One Member of Pussy Riot Freed; Tim deChristopher Still In Prison

One of the three members of Russian punk rock band Pussy Riot has had her sentence commuted to time served. Good news, of course. The other two are still serving two year sentences for playing an anti-Putin song in a Russian Orthodox Cathedral, outraging the reactionary Church hierarchy. For their disorderly conduct, a fair punishment would have been a small fine.

Meanwhile, U.S. political prisoner Tim deChristopher continues to serve his two year sentence for daring to bid in a U.S. Interior Department oil lease auction. Instead of having security guards escort him from the auction, which he in no way disrupted, (nor did he threaten anyone, attack anyone, scream or shout or destroy or damage Government property), the Obama regime prosecuted him for Federal felonies.

Thanks to the power of Western media, which continues to follow every twist and turn of the Pussy Riot case, Pussy Riot has gotten international attention and support from various Big Name celebrities like Madonna, Lady Gaga, and Yoko Ono.

Tim deChristopher, as it always the case for U.S. dissidents being persecuted by the U.S., is ignored and marginalized. Even most of the allegedly progressive media devotes insufficient attention to such cases- cases which reveal the hollowness of U.S. propaganda noise about "freedom" and "human rights,"- and never draw the obvious contrast to foreign dissident cases.

Amnesty International is blind and deaf to U.S. dissidents and political prisoners.

Perhaps progressives themselves have too much ideological and psychological investment in the myth of U.S. "freedom" and "rights" to bring themselves to face reality and attack the U.S. and its "Western" stooge nations for their rank hypocrisy.

South Africa, and the Sad Degeneracy of Power.

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely"- Lord Acton.

It's time to speak of  the disappointing and indeed, demoralizing degeneracy of the African National Congress. Enough time has passed with the ANC in power to pass judgment. It is now clear that their rule is a terrible betrayal of the impoverished black masses. The ANC is a gang of thieves allying themselves with the established big business and mining interests to line their own pockets.

For example, last month the police murdered 34 striking miners, then indicted 270 of the survivors for the murders of the 34 gunned down by the police! An outcry forced the government to back down after a few days. The establishment trade union, COSATU, is in bed with the government and miners. The so-called “Communist” party, apparently connected at the hip to the ANC, opposed the strikers. (Imagine that! “Communists” against workers! Where have we seen that before? The Soviet Union? “Red” China? Hmmmm.)

The miners were paid around $750 a month. The mine owners kept playing hardball, insisting on no deal until the strikers went back to work first. After the massacre, they agreed to a 22% wage increase (the miners had been demanding 100%). That ended that strike. Other strikes are ongoing at other mines.

The ANC has done virtually nothing to improve the lives of the black population. If anything, the masses of blacks live in worse squalor than ever. In all their years in power, the ANC has failed to provide even basic services to much of the population they rule. Instead they've made themselves partners with the preexisting upper class and shared in the spoils. If this was the deal Nelson Mandela arranged with the white supremacists, shame on him.

Today the BBC reported yet another horrific crime against the black population by the ANC. Poor black schoolchildren in Limpopo district have no textbooks because the local ANC overlords who control the “education” department apparently stole the money. There was a phony “bidding process,” in which 22 companies were disqualified, leaving only one, “EduSolutions,” standing. (Don't you love those bullshit faux can-do pseudo-progressive company names hustlers come up with?) They took millions of dollars, and delivered no books. Under their contract, the price was ten times the actual cost of just buying the books. (The old rigged-bid-cum-kickbacks trick. How unoriginal!) A civil servant who objected to the scheme was sacked. The ANC hacks running the show insist that nothing untoward happened. Now the central government is looking into $250 million in “unauthorized expenditures” disappeared to. (Obviously a lot of corruption.) Meanwhile classes are held outside on the ground for lack of facilities, sans textbooks. Thus are the lives of another generation stunted by the rulers.

The ANC! Building a Bright Future for the People of South Africa!

Jacob Zulu, the current ANC boss (and thus President) is a satyr and freak who thinks showering after sex prevents AIDS. His crackpot predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, was an HIV denier. These are the caliber of gentlemen who preside over this kleptocracy. I guess outside of Mandela and some others, the apartheid butchers and assassins managed to kill all the good leaders in the ANC.

To his discredit, Nelson Mandela has put loyalty to the ANC gang above principle, and as far as I've heard in foreign (non-South African) media, has maintained silence about the ANC's crimes against the people, malfeasance, and feckless, negligent misrule. It's a terribly disheartening legacy for the years of struggle and sacrifice, and turns the sacrifice of Mandela and so many others (many of whom are dead or maimed) to mud.

Unfortunately, one of the truest things ever said about revolutions is The Who song, “Won't Get Fooled Again.” (“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”) The same in that a new gang of exploiters and oppressors takes over. And any idealists who don't get with the program get purged, as “counterrevolutionaries.” (How ironic that epithet!)

Another example: Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) and the execrable tyrant and head of another gang of thieves, the stone-cold thug Robert Mugabe. (The first thing he did after seizing power was to destroy the other black freedom fighting group, ZAPU. That was a tip-off to his nature, and what was to come. Like so many cynical “revolutionaries,” what he meant by “liberation” was “power for me!”)

Of course, virtually every African ex-colony is now ruled by tyrants and thieves. They despoil and exploit their lands in partnership with foreign corporations (including Chinese ones now) and brutalize their people for being in the way of this self-enrichment.

The challenge for humans who want the sorry state of civilization on this planet to evolve is to solve the conundrum of how power can be used for good, when those who are best at seizing power are the ruthless, selfish ones, the politicians, thugs, and mercenaries. The best I can come up with is “more democracy,” which means more political involvement by the masses of people directly in decisions that affect their lives. How to get people to fundamentally change their relationship to power in that way is the real hard problem. Most people do not want to be bothered. Plus they would have to create the structural mechanisms to exercise real power themselves. This would almost certainly involve overthrowing the existing power structures in most cases. And they would have to overcome their own deep psychology of authoritarianism, viewing the people in power as a child relates to parents, in a submissive, obedient way, deferring to them, and expecting to be taken care of. In that sense part of the problem is that many people on a deep level never grow up.

Another big problem is that the kind of humane people who want to make the world better for humans are at a real disadvantage because violence is so powerful a weapon. Forget all that gush about “the power of nonviolence.” It is almost never a match for violence. This gives the criminal classes and the thugs they employ a huge advantage, since normal humans have no stomach for violence. The only times nonviolence has trumped violence is when there were no longer a sufficient number of thugs willing to be sufficiently violent to suppress the large number of people willing to risk their safety and well-being by physically opposing a regime. This happened in India after World War Two, when the British could no longer muster an army large enough to suppress the Indian masses, and when the Shah of Iran was overthrown in 1979. In the last week of his rule, his army killed 10,000 Iranians, then couldn't do it anymore. The Shah fled to the bosom of his benefactor, the U.S., precipitating the so-called “Hostage Crisis.” Someone challenges U.S. Imperialism, and it's a “crisis.” Today in Indonesia 2 million people are simultaneously striking. That's what it takes, massive numbers. But that is hard to organize, especially when regimes systematically murder organizers, as in Colombia, where the murder of labor organizers continues unabated with the tacit approval of the Obama regime. The strategy of systematically exterminating anyone with a normal, pro-human social consciousness, who are labeled “communist” or “terrorist,” has occurred repeatedly in U.S.-backed neofascist states since World War Two as a method of preventing the possibility of social progress and economic change.

As long as the oppressors are willing to be violent, unless there is some other force impinging on them, they will continue to use it.

Some examples where other forces impinged on the masters of violence: In the case of the Vietnam war, the U.S. Army was virtually mutinying in the field, and there was a massive anti-war movement in the homeland. (Nixon was bitter about the fact that the anti-war movement inhibited him from using nuclear weapons on the Vietnamese.) In the case of apartheid, external economic sanctions made the white business elite say “uncle.” In the case of the civil rights movement in the U.S., the cold war ideological competition with the U.S.S.R. Put the U.S. In a embarrassing position of bloviating about freedom and rights and how oppressive “communism” is, while lurid brutality and atrocities by Southern “sheriffs” and redneck mobs against people just trying to ride buses, register to vote, go to school, or eat at lunch counters, was on blatant display for the world to see. (And of course not all American whites were committed to the extreme form of anti-black racism practiced in the Confederacy.) This ultimately forced yet another round of civil rights legislation to be passed. (The set of laws and even Constitutional Amendments following the Civil War being mostly moot points.) Yet, there has been real progress. On the other hand, the CIA, with the aid of the FBI and Memphis police, murdered Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, and the complicit power structure and establishment media are complicit to this day by their never-ending lies and coverup about that assassination.

Finally, another factor that can undermine oppressors is internal divisions among elites.

So in conclusion, The End.