Coming
in September
From AK Press
Featuring Essays by:
Edward Said, Robert Fisk, Michael Neumann, Shahid Alam, Alexander
Cockburn, Uri Avnery, Bill and Kathy Christison and More
Today's
Stories
August 12, 2003
Ray McGovern
Relax, It Was All a Pack of Lies
Recent
Stories
August
11, 2003
Douglas
Valentine
Homeland Security for Whom?
Mickey
Z.
Bush's Progress
Bill
Glahn
RIAA Watch: Meet the New Bitch, Same
as the Old
Elaine
Cassel
Indicting DNA
Dr. Mohammad
Omar Farooq
Civil Liberties and Uncivil Super-Patriotism
Uri
Avnery
Who Will Save Abu Mazen?
Website
of the Day
RIAA Subpoena Clearinghouse
August
9 / 10, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
California's Glorious Recall!
Saul
Landau
Bush and King Henry
Gary
Leupp
On Terrorism, Methodism, "Wahhabism"
and the Censored 9/11 Report
Paul de
Rooij
The Parade of the Body Bags
Michael
Egan
History and the Tragedy of American Diplomacy
Rob Eshelman
A Home of Our Own
Daoud
Kuttab
Life as an ID Card
Philip
Agee
Terror and Civil Society: Instruments of US Policy in Cuba
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Marc Racicot: Bush's Main Man
Walt Brasch
Schwarzenegger, "Hollyweird"
and the Rigtheous Right
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush, Bribery and Berlusconi
Josh Frank
Mean, Mean Howard Dean
Elaine
Cassel
Will the Death Penalty Ever Die?
Sean Carter
Total Recall
Poets'
Basement
Hamod, Engel, Albert
August
8, 2003
John
Chuckman
What the US Says Goes
Roberto
Barreto
Defend the Vieques 12!
Bruce Gagnon
Iraq War Emboldens Bush Space Plans
Elaine
Cassel
The Reign of John Ashcroft
Dave
Lindorff
Snoops Night Out
Website
of the Day
Zero Boy
August
7, 2003
M.
Shahid Alam
It the US a "Terrorist Magnet?"
Toni
Solo
Neo-liberal Nicaragua: a New Banana
Republic
Adam Lebowitz
Hiroshima Commemorated: the View from Japan
Hanan
Ashrawi
When the Bully Whines
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Conscience Takes a Holiday
Jason
Leopold
Wolfowitz Lets Slip: Iraq Not Behind 9/11; No Ties to Al-Qaeda
Mike Kimaid
What's the Score?
Elaine
Cassel
The Smell of VICTORY: Ashcroft's Latest Stinkbomb
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
August 6, 2003
Steve
Higgs
Going to Jail for the Cause: It's Not
Easy Confronting King Coal
David
Krieger
Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Robert
Fisk
The Ghosts of Uday and Qusay
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush's War on the National Forests
Elaine
Cassel
No Fly Lists
Stan
Goff
Military Equipment and Pneumonia
Hugh Sansom
An Open Letter to Nicholas Kristof on the Nuking of Japan
August
5, 2003
Uri
Avnery
The Prisoner of Ramallah: Arafat at
74
Forrest
Hylton
Terrorism and Political Trials: the
View from Bolivia
Ray
McGovern
"We Cook Estimates to Go"
David
Morse
Poindexter's Gambit
Edward
Said
Orientallism: 25 Years Later
George
W. Bush
My Darn Good Resumé
Hammond
Guthrie
It's Incremental, Watson!
Website
of the Day
National Prayer Day
August 4, 2003
Bruce
K. Gagnon
Another Peace Activist Detained by
Airport Cops: My Story
David
Lindorff
Fear-Mongering About Social Security
Mark
Zepezauer
George F. Will: Descent into Self-Parody
James
Plummer
Tracking You Through the Mail
Mickey
Z.
Marriage Insecurity from Sharon to Bush
Bruce
Jackson
News that Isn't News: How the NYT's
Pimps for the White House
August
2 / 3, 2003
Tamara
R. Piety
Nike's Full Court Press Breaks Down
Francis
Boyle
My Alma Mater, the University of Chicago, is a Moral Cesspool
David
Vest
Sons of Paleface: Pictures from Death's Other Side
Neve Gordon
Nightlife in Jerusalem
Uri
Avnery
Their Master's Voice:
Bush, Blair and Intelligence Snafus
Robert
Fisk
Paternalistic Democracy for Iraq
Jerry
Kroth
Israel, Yellowcake and the Media
Noah Leavitt
What's Driving the Liberian Bloodbath: Is the US Obligated to
Intervene?
Saul
Landau
The Film Industry: Business and Ideology
Ron Jacobs
One Big Prison Yard: the Meaning of George Jackson
Thomas
Croft
In the Deep, Deep Rough: Reflections on Augusta
Amadi Ajamu
Def Sham: Russell Simmons New Black Leader?
Poets'
Basement
Vega, Witherup, Albert and Fleming
August
1, 2003
Joanne
Mariner
Stopping Prison Rape
Alex Coolman
Who Moved My Soap: Trivializing
Prison Rape
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Stan Goff
Injury and Decorum: The Missing Wounded in Iraq
Wayne
Madsen
Europe Unplugs from the Matrix
Robert
Fisk
Wolfowitz the Censor
Elaine
Cassel
Ashcroft Loses Big in Puerto Rico
Website
of the Day
Stop Prisoner Rape
July
31, 2003
Ray
McGovern
The Prostitution of Intelligence
Brian
Cloughley
Wolfowitz's Operative Statement
Sheldon
Hull
The RIAA's Jihad:
The Devil's Music (Industry)
Elaine
Cassel
The Next Time You Crack a Lawyer Joke, Think of These Attorneys
Sheldon
Rampton
and John Stauber
True Lies: Propaganda and Bush's
Wars
Hammond
Guthrie
Speculation Blues
Website
of the Day
Army of One?
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
July
30, 2003
David
Lindorff
Poindexter the Terror Bookie
Marjorie
Cohn
Why Iraq and Afghanistan? It's About
the Oil
Elaine
Cassel
How Ashcroft Coerces Guilty Pleas
in Terror Cases
Zvi
Bar'el
The Hidden Costs of the Iraq War
Lisa Walsh
Thomas
Killing Mustafa Hussein: Death of a Child, Birth of a Legend?
Sean
Carter
Pat Robertson's Prayer Jihad: God, Sodomy and the Supremes
ND Jayaprakash
India and Ariel Sharon
Steve
Perry
Bush's Top 40 Lies
Standard
Schaefer
Correction about Bloomberg and Outscourcing
Website
of the Day
Bring Them Home Now!
Hot Stories
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
Michel
Guerrin
Embedded Photographer Says: "I
Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
August
12, 2003
What's a Fifth Columnist?
Well,
Someone Like Hitchens, For Starters
By WAYNE MADSEN
After recently returning from Spain and after
many discussions with Spanish, Catalonian, and Basque friends
about the Spanish Civil War, I decided to do a Google search
to see if there were any new revelations about the war -- a war
in which I'm proud to say my late father participated in on the
side of the Republican and anti-Fascist Popular Front government.
I discovered that the Catalonian government has recently announced
plans to exhume the remains of just one of 54 mass graves where
the Fascists disposed of executed prisoners and other political
opponents during the Civil War.
During the Google search, I also ran
across an archived television program from March 2000 called
Uncommon
Knowledge, produced by the right-wing Hoover Institution.
The topic was the Spanish Civil War and the former progressive
journalist-turned-neo-con toadie, Christopher Hitchens, was featured
as a guest. The program was underwritten by the John M. Olin
Foundation, which also supports the neo-con American Enterprise
Institute and Heritage Foundation, and the Starr Foundation,
another right-wing money machine that supports the neocon diatribe-rich
periodical, American Spectator, a home base for another liberal-turned
neo-con sycophant, P. J. O'Rourke.
Hitchens was supposed to have been debating
Ronald Radosh, a researcher at George Washington University,
who unabashedly apologized for the Spanish Fascists and their
leader, Generalissimo Francisco Franco. But Hitchens wound up
generally agreeing with his "adversary" and beat up
on the Spanish Republican cause -- something that must have pleased
the right-wing sponsors of the program.
Hitchens' verbal flatulence about the
Spanish Civil War is evidence of the beginning of his transition
into a fifth columnist for the neo-cons at least three years
ago. Here is what Hitchens said about the Spanish Republican
cause:
"Stalinism was one of the causes
of the defeat of the Spanish republic. I think that's been amply
demonstrated by a number of historians, and was understood by
a number of the historians of the time. In other words, that's
why I'm bold enough to quote an axiom: victory and Stalinism
were not possible in Spain. You couldn't have had a Stalinist
victory."
Really? My father served on a Danish
merchant vessel that shipped arms and ammunition from that nasty
Stalinist Russia to the Republican-controlled Basque ports of
Santander and San Sebastian. That effort was organized by the
Social Democratic-controlled merchants' union in Copenhagen.
Russia was one of the few countries in the world that was willing
to supply the Republican side with much needed weapons and communications
systems to counter the heavy influx of Nazi German and Italian
Fascist support for the Franco forces.
The Russian arms were not only shipped
from Leningrad but also from the Lithuanian (and former German)
port of Klaipeda, the Latvian port of Riga, and the Estonian
port of Tallinn with the support of the Lithuanian, Latvian,
and Estonian governments, respectively. So the effort to ship
arms from Russia to Spain not only involved Stalin's Russia but
also Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Denmark, nations which were
certainly not counted in 1936 as being within the Stalinist sphere.
When my father trekked into the Basque Pyrenees to help install
radio stations for the Republican side, it was done with the
assistance of a number of international volunteers for the Republican
cause, including American, French, and British partisans. So
Hitchens is flat out wrong when he states that the Spanish Republicans
were hijacked by Stalin and every Republican volunteer was an
unwitting tool of the Soviet Comintern. That is just pure right-wing
claptrap.
Hitchens also fails to mention that Texaco
provided oil credits to the Franco forces and Ford Motor supplied
the Fascist forces with vehicles. Only Stalin is accused of using
the Spanish Republicans for his own purposes. The Americans are
always pure in Hitchens' myopic Pax Americana view of the world
and of 2oth century history.
Then Hitchens blames the Communists for
the defeat of the Spanish Republicans: "the Communist Party
in Spain and its Soviet backers who infiltrated a number of the
institutions of the Republic, and also the International Brigade,
were in a  sense working to
undermine the revolution. They didn't want any government or
movement to succeed that they did not control. They would rather
have been defeated. That's consistent by the way across Europe."
More of Hitchens' ramblings. When one
looks at the underground movements that fought the Germans during
Nazi occupation, the Communists and left-wing socialists served
as the activist vanguards for the resistance movements. In Denmark,
where my grandmother Victoria Madsen, an official of the Danish
Communist Party and newspaper (who also fought as a resistance
leader), it was the Communists who were the most willing to attack
the Germans and die for the cause of liberation of their country
from the Nazi yoke. It was the Communists and their left Socialist
allies who largely organized the secret boatlift of Danish and
other Jews to safety in Sweden.
Likewise, in Spain, it was the Communist
trade unions that organized workers into militias to fight the
Fascists in cities like Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia.
As for Hitchens' other contention that
the International Brigade and the Communists undermined the Spanish
Revolution, Hitchens seems to ignore the fact that it was the
Fascists (backed by the German Nazis) who undermined the legitimate
government of the Spanish Republic through their backing of Franco.
Hitchens uses a big paintbrush to tar and feather all International
Brigaders as "Communists." Of course, the Abraham Lincoln
and International Brigades were full of Hitchens' "Communist"
supporters -- John Dos Passos, Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway,
George Orwell, Paul Robeson, Archibald MacLeish, John Steinbeck,
W. H. Auden, and Esmond Romilly (the nephew of Winston Churchill).
Hitchens' use of the term "infiltration"
is also interesting. It was a favorite term of Senator Joe McCarthy
and Richard Nixon. But now the term can be used for people like
Hitchens, who obviously has been used by the neo-cons to infiltrate
progressive movements and gatherings as a "fifth columnist."
When it comes to the Spanish Civil War, and who was right and
who was wrong, I'll defer to my progressive Spanish, Catalonian,
and Basque friends, as well as to the memories my father had
of that grand war against the same types of imperialistic right-wingers
who Hitchens now prefers to keep in his company.
Wayne Madsen
is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and columnist.
He wrote the introduction to Forbidden
Truth. He is the co-author, with John Stanton, of the
forthcoming book, "America's Nightmare: The Presidency of
George Bush II."
Madsen can be reached at: WMadsen777@aol.com
Weekend
Edition Features for August 9 / 10, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
California's Glorious Recall!
Saul
Landau
Bush and King Henry
Gary
Leupp
On Terrorism, Methodism, "Wahhabism"
and the Censored 9/11 Report
Paul de
Rooij
The Parade of the Body Bags
Michael
Egan
History and the Tragedy of American Diplomacy
Rob Eshelman
A Home of Our Own
Daoud
Kuttab
Life as an ID Card
Philip
Agee
Terror and Civil Society: Instruments of US Policy in Cuba
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Marc Racicot: Bush's Main Man
Walt Brasch
Schwarzenegger, "Hollyweird"
and the Rigtheous Right
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush, Bribery and Berlusconi
Josh Frank
Mean, Mean Howard Dean
Elaine
Cassel
Will the Death Penalty Ever Die?
Sean Carter
Total Recall
Poets'
Basement
Hamod, Engel, Albert
Keep CounterPunch
Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|