Bin Laden may be dead, but authorities are still trying to track down Bert.

He was the Salafist Jihadist Terrorist Princess Queen of Hearts. We’ve spent almost 10 years growing up in his Bond-villain like shadow, but after nearly a decade of hiding from US intelligence they finally got round to finding the best hide and seek champion in the Islamic world – Osama Bin Laden is dead. Watching President Obama’s address to the nation (coming a couple of days after he released a document showing he himself wasn’t a mad Islamic terrorist) he outlined the unique care and rules of war America abides in dealing with terrorists – they found him, shot him in the head and then dumped his body in the sea, presumably whilst pished and chanting “USA, USA, USA”. Bin Laden’s death also follows the killing of Saif Al Arab Gaddaffi, one of Colonel Gaddafi’s younger sons who never made it into Italian Serie A football. It just shows you what the American’s can do when the PS3 network is down, and that America’s idea of what present you give to a newlywed Royal couple is somewhat tasteless.

But now Bin Laden is dead, Is Al Qaeda finished? is the War on Terror over? Will the occupation of Afghanistan end? The reality is that Bin Laden’s death will not significantly change the fortunes of the three. Al Qaeda as an organisation in Afghanistan was already effectively destroyed in the late Autumn of 2001 with the Western bombing and invasion of the country. It’s training facilities (which consisted of sinister looking jungle gyms)  and headquarters were overrun, and organising the most wanted terrorist group in the world was a bit more tricky in a country occupied by thousands of NATO soldiers with assistance from Afghan warlords to boot.

Al Qaeda as an organisation was also an illusion – the idea of a world wide terrorist organisation, with branches in hundreds of countries taking orders from Bin Laden was and still is a myth, as this excellent BBC series outlines. President Obama is continuing to promote that myth by declaring that Bin Laden was the “leader” of Al Qaeda. But Al Qaeda as it actually exists is completely different. Al Qaeda is not an organisation but more a means of conducting terrorism and an ideology that justifies that terrorism on the basis of an apocalyptic clash between Islam and unbelievers.

Al Qaeda came out of a small hardcore of Islamist militants in the late 80′s, who were Arabs who had travelled to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union. After their victory against the Soviets, they intended to form a network of Islamist militants to take the fight to their own Arab regimes (who they believed were too secular) and to the corrupt and morally bankrupt Western Christian countries who backed them. They organised Al Qaeda like a franchise, allowing Islamists from anywhere in the world to blow up people in the name of a cosmic struggle between the West and Islam and to do so in the name of Al Qaeda. There’s very rarely any direct link between Bin Laden and other Al Qaeda cells, let alone direct orders.

Some attacks attributed to Al Qaeda have shown considerable deviation from the “leadership” of the Al Qaeda idea as outlined by Osama Bin Laden and his deputy Ayman Al Zawahiri. The 2004 Madrid bombing for example, was conducted only a few days before the Spanish Elections, and resulted in the removal of the pro-Iraq War Popular Party government and it’s replacement with PSOE who opposed the invasion of Iraq. Bin Laden and Zawahiri would never be motivated to bomb a country on the basis of changing it’s unbeliever Government – they see their struggle as a cosmic clash of Islam and Crusaders, in which changing one non-Muslim Government to another non-Muslim Government as having little point to their struggle. Zawahiri has also criticised the head of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Musab Al Zarqawi for carrying out a massive sectarian bombing campaign explicitly targeting Shia civilians. While Zawahiri agrees that Shiites are deviating from Islam he outlines in his statement how bombing civilians instead of occupying armies is bad for PR. These examples show Bin Laden simply never was the leader of a cohesive terrorist organisation. There is no equivalent of an Al Qaeda “Army Council” which directs it’s war like the Provisional IRA had.

The name Al Qaeda itself also shows that it is more of an ideology instead of an organisation. Al Qaeda is Arabic for “The Base”; meaning a base of ideas, a manual for how to conduct jihad and what should motivate Islamists. It was originally coined by Abdallah Azzam, Bin Laden’s mentor who wrote “Every principle needs a vanguard to carry it forward and [to] put up with heavy tasks and enormous sacrifices. This vanguard constitutes the strong foundation (al qaeda al-sulbah) for the expected society.” As Jason Burke points out Azzam was talking about a strategy, not an organisation. Al Qaeda only became an organisation at the insistence of the US judicial system when an Islamist militant Jamal Al Fadl turned informant after embezzling over $100,000 of Al Qaeda’s money.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mztfFdpd1Rk

The US wanted to indict Bin Laden for the bombing of their embassies in Africa and used Al Fadl’s testimony to create a picture of Al Qaeda as an organisation with a leadership, branches and hierarchy – so that Bin Laden could be prosecuted for the crimes other Islamists committed because he was supposedly in the same organisation as them. Having this vision of Al Qaeda meant that the US Government could prosecute Bin Laden using the same laws that they use to arrest the heads of the Mafia and other organised crime families. In these cases it is crucial to have an organisation that someone is a member of in order to successfully obtain a prosecution – the problem is that this simply does not exist in Al Qaeda’s case.

Even Al Qaeda’s most famous atrocity, the 9/11 attacks was not Bin Laden’s idea, but that of Khalid Sheik Mohammed (who was arrested in 2003). Khalid obtained financial support from Osama for the 9/11 attacks, but it was he who organised it. This is how the 9/11 attacks were really organised – a network of Islamists worked together and were funded by Bin Laden’s considerable personal wealth. Bin Laden’s role in Islamist terrorism has not been primarily that of an organiser but a financier. Different terrorist cells and organisations can approach Bin Laden and request funds for operations against the West. This loose, network is what makes Al Qaeda amorphous and potentially dangerous. The death of Bin Laden will not do much to practically impede this network’s activities against the West – Bin Laden was already isolated and could not provide much practical assistance to Al Qaeda affiliates.

Bin Laden was useful as a symbol however, a charismatic figurehead for the Al Qaeda brand’s form of extreme Islamism. Bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri may become the new “face” of Al Qaeda but he does not have the same charm and charisma of Osama. The real danger from Al Qaeda’s brand of terrorism is still the same (and as overhyped) as it was before Bin Laden’s death. It’s based on angry, Muslim, predominantly middle class men operating loosely as cells without a central leadership. Bin Laden’s death may even spur some of these groups on to carry out attacks – possibly in a half-arsed manner, like the Glasgow Airport Attacks.

Bin Laden’s death is already being celebrated across the USA, but the reality is that the so-called “War on Terror” will go on regardless – because both the terror networks known as Al Qaeda will still exist, and because the War on Terror itself was never about fighting terrorism. It was a convenient label to cover up what wars have always been about, control of the world and it’s resources.

Bin Laden’s death may have the positive effect of putting more pressure on the USA/UK to end it’s occupation of Afghanistan, as the original reason for the NATO invasion – hunting down Bin Laden – has been resolved. In reality however the occupation of Afghanistan is motivated not by fighting Al Qaeda but on the control of a strategically important country in the middle of some of the largest natural gas fields in the world. The War on Terror didn’t just start using terrorism as a justification to control the world’s energy resources in Iraq – it was a motivation from the very start in Afghanistan.

Bin Laden died a prisoner of his own security, unable to effectively organise or finance terrorism personally, due to the worldwide manhunt for him. Despite this he goes to his death with his and Al Qaeda’s ideas immensely stronger. The 9/11 attacks did not only succeed in massacring thousands of casualties and damaging the pride of the USA, it has also embroiled the West in two bloody and expensive wars, Iraq and Afghanistan. Bin Laden may not have seen the invasion of Iraq coming (although he and Al Qaeda have benefited from it enormously) but it was inevitable the USA would invade Afghanistan after 9/11.

Two days before the September 11th attacks Al Qaeda members assassinated the anti-Taliban warlord Ahmed Shah Massoud, the most credible anti-Taliban figure in Afghanistan and a natural puppet leader for the US. In killing Massoud Al Qaeda knew that if Afghanistan was invaded once again, they could make the subsequent occupation much harder for NATO by removing a unifying figure. Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are repeating the strategy they used in the 80′s against the Soviets – dragging a superpowers army into their backyard, and bleeding them. The ongoing quagmire in Afghanistan is Bin Laden’s victory in death.

Now that Osama Bin Laden has been killed it’s time for Socialists and the anti-war movement to call for a complete end to the so-called War on Terror. The very flimsy justification for this war is now gone, and the continuing war against Muslim and Arab countries – from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya – is the exact strategy Bin Laden has fought for all his life, a bloody clash between Muslims and Christians, a clash that will only result in increasing support for Al Qaeda type networks across the globe.

It’s also a clash which, contrary to the predictions of Al Qaeda supporters and anti-Muslim bigots is not inevitable. Al Qaeda may be stronger in some respects given the West has acted as a recruiting sergeant for fundamentalist Islam, due to it’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, but it is also much, much weaker in another and far more important battlefield; Al Qaeda has been left behind by the pro-democracy movement in the Middle East. Across the entire Arab world a tidal wave of people power is challenging the established pro-western, corrupt dictators – and Al Qaeda and fundamentalist Islam is nowhere to be seen.

The wave of protest is almost entirely secular in it’s makeup and demands. Al Qaeda has spent 20 years bombing civilians across the middle east and the Islamic world to try and change their societies, all without any success whatsoever, with no real threat to the regimes they oppose. In contrast a secular, working class, non sectarian movement in Egypt brought the most powerful Arab regime to it’s knees within a month. Al Qaeda know how to react to Western bombing campaigns, Arab autocracies, and Israeli atrocities – but they have no idea how to respond to the mass movement of millions of Arabs fighting against dictatorship using their power primarily as a class of workers, and not as Muslims pitted against other religious groups.

It’s those ideas currently sweeping the Arab world that will defeat the ideas of Al Qaeda, not the abuses of Guantanamo Bay, Al Ghraib and the senseless bombing campaigns in Afghanistan and Libya today.

Edited to include some political points at the bottom

I agree with Mullah Omar

As the Lib Dems prepare for their first election – a by-election in Oldham – since they jumped in bed wi the Tories, it’s looking likely that not only will they not be able to win the seat, but they will be crushed at the polls. Even David Cameron has felt some sympathy for the poor Lib Dems and says the Tories aren’t really trying to win the by-election – a bit like when your dad gives in to your shit tackles when you’re wee to let you win.

It’s all the more disheartening for the Lib Dems given the circumstances of the by-election – it’s happening because the Labour candidate Phil Woolas (who bet his Libdem opponent by a baw hair) engaged in a campaign of racist lies. In any other circumstances you would expect the Libdems to be taking the moral high ground, and Labour running a shamefaced damage limitation exercise.

In fact Labour will almost certainly win back this seat, and with a much increased majority. There doesn’t appear to be any dent at all in Labour’s support, despite the fact that “Red” Ed Miliband picked the racist chancer Phil Woolas to be his Shadow Immigration Minister while he was under investigation by the courts.

Even worse for the Lib Dems is that their vote in Oldham – which will collapse – will be far higher than the national average that the Lib Dems are currently polling at, a measly 7%. Since selling his soul to the Tories Nick Clegg has transformed from a messiah figure to the most hated man in Britain.

In fact the collapse in the Lib Dems vote has been so massive, even the Taliban in Afghanistan currently have more support than the Lib Dems – despite Mullah Omar’s controversial stances on gay marriage, stem cell research, international jihad and the flying of kites. Approximately 9% of the Afghan public support the Taliban taking over again – and more worryingly for Nato – 27% of Afghans support attacks on Nato soldiers occupying the country.

That’s a massive section of public support, and it’s even worse when the insurgents are fighting from impenetrable mountain territory basically doing the same thing they’ve done on and off for the past couple of hundred years – repel any and all attempts to invade and occupy them.

Both polls should be wake up calls to the people who run the UK; in Afghanistan the occupation of the country by the British and American military is actually helping build support for arguably the most mental and repressive group o folk on the planet – while at the same time the second party of Government in the UK has less support than these same crazies because of their sellouts.

"We want to look over those proposals for PR again Mr Duncan Smith"

And remember Lib Dems this is before you actually put a million folk on the dole and cut public services worse than Thatcher. Wi these kind of poll ratings though the Condem coalition is very weak and with enough resolve the anti-cuts movement can force out the Government before we see the Lib Dems vote collapse even further – which is admittedly a bit of a shame.

Your typical psychoactive/methamphetime drug user.

Recently another name can be added to this star run down – that of Bob Ainsworth, the former Defence Minister in the last Labour Government.  Bob’s called for drugs to be decriminalised, with different substances being legalised and other prescribed. This is the same argument SSY has made; legalise soft drugs like cannabis which cannot be reasonably considered any worse than alcohol, but put heroin on prescription so that it can be prescribed in a controlled environment to addicts and therefore remove an addictive drug from the control of dealers.

The facts are that Britain already had a system of prescribing heroin to addicts which was known as the “British method” because unlike the USA it treated drug abuse as a medical issue. This practice was wound up in the late 60′s, and since then heroin use in the UK has skyrocketed. Instead of addicts being able to get clean drugs in a controlled environment from the state, they get it from drug dealers  and fund their habit from burglary, mugging etc.

SSY welcomes Bob’s conversion, but it’s a shame he couldn’t have done anything about the UK’s unwinnable drug war when he was a Minister. Perhaps it was his experience as Minister of Defence during the ongoing war in Afghanistan that he saw how much money various warlords could make out of the heroin trade. It’s no exaggeration to say that it’s been the heroin addiction of Europe that has basically funded the entire conflict in Afghanistan, from the Soviet occupation to the NATO occupation today.

Unsurprisingly Bob has been attacked for his new stance by Ed Miliband, showing that on this issue (alongside many others) he doesn’t represent even a cosmetic change for New Labour. But the fact that ex-Ministers are now backing drug legalisation and prescription shows that our ideas can no longer be tarred as just those of loonies. Ending the drug war is an idea whose time has come.

We gotta fight, fight, fight, fight, fight the Taliban

Today is Remembrance Sunday, a day when we stop for a moment of silence, or watch veterans’ parades, or wear red poppies on our tops “to commemorate the contribution of British and Commonwealth military and civilian servicemen and women in the two World Wars and later conflicts”.

It was originally named the Earl Haig Appeal after the man who caused tens of thousands of needless deaths in World War I. There is nothing to celebrate about the first World War. It was a completely unjustified war for colonies, wealth and markets.

Today, Remembrance Sunday is basically a state-enforced institution, where criticism and dissent of the principle of celebrating this is not on any level tolerated, and this year it has reached fever pitch. Virtually every UK citizen is subjected to a form of hysterical bullying to participate. No one is allowed to be featured on the BBC unless they are wearing a red poppy, all political leaders wear them – even if it deeply offends the people that they are visiting – and children are forced to buy and sell them in schools.

This year, it has arrived in a fanfare of glitz and glamour, with the commercialisation of Poppy Day more noticeable than ever before. The Saturdays opened the ‘celebrations’ in London this year, inexplicably. On The X Factor, that barometer of our society’s values, the judges wore £84.99 diamond encrusted poppies, bringing a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘conflict diamonds’. (This is of course unfair, we all know that Cheryl Cole has a deep sympathy and understanding for the sacrifices made at Ypres and the Somme, and is an avid fan of the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen). Obviously you’ve got to spend more to remember more.

At the heart of the “celebrations” this year has been the commodification of wholesale slaughter and the monetization of mass murder. The poppy has become a fashion statement, one that’s supposed to display your commitment to Britain, to ‘our heroes’ and to the continued fetishisation of the ‘glory’ of war. Wearing a poppy for many people is genuinely about remembering those who were forcefully drafted against their will into a horrific world war, but you can now buy t-shirts that proclaim ‘I *poppy* our heroes”. In today’s world, the ‘heroes’ fixation is a direct endorsement of the imperialist and unjust wars Britain is still undertaking in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Earl Haig: how can he be a hero? He doesn't even have any superpowers. Get back to us when you've been bitten by a radioactive spider.

Another reason people buy poppies and the various new related merchandise is because the poppy fund is a charity which provides for veteran soldiers. It’s an indictment of our fucked up priorities that we expend so much energy talking about how much we value the heroism of fighting for Britain in wars, yet it’s left to a charity to provide for those who have survived them. One in eleven prisoners in the UK formerly served in the armed forces. Up to a quarter of homeless people are former servicemen and women. There are countless veterans suffering from mental health issues who aren’t receiving proper support (although at least we no longer execute returned soldiers for suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder like we used to). The politicians that brandish their poppies are directly responsible for this – they don’t actually care about veterans – they prefer the idea of veterans to the reality of what life is like for those who have seen the horrors of war. The poppies they wear allow them to justify their inaction. It shouldn’t be left to charity donations to pay to look after veterans.

Here at SSY, we don’t agree with glorifying war and British imperialism. The actions of British troops today in Afghanistan and Iraq are far from heroic. For decades, the memory of the evils of fascism has been used to justify other imperialist conflicts which are in no way comparable, e.g. Kenya (even today, British forces based in Kenya for training continue to rape local women with impunity, which has been going on for three decades; these women are slandered by the British, and rejected by their own communities as well), Malaya, Yemen and Ireland. Remembrance Day, alongside the far more blatant Armed Forces Day, has been hijacked to promote and endorse the militarisation of British life and to encourage young people to sign up, for the “glory” of being remembered as a “hero” after you’ve been blown to bits fighting for the geopolitical and ideological aims of the elite who will never represent you.

We’re not the only ones who don’t appreciate every part of the message of the ideology of Remembrance Day. Legitimate dissent is not tolerated when it comes to Poppy Day – just look at the recent “ban sick bastards” style headlines when the Green Brigade, a left-wing Celtic fan group had a half time banner display in protest at the club’s decision to impose a poppy on the Celtic shirt, going against the wishes of the majority of fans. In Glasgow, it’s fair to say that there’s a lot of people who don’t appreciate being forced to participate in a celebration of British troops who caused misery in the north of Ireland for so many years. Like SSY, the Green Brigade has no problem with the individual choice to wear a red poppy, but rather to the bullying nature of the political campaign which expects everyone to wear poppies and to support the cause without reservation.

On a state visit to China last week, David Cameron and pals caused offence by wearing the poppy, without thinking of the fact that in the 19th Century British forces went to war with China to force them to accept imports of our opium (which is of course derived from poppies). This is a clear example of why a little bit more historical memory about the role of British forces and the British Empire in the world is necessary. The peoples who were wronged by Britain haven’t forgotten, even if we have.

This is what our generation does to remember the war dead. Not in our name, we don't want it to happen again

An official alternative to the poppy cult is the White Poppy Campaign, advocated by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). The idea is to remember the deaths of all who have died in wars, not just soldiers, and to advocate peace, not militarisation. This campaign has not been without controversy. In 1986, Maggie Thatcher (gonny just die already?) expressed her “deep distaste” for the white poppy symbol, and their spread in Canada has proved contentious to the point of being banned from being sold at markets and has drawn public criticism from the Royal Canadian Legion. You’re unlikely to see a white poppy on tv, where red poppies are ubiquitous throughout November.

The above views might seem controversial to some, but this year, veterans (and even the Queen’s composer) have spoken out against the use of the red poppy as a “political tool”. Former SAS soldier Ben Griffin rightly stated that

“Calling our soldiers heroes is an attempt to stifle criticism of the wars we are fighting in.

It leads us to that most subtle piece of propaganda: You might not support the war but you must support our heroes, ergo you support the war.”

Remembrance Day should be about honouring those who died needlessly in needless wars. The best way to honour the dead, and the point of remembering, is to ensure it never happens again. Anti-militarism and dissent against war is the way to honour those people, not diamond encrusted poppies, military parades and the stifling of dissent. As a youth organisation, we are proud of our record of opposing military recruitment and the lies spread to young working class folk to persuade them to become cannon fodder for the imperialist war machine that is the British Army.

Last word goes to the late Harry Patch, the last surviving person to have served in World War I

“Irrespective of the uniforms we wore, we were all victims.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88VPZ74zk6w

Monday morning's headlines after SSY's legalise cannabis march

Every human society since we first evolved has experimented with drugs, pyschoactive substances, and altered states of consciousness.

Many leading psychologists and anthropologists believe that this is a normal part of human life, and experimenting with substances like cannabis or magic mushrooms has actually played a role in the evolution of modern, intelligent humans.

But in the last 200 years human society has changed dramatically. With the arrival of capitalism came the rise of modern states, with their borders, armies and police forces. As the technology to control their own people developed, states have had an ever increasing urge to monitor and discipline their populations.

One of the ways they have done this is implement a worldwide system of prohibition of drugs. While the two biggest drug killers, alcohol and tobacco, remain legal billion pound industries, relatively harmless drugs like cannabis and ecstasy remain the target of expensive police operations, and users are turned into criminals who can face imprisonment for doing nothing but experimenting with their own bodies.

The drugs laws we have in Britain and throughout the developed world have never borne any relation to real medical or scientific information, but instead have been shaped by the prejudices and scapegoats created by elites to divide and control the people. One of the main ways they have done this is to use racism, associating certain substances with foreigners or ethnic minorities.

Now, in the 21st century, many countries around the world are finally beginning to wake up to the fact that prohibition has been a costly disaster that has caused untold misery across the planet. The time has at last come to begin treating drugs as a health and social issue, not a criminal one, and base our drugs policies on real scientific evidence, not prejudice and racism.

Early days

The first modern drugs laws were formulated in the 1870s in the US. After the end of slavery, the US began to thousands of Chinese indentured labourers to replace black labour as virtual slaves building the American economy.

Chinese immigrants faced extreme racism and discrimination. The first laws against opium were directed specifically to stop Chinese people from smoking the substance, and excluded whites from punishment.This racialised pattern of justice was to set a pattern that would be repeated again and again, such as the modern US laws which punish crack cocaine, used by in poor ghetto communities, mush harsher than the cocaine consumed by wealthy whites.

Contemporary cartoon of a San Francisco opium den. This was part of a propaganda campaign that saw Chinese workers harassed and killed. In 1886 the Oregon constitution barred Chinese from owning land

Throughout the 19th century however, drugs like cannabis and cocaine remained freely available, with famous patients such as Queen Victoria using cannabis to cope with her menstrual pains.

The biggest reduction in drug addiction achieved by US law was nothing to do with prohibition of recreational drugs. In 1900 around 5% of the US adult population was addicted to morphine. The reason for this is that in the absence of any proper healthcare, travelling salesman hawked their own patent medicines to gullible customers. Most of these had a very high morphine content, and were unsurprisingly popular. No matter what’s wrong with you, if you drink a solution of 80% morphine you’re going to feel pretty good.

In 1906 the Pure Food and Drug Act regulated the market for medicines, forcing all drugs for sale to the public to be licensed by government scientists, sold on prescription, and labelled appropriately. This was not a criminal law, but did more to reduce the level of addiction than any other single statute the US passed in all of the times from then to now. What it shows is that the best way to reduce harm caused by drugs is to regulate and control the market, rather than allow those making money from drugs to peddle whatever they want in an underground, uncontrolled market.

Unfortunately other laws passed throughout the early 20th century weren’t as sensible. From 1899 onwards the US began its expansion as an imperial power, occupying Cuba and the Philipines. In the Philipines their imperial occupation featured repression against opium smokers. Following this, during the First World War, both the US and the UK began to pass laws against heroin and then cocaine, worried that their own troops, despairing in the slaughter of the trenches, were turning to drugs.

The Treaty of Versailles which ended World War One incorporated restrictions on opium, setting a long term pattern of powerful countries like the US forcing their own views about drugs all over the world through international negotiations and treaties. The history so far has been all about America, but that’s because American governments again and again have been the ones that wrote the drugs policies of nearly every country in the world, imposed by their power.

The British government had conducted a massive study into the use of cannabis in it’s Indian colony. Published in 1894, the report found that almost all cannabis users used the drug moderately, and that moderate use caused virtually no ill effects. Despite running to seven volumes, the report was never seriously discussed in Britain. When cannabis was made illegal in Britain in 1928, it was not even discussed in parliament! The amendment to the Dangerous Drugs Act 1920 that prohibited cannabis followed international negotiations at the League of Nations that had conflated cannabis with opium, and, in a pattern that’s familiar today, MPs passed a foolish law on the basis of misinformation and ignorance.

At the time an internal Home Office memo suggested that coverage of one particularly overblown cannabis case were evidence of journalists “having nothing better to do”.

Racism and cannabis prohibition

In the US, the campaign against cannabis was fueled by prejudice against Mexicans. In the Mexican-American war of 1846-8 the US had conquered almost half of Mexican territory, and with it a large number of Mexicans. Just like today many Mexicans moved into the US in search of work.

Creepy looking racist sack of shit: Hearst

The Mexican revolution of 1910, in which the poor majority attempted to take power and control their country’s resources for themselves, fueled the hatred of the American elite. One of the most powerful anti-Mexican racist figures was the newspaper baron Randolph Hearst, who was the Rupert Murdoch of his day. He was furious that Mexican revolutionaries had confiscated timber lands from him during the revolution, and wanted revenge. He used his media empire to spread fear of marijuana (a Mexican term he brought into English so that his readers wouldn’t realise he meant the same plant as the crop hemp, grown for rope and clothing throughout the US.)

His racist campaign against the drug was also based on the fear by racist whites that black people, asserting their cultural independence and influence through the growth of jazz, were spreading use of the drug. Ridiculous scare stories appeared in Hearst’s papers claiming that cannabis caused insanity, murderous rage, and drove black men to rape white women. “Marihuana influences Negroes to look at white people in the eye, step on white men’s shadows and look at a white woman twice,” wrote one editorial.

Hearst was supported by other rich business owners who controlled the Dupont chemical company as well as the pharmaceutical industry. Dupont owned the patent for nylon, and wanted to eliminate the hemp crop in order remove competition from their new synthetic material. Drugs companies meanwhile found it difficult to synthesise profitable drugs because they couldn’t identify what gave cannabis its medicinal properties, and besides recognised it would be difficult to turn a profit from a plant that people could simply grow themselves. They’d much rather that people used the drugs they manufactured, such as morphine.

But the biggest leader of the anti-cannabis crusade was Harry J. Anslinger, who was appointed head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1930. This new government agency was a huge job opportunity for Anslinger, a relentless self-promoter. It gave him the chance to create a problem for society where there wasn’t one before, and then present himself and his policies as the solution. He was the creator of what’s known as a “moral panic“, where powerful figures create fear of a certain group as a way of defending the existing hierarchy of society. Here are some choice quotes of Anslinger’s:

“There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz, and swing, result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others.”

“…the primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races.”

“Marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death.”

“Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.”

“Marihuana leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing”

“You smoke a joint and you’re likely to kill your brother.”

“Marijuana is the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind.”

In 1936 the insane propaganda film Reefer Madness was released, showing cannabis smoking leading young people to attempt murder, suicide and madness.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZdhcNegZgU

This relentless campaign resulted in the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, the beginning of cannabis prohibition in the US. Following this, Anslinger pushed an endless campaign of racist, anti-Communist propaganda against cannabis. Through his participation in drugs treaty negotitations at the United Nations he was able to impose the US prohibition policy, which originated in racism, prejudice and the need of elites to scapegoat Mexicans and blacks while protecting their own interests, on most countries around the world.

Another racist sack of shit, and Mussolini lookalike: Harry J Anslinger

The tragedy of all this is that the US seemed to have learned nothing from their disastrous attempt to make alcohol illegal between 1920 and 1933. This was the biggest boost the mafia and American organised crime had ever received. Within a year they had an industrial, corporate scale distribution operation across North America. People still wanted to consume alcohol, and began drinking illegally made supplies that were extremely strong and in some cases poisonous, leading to blindness or even death. In the the area of Windsor, Ontario, Canada (where alcohol was also illegal) alone, alcohol consumption per capita increased from just 9 gallons to 124 in just a few years!

The mafia became hugely powerful, and this fueled violence. Prohibition was repealed in 1933 after the recognition of the terrible damage it was causing to American society. There’s clear demonstrable evidence that prohibition increased arrests, imprisonment and violent crime.

The 60s

In Britain, some drugs were at least being treated more sensibly. Up until the 1960s, British doctors administered what was known as the “British system” in relation to heroin, which allowed them to prescribe heroin to addicts. However, when this was curtailed as the British government and police clamped down on all drugs in an attempt to undermine the 60s counterculture, the first serious social problems resulting from addicts unable to supply themselves except on the black market began to bite for the first time.

In both the US and UK, as radical social movements, usually heavily involving the huge post-World War Two generation of youth, presented a huge challenge to the government and elites. The growing repression against drug users helped justify ballooning of funding and powers to police forces, and an excuse to search and monitor young people.

On July 24th 1967 The Beatles paid for a full page advert to appear in The Times, headed “The law against marijuana is immoral in principle and unworkable in practice.” It went on to talk about the harms done by the law, compared to the relative harmlessness of cannabis itself, and quoted expert medical and scientific opinion that moderate use of cannabis caused no major health problems. It was signed by MPs, journalists, artists, writers, Nobel Prize winners and doctors, as well as The Beatles.

But the governments of the next few years failed to heed this wise advice. Labour Home Secretary and future Prime Minister Jim Callaghan said he disagreed with the expert advice he’d received to decriminalise possession of cannabis, and blocked publications of official reports that recommended it. Callaghan suggested said they’d been influenced by the ‘notorious’ Times advert and the ‘pro-cannabis lobby’. He told the ‘leads-to-heroin’ story and said that he was glad to help ‘halt the advancing tide of so-called permissiveness’.

The 1970 Misuse of Drugs Act represented the culmination of the government anti-drugs push came, originally written by a Labour government but implemented by a Tory one. It established the system British law still uses, which is completely unscientific and based on prejudice. Prohibited drugs are divided into one of three categories, A,B, and C, based on supposed harms. However, the nonsense of the system can be seen that drugs like ecstasy (shown by former government adviser Professor David Nutt to be safer than horse riding) or magic mushrooms are placed in the most serious category, class A. Cannabis, meanwhile, is classified as class B, meaning you can get several years in prison just for possession.

Between the 1970s and today, numerous government inquiries by countries all over the world have found the health risks from cannabis to be neglible, but the policy of prohibition and repression remains in place against cannabis users. In that time, cannabis use has continually risen, as have much more serious problems with hard drugs like heroin.

Drug wars and imperialism

For the US, hard drugs like heroin and cocaine, though persecuted at the local level of street dealers, also presented a key opportunity. In US imperial wars around the world they have tolerated their local allies producing and trading in drugs that often ended up in the US. The cash raised from the drugs trade allowed them to go on fighting for America’s side in the Cold War.

In the Vietnam war, which went on to spread to Laos and Cambodia, pro-US right wing fighters produced most of the world’s heroin, which was sold at a profit for their continued fight against Communist forces. When the war in Indo China came to an end, the US then went on to make a covert intervention in Afghanistan, to fund Islamic fundamentalists to take on the pro-Soviet left wing government. Again, these warlords and their friends in the intelligence agencies of the US-allied Pakistani military dictatorship went on to make a killing from heroin that funded their dirty war.

In Latin America the US has tolerated cocaine trafficking by its right wing allies in order to continue to fund their dirty wars against left wing groups in Nicaragua and Colombia. In Nicaragua, the US funded right wing paramilitaries known as the Contras to fight against the revolutionary government, and they funded their operations by trafficking in cocaine, which became the crack which flooded poor urban communities in the US in the 80s. In Colombia, there is a long history of fascist death squads, which are closesly connected with the US-allied government, using trafficking to fund their campaign of torture and assassination against left wingers, community activists or trade unionists.

A paramilitary SWAT team unit

The emergence of crack as a major commodity in the 1980s in the US was intimately connected with the wars the US government was fighting, either directly or by funding local allies, in Central and South America. It absolutely devastated black communities, especially as it came as the same time as the Reagan administration was pulling back all it’s support for the less well off through a neoliberal programme that came to be known as ‘Reaganomics.’ At the same time, there was a huge increase in funding to the police, the FBI and paramilitary law enforcement units like SWAT teams. The police in the US became like an army to be used against its own people, something which has proved very useful as the state prepares to confront any kind of challenge to it’s power from oppressed communities.

This was also the beginning of the era of private prisons, with all the evil they bring. A private prison is a business, and for the business to expand and make more money, more people need to be locked up. So the law comes under pressure to be harsher, and more minor offences such as possession of cannabis get a jail sentence. Whole towns become dependent on the prison for jobs, and so support tougher penalties. Private prison owners use their money to get candidates elected to office who promise to be “tough on crime” or “fighting the war on drugs.” Prison numbers in the US have exploded in the last 30 years, and, of course, in a society riven with racism it’s hit black people disproportionately hard. The US has only 4% of the world’s population, but 25% of those in jail on Earth are in the US.

In Europe around the same, the war in Afghanistan encouraged greater heroin production, which, with the support of the Pakistani military and intelligence, and the awareness of the US, was sold on to Europe to finance the war with the USSR. Countries like Scotland were devastated just like the US had been by the combination of mass unemployment, poverty and the arrival of plentiful supply of a dangerous, highly addictive drug. Instead of being treated as a social and health problem, the Tory governments of the time again turned to the drug war rhetoric, meaning many lives were lost and people imprisoned who really needed help. The damage done by treating these people as criminals (while at the same time the US and UK governments were lauding the Afghan warlords who produced the stuff as heroes) is incalculable.

The cost of prohibition

When you make the argument that we should properly fund support for people with addiction problems, a common reply is, “Why should they get all this help when there’s nothing for law abiding people?” Ignoring for a moment the fact that there’s enough resources to help everyone, (especially if we stop funding drug fueled wars like Afghanistan or Colombia), the point is that we are already paying much more than proper health and social support would cost on the crime that those who have an addiction so powerful that withdrawal could make them seriously ill or could kill them are forced to commit to maintain their habit. A recent study suggested that an end to prohibition would save Scotland £2.2 billion a year by cutting the prison population, lower crime and less waste of police resources pursuing people with health and social problems.

Moral panics

In the UK in recent years, drugs moral panics have been about presenting youth as a social threat, and youth subcultures as inherently dangerous. There was the outcry about ecstasy in the early 1990s. At this time there was a thriving rave scene, where people would gather at secret locations for free parties where ecstasy was often used to enhance the experience. But there was no big bar and profits being made for the alcohol industry, and the parties posed a threat to the established, profitable ways young people were supposed to socialise. So there was heavy repression against the drug, and even the music itself, with the 1994 Criminal Justice Act specifically outlawing gatherings with the “emission of a succession of repetitive beats.”

This of course came with a hysterical media campaign painting ecstasy as deadly. Now, after over 20 years of its common use among youth, many young people know that the drug is far less dangerous than we were told. It is in fact a relatively safe drug, and much less damaging to your health than alcohol or tobacco. But that doesn’t deter the government from keeping it at Class A.

The campaign reached fever pitch when Essex teenager Leah Betts died shortly after her 18th birthday in 1995. She died as a

Leah Betts

result of drinking too much water, concerned by health warnings of dehydration which were in fact aimed at people taking the drug and dancing, which she wasn’t doing. But her parents mounted a campaign against Ecstasy, supported by the right wing media that wanted to paint the drug as responsible when in fact a panicked reaction to health advice was the cause.

Posters soon appeared throughout Britain with Leah’s face on them and the caption: ‘Sorted: Just one Ecstasy Tablet Took Leah Betts.’ These posters were funded by the advertising/marketing companies Booth Lockett and Makin, Knight Leech and Delaney, and FFI who had contracts with the brewers Löwenbräu and the energy drink Red Bull, which was deliberately marketed as an alternative to ecstasy. In other words the alcohol industry directly funded a campaign aiming at keeping people using their own potentially deadly, but legal, products.

Most recently of course we’ve seen the tabloid created panic about mephedrone, a substance on which there is still no substantial scientific research, and that tabloids attributed dozens of deaths to over the earlier part of this year, none of which has so far turned out to be substantiated by coroners or toxicology tests.

Legal highs

The enormous growth of the legal highs industry is a by-product of other things going on in the global capitalist economy. With the growth of the capitalist pharmaceutical industry has come a much better understanding of the physical and chemical processes of the brain. Research into Serotonin can help develop new anti-depressants, but also new party drugs. Just like the rest of the economy, factories for drugs have been moved to China for the cheap labour. But these factories can also produce drugs like mephedrone, or the synthetic cannabis alternative Spice, that have been designed by sophisticated neuro-scientists who have studied the scientific literature to be able to create a product that is legal but structurally similar to illegal drugs. These can then be distributed and sold much more easily than in the past because of the internet.

This means that governments that want to ban these products are in a permanent “chemical arms race” with scientists in the legal high industry, who will always be a step ahead and have a new product ready for release. When Germany banned Spice, there was a replacement product on the market within 4 weeks, a product that it would have taken detailed scientific knowledge and equipment to produce. With the banning of mephedrone, we’ve seen the emergence in recent months of ‘NRG-1′, a drug which anecdotal evidence suggests is much more dangerous than mephedrone was. (Which of course ignores the fact that if people could legally use MDMA, the most important chemical in ecstasy, which is relatively harmless, then a lot fewer people would have bothered with mephedrone.)

Monitoring projects reported 24 new drug products appearing on the internet last year, the biggest annual increase ever.

Solutions

Drugs prohibition has never been based on reducing harm, but instead has always been about pseudo-scientific prejudices against youth, and racism. Drugs provide the state with an excuse to police our private lives, and monitor society closesly with paramilitary police forces. Internationally however, these same states recognise the great unspoken truth: just because illegal drugs are prohibited doesn’t change the fact that they are commodities that people want to buy. Commodities that are produced and distributed by huge businesses that are little different from their fellow global corporations, except they operate in an illegal market. Therefore they are controlled by violent gangsters who are able to muster political influence over governments and police forces to keep themselves free from interference. Many have other political and social aims, and use drugs merely as a way of funding their fight. When their objectives are the same as those of the US or other big imperial powers, then they are tolerated and supported by those powers.

There are many drugs that are currently illegal which are far less dangerous (as demonstrated by scientific study) than alcohol or tobacco. All drug taking carries potential harm, but it’s time we recognised that the way to deal with drugs like cannabis or ecstasy is to create a legally regulated market where people would be able to buy these drugs in a controlled way, with guarantees about what they were receiving.

For more dangerous drugs like heroin, it’s time we stopped treating those with addiction problems as criminals, and recognised that addiction is often the result of other factors in a person’s life, such as abuse and poverty. We could save vast sums of money and untold misery by properly supporting and helping those with addiction as a society.

Ultimately, in the long term modern society has to re-learn something that many tribal peoples never forgot: it’s ok that many people want to experiment with altered states of consciousness, and it may well be of serious advantage to our intellectual development to do so. They recognised the best way to do this safely was in a socially regulated way, so they incorporated drug taking into their religions and rituals. We need a modern, secular version of this, where those who want to experiment with drugs are given help and advice rather than treated as social deviants or criminals.

Raging, or just constipated: McChrystal

This week Obama sacked his top commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal. What the affair proves is that, for US commanders, it doesn’t matter how many innocent civilians you kill, or deaths you cover up; what really matters is slagging off colleagues.

McChrystal had given exclusive access to a reporter from Rolling Stone, who went on to report some of the stuff he said about other top US officials in Afghanistan. Basically, he and his team don’t think very highly of them.

McChrystal and his aides said of Obama that he was “unprepared” and “intimidated”, and of US Vice-President Joe Biden, “Who’s that? Joe Bite Me?” They called a meeting with a French minister about war policy “fucking gay.” They say the President’s national security adviser is “a joke”. They call the President’s special adviser to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, “a wounded animal”, and react to him contacting them with “Not another fucking email from Holbrooke!”

The comments are so extraordinary they have made some people ask if McChrystal was actually trying to get fired to avoid taking the blame for failure in Afghanistan. Obama has made a promise to start pulling out troops next July, but this is of course dependent on the situation being stabilised to the US’ liking, something which looks just as unlikely as it has done for the last few years. Certainly there seems to be a recognition by pretty much everyone interviewed in the article that the US is not going to succeed in getting what it wants from Afghanistan. In a long piece, the words “win” or “victory” are not uttered by the general or his team. One commander who does say win says:

“It’s not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win. This is going to end in an argument.”

But a perhaps more convincing explanation is that McChrystal is a product of a society that now accepts permanent war as a part of reality, and glorifies the soldier above the political “wimps” and “pen pushers” back home. The US is an incredibly militarised society, a process which has accelerated dramatically over the past decade. The idea of unending war for global dominance has become acceptable in a way that it wouldn’t have been not that long ago. McChrystal spoke out as part of a culture that loves “mavericks” who ignore what those above them think, causing maximum destruction in the process.

Movies and popular culture help create the context in which McChrystal felt he could publicly speak his mind so dramatically. His backstory reads a perfect action movie character. As a student he defied authorities and was a hard drinker, before going into the special forces to command black ops on behalf of the US government. This is the kind of character who is constantly glorified to the American public. His team of special advisers, who surely must share some of the blame for his gaffes, was composed of special forces veterans, and called themselves ‘Team America.’

The reporter for Rolling Stone himself was suckered into this atmosphere, gleefully describing how, after the “fucking gay” dinner, Team America found the “least Gucci” (unfancy) Paris bar to get “shit faced”, dance, sing incoherent songs about Afghanistan and declare how they would die for each other.

America's top people in Afghanistan

What the tales of macho heroism ignore however is the truth of what a special forces based, counter insurgency strategy actually means. Sacking McChrystal, Obama declared he was making “a change of personnel not of policy.” That is, the plan that McChrystal fought for in Afghanistan remains in place.

The plan is basically to flood Afghanistan with US troops, who will carry out special forces missions to assassinate the networks of opposition, gaining intelligence on how people organise against the US presence and eliminating them. In Iraq, McChrystal headed death squads that systematically hunted US opponents. The article refers to this operation as a “killing machine”, and McChrystal as “a terrorist hunter.”

The only problem with this plan is that it’s been shown again and again not to work. Leave aside all your preconceptions of Jack Bauer lone warrior types from movies, and examine the places were these kinds of tactics have been used before. Algeria, where the French were defeated by the national resistance and independence achieved in 1962. Or Vietnam, where year upon year of American actions failed to remove the political support for the National Liberation Front among the people.

The new US commander, veteran of death squads in Iraq General David Petraeus, wrote a manual on counter insurgency that praises Operation Phoenix in Vietnam. This programme used capture, torture, assassinations, terrorism and infiltration to disrupt the civilian population of Vietnam who supported the Communist resistance to the US. It targeted civilian members of the Communist Party, and led to untold deaths and misery. At least 26,000 people were killed. One former US serviceman called it “a sterile depersonalised murder programme.”

Insurgencies, or guerilla wars, fundamentally depend on the support of the people. Mao famously once wrote that “the guerilla must swim in the people as the fish swim in the sea.” Therefore, counter insurgency programmes inevitably end up killing a lot of civilians.

A good example of what the policy means for people in Afghanistan is a night time raid in Khataba earlier this year. US special forces attacked a home, killing a teenage girl, two pregnant women, alongside an Afghan police officer and government prosecutor who were on their fucking side.

On discovering they had made a mistake, the soldiers then carved their bullets out of the bodies with knives, and carved more out of the walls of their home. They washed blood from the scene with alcohol, and went on to tie up the corpses, claiming that was how they had found the scene. McChrystal, as overall commander, supported this cover up. It was only exposed because of journalists who were willing to dig a little deeper. However, McChrystal has suffered no reprimand as a result. If it had turned out that the men in the house had been “enemy combatants,” you can bet they wouldn’t even have bothered with the cover up.

Death covered up: Pat Tillman

McChrystal’s only other major previous brush with trouble was the affair of Pat Tillman. Tillman was a celebrity recruit for the military, a former NFL American Football player, who very publicly joined the special forces after 9/11, in what was a propaganda coup for the military and government. He was later accidentally killed by his own troops in Afghanistan, something which McChrystal helped cover up by signing off on a falsified report aiming to make it look like he had been killed by hostile fire. But even when this was exposed he got away with it, even though this time it was an American celebrity dead rather than a (to the US public) anonymous Afghan girl.

So the conclusion to take away from all this is clear: the US government doesn’t care about civilian deaths, or even that much about the deaths of their own grunts. Deaths are what they send commanders abroad to cause. But when you start fucking with your fellow officials and commanders, well then your job really is on the line.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haHXgFU7qNI

“When we understand that diagram, we’ll have won the war” – US Generals.

So puzzle fans, please send all helpful answers in a stamp addressed envelope to

Pentagon,
Washington,
DC 20001 – Dept. of Defense

The first five lucky senders will receive a Blue Peter badge and the leadership of Afghanistan’s National Army.

Oh Hamid, you are a tease!

Karzai’s threat isn’t as outlandish as it may seem – he originally joined in the Taliban’s Pashtun based rebellion, after he himself had served as a Government minister in a Jaaamat I-Islamiya (an Islamic fundamentalist group) led Afgan regime. Today Karzai is happy to sit in Government with a raft of brutal Afghan warlords who impose similar Sharia law on their population to the Taliban. Karzai doesn’t have any principles beyond manoeuvring himself into power, whether it’s with Afghan warlords, Taliban or NATO.

The fact that the President of a country, the leader of it’s fictional “Afghan National Army” openly talks about defecting to the Taliban like a career move shows there is no stable, democratic or principled Afghan Government worth defending. It’s a collection of cut-throat careerists who are in power off the back of NATO firepower, and not one more Afghan, British or American Soldier should die to prop up Karzai’s corruption any longer.

A while ago I did an article about violent videogames, where I jokingly made reference to accidentally shooting civilians in a helicopter gunship. Watching this footage thats been leaked on the internet of insurgents and civilians (including a reuters cameraman) being slaughtered makes you wonder how far war is from a videogame today. The gunship attacking the crowd doesn’t appear to be at threat, with the pilots chatting casually – and then laughing when they make the kill.

This isn’t the first time journalists have been killed by the US Army – the Al Jazeera offices were bombed not just in Iraq, but also in Afghanistan as well. This slaughter of journalists might have been a mistake, but the attack on Al Jazeera offices twice in two wars must be a deliberate attack on a tv station that is critical of the war on terror.

The footage of this attack must have been extremely hard to obtain, and leak without risk of discovery and or court martial from the US military – it’s very likely there are many more cases like this across Iraq, that we will never see footage of. The mainstream media has ignored research done by institutions like ORB predicting over a million Iraqi casualties, with Iraq Body Count research showing the single largest cause of death was from US/UK forces attacking from the air.