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https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2023/11/10/we-are-spartacus/

We are Spartacus

We are Spartacus now. Are we? Spartacus is the resistance of ordinary people against a fascism that seldom speaks its name. The answer to this question – whether or not we are prepared to resist – is the most important of our age.

Spartacus was a 1960 Hollywood film based on a book written secretly by the blacklisted novelist Howard Fast, and adapted by the screenplay writer Dalton Trumbo, one of the ‘Hollywood 10’ who were banned for their ‘un-American’ politics. It is a parable of resistance and heroism that speaks unreservedly to our own times. 

Both writers were Communists and victims of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House of Un-American Activities which, during the Cold War, destroyed the careers and often the lives of those principled and courageous enough to stand up to a homegrown fascism in America.

‘This is a sharp time, now, a precise time …’ wrote Arthur Miller in The Crucible, ‘We live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world.’

There is one ‘precise’ provocateur now; it is clear to see for those who want to see it and foretell its actions. It is a gang of states led by the United States whose stated objective is ‘full spectrum dominance’. Russia is still the hated one, Red China the feared one. From Washington and London, the virulence has no limit. Israel, the colonial anachronism and unleashed attack dog, is armed to the teeth and granted historical impunity so that ‘we’ the West ensure the blood and tears never dry in Palestine. British MPs who dare call for a ceasefire in Gaza are banished, the iron door of two-party politics closed to them by a Labour leader who would withhold water and food from the children of Palestine.

In McCarthy’s time, there were bolt holes of truth. Mavericks welcomed then are heretics now; an underground of journalism exists (such as this site) in a landscape of mendacious conformity. Dissenting journalists have been defenestrated from the ‘mainstream’ (as the great editor David Bowman wrote); the media’s task is to invert the truth and support the illusions of democracy, including a ‘free press’.

Social Democracy has shrunk to the width of a cigarette paper that separates the principal policies of major parties. Their one subscription is to a capitalist cult, neoliberalism, and an imposed poverty described by a UN special rapporteur as ‘the immiseration of a significant part of the British population.’

War today is an unmoving shadow; ‘forever’ imperial wars are designated normal. Iraq, the model, is destroyed at a cost of a million lives and three million dispossessed. The destroyer, Blair, is personally enriched and fawned over at his party’s conference as an electoral winner. Blair and his moral counter, Julian Assange, live 14 miles apart, one in a Regency mansion, the other in a cell awaiting extradition to hell.

According to a Brown University study, since 9/11, almost six million men, women and children have been killed by America and its acolytes in the ‘Global War on Terror’. A monument is to be built in Washington in ‘celebration’ of this mass murder; its committee is chaired by the former president, George W Bush, Blair’s mentor. Afghanistan, where it started, was finally laid to waste when President Biden shop-lifted its national bank reserves

There have been many Afghanistans. The forensic William Blum devoted himself to making sense of a state terrorism that seldom spoke its name and so requires repetition:

In my lifetime, the United States has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most democracies. It has interfered in democratic elections in 30 countries. It has dropped bombs on the people of 30 countries, most of them poor and defenceless. It has fought to suppress liberation movements in 20 countries. It has attempted to murder countless leaders.

Perhaps I hear some of you saying: that is enough. As the Final Solution of Gaza is broadcast live to millions, the small faces of its victims etched in bombed rubble, framed between TV commercials for cars and pizza, yes, that is surely enough. How profane is that word ‘enough’?

Afghanistan was where the West sent young men weighed down with the ritual of ‘warriors’ to kill people and enjoy it. We know some of them enjoyed it from the evidence of Australian SAS sociopaths, including a photograph of them drinking from an Afghan man’s prosthetic.

Not one sociopath has been charged for this and crimes such as kicking a man over a cliff, gunning down children point-blank, slitting throats: none of it ‘in battle’. David McBride, a former Australian military lawyer who served twice in Afghanistan,  was a ‘true believer’ in the system as moral and honourable,  He also has an abiding belief in truth, and loyalty. He can define them as few can. On 13 November he is in court in Canberra as an alleged criminal.

‘An Australian whistleblower,’ reports Kieran Pender, a senior lawyer at the Australian Human Rights Law Centre, ‘ [will face] trial for blowing the whistle on horrendous wrongdoing. It is profoundly unjust that the first person on trial for war crimes in Afghanistan is the whistle blower and not an alleged war criminal.’

McBride can receive a sentence of up to 100 years for revealing the cover-up of the great crime of Afghanistan. He tried to exercise his legal right as a whistleblower under the Public Interest Disclosure Act, which the current Attorney General, Mark Dreyfus, says ‘delivers on our promise to strengthen protections for public sector whistleblowers’. Yet it is Dreyfus, a Labor minister, who signed off on the McBride trial following a punitive wait of four years and eight months since his arrest at Sydney airport: a wait that shredded his health and family.

Those who know David and know of the hideous injustice done to him fill his street in Bondi near the beach in Sydney to wave their encouragement to this good and decent man. To them, and me, he is a hero.

McBride was affronted by what he found in the files he was ordered to inspect. Here was evidence of crimes and their cover-up. He passed hundreds of secret documents to the the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Sydney Morning Herald. Police raided the ABC’s offices in Sydney while reporters and producers watched, shocked, as their computers were confiscated by the Federal Police.

Attorney-General Dreyfus, self-declared liberal reformer and friend of whistleblowers, has the singular power to stop the McBride trial. A Freedom of Information search of his actions in this direction suggests an indifference to whether or not an innocent man rots.

You can’t run a fully-fledged democracy and a colonial war; one aspires to decency, the other is a form of fascism, regardless of its pretensions. Mark the killing fields of Gaza, bombed to dust by apartheid Israel. It is no coincidence that in rich, yet impoverished Britain an ‘inquiry’ is currently being held into the gunning down by British SAS soldiers of 80 Afghans, all civilians, including a couple in bed.

The grotesque injustice meted out to David McBride is minted from the injustice consuming his compatriot, Julian Assange. Both are friends of mine. Whenever I see them, I am optimistic. ‘You cheer me,’ I tell Julian as he raises a defiant fist at the end of our visiting period. ‘You make me feel proud,’ I tell David at our favourite coffee shop in Sydney. Their bravery has allowed many of us, who might despair, to understand the real meaning of a resistance we all share if we want to prevent the conquest of us, our conscience, our self respect, if we prefer freedom and decency to compliance and collusion. In this, we are all Spartacus.

Spartacus was the rebellious leader of Rome’s slaves in 71-73 BC. There is a thrilling moment in the Kirk Douglas movie Spartacus when the Romans call on Spartacus’s men to identify their leader and so be pardoned. Instead hundreds of his comrades stand and raise their fists in solidarity and shout, ‘I am Spartacus!’ The rebellion is under way.

Julian and David are Spartacus. The Palestinians are Spartacus. People who fill the streets with flags and principle and solidarity are Spartacus. We are all Spartacus if we want to be.

Comment to article:

" Until he passed away recently at the age 94, my father used to say: “We [in the US-West] live under Fascist rule far worse than that of Adolf Hitler and the German Nazis”. My dad often added: “Fascism continues where it was left in different form serving those Anglo-Saxon regimes who used it very cleverly relying on the media and entertainment industry (Hollywood) to normalize it and make it acceptable”.
Today, the Western media are playing a big role in dehumanizing Arabs and the Palestinians in particular and normalizing the ongoing Genocide by Israeli Jews and their U.S.-Western supporters. The Israeli Nazis are specifically targeting Palestinian. American scholar Norman Finkelstein accurately said Israel is worse than Nazi Germany and South Africa under Apartheid.
Here in Australia, the country with the most Nazis-like anti-Muslims laws, the regime and the media (without exception) are fully behind the Nazis in Israel and make it very clear that they are proud of being complicit in the ongoing Genocide by the Israeli Nazis. Any sympathy for the Palestinians is unacceptable and have dire consequences.

Western politicians and the media can’t imagine HAMAS being noble and chivalrous fighters, and Israelis being cowardly child-killing terrorists, though such is obviously the case. More than 5000 children and babies have been murdered. The UN Secretary Guterres said: Israeli Jews have turned “Gaza into a graveyard for children.” Israelis can’t acknowledge that the vast majority of the world disagrees with them for very good reasons, not because of “antisemitism.” More than 17000 Palestinian civilians have been needlessly killed. It doesn’t make sense and you can’t win war by killing women and children unless the aim is Genocide, a real in broad daylight Holocaust. "

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https://williamblum.org/books/americas-deadliest-export

William Blum

America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy

The Truth About US Foreign Policy and Everything Else

For over 65 years, the United States war machine has been on auto pilot. Since World War II, the world has believed that US foreign policy means well, and that America’s motives in spreading democracy are honorable, even noble. In this startling and provocative book from William Blum, one of the United States’ leading non-mainstream chroniclers of American foreign policy and author of the popular online newsletter, The Anti-Empire Report, demonstrates that nothing could be further from the truth. Moreover, unless this fallacy is unlearned, and until people understand fully the worldwide suffering American policy has caused, we will never be able to stop the monster.

“A fireball of terse information—one of our best muckrakers.” – Oliver Stone

“America’s Deadliest Export is a brilliant expose of critically important information about the role of the U.S. in the world - yet that is arguably the least of its virtues. Blum’s book is also passionate when it ought to be passionate, and sober when it ought to be sober. It takes the raw data of international relations and presents it so movingly, so compellingly, and so insightfully, that when it reaches out for us to act - it has put us very much in the mood to do so. Succinct and comprehensive, reasoned and also impassioned, this is a book all should read.” – Michael Albert, co-founder of Znet

“As in the past, in this remarkable collection Bill Blum concentrates on matters of great current significance, and does not pull his punches. They land, backed with evidence and acute analysis. It is a perspective on the world that Westerners should ponder, and take as a guideline for action.” – Noam Chomsky

“Coruscating, eye-opening and essential. This is a must-read for anyone rightfully concerned at the destructive influence of the world’s only superpower.” – Cynthia McKinney, Presidential Candidate for the Green Party of the United States

“William Blum’s America’s Deadliest Export is another in his blockbuster series that has applied the reality and morality principles to work on U.S. foreign policy. This book has vignettes and longish essays on matters running from Conspiracies, Ideology and the Media to Cuba, Iran and Wikileaks. It is brimming with wit and with both laughable and frightening quotations. It is admittedly written for ‘the choir,’ but even the choir needs encouragement as well as facts and analyses that will keep its members from succumbing to a potent propaganda system. And we may hope that choir will grow with books like this that both amuse and enlighten.” – Edward S. Herman, co-author of The Politics of Genocide

“This book deals with unpleasant subjects yet it is a pleasure to read. Blum continues to provide us with convincing critiques of U.S. global policy in a freshly informed and engaging way.” – Michael Parenti, author of The Face of Imperialism

“With good cheer and humor Blum guides us toward understanding that our government does not mean well. Once we’ve grasped that, we’re far more capable of effectively doing good ourselves.” – David Swanson, author of War is a Lie