February 5, 2005 Public opinion in Germany has not exploded yet, but it may well as details of U.$. treatment of Germans continue to leak out in the "war on terror." In January 2005, it came out that the united $tates is holding at least 9000 new prisoners outside U.$. borders since the "war on terror" began. One was Khaled al-Masri, an unemployed used car salespersyn from Germany. While Khaled al-Masri was on holiday in ex-Yugoslavia on New Year's Eve, u.$. authorities kidnapped him and brought him to Afghanistan for torture there. He returned to Germany in May 2004 and now the story is getting out. The German government is belatedly carrying out an investigation into how the united $tates picked on Khaled al-Masri for torture. U.$. lackeys of all sorts ranging from the government to Nazis have downplayed the case, because the united $tates tends to persecute those with Arab-sounding names. It has become apparent that the CIA believes it has the right to pose as anyone and kidnap anyone for torture in Afghan and Guantamo prisons to name the ones that are public knowledge. Corrupt and treasonous government officials in eastern Europe, Germany and elsewhere are allowing the CIA to pose as whatever they want--border officials for example. When there was a Soviet Union, Uncle $am bent over backwards for the Western European imperialists to prevent their sliding into the Soviet camp. Now there is no Soviet Union, so the locus of bourgeois competition has changed and the world is still finding it difficult to get used to that. Instead of a relatively united West competing with the Soviet Union, we are starting to see increasingly competitive behavior among the Western imperialists. Instead of forever saying "I can't believe they are doing this," we have to prepare people with Marx's contributions on capitalism and Lenin's contributions on imperialism. Despite victory in the Cold War, the Western imperialists still have the same old competitive system and drive to war. They have learned no lesson of peace from the world wars or Cold War. Cut-throat economic competition is built into capitalism and the corresponding politics is what we see in the global u.$. kidnapping policy. Historically, the kidnapping of a citizen by another country would result in a war or at least an expedition to capture the pirate kidnappers. In U.$. history, the Congress debated at length the recruitment of u.$. sailors by the British as an act of hostility leading up to the war of 1812--and those cases were much more in doubt than what the united $tates is doing now, since the British sea merchants paid for the services of the recruited Amerikan sailors while Amerikans are torturing and imprisoning foreigners from Germany, England, Au$tralia and many other countries. In the German case as in all the others, the German and Amerikan people are not ready yet for a war between Germany and the united $tates. Also in the news and of obvious interest to Germans is that the CIA has turned down freedom of information requests regarding its ties to Nazis after World War II. Now the U.S. legislature (Congress) is having to threaten to extend the law and hearings to force the CIA into compliance with existing law on releasing of documents, especially those over 50 years old.(2) Such foot-dragging can do nothing to improve the u.$. image in Germany or I$rael. Meanwhile, in January, the united $tates also released four British citizens from Guantanamo Bay,(3) another illegal u.$. prison; Russian ex-prisoners announced February 4 that they are suing the u.$. government for torture(4) and even one Australian from Guantanamo Bay went home at the end of January. It was a member of the Au$tralian ruling class that championed Au$tralian nationalism against the united $tates: "A former senior Australian cabinet minister has come to the defense of released Guantanamo Bay inmate Mamdouh Habib, assailing the government for letting US authorities hold him and other terror suspects for years without charge on the basis of 'doctored' intelligence."(5) In the united $tates, the Bu$h administration is receiving slight resistance from two sources--local governments and the judiciary. A federal judge ruled on January 31 that the U.$. government's Guantanamo Bay (Gitmo) tribunals are unconstitutional.(6) In this situation, the temptation of many rulers is to impose the judgements of their core of political lackeys through fascism and war by abolishing the independence of the judiciary, eliminating local government powers and carrying out wars against all other countries not going along. At first glance, one might make the mistake of thinking the u.$. prisons outside the united $tates are proof of "globalization" dominated by u.$. imperialism. In actual fact, they are proof of MIM's thesis on the national and class question, because nations still do matter as proved by the indignation in each country that citizens of each country face arbitrary kidnapping and torture by u.$. imperialism. The faultlines in international politics are along lines of parasitism and united front strategy dictates that the Europeans will not feel a complete unity with U.$. parasitism. Indignation about u.$. kidnapping of Germans and Au$tralians is likely to be much greater than U.$. kidnapping of Third World people or even Amerikans themselves. Although both Germany and the united $tates are countries with huge parasitic middle-classes dominating, alliance with u.$. Democrats leads no where while alliance with the German middle-classes in general does have some potential anti-u.$. imperialist thrust on a vacillating basis. The reason for this is that the parasites of any country have no real basis for conflict with their government representatives, but the parasites of other countries certainly do have a basis of conflict with imperialist governments not of their home country. These parasites in Europe will wonder why they should risk kidnapping by the CIA when the contracts and oil control in Iraq go to the united $tates for example.
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