of “the West”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">For
starters, every international human rights monitor </span><span style="font-size: small;">-- <span style="font-weight: normal;">among them <a href="http://www.hrw.org/europecentral-asia/kazakhstan">Human Rights Watch</a>, <a href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/kazakhstan-must-not-muzzle-media-outlets-2012-11-22">Amnesty International</a>, <a href="http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/nations-transit/2012/kazakhstan">Freedom House</a> and
<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/dec/05/corruption-index-2012-transparency-international">Transparency International</a> </span>--<span style="font-weight: normal;"> has continually condemned the Nazarbayev state
as little more than a dictatorial kleptocracy in violation of all human rights
standards. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/16/us-kazakhstan-trial-idUSBRE87F0VJ20120816">Opposition parties</a> are not allowed to function in any meaningful fashion. We’re talking
about a society with a rubber stamp parliament and a corrupt judiciary where police
are allowed to act with impunity and those in custody are often tortured; one
in which all religious groups are required by law to register with the state or
face severe penalties including imprisonment. Independent trade unions are out
of the question. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Groups like
<a href="http://en.rsf.org/kazakhstan.html">Reporters Without Borders</a> and <a href="http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2012/kazakhstan">Freedom House</a> have
long chronicled the systematic harassment, intimidation and outright violence
<a href="http://www.refworld.org/docid/512b79d1c.html">aimed at any and all journalists and news outlets</a> who dare to raise critical
questions about the corruption, venality and repressive nature of the regime. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><a href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/kazakhstan-must-not-muzzle-media-outlets-2012-11-22">Reporters</a> have been <a href="http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/04/21/kazakhstan-journalist-stabbed-violent-attack">beaten and stabbed</a>;
newspaper offices have been vandalized and <a href="http://www.rferl.org/content/opposition-media-kazakhstan-crackdown/24788973.html">closed down</a>. It’s against the law to
write anything critical, deemed “defamatory” about “president for life”
Nazarbayev or any of his family. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Following
the Media Forum’s opening address by “Leader of the Nation” Nazarbayev, his eldest
daughter, multi-millionaire Dariga Nazarbayeva took to the rostrum as “Chair of the
Eurasia Media Forum Organizing Committee.” It just so happens that she and a
handful of close associates basically hold a monopoly on all the electronic
media – television, radio, internet providers, etc. - in the country. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Censorship
and suppression of all news media, print and otherwise, attempting to operate
outside the closely monitored confines of the state-aligned media system has
increased in the last year. Those outlets which gave unvetted coverage to the
December, 2011 massacre of striking oil workers by state security forces in the
Caspian Sea company town of <a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/66306">Zhanaozen</a> or to the <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/kazakhstan/9105592/Anti-government-protesters-hold-rare-demonstration-in-Kazakhstan.html">stepped up repression</a> that has
continued since have been specifically targeted.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Apparently
unaware of that situation or somehow able to turn a blind eye, Palast could
write from Astana that, </span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">“Here on the Steppes, where armed Islamists use social
networks to recruit killers, where rumours can be deadly as cyanide, where
gangsters, con men and liars use social networks to create riots and mayhem, the
Kazakh government seeks advice from me and a gang of fellow reporters on
“information wars and information security systems”. </span></div>
</blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">What he
apparently was ignorant of, or simply decided to remain silent on is the fact
that it has been Nazarbayev’s “social networks” that have been waging a literal
“information war” against the country’s people as well as a public relations
disinformation campaign aimed at the outside world. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">The
“Eurasia Media Forum” at which Palast spoke, with its array of international panelists,
served to provide yet another level of faux legitimacy for the far from
democratic regime.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZwXqGF7OfMq10W1cAp2at9ALCacMvoDqRiDoiiXZnBMDWYNrAEhGtk5oTBlelOPD0wKv9guaGzBbVRJhFgb43yPFYL7KLCH4e6eFR5jPKv51-IZ0TnrHEQJJ7pVwmz2xk1OYcJWprH7r5/s1600/Palast+at+Rostrum.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="248" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZwXqGF7OfMq10W1cAp2at9ALCacMvoDqRiDoiiXZnBMDWYNrAEhGtk5oTBlelOPD0wKv9guaGzBbVRJhFgb43yPFYL7KLCH4e6eFR5jPKv51-IZ0TnrHEQJJ7pVwmz2xk1OYcJWprH7r5/s320/Palast+at+Rostrum.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Palast posing? <a href="https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151571466747128&set=a.430516172127.205520.87777747127&type=1&theater">Posted on his FB page</a>, a shot taken in an apparently empty auditorium. (<span class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" data-ft="{"type":45}" id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption">Photo via @davidbarnwell)</span></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: small;">In all fairness, it should be mentioned that other journalists and public figures, often respected by elements on the Left, were present at the conference. Media critic Danny Schechter was there as was the Brit MP and anti-imperial voice, George Galloway. <span style="font-size: small;">(An apparent recidivist at the Media Forum, he received </span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/george_galloway/bradford_west">£5,000 plus</a> ai<span style="font-size: small;">r</span> fare, etc.<span style="font-size: small;"> <span style="font-size: small;">for appearing at the 2012</span> fete.)</span> </span> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: small;">Schechter actually mentioned Palast’s <span style="font-size: small;">panel</span> talk before the conferees as one offering up some critical points. A<span style="font-size: small;">t a previous Media Forum a while back, <span style="font-size: small;">S</span>chechter sha<span style="font-size: small;">red a panel slot with</span></span> Zbigniew Brezezinski, the former Presidential <span style="font-size: small;">adviser</span> and foreign policy “realist” who has long advocated for US strategic control of the “Asian core” with Kazakhstan at its heart.<span style="font-size: small;"> He wasn't invited to speak this year.</span><br /><br />Regardless, Palast should be asked if he would have gone to apartheid South Africa as a guest of the white-rule regime. Or if he would today accept invitations from the Israeli government to speak in Jerusalem despite Palestinian calls for a boycott through the BDS campaign? If he was to answer “no,” then he must be asked, “Then why go to Kazakhstan?”<br /><br />In a FB post made on April 29th while he was still in Astana, Palast wrote that he “…Spent an hour killing the (Kazakh) President's supreme bottles of red with Hamid Karzai's right hand man, Afghanistan's former Foreign Minister..." Then, in a piece entitled “Truth vs. Info-Jihad” that appeared on May 2, he stated that, “We can only get to The Truth if the US, UK and other governments end their own jihad against information and those who provide it.” <br /><br />Viewed by many as an important investigative voice best known for his exposure of domestic US political shenanigans, and seen by others as a self-promoting huckster underneath an affected Fedora, Palast must not be allowed to avoid the contradictory truth of his own opportune behavior. Especially when he’s been copping sips from a dictator’s stash of “supreme red.”</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrQ3aaZV8AIuwTLVtQSAKLM6QUKzxXzeQvBDibzsFxz1s3Qlm09S2Q214vZ67ZZwb2AY94bCU59hE4XqAghOt-z4n5t7HYudEbB7fqb1VMYIg9l1T5V6gi2gSiVO5zs-hbJqScFkBJ1BzW/s1600/Palast+in+K.+Garb.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="313" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrQ3aaZV8AIuwTLVtQSAKLM6QUKzxXzeQvBDibzsFxz1s3Qlm09S2Q214vZ67ZZwb2AY94bCU59hE4XqAghOt-z4n5t7HYudEbB7fqb1VMYIg9l1T5V6gi2gSiVO5zs-hbJqScFkBJ1BzW/s320/Palast+in+K.+Garb.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Too much "supreme red" in Astana? Palast and pal yucking it up in appropriated Kazakh garb. <span class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" data-ft="{"type":45}" id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption"></span></span></td></tr>
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Allen Ruffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18310195276315827048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458840028095794061.post-74772404624478879922013-04-20T04:14:00.001-07:002019-02-02T13:29:36.154-08:00The "Wisconsin Idea" Gone Bad at Kazakhstan's Nazarbayev University<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in; text-align: left;">
<u></u><span style="font-size: large;">By Allen Ruff and Steve Horn</span><br />
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[An earlier version of this piece originally appeared at <a href="http://truth-out.org/news/item/15691">Truthout</a> <span class="itemDateCreated">on Thursday, 11 April</span>.]</div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Ten
major, primarily U.S.-based universities and campus-based research
institutes signed contracts in 2010 to help establish and run a major
“world class” university in Kazakhstan, the resource-rich Central
Asia </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">country</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
lorded over by autocrat, Nursultan Nazarbayev. </span></span></span>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison), beginning in late-2009,
actively sought and eventually won one of those contracts. That
agreement with the regime provided the go-ahead for a team of
UW-Madison experts to create a School of Humanities and Social
Sciences (SHSS) at </span></span></span><span style="color: #a64d79;"><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/13/the-world-bank-brings-nazarbayev-university-to-kazakhstan/"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">Nazarbayev
University</span></u></span></span></a><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/13/the-world-bank-brings-nazarbayev-university-to-kazakhstan/"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">(NU),
named after the country’s “</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/62715"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">President-for-Life</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">”</span></span></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Kazakhstan's "Leader of the Nation," Nursultan Nazarbayev (Photo: The Guardian)</td></tr>
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UW-Madison, birthplace of the progressive <span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/turningpoints/tp-036/?action=more_essay">“Wisconsin Idea,”</a></span> has long prided itself as a bastion of liberal democratic values and its dedication to public service and social betterment. As such, the story of its ongoing Kazakhstan involvement stands as a case study of the contradictions inherent in the rush by today’s “global universities” eager to win clients, prestige, and income abroad from those regimes most able to pay - regardless of their nature. </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Sealing
the</span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
Deal</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Documents
acquired via a series Wisconsin Open Records Law requests show that
i</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">n
March-2010, an<span style="font-size: small;"> eight member high-level delegation</span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">representing NU traveled nearly 6,000 miles from their home on the
Kazakh steppes to attend a brief ceremony at then-Chancellor Ca</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">r</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">olyn
“Biddy” Martin’s Office atop the UW-Madison's famed Bascom
Hill. </span></span></span>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Representing
the country’s authoritarian regime, the team had come to Madison
for the formal signing of an <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/136667313/NU-Feasibility-Study">initial contract</a> committing UW-Madison
to prepare a feasibility study</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
for </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">the
creation of</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
a social science and humanities program for the then-</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">dubbed
</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">“</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://kazakhstanun.org/press-releases/the-new-university-of-astana-opens-in-the-heart-of-eurasia.html"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">New
University of Astana</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.”
The proposed university</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
-</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
already projected to become a major Central Asia research hub</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
-</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
was at the time under construction at a </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.cacianalyst.org/?q=node/5534/print">estimated cost of $2 billion</a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> at
the country’s </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/kazakhstans-capital-outside-and-in/"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">showcase
capital</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></span></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj97KsS66_2brBaKDnlQGz3SsBBuTIyH2x1tTtI0CUFrNcg74uSPnjqLofQ69YZs1VXl6rMhda8_PUmEf5Lv-DVz6SRIOter3Kic4PE32JRBarjdH6XNebLZgbWeymjLHhblKyVrqBQuogQ/s1600/Naz+U.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj97KsS66_2brBaKDnlQGz3SsBBuTIyH2x1tTtI0CUFrNcg74uSPnjqLofQ69YZs1VXl6rMhda8_PUmEf5Lv-DVz6SRIOter3Kic4PE32JRBarjdH6XNebLZgbWeymjLHhblKyVrqBQuogQ/s1600/Naz+U.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Central atrium at Nazabayev University (Photo: Jonathan Kucera)</td></tr>
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In Madison to witness the signing as head of was Kazakhstan Deputy Foreign Minister and former Nazarbayev aide, <a href="http://bnews.kz/en/persons/show/14355/">Yerbol Orynbayev</a>. The Western-trained diplomat and former in-country liaison for the World Bank in Kazakhstan, <a href="http://www.thebusinessyear.com/publication/article/5/354/kazakhstan-2011/shoulders-of-giants">Aslan Sarinzhipov</a>, in his capacity as acting president and CEO of the “New University” came to sign the contract. “Biddy” Martin fixed her signature to the agreement along with the Nazarbayev insider at the March 4 ceremony.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPYyMNFhWcZKajRvK0Babtt3zDuXmjB7Zstq8Gwci4N3AgWdo9bKpNa64WeLkjIugUCzhPTepdCYp9dk4IsIrHXKgcEWEn65AUbZRQhK5_a5ONfse6DJXgQZ7r8u3JQfAzHuH94l4AR1EK/s1600/Kazakhstan_signing-+Martin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPYyMNFhWcZKajRvK0Babtt3zDuXmjB7Zstq8Gwci4N3AgWdo9bKpNa64WeLkjIugUCzhPTepdCYp9dk4IsIrHXKgcEWEn65AUbZRQhK5_a5ONfse6DJXgQZ7r8u3JQfAzHuH94l4AR1EK/s1600/Kazakhstan_signing-+Martin.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">UW Chancellor M<span style="font-size: x-small;">a</span>rtin seals initial deal as Dean Gilles Bousquet (L) and
Dep. PM Yerbol Orynbayev look on. (Photo<span style="font-size: x-small;">: </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/24164132@N05/sets/72157623435615557/with/4409182052/"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">UW-Madison
Division of International Studies</span></u></i></span></a></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">)</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #a64d79;"><span style="color: black;">A</span> <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/136667268/UW-Background-on-Collaboration-With-NU">two-page background
briefing</a></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><http: ackground-on-collaboration-with-nu="" doc="" www.scribd.com=""></http:></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
prepared for Martin in advance of the gathering noted the work
underway at Astana to establish the NU as an “English-language
university based on the American model.” </span></span></span>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">A</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">fter
listing the names of visiting delegation, </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">that
backgrounder </span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">gave
a cursory five-sentence sketch of the countr</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">y.
It</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
simply described Kazakhstan as a former Soviet republic populated
mainly of Turkic, Russian and German speakers with major gas and oil
reserves in its Caspian Sea region. The description also noted
Nazarbayev’s upcoming 70</span></span></span><sup><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">th</span></span></sup><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
birthday, without </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">giving
any</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
indication of the bru</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">tal</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503543_162-20067252-503543.html"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">nature
of his di</span></u></span></span></a><a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503543_162-20067252-503543.html"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">c</span></u></span></a><a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503543_162-20067252-503543.html"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">tatorial
regime</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">. </span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> </span></span></span></span>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">While
the sum offered up by the NU suitors for that feasibility study
totaled a mere $100,000, the UW-Madison representatives involved
viewed it as the beginning of a mutually-beneficial and
potentially-lucrative relationship. For instance, in a mid December 2009 e-mail promoting the opportunity to then Dean of International Studies Giles Bousquet, the UW's point-man on the project, Central Asia studies professor Uli Schamiloglu pointed that the NU effort, with annual faculty salaries projected at $55 million and an annual operating budget ranging upwards of $20 million or more, could become a serious revenue generator for Madison.</span></span></span>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Completed
in July 2010, that</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
initial proposal</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
paved the way for a </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.nureport.wisc.edu/report1/fullreport/final_nu_report_appendices.pdf"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">594-page
detailed strategic plan</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
submitted in June 2011, for a state-of-the art School of Humanities
and Social Studies based upon UW-Madison’s “best practices.” </span></span></span>
</div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">An
additional “</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.nureport.wisc.edu/report2/"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">phase
two</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">”
“Strategic Planning and Assessment Program” went into operation
in Oct. 2011. This entailed numbers of teleconference meetings by
various working groups and </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">multiple
exchanges </span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">of
visitors to Astana and Madison over the next several months. </span></span></span>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Nazarbayev
University's Wisconsin-designed SHSS opened for business in Sept.
2011. A <span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://international.wisc.edu/blog/index.php/2012/12/20/uw-madison-team-begins-third-phase-of-agreement-with-kazakhstan-university/">contract for “phase three” was signed in Dec. 2012</a></span>. The
regular back-and-forth flow of UW-Madison faculty and administrative
consultants continues to this day.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Onlookers
and Go-Betweens</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Among
those present for the signing of the initial UW-NU agreement was
</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://international.wisc.edu/blog/index.php/2011/07/06/bousquet-reflects-on-kazakhstan-initiative-3/"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">Gilles
Bousquet</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
at the time Dean of the UW’s </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://international.wisc.edu/about/"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">Division
of International Studies</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
Director of the UW</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">-</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Madison’s
</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.intl-institute.wisc.edu/"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">International
Institute</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
and Vice Provost for Globalization. Bousquet now serves as the
</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="https://www.uwec.edu/chancellor/"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">Interim
Chancellor at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTliX4jEQHYWS33I7sZ_aRNqlHOeZaS65hY5OtwMtoFoxpdYnvLLydN4KQDPfUN4k3ggoP9mdoJuFgMVWMVbu6B8S3TSn7_JGbhgieKEF_OuwFCokbg78YarapkOSPJCDEekNYUoK7L2RC/s1600/Bousquet.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTliX4jEQHYWS33I7sZ_aRNqlHOeZaS65hY5OtwMtoFoxpdYnvLLydN4KQDPfUN4k3ggoP9mdoJuFgMVWMVbu6B8S3TSn7_JGbhgieKEF_OuwFCokbg78YarapkOSPJCDEekNYUoK7L2RC/s200/Bousquet.jpg" width="131" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Fo<span style="font-size: x-small;">r</span>mer </span></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">UW </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">D</span>ean</span> of Division of International Studies, Gilles
Bousquet. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">(Photo: </span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://international.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/GBousquet.jpg"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">UW
Divison of International Studies</span></u></i></span></a></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">)</span></span></td></tr>
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“<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">We
are honored and delighted to be selected by Kazakhstan as a partner
as they embark on establishing a new university to bring the benefits
of education to their people and the entire region in the tradition
of the Wisconsin Idea</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"
an </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://international.wisc.edu/blog/index.php/2010/03/09/chancellor-signs-partnership-linking-uw-madison-with-kazakhstan/">article covering the event</a></span> from </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">the
UW-Madison press office</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
quoted him as saying</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></span></span>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Bousquet
subsequently </span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0; font-size: small;"><a href="http://international.wisc.edu/blog/index.php/2011/07/06/bousquet-reflects-on-kazakhstan-initiative-3/"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">traveled
to Astana in late-June 2011 for a two-day conclave</span></u></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.
While there, he was presented to the then-Prime Minister, now Nazarbayev’s
current Chief-of-Staff and</span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> </span><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">Chairman
of NU’s Board of Trustees</span></u></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">, <a href="http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2012/09/24/kazakhstans-musical-chairs/">Karim Massimov</a></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtCXjIVoUrJu4hkEXkJhjVVItwI0hsg8e43mmecBKBFq10GHvgMIQDDLfFEFSZuvj1xrw2jHCVDCvhf-tbwiZIjNmb4SHt9SSEnfn8xLw3m5xlWXqbjHYbIS-r2zZ7We4R7ehsA_-haiMs/s1600/Bousquet+%2526+Massimov.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtCXjIVoUrJu4hkEXkJhjVVItwI0hsg8e43mmecBKBFq10GHvgMIQDDLfFEFSZuvj1xrw2jHCVDCvhf-tbwiZIjNmb4SHt9SSEnfn8xLw3m5xlWXqbjHYbIS-r2zZ7We4R7ehsA_-haiMs/s1600/Bousquet+%2526+Massimov.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">UW's Bous<span style="font-size: x-small;">quet <span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">with</span> Kazakh Prime Minister <span style="font-size: x-small;">and</span> Nazarbayev insider, K<span style="font-size: x-small;">a</span>rim Massimov (Photo: <a href="http://en.tengrinews.kz/kazakhstan_news/Massimov-met-with-representatives-of-universities-partners-of-Nazarbayev-2696/"><span style="font-size: x-small;">T</span>engri News</a>)</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Interviewed
upon his return about the developing UW-Madison relationship,
Bousquet emphasized, “the benefits that Wisconsin’s business
community can derive from such [a] relationship.” </span></span></span>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Also
accompanying the Kazakh delegation was </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/18/the-men-behind-the-curtain-at-nazarbayev-world-bank-university/"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">Dennis
De Tray</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.
The World Bank’s Country Director in Indonesia during the
late-1990s, the final years of the Suharto dictatorship, De Tray
subsequently became an apologist for th<span style="font-size: small;">a<span style="font-size: small;">t</span></span> murderous, kleptocratic
regime.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">In
recent years a private “development contractor” and Pentagon
consultant in US-occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, he now sits as
Chairman of NU’s “International Advisory Committee,” a</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">consigliere</span></span></span><span style="color: red;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">for
the regime’s operatives doing business with various university
partners, UW-Madison among them.</span></span></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1sJ1uTdBKwhqSxljp0J0iQqbbBRunPSklGlurEvdQuHqFysvvk40qqd8QGSZUKvjt3aMHlag7RD5a8R6WfE3Kq8shex_Vp5wZ4Jaf_aOfIK2LcblC13HPf_iB2a1SsquzjpVFHNkMZAsj/s1600/Denny+%2526+Naz.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1sJ1uTdBKwhqSxljp0J0iQqbbBRunPSklGlurEvdQuHqFysvvk40qqd8QGSZUKvjt3aMHlag7RD5a8R6WfE3Kq8shex_Vp5wZ4Jaf_aOfIK2LcblC13HPf_iB2a1SsquzjpVFHNkMZAsj/s1600/Denny+%2526+Naz.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Consigliere Dennis De
Tray with new boss Nazarbayev at Naz U. ceremony (Photo<span style="font-size: x-small;">:</span>
</span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.kazpravda.kz/c/1277811136"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">KazPravda</span></u></i></span></a></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">)
</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Also
present at the 2010 signing</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">:
</span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.turko-tatar.com/uli/"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">Uli
Schamiloglu</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
Chair of the UW-Madison Central Asian Studies Program and Associate
Director of the Center for Middle East Studies. A </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/136667295/Uli-as-Central-NU-UW-Planner"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">central
figure from its
inception</span></u></span></span></a><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><http: doc="" li-as-central-nu-uw-planner="" www.scribd.com=""></http:></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
he played the major role in forging the relationship.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> </span></span></span>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> <span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgC1GWQbtyYmpKfpQvRTQ0xHuiP6-uIvgYpn03GsgSskSlWyX0Ajp-Bs7566DCutcutGjfHYqiwuJeeniH-bjIkyYRR4BkstcBtONdmJX1IVeDAH8JyMizEUmJnUdOGAsbMwKM49UxxCPc6/s1600/Uli,+Biddy,+DeTray.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgC1GWQbtyYmpKfpQvRTQ0xHuiP6-uIvgYpn03GsgSskSlWyX0Ajp-Bs7566DCutcutGjfHYqiwuJeeniH-bjIkyYRR4BkstcBtONdmJX1IVeDAH8JyMizEUmJnUdOGAsbMwKM49UxxCPc6/s320/Uli,+Biddy,+DeTray.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Uli Schamiloglu, Gilles Bousquet, Dennis DeTray & Biddy Martin <span style="font-size: x-small;">at </span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">March, 2010 </span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: x-small;">NU signing. (Photo<span style="font-size: x-small;">: <span style="font-size: x-small;">Jeff Miller</span>)</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Tapped
to head the feasibility study, he became “team leader” of the
“Nazarbayev University Project,” the main liaison with the NU’s
representatives, among them Dennis De Tray.</span></span></span><span style="color: red;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></span></span></span>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Schamiloglu
lead a </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/136667318/5-Member-Contingent-to-Astana"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">five-member
UW-Madison contingent to
Astana</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><http: doc="" ember-contingent-to-astana="" www.scribd.com="">
</http:></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">in
April 2010. Besides visiting their NU counterparts and the
nearly-completed campus, the group received a dignitary’s welcome
at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They also toured the Ministry of
Education and </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">met
with </span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">a
group described as Nazarbayev’s “apparatus.” The next </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">junket
stops</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">:
the country’s rubber stamp Senate and the headquarters of Nur Otan
("Light of the Fatherland"), Nazarbayev’s ruling party.
They also conferred with the US Ambassador, Richard Hoagland. </span></span></span>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Schamiloglu
and </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://international.wisc.edu/the-road-to-world-class-university/"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">Cynthia
Williams</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
Director of External Relations in the UW’s Division of
International Studies, flew to Astana in June 2010 to attend the
official opening ceremony of NU, personally lorded over by
Nazarbayev. </span></span></span>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Alongside</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
representatives from the other major university partners, they also
attended </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://international.wisc.edu/blog/index.php/tag/meet-dean-gilles-bousquet/"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">a
private audience with Nazarbayev</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
in which </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">he
</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">described
his “</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://centralasiaonline.com/en_GB/articles/caii/features/politics/2010/01/29/feature-02"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">Strategy
2020</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">”
for economic growth through accelerated industrialization and
infrastructure development. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> </span></span></span>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh__YALqL_j0giuLipGkjmyhAJqwqA0DndaukdznxVWEJZsqt7iYQ9h_kvH2eBujZvj5t7C071DKsJ47djvWO9apYNjwglZhZN_XD7P_CtoY4bvyPgVBWOY7MrxeoN48ZXKNPkQux4pFoVM/s1600/Naz+%2526+Internationals.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="292" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh__YALqL_j0giuLipGkjmyhAJqwqA0DndaukdznxVWEJZsqt7iYQ9h_kvH2eBujZvj5t7C071DKsJ47djvWO9apYNjwglZhZN_XD7P_CtoY4bvyPgVBWOY7MrxeoN48ZXKNPkQux4pFoVM/s400/Naz+%2526+Internationals.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Nazarbayev (c.) </span></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">with NU internationa<span style="font-size: x-small;">l </span></span></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">partners</span>. Dennis De Tray to his right<span style="font-size: x-small;">;</span> UW’s Uli Schamiloglu<span style="font-size: x-small;">,</span>at rear right. (Photo<span style="font-size: x-small;">:</span> </span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.kazpravda.kz/c/1277811136"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">KazPravda</span></u></i></span></a></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">)
</span></span>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">A
duo from each of the partnering institutions – among them
rep<span style="font-size: small;">representatives</span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
from Duke, Carenegie Mellon, the <span style="font-size: small;">University</span> of <span style="font-size: small;">Pennsylvania</span>,
Pittsburgh, the University College of London and the National
University of Singapore – also signed a </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">mutually</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
vetted “</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/136667156/Principles-of-Collaboration"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">Principles
of
Collaboration</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">”</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><http: doc="" rinciples-of-collaboration="" www.scribd.com=""></http:></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
that, among other things, listed university autonomy, academic
freedom, transparency, integrity and diversity as institutional
goals.</span></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Williams,
upon her return, </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://international.wisc.edu/the-road-to-world-class-university/"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">expressed
the hope</span></u></span></span></a></span><a href="http://international.wisc.edu/the-road-to-world-class-university/"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></u></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">that
the UW’s involvement in the project “can help spread the values
of the Wisconsin Idea” by “inspiring Nazarbeyev University to go
beyond being an ivory tower and instead to use its knowledge to serve
all the people of the country in relevant ways.” </span></span></span>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Others
would continue to speak of the “Idea” as a model and inspiration
for the venture. Aslan Sarinzhipov - presumably learning of the
tradition via Schamiloglu </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">and
</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">translat</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">ing</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
it as the “</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/136667249/Wisconsin-Way"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">Wisconsin
Way</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">”</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
referenced it as such in his </span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">UW-Madison
correspondence.</span></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The
Unspoken Problem</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">While
UW</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">-Madison
team</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
members involved in the ongoing project have continually spoken of
the Kazakhstan partnership as a logical global </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">extension</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
of the “Wisconsin Idea,” none have commented or<span style="font-size: small;"> </span>publicly raised concerns about the
repressive nature of Nazarbayev’s regime. </span></span></span>
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<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Larger
than Western Europe and four times the size of Texas, the former
Soviet Republic shares a 4,000-mile border with Russia, a 1,400-mile
frontier with China. The republic's last Soviet <span style="font-size: small;">era <span style="font-size: small;">head</span>, Nazarbayev assumed leadership of the nation in 1991 and has <span style="font-size: small;">remained</span> in power<span style="font-size: small;"> since</span>. </span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Located at the heart of the Asian land mass, <span style="font-size: small;">t</span>he country </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/kz.html"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">contains
vast amounts</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">of
oil, natural gas, uranium, and rare-earth minerals.
As such, it has been defined by U.S. economic and strategic planners
as vital to “national interest,” despite an </span></span></span><a href="http://www.hrw.org/world-report-2012/world-report-2012-kazakhstan"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">atrocious
human rights record</span> </span></u></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">that
actually has worsened since the UW-Madison joined the consortium of
prominent universities currently “</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">partnering</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">”
at the new university.</span></span></span><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUa1YeVP7BJZHuobwXYDsf9sLtCLlogyqGl3rCCvmXogArs1SYdRSFueGWXHHeb6IdhowM0C3JQpLQXbTmKjQHH3U0Z89dOBDrMxAmwrjsy4n40JSAdALnnqH2bN-iQJcOGO27D1wZbX9t/s1600/Kazakhstan+map.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUa1YeVP7BJZHuobwXYDsf9sLtCLlogyqGl3rCCvmXogArs1SYdRSFueGWXHHeb6IdhowM0C3JQpLQXbTmKjQHH3U0Z89dOBDrMxAmwrjsy4n40JSAdALnnqH2bN-iQJcOGO27D1wZbX9t/s400/Kazakhstan+map.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Strategically located, resource-rich Kazakhstan</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;">I</span>n 2010, the country's rubber stamp parliament passed a law naming <span style="font-size: small;">Nazarbayev</span> “</span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/features/2011/kazakhstan_rising/the_cult_of_nazarbayev.html"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">Leader
of the Nation</span></u></span></a></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.”
Th<span style="font-size: small;">e new</span> enactment not only made him immune from prosecution and seizure of his assets
for the rest of his life, but a<span style="font-size: small;">lso</span> provided him with <i>ipso facto</i> veto power and ultimate authority. <span style="font-size: small;"> </span> </span></span>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Critics
have characterized </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">his</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
ruling oligarchy as an</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:eUT2OfAPoOUJ:harpers.org/archive/2007/06/hbc-90000389+Kazakhstan+kleptocracy&cd=23&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span>outright kleptocracy</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
one that has siphoned off</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8171617/Nursultan-Nazarbayev-the-shepherds-son-who-became-Kazakhstans-Emperor.html"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">
billions to Nazarbayev and his immediate circles</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.
</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.business-anti-corruption.com/country-profiles/europe-central-asia/kazakhstan/"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">Corruption
and bribery</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
at all levels of government, the judiciary included, have long been
considered the <i>modus operandi</i> in the country.</span></span></span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">A
</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/65393"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">2012
listing of the Kazakhstan’s 50 wealthiest individuals</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
holding a combined estimated wealth of $24 billion, included four of
Nazarbayev’s immediate family members -- two daughters, a son-in
law and a grandson -- as well as his minister of defense and
environment minister. The average monthly wage, meanwhile, </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/65393"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">continues
to hover at $670</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">U.S.
State Department’s 2012 survey on Kazakhstan’s “rampant and
diverse” human rights violations</span></u></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
cited "severe limits on citizens’ rights to change their
government," the clampdown on freedom of expression, and a lack
of judicial independence and rule of law, "especially in dealing
with pervasive corruption…." </span></span></span>
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<span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.hrw.org/world-report-2012/world-report-2012-kazakhstan"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">Human
Rights Watch</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
an<span style="font-size: small;">d </span></span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/EUR57/003/2010/en/3191021e-1d65-4c18-b373-ff29fe5251cb/eur570032010en.html"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Amnesty International</span></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
have long criticized the regime for its violations of international
standards regarding workers’ rights, </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">political
repression</span></u></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/report/kazakhstani-authorities-must-tackle-police-brutality-2010-03-22"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">police</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
impunity, and</span></span></span><a href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/EUR57/001/2010/en/88639715-0122-4cdd-ab15-9583ec80f30d/eur570012010en.pdf"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">
<span style="color: #c27ba0;">intimidation and torture</span></span></u></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
of those arrested and imprisoned. </span></span></span>
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<br />
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The</span></span></span><a href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/EUR57/002/2011/en/88652b78-fe97-4d17-bb73-10555ff95898/eur570022011en.html"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">
<span style="color: #c27ba0;">mistreatment of immigrants</span></span></u></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
exploitation of</span></span></span><a href="http://hrbrief.org/2011/02/made-in-kazakhstan-migrant-child-labor-in-kazakhstan%25E2%2580%2599s-tobacco-fields/"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">
<span style="color: #c27ba0;">child labor</span></span></u></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
and</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/4ecf57862.html"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">
human trafficking</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
also continue to be documented</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.
Kazakhstan also recently revised its existing codes requiring that
all religious groups register with the state. Those unregistered or
denied a permit to practice their faith have </span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1814"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">come
under increased repression in the past year</span></u></span></a></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.07in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2012/kazakhstan"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">Transparency
International</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
in 2012 ranked the country as “not free” while</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/nations-transit/2012/kazakhstan"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">
Freedom House</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
gave it a worsening “democracy score” of 6.54 (with 1
representing the highest level of democratic progress and 7 the
lowest.)</span></span></span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">In
an interview following his July 2011 visit to Astana, G</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">illes
</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Bousquet
spoke of how the UW-Madison’s </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://international.wisc.edu/blog/index.php/2011/07/06/bousquet-reflects-on-kazakhstan-initiative-3/"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">world-wide
partners looked to Madison to educate</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
“leaders who will have an impact and help change the world, like
the thousands of UW-Madison graduates who have joined the Peace Corps
over the decades…” </span></span></span>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.07in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">A
few m</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">onths
later, in late-2011 the Peace Corps abruptly removed its 117
volunteers from the country following </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/64566"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">several
sexual assaults</span></u></span></span></a><a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/64566"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">and
</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://peacecorpsonline.org/messages/messages/467/4004545.html"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">reported
instances of harassment by the KNB</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
the KGB-styled state intelligence service.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.07in; margin-top: 0.07in; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The
“Zhanaozen Massacre” </span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.07in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Three
months after </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">NU
</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">and
its Wisconsin-created </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">SHSS
</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">opened,
on Dec. 16, 2011 Kazakhstan state security forces</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7128:the-kazakhstan-massacre-killing-hope-to-benefit-us-geopolitical-interests"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">
opened fired on striking oil workers </span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">in
the Caspian Sea oil company town of Zhanaozen. </span></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.07in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">According
to the official government account, 15 died and upwards of 70 were
wounded. </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7128:the-kazakhstan-massacre-killing-hope-to-benefit-us-geopolitical-interests"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">Unofficial
casualty counts ran much higher</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
numbering into the hundreds, and many more were detained and
routinely beaten while in custody as the government blacked out
communications from the region.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.17in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipzdoEch4xLNW-mHqGO7Q6LytjbvyjJPGFW2sVr0UN_ixOpEOkNUvInMrMMx80eTQPPObztSWRojZa-Y3cfp99gqfzLg00fjuioD0CMNcKBXULEQp1UYy-wgDVsEujmCxv8KwNIj97FkPd/s1600/Dead+Striker.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="181" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipzdoEch4xLNW-mHqGO7Q6LytjbvyjJPGFW2sVr0UN_ixOpEOkNUvInMrMMx80eTQPPObztSWRojZa-Y3cfp99gqfzLg00fjuioD0CMNcKBXULEQp1UYy-wgDVsEujmCxv8KwNIj97FkPd/s400/Dead+Striker.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.17in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Dead striker in
Zhanozen, Dec. 2011 (Photo<span style="font-size: x-small;">: </span> </span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://exiledonline.com/the-massacre-everyone-ignored-70-striking-oil-workers-killed-in-kazakhstan-by-us-supported-dictator/"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">Exiled
Online</span></u></i></span></a></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">)
</span></span>
</div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.17in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.07in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">In
the immediate aftermath of the strike, the regime not only held a
</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/65423"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">mass
show trial</span></u></span></span></a><a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/65423"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">and
</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/65303"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">imprisoned
strike leaders</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
but also </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/65115"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">jailed
attorneys</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="color: #1155cc;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">who
came forward to assist the detained and </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/66021"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">opposition
political activists protesting the repression</span></u></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> </span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.07in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Western
academics employed at NU at the time of the “</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7128:the-kazakhstan-massacre-killing-hope-to-benefit-us-geopolitical-interests"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">Zhanaozen
Massacre</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">”
might not have had any clue about the situation.<span style="font-size: small;"> </span>After
all, Nazarbayev family members or cronies have long </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fyv5oI1LYk&feature=g-high"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">controlled
or own the dominant media</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.
</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2011/kazakhstan"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">Independent
journalists</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
are regularly subjected to </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.rferl.org/content/kazakhstan-appeal-fails-journalist-akhmedyarov/24726998.html"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">fines</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
and criminal charges </span></span></span><span style="color: #a64d79;"><a href="http://www.freedomhouse.org/article/freedom-house-condemns-arrest-kazakh-activists-and-journalist"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">for
publishing “defamatory” reports</span></u></span></span></a><a href="http://www.freedomhouse.org/article/freedom-house-condemns-arrest-kazakh-activists-and-journalist"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">regarding
Nazarbayev his family or leading government officials. </span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.17in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.07in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Critical
reporters have also been </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://en.rsf.org/kazakhstan.html"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">jailed,
harrassed and physically attacked</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
while offices of independent newspapers and websites, closely
monitored by the state, continue to be shut down. The regime </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/66340"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">banned
</span></u></span></span></a><a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/66340"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">dissident
newspaper </span></u></span></a><a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/66340"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">Respublika
</span></u></i></span></a><a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/66340"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">in
Dec. 2012</span></u></span></a></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
along with t</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">he
</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/66330"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">small
opposition party, Alga</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></span></span>
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The
“Nazarbayev Idea”</span></span></div>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">In
October 2009, Kazakh Deputy Prime Minister Orynbayev’s Office </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/136669872/nu-reached-out-to-kevin-reilly"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">sent
letters to a number of American
universities</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">announcing
the establishment of “a new flagship university with the highest
international standards… in partnership with a number of leading
international universities.” </span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;">According to official state sources, <span style="font-size: small;">t</span></span>he idea for the new school originated with President
Nazarbayev<span style="font-size: small;">.</span> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">The letter, <span style="font-size: small;">u</span></span>tilizing the</span> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">“</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/the-world-bank-brings-nazarbayev-university-to-kazakhstan-by-allen-ruff"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">knowledge
bank</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">”
language</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> of World Bank<span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">"<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">education</span> reform" </span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;">advisers already <span style="font-size: small;">fully engaged</span> in th<span style="font-size: small;">e</span> country</span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;">, </span>spoke of the goal of creating a “knowledge
based society” </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">to assure sustainable economic growth. In the letter, Or<span style="font-size: small;">ynbayev</span>
requested an early-November meeting to discuss “partnering”
opportunities.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">According
to a conversation with Cynthia Williams, the Kazakhs expressed a
desire to meet with Chancellor Martin. Reluctant to schedule such a
meeting on short notice with limited information, Williams asked Uli
Schamiloglu if he would be interested in forming a group to greet the
delegation. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> </span></span></span>
</div>
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: center;"><tbody></tbody></table>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXzkhw0ROtyiqUOuAo24sxuHagQwkXPEX4Z7AFPnAsEAjZAShpw5jpBFu105F-ZB0pURt361ME1LAfScdJX_L2o1cIZhJUmomavqCxhz-mbCt4L31FNp_o-r3eXYErCMGWmhq7qtQJgDmh/s1600/Cynthia+Willaims+in+K-Stan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXzkhw0ROtyiqUOuAo24sxuHagQwkXPEX4Z7AFPnAsEAjZAShpw5jpBFu105F-ZB0pURt361ME1LAfScdJX_L2o1cIZhJUmomavqCxhz-mbCt4L31FNp_o-r3eXYErCMGWmhq7qtQJgDmh/s320/Cynthia+Willaims+in+K-Stan.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">UW International Studies' </span></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Cynthia
Williams<span style="font-size: x-small;">, NU</span></span></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> partners </span></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">banquet, As<span style="font-size: x-small;">tana, </span>June 2011 </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">(Photo:
</span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://international.wisc.edu/the-road-to-world-class-university/"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">UW-Madison
Division of International Studies</span></u></i></span></a></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">)
</span></span>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Schamiloglu
met with a single Kazakh representative over dinner on Nov. 4, after
a larger meeting </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">was
</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">cancelled
due to a flight delay. </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
Kazakh envoy</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
expressed a primary interest in partnering with the UW-Madison's biotechnology
programs, but </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Schamiloglu</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
introduced the idea of the </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">UW-Madison</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">creating
</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">a
humanities and social-science focused “liberal arts” effort at
Astana.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Things
moved quickly </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">thereafter.
</span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Schamiloglu,
viewing a possible Kazakhstan project as “</span></span></span><span style="color: #a64d79;"><a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/136669642/Uli-Opportunity-of-a-Lifetime-at-NU"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">the
opportunity of a life
time</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,”</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">actively
promoted the idea to his superiors on Bascom Hill, among them the
Dean of the College of Letters and Science, </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/soc/faculty/show-person.php?person_id=65"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">Gary
Sandefur</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
and International Programs head Bousquet. </span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">UW-Madison
wasted little time in submitting a “</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/136669702/UW-Madison-Hard-Copy-of-Letter-of-Intent-to-Partner-With-NU"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">letter
of
intent</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">”</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
in Jan. 2010 signed by the Sandefur and Bousquet. </span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">In
Feb. 2010, Aslan Sarinzhipov and then- “New University” Vice
President, </span></span></span><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/14/the-world-bank-and-higher-education-in-kazakhstan/"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">Kadisha
Dairova</span></u></span></span></a><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
-</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
today both members of NU’s </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://nu.edu.kz/portal/faces/mainmenu/aboutus1/administrations/managementstructure1;jsessionid=KG8wRVdQ8j3GyJXlxPLhQQ8n1dD2Xy54yDzChqKJpVL4Qpw6yy0Y!780778233?_afrWindowId=null&_a&_afrLoop=2459783456246332&_afrWindowMode=0"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">Executive
</span></u></span></span></a><a href="http://nu.edu.kz/portal/faces/mainmenu/aboutus1/administrations/managementstructure1;jsessionid=KG8wRVdQ8j3GyJXlxPLhQQ8n1dD2Xy54yDzChqKJpVL4Qpw6yy0Y!780778233?_afrWindowId=null&_a&_afrLoop=2459783456246332&_afrWindowMode=0"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">Council</span></u></span></a></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #c27ba0;">
</span>- </span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/136669781/NU-Delegation-to-UW-Madison-Round-One"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">toured
the U</span></u></span></span></a><a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/136669781/NU-Delegation-to-UW-Madison-Round-One"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">W-</span></u></span></a><a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/136669781/NU-Delegation-to-UW-Madison-Round-One"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">Madison
campus</span></u></span></span></a><span style="font-size: small;"><u> </u></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">and
liked what they saw. </span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
contract for the feasibility study was hastily drawn up, vetted by a
UW-Madison legal team</span></span></span><span style="color: red;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: black;">,</span>
</span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">and
signed on March 4, 2010. <span style="font-size: small;">T</span>he first UW-Madison team arrived in
Astana on April 24, 2010. In June 2010, that five-member team and
Williams </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/136669657/June-2010-NU-International-Partners-Meeting-Roster"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">attended
a Washington, DC “partners’ meeting”</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">and
Williams and Schamiloglu </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.nureport.wisc.edu/report1/part1/NULibraryCollectionsDevelopment/01NU_Library_Collection_Development_Project_Final_Report.pdf"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">attended
the NU opening ceremonies in Astana later that month</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;">C</span>ompris<span style="font-size: small;">ed</span> of <span style="font-size: small;">over</span> than 20 <span style="font-size: small;">faculty, administrative staff, and administrators, </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;">t</span>he
full UW-Madison team planned whole
departments, detailed curricul<span style="font-size: small;">a</span>, and a full battery of courses. </span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Administrat</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">ive
staff</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
also submitted plans for a Registrar’s and Admissions Offices,
while faculty from the UW-Madison School of Library Science prepared
detailed designs for the layout of the NU library and its collections. </span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
intent, it appeared, was to implant some </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/136669677/American-Model-Kazakh-Mentality"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">semblance
of UW-Madison at
NU</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.<http: doc="" merican-model-kazakh-mentality="" www.scribd.com=""></http:></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.07in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The
“Idea”<span style="font-weight: normal;"> </span></span></span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">As
part of its </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">NU
pitch</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
the authors of the original feasibility study noted that “…the
UW-Madison is guided by the ‘Wisconsin Idea’…” and that,
“through the Nazarbayev University project, the UW-Madison is
seeking to extend the “Wisconsin Idea” to Kazakhstan and the
world…”</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> </span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">“</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Idea</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">”</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
came about in response to the abuses of unimpeded economic power and
political corruption during the late 19</span></span></span><sup><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">th</span></span></span></sup><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
century “</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Age
of the Robber Barons</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,”
an era void of social protections and increasing social upheaval
caused by the abuses of unrestrained industrial and financial might.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3458840028095794061" name="h.4d34og8"></a>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Idea
legislation and policies</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">proposed
by progressive UW-Madison faculty brought about workers’
protections, improved practices in agriculture and rural life,
environmental safeguards and public health standards. Political
reforms broadened the scope of democracy by rooting out corruption,
graft and behind-the-scenes statehouse corporate influence-peddling.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3458840028095794061" name="h.2s8eyo1"></a>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">In
2012, as various UW-Madison faculty, staff, and administrators came
and went from Astana,</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">the
university officially celebrated the 100-year anniversary of the
“Idea,” articulated in the </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.wisc.edu/about/leadership/mission.php"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">mission
statement of the university</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">, to
“embody, through its policies and programs, respect for, and
commitment to, the ideals of a pluralistic, multiracial, open and
democratic society.”</span></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.lafollette.wisc.edu/publicservice/wi_idea_symposium.html"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">One
anniversary panel on April 26</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
of that year, featured </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.lafollette.wisc.edu/facultystaff/witte-john.html"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">John
Witte</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
an accomplished </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">p</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">olitical
</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">s</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">cience
professor, public policy maven and grandson of the UW’s renowned
Edwin Witte. Edwin embodied the “Wisconsin Idea,” going from
Madison to Washington, DC during Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to
become the “</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.ssa.gov/history/cohenwitte.html"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">father
of Social Security</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.” </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> </span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Two
weeks before the 2012 forum, a UW-Madison press release announced Witte
was retiring from his 35-year stint in Madison</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.
That release further announced he was departing for Kazakhstan</span></span><span style="color: red;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.lafollette.wisc.edu/news/Spring_2012/Witte_to_retire_after_35_years_of_teaching_research_service.html"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">to
become Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
Nazarbayev University</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">. </span></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjepgOZQLZh1I2gEvt7ocQOsLvMnPRgsHpWVuJN-_vXqlKo-j7fftAb_bUxb10Q3KDOE-zMApP_cn7tSxKgT2FGG8AFxlsiUBm0HscDZO9ncKXGRepsLHZSoadV-4o4Bjd6pLL-cU1_yWpp/s1600/Witte.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjepgOZQLZh1I2gEvt7ocQOsLvMnPRgsHpWVuJN-_vXqlKo-j7fftAb_bUxb10Q3KDOE-zMApP_cn7tSxKgT2FGG8AFxlsiUBm0HscDZO9ncKXGRepsLHZSoadV-4o4Bjd6pLL-cU1_yWpp/s200/Witte.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">From
Madison to Astana: UW’s John Witte (Photo<span style="font-size: x-small;">:</span> </span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.lafollette.wisc.edu/facultystaff/witte-john.html"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">UW-Madison</span></u></span></a></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">)</span></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Witte
had already had </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">been</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
to Astana as part of the initial </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">project</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
team. He made a second journey there in Dec. 201</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">1</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
to scope out his new campus digs and to present a dusted off </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=140017992772515&id=181624208574827"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">paper
on Milwaukee’s voucher and charter schools</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
to his future NU colleagues.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">On
the eve of the Novem<span style="font-size: small;">ber</span> 2012 U.S. Presidential election, Witte joined
UW-Madison political scientist </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://law.wisc.edu/profiles/schweber@polisci.wisc.edu"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">Howard
Schweber</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
on leave and teaching in Astana, at a campus forum on what another
President Barack Obama term or a Mitt Romney victory could mean for
Kazakhstan.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">While
Schweber suggested that a Romney election would not bode well for
Kazakhstan, </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://en.tengrinews.kz/opinion/293/"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">Witte
was quoted as stating</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,</span></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"Kazakhstan…
absolutely critical to the world… is a stable democracy that will
enhance this country as well as the United States’ goals. It is
also a country of peace, stability, and prosperity. All of these
things the United States will benefit from. </span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Some
of our companies are already here. I think that they will
benefit. And also, to be honest, I think that there is a greater
free-market spirit here in Kazakhstan than there would be in the
Democratic Party of the United States. So I think that in fact that
private initiative would be well-received here. And that private
initiative is not the hallmark of the Obama administration."</span></span></span></div>
<h1 class="western">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">A
month later while serving as </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">acting
</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">NU
</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Vice
Provost</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
Schweber spoke at a conference on the institution of the presidency
and its importance in the transition to democracy. The
state-controlled press reported the event under the headline,
“</span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://en.tengrinews.kz/politics_sub/Kazakhstan-is-not-ready-for-presidential-parliamentary-rule-Vice-Provost-of-14866/"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Kazakhstan is not ready for presidential-parliamentary rule: Vice-Provost of Nazarbayev University</span></span></span></a></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.”</span></span></h1>
<h1 class="western">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
official media report quoted Schweber as suggesting that while the
office of the presidency should be separated from any specific
individual as the country moved toward democracy, “probably,
Kazakhstan is not ready for this transition yet.”</span></span></h1>
<h1 class="western">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFxRWQczg6ORuVajsg2hTVdQzi9nHNxLOkLtRQFJs4bejgvOFwOgd95GjzhQIQ_uyxgAl-XosV_FXDL8W3TJ1Ofnkfb6jsrW8cuIe9dw9o-ydkynNqf0irIPs_UauFd-QEHRPHkVN79B6n/s1600/Schweber+at+Naz+U.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFxRWQczg6ORuVajsg2hTVdQzi9nHNxLOkLtRQFJs4bejgvOFwOgd95GjzhQIQ_uyxgAl-XosV_FXDL8W3TJ1Ofnkfb6jsrW8cuIe9dw9o-ydkynNqf0irIPs_UauFd-QEHRPHkVN79B6n/s320/Schweber+at+Naz+U.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stylin' <span style="font-size: small;">i</span>n Astana, 2012: UW Poli Sci Prof. and N<span style="font-size: small;">a</span>z. U actin<span style="font-size: small;">g <span style="font-size: x-small;">P</span></span>rovost Howard Schweber </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</span></span></h1>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in; text-align: center;">
“<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Academic
Freedom”</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">In
his July, 2011 UW interview, Gilles Bousquet mentioned NU was the
country’s first university to guarantee academic freedom “</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://international.wisc.edu/blog/index.php/2011/07/06/bousquet-reflects-on-kazakhstan-initiative-3/"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">in
the law</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.”</span></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">As
if to assuage concerns and circumvent criticism, the regime’s
rubber-stamp parliament passed specific legislation, signed into law by
Nazarbayev in early 2012, granting “autonomy” and “academic
freedom” to NU faculty and staff.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.07in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">One
line in </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.docstoc.com/docs/129012887/On-the-status-of-Nazarbayev-University_-Nazarbayev-Intellectual-Schools-and-Nazarbayev-Fund"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">the
new law</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
simply defined the “principle of academic freedom” as
“independence of the University… in defining and selection of
educational programs, forms and methods of implementation of
education activities, and the directions of conducting scientific
research.”</span></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.07in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The enactment enshrining “autonomy” and “academic freedom” also
granted ultimate authority over the University, its feeder
</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Intellectual</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
Schools and its </span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/13/the-world-bank-brings-nazarbayev-university-to-kazakhstan/"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">specially-created
corporate-funded endowment</span></u></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #eeeeee;"><span style="font-size: small;">to a</span></span> “</span></span></span><a href="http://nu.edu.kz/portal/faces/mainmenu/aboutus1/administrations/managementstructure1?_afrWindowId=13xp4ko5b0_10&_afrLoop=47071724657556&_afrWindowMode=0&_adf.ctrl-state=i6crc3i7k_4#%40%3F_afrWindowId%3D13xp4ko5b0_10%26_a"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">Supreme
Board of Trustees</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">”
chaired by Nazarbayev and comprised entirely </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">by
insiders</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.07in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
meaning of the “</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://www.popecenter.org/acrobat/AcademicFreedom.pdf"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">academic
freedom</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,”
usually understood as an implicit, if not always explicit right of
faculty and students to write and speak freely inside and outside the
walls of </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">the
</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">academy</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></i></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">without
fear of repercussion has been</span></span></span><a href="http://nu.edu.kz/portal/faces/mainmenu/aboutus1/historyvision1?_afrWindowId=null&_afrLoop=4869637107878745&_afrWindowMode=0&_adf.ctrl-state=bc378e0jh_13#%40%3F_afrWindowId%3Dnull%26_afrLoop%3D"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;"> <span style="color: #c27ba0;">subtly nuanced by NU</span></span></u></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> </span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.07in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
“</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://nu.edu.kz/portal/faces/mainmenu/aboutus1/historyvision1;jsessionid=DvZLRXyMsbJzRnfZGyzwKrQd2v20CC3TFJgGF4BMmlLJ8VSjVhjB!780778233?_afrWindowId=null&_afrLoop=2544403600036529&_afrWindowMode=0#%40%3F_afrWindowId%3Dnull%26_afrLoop%3D2544403600036529%26_afrWindowMode%3D0%26_adf.ctrl-state%3Df2xzmssmu_4"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">guiding
principle</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">”
dealing with “Autonomy and Academic Freedom,” states that the
University will,</span></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.07in; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">[E]nsure
independence and collegiality in management and decision making based
on democratic principles and personal responsibility of each
individual involved; guarantee academic freedom of teachers and
researchers</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">
within their research and educational activities.</span></i></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
(<span style="font-size: small;">E</span>mphasis ours)</span></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.17in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Implicit is a clear
message that faculty and staff must take care not to speak beyond the
confines of their respective disciplines - or else. </span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.07in; margin-top: 0.07in; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The
Big Picture</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
ongoing “partnership” between the UW-Madison and </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">the
Kazakhstan dictatorship’s</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
“world class” university is far from exceptional</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.
E</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">very
major U.S. university has joined in the highly competitive international scramble
for a piece of the </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">globalized</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
“</span></span></span><span style="color: #c27ba0;"><a href="http://truth-out.org/news/item/9642-greening-the-knowledge-economy-a-critique-of-neoliberalism"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;">knowledge
economy</span></u></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">”
pie, often times served up by far from democratic regimes rich in
resources and strategic value</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">UW-Madison’s
“partnering relationship” with Nazarbayev University serves as
but one </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">example,
among numerous others, of</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
the expanding international role of today’s </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">global
universities as multinational corporations driven primarily by market concerns. In that capacity, <span style="font-size: small;">such</span> elite globalized <span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">"institutions</span> of higher learning</span>" continue to play an ever <span style="font-size: small;">evolving</span> function </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">as servan<span style="font-size: small;">ts of imperial power</span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
reproducing and expanding the existing economic and political order </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span> </span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
Allen Ruffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18310195276315827048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458840028095794061.post-91479011991813135872013-02-05T12:26:00.001-08:002019-02-02T13:29:36.300-08:00Imperial Business School: The World Bank and the Academy in Kazakhstan<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">ALLEN
RUFF AND STEVE HORN</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">*</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">[This is a revised version of a piece that appeared in <a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/the-world-bank-brings-nazarbayev-university-to-kazakhstan-by-allen-ruff"><i>Z-Magazine</i>, February, 2013</a>. A longer more detailed piece initially run by <i><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/13/the-world-bank-brings-nazarbayev-university-to-kazakhstan/">Counterpunch</a></i> in three installments on December 13th, <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/14/the-world-bank-and-higher-education-in-kazakhstan/">Dec 14th</a>, and <a href="http://dec.18th/">Dec.18th</a>. ]</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">On </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Dec. 16, 2011</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Kazakhstan</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> state security forces<a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7128:the-kazakhstan-massacre-killing-hope-to-benefit-us-geopolitical-interestshttp://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7128:the-kazakhstan-massacre-killing-hope-to-benefit-us-geopolitical-interests">
opened fire on striking oil workers </a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in the </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Caspian Sea</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> company town of Zhanaozen.
According to the official count, 15 died and upwards of 70 were wounded while unofficial
casualty counts ran much higher. Some suggested that as many as 70 died that day. Jailings and repression of critics and political
opponents of the regime followed and have actually <a href="http://www.freedomhouse.org/article/kazakh-government-escalates-repression-media-and-opposition">worsened</a> in the year since. </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwcxh7p8Qmywun-A7qHLKkVvG8Ubfdq_B4T7oMJe_nlK874zv7gl3x_xoNjN8Grl3SoDdSqTKOZ2daWCLhHL_y_bgSed-YYyobIZm49NggH9JiRK2os1KFM0RuIQlDBlKdGX_3E-ZVGWHs/s1600/Dead+Striker.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="145" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwcxh7p8Qmywun-A7qHLKkVvG8Ubfdq_B4T7oMJe_nlK874zv7gl3x_xoNjN8Grl3SoDdSqTKOZ2daWCLhHL_y_bgSed-YYyobIZm49NggH9JiRK2os1KFM0RuIQlDBlKdGX_3E-ZVGWHs/s320/Dead+Striker.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dead oil worker killed at Zhanaozen, November 16, 2011</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The “Zhanaozen Massacre” seemingly went unnoticed by the Western
faculty members and administrators working at the recently opened </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Nazarbayev</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">University</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, located at
the country’s ostentatious new capital, Astana.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Opened in 2010, the mutli-billion dollar showcase university came about
through a joint venture involving the country’s authoritarian regime under “<a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/62715">Leader of the Nation</a>,”
Nursultan Nazarbayev, the World Bank, and a number of major, primarily </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">US</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> “partnering”
universities.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">As a result of deals shaped and brokered by the Bank in 2009 and 2010,
scores of academics have flocked to the resource rich, strategically located Central
Asian country. They remain there despite the fact that every major international
human rights monitor has cited the regime for its continuing abuse of civil
liberties and basic freedoms.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFpYTIteS9SlUWxKhmtqFxEG8HqHWBejSio9bcuXhM5xDs3iFNjHyAMRRvFQ_ZHWN2zkLS4KgMjsGpMuQAmy39AiagZLZ_0yHrKXfrMD6WARF3-TrxRHjRNJfQRmHSKU_sB7w3htmE85cf/s1600/NU+Atrium.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="237" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFpYTIteS9SlUWxKhmtqFxEG8HqHWBejSio9bcuXhM5xDs3iFNjHyAMRRvFQ_ZHWN2zkLS4KgMjsGpMuQAmy39AiagZLZ_0yHrKXfrMD6WARF3-TrxRHjRNJfQRmHSKU_sB7w3htmE85cf/s320/NU+Atrium.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The <a href="http://mendeleev.kz/media/img/blogs/4f9ec7b81415e.jpg" target="_blank">central Atrium of NU’s campus</a>, fully enclosed, “<a href="http://www.cablegatesearch.net/cable.php?id=09ASTANA1949&q=and%20kazakhstan%20new-universityhttp://wikileaks.org/cable/2009/11/09ASTANA1949.html" target="_blank">like a shopping mall in the United States, with roads and buildings inside</a>…”</i></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In the process, </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Kazakhstan</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> has become a proving ground for the Bank’s “education reform” efforts
and a revealing case study of the deep seeded “soft power” workings of the </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">US</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> imperial
order. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> <b>A
“Number-One Priority”</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">Nazarbayev<span style="text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;"> </span><span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;"><span style="color: #f3f3f3;">in</span> <a href="http://nu.edu.kz/cs/idcplg?IdcService=GET_DYNAMIC_CONVERSION&dID=10687">2006</a> </span>called
for the establishment of “a unique academic environment” and the “need to
create a prestigious, world-class university” in order to improve the resource
rich country’s international standing. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Work on the <a href="http://www.cacianalyst.org/?q=node/5534/print"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>$2 billion dollar Astana</span> <span style="color: blue;">campus</span><u><span style="color: blue;"> </span></u></a>began in 2007. The outside planners of
what was initially dubbed the “<a href="http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=174384">New University of
Astana</a>” designed it from the start to become the centerpiece of a totally
remodeled<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Academic-Capitalism-New-Economy-Education/dp/0801892333">
market-oriented education system</a> fully tethered to “the West” (meaning, the
national and financial interests of the </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">US</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> and its
British junior partner).</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCBMbnl968CW6udBiEYioUBJUFWXi7jaADtOzHg9Imt4_nh3UNdXycORAdjIYIWD7dMiKo8hazJHSrva8yLVHU5RLUdlHYjyvsUtuZhvfrzzT0oTpfJGcBNlyxcOab-A2VWKxu8tM3o4Du/s1600/images.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCBMbnl968CW6udBiEYioUBJUFWXi7jaADtOzHg9Imt4_nh3UNdXycORAdjIYIWD7dMiKo8hazJHSrva8yLVHU5RLUdlHYjyvsUtuZhvfrzzT0oTpfJGcBNlyxcOab-A2VWKxu8tM3o4Du/s1600/images.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Astana, constructed since 1997, with Nazarbayev's palace in the foreground</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Reflecting the importance of the project by the regime, </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">US</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> envoys
meeting with the </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Kazakhstan</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Deputy Prime Minister and Nazarbayev insider Yerbol Orynbayev in
October 2009 could cable back to </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Washington</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> that besides
Astana, the University was “<a href="http://wikileaks.org/cable/2009/11/09ASTANA1949.html">the government’s number one priority</a>.” Projecting an <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/features/2011/kazakhstan_rising/nazarbayev_u.html"><span style="color: blue;">eventual enrollment of 20,000,</span></a>
the school received its first incoming class of 500 students in September,
2010.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Human Rights,
Kazakh Style</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQLM1ojn7y1oZDF9wZYUWcF1CMyIsYaxjvy8uypWXhYgP88KxkmfvpAL-eBIyU8NT5Q4AsAupuTHdJffMi4lNcVHpd0wswGKoVtfk1fVV5mUUVwxVn0z2Dvq3I4LcaXtGPLBJC6GOwKp5i/s1600/Nursultan+Nazarbayev.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQLM1ojn7y1oZDF9wZYUWcF1CMyIsYaxjvy8uypWXhYgP88KxkmfvpAL-eBIyU8NT5Q4AsAupuTHdJffMi4lNcVHpd0wswGKoVtfk1fVV5mUUVwxVn0z2Dvq3I4LcaXtGPLBJC6GOwKp5i/s200/Nursultan+Nazarbayev.jpg" width="135" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Leader for Life" Nazarbayev: "...Don't let me down."</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">With <a href="http://kazakhstanun.org/press-releases/the-new-university-of-astana-opens-in-the-heart-of-eurasia.html">reps
from the various “partnering institutions” looking</a> on, “Leader for Life” Nazarbayev
spoke at the NU campus’ opening ceremony June 2010. Expressing his hope that
the new venture would become the “<a href="http://www.rferl.org/content/Kazakhstans_Nazarbaev_University_Opens_In_Astana/2085269.html">national
brand of Kazakhstan</a>,” the “president for life” also offered the school’s
first incoming class some godfatherly advice. “Young people should seek
studying here…,” he told them. “<a href="http://www.kazpravda.kz/print/1277811136">I agreed it [the university] to
be named after me, so don’t let me down.</a>”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A compliant press corps got the message. After all, Nazarbayev family
members or cronies <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fyv5oI1LYk&feature=g-high">control or
own the dominant media</a> while <a href="http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2011/kazakhstan">independent
journalists</a> are subjected to <a href="http://www.rferl.org/content/kazakhstan-appeal-fails-journalist-akhmedyarov/24726998.html">prohibitive
fines</a> for publishing anything considered “defamatory” about Nazarbayev, his
family or leading government officials. Critical reporters are<a href="http://en.rsf.org/kazakhstan.html"> jailed and physically attacked</a>,
while offices of opposition newspapers have been shut down, vandalized or even<a href="http://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/ryan-gallagher/decapitated-dogs-and-burning-bureaus-year-kazakhstan-did-democracy">
firebombed</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A <a href="http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/humanrightsreport/index.htm?dynamic_load_id=186466#wrapper"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>2011 U.S. State Department report on
Kazakhstan’s Human Rights Practices</a>, described the country as having
“significant human rights problems” including “…restrictions on freedom of
speech, press, assembly, and association; and lack of an independent judiciary
and due process, especially in dealing with pervasive corruption and law
enforcement and judicial abuse.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2012/kazakhstan">Transparency
International</a> in 2012 ranked the country as “not free” while<a href="http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/nations-transit/2012/kazakhstan">
Freedom House</a> gave it a worsening “democracy score” of 6.54 (with 1
representing the highest level of democratic progress and 7 the lowest.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="http://www.hrw.org/world-report-2012/world-report-2012-kazakhstan">Human
Rights Watch</a> and<a href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/EUR57/003/2010/en/3191021e-1d65-4c18-b373-ff29fe5251cb/eur570032010en.html">
Amnesty International</a> have long criticized the regime for its violations of
international standards regarding workers’ rights, routine<a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/64881"> repression of political opposition</a>, <a href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/report/kazakhstani-authorities-must-tackle-police-brutality-2010-03-22">
impunity of the police</a>, and<a href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/EUR57/001/2010/en/88639715-0122-4cdd-ab15-9583ec80f30d/eur570012010en.pdf">
intimidation and torture</a> of those detained and imprisoned. The<a href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/EUR57/002/2011/en/88652b78-fe97-4d17-bb73-10555ff95898/eur570022011en.html">
mistreatment of immigrants</a>, exploitation of<a href="http://hrbrief.org/2011/02/made-in-kazakhstan-migrant-child-labor-in-kazakhstan%25E2%2580%2599s-tobacco-fields/">
child labor</a> and<a href="http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/4ecf57862.html">
human trafficking</a> in the country continue to be documented. Recent legislation
has placed further limits on <a href="http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/2011/sca/192925.htm"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>freedom of religion</a> while the
post-Zhanaozen repression has continued up to the present.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">Critics have characterized the regime as an<a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:eUT2OfAPoOUJ:harpers.org/archive/2007/06/hbc-90000389+Kazakhstan+kleptocracy&cd=23&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a">
outright kleptocracy</a> that has siphoned off<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8171617/Nursultan-Nazarbayev-the-shepherds-son-who-became-Kazakhstans-Emperor.html">
billions to Nazarbayev and his immediate circles</a>.<a href="http://www.business-anti-corruption.com/country-profiles/europe-central-asia/kazakhstan/">
Corruption and bribery</a> at all levels of government, the judiciary included,
have long been considered “part of doing business” in the country. B<a href="http://report.globalintegrity.org/reportPDFS/2008/Kazakhstan.pdf">ribery
of school administrators and instructors for admission and grades</a> has also been
a long established practice that apparently has continued at NU despite newly
instituted “best practices,” according to <a href="http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=419261"><span style="color: blue;">online discussions</span></a>. </span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The Regime’s
New Partners</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">The list of elite institutions holding “strategic partner” contracts
with the regime – most of which regularly portray themselves as bulwarks of academic
freedom of inquiry, liberal tolerance, “ethical conduct” and the rule of law -
is impressive.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A team from the University of<a href="http://www.gse.upenn.edu/penn-gse-kazakhstan"> Pennsylvania’s Graduate
School of Education</a> (GSE) helped design NU's administrative workings and
governance procedures.<a href="http://nu.edu.kz/portal/faces/mainmenu/academics/schools4/id_4_4_2_the_school_of_science_and_technology?_afrWindowId=null&_afrLoop=4678043883902142&_afrWindowMode=0&_adf.ctrl-s#%40%3F_afrWindowId%3Dnull%26_adf.ctrl-s%3D%26_afrLoop%3D4678043883902142%26_af">
Carnegie Mellon University</a>’s global subsidiary,<a href="http://www.icarnegie.com/global_partners.html"> iCarnegie</a> landed a
Bank-brokered deal to help run the<a href="http://sst.nu.edu.kz/about-4/">
School of Science and Technology</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Experts from the <a href="http://www.news.wisc.edu/17767"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>University of Wisconsin-Madison</a>, famed for
its “<a href="http://legis.wisconsin.gov/lrb/pubs/feature/wisidea.pdf">Wisconsin
Idea</a>” progressive tradition but apparently untroubled by the repressive
nature of <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nazarbayev’s regime, designed every
detail of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.<span style="color: blue;"> <a href="http://today.duke.edu/2011/10/fuquakazakhstan">Duke</a></span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>received
the contract to set up and jointly run NU’s <a href="http://www.dukechronicle.com/article/fuqua-partner-kazakhstan-business-school">Graduate
School of Business</a>, while the<a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ij400v-6vh4J:www.thebusinessyear.com/publication/article/5/354/kazakhstan-2011/shoulders-of-giants+%22Center+for+Life+Sciences%22+&+%22Nazarbayev+University%22+&+Sarinzhipov&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us">
University of Pittsburgh</a> is involved with the<a href="http://nu.edu.kz/portal/faces/mainmenu/research/centers/centerforlife?_afrLoop=324940986939218&_afrWindowMode=0&_afrWindowId=1dgnw0tap_10#%40%3F_afrWindowId%3D1dgnw0tap_10%26_afrLoop%3D324940986939218%26_afrWindowMode%3D0%26_adf.ctrl-state%3D1dgnw0tap_22">
Center for Life Sciences</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:b_mZ0WUrIOoJ:www.pm.kz/news/show/33/news_item-885/10-11-2011+%22Nazarbayev+University%22+&+Harvard&cd=25&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a">Harvard
</a>, with prestigious faculty from its<a href="http://www.hks.harvard.edu/kaz/background.html"> Kennedy School of
Government</a> and Business School such as management “guru”<a href="http://www.isc.hbs.edu/pdf/Kazakhstan_Competitiveness_2005.01.26.pdf">
Michael Porter</a> intimately involved in shaping the country’s’s post-Soviet path,
entered an agreement to establish<a href="http://www.phmi.partners.org/News/PHMI-Archive/PHMI-to-help-new-university-in-Kazakhstan-with-med.aspx">
NU’s medical school</a>. Two U.S. Department of Energy National Labs — the
University of Chicago-affiliated<a href="http://nu.edu.kz/portal/faces/mainmenu/aboutus1/internationalpartners?_afrLoop=325011643935559&_afrWindowMode=0&_afrWindowId=1dgnw0tap_19#%40%3F_afrWindowId%3D1dgnw0tap_19%26_afrLoop%3D325011643935559%26_afrWindowMode%3D0%26_adf.ctrl-state%3D1dgnw0tap_31">
Argonne National Laboratory</a> and the University of California’s<a href="http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2011/06/23/kazakhstan-research-center/">
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory</a> — are now operating from state of the art campus
research facilities.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Additional partners include the UK’s elite<a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/global/europe-central-asia/kazakhstan/#tabs-1">
University College London</a> (UCL), centrally involved with the country’s broader
education restructuring efforts, and faculty from “strategic partner,”<a href="http://www.nu.edu.kz/portal/faces/mainmenu/recentnews/news2/postviewNews;jsessionid=2gGRQyVXZcQgVyTCV89Q0Qpf6rZRCQdKpfbSB4BJC10vMTWGL6Nm%21-172157093?postId=APKECM.NU.EDU.008021&_afrLoop=4445171429486171&_afrWindowMode=0&_afrWindowId=null#%40%3F_afrWindowId">
Cambridge University</a>, now busy with the NU “</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal;">Centre for Teacher Excellence</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">.” Experts from the<a href="http://nu.edu.kz/portal/faces/mainmenu/academics/schools4/id_4_4_5_the_graduate_school_of_public_policy?_afrWindowId=null&_afrLoop=4439603242017233&_afrWindowMode=0&_adf.ctrl-state=wjhy7y6us_4#%40%3F_afrWindowId%3Dnull%26_afrLoop%3D4439603242017233%26_afr">
National University of Singapore</a>, far from their<a href="http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/HL01Ae01.html"> authoritarian
home</a>, helped create and now manage the <a href="http://nu.edu.kz/portal/faces/mainmenu/academics/schools4/id_4_4_5_the_graduate_school_of_public_policy?_afrWindowId=nceyd9jlx_1&_afrLoop=937406552030035&_afrWindowMode=0&_adf.ctrl-state=qv1x4rrvr_4#%40%3F_afrWindowId%3Dnceyd9jlx_1%26_afrLoop%3D9374065520">Graduate
School of Public Policy</a>.</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 12pt;">“Great
Game” Players</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The NU project came about in a <a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7128:the-kazakhstan-massacre-killing-hope-to-benefit-us-geopolitical-interests"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>broader context of international competition
and imperial interest</a>, the new “Great Game” for </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Central Asia</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">. At the center of
the region, Kazakhstan sits atop<a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7128:the-kazakhstan-massacre-killing-hope-to-benefit-us-geopolitical-interests">
vast reserves of oil and gas</a>,<a href="http://www.nationofchange.org/uranium-double-standard-us-kazakhstan-and-iran-1334236438">
uranium</a>, and<a href="http://www.edgekz.com/kazakhstan-poised-for-rare-earth-boom.html">
additional mineral wealth</a> in an era of <a href="http://oilprice.com/Geopolitics/International/Resource-Wars-Geopolitics-In-A-World-Of-Dwindling-Energy-Supplies.html">increasing
global competition for diminishing energy sources</a>.</span></div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC5p5T3UhZXra2cE1vN5BHYYoFh6-N8J0QIzRBImo1hxq2w8_Ppp9EYvB4glWMc4y347V75WzMm6f8jhcnzixu3a9eC4bjpDdj_vFjEdmIdvyzklYDrf9kA_q2a7J5DbguseK3KtogpQuV/s1600/Existing+and+proposed+pipelines+in+Eurasia......png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC5p5T3UhZXra2cE1vN5BHYYoFh6-N8J0QIzRBImo1hxq2w8_Ppp9EYvB4glWMc4y347V75WzMm6f8jhcnzixu3a9eC4bjpDdj_vFjEdmIdvyzklYDrf9kA_q2a7J5DbguseK3KtogpQuV/s400/Existing+and+proposed+pipelines+in+Eurasia......png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">At Central Asia's heart, strategically vital, resource-rich Kazakhstan (2010)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">With its 4,200 mile border with </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Russia</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> to the north
and a 1,100 mile frontier with </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">China</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> to the east,
and </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Iran</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> to the southwest across the </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Caspian Sea</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, the country also has major strategic importance for the </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">US</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">. </span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">Playing its own game, the Nazarbayev regime developed a shrewd<a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:GrkIkZLBVW4J:chinausfocus.com/foreign-policy/the-underappreciated-china-kazakhstan-partnership/+Nazarbayev+%22multi-vector%22+%22foreign+policy%22&cd=20&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a">
“multi-vector” foreign policy</a> to play off the competing interests of the
country’s powerful neighbors with those of the US and lesser imperial interests
of others including Japan, Germany, Italy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="background-color: black; color: white;">M</span><span style="color: blue;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="background-color: black; color: white;">yriad</span><span style="background-color: black;"> </span></span><a href="http://www.amcham.kz/membership">US-based multinational corporations</a>,
<span style="color: white;">meanwhile, have moved </span></span><span style="color: white;"> </span><span style="color: white;">into
every sector of the country’s booming economy. International financial
institutions arrived early on, with the</span><a href="http://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/Worldbank/document/Kazakhstan-Snapshot.pdf">
World Bank</a> setting up shop in 1992.</span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">Playing their own highly competitive “<a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7128:the-kazakhstan-massacre-killing-hope-to-benefit-us-geopolitical-interests">Great
Game</a>,” major universities, in turn, have come on board more recently. The
academy’s<a href="http://www.fernwoodpublishing.ca/Doing-Missionary-Work-Dean-Neu-Elizabeth-Ocampo/http:/www.fernwoodpublishing.ca/Doing-Missionary-Work-Dean-Neu-Elizabeth-Ocampo/">
modern-day missionaries</a> have flocked to Astana bearing promises of progress
and development through a new “<a href="http://herana-gateway.org/uploads/tx_herana/27slr_1_.pdf">knowledge
economy</a>.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Enter the
“Knowledge Bank”</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">NU resulted from a number of initiatives closely coordinated by the
World Bank, these days self-described as the ‘<a href="http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/WBI/0,,contentMDK:20212623%7EmenuPK:575902%7EpagePK:209023%7EpiPK:207535%7EtheSitePK:213799%7EisCURL:Y,00.html">‘Knowledge
Bank”</a> determined to eliminate global poverty through market-centric
“education reform.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Structured from its inception during World War II to assure </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">U.S.</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> economic
supremacy in the post-war world, the Bank has never simply been a lending
institution, but rather an instrument of imperial “soft power.” In tandem with
other international financial institutions such as the International Monetary
Fund (IMF), its loan “conditionalities” and “structural adjustment” austerity
demands actually functioned to<a href="http://corporate-rule.co.uk/drupal/book/export/html/64"> increase
national debt and deepen dependency and inequality</a> across the “developing
world” through the 1970s and 1980s.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">Beginning in mid-1990s under the presidency of James Wolfensohn and his
chief economist, Joseph Stiglitz, the<a href="http://siteresources.worldbank.org/WBI/Resources/EvolutionoftheKnowledgeBank.pdf">
Bank gradually recast itself</a> as a development agency. Moving away from
narrow “make you an offer you can’t refuse” infrastructural loans, it turned
toward the shaping of programs and policy through “<a href="http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTOED/EXTECOSECWOR/0,,menuPK:5249466%7EpagePK:64829575%7EpiPK:64829612%7EtheSitePK:5249459,00.html">non-lending
technical assistance</a>; what Bank critic Paul Cammack has described as a form
of “<a href="http://www.chronicpoverty.org/uploads/publication_files/CP_2003_Cammack.pdf">deep
interventionism</a>” -- the fundamental transformation and full integration of
potential centers of economic growth through client “country ownership” and
“participation.”</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhR0cEKSY5WGONyHmXW0JeS5pHeeGRDdVUNfJs2h7467RV7TnaVn35dWSIdfyNthxP7uA_YjeU-HhEUQTXkJ0vbK0650KpmBXrHofTiRnwsjbRb1rFWq_HYIDJmhhxgHy7k9n4TpCyii4EV/s1600/WB+Knowledge+Bank.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhR0cEKSY5WGONyHmXW0JeS5pHeeGRDdVUNfJs2h7467RV7TnaVn35dWSIdfyNthxP7uA_YjeU-HhEUQTXkJ0vbK0650KpmBXrHofTiRnwsjbRb1rFWq_HYIDJmhhxgHy7k9n4TpCyii4EV/s1600/WB+Knowledge+Bank.gif" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Bank strategists in the mid-2000s shifted focus toward “tertiary
education” as a sector vital for “progress”. Understanding “knowledge” both as
a source of power and as an increasingly valuable commodity, the Knowledge
Banksters also came to emphasize the benefits gained from “knowledge transfers”
to and from the centers of a globalized “knowledge economy.” Under the new
model, the knowledge gained from experience in one country get filtered back to
Washington for use as "templates for development" passed off as
neutral "best practices" by Bank advisers and hired consultants.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Knowledge Bank” crtitics Elizabeth Ocampo and Dean Neu have compared
its operatives and consultants to the missionaries of an earlier colonialism:</span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">"…If we exchange the black robe of the missionary for
a pin-stripe suit — each a symbol of power — and the Bible for a bank ledger,
with globalization as the holy grail, we may not be far off from an acceptable
analogy of how the World Bank operates today…[Its] practices…are not to be
questioned by the congregation. Under the guise of knowing what is best for the
people of the borrower country, [their] sacred rites are clearly designed to
introduce particular forms of behaviour…" (<i><a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Doing_missionary_work.html?id=oeQTAQAAIAAJ">Doing
Missionary Work:</a><a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Doing_missionary_work.html?id=oeQTAQAAIAAJ">
The World Bank and the Diffusion of Financial Practices </a></i><a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Doing_missionary_work.html?id=oeQTAQAAIAAJ">(2008)</a>
</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 12pt;">The </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Kazakhstan</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Initiative</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">Despite (or because of) the authoritarian but stable nature of its
regime. </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Kazakhstan</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> became a proving ground, of sorts, for the Bank’s “knowledge economy” education
initiatives starting in the mid-2000s.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Bank planners saw it as a place to work out new strategies in a
relatively well-off “middle income country” not so much in need of massive
loans as an unhidden guiding hand. What better environment to work out a
strategy for the retooling of a society could there be than an authoritarian cash-flush
petrostate?</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">The Bank proposed plans <a href="http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2007/12/21/000020953_20071221091642/Rendered/PDF/41821.pdf">in
late-2007 </a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>to upgrade and
“commercialize” the nation’s research and development efforts. Part of that
blueprint called for the creation of a network of university-housed,
market-oriented research and development centers based primarily on </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">U.S.</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> models.
Subsequent World Bank proposals for the<a href="http://www.worldbank.org/projects/P102177/technical-vocational-education-modernization-tvem?lang=en">
revamping of the country’s technical and vocational education</a> followed suit.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The Knowledge Bank turn had to overcome one major hurdle -- a financial
institution, the Bank had never explicitly been in the higher education business,
as such. It looked for assistance to those major universities, the home of
countless education policy planners and think-tank experts all eager to enter
the new frontiers of the “global knowledge market.”</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The JERP</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTEDUCATION/0,,contentMDK:22070097%7EmenuPK:617592%7EpagePK:148956%7EpiPK:216618%7EtheSitePK:282386%7EisCURL:Y,00.html">According
to the Bank</a>, it received a formal request from the country’s Ministry of
Education and Science (MOES) in 2008 to assist in the construction of the “</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">New</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">University</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> at Astana.”
But Bank involvement began well before then.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The Bank’s “knowledge economy” specialists, in conjunction with the<a href="http://www.oecd.org/countries/kazakhstan/kazakhstan-investmentpolicyreview-oecd.htm">
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development</a> (OECD), had already issued
“<a href="http://www.usp.ac.fj/worldbank2009/frame/Documents/Publications_regional/Kazakhstan%20Higher%20Education.pdf">Higher
Education in Kazakhstan</a>” in January 2007. The 226-page report diagnosed
problems with the country’s education system as an outmoded but potentially
re-workable growth engine in need of major overhaul.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">That study, essentially a blueprint for the restructuring of the entire
education system, provided the bases for the MOES “sector-reform strategy”. It was
produced by the<a href="http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/2002/04/06/kazakhstan-joint-economic-research-program">
Joint Economic Research Program (JERP)</a>, an innovative partnering effort between
Bank development advisers and various Kazakhstani apparatchiks.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">With the Bank providing the expertise and the regime picking up most of
the tab, JERP initiatives during the preceding ten years had provided policy
analysis, strategic planning, and ‘best practice options” for various sectors. Those
efforts became the cornerstone of the Bank’s<a href="http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2008/05/16/000334955_20080516023607/Rendered/PDF/433930CAS0P10817374B01off0use0only1.pdf">
“Country Partnership Strategy</a>” and made </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Kazakhstan</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> <a href="http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/2012/05/21/kazakhstan-20-years-on">“a
pioneer in drawing on the Bank’s pool of knowledge</a>…[and] an example to
other countries.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">The JERP’s prescription for the renovation of Kazakhstani education called
for a rapid transfusion of “Western” expertise, technique and new institutions
built around market-driven competitiveness and “commercialization.” </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Nazarbayev</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">University</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, viewed as the
centerpiece of the entire restructuring effort, would require a US-modeled
administrative structure and procedures, curricula, “rules of engagement” with
industry, and “twinning arrangements” with top-rate universities around the
world. </span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Partnership
Development </span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTEDUCATION/0,,contentMDK:22070097%7EmenuPK:617592%7EpagePK:148956%7EpiPK:216618%7EtheSitePK:282386%7EisCURL:Y,00.html">The
challenge</a> was to make sure the new university would have an institutional
structure that would “offer the dividends from a knowledge economy” and a sound
“internationalization strategy.” With that in mind and the new campus initially
projected to open in fall 2009, Bank advisors arranged a JERP “<a href="http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTEDUCATION/0,,contentMDK:22011591%7EmenuPK:617592%7EpagePK:148956%7EpiPK:216618%7EtheSitePK:282386%7EisCURL:Y%7EisCURL:Y,00.html">Workshop
for the New University</a>” in Dec. 2008.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">That <a href="http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTEDUCATION/0,,contentMDK:22011591%7EmenuPK:617592%7EpagePK:148956%7EpiPK:216618%7EtheSitePK:282386%7EisCURL:Y%7EisCURL:Y,00.html">two-day
Astana meet-up</a> brought together a Bank team of <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>consultants and MOES officials in an effort to
define the “global knowledge” needed “for the successful design and implementation
of the New University” and to help develop “a clear, strong governance
structure,” a “financing plan,” and a “quality assurance framework.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>“Knowledge Bank” handlers then escorted
a high level MOES delegation on a month long, around-the-world “<a href="http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTEDUCATION/0,,contentMDK:22050158%7EmenuPK:617592%7EpagePK:148956%7EpiPK:216618%7EtheSitePK:282386%7EisCURL:Y%7EisCURL:Y,00.html">Partnership
Development Tour</a>” (PDT) in Feb. 2009. The <a href="http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTEDUCATION/0,,contentMDK:22050158%7EmenuPK:617592%7EpagePK:148956%7EpiPK:216618%7EtheSitePK:282386%7EisCURL:Y%7EisCURL:Y,00.html">trip’s
prospectus</a> promised the delegation would, “see first-hand a range of
governance structures, financing mechanisms, quality assurance systems,
internationalization strategies and curriculum development at established,
top-ranked universities…, while gaining exposure to the recent experiences of
young, emerging universities on the other.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The objective, <a href="http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTEDUCATION/0,,contentMDK:22050158%7EmenuPK:617592%7EpagePK:148956%7EpiPK:216618%7EtheSitePK:282386%7EisCURL:Y%7EisCURL:Y,00.html">according
to the Bank</a>, was twofold: “to apply the lessons learned to the
establishment and expansion of the new </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">university</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> of </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Astana</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">…” and for “host
institutions to learn about the concept and strategy of the </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">University</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> of </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Astana</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">.” The Kazakhs and
their guides visited multiple institutions, most of which eventually landed a
“partnering agreement” from Nazarbayev.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Stops on the <a href="http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EDUCATION/Resources/278200-1121703274255/1439264-1229357921800/5680381-1233591135842/PDT_AGENDA.pdf">PDT
globe trot</a> included visits to Stanford, Harvard, MIT, </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Cambridge</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">University</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, and the
University College of London. The journey also included stopovers at </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Qatar</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> and </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Singapore</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, two examples of capitalist development driven by authoritarian state.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Outside Doha, the group visited the <a href="http://www.qstp.org.qa/home/about-us">Qatar Science and Technology Park</a>
at <a href="http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/420/index.html">“Education City”</a>,
home to a cluster of joint projects with US-based universities including <a href="http://www.cornell.edu/visiting/qatar/">Cornell</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN_2bfBsoYM">Georgetown</a>, <a href="http://www.qatar.northwestern.edu/">Northwestern</a>, <a href="http://www.qatar.tamu.edu/">Texas A&M</a>, <a href="http://arts.vcu.edu/programs/vcuqatar/">Virginia Commonwealth</a> and <a href="http://www.qatar.cmu.edu/history">Carnegie Mellon</a> brokered <a href="http://siteresources.worldbank.org/KFDLP/Resources/QatarKnowledgeEconomyAssessment.pdf">through
the Bank</a> -- in some ways the model of things to come at Astana.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Delegates also met with higher ups at the National University of
Singapore’s <a href="http://www.spp.nus.edu.sg/Home.aspx">Lee Kuan Yew School
of Public Policy</a>. Named after the mini-state’s long-time <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/most-succesful-dictators-2011-6?op=1">“benevolent
dictator”</a> and “<a href="http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2010/06/09/in-nazarbayevs-legacy-echoes-of-singapores-lee-kuan-yew/">minister
mentor</a>” long <a href="http://www.spp.nus.edu.sg/LKY_receives_prestigious_award_from_Kazakhstan.aspx">admired
by Nazarbayev</a>, the school was a forerunner in the establishment of “<a href="http://www.spp.nus.edu.sg/Partners.aspx">partnering relationships</a>”
with major universities in the U.S., UK, Japan, and China. It soon won a
“twinning” contract to help create and run NU’s <a href="http://nu.edu.kz/portal/faces/mainmenu/academics/schools4/id_4_4_5_the_graduate_school_of_public_policy;jsessionid=yvRyQvrYvqh2Yxk2FtKQnhtqNkDyCZb3wzy8Y5s6LyQjwzgT6bKT%21-172157093?_afrLoop=3402227937496206&_afrWindowMode=0&_afrWindowId=null">Graduate
School of Public Policy</a>, currently slated to become the leading research
and training facility for </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Central Asia</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’s politicians and state bureaucrats.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">While at </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Cambridge</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, the Kazakhs were greeted by <a href="https://going-global-2012.marcom-education.com/speaker/viewSpeaker/id/205">Anne
Lonsdale</a>, at the time Deputy Vice Chancellor of the University. As the NU
got underway in 2010, Lonsdale <a href="http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=419524">briefly
became the university’s Provost</a> with oversight over the vetting process for
many of the Western faculty hired to teach at Astana. </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZGOPvYvTYnFP2FSUnDp6mh8zf2kpzPnOVYMwrXX5_3rH5Qg4Zr4uVhpPtUHQ3VRSdHjnQpwvuDdsOLcCq9edo5dO86HJNRWjFjg26Y_jltR03vwQkBfUSZQ-z9PAoRF68e8FQ0kTETAzt/s1600/Aslan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZGOPvYvTYnFP2FSUnDp6mh8zf2kpzPnOVYMwrXX5_3rH5Qg4Zr4uVhpPtUHQ3VRSdHjnQpwvuDdsOLcCq9edo5dO86HJNRWjFjg26Y_jltR03vwQkBfUSZQ-z9PAoRF68e8FQ0kTETAzt/s200/Aslan.jpg" width="145" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Once World Bank's in-country officer, Aslan Sarinzhipov is now key administrator of Naz. U. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Upon arriving in Astana, Lonsdale her other staff associate, the
“Chairman of the Executive Council of the University,” <a href="http://www.thebusinessyear.com/publication/article/5/354/kazakhstan-2011/shoulders-of-giants">Aslan
Sarinzhipov</a>. Formerly the World Bank’s in-country operations officer and previously
an economic envoy at the Kazakhstan Embassy in </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Washington</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, Sarinszhipov was
the interim President of the “New University of Astana.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">As part of NU’s “<a href="http://nu.edu.kz/portal/faces/mainmenu/aboutus1/administrations/executivestaff;jsessionid=DyJcQ9TGRtBqqbqs0hL16Gt8wjsLSsFHhgqNNQXBTGYh5WyNh96p%212143468152?_afrWindowId=null&_afrLoop=949092447289499&_afrWindowMo&_afrWindowMode=0#%40%3F_afr">Executive
Staff</a>,” Lonsdale worked alongside <a href="http://nu.edu.kz/portal/faces/mainmenu/aboutus1/administrations/executivestaff?_afrLoop=2967798028973401&_afrWindowMode=0&_afrWindowId=null#%40%3F_afrWindowId%3Dnull%26_afrLoop%3D">Shigeo
Katsu</a>, the decades-long World Bank career man, <a href="https://www.devex.com/en/news/leader-profile-shigeo-katsu-vice-president-world/29853">former
regional vice president for its Europe and Central Asia</a> division, and now
the Rector (President) of the University.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM-SoPrnmoOEO06b_K8OkBeHZWErki1fSHF4p4ydLfWHB9qoelnu3SW3fkqBcQXhW-ZiQMkHvYf0clNOmugFUiHFlw_qbm1st_sAXB_CUKEVmsLhWeg274_7FZx2A9pjRrKWlWcgDwQA0R/s1600/Katsu.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM-SoPrnmoOEO06b_K8OkBeHZWErki1fSHF4p4ydLfWHB9qoelnu3SW3fkqBcQXhW-ZiQMkHvYf0clNOmugFUiHFlw_qbm1st_sAXB_CUKEVmsLhWeg274_7FZx2A9pjRrKWlWcgDwQA0R/s1600/Katsu.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Former World Bank VP for Europe & Central Asia, Shigeo Katsu, now Rector of Nazarbayev U.</td></tr>
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<b><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">University</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">College</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">London</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">In April 2009, JERP organizers brought “key potential partners”
including representatives from Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Cambridge</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, the University
College of London, Singapore’s </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">National</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">University</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> and others
to Astana for a “<a href="http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTEDUCATION/0,,contentMDK:22148899%7EmenuPK:617592%7EpagePK:148956%7EpiPK:216618%7EtheSitePK:282386%7EisCURL:Y%7EisCURL:Y,00.html">Partnership
Development Forum</a>.” Following an NU campus tour, they met with Kazakh
officials and Bank go-betweens to finalize “partnering agreements.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">One of the <a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0905/09051203">first to sign</a>
was the University College of London (UCL). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It took charge of a campus-based “<a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/higher/welcome-to-the-new-frontier-ndash-central-asia-1737516.html">foundation
program</a>” designed to tutor incoming NU students in academic and technical
English. The College signed an additional “partnering” contract in 2011 to help
run the NU </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">School</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> of </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Engineering</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal;">Michael Worton, the UCL rep who sealed
the deal, understood the Great Game stakes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Noting that, “</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal;">Kazakhstan</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal;"> is emerging as a key strategic
partner for the </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal;">UK</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal;">,” he continued, "It also is a
country… committed to modernisation and internationalism (sic) … [with]
enormous natural resources.” </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Penn’s Part</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Personnel from the </span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">University</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> of <a href="http://www.upenn.edu/spotlights/penn-gse-kazakhstan">Pennsylvania</a></span><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.upenn.edu/spotlights/penn-gse-kazakhstan">’s
Graduate School of Education</a> (GSE) became involved early on in planning of
NU. Its experts helped develop the university’s governance structure and
policies.</span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">According to <a href="http://www.gse.upenn.edu/penn-gse-kazakhstan">the
GSE’s account</a>, a “chance encounter” led to the Penn-NU partnership. As the
story goes, in Oct. 2009 <a href="http://www.gse.upenn.edu/faculty/ruby">Alan
Ruby</a>, at the time a guest lecturer on global education at the GSE, happened
to be working as a consultant with the </span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Kazakhstan</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> finance ministry, “when word came about President Nazarbayev’s plans.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://www.gse.upenn.edu/penn-gse-kazakhstan">Telling his
Kazakhstani associates</a> that it was “not just a matter of magicking up a
university,” he informed them that they had to think about admissions, curriculum,
faculty, governance, etc.. When asked if he knew how to do such things, he
informed his Astana colleagues that he just happened to know people at Penn who
had the needed expertise.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">At the time, Ruby was working as a private <a href="http://www.gse.upenn.edu/faculty/ruby">consultant for the World Bank</a>,
his former employer. As an operative with “a longstanding interest in education
reform, globalization, alliances between unions and governments, and the role
of education in developing economies,” <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:yJWlNLyqXDAJ:impactnetwork.org/boards.jsp+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a">Ruby earlier had </a><span style="color: blue;"><a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:yJWlNLyqXDAJ:impactnetwork.org/boards.jsp+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a">led development programs</a> </span> in </span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">China</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">, </span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Vietnam</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> and </span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Indonesia</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> as director of the Bank’s </span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">East Asia</span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> “Human Development Sector.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">As a result of Ruby’s “<a href="http://www.gse.upenn.edu/penn-gse-kazakhstan">chance encounter</a>,” a <a href="http://www.upenn.edu/spotlights/penn-gse-kazakhstan">Kazakh planning team
went to Penn</a> in Feb. 2010 for a one-week crash course on university administration
led by the heads of the GSE’s higher education management division and other
Penn experts.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">While the Kazakh planners enlisted help with academic programs
elsewhere, the <a href="http://www.gse.upenn.edu/penn-gse-kazakhstan">Penn
advisors assisted with larger institutional issues</a>. As a result of GSE
input, </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Kazakhstan</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’s rubber stamp parliament <a href="http://www.universalnewswires.com/centralasia/viewstory.aspx?id=1940">passed
legislation</a> requiring all the country’s colleges and universities to
develop Boards of Trustees by 2020. The Penn team, <a href="http://www.pm.kz/program/expert/view/54/9">according to Ruby</a>, also
assisted in the recruitment of NU’s Rector -- the former World Bank man, Shigeo
Katsu.</span><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimVrUwtVzNJyWg2jomVN3ThVNo9ivTfZzGQRZZ1BaDsR2O7QWITCRPWPgsGveOcSZKGDkF-XUHGlTafowoxK6SpH7ohu5-ILVn-i_28V2-YtlT0vCZN-YwCppniCofBxWHs_SJTsV7i_O-/s1600/Ruby.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="153" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimVrUwtVzNJyWg2jomVN3ThVNo9ivTfZzGQRZZ1BaDsR2O7QWITCRPWPgsGveOcSZKGDkF-XUHGlTafowoxK6SpH7ohu5-ILVn-i_28V2-YtlT0vCZN-YwCppniCofBxWHs_SJTsV7i_O-/s320/Ruby.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Penn GSE lecturer and former World Bank hand Alan Ruby, now Kazakhstan education adviser</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Continuing on as both <a href="http://www.gse.upenn.edu/faculty/ruby">a
Bank consultant and a NU advisor</a>, Ruby helped plan the <a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/65035">Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools</a>,
a national network of secondary schools created to prepare elite students for
technocratic and managerial career track programs at NU. He also has played an
ongoing role in restructuring the country’s education system through its “<a href="http://www.primeminister.kz/program/about/index/9">National Education
Development Program</a>.”</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Dennis Detray: Man Behind the Curtain</span></b><!--[if !mso]>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://www.resultsfordevelopment.org/experts/dennis-de-tray">Dennis De Tray</a>, </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">another long-time World Bank operative,</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> has come to play a central role in the development of Nazarbayev U and
the country’s efforts at “education reform.” </span></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> Former World Bank operative and apologist for Indonesia's Suharto, Nazarbayev advisor Dennis De Tray </td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Currently a “private consultant”
to the Astana regime, he initially received <a href="http://siteresources.worldbank.org/MONGOLIAINMONGOLIANEXTN/Resources/CV_Dennis_De_Tray.pdf">his MA in 1972 from the University of Chicago
Economics Department</a>, where he <a href="http://www.cgdev.org/content/enews/detail/14292/">studied with</a> “free market” proponent and neoliberal
ideologue, <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitextlo/int_alharberger.html">Arnold “Al” Harberger</a>, best known his
instrumental in <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/mar/03/chile-earthquake">implementing free-market reforms</a>
in 1970s Chile under the Augosto Pinochet dictatorship.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Upon leaving </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Chicago</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">, De Tray <a href="http://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/d/detray_dennis_n.html">worked </a><a href="http://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/d/detray_dennis_n.html">for over a decade </a><a href="http://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/d/detray_dennis_n.html">as a researcher at the RAND Corporation</a>.
He worked at the World Bank <a href="http://siteresources.worldbank.org/MONGOLIAINMONGOLIANEXTN/Resources/CV_Dennis_De_Tray.pdf">from 1983-2006</a>. While at the Bank,
<a href="http://siteresources.worldbank.org/MONGOLIAINMONGOLIANEXTN/Resources/CV_Dennis_De_Tray.pdf">De Tray held multiple positions around the
world</a>, ranging from </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Central America</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> and the </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Dominican
Republic</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">, to </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Indonesia</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">, and eventually made his way to </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Central Asia</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> and </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Kazakhstan</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">He was World Bank Country Director for </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Indonesia</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">, stationed in </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Jakarta</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> from July 1997-March 1999, a period coinciding with the end of the
US-backed Suharto dictatorship.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Under De Tray’s watch as the Bank’s Country Director those years, an
estimated $25 million in World Bank funds earmarked for development projects, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117798706852187746-search.html">disappeared, siphoned off by the
kleptocratic regime</a>. The <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117798706852187746-search.html"><i>Wall Street Journal</i></a> subsequently
noted that “World Bank officials knew corruption in Bank-funded projects was
common, but never commissioned any broad reports tracking how much money was
lost to it.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">A subsequent </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">US</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> <a href="http://www.odiousdebts.org/pi/documents/odious_debts/Criminal_Debt.html">Government Accountability Office (GAO) report</a> <a href="http://www.odiousdebts.org/pi/documents/odious_debts/Criminal_Debt.html">stated</a>
that “Dennis De Tray ignored internal reports detailing program kickbacks,
skimming and fraud because he was unwilling to upset the Suharto family and
their cronies whom he believed were responsible for </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Indonesia</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">’s economic boom.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://www.cgdev.org/content/article/detail/1423657/">Responding to the GAOs findings</a>
and other criticism of the Bank’s practices in </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Indonesia</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">, DeTray in 2006 stated that there was “a trade-off between dealing
with corruption and the pace with which we improve the lives of the poor. The
tougher we are on corruption and the corrupt, the less we will improve the
lives of the poor today.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Following Suharto’s death in Jan. 2008, De Tray suggested that critics should shut up
and <a href="http://blogs.cgdev.org/globaldevelopment/2008/01/giving-suharto-his-due.php">give the dictator his due</a>: “I have taken a good deal of grief over the years since I left </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Indonesia</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> as an apologist for Suharto. Why? Because I have argued that the bad
that he did — and some of it was horrific — should be balanced against the
good, not for the sake of Suharto but for the sake of development,” <a href="http://blogs.cgdev.org/globaldevelopment/2008/01/giving-suharto-his-due.php">De Tray wrote</a>. “To see Suharto as
just another corrupt dictator is to risk losing the lessons from one of the
great development success stories of all times.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">De Tray, touting increases in per capita income as a measure of such
“success,” neglected to mention that today, “120 million citizens…live on less
than two dollars a day” and that tens of millions live without bare
necessities, such as “clean water, proper nutrition, healthcare, education,
clothing and shelter,” according to a <a href="http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/06/poverty-rises-with-wealth-in-indonesia/">Jan. 2012 </a><a href="http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/06/poverty-rises-with-wealth-in-indonesia/"><i>Inter Press Service</i></a>.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>De
Tray and NU</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">After </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Indonesia</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">, <a href="http://siteresources.worldbank.org/MONGOLIAINMONGOLIANEXTN/Resources/CV_Dennis_De_Tray.pdf">and a stint working for the IMF in Hanoi,
Vietnam</a>, he then went on to <a href="http://siteresources.worldbank.org/MONGOLIAINMONGOLIANEXTN/Resources/CV_Dennis_De_Tray.pdf">served for roughly five years</a> as
the Bank’s Director for its </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Europe</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> and Central Asia Region, based in </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Almaty</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">, </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Kazakhstan</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">. De Tray served in this capacity at the same time that the future
President of NU, Shigeo Katsu was working as the Bank’s Vice President for the
Region.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Upon leaving the Bank, <a href="http://siteresources.worldbank.org/MONGOLIAINMONGOLIANEXTN/Resources/CV_Dennis_De_Tray.pdf">De Tray became the first Vice President</a>
of a <a href="http://www.cgdev.org/doc/Annualreport/CGD@5.pdf">Bank-funded</a> NGO, the <a href="http://www.cgdev.org/section/about/">Center for Global Development</a> (CGD), a self-described “think
and do” development think-tank. In 2009 CGD’s <a href="http://www.cgdev.org/doc/annualreports/CGD%20Annual%20Report%202009.pdf">funding</a> came from the likes of
Goldman Sachs, Chevron, Cargill, DeBeers, and Nestle, among others. <a href="http://www.cgdev.org/doc/Annualreport/CGD@5.pdf">In 2006</a>, it received funds from Citigroup, Nike, Microsoft,
and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the ultra-conservative <a href="http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/Smith_Richardson_Foundation">Smith Richardson Foundation</a>, and
many others.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">CGD’s <a href="http://www.cgdev.org/section/about/board">Board of Directors</a> also has many
ex-World Bank employees, including <a href="http://www.whirledbank.org/ourwords/summers.html">Larry Summers</a>, the <a href="http://www.harvard.edu/history/presidents/summers">former Harvard University President</a>
who from 2009-2010 worked as the <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/12/091012fa_fact_lizza">head of the Obama White House’s National
Economic Council</a>. During Summers’ brief stint as Chief Economist of
the World Bank from 1991-1993, De Tray <a href="http://siteresources.worldbank.org/MONGOLIAINMONGOLIANEXTN/Resources/CV_Dennis_De_Tray.pdf">worked as his Senior Economic Advisor</a>.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">De Tray is also a <a href="http://www.resultsfordevelopment.org/experts/dennis-de-tray">Principal</a> at <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20080118024049/http:/resultsfordevelopment.org/r4d.php">Results for Development </a>(R4D),
founded in late-2007 as a “high-quality research approach of a traditional
think tank with the capacity to turn that research into action on the ground in
developing countries.” Also listed as an Expert for R4D is <a href="http://www.resultsfordevelopment.org/experts/alan-ruby">Alan Ruby</a>, associate at the </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">University</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> of </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Pennsylvania</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">’s Grad School of Education and
today a key advisor for the <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/18/2012/12/13/the-world-bank-brings-nazarbayev-university-to-kazakhstan/">restructuring of Kazakhstan’s education
system</a>.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">R4D’s <a href="http://www.resultsfordevelopment.org/about-us/who-we-are/our-funders">funders</a> include the World Bank,
the Government of Kazakhstan, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the United
States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Rockefeller
Foundation, among others.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Under the auspices of R4D, De Tray helped lay the groundwork of what
would become NU while working as a senior advisor for “<a href="http://www.resultsfordevelopment.org/focus-areas/kazakhstan-strategic-plan-2020">Kazakhstan 2030</a>,” the country’s
economic development plan for the next two decades. A key portion of the
Kazakhstan 2030 “<a href="http://www.edgekz.com/national/blue-print-for-success-kazakhstans-next-20-years.html">Blue Print For Success</a>” — as it is
referred to as by Kazakh state media — deals with higher education and the
creation of “world-class universities.”</span></span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" class="size-full wp-image-49716" height="186" src="file:///C:/Users/AMR/AppData/Local/Temp/msohtml1/01/clip_image001.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="De Tray Nazarbayev Hand Shake" width="300" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dennis Detray greets the "Leader for Life" at Nazarbayev U.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/dropzone/2012/12/De-Tray-Nazarbayev-Hand-Shake.jpg"><span style="text-decoration: none;"></span></a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">De Tray now serves on the <a href="http://www.nac.gov.kz/en/about/corpmanagement/">Board of Directors</a> of the </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">National</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Analytical</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Center</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">. Among NAC’s
projects are <a href="http://www.nac.gov.kz/en/human_capital/">Human Capital Development</a>, where
one of the <a href="http://www.nac.gov.kz/en/strategic_initiatives/index.php">Strategic Initiatives</a> is
fulfilling the dictates of Kazakhstan 2030.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">“Quality of higher education will correspond to the best world
standards and practices,” <a href="http://www.nac.gov.kz/en/projects/completed/100/">reads the NAC website</a>. “The effective system of technical
education and vocational training, integrated into the world educational
sector, will be created.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Most significantly, De Tray has also served as a key “go-between” for </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Kazakhstan</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">’s government, facilitating meetings between university partners,
upper-level NU management, and high level Kazakh government officials.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">A case in point: De Tray accompanied a high-level Kazakh delegation
including the country’s Deputy Prime Minister <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/24164132@N05/4409182066/in/set-72157623435615557/">Yerbol Orenbayev and then-President of “New
University of Astana” (now NU), the </a><a href="http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/ECAEXT/EXTECAREGTOPKNOECO/0,,contentMDK:20725944%7EmenuPK:1942516%7EpagePK:34004173%7EpiPK:34003707%7EtheSitePK:677607,00.html">former employee of the World Bank</a><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/24164132@N05/4409182066/in/set-72157623435615557/">, Aslan Sarinzhipov</a> to the
University of Wisconsin-Madison in March 2010 for the <a href="http://www.news.wisc.edu/17767">signing
of contract</a> to assist in the creation of NU’s Social Sciences and
Humanities Department.</span></span></div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKuU7fhlNWdk2UvFX-Fwm-ZLsBh3p3C9diReB3R-P7o2glQH5ryhwj-lfFsOfzrta4FjInhai_nlzw19png0b9miF1GFoo5zFWLLZHvgWWuPCpiyPl59GQUVkeKY01I1lgpqg0JkUAaY4P/s1600/DeTray+&+Massimov.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKuU7fhlNWdk2UvFX-Fwm-ZLsBh3p3C9diReB3R-P7o2glQH5ryhwj-lfFsOfzrta4FjInhai_nlzw19png0b9miF1GFoo5zFWLLZHvgWWuPCpiyPl59GQUVkeKY01I1lgpqg0JkUAaY4P/s1600/DeTray+&+Massimov.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">De Tray greets Karim Massimov, NU Supreme Board of Trustees member and former Prime Minister (now Nazarbayev’s Chief-of-Staff) as fellow Board Member at June 2011 NU international partners
meeting.</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">A key liaison for the World Bank-assisted "partnering projects," De Tray was also present for a <a href="http://en.tengrinews.kz/kazakhstan_news/Massimov-met-with-representatives-of-universities-partners-of-Nazarbayev-2696/">June 2011 Astana meeting</a> of
representatives from NU’s international university partners and Kazakhstan’s
then-Prime Minister Karim Massimov (<a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/24/us-kazakhstan-government-idUSBRE88N04L20120924">currently </a></span></span><a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/24/us-kazakhstan-government-idUSBRE88N04L20120924"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">“</span></span></a><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/62715">President-for-Life</a>” Nazarbayev</span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/24/us-kazakhstan-government-idUSBRE88N04L20120924">'s Chief-of-Staff</a>). </span></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_qRDUP8Wz6YkcDeK1Ya__98JUNNxSC4lCoMMy54RVXNVrMKM-WUN7ET-3Dns9-qy7VCjaWcuYGDwn-5oQEfIsm-QFtnNTMvsuknszZC-bzfH4-CxfMZ435sRGN5nohppGNJIHvZK09qGV/s1600/Detray+Iraq.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_qRDUP8Wz6YkcDeK1Ya__98JUNNxSC4lCoMMy54RVXNVrMKM-WUN7ET-3Dns9-qy7VCjaWcuYGDwn-5oQEfIsm-QFtnNTMvsuknszZC-bzfH4-CxfMZ435sRGN5nohppGNJIHvZK09qGV/s400/Detray+Iraq.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A deal maker and man of many hats, Dennis Detray pictured here in <a href="http://blogs.cgdev.org/globaldevelopment/2008/04/the-other-surge-a-frontline-vi.php">Iraq, 2008</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">[For more on DeTray,
including his stints in US-occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, as a
consultant and contractor for the Pentagon, see: <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/18/the-men-behind-the-curtain-at-nazarbayev-world-bank-university/">"The Men Behind the Curtain...," </a><i>Counterpunch, </i>(December 18, 2012)]</span></span></div>
<br />
<b><span style="font-size: 12pt;">English Only</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">The first crop of NU students began classes in Sept. 2010 taught by a
largely non-Kazakh faculty with instruction entirely in English, <a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/61658">an entrance requirement</a>. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The country’s entire academic curriculum had previously been taught in
Russian or Kazakh. But according to official accounts, Nazarbayev followed the <a href="http://82.200.130.64/k/1152243624/2011-03-02">advice of his fellow
autocrat, Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew</a> and made English NUs primary language,
viewed as the <i>lingua franca</i> for international scientific, technical and
business success.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Alongside Kazakh counterparts increasingly mindful of the
Anglo-American comparative advantage in higher education, the Knowledge Bank’s
advisers and academic specialists also promoted an “English only” curriculum.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Critics of such requirements have described them as a form of <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/mar/13/linguistic-imperialism-english-language-teaching">“linguistic
imperialism,”</a> a means of tethering client state institutions to </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">U.S.</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> corporate
and strategic interests. English currently is being mandated and taught at all
levels in the Kazakh system, beginning with pre-school.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Autonomy”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Early in 2011, </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Kazakhstan</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’s rubber stamp parliament unanimously passed and President Nazarbayev
signed a new law, “<a href="http://www.docstoc.com/docs/129012887/On-the-status-of-Nazarbayev-University_-Nazarbayev-Intellectual-Schools-and-Nazarbayev-Fund">On
the status of Nazarbayev University, Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools and
Nazarbayev Fund</a>.” The enactment granted NU and the “</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Intellectual</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Schools</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">” a range of
“special status” exemptions from Education Ministry regulations and mandates.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The law granted NU administrators the authority to set academic and
governance practices in line with “Western educational standards.” <a href="http://www.docstoc.com/docs/129012887/On-the-status-of-Nazarbayev-University_-Nazarbayev-Intellectual-Schools-and-Nazarbayev-Fund">It
also called for</a> the “integration of education, science and industry – the
inseparability of educational process from scientific and practical activities
in [the] University and… [the] provision of strategic partnerships with science
and business organizations.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A line in<span style="color: blue;"></span> the enactment narrowly
defined the “principle of academic freedom” solely as “independence of the
University… in defining and selection of educational programs, forms and
methods of implementation of education activities, and the directions of
conducting scientific research.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The “guiding principle” dealing with “Autonomy and Academic Freedom,”
states that the University will,</span><br />
</div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">[E]nsure independence and collegiality in management and
decision making based on democratic principles and personal responsibility of
each individual involved; guarantee academic freedom of teachers and
researchers<i> within their research, and educational activities.</i>(emphasis
ours)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">While seemingly enshrining “autonomy” and “academic freedom,” the new
law also granted ultimate authority over the University, its feeder
Instructional Schools and its specially created endowment fund to a “<a href="http://nu.edu.kz/portal/faces/mainmenu/aboutus1/administrations/managementstructure1?_afrWindowId=13xp4ko5b0_10&_afrLoop=47071724657556&_afrWindowMode=0&_adf.ctrl-state=i6crc3i7k_4#%40%3F_afrWindowId%3D13xp4ko5b0_10%26_a">Supreme
Board of Trustees</a>” comprised entirely of Nazarbayev loyalists and
personally chaired by the “Leader for Life.”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<b><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
Nazarbayev Fund</span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">The new autonomy law formally establishment of the “<a href="http://test.centralasianewswire.com/Tourism/viewstory.aspx?id=3090">Nazarbayev
Fund</a>,” designed to emulate self-sustaining university endowments in the </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">U.S.</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> and
elsewhere. Like much else associated with the University, the World Bank
assisted in setting up the Fund. Its investments are currently <a href="http://test.centralasianewswire.com/Tourism/viewstory.aspx?id=3090">managed
by Cambridge Associates</a>, a multinational leader in the handling of major
university endowments. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">With no successful alumni on hand, initial <a href="http://www.universalnewswires.com/centralasia/viewstory.aspx?id=3090">contributions
to the fund</a> came from “some of </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Kazakhstan</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’s world-class companies, such as its petroleum and mining giants.” Wealthy
donors with close ties to the regime immediately ponied up. The Kazakh-based mining
multinational, <a href="http://www.enrc.com/about-us/glance">Eurasian Natural
Resources Corporation</a> (ENRC), largely controlled by three <i>Forbes 500 </i>billionaires and
Nazarbayev associates, <a href="http://www.iii.co.uk/investment/detail/?display=news&code=cotn:ENRC.L&action=article&articleid=8533099">ponied up $98 million</a> <span style="color: blue;"></span>to
the total endowment, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>estimated to be
worth $370 million by mid-2011. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">Heavily invested in mineral mines in </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Africa</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Brazil</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> and
elsewhere, ENRC has been subject to a <a href="http://100r.org/2012/06/fast-track-past-red-flags/">number of
investigations</a> surrounding <a href="https://100r.org/2012/05/mining-copper-burying-truth/">allegations of
corrupt investment practices</a> and “insider trading”.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Industrial
Knowledge</span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">The restructuring of </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Kazakhstan</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’s education system with </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Nazarbayev</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">U.</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> at its center has
had nothing to do with the values of liberal democracy or academic freedom.
Except, of course, in some of the self-serving rhetoric of those signing
contracts with the regime or perhaps some academics who somehow believe their
presence as the bearers of “Western values” will induce a positive change “over
time.”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">Still underway, that restructuring has had everything to do with serving
corporate demands for “applied science” geared to industrial needs and the
“commercialization” of any and all intellectual property and discoveries. Fully
operational, the system will systematically turn out a technocratic and
scientific “<a href="http://kazpravda.kz/c/1308299649">elite of the future</a>,”–
a corps of technicians, administrators and bureaucrats in service to an
authoritarian state and its corporate partners, foreign and domestic.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">Member of the NU’s administrative <a href="http://nu.edu.kz/portal/faces/mainmenu/aboutus1/administrations/managementstructure1?_afrWindowId=10hdi9cqh8_19&_afrLoop=701696369765676&_afrWindowMode=0&_adf.ctrl-state=xbwasy7wm_4#%40%3F_afrWindowId%3D10hdi9cqh8_19%26_a">Executive
Council</a>, Kadisha Dairova — the former staffer at Kazakhstan’s Washington
embassy who <a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/61658">administered the
state’s “study abroad” Bolashak Program </a>– stated it clearly.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Industry and the university must cooperate, otherwise the universities
graduate students with skills that aren’t applicable. Industry must tell us
what kind of students to produce and train.” In that vein, the University has set up its own advisory <a href="http://www.slideserve.com/eloise/nazarbayev-university">Industrial Board</a>
comprised of executives from a number of firms to assure
“education-research-industry integration.”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://kazworld.info/?p=18000">Dairova candidly spoke</a> of NU
as “a unique project that was from the outset created as a testing ground for
new innovative educational and research projects…” She explained elsewhere that,
“…</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Nazarbayev</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">University</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> is a kind of educational and scientific hub of </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Kazakhstan</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> and in the future will be one for </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Central Asia</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> and the entire
post-Soviet space.”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">While some conservative academics and ideologues have long claimed that
the “free market” and democracy are inextricably tied together, the program
developers and World Bank operatives have long understood that dictatorial
regimes can be quite efficient in propelling economic growth and industrial
development. The Kazakh leadership, despite its public relations lip service to
“democracy,” “autonomy,” and “academic freedom” encoded in the law but violated
in practice has certainly understood that.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">The <a href="http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/nations-transit/2012/kazakhstan">2012
Freedom House country report</a> framed it well, stating “</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Kazakhstan</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> has used the rhetoric of reform and democratization to appease the
West without demonstrating a genuine commitment to these processes in
practice.”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
Allen Ruffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18310195276315827048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458840028095794061.post-91391001540728367362013-01-09T05:11:00.000-08:002019-02-02T13:29:36.276-08:00Why Progressives Should Oppose Hagel<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal;">[An initial version of this piece appeared on <a href="http://www.progressive.org/why-progressives-should-oppose-hagel#.UOz9S0M4ABF.facebook">The Progressive Magazine's webzine</a> on Jan. 7th] </span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtsL9mxNU7KajGRFih6a74nUrKq0U1RxyNyy0LeFJg2LGlQoM9jw_wGqb-UtpnDHNnOiFXUDEAfaALhfs_3GzbmL_mtlows0G2BP_wVLRPkd_ENhW4ScACEdhp7-m_CdDOC8jsgd6purNy/s1600/Hagel+at+AC.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtsL9mxNU7KajGRFih6a74nUrKq0U1RxyNyy0LeFJg2LGlQoM9jw_wGqb-UtpnDHNnOiFXUDEAfaALhfs_3GzbmL_mtlows0G2BP_wVLRPkd_ENhW4ScACEdhp7-m_CdDOC8jsgd6purNy/s1600/Hagel+at+AC.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Chair of the Atlantic Council Chuck Hagel to head Pentagon?</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Following
weeks of trial balloon conjecture, White House point men announced over the
weekend that President Obama would nominate Chuck Hagel, the former Senator
from </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Nebraska</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> and oft-described “moderate Republican,” to succeed Leon
Panetta as Secretary of Defense. </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Conservative
critics immediately raised objections as soon as Hagel’s name surfaced as a
probable nominee in mid November. The usual pack of Neocon watchdogs charged
him with being inadequately hawkish on </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Iran</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> and out of lock-step in requisite full
support for </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Israel</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">. </span></span></div>
<h1>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Towing its increasingly
neocon editorial line, the Washington Post on November 18th editorialized that Hagel
was<span class="entry-title"> “<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/chuck-hagel-is-not-right-for-defense-secretary/2012/12/18/07e03e20-493c-11e2-ad54-580638ede391_story.html?hpid=z6">not
the right choice for defense secretary</a>.” Citing the ex-Senator-cum-Washington
insider’s </span>public record, the WAPO suggested that, “Mr. Hagel’s stated
positions on critical issues, ranging from defense spending to Iran, fall well
to the left of those pursued by Mr. Obama during his first term.” (Hagel once had
the temerity to suggest that Pentagon spending should be “pared down.”
Imagine!).<span> </span></span></span></h1>
<h1>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Detractors dredged up a
back-when Senate vote against Iran sanctions as right-wing media hacks echo
chambered alleged “anti-Semitism” based upon the Senator’s years ago use of the
phrase “Jewish lobby”. He certainly rankled some </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Israel</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> right-or-wrong types in 2006 when
he said, “I’m not an Israeli senator. I’m a </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">United States</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> senator. I support </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Israel</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">, but my first interest is I take
an oath of office to the Constitution of the </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">United States</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">, not to a president, not to a
party, not to </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Israel</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">. If I go run for Senate in </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Israel</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">, I’ll do that.”</span></span></h1>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Liberal
backers, in response, immediately sprung to the Nebraskan’s defense. <i>The
Atlantic</i>’s James Fallows described him as a “wise bipartisan pick” with </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Vietnam</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> combat-vet cred and a “cautious
realist-centrist record” while filleting the “<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/12/the-bogus-case-against-chuck-hagel/266429/">bogus
case against Chuck Hagel</a>.” </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Hagel in
August, 2005 had won favor among centrist types when he became the first
Republican Senator to publicly criticize the </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Iraq</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> war and to call for </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">US</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> withdrawal. Criticizing then
President Bush, the GOP, and the Patriot Act's erosion of civil liberties that
December, Hagel stated that, "I took an oath of office to the
Constitution, I didn't take an oath of office to my party or my
president," He later went on, in 2007, to criticize plans for the Iraq war
“surge”. Such rank-breaking statements, while endearing him to disquieted
anti-war moderates have never been forgotten by the Right. </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
problem today is that neither Hagel’s detractors nor his supporters have really
fully laid out who he is or why progressives should firmly oppose his
appointment as the Pentagon’s top gun. Certainly, those to the left should not
fall into the trap of cheering on Obama’s latest War Department pick, solely
because the Right stands opposed. </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Currently
a member of the <a href="http://www.chevron.com/about/leadership/boardofdirectors/hagel/">board of
directors of Chevron</a>, Hagel led the charge in 1997 to block ratification of
the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement that would have committed the </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">US</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> and other industrial nations to
reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The Hagel-Byrd Resolution, co-authored by <span> </span>the coal friendly Democrat and “conscience of
the Senate,” West Virginia’s Robert Byrd, argued that the Kyoto</span><span> </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">failed to include developing countries and posed barriers to US
economic expansion.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">On his way
through the revolving door to higher fame and fortune, Hagel announced in
September, 2007, that he would not seek a third term in the Senate. While his current
mainstream biographies note that he happens to teach at </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Georgetown</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">, they somehow consistently miss
mentioning that he might have to give up his current position on Chevron’s
board.<span> </span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">He
probably will have to rotate out of his seat as <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/piab/members">co-chair</a>
of the <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/piab/about">President’s
Intelligence Advisory Board</a>, the appointed body of</span><span> </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">“</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">distinguished citizens selected from the national security,
political, academic, and private sectors…, independent of the Intelligence
Community, free from day-to-day management or operational responsibilities..,
with full access to the complete range of intelligence-related information.”</span></span></div>
<h4>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Hagel also currently sits
on the board of directors of the <a href="http://americansecurityproject.org/about/board-of-directors/the-honorable-chuck-hagel/">American
Security Project</a>, a Washington-based imperial think tank committed to
“understanding and articulating American beliefs and values related to </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">U.S.</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> foreign policy,” and forging a
domestic “bipartisan consensus” on “a new national security </span><strong><span>strategy</span></strong><span style="font-weight: normal;"> that will restore </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">America</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">’s leadership…”<span> </span>Founded in 2007, with Hagel and Hillary
Clinton’s State Department heir apparent, John Kerry as founding members, the
ASP is heavily involved in “energy security policy research,” and “<a href="http://americansecurityproject.org/issues/climate-energy-and-security/energy/defense-energy/">the
national security need for biofuels</a>” (i.e., the “greening” of the Pentagon)
as well as “cultivating strategic responses to 21st century challenges.”</span></span></h4>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">If he
receives Senate confirmation, Hagel’s current position as <a href="http://www.acus.org/users/chuck-hagel">Chair</a> of the non-governmental
but immensely influential <a href="http://www.acus.org/users/chuck-hagel">Atlantic
Council</a> will most likely be placed on hold, at least until he returns to
“private life.”</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Seldom
discussed, the Washington-based Council was founded 50 years ago as an elite
foreign policy NGO committed to forwarding US “national interest” and continued
Cold War supremacy within the “Atlantic community” and beyond. According to
foreign policy critic Rick Rozoff, it</span><span> </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">was established in 1961 by former
Secretaries of State Dean Acheson and Christian Herter to <a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-insiduous-role-of-the-atlantic-council-securing-the-21st-century-for-nato/18945">bolster
support for NATO</a>. Under </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">US</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> leadership, Atlantic Councils were
set up in affiliated member states for the same purpose. </span></span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">A recent <a href="http://www.acus.org/?q=people/board">list of Council associates</a>
reads like a “who’s who” of the Washington
foreign policy establishment.<b> </b>Henry Kissinger’s disciple, the former
National Security adviser <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Brent_Scowcroft">Brent
Scowcroft</a> has played a significant role in shaping the contemporary
organization.<span> </span>Obama’s<b> </b>first National
Security Advisor <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/j/james_l_jones/index.html">James
L. Jones</a> and UN Ambassador Susan Rice, the first pick to succeed Panetta at
the Pentagon, formerly worked for the Council. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Hagel’s predecessor as Council Chair, Jones had been a Marine Corps
four-star general, top commander of U.S. European Command and NATO Supreme
Allied Commander Europe from 2003 to 2006. He also served as Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice’s special envoy for Middle East security
and in that position openly discussed deploying NATO troops to the West
Bank, a recommendation echoed by his Atlantic Council colleague, Scowcroft.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Scowcroft, a retired Air Force general and National Security Advisor under
Presidents Ford and George H. W. Bush, is now the chairman of the Atlantic
Council’s International Advisory Board.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Co-chaired by Hagel, the Council’s <a href="http://www.acus.org/people/sag">Strategic
Advisors Group</a> is a standing body of roughly 40 senior experts on NATO and
transatlantic security issues. Founded in 2007 by then Council Chairman Jones,
Scowcroft, and others, the SAG describes itself as the “pre-eminent institution
for strategic thinking and analysis on Euro-Atlantic security” through its “thought
leadership” on issues such as Afghanistan/Pakistan, and NATO’s Strategic
Concept. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">The SAG produces major public policy briefs and reports, and hosts
off-the-record “Strategy Sessions” for senior U.S.
and European civilian and military officials, while providing “informal, expert
advice to senior policymakers.”</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">With Chuck Hagel at the helm, the Council’s attentions have increasingly turned
toward Central and South Asia. As part of that pivot,
especially toward oil and uranium rich and strategically located <a href="http://www.acus.org/event/twenty-years-kazakhstan-independence-and-us-kazakhstan-relations">Kazakhstan</a>,
the Council undertook a project in 2010 entitled <strong><span style="font-weight: normal;">‘</span></strong><strong><span style="font-weight: normal;">Eurasia</span></strong><strong><span style="font-weight: normal;"> as Part of Transatlantic Security’.</span></strong>
Also headed by Hagel, that effort has sought to “shape the transatlantic debate
on security in Eurasia…” <span> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The Council’s <a href="http://www.acus.org/?q=tags/eurasia-task-force">Eurasia Task Force</a>
has been funded by a <a href="http://www.acus.org/?q=tags/eurasia-task-force">grant
from the Kazakhstan</a> government, currently ruled by the authoritarian
“president for life,” Nursultan Nazarbayev. Additional support has come though
the Council’s Strategic Advisory Group as well as <em><span style="font-style: normal;">from EADS-North America, the </span></em></span><em><span style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;">US</span></em><em><span style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"> subsidiary of one </span></em><em><span style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;">Europe</span></em><em><span style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;">’s largest
military aircraft manufacturers presently providing weaponry to repressive
regimes across </span></em><em><span style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;">Central Asia</span></em><em><span style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;">. </span></em></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">While
still in elected office and well before he joined the BOD at Chevron (today a
major investor in </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Kazakhstan</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">’s </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Caspian Sea</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> oil fields) or became Chair of the
Atlantic Council, Hagel had been the only </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">US</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> Senator to visit all five Central
Asian republics. <span> </span>His dovetailing
interests and ties to the region have continued since.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">In May,
2010 Michele Kinman, the deputy director of <a href="http://crudeaccountability.org/mission">Crude Accountabilty</a>, an
environmental citizen action group concerned with Caspian Sea regional
issues,<span> </span><a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:S858MaH3I7wJ:www.crudeaccountability.org/en/index.php?page=hagel+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us">addressed
Hagel at Chevron’s annual Board of Directors’ meeting</a>. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Kinman
pointed out</span><span> </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">how Chevron was intensely involved
in hydrocarbon projects in </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Kazakhstan</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> fraught with violations of
environmental law, a lack of transparency and, ultimately, scandal. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">She
pointed out how Chevron was then poised to sign a major agreement with the
authoritarian government of </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Turkmenistan</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> to develop the country’s largely
untapped hydrocarbon reserves. Noting Hagel’s clear interest in and ties
to Caspian oil and gas development, she also pointed to his stated record in
support of transparency and anti-corruption. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">She called
upon him to be put his weight behind a call for </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Turkmenistan</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">, one of the world’s most
repressive countries, to “dramatically and measurably improve its human rights
and accountability record before Chevron invests in its hydrocarbon sector.”</span></span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Kinman went on to argue that, “If Chevron engages with a repressive regime such as Turkmenistan to secure hydrocarbons without first insisting on significant, demonstrable improvements in human rights, transparency and rule of law, it will strengthen anti-democratic tendencies and stifle the development of an already severely compromised civil society, as it has in Burma, Nigeria, Columbia and in numerous other countries around the world.”<br /><br />Addressing the now would-be Secretary of Defense, she went on: “Senator Hagel, as a new board member, you have a tremendous opportunity and responsibility to raise the bar for corporate responsibility in the Caspian to a level that is in accordance with the Chevron Way, for starters, but more importantly, in accordance with international law and practice.”<br /><br />“Senator Hagel,” she asked, “Are you prepared to insist that your company take a principled stance in favor of human rights in Turkmenistan today?”<br /><br />Hagel did not respond to Kinman. Instead, Chevron CEO John Watson encouraged Crude Accountability to write the Senator at a later time. <br /><br />Perhaps during his confirmation hearings, some current Senator will elicit some answers to similar questions as Kinsman’s regarding Hagel’s concerns for “energy security” and a his apparent willingness to overlook the nature of repressive regimes in exchange for such. The prospect is unlikely.</span><br /> Allen Ruffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18310195276315827048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458840028095794061.post-37682572569937132472012-11-28T11:06:00.001-08:002019-02-02T13:29:35.873-08:00UPDATE: David Cagigal - Standing Behind Walker<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; font-weight: normal;">Part of Walker’s “Homeland Security” Team</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; font-weight: normal;">As
reported here at “<a href="http://allenruff.blogspot.com/2012/11/urban-leagues-david-cagigal-to-join.html">Ruff Talk</a>” on November 16th, David Cagigal, a key figure in
last year’s failed campaign to win </span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; font-weight: normal;">Madison</span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; font-weight: normal;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; font-weight: normal;">School District</span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; font-weight: normal;"> funding for the </span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; font-weight: normal;">Madison</span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; font-weight: normal;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; font-weight: normal;">Preparatory</span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; font-weight: normal;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; font-weight: normal;">Academy</span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; font-weight: normal;">, has joined the </span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; font-weight: normal;">Walker</span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; font-weight: normal;"> administration as “Chief
Information Officer” (CIO) in the state’s Division of Enterprise Technology
(DET).</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; font-weight: normal;">Assuming
his new position on November 19, Cagigal appeared in a line-up of law
enforcement types standing behind Governor Scott Walker at a November 27 press
conference staged to publicize the <a href="http://homelandsecurity.wi.gov/">2012
Annual Report on Wisconsin Homeland Security</a> (WHS).</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVFCN9ArWJOxaNsDJIqUi_4YQwkOlD9RFGhhs2VB5XvE63HYZk9ltuoVYcB__PhnjSLoSwGCKNGNX7fT7fRTQh4Vf22JZuE0qElZ6baAAgHqZZ3cYrVHKkwkEteKJNRpG5bTxkK0xv1mqS/s1600/Cagigal+&+Walker.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="425" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVFCN9ArWJOxaNsDJIqUi_4YQwkOlD9RFGhhs2VB5XvE63HYZk9ltuoVYcB__PhnjSLoSwGCKNGNX7fT7fRTQh4Vf22JZuE0qElZ6baAAgHqZZ3cYrVHKkwkEteKJNRpG5bTxkK0xv1mqS/s640/Cagigal+&+Walker.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr align="left"><td class="tr-caption">David Cagigal behind Walker (rear, left) at press conference (Photo: Rebecca Kemble)</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; font-weight: normal;">As reported
by the Progressive Magazine’s <a href="http://www.progressive.org/walker-denies-illegality-presses-on-with-privatization">Rebecca
Kemble</a>, </span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; font-weight: normal;">Walker</span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; font-weight: normal;"> took the opportunity, surrounded
as he was by so many law-and-order officials, to once again deny any wrongdoing
in connection with the violations of state law for which a number of his close
associates and former staffers have taken a fall. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; font-weight: normal;">At the
press conference, Maj. Gen. Donald Dunbar, head of the Wisconsin National Guard
presented </span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; font-weight: normal;">Walker</span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; font-weight: normal;"> with the report listing the priorities and expenditures
earmarked for the state’s interagency effort to make us all more secure. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; font-weight: normal;">Kemble, in her piece, pointed out
that more than half of the $3 million annual WHS budget is dedicated to
upgrading communications equipment and software for law enforcement agencies and
staffing of the Wisconsin Statewide Information Center (WSIC), the clearing
house for Walker’s citizen surveillance <a href="http://www.channel3000.com/news/Gov-Walker-launches-If-You-See-Something-Say-Something-campaign/-/1648/16782720/-/9tb183z/-/index.html">“If
You See Something, Say Something”</a> program. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; font-weight: normal;">Cagigal,</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; font-weight: normal;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">as the man in charge of</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; font-weight: normal;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“<a href="http://www.nascio.org/careers/documents/Wisconsin%20CIO%20Position.pdf">IT
planning and implementation efforts for the State of Wisconsin executive branch</a>..., a statewide leader in all technology issues” and “the primary advisor to the
Governor and Legislature regarding technology strategies and policies,” </span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; font-weight: normal;">will certainly have input or oversight in monitoring our security and surveillance.</span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; font-weight: normal;">Apparently
there’s money to spread around for increasing the surveillance state’s capabilities
while funding for improving public schools continues to diminish. One must
wonder if Wisconsin’s new IT head, an advocate of for-profit virtual (online) charter
schools and legislation accelerating the privatization of public education, pondered that thought as he stood behind Walker.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBqHQp9BUn1UePvWgS_ka3NtKQJbRdL7EU8E7at9CgWqbBG19TVYrqJxWJoNziC8H4N2gEX6f1E7JJPyXUTrU4AtYMdEcixOmhM93AZ6RL4rbKiC__mggVgj0tijRiAtQUIKz4rXIcDVEu/s1600/Cagigal+thinking.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBqHQp9BUn1UePvWgS_ka3NtKQJbRdL7EU8E7at9CgWqbBG19TVYrqJxWJoNziC8H4N2gEX6f1E7JJPyXUTrU4AtYMdEcixOmhM93AZ6RL4rbKiC__mggVgj0tijRiAtQUIKz4rXIcDVEu/s640/Cagigal+thinking.JPG" width="426" /></a></td></tr>
<tr align="left"><td class="tr-caption">Pondering whatever: CIO Cagigal at Walker press conference. (Photo: Rebecca Kemble)</td></tr>
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Allen Ruffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18310195276315827048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458840028095794061.post-35877888946296411792012-11-16T13:17:00.001-08:002019-02-02T13:29:35.837-08:00<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-size: large;">Urban League's David Cagigal to Join Walker's Team</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br /></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">An interesting little tid-bit has been bounced my way – a notice going out to various Wisconsin state agencies from Mike Huebsch, Scott Walker’s Secretary of Administration, to various Wisconsin agencies announcing the appointment of David Cagigal as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the state’s Division of Enterprise Technology (DET). Cagigal is scheduled to begin in his new position on November 19th.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://wistechnology.com/images/Cagigal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://wistechnology.com/images/Cagigal.jpg" width="210" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">David Cagigal</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Huebsch’s brief heads-up listed some of Cagigal’s track record, noting that he previously “held executive IT positions that cross multiple industries and business functions, including executive positions at Alliant Energy, DeVry University, DePaul University, Maytag and Amoco.”</span><br />
<br style="font-family: Helvetica;" />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">The notice somehow failed to mention that Cagigal also is still listed as the <a href="http://ulgm.org/davidcagigal">Vice Chair</a></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> on the Board of Directors and “<a href="http://ulgm.org/board">At-Large Member </a></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><a href="http://ulgm.org/board">IT Leader</a>” of the Urban League of Greater Madison (ULGM). Huebsch’s release also didn’t list Cagigal’s recent position as the chair of the board of directors of the currently defunct Madison Preparatory Academy.</span><br />
<br style="font-family: Helvetica;" />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">The new state appointee is thought to have been a main strategist of last year’s attempt by the ULGM to win Madison school board approval for the proposed academy. He reportedly played a key role in recruiting Mad Prep’s public champion, Kaleem Caire to return to the city to head the ULGM and lead the failed charge for the quasi-privatized charter school.</span><br />
<br style="font-family: Helvetica;" />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Immediately following last December’s Madison School Board rejection of the Mad Prep proposal, Cagigal suggested that supporters should take a different tack. Speaking to the <i><a href="http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/education/local_schools/madison-prep-proponents-raise-possibility-of-creating-private-school/article_3b14fdce-2b71-11e1-b932-0019bb2963f4.html#ixzz1m4JHwVHp">Wisconsin State Journal</a></i>, he suggested that the school’s supporters might urge Wisconsin legislators to create a statewide charter school authorizing board as a way to bypass School Board approval and help Madison Prep receive the funding it was after from public coffers.</span><br />
<br style="font-family: Helvetica;" />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Reporting Cagigal’s statement, the WSJ’s Mathew DeFour pointed out that such a bill had already been introduced earlier in 2011. It was approved by the Republican-dominated Joint Finance Committee in the spring, but did not come up for a final vote. The WSJ piece noted that charter schools currently become eligible for public money only after they receive approval from the school districts in which they are located. The proposed legislation, eventually placed on hold but bound to come back in some form, would have done away with such local say.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Caire had emphatically stated how he was “<a href="http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/video/2011/03/kaleemcairesb22_3232011.mp3">one hundred percent in support of the charter bill</a>” when he spoke before the Republican-dominated Joint Finance Committee hearing on the bill in March, 2011. His associate, Cagigal clearly understood the significance of the pending “school choice” legislation.</span><br />
<br style="font-family: Helvetica;" />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Cagigal had come to Madison in October, 2004 to become <a href="http://wtnnews.com/fusioncio/symposium/2010/people/">chief information technology officer at Alliant Energy.</a></span><br />
<br style="font-family: Helvetica;" />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Previously, he helped develop electronic learning at DePaul University. He then went on to become a director of information services involved with e-learning at<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/news/business/companies/devry-inc/index.html"> DeVry, Inc.</a>, the international education-for-profit corporation.</span><br />
<br style="font-family: Helvetica;" />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">The parent firm of a wide range of business and technical colleges and universities, Devry in recent years has moved into making acquisitions in the rapidly expanding field of online secondary education. Following the foiled Mad Prep project, Cagigal took a $500-a-day position as i<a href="http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-30725680.html">nterim director of technology for the Dubuque Community School Distric</a>t.</span><br />
<br style="font-family: Helvetica;" />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">The proposed “charter school reform” legislation that Cagigal urged Madiso Prep supporters to get behind would have among other things, entirely removed the charter school approval process from locally elected school boards.</span><br />
<br style="font-family: Helvetica;" />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">If enacted, the legislation, destined to come back in some form, would create an appointed state body, the Charter School Authorizing Board (CSAB) that would have the power to grant charters anywhere in Wisconsin, even in communities where the local school board has turned down a proposal.</span><br />
<br style="font-family: Helvetica;" />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Writing in May, 2011, the <a href="http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/education/blog/article_46220a10-75cb-11e0-9043-001cc4c002e0.html">Capital Times’ Susan Trolle</a>r honed in on what the originally proposed legislation entailed :</span><br />
<br style="font-family: Helvetica;" />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">In the past, School Board denial of a charter agreement signaled the end of the line for a project. But a new GOP-backed piece of legislation creating a state authorizing board for charters could change that. In fact, it would upend Wisconsin’s long tradition of local control of schools, where authority rests primarily with school board officials elected by local taxpayers….</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<br style="font-family: Helvetica;" />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">…[C]ritics say loss of such control, combined with Gov. Scott Walker’s massive budget cuts to schools, plus 18 years of strict revenue limits, would lead to financial ruin for some public school districts. They claim the legislation is unfair because it provides public money from the state’s general aid fund — at $7,775 per student — to start new independent charter schools, but eliminates any oversight role by locally elected school officials. The flow of money for these new charters would reduce the pot of money remaining for the states’ existing schools during already fiscally challenging tim</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">es.</span></blockquote>
<br style="font-family: Helvetica;" />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Observing the public hearings held before the legislatures’ Joint Finance Committee in March, 2011, the political correspondent for the Progressive Magazine, <a href="http://www.progressive.org/conniff0511.html">Ruth Conniff</a> observed that the measure was a political maneuver to allow privatization of public education.</span><br />
<br style="font-family: Helvetica;" />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Parts of the “Charter School Reform Bill” and related bills introduced by conservative Republicans in both houses of the legislature called for the expansion and funding of virtual (online) charter schools, something that long-time corporate IT specialist and “education reform” advocate David Cagical would likely find favorable.</span><br />
<br style="font-family: Helvetica;" />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">In his announcement of Cagigal’s appointment, Mike Huebsch stated how, “We [the Walker administration, assumedly] are committed to leveraging technology to help state government perform more efficiently and effectively for Wisconsin taxpayers (sic) and we look forward to utilizing David’s experience and leadership in that pursuit.”</span><br />
<br style="font-family: Helvetica;" />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">The notice mentioned neither those corporations nor wealthy individuals who currently pay little or no taxes who certainly have an already leveraged interest in supporting the state’s latest pro-privatization ally.</span>Allen Ruffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18310195276315827048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458840028095794061.post-3787318713598770342012-06-24T11:14:00.000-07:002019-02-02T13:29:35.897-08:00The Wisconsin Recall Results: A Post Post-Mortem<div class="field field-type-text field-field-caption">
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By Allen Ruff, </div>
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</div>
<br />
[This piece initially appeared on the <a href="http://progressive.org/wisconsin_recall_post_mortem.html"><i>Progressive Magazine's</i> webzine</a> on June 21, 2012 -AR]<br />
<br />
A number of post-mortem analyses surfaced almost immediately,
and they were somewhat helpful in conveying various understandings for
the defeat of the recall effort against Scott Walker in Wisconsin. They
got most of the immediate facts straight. But they were lacking in
various respects. We need a deeper social and political analysis to
understand some of the other factors behind the defeat. This is key for
the development of future strategies and tactics.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.progressive.org/images/2012/0606.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.progressive.org/images/2012/0606.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<br />
While the inordinate out-of-state amount of pro-Walker (and
anti-Barrett) money and media time, the weaknesses and shortsightedness
of the Democratic campaign, the failures of the trade union leadership,
the all-in emphasis on the electoral effort, and the structure and
timing of the recall process (“recall fatigue”), all had a part in
shaping the outcome, other factors helped give the victory to the right.<br />
<br />
For instance, we have been told that, “59% of white people voted for Walker, as did most suburbs and small
towns,” and that “38% of union households (rather than unionists) voted
Republican.” Several pieces stated that support for either candidate was
largely related to the perception of how well Walker’s administration
had been creating new jobs.<br />
<br />
Modest improvement (if any) in the number of jobs and improvements in
the state of Wisconsin’s economy, distorted and trumpeted by the
Republican’s propaganda mills, certainly were made a key issue. (The
Barrett campaign spent a whole lot of energy and resources responding to
the Walkerite’s framing of that issue).<br />
<br />
But “jobs, jobs, jobs” was not the sole reason why people voted the
way they did. As in any election, various subjective factors, some of
which could be described as key “wedge issues,” played a significant
role. How else, might we otherwise begin to understand why “38% of union
households” (Up only 1% from 2010, according to a New York Times exit
poll) voted against their own (material) interests?<br />
<br />
<br />
<center><b>“Milwaukee”</b></center>
<br />
Key among the “wedge issues” was that of race, utterly ignored by the
overwhelming majority of commentators. It is well known that Milwaukee
is one of the most segregated cities in the country, surrounded by bands
of predominantly white suburbs. (Walker was the former county executive of Milwaukee County, put there by a suburban “white flight”
Republican electorate.<br />
<br />
Across the state, but especially in those suburban, small town and
rural areas that went for Walker, the TV images and radio airwaves
carried a barrage of anti-Barrett ads inundated with a racist subtext of
the mayor’s failings in regard to crime and the failure of his “liberal
policies” (despite the fact that Barrett has been in-step with the
neoliberal and austerity agenda pushed by the DLC Dems and Obama). The
sub-textual thematic line of all the ads was the same: “Barrett can’t
govern (manage? control?) Milwaukee. How’s he going to govern the
state?” Manipulation of white racist fear of “the other,” of “them,” of
“Milwaukee” and “Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett” as a code for the “out of
control, crime-ridden inner city,” filled the airwaves and exacted its
toll.<br />
<br />
Reportedly in some up-state and out-state media markets, anti-Barrett
ads paid for by Super Pac or Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce (WMC)
spoke of Barrett’s failures while showing images of people of color.<br />
<br />
The county is comprised of the city of Milwaukee and an inner ring of
older suburbs, such as West Allis, very white working class and the
former site of Allis Chalmers and other heavy industry, now a classic
example of the rust belt, as is Milwaukee in general: the massive site
of AC is now basically strip malls. (Some of that “inner ring” contains
still contains well-to-do enclaves, it should be noted.)<br />
<br />
Milwaukee-proper has experienced a lot of white flight over the last
30-35 years. Shrinking in population by about a third, and is now a
so-called “majority minority city” in which the African-American
population in particular is isolated and deeply impoverished. The Latino
population has also grown significantly.<br />
<br />
A political sociologist friend familiar with the Milwaukee area’s social
geography found,* not surprisingly, that most of the support for Walker
in Milwaukee County came from the wealthier suburbs. According to his
figures, the population of the County in 2010 was about 950,000, 61%
“white” and 75% 18 or over, with a median household income of $43k.
Almost 393,000 people voted in the recall, about a 55% turnout. Walker
got 143,000 of those votes.<br />
<br />
A second ring of newer suburbs, which extends beyond Milwaukee
County, has been one of the main bastions of support for Walker. For
example, Waukesha County immediately to the west, alone provided Walker
with another 154,000, nearly 100,000 more than Barrett, which alone
negated Barrett's advantage in Milwaukee. Waukesha is 91% white with a
median income of $75k and there was a 72% turnout of eligible voters
there!<br />
<br />
Immediately to the north, in Ozaukee county, which is 95% white and
has a median income of $75k, Walker won by more than 20,000 (with a 73%
turnout) and to the northwest, in Washington county, which is 96% white
with a median income of $64k, he won by 36,000 (with a 69% turnout).<br />
<br />
The white suburbs and urban outskirts have also witnessed the growth
of “industrial parks” detached from the city, often employing
non-unionized workers, who but a generation back remained tied to the
urban core. They now travel the outer rings for their work and leisure
and as consumers, and rarely enter the now alien city, except for an
occasional night out or a weekend event.<br />
<br />
The one “bright spot” hailed by liberals and progressives was the
recall victory (currently being challenged) of Dem. John Lehman over
Republican state Senator Van Wanggaard in de-industrialized Racine
County, on the lake shore south of Milwaukee. In the county as a whole,
Walker won by 45,480 to 40,191. That total represented 58.3% of eligible
voters, based on the 2010 census. 74.4% of the county is white and it's
got a median family income of $54k.<br />
<br />
So what happened there? The Lehman plurality of 840 votes came about in
large part because of the city’s Latino and African-American turnout,
people who came out not in lockstep as so many Democratic faithful, but
as those who already had some real sense of worsening results if the
recalls failed.<br />
<br />
From what I have been told, a well-organized grass roots activist
effort won the day there, at least as of this writing. (One might ask
why the voter turnout by people of color in Milwaukee proper was not
higher, based on their previous experience with Walker as County Exec?
The short and simple: Milwaukee’s already hard-pressed inner city was
already well-acquainted with Barrett on various fronts.)<br />
<br />
Other than Dane County with Madison at its heart, 85% white with a
median income of $60k, where Barrett beat Walker by 98,000 votes (with a
66% turnout), and a few other counties, primarily in the far northwest
up by Lake Superior and toward La Crosse in the west where he beat
Walker by fairly small margin, the Dem contender (sic) got his butt
kicked in most of the rest of the state.<br />
<br />
<br />
<center><b>“Those Liberals in Madison”</b></center>
<br />
Other “wedge issues” contributed to the outcome. The right wing
assault, the absolute vilification of all things “liberal,” pushed not
just by the Tea Party, but by the conservative movement as a whole over a
longer period of time, took its toll. “Liberal” in the minds of many
has replaced “communism” as the bogeyman of the post-Cold War era. For
some these days, it has become interchangeable with “socialism”! (One
only had to witness the signs at any of the right-wing mobilizations in
the state over the last year to get a sense of that.) “Liberal” for
many, with their ears tuned to the omnipresent demagoguery of Fox and
the non-stop squawkery of conservative blab radio, has come to mean the
“tax and spend” interventionist and regulatory state. The now
decades-long ideology of neoliberalism has taken its toll.<br />
<br />
That, of course, leads to another significant, yet different code:
“Madison.” Long a liberal and progressive center as home of the
University of Wisconsin and heart of the state’s progressive tradition,
the city and its Dane County environs have long been viewed as out of
step, unreal, and out-of-touch by out-state residents; the home of
“those protesters” and “hippies” ever since the 1960s.<br />
<br />
The city has also been viewed as the home of well-off intellectual
elitists, as well as the source of “big state government” policies, the
birthplace of regulation and state taxes hampering and burdening the
“little guy,” a citadel of “pampered and overpaid” state employees and
their unions. A legitimate concern at various levels, “What has the
state done for me while increasing what I have to shell out in taxes and
fees?” has effectively been taken up, and manipulated by the right.<br />
<br />
Anti-intellectualism, always a key ingredient of right-wing populism,
certainly figured in as well as conservatives looked to the state
capital over the span of 2011-2012. The University at Madison, in an
earlier time was largely perceived across the state as an institution
directly serving the needs and interest of Wisconsin’s residents through
its Extension and in-state accessibility, a key of the “Wisconsin
Idea.” In recent years, it has been transformed into a largely
corporatized research university, now increasingly cost prohibitive for
the state’s middle and low income kids and is now increasingly seen as a
rest home for overpaid “do-nothing” tenured faculty spreading
“subversive” ideas.<br />
<br />
<br />
<center><b>“Kirche, Küche and Kinder”</b></center><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<b> </b>There’s been very little, if any, discussion of the role of the
Christian right – the conservative evangelical and fundamentalist
Protestant and Catholic churches. Those very same elements who have been
“pro choice” in regard to public school privatization and the
(primarily) Republican push for school vouchers and charters paid for
with school district funds, have also stood opposed to women’s right to
choose and other liberal heresies.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<br />
Sex education and the teaching of evolution in the public schools
have continued to be salient issues propelling the popular movement for
charter and voucher schools in many cases; i.e., the shift of funding
from what the Catholic and Protestant right refers to as “government
schools” to parochial school education. Part of the agenda of Walker and
his cohorts in the Legislature has been the expansion of that
“privatization”.<br />
<br />
In early April, Walker signed a bill repealing the state’s 2009 Equal
Pay Enforcement Act, which allowed victims of workplace discrimination
to seek damages in state courts for “equal pay for equal work” discrimination. That Walker move may have pushed some voters in
Barrett’s direction, but the repeal bill was aimed squarely at a tier of
white male voters, for whom women, like people of color, are seen to
have taken away their jobs, dignity, authority, etc., ad nauseam.
(According to New York Times polling, inconclusive on this theme, 59% of
males went for Walker, up 2% from 2010, while women gave him only 47%,
down 2% from the preceding election cycle.)<br />
<br />
<br />
<center><b>The Small Towns</b></center><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<b> </b>We need to take a closer look at the social geography of small town
Wisconsin. One results of the longer term de-industrialization and
rust-belting of the Lake Michigan cities like Milwaukee, Racine,
Kenosha, Manitowoc and other formerly heavy manufacturing and lake trade
centers was not just the shipping of production and jobs to other
regions of the country or “offshore,” but the dispersal of light and
medium manufacturing to small and medium towns throughout the state.</div>
<br />
There hardly exists a town or village in the state that does not have
some light industrial firm manufacturing you name it. As small and
even medium farms disappeared and more families were forced off the
land, various “developers” and entrepreneurs took advantage of
relatively cheap non-union labor, lower land prices and tax incentives
to set up new firms producing various parts and components, agricultural
equipment, and capital and consumer goods ventures, often but not
always tied to the agricultural economy. Often locally owned and family
run and employing local labor, such firms often belonging to the WMC,
have become lynchpins for the local economies in communities where
people know each other, some of them tied together for generations
through the churches, schools and extended families. Many of them, it
can be imagined, have felt the effects of the “Great Recession”.<br />
<br />
Often socially conservative, they have looked for redress not
necessarily coming from Washington or Madison. Some have consciously
turned to the Tea Party while others have readily taken to a broader
populist ideology appealing to the “little guy” with its promise to
“take back” whatever – “our government,” “our democracy,” “our freedom” –
from “big government” with its faceless, far away bureaucrats.<br />
<br />
What can be said about the “opportunity lost” when the “Wisconsin
Uprising” became channeled into an all but singular focus on the
recalling Walker and his cronies? It isn’t clear if other options were
possible based on the correlation of forces in the field -- the
proscribed nature of the movement, its inability to go from the initial
level of protest to forms of resistance and mass civil disobedience; the
atrophied memory of labor’s mass struggle experience; the deference to a
conservative leadership, and narrow understandings of “politics” and
the possible all played a part. Things certainly could have been
different if there had been an organized left pole alternative to the
Democratic and trade union’s conservative leadership. A huge “if,” for
sure.<br />
<br />
What remained surprising, indeed puzzling to some during the Walker
recall effort was the lack of support for the Barrett campaign from the
national Democratic Party – the silence and invisibility of Obama, the
Democratic National Committee, or for that matter, the national
leadership of the major trade unions. While that could be explained by some assessments of the current
political terrain at this, the lead up to Obama’s increasingly uncertain
re-election bid, there are other concerns at work.<br />
<br />
A kind of mistrust of an uncontrolled mass movement exists; a
downright mistrust, if not fear of an uncontrolled popular insurgency
from below. The Democratic leadership and its labor allies absolutely
dread a return of those kinds of movements and mass mobilizations,
dating back to the Great Depression and extending through the strike
wave immediately following World War II, the Civil Rights Movement of
the early 1960s, and the Anti-War Movement later that decade, that
challenged power from below succeeded in exacting concessions from the
system.<br />
<br />
Such insurgencies, polarizing in their effect, also provoked the
kinds of reaction that led to the ascendancy of Nixon and Agnew, the
McGovern beating in ’72, the rise of the “New Right,” Carter’s loss in
’80 to Reagan and worse, subsequently. In response, the Democratic
leadership chose a more conservative course, one leery of its own social
base.<br />
<br />
<br />
<center><b>The Point is to Change It</b></center><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<b> </b>What has been offered here are some preliminary thoughts, hopefully a
contribution to a deeper collective assessment that needs to take place
if we are going to move forward. Clearly, a lot more needs to be
fleshed in and understood and the way out of the wilderness is going to
be long and hard. The point is not just to understand our history, but
to change it.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<br />
<i>____________________</i><br />
* His calculations were based on the 2010 census figures for total
population, percentage of the population 18 or over, and median
household income. That data was then compared that to the vote totals
for the two candidates. An obvious caution: It should be noted that one
cannot draw too many conclusions regarding a direct correlation between
income figures and voter preferences. Such numbers do convey some sense
of class composition (based on income, exclusive of wealth) and voting
preferences.Allen Ruffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18310195276315827048noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458840028095794061.post-91817547297276476752012-05-16T12:04:00.001-07:002019-02-02T13:29:36.324-08:00How Long Will Japan’s Nuclear Recess Be? Enter Kazakhstan<br />
[The following, by my research and writing partner, <span style="color: #93c47d;">Steve Horn</span>, originally appeared at <a href="http://whowhatwhy.com/2012/05/14/how-long-will-japans-nuclear-recess-be-enter-kazakhstan/">WhoWhatWhy</a> on May 14, 2012. It supplements our earlier pieces: "<a href="http://allenruff.blogspot.com/2012/03/massacre-in-kazakhstan-killing-hope-for.html">Massacre in Kazakhstan: Killing Hope for US Interests</a>" & "<a href="http://allenruff.blogspot.com/2012/04/uranium-diplomacythe-us-double-standard.html">Uranium Diplomacy: The US Double-Standard in Kazakhstan and Iran</a>" -AR]<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi80UjmhIy08QZTzVyDBKBByjSReprqzlFQuM9cW72BPJzQop_B6gzrfNzz7DWU_HkVowpzPcdgDnXLDIwj8L0KMUq9_c2fYIK4959BjTJ9HryLcbNVJmerTYPj0SStw6t0iu8EcaN-sTau/s1600/Kazakh+Uranium+deposits.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="193" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi80UjmhIy08QZTzVyDBKBByjSReprqzlFQuM9cW72BPJzQop_B6gzrfNzz7DWU_HkVowpzPcdgDnXLDIwj8L0KMUq9_c2fYIK4959BjTJ9HryLcbNVJmerTYPj0SStw6t0iu8EcaN-sTau/s320/Kazakh+Uranium+deposits.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Currently the world's largest producer, Kazakhstan has about 19% of the world's known uranium reserves. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Environmental victories are so scarce these days that you can’t blame
eco-activists for trumpeting any good news — even when the news turns
out to be mostly smoke and mirrors.<br />
<br />
Take the latest sequel to Japan’s March 2011 <a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/fukushima_accident_inf129.html">Fukushima</a><a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/fukushima_accident_inf129.html"> Daiichi</a><a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/fukushima_accident_inf129.html"> nuclear </a><a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/fukushima_accident_inf129.html">disaster</a>, which was deemed the “most serious nuclear crisis since Chernobyl” <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/special/fukushima-crisis">by </a><a href="http://www.newscientist.com/special/fukushima-crisis"><i>New</i></a><a href="http://www.newscientist.com/special/fukushima-crisis"><i>Scientist</i></a>. To this day the city of Fukushima is surrounded by a <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/05/01/trivializing-fukushima/">20-</a><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/05/01/trivializing-fukushima/">kilometer</a><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/05/01/trivializing-fukushima/"> (12.4 </a><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/05/01/trivializing-fukushima/">mile</a><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/05/01/trivializing-fukushima/">) </a><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/05/01/trivializing-fukushima/">dead </a><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/05/01/trivializing-fukushima/">zone</a>.<br />
<br />
On May 4, in an action hailed by anti-nuclear activists around the world, Japan announced that it was putting its <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/05/us-nuclear-japan-idUSBRE84405820120505">last</a>
remaining operational nuclear power plant, located in the northern city
of Tomari, on “recess.” The next day, five thousand demonstrators in
Tokyo celebrated what one participant called a “historic” victory, in a
country where some 30 percent of electrical power had been provided by
nuclear reactors.<br />
<br />
While pressure from activists undoubtedly influenced the government’s
decision, a closer look at Japan’s nuclear power industry raises
serious questions about the extent of the victory.<br />
<br />
<b>Japan Announces Big Nuclear Deal with Kazakhstan<br />
</b><br />
Unmentioned by all but two news outlets was the fact that a day before the announcement, the Japanese government <a href="http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/337026/20120503/kazakhstan-japan-uranium-nuclear.htm">signed </a><a href="http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/337026/20120503/kazakhstan-japan-uranium-nuclear.htm">a </a><a href="http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/337026/20120503/kazakhstan-japan-uranium-nuclear.htm">deal</a> with Kazakhstan’s state-owned nuclear giant, <a href="http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId=7728385">KazAtomProm</a>, to begin supplying Japan with more nuclear fuel starting in 2013.<br />
<br />
“Japan will take part in the implementation of 40 projects in Kazakhstan,” <a href="http://caspionet.kz/eng/general/Kazakhstan_and_Japan_sign_new_memoranda_1335933477.html">explained</a> the Kazakh state-run news outlet, <i>CaspioNet</i>.
“This applies to cooperation in the nuclear industry, mining and met
allurgical complex, high technology, as well as mechanical engineering
and gas-chemical industry.”<br />
<br />
As for “projects” in Japan itself, the picture is a little murky,
perhaps intentionally so. “The Japanese government never actually said
it was going to turn off the lights on the nuclear industry at any point
in time,” the Netherlands-based Nuclear Campaigner for <i>Greenpeace International</i>, Aslihan Tumer told WhoWhatWhy in an interview.<br />
<br />
“What the Japanese government has been saying is that they’re going
to restart it, eventually, once the safety checks are done, once they
take local concerns into consideration,” said Turner. “So, they are not
saying it is off the table right now.”<br />
<br />
Japan’s newly strengthened ties to Kazakhstan come on top of the
major foothold Japanese multinational energy corporations already have
in that Central Asian country, which is four times the size of Texas.<br />
<br />
<b>Japan’s Nuclear Alliance with KazAtomProm<br />
</b><br />
Known for its massive reserves of <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/8279444/Caspian-Sea-oil-find-could-be-biggest-this-year.html">Caspian</a><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/8279444/Caspian-Sea-oil-find-could-be-biggest-this-year.html"> Sea </a><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/8279444/Caspian-Sea-oil-find-could-be-biggest-this-year.html">oil </a><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/8279444/Caspian-Sea-oil-find-could-be-biggest-this-year.html">and</a><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/8279444/Caspian-Sea-oil-find-could-be-biggest-this-year.html"> natural </a><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/8279444/Caspian-Sea-oil-find-could-be-biggest-this-year.html">gas</a><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/8279444/Caspian-Sea-oil-find-could-be-biggest-this-year.html"> resources</a>,
Kazakhstan also possesses roughly 15 percent of the world’s known
uranium supply, accounting for roughly one-third of current global
production, <a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf89.html">according</a><a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf89.html"> to </a><a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf89.html">the </a><a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf89.html">World </a><a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf89.html">Nuclear </a><a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf89.html">Association</a> (WNA).<br />
<br />
With no uranium resources of its own Japan, the world’s <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12427321">third</a><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12427321"> biggest</a><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12427321"> economy</a>,
has relied on the global market to fuel its nuclear reactors, trading
mainly with Australia, Canada and, increasingly, Kazakhstan, <a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf79.html">according</a><a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf79.html"> to </a><a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf79.html">WNA</a><a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf79.html">.</a>
In 2010, three Japan-based nuclear fuel corporations, Kansai Electric
Power Company, Sumitomo, and Nuclear Fuel Industries Ltd, <a href="http://uk.reuters.com/article/2010/03/02/japan-kazakhstan-nuclear-idUKTOE62107I20100302">signed</a><a href="http://uk.reuters.com/article/2010/03/02/japan-kazakhstan-nuclear-idUKTOE62107I20100302"> a </a><a href="http://uk.reuters.com/article/2010/03/02/japan-kazakhstan-nuclear-idUKTOE62107I20100302">deal</a> with KazAtomProm to supply its plants with uranium.<br />
<br />
A complex web of agreements across national borders links many of the
biggest players in the nuclear industry. For example, in October 2006,
the Japanese multinational corporation Toshiba <a href="http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2006_10/pr1702.htm">purchased</a>
a 77-percent share of the U.S. nuclear company Westinghouse Electric
for $5.4 billion. Two other companies were involved in the deal: Japan’s
IHI Corporation, and U.S. multinational Shaw Group. Later, in July
2007, KazAtomProm <a href="http://djysrv.blogspot.com/2007/07/toshiba-sells-stake-in-westinghouse-to.html">paid</a><a href="http://djysrv.blogspot.com/2007/07/toshiba-sells-stake-in-westinghouse-to.html"> $486.3 </a><a href="http://djysrv.blogspot.com/2007/07/toshiba-sells-stake-in-westinghouse-to.html">million </a><a href="http://djysrv.blogspot.com/2007/07/toshiba-sells-stake-in-westinghouse-to.html">for</a><a href="http://djysrv.blogspot.com/2007/07/toshiba-sells-stake-in-westinghouse-to.html"> 10 </a><a href="http://djysrv.blogspot.com/2007/07/toshiba-sells-stake-in-westinghouse-to.html">percent</a><a href="http://djysrv.blogspot.com/2007/07/toshiba-sells-stake-in-westinghouse-to.html"> of </a><a href="http://djysrv.blogspot.com/2007/07/toshiba-sells-stake-in-westinghouse-to.html">Toshiba</a><a href="http://djysrv.blogspot.com/2007/07/toshiba-sells-stake-in-westinghouse-to.html">’</a><a href="http://djysrv.blogspot.com/2007/07/toshiba-sells-stake-in-westinghouse-to.html">s</a><a href="http://djysrv.blogspot.com/2007/07/toshiba-sells-stake-in-westinghouse-to.html"> stake</a> in the jointly owned corporation, meaning it now owns 7.7-percent of the corporation formerly known as Westinghouse.<br />
<br />
As a result of such deals Kazakhstan has a direct tie to the
Fukushima meltdown. Investigative reporter Greg Palast explained in a
March 2011 <a href="http://www.gregpalast.com/no-bs-info-on-japan-nuclearobama-invites-tokyo-electric-to-build-us-nukes-with-taxpayer-funds/">story</a>:
“One of the reactors dancing with death at Fukushima Station 1 was
built by Toshiba. Toshiba was also an architect of the emergency diesel
system.”<br />
<br />
Eerily enough, Kazakhstan is still recovering from a nuclear tragedy of its own. The city of <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Semey</span>, near the country’s northeastern border with Siberia, was formerly known as <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Semipalatinsk</span>. From 1949 to 1989, a secret complex 93 miles west of the city was the site of the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons tests.<br />
<br />
<b>History Repeating Itself?</b><br />
<br />
<b></b>“After a wave of popular protests, the Semipalatinsk site was closed in 1991. It had carried out 456 secret nuclear tests,” <a href="http://www.euronews.com/2010/04/14/kazakhstan-s-nuclear-legacy/">explained</a><a href="http://www.euronews.com/2010/04/14/kazakhstan-s-nuclear-legacy/"><i> EuroNews</i></a>.
“However, the closure could not reverse the environmental damage to the
region, which has more than a million inhabitants, most of which are
villagers.”<br />
<br />
“Local oncology centers are screening tens of thousands of patients,
trying to detect and treat tumors at early stages…Infant mortality here
is five times higher than the average or developed countries. Embryonic
defects are widespread, and cancer strikes teenagers as well as adults,”
<a href="http://www.euronews.com/2010/04/14/kazakhstan-s-nuclear-legacy/">the</a><a href="http://www.euronews.com/2010/04/14/kazakhstan-s-nuclear-legacy/"> report</a><a href="http://www.euronews.com/2010/04/14/kazakhstan-s-nuclear-legacy/"> continues</a>.<br />
<br />
The nuclear tragedies at Chernobyl, Semipalatinsk and Fukushima have
not proved a deterrent to the global nuclear industry’s ambitions.
“Japan hasn’t used the Fukushima disaster as an opportunity to push for
renewable energy or energy efficiency,” said Tumer. “Instead, it has
used the time since the disaster to push for the restart of nuclear
reactors.”Allen Ruffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18310195276315827048noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458840028095794061.post-8347941303308863042012-04-14T10:44:00.000-07:002019-02-02T13:29:36.226-08:00Uranium Diplomacy:The US Double-Standard in Kazakhstan and Iran<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">By
Allen Ruff and Steve Horn*</span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">[This is a slightly revised version of "Uranium
Double-Standard: The U.S., Kazakhstan and Iran," that originally appeared at <a href="http://www.nationofchange.org/uranium-double-standard-us-kazakhstan-and-iran-1334236438">Nation of Change</a>. It is the second installment of an ongoing series on U.S. involvement in Kazakhstan. The first originally appeared at <a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7128:the-kazakhstan-massacre-killing-hope-to-benefit-us-geopolitical-interests%C2%A0%C2%A0%C2%A0">Truthout</a> and is also available <a href="http://allenruff.blogspot.com/2012_03_01_archive.html">here</a>.]</span></div>
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<br />
Iran’s alleged “nuclear threat”
has taken center stage among diplomats, military men, and politicians in
Washington, Tel Aviv, and the West at-large. </div>
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Despite the fact that
investigative journalists <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/06/06/110606fa_fact_hersh"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Seymour</span></a><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/06/06/110606fa_fact_hersh"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/06/06/110606fa_fact_hersh"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Hersh</span></a>, <a href="http://ipsnorthamerica.net/news.php?idnews=3201">Gareth</a><a href="http://ipsnorthamerica.net/news.php?idnews=3201"> </a><a href="http://ipsnorthamerica.net/news.php?idnews=3201">Porter</a> and others
have meticulously documented the fact that Iran, in fact, poses no nuclear
threat at all, the Obama Administration and the U.S. Congress have laid down <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iran#Bilateral_sanctions_against_Iran"><span style="color: #1155cc;">multiple</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iran#Bilateral_sanctions_against_Iran"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iran#Bilateral_sanctions_against_Iran"><span style="color: #1155cc;">rounds</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iran#Bilateral_sanctions_against_Iran"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iran#Bilateral_sanctions_against_Iran"><span style="color: #1155cc;">of</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iran#Bilateral_sanctions_against_Iran"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iran#Bilateral_sanctions_against_Iran"><span style="color: #1155cc;">harsh</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iran#Bilateral_sanctions_against_Iran"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iran#Bilateral_sanctions_against_Iran"><span style="color: #1155cc;">sanctions</span></a> as a means to “deter” Iran from
reaching its “nuclear capacity.” </div>
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The <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-17569326"><span style="color: #1155cc;">most</span></a><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-17569326"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-17569326"><span style="color: #1155cc;">recent</span></a><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-17569326"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-17569326"><span style="color: #1155cc;">round</span></a> featured a call to boycott Iran’s oil
industry by President Obama. </div>
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While rhetorical attention
remains focused on Iran’s “threat”, there is an “elephant in the room”:
Kazakhstan’s booming uranium mining<span style="color: red;"> </span>and
expanding nuclear industry -- a massive
effort involving U.S. multinational corporations and an <a href="http://www.rferl.org/content/Kazakhstans_Golden_Cradle_To_Authoritarian_Rule/2222894.html">authoritarian regime</a>
increasingly tied to Washington.</div>
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Double standards have long
reigned supreme in U.S. foreign policy. Few examples illustrate that better
than the contrast between Washington’s stance toward the nuclear ambitions of
Iran and Kazakhstan.</div>
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<br />
<b>The </b><b>Seoul </b><b>Dog and Pony Show</b><b> </b></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaWXuon8Aq03v-SV6DLmSrlXet4FJfeL5eb0oVkjHOvaRB0Xu4hHfSDVAIY1Zo2QTLRp9Po-OttiOTojh7OzXMIBmCrgbdT1B7H4YQmuydk8ktWe9WAdR7-saWDkWHH_HPpskZoAcFd6t_/s1600/Obama+Naz+&+Medvdev+%232.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaWXuon8Aq03v-SV6DLmSrlXet4FJfeL5eb0oVkjHOvaRB0Xu4hHfSDVAIY1Zo2QTLRp9Po-OttiOTojh7OzXMIBmCrgbdT1B7H4YQmuydk8ktWe9WAdR7-saWDkWHH_HPpskZoAcFd6t_/s1600/Obama+Naz+&+Medvdev+%232.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Seoul Nuclear Summitry: Obama and Kazakhstan's Nazarbayev (c.) have a laugh as Russia's Dimitry Medvedev (r.) looks on.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The alleged Iranian “threat” was
a central concern at the <a href="http://www.thenuclearsecuritysummit.org/eng_info/overview.jsp"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Nuclear</span><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span><span style="color: #1155cc;">Security</span><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span><span style="color: #1155cc;">Summit</span></a>, which occurred in Seoul, South Korea
between March 26-27. </div>
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<a href="http://english.cntv.cn/program/newshour/20120327/113723.shtml"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Notables</span><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span><span style="color: #1155cc;">attending</span><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span><span style="color: #1155cc;">the</span><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span><span style="color: #1155cc;">conference</span></a> included the likes of U.S.
President Barack Obama, Israeli Deputy Prime Minister, Dan Meridor; Canadian
Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Russian outgoing President Dmitry Medvedev,
Chinese President Hu Jintao, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, and British
Prime Minister Nick Clegg, to name several. </div>
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Noticeably <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_8dvnx9WJX4J:www.basicint.org/news/2012/review-2012-nuclear-security-summit+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a">absent were representatives from Iran</a>, though the country received the brunt of criticism
from many of the attendees at what amounted to a dog and pony show in Seoul.</div>
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Speaking at the Summit, Obama <a href="http://english.ntdtv.com/ntdtv_en/news_asia/2012-03-26/obama-tells-iran-time-running-out-end-nuclear-standoff.html"><span style="color: #1155cc;">stated</span></a>, "There is time to solve this
diplomatically, but time is short. Iran's leaders must understand that there is
no escaping the choice before it. Iran must act with the seriousness and sense
of urgency that this moment demands. Iran must meet its obligations."</div>
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One notable <a href="http://www.iea.org/country/n_country.asp?COUNTRY_CODE=KZ">uranium-developing powerhouse</a>
in no way viewed as a “threat” by the 53 world leaders assembled at Seoul was
Kazakhstan, the resource-rich former Soviet republic strategically located at
the center of the Asian heartland.</div>
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A country <a href="http://www.kazakhembus.com/index.php?page=at-a-glance"><span style="color: #1155cc;">four</span></a><a href="http://www.kazakhembus.com/index.php?page=at-a-glance"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.kazakhembus.com/index.php?page=at-a-glance"><span style="color: #1155cc;">times</span></a><a href="http://www.kazakhembus.com/index.php?page=at-a-glance"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.kazakhembus.com/index.php?page=at-a-glance"><span style="color: #1155cc;">the</span></a><a href="http://www.kazakhembus.com/index.php?page=at-a-glance"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.kazakhembus.com/index.php?page=at-a-glance"><span style="color: #1155cc;">size</span></a><a href="http://www.kazakhembus.com/index.php?page=at-a-glance"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.kazakhembus.com/index.php?page=at-a-glance"><span style="color: #1155cc;">of</span></a><a href="http://www.kazakhembus.com/index.php?page=at-a-glance"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.kazakhembus.com/index.php?page=at-a-glance"><span style="color: #1155cc;">the</span></a><a href="http://www.kazakhembus.com/index.php?page=at-a-glance"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.kazakhembus.com/index.php?page=at-a-glance"><span style="color: #1155cc;">state</span></a><a href="http://www.kazakhembus.com/index.php?page=at-a-glance"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.kazakhembus.com/index.php?page=at-a-glance"><span style="color: #1155cc;">of</span></a><a href="http://www.kazakhembus.com/index.php?page=at-a-glance"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.kazakhembus.com/index.php?page=at-a-glance"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Texas</span></a>, the Central Asia giant now serves as a
key thoroughfare for what the Pentagon and U.S. geo-strategic planners refer to
as the<span style="color: red;"> </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Distribution_Network#Northern_Distribution_Network"><span style="color: #3366ff;">Northern</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Distribution_Network#Northern_Distribution_Network"><span style="color: #3366ff;"> </span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Distribution_Network#Northern_Distribution_Network"><span style="color: #3366ff;">Distribution</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Distribution_Network#Northern_Distribution_Network"><span style="color: #3366ff;"> </span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Distribution_Network#Northern_Distribution_Network"><span style="color: #3366ff;">Network</span></a><span style="color: #3366ff;"> </span>(NDN),
the main route equipping US/NATO forces in Afghanistan. </div>
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Kazakhstan’s self-proclaimed “<a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F01EFD61131F93AA25756C0A9619C8B63"><span style="color: #1155cc;">president</span></a><a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F01EFD61131F93AA25756C0A9619C8B63"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F01EFD61131F93AA25756C0A9619C8B63"><span style="color: #1155cc;">for</span></a><a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F01EFD61131F93AA25756C0A9619C8B63"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F01EFD61131F93AA25756C0A9619C8B63"><span style="color: #1155cc;">life</span></a>” --
Nursultan Nazarbayev – played a highly visible role at Seoul and joined
Obama in a<span style="color: red;"> </span><a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/2012/03/26/president-obama-s-bilateral-meeting-president-nazarbayev-kazakhsta#transcript">bilateral</a><a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/2012/03/26/president-obama-s-bilateral-meeting-president-nazarbayev-kazakhsta#transcript">
</a><a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/2012/03/26/president-obama-s-bilateral-meeting-president-nazarbayev-kazakhsta#transcript">meeting</a>,
as well as a<span style="color: red;"> </span><a href="http://www.google.com/imgres?um=1&hl=en&sa=N&biw=853&bih=412&tbm=isch&tbnid=OH3MzJ8aVYs_IM:&imgrefurl=http://kazakhstan.usembassy.gov/&docid=C3OwO_Iaux3zTM&imgurl=http://photos.state.gov/libraries/almaty/21498/front_page/Obama-Nazarbayev-300.jpg&w=300&h=234&ei=3_2BT-ybFYfX0QGC4s2JCA&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=77&vpy=104&dur=1143&hovh=187&hovw=240&tx=125&ty=137&sig=107442794049752431411&page=1&tbnh=99&tbnw=113&start=0&ndsp=10&ved=1t:429,r:0,s:0,i:70">photo</a><a href="http://www.google.com/imgres?um=1&hl=en&sa=N&biw=853&bih=412&tbm=isch&tbnid=OH3MzJ8aVYs_IM:&imgrefurl=http://kazakhstan.usembassy.gov/&docid=C3OwO_Iaux3zTM&imgurl=http://photos.state.gov/libraries/almaty/21498/front_page/Obama-Nazarbayev-300.jpg&w=300&h=234&ei=3_2BT-ybFYfX0QGC4s2JCA&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=77&vpy=104&dur=1143&hovh=187&hovw=240&tx=125&ty=137&sig=107442794049752431411&page=1&tbnh=99&tbnw=113&start=0&ndsp=10&ved=1t:429,r:0,s:0,i:70">
</a><a href="http://www.google.com/imgres?um=1&hl=en&sa=N&biw=853&bih=412&tbm=isch&tbnid=OH3MzJ8aVYs_IM:&imgrefurl=http://kazakhstan.usembassy.gov/&docid=C3OwO_Iaux3zTM&imgurl=http://photos.state.gov/libraries/almaty/21498/front_page/Obama-Nazarbayev-300.jpg&w=300&h=234&ei=3_2BT-ybFYfX0QGC4s2JCA&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=77&vpy=104&dur=1143&hovh=187&hovw=240&tx=125&ty=137&sig=107442794049752431411&page=1&tbnh=99&tbnw=113&start=0&ndsp=10&ved=1t:429,r:0,s:0,i:70">op</a><span style="color: red;">. </span></div>
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As the Summit started, the<i> New
York Times</i> published a public relations piece by Nazarbayev, fittingly
titled, “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/26/opinion/what-iran-can-learn-from-kazakhstan.html?_r=1"><span style="color: #1155cc;">What</span></a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/26/opinion/what-iran-can-learn-from-kazakhstan.html?_r=1"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/26/opinion/what-iran-can-learn-from-kazakhstan.html?_r=1"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Iran</span></a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/26/opinion/what-iran-can-learn-from-kazakhstan.html?_r=1"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/26/opinion/what-iran-can-learn-from-kazakhstan.html?_r=1"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Can</span></a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/26/opinion/what-iran-can-learn-from-kazakhstan.html?_r=1"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/26/opinion/what-iran-can-learn-from-kazakhstan.html?_r=1"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Learn</span></a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/26/opinion/what-iran-can-learn-from-kazakhstan.html?_r=1"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/26/opinion/what-iran-can-learn-from-kazakhstan.html?_r=1"><span style="color: #1155cc;">From</span></a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/26/opinion/what-iran-can-learn-from-kazakhstan.html?_r=1"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/26/opinion/what-iran-can-learn-from-kazakhstan.html?_r=1"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Kazakhstan</span></a>.” Noting his country’s post-Soviet
efforts at nuclear weapons disarmament, the Kazakh leader informed his readers
that his country “…chose building peaceful alliances and prosperity over fear
and suspicion…” </div>
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The cynicism in Nazarbayev’s
rhetoric could not have been missed by those familiar with a country where no
true opposition parties, critical media or free trade unions are allowed, where
protections under the law are virtually absent; and bribery and corruption
rule. </div>
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Just days prior to the appearance
of Nazarabyev’s <i>Times</i> piece, <a href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/EUR57/001/2012/en/d70af967-f211-487d-88c3-5568d03d3cde/eur570012012en.html">Amnesty International examined</a> events in the aftermath of the<span style="color: red;"> </span><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7128:the-kazakhstan-massacre-killing-hope-to-benefit-us-geopolitical-interests">December</a><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7128:the-kazakhstan-massacre-killing-hope-to-benefit-us-geopolitical-interests">
2011 </a><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7128:the-kazakhstan-massacre-killing-hope-to-benefit-us-geopolitical-interests">massacre</a><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7128:the-kazakhstan-massacre-killing-hope-to-benefit-us-geopolitical-interests">
</a><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7128:the-kazakhstan-massacre-killing-hope-to-benefit-us-geopolitical-interests">of</a><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7128:the-kazakhstan-massacre-killing-hope-to-benefit-us-geopolitical-interests">
</a><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7128:the-kazakhstan-massacre-killing-hope-to-benefit-us-geopolitical-interests">striking</a><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7128:the-kazakhstan-massacre-killing-hope-to-benefit-us-geopolitical-interests">
</a><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7128:the-kazakhstan-massacre-killing-hope-to-benefit-us-geopolitical-interests">oil</a><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7128:the-kazakhstan-massacre-killing-hope-to-benefit-us-geopolitical-interests">
</a><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7128:the-kazakhstan-massacre-killing-hope-to-benefit-us-geopolitical-interests">workers</a><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7128:the-kazakhstan-massacre-killing-hope-to-benefit-us-geopolitical-interests">
</a><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7128:the-kazakhstan-massacre-killing-hope-to-benefit-us-geopolitical-interests">in</a><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7128:the-kazakhstan-massacre-killing-hope-to-benefit-us-geopolitical-interests">
</a><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7128:the-kazakhstan-massacre-killing-hope-to-benefit-us-geopolitical-interests">Zhanaozen</a><span style="color: red;">. </span>Appearing a 100 days after that dark day, the <a href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/EUR57/001/2012/en/d70af967-f211-487d-88c3-5568d03d3cde/eur570012012en.html" style="color: blue;"> </a><a href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/EUR57/001/2012/en/d70af967-f211-487d-88c3-5568d03d3cde/eur570012012en.html" style="color: blue;">report</a> found the government’s investigation into
the events “inadequate.” Amnesty noted, “There have been numerous reports of
widespread torture and other ill-treatment of those detained by security forces
in the aftermath of the violence and investigations into these allegations do
not to date appear to be thorough and impartial.”<br />
<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhp6omXWQc4ezfd9PjiCzdTZLR9RYq-EBYfJ3-ImXMq82eX1JA0vcAmBee-aalpJBeyjeCsWml4i9bknGuF620tIB2gJlIhi_BPo4-cuT-BP_CA9hVrksRkyj6PW3-25su3Qt7KLOFPDuQG/s1600/Zhanaozen+worker.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="238" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhp6omXWQc4ezfd9PjiCzdTZLR9RYq-EBYfJ3-ImXMq82eX1JA0vcAmBee-aalpJBeyjeCsWml4i9bknGuF620tIB2gJlIhi_BPo4-cuT-BP_CA9hVrksRkyj6PW3-25su3Qt7KLOFPDuQG/s320/Zhanaozen+worker.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A striking oil worker at Zhanaozen, one of many massacred on December 16, 2011</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">In an effort to counterbalance the influence of neighboring Russia and China, and concerned with Nazarbayev’s importance as a supportive ally in regard to nearby Afghanistan and Iran, US officials have often extended lip service praise for slow-in coming cosmetic social and political reforms as Nazarabyev consolidated his hold of what amounts to a one party monopoly on all the levers of power.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Numerous major human rights
monitors, including <a href="http://www.hrw.org/world-report-2012/world-report-2012-kazakhstan">Human
Rights Watch</a>, <a href="http://www.freedomhouse.org/country/kazakhstan">Freedom
House</a> and <a href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/region/kazakstan/report-2011">Amnesty
International</a> have long cited Kazakhstan for violations of international protocols
regarding workers’ rights, the freedom of assembly and dissent, the state <a href="http://en.rsf.org/report-kazakhstan,112.html">control of the media system</a>
at all levels, the routine <a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/64881">repression
of opposition political parties and candidates</a>, the <a href="http://www.blogger.com/">absence of due process</a>
under the law, the <a href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/report/kazakhstani-authorities-must-tackle-police-brutality-2010-03-22">impunity of the police</a>, <a href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/EUR57/001/2010/en/88639715-0122-4cdd-ab15-9583ec80f30d/eur570012010en.pdf">ubiquitous
torture</a>, and the limited rights of those accused, detained, prisoners and
the lawyers who defend them; and state violence, in general. The <a href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/EUR57/002/2011/en/88652b78-fe97-4d17-bb73-10555ff95898/eur570022011en.html">mistreatment
of immigrants</a>, the exploitation of <a href="http://hrbrief.org/2011/02/made-in-kazakhstan-migrant-child-labor-in-kazakhstan%25E2%2580%2599s-tobacco-fields/">child
labor</a> and <a href="http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/4ecf57862.html">human
trafficking</a> in the country have also been cited. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2011/kazakhstan">Kazakh
media</a><span style="color: red;"> </span>remain subject to legal restrictions,
prohibitive libel and defamation judgments, self-censorship, harassment, and
pressures from partisan owners and politicians. When Kazakhstan assumed the chairmanship of the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in 2010, the government pledged to
improve human rights practices and increase media freedom. The level of press
freedom nevertheless declined during the year, as a restrictive internet law
passed in 2009 was used to intimidate bloggers and block websites, two
independent newspapers were closed, and a journalist remained in jail.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The final report regarding
country’s <a href="http://www.europeanforum.net/country/kazakhstan">2010 OSCE
chairmanship</a> concluded that the Nazarbayev government introduced no
positive changes in regard to its own human rights record, as was promised at
the beginning of its OSCE tenure. The report stated that the regime had
actually displayed disrespect for its international obligations in regard to
human rights.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Despite documentation of such regularized abuses, representatives of the
regime centered at the country’s newly constructed showcase capital, the <a href="http://aboutkazakhstan.com/blog/cities/the-beauty-of-kazakhstan-capital-city/">“mini-Dubai”
at Astana</a>, have regularly been well received by </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Washington</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">.</span></span><br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYKABraSrWxTZepYsBWif1XjyXLJDsBNVCeZfu5D4hCxuhKK5FUXEUub8i9SPiyipb8j0TN7jkp60pBDkpyuSLgf0rEUoZA1Yzqr4vKH6bZDOz5lH1BKOUO8BHM1wmrSAA8PcygDR9cwKa/s1600/astana.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYKABraSrWxTZepYsBWif1XjyXLJDsBNVCeZfu5D4hCxuhKK5FUXEUub8i9SPiyipb8j0TN7jkp60pBDkpyuSLgf0rEUoZA1Yzqr4vKH6bZDOz5lH1BKOUO8BHM1wmrSAA8PcygDR9cwKa/s320/astana.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nazarabyev's "Mini-Dubai" at Astana</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
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<b>Kazakh
Nukes</b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
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Well-known for its <a href="http://www.iea.org/country/n_country.asp?COUNTRY_CODE=KZ"><span style="color: #1155cc;">massive quantity of Caspian Sea oil and natural gas resources</span></a><span style="color: #1155cc;"></span>, massive quantity of Caspian Sea oil and natural gas resources Kazakhstan is also a growing
nuclear power, possessing roughly 15-percent of the world’s known uranium
supply and producing roughly one-third of the current global supply, <a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf89.html"><span style="color: #1155cc;">according</span></a><a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf89.html"><span style="color: #1155cc;">
</span></a><a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf89.html"><span style="color: #1155cc;">to</span></a><a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf89.html"><span style="color: #1155cc;">
</span></a><a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf89.html"><span style="color: #1155cc;">the</span></a><a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf89.html"><span style="color: #1155cc;">
</span></a><a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf89.html"><span style="color: #1155cc;">World</span></a><a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf89.html"><span style="color: #1155cc;">
</span></a><a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf89.html"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Nuclear</span></a><a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf89.html"><span style="color: #1155cc;">
</span></a><a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf89.html"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Association</span></a>. Bypassing Australia and Canada
last year, it currently is the world’s largest producer of the nuclear fuel
source.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Kazakhstan’s nuclear industry
extends from the mining, processing and export of uranium to the construction
of nuclear reactors. Closely tied to
both Canadian and U.S. mega energy corporations, it seemingly poses no concern
for Washington. Unlike Iran, no one seems to be calling for sanctions or regime
change despite the repressive nature of Nazarbayev’s regime. Business is
business and U.S. strategic interest trumps all. </div>
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<br /></div>
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A bit of recent nuclear industry
business history is in order. </div>
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<br /></div>
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In October 2006, the Japanese
multinational corporation <span style="color: #1155cc;">Toshiba</span> -- of television- and
computer-manufacturing fame -- <a href="http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2006_10/pr1702.htm">purchased a 77-percent majority share in Westinghouse Electric</a> for a mere $5.4 billion. The other
two companies involved in the buyout were Japan’s <a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_1992008858"><span style="color: #1155cc;">IHI</span></a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_1992008858"><span style="color: #1155cc;">
</span></a><a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/06/westinghouse-toshiba-idUSL3E7K600T20110906"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Corporation</span></a>, as well as the U.S. multinational
<a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-06/toshiba-falls-on-report-company-may-buy-shaw-group-s-stake-in-westinghouse.html">Shaw Group</a>.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Less than a year later, in July
2007, <a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fdjysrv.blogspot.com%2F2007%2F07%2Ftoshiba-sells-stake-in-westinghouse-to.html&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHTD5kU_0yHI42z0idq56CksLG28w"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Kazakhstan</span></a><a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fdjysrv.blogspot.com%2F2007%2F07%2Ftoshiba-sells-stake-in-westinghouse-to.html&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHTD5kU_0yHI42z0idq56CksLG28w"><span style="color: #1155cc;">’</span></a><a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fdjysrv.blogspot.com%2F2007%2F07%2Ftoshiba-sells-stake-in-westinghouse-to.html&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHTD5kU_0yHI42z0idq56CksLG28w"><span style="color: #1155cc;">s</span></a><a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fdjysrv.blogspot.com%2F2007%2F07%2Ftoshiba-sells-stake-in-westinghouse-to.html&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHTD5kU_0yHI42z0idq56CksLG28w"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fdjysrv.blogspot.com%2F2007%2F07%2Ftoshiba-sells-stake-in-westinghouse-to.html&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHTD5kU_0yHI42z0idq56CksLG28w"><span style="color: #1155cc;">state</span></a><a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fdjysrv.blogspot.com%2F2007%2F07%2Ftoshiba-sells-stake-in-westinghouse-to.html&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHTD5kU_0yHI42z0idq56CksLG28w"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fdjysrv.blogspot.com%2F2007%2F07%2Ftoshiba-sells-stake-in-westinghouse-to.html&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHTD5kU_0yHI42z0idq56CksLG28w"><span style="color: #1155cc;">owned</span></a><a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fdjysrv.blogspot.com%2F2007%2F07%2Ftoshiba-sells-stake-in-westinghouse-to.html&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHTD5kU_0yHI42z0idq56CksLG28w"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fdjysrv.blogspot.com%2F2007%2F07%2Ftoshiba-sells-stake-in-westinghouse-to.html&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHTD5kU_0yHI42z0idq56CksLG28w"><span style="color: #1155cc;">company</span></a><a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fdjysrv.blogspot.com%2F2007%2F07%2Ftoshiba-sells-stake-in-westinghouse-to.html&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHTD5kU_0yHI42z0idq56CksLG28w"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fdjysrv.blogspot.com%2F2007%2F07%2Ftoshiba-sells-stake-in-westinghouse-to.html&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHTD5kU_0yHI42z0idq56CksLG28w"><span style="color: #1155cc;">KazAtomProm</span></a><a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fdjysrv.blogspot.com%2F2007%2F07%2Ftoshiba-sells-stake-in-westinghouse-to.html&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHTD5kU_0yHI42z0idq56CksLG28w"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fdjysrv.blogspot.com%2F2007%2F07%2Ftoshiba-sells-stake-in-westinghouse-to.html&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHTD5kU_0yHI42z0idq56CksLG28w"><span style="color: #1155cc;">paid</span></a><a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fdjysrv.blogspot.com%2F2007%2F07%2Ftoshiba-sells-stake-in-westinghouse-to.html&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHTD5kU_0yHI42z0idq56CksLG28w"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> $486.3 </span></a><a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fdjysrv.blogspot.com%2F2007%2F07%2Ftoshiba-sells-stake-in-westinghouse-to.html&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHTD5kU_0yHI42z0idq56CksLG28w"><span style="color: #1155cc;">million</span></a> for a<span style="color: red;"> </span>10-percent
of Toshiba’s stake in the jointly owned corporation, meaning it now owns
7.7-percent of Westinghouse. </div>
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<br /></div>
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“The deal,” <a href="http://djysrv.blogspot.com/2007/07/toshiba-sells-stake-in-westinghouse-to.html"><span style="color: #1155cc;">explained</span></a> nuclear industry analyst and
consultant, Dan Yurman, “would give Toshiba access to Kazakhstan's uranium at a
time when increased demand has tripled prices of the nuclear fuel ingredient in
the past year. It would give <a href="http://www.kazatomprom.kz/en/"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Kazatomprom</span></a> access to Toshiba's uranium
processing technology and its sales channels.”</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
The transaction infuriated close observers of the global nuclear industry who cited <a href="http://www.hrw.org/europecentral-asia/kazakhstan"><span style="color: #1155cc;">human</span></a><a href="http://www.hrw.org/europecentral-asia/kazakhstan"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.hrw.org/europecentral-asia/kazakhstan"><span style="color: #1155cc;">rights</span></a><a href="http://www.hrw.org/europecentral-asia/kazakhstan"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.hrw.org/europecentral-asia/kazakhstan"><span style="color: #1155cc;">concerns</span></a> and the dictatorial, <a href="http://www.thefreelibrary.com/KAZAKHASTAN+-+Profile+-+Nursultan+Nazarbayev.-a0107151815">kleptocratic nature of the Nazarbayev regime</a> that<span style="color: red;"> </span><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/24/kazakhstan-strongman-wins-disputed-election"><span style="color: blue;">“won” yet another rigged election</span></a><span style="color: red;"> </span>in January, 2012 held amidst the ongoing repression following the
state crackdown at<span style="color: red;"> </span>Zhanaozen. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: center;">
<b>Clinton
and Nazarbayev: East Meets Westinghouse</b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
The nature of wheelings and
dealings under Nazarbayev was fully displayed in an earlier nuclear deal that
preceded, but was directly connected to the Westinghouse purchase - a 2005 transaction between the Kazakh
state-owned KazAtomProm and a Canadian energy entrepreneur, facilitated by none
other than the former U.S. President Bill Clinton. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
In 2005, Clinton, then (and
still) head of the newly-formed <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Foundation"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Clinton</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Foundation"><span style="color: #1155cc;">
</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Foundation"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Foundation</span></a>, helped Canadian business mogul <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Giustra"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Frank</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Giustra"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Giustra"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Giustra</span></a>
make the nuclear deal of a lifetime. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31donor.html">According to the <i>New York Times</i></a>, Clinton facilitated a trip in
September that year for the two of them to visit Nazarbayev in Almaty,
Kazakhstan. Two days later Giustra “signed preliminary agreements giving it the
right to buy interests in three uranium projects controlled by Kazakhstan’s
state-owned uranium agency, Kazatomprom.”<br />
<u></u><br />
<u><span style="color: #1155cc;"></span></u></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Clinton and Nazarbayev: "Let's Make a Deal"?</td></tr>
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The deal needed Nazarbayev’s
go-ahead to assure final approval. With Clinton at his side, Giustra received
it. As the <i>Times</i> piece described it, “The monster deal stunned the
mining industry, turning an unknown shell company (UrAsia Energy Ltd.) into one
of the world’s largest uranium producers in a transaction ultimately worth tens
of millions of dollars to Mr. Giustra.” </div>
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Giustra obtained a stake in the <a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2008%2F01%2F31%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2F31donor.html%3F_r%3D1%26pagewanted%3Dprint&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGFt1gXz5D2Y_iqSTDdUj6fyQVXSg"><span style="color: #1155cc;">mines</span></a><a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2008%2F01%2F31%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2F31donor.html%3F_r%3D1%26pagewanted%3Dprint&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGFt1gXz5D2Y_iqSTDdUj6fyQVXSg"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2008%2F01%2F31%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2F31donor.html%3F_r%3D1%26pagewanted%3Dprint&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGFt1gXz5D2Y_iqSTDdUj6fyQVXSg"><span style="color: #1155cc;">for</span></a><a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2008%2F01%2F31%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2F31donor.html%3F_r%3D1%26pagewanted%3Dprint&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGFt1gXz5D2Y_iqSTDdUj6fyQVXSg"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> $450 </span></a><a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2008%2F01%2F31%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2F31donor.html%3F_r%3D1%26pagewanted%3Dprint&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGFt1gXz5D2Y_iqSTDdUj6fyQVXSg"><span style="color: #1155cc;">million</span></a>, “the largest initial public offering
in the history of Canada’s Venture Exchange.” In appreciation for his role as
internediary, Giustra made a “philanthropic gift” to the former
President’s Foundation totaling $131.1
milliion.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Clinton and Canadian uranium mogul pal, Frank Giustra</td></tr>
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It gets better. “In February
2007, a company called Uranium One agreed to pay $3.1 billion to acquire (the
shell company) UrAsia. Mr. Giustra, a director and major shareholder in UrAsia,
would be paid $7.05 per share for a company that just two years earlier was
trading at 10 cents per share,” the<i> New York Times </i>story<i> </i><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31donor.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print"><span style="color: #1155cc;">explained</span></a>. That same month, the then president
of KazAtomProm, <a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_993048265"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Moukhtar</span></a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_993048265"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.touchbriefings.com/pdf/2402/mirshanov.pdf"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Dzhakishev</span></a>, paid a special visit to Clinton’s
Chappaqua, NY abode.</div>
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The reason for the visit? <i>The
Times</i> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31donor.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print"><span style="color: #1155cc;">provides</span></a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31donor.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31donor.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print"><span style="color: #1155cc;">the</span></a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31donor.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31donor.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print"><span style="color: #1155cc;">answer</span></a>: “Mr. Dzhakishev said he wanted to
discuss Kazakhstan’s intention — not publicly known at the time — to buy a 10
percent stake in Westinghouse, a United States supplier of nuclear
technology.” </div>
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Roughly two years after the deal
was cut, <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a.TbDoI9pWAQ&refer=canada"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Dzhakishev</span></a><a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a.TbDoI9pWAQ&refer=canada"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a.TbDoI9pWAQ&refer=canada"><span style="color: #1155cc;">was</span></a><a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a.TbDoI9pWAQ&refer=canada"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a.TbDoI9pWAQ&refer=canada"><span style="color: #1155cc;">sent</span></a><a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a.TbDoI9pWAQ&refer=canada"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a.TbDoI9pWAQ&refer=canada"><span style="color: #1155cc;">packing</span></a><a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a.TbDoI9pWAQ&refer=canada"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a>to <span style="color: #1155cc;"></span>a high security <a href="http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/IT-Prison_sentence_for_former_KazAtomProm_head-1503104.html">penitentiary for 14 years</a>, accused by Nazarbayev’s investigators, <i>Bloomberg</i>
<a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a.TbDoI9pWAQ&refer=canada"><span style="color: #1155cc;">reported</span></a>, of “embezzling state shares in
uranium deposits, including one co-owned by Canada’s Uranium One.” (Uranium
One, of course, was the company that purchased Giustra’s UrAsia Energy Ltd.) </div>
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The arrest was <a href="http://in.reuters.com/article/2009/05/25/kazakhstan-arrest-idINLP59474420090525"><span style="color: #1155cc;">made</span></a><a href="http://in.reuters.com/article/2009/05/25/kazakhstan-arrest-idINLP59474420090525"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://in.reuters.com/article/2009/05/25/kazakhstan-arrest-idINLP59474420090525"><span style="color: #1155cc;">by</span></a><a href="http://in.reuters.com/article/2009/05/25/kazakhstan-arrest-idINLP59474420090525"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://in.reuters.com/article/2009/05/25/kazakhstan-arrest-idINLP59474420090525"><span style="color: #1155cc;">the</span></a><a href="http://in.reuters.com/article/2009/05/25/kazakhstan-arrest-idINLP59474420090525"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://in.reuters.com/article/2009/05/25/kazakhstan-arrest-idINLP59474420090525"><span style="color: #1155cc;">KNB</span></a>, the Kazakhstani successor to the
Soviet-era KGB<span style="color: red;">.</span> <a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/civilsociety/articles/eav031710.shtml"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Many</span></a><a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/civilsociety/articles/eav031710.shtml"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/civilsociety/articles/eav031710.shtml"><span style="color: #1155cc;">believe</span></a> -- including leaders from the
opposition <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azat_party"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Azat</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azat_party"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azat_party"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Party</span></a>
-- that the arrest was <a href="http://registan.net/index.php/2009/05/26/nuclear-industry-arrest-politically-motivated/"><span style="color: #1155cc;">politically</span></a><a href="http://registan.net/index.php/2009/05/26/nuclear-industry-arrest-politically-motivated/"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://registan.net/index.php/2009/05/26/nuclear-industry-arrest-politically-motivated/"><span style="color: #1155cc;">motivated</span></a>.</div>
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Everyone walked away a winner in
this one, other than Dzhakishev. </div>
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In exchange for his patronage,
Nazarbayev received Clinton’s <a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2008%2F01%2F31%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2F31donor.html%3F_r%3D1%26pagewanted%3Dprint&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGFt1gXz5D2Y_iqSTDdUj6fyQVXSg"><span style="color: #1155cc;">praise</span></a> for “opening up the social and
political life” of Kazakhstan. The ex-president and former leader of the “free
world” proceeded to endorse the dictator in his bid to become the chair of the <a href="http://www.osce.org/"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Organization</span></a><a href="http://www.osce.org/"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.osce.org/"><span style="color: #1155cc;">for</span></a><a href="http://www.osce.org/"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.osce.org/"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Security</span></a><a href="http://www.osce.org/"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.osce.org/"><span style="color: #1155cc;">and</span></a><a href="http://www.osce.org/"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.osce.org/"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Co</span></a><a href="http://www.osce.org/"><span style="color: #1155cc;">-</span></a><a href="http://www.osce.org/"><span style="color: #1155cc;">operation</span></a><a href="http://www.osce.org/"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.osce.org/"><span style="color: #1155cc;">in</span></a><a href="http://www.osce.org/"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.osce.org/"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Europe</span></a>
(OSCE), the body mandated to monitor arms control, human rights, freedom of the
press, and fair elections across the Global North.</div>
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Eleven months prior to the 2005
deal, then U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31donor.html?_r=1"><span style="color: #1155cc;">co</span></a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31donor.html?_r=1"><span style="color: #1155cc;">-</span></a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31donor.html?_r=1"><span style="color: #1155cc;">signed</span></a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31donor.html?_r=1"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31donor.html?_r=1"><span style="color: #1155cc;">a</span></a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31donor.html?_r=1"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31donor.html?_r=1"><span style="color: #1155cc;">letter</span></a> to the U.S. State Department she now heads
sounding “alarm bells” regarding Nazarbayev’s earlier bid to head the OSCE. The
letter found Kazakhstan’s bid unacceptable and cited “serious corruption,”
cancelled elections and government control of the media. This </div>
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The only honest way to describe the
situation: insider wheeling and dealing of epic proportions for Clinton,
Giustra, and the Nazarbayev clique, with Dzhakishev ending up on the rotten end
of this deal. </div>
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<b>The
Fukushima Connection</b></div>
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No story about the nuclear
industry would be complete without a mention of the spring 2011 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Fukushima</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Daiichi</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster"><span style="color: #1155cc;">nuclear</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster"><span style="color: #1155cc;">disaster</span></a>. This tale, too, would be incomplete
without pointing to the connections between U.S. geopolitical maneuvering, the
Iranian “nuclear” threat, the “benevolent” Kazakhstani nuclear industry, and
what is now a wasteland in Fukushima. </div>
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In the days after Japan’s nuclear
disaster, investigative journalist Greg Palast <a href="http://www.gregpalast.com/no-bs-info-on-japan-nuclearobama-invites-tokyo-electric-to-build-us-nukes-with-taxpayer-funds/">connected some of the dots</a>
by revealing that, “One of the reactors dancing with death at Fukushima Station
1 was built by Toshiba. Toshiba was also an architect of the emergency diesel
system.”</div>
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Such back-up power generators
were part the “seismic qualification” (SQ) test requirements that all nuclear
power plants must pass. Yet, meeting SQ qualifications is expensive, so, as
Palast <a href="http://www.gregpalast.com/no-bs-info-on-japan-nuclearobama-invites-tokyo-electric-to-build-us-nukes-with-taxpayer-funds/"><span style="color: #1155cc;">explained</span></a>, “The most inexpensive way to meet
your SQ is to lie.” Stone and Webster, the nuclear unit of The Shaw Group, did
just that for Fukushima Daiichi.</div>
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Shaw, as mentioned, owns a
20-percent stake in Westinghouse, KazAtomProm owns a 7.7-percent stake in it,
while Toshiba owns a 69.3-percent stake.</div>
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Kazakhstan continues to
experience its own <a href="http://www.euronews.com/2010/04/14/kazakhstan-s-nuclear-legacy/">nuclear</a><a href="http://www.euronews.com/2010/04/14/kazakhstan-s-nuclear-legacy/"> </a><a href="http://www.euronews.com/2010/04/14/kazakhstan-s-nuclear-legacy/">tragedy</a>
in the area around <a href="http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/11/kazakhstans_radioactive_legacy.html">Semipalatinsk</a>, (Semey),
formerly the center of Soviet-era nuclear weapons tests. A still unknown, but
massive number of inhabitants of this <a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fthebulletin.org%2Fweb-edition%2Ffeatures%2Fthe-lasting-toll-of-semipalatinsks-nuclear-testing&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNF6dzEBkxFYtS31rPS1qZRYE4to_Q"><span style="color: #3366ff;">northeastern</span></a><a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fthebulletin.org%2Fweb-edition%2Ffeatures%2Fthe-lasting-toll-of-semipalatinsks-nuclear-testing&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNF6dzEBkxFYtS31rPS1qZRYE4to_Q"><span style="color: #3366ff;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fthebulletin.org%2Fweb-edition%2Ffeatures%2Fthe-lasting-toll-of-semipalatinsks-nuclear-testing&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNF6dzEBkxFYtS31rPS1qZRYE4to_Q"><span style="color: #3366ff;">Kazakh</span></a><a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fthebulletin.org%2Fweb-edition%2Ffeatures%2Fthe-lasting-toll-of-semipalatinsks-nuclear-testing&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNF6dzEBkxFYtS31rPS1qZRYE4to_Q"><span style="color: #3366ff;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fthebulletin.org%2Fweb-edition%2Ffeatures%2Fthe-lasting-toll-of-semipalatinsks-nuclear-testing&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNF6dzEBkxFYtS31rPS1qZRYE4to_Q"><span style="color: #3366ff;">region</span></a> continue to suffer and die from leukemia,
other cancers, and horrific birth defects caused by high levels of radiation.</div>
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“Already, the thyroid cancer rate
in the east and north of Kazakhstan is twice as high as in the rest of the
country, and other cancers such as breast, have higher rates,” <a href="http://www.theecologist.org/how_to_make_a_difference/climate_change_and_energy/1033288/kazakhstans_nuclear_legacy_offers_lessons_for_fukushima.html"><span style="color: #1155cc;">explained</span></a><a href="http://www.theecologist.org/how_to_make_a_difference/climate_change_and_energy/1033288/kazakhstans_nuclear_legacy_offers_lessons_for_fukushima.html"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.theecologist.org/how_to_make_a_difference/climate_change_and_energy/1033288/kazakhstans_nuclear_legacy_offers_lessons_for_fukushima.html"><i><span style="color: #1155cc;">The</span></i></a><a href="http://www.theecologist.org/how_to_make_a_difference/climate_change_and_energy/1033288/kazakhstans_nuclear_legacy_offers_lessons_for_fukushima.html"><i><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></i></a><a href="http://www.theecologist.org/how_to_make_a_difference/climate_change_and_energy/1033288/kazakhstans_nuclear_legacy_offers_lessons_for_fukushima.html"><i><span style="color: #1155cc;">Ecologist</span></i></a> in an August 2011 article.</div>
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This, then, raises the question: Who or what poses the
nuclear threat? Nuclear energy, nuclear armament, and uranium enrichment in of
themselves, or solely Iran’s “nuclear ambitions”?</div>
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<b>History
Repeating Itself?: Iran’s Once Benevolent Nuclear Industry</b></div>
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Iran hasn’t <i>always</i> been
deemed a “nuclear threat” by U.S. policymakers. </div>
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Long before U.S. geopolitical
planning elites deemed Iran’s nuclear program a “threat,” its development was
encouraged, in the 1970s during the closing years of Shah Reza Pahlavi’s
dictatorship. None other than former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, former
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and former Deputy Secretary of Defense
Paul Wolfowitz, all three at the time holding held high-level national security
positions under President Gerald Ford, promoted the effort. </div>
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The scenario was best unpacked in
an article appearing in the <i>The Washington Post </i>in March 2005. Dafna
Linzer <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3983-2005Mar26.html"><span style="color: #1155cc;">wrote</span></a> of the deal:</div>
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“Ford's team
endorsed Iranian plans to build a massive nuclear energy industry, but also
worked hard to complete a multibillion-dollar deal that would have given Tehran
control of large quantities of plutonium and enriched uranium -- the two
pathways to a nuclear bomb. Either can be shaped into the core of a nuclear
warhead, and obtaining one or the other is generally considered the most
significant obstacle to would-be weapons builders.</div>
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Iran, a U.S.
ally then, had deep pockets and close ties to Washington. U.S. companies,
including Westinghouse and General Electric, scrambled to do business there.</div>
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(Snip)</div>
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“After balking
initially, President Gerald R. Ford signed a directive in 1976 offering Tehran
the chance to buy and operate a U.S.-built reprocessing facility for extracting
plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel.”</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-left: .5in;">
(Snip)</div>
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<br /></div>
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“The U.S.-Iran
deal was shelved when the shah was toppled in the 1979 revolution that led to
the taking of American hostages and severing of diplomatic relations.”</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
Linzer went on to explain that
U.S. companies, led by Westinghouse, stood to gain $6.4 billion from the sale
of six to eight nuclear reactors and parts.</div>
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It all connects. Westinghouse
today is co-owned by Toshiba, The Shaw Group, and Kazakhstan’s uranium giant, KazAtomProm.
Basically the same corporate interests eyeing Iran’s nuclear development under
the US-backed Shah’s currently have their hands in Kazakhstan’s nuclear industry
today. </div>
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<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: center;">
<b>Hypocrisy
and the Looming Attack on Iran</b></div>
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<br /></div>
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With rapidity, the build-up for
an attack on Iran progresses.</div>
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<br /></div>
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In response to a U.S. <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/28/news/international/iran_oil_sanctions/index.htm">threat</a><a href="http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/28/news/international/iran_oil_sanctions/index.htm">
</a><a href="http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/28/news/international/iran_oil_sanctions/index.htm">to</a><a href="http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/28/news/international/iran_oil_sanctions/index.htm">
</a><a href="http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/28/news/international/iran_oil_sanctions/index.htm">sanction</a><a href="http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/28/news/international/iran_oil_sanctions/index.htm">
</a><a href="http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/28/news/international/iran_oil_sanctions/index.htm">Iran</a><a href="http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/28/news/international/iran_oil_sanctions/index.htm">’</a><a href="http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/28/news/international/iran_oil_sanctions/index.htm">s</a><a href="http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/28/news/international/iran_oil_sanctions/index.htm">
</a><a href="http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/28/news/international/iran_oil_sanctions/index.htm">oil</a><a href="http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/28/news/international/iran_oil_sanctions/index.htm">
</a><a href="http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/28/news/international/iran_oil_sanctions/index.htm">industry</a>,<span style="color: red;"> </span>in late-December 2011 the<span style="color: red;"> </span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_670535208">Iranian</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_670535208"> </a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_670535208">government</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_670535208"> </a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_670535208">threatened<u><span style="color: blue;"></span></u> to</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_670535208"></a><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-16344102"> shut down</a><span style="color: red;"> </span>the<span style="color: red;"> </span><a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57377270/u.s-naval-battle-group-crosses-strait-of-hormuz/">Strait of Hormuz</a>, the strategic
“choke point” for oil passing passing
from the Persian Gulf. </div>
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<br /></div>
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Soon after, U.S. Joint Chiefs of
Staff Chairman <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-08/iran-able-to-block-strait-of-hormuz-general-dempsey-tells-cbs.html">Gen. Martin Dempsey</a> told CBS’ Face the Nation that, “[Iran] has invested in
capabilities that could, in fact, for a period of time block the Strait of
Hormuz. We’ve invested in capabilities to ensure that if that happens, we can
defeat that.” </div>
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Three weeks on, the U.S. Navy
announced the deployment of a floating <span style="color: #1155cc;">"forward</span><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span><span style="color: #1155cc;">operating</span><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span><span style="color: #1155cc;">base"</span> “mothership” south of Iran, aboard the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Ponce_%28LPD-15%29"><span style="color: #1155cc;">USS</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Ponce_%28LPD-15%29"><span style="color: #1155cc;">
</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Ponce_%28LPD-15%29"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Ponce</span></a>. “Navy documents indicate that it
could be headed to the Persian Gulf, where Iran has threatened to block the
Strait of Hormuz, a crucial shipping route for much of the world’s oil supply,”
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/pentagon-wants-commando-mother-ship/2012/01/27/gIQA66rGWQ_story.html"><span style="color: #1155cc;">explained</span></a><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/pentagon-wants-commando-mother-ship/2012/01/27/gIQA66rGWQ_story.html"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/pentagon-wants-commando-mother-ship/2012/01/27/gIQA66rGWQ_story.html"><i><span style="color: #1155cc;">The</span></i></a><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/pentagon-wants-commando-mother-ship/2012/01/27/gIQA66rGWQ_story.html"><i><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></i></a><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/pentagon-wants-commando-mother-ship/2012/01/27/gIQA66rGWQ_story.html"><i><span style="color: #1155cc;">Washington</span></i></a><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/pentagon-wants-commando-mother-ship/2012/01/27/gIQA66rGWQ_story.html"><i><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></i></a><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/pentagon-wants-commando-mother-ship/2012/01/27/gIQA66rGWQ_story.html"><i><span style="color: #1155cc;">Post</span></i></a>. The ship will manned with <a href="http://www.maritime-executive.com/article/us-navy-converting-ship-into-floating-commando-base-in-middle-east"><span style="color: #1155cc;">active</span></a><a href="http://www.maritime-executive.com/article/us-navy-converting-ship-into-floating-commando-base-in-middle-east"><span style="color: #1155cc;">-</span></a><a href="http://www.maritime-executive.com/article/us-navy-converting-ship-into-floating-commando-base-in-middle-east"><span style="color: #1155cc;">duty</span></a><a href="http://www.maritime-executive.com/article/us-navy-converting-ship-into-floating-commando-base-in-middle-east"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.maritime-executive.com/article/us-navy-converting-ship-into-floating-commando-base-in-middle-east"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Navy</span></a><a href="http://www.maritime-executive.com/article/us-navy-converting-ship-into-floating-commando-base-in-middle-east"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.maritime-executive.com/article/us-navy-converting-ship-into-floating-commando-base-in-middle-east"><span style="color: #1155cc;">SEAL</span></a><a href="http://www.maritime-executive.com/article/us-navy-converting-ship-into-floating-commando-base-in-middle-east"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.maritime-executive.com/article/us-navy-converting-ship-into-floating-commando-base-in-middle-east"><span style="color: #1155cc;">commandos</span></a>.</div>
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In the midst of the Hormuz snafu,
investigative reporter Mark Perry published a <a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/01/13/false_flag"><span style="color: #1155cc;">groundbreaking</span></a><a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/01/13/false_flag"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/01/13/false_flag"><span style="color: #1155cc;">exposé</span></a>, revealing that agents from Israel’s
foreign intelligence service,<span style="color: red;"> </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mossad">Mossad</a>, had been posing as U.S.
spies in Pakistan to recruit members of the terrorist organization <a href="http://irancoverage.com/2008/07/08/seymour-hersh-us-training-jundullah-and-mek-for-bombing-preparation/"><span style="color: black;">Jundallah</span></a>
to fight a covert war against Iran, presumably with the blessing of the U.S.
government. Jundallah is a State Department <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11686571"><span style="color: #1155cc;">designated</span></a><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11686571"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11686571"><span style="color: #1155cc;">terrorist</span></a><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11686571"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11686571"><span style="color: #1155cc;">organization</span></a>.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Perry also broke a story on March
28, uncovering the fact that Israel -- again, almost certainly with U.S.
blessing -- procured an air base in Azerbaijan, Iran’s northern neighbor
located to the southwest of Kazakhstan, across the Caspian sea. He referred to
this as “<a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/03/28/israel_s_secret_staging_ground"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Israel</span></a><a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/03/28/israel_s_secret_staging_ground"><span style="color: #1155cc;">’</span></a><a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/03/28/israel_s_secret_staging_ground"><span style="color: #1155cc;">s</span></a><a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/03/28/israel_s_secret_staging_ground"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/03/28/israel_s_secret_staging_ground"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Secret</span></a><a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/03/28/israel_s_secret_staging_ground"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/03/28/israel_s_secret_staging_ground"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Staging</span></a><a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/03/28/israel_s_secret_staging_ground"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/03/28/israel_s_secret_staging_ground"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Ground</span></a>.” </div>
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<br /></div>
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This development is a logical
one, given that Azerbaijan has already been the home site of a secretive U.S.
Central Operations Command (CENTCOM)/Blackwater Worldwide (now known as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academi"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Academi</span></a>
and, previously, as Xe Services) forward operating base as part of the broader <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspian_Guard_Initiative"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Caspian</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspian_Guard_Initiative"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspian_Guard_Initiative"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Guard</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspian_Guard_Initiative"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspian_Guard_Initiative"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Initiative</span></a> for years. Jeremy Scahill explained
the Initiative in his book “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful
Mercenary Army.” He wrote,</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-left: .5in;">
"Beginning
in July 2004, Blackwater forces were contracted to work in the heart of the
oil- and gas-rich Caspian Sea region, where they would quietly train a force
modeled after the Navy SEALs and establish a base just north of the Iranian
border," Scahill wrote.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-left: .5in;">
"Blackwater
would be tasked with establishing and training an elite ... force modeled after
the U.S. Navy SEALs that would ultimately protect the interests of the United
States and its allies in a hostile region ... [serving] a dual purpose:
protecting the West's new profitable oil and gas exploitation in a region
historically dominated by Russia and Iran, and possibly laying the groundwork
for an important forward operating base in an attack against Iran," he
continued.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
More recently, <i>The</i> <i>New
Yorker </i>magazine’s<i> </i> Seymour
Hersh, writing on “<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/04/mek.html"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Our</span></a><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/04/mek.html"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/04/mek.html"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Men</span></a><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/04/mek.html"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/04/mek.html"><span style="color: #1155cc;">in</span></a><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/04/mek.html"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/04/mek.html"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Iran</span></a><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/04/mek.html"><span style="color: #1155cc;">?</span></a>,” revealed that the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Special_Operations_Command"><span style="color: #1155cc;">U</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Special_Operations_Command"><span style="color: #1155cc;">.</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Special_Operations_Command"><span style="color: #1155cc;">S</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Special_Operations_Command"><span style="color: #1155cc;">. </span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Special_Operations_Command"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Joint</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Special_Operations_Command"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Special_Operations_Command"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Special</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Special_Operations_Command"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Special_Operations_Command"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Operations</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Special_Operations_Command"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Special_Operations_Command"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Command</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Special_Operations_Command"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> (</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Special_Operations_Command"><span style="color: #1155cc;">JSOC</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Special_Operations_Command"><span style="color: #1155cc;">)</span></a> has been training another <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/04/06/report_us_trained_terror_group/singleton/"><span style="color: #1155cc;">U</span></a><a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/04/06/report_us_trained_terror_group/singleton/"><span style="color: #1155cc;">.</span></a><a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/04/06/report_us_trained_terror_group/singleton/"><span style="color: #1155cc;">S</span></a><a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/04/06/report_us_trained_terror_group/singleton/"><span style="color: #1155cc;">. </span></a><a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/04/06/report_us_trained_terror_group/singleton/"><span style="color: #1155cc;">designated</span></a><a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/04/06/report_us_trained_terror_group/singleton/"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/04/06/report_us_trained_terror_group/singleton/"><span style="color: #1155cc;">terrorist</span></a><a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/04/06/report_us_trained_terror_group/singleton/"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/04/06/report_us_trained_terror_group/singleton/"><span style="color: #1155cc;">organization</span></a>, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Mujahedin_of_Iran"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Mujahideen</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Mujahedin_of_Iran"><span style="color: #1155cc;">-</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Mujahedin_of_Iran"><span style="color: #1155cc;">e</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Mujahedin_of_Iran"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Mujahedin_of_Iran"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Khalq</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Mujahedin_of_Iran"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> (</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Mujahedin_of_Iran"><span style="color: #1155cc;">MEK</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Mujahedin_of_Iran"><span style="color: #1155cc;">)</span></a>, since 2005. The training has occurred at
the <a href="http://www.nv.doe.gov/main.aspx"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Department</span></a><a href="http://www.nv.doe.gov/main.aspx"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.nv.doe.gov/main.aspx"><span style="color: #1155cc;">of</span></a><a href="http://www.nv.doe.gov/main.aspx"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.nv.doe.gov/main.aspx"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Energy</span></a><a href="http://www.nv.doe.gov/main.aspx"><span style="color: #1155cc;">’</span></a><a href="http://www.nv.doe.gov/main.aspx"><span style="color: #1155cc;">s</span></a><a href="http://www.nv.doe.gov/main.aspx"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.nv.doe.gov/main.aspx"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Nevada</span></a><a href="http://www.nv.doe.gov/main.aspx"><span style="color: #1155cc;">-</span></a><a href="http://www.nv.doe.gov/main.aspx"><span style="color: #1155cc;">based</span></a><a href="http://www.nv.doe.gov/main.aspx"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.nv.doe.gov/main.aspx"><span style="color: #1155cc;">National</span></a><a href="http://www.nv.doe.gov/main.aspx"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.nv.doe.gov/main.aspx"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Nuclear</span></a><a href="http://www.nv.doe.gov/main.aspx"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.nv.doe.gov/main.aspx"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Security</span></a><a href="http://www.nv.doe.gov/main.aspx"><span style="color: #1155cc;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.nv.doe.gov/main.aspx"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Administration</span></a>
headquarters. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
Hersh and others have suggested
that the MEK and others, including Mossad have been responsible for the<span style="color: red;"> </span><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7033:israels-assassins-and-tehrans-killers-2">spate</a><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7033:israels-assassins-and-tehrans-killers-2">
</a><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7033:israels-assassins-and-tehrans-killers-2">of</a><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7033:israels-assassins-and-tehrans-killers-2">
</a><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7033:israels-assassins-and-tehrans-killers-2">assassinations</a><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7033:israels-assassins-and-tehrans-killers-2">
</a><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7033:israels-assassins-and-tehrans-killers-2">of</a><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7033:israels-assassins-and-tehrans-killers-2">
</a><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7033:israels-assassins-and-tehrans-killers-2">Iranian</a><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7033:israels-assassins-and-tehrans-killers-2">
</a><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7033:israels-assassins-and-tehrans-killers-2">nuclear</a><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7033:israels-assassins-and-tehrans-killers-2">
</a><a href="http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7033:israels-assassins-and-tehrans-killers-2">scientists</a><span style="color: red;"> </span>over the past several years<span style="color: red;">.</span>
They also portend a dark future, if these series of events proceed in their
logical and rather predictable order.</div>
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<br /></div>
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The alleged Iranian “nuclear
threat” has become a pretext for regime change in Tehran, a desired goal of
U.S. strategic planners and allies in Tel Aviv ever since the overthrow of the
U.S.-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979. </div>
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<br /></div>
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The real concern since then for
the U.S. has been control over the flow of increasingly valuable strategic
sources of energy -- oil, gas, and uranium -- that propel corporate state
interests in the region. Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev will remain a strategic ally
regardless of the brutality of his regime, as long as he keeps in line.</div>
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<br /></div>
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As Franklin Delano Roosevelt <span style="color: black;">once</span><span style="color: black;"> </span><span style="color: black;">said</span><span style="color: red;"> </span>in regard to
Nicaragua’s U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza García,
"Somoza <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastasio_Somoza_Garc%C3%ADa">may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch</a>."</div>
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<br /></div>
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The same, it appears, could be
said about Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev as the U.S. moves toward desired regime
change in Iran. </div>
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<br /></div>
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--------------------------------------------------</div>
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*<b>Allen Ruff </b>received his Ph.D. in U.S. History
from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He's written on the history of
the American Left, local history and has published one novel. Schooled
by decades of activist experience, his primary work now centers on
opposition to U.S. interventions in the Middle East and elsewhere. He hosts a weekly a public affairs program on WORT, 89.9fm in Madison, WI, where he currently lives.</div>
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<br /></div>
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*<b>Steve Horn</b> is a
researcher and writer at DeSmogBlog. He is also a freelance investigative
journalist. Follow him on Twitter at @Steve_Horn1022.</div>
Allen Ruffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18310195276315827048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458840028095794061.post-39604384645166837882012-04-08T05:59:00.001-07:002019-02-02T13:29:35.920-08:00UPDATE: Kaleem Caire Named to ALEC-Affiliated NACSA's Board<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJmW-j-kyaW1R4i44v86XEWuhO7qJcscTu4N3AxL_l32AcNRCce4B2mO1uKp7X8sdt5pCgO5nZ2Ey5JTLHRf2s0cl2sRYFAf0hTCn7_tSQaGw8Koj4w2hcYZSd1XFTzpuyEzxhiIRfUwlJ/s1600/Caire.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="128" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJmW-j-kyaW1R4i44v86XEWuhO7qJcscTu4N3AxL_l32AcNRCce4B2mO1uKp7X8sdt5pCgO5nZ2Ey5JTLHRf2s0cl2sRYFAf0hTCn7_tSQaGw8Koj4w2hcYZSd1XFTzpuyEzxhiIRfUwlJ/s200/Caire.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">NACSA's new advisory board member, Kaleem Caire</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
UPDATE: An April 5th <a href="http://ulgm.org/images/Caire_NAB%20New%20Appointee%20Press%20Release%20local%20-final.pdf">press release</a> from the Urban League of Greater Madison announced that its President and CEO, <a href="https://research.tdwaterhouse.ca/research/public/Markets/NewsArticle/100-096b3966-1">Kaleem Caire has been named to the National Advisory Board of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA)</a>.<br />
<br />
As <a href="http://allenruff.blogspot.com/2012/01/history-not-conspiracy-kaleem-caires.html">documented at this site previously</a>, the NACSA is very much a part of an effort to privatize public education and turn it over to education-for-profit operations. <a href="http://www.qualitycharters.org/press-releases-statements/nacsa-president-launches-new-set-of-policy-guides-at-alec-conference">NACSA is also an affiliate of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)</a>.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqJE6xMp2-R7CASFGWq1ysrVz3dOIkgIUpizW68yO8Tviag7bYqVNoTeSOCeFjQWzbrJp9DHgtD08IbQ-oihsY4WmZrk1eJbCFyXxjlo8hibMf9nkoRigHfxxun5FILHYJKIJDbwQciGOz/s1600/NACSA+logo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqJE6xMp2-R7CASFGWq1ysrVz3dOIkgIUpizW68yO8Tviag7bYqVNoTeSOCeFjQWzbrJp9DHgtD08IbQ-oihsY4WmZrk1eJbCFyXxjlo8hibMf9nkoRigHfxxun5FILHYJKIJDbwQciGOz/s1600/NACSA+logo.jpg" /></a></div>
NACSA has been behind an effort to <a href="http://www.qualitycharters.org/policy/statewide-authorizer-legislation">remove the authority of locally elected school boards</a> to approve charter schools, and to place that authority under the control of governor-appointed state-wide authorization panels. Such panels would also be given the authority to approve <span id="goog_257474017"></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/">"virtual" (online) charter and voucher schools<span id="goog_257474018"></span></a> that would draw funds from already-strapped public school districts.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjX29nHqd2Uc5oMJS6czt3yQffye_Qj2geH1OCClHMHLmZiwkkudiyC5uuDhsMP0pv9EqfxzonliPkFPXH9_mpwz7SXykjwNXHrR7_taDVDLBSxh-fOwJVf6h8sy30-RQqrGsjqIJfNCYdc/s1600/ALEC.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="116" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjX29nHqd2Uc5oMJS6czt3yQffye_Qj2geH1OCClHMHLmZiwkkudiyC5uuDhsMP0pv9EqfxzonliPkFPXH9_mpwz7SXykjwNXHrR7_taDVDLBSxh-fOwJVf6h8sy30-RQqrGsjqIJfNCYdc/s200/ALEC.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<a href="http://alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed">ALEC</a> is a national association of conservative corporate leaders, think tanks, foundations and legislators that prepare "model legislation" bills introduced primarily by Republican lawmakers across the country. Its various "working groups" have not only pushed <a href="http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/Public_Education">"education reform"</a> (meaning, school privatization) but have also been a <a href="http://www.politicususa.com/stand-your-ground-racists/">source of such backward legislation as the "Castle Doctrine" and "Stand Your Ground"</a>.<br />
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Some of the very same foundations and right-wing think tanks standing behind ALEC have also supported the growth of the <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/162478/hidden-history-alec-and-prison-labor">prison-industrial complex</a> and the related criminalization of youth of color. That reality has consistently been neglected by proponents of privatized charter schools who sell such ventures to an unsuspecting public as a way to "save our kids most at risk" and a way to seal off the "<a href="http://www.progressive.org/charter_school_madison_wi.html">schools-to-prison pipeline</a>".<br />
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<a href="http://www.qualitycharters.org/about/leadership">Greg Richmond</a>, the President and CEO of NACSA, speaking in regard to the appointment of the organization's new board members, stated that <a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/news/national-association-charter-school-authorizers-154500296.html">“We are at a critical point in the evolution of charter schools.”</a> Richmond went on to state “To make a meaningful
difference in public education and increase opportunities for kids
across the country, charter schools cannot be anything less than
exceptional. NACSA welcomes the newest members of its National Advisory
Board to help us make this goal a reality.”<br />
<br />
Regarding Caire's appointment Richmond stated that, "Making this goal a reality will require the insight and bold leadership of thoughtful and innovative professionals like Kaleem. We welcome him to NACSA.”<br />
<br />
Richmond, <a href="http://www.isthmusparents.com/calendar/details.php?event=272766&name=Charter%20Schools%20Seminar">whom Caire previously brought to Madison</a>, is a board member of the <a href="http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/illinois-charter-school-commission-members-announced-130783573.html">Illinois Charter School Commission</a>, the state-wide chartering body created last year through the passage of ALEC backed legislation.Allen Ruffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18310195276315827048noreply@blogger.com7