"Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?" [asked Inspector Gregory].

"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time," [came the answer].

"The dog did nothing in the night-time."

"That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.

-Silver Blaze, by Arthur Conan Doyle

The world is filled with curious incidents -- things whose non-occurrence speaks volumes.

So, inspired by this insight from the Great Detective, let's gather in the drawing room and investigate some mysteries.

The Case of the Bashed Newcomers

Immigrants--literally dehumanized as "aliens"--face an avalanche of laws stripping them of legally (and morally) owed taxpayer benefits, children's' services, due process and other Constitutional rights. The Marines are deployed along the Texas border and blow away a local goat-herder, their license to kill innocent citizens quickly backed by U.S. courts. Speaking Spanish is illegalized, again with court support.

Immigrants are now such anathema that Washington spends more than two billion dollars a year harassing, apprehending, jailing and deporting them.

Yet where's the halt to immigration? Surely it's a curious incident that the most powerful government in history lets more than half a million "aliens" slip through its grasp.

Forget--please--the populist explanation that supposedly-unpatriotic Big Business is using immigrants to destroy our bountiful American Way of Life. After all, if corporations--and their Washington government--are so pro-immigrant, where is the Welcome mat?

And so draw your attention to the sealing of the border ... and to the welcoming of immigrants. But the border is not sealed -- and immigrants are not welcomed, you may protest.

Precisely. "Grasp the significance" of these non-events, to quote Holmes, and mystery's solution becomes, ah ... elementary . U.S. capitalists don't want to stop immigration--they just want it illegal. Keeping a section of the U.S. working class "illegal" allows the capitalists to pay sub-poverty wages ... and to unleash a plague of measures--from military deployment against civilians to denial of services and Constitutional rights--that threaten everyone it rules.

See? Mystery solved.

By the way, this leaves anybody embracing "Americanism" in the name of protecting good-paying jobs nothing but a ... chump. The only counter-move to the "illegal immigration" ploy is de-criminalization: an open border and full pay, benefits and especially Constitutional rights for all.

Case closed.

The Case of the Non-Smoking Gun

Federal, state and local governments are enacting and are enforcing sweeping legislations against the (admittedly foolish) personal use of tobacco.

Indoor smoking, except in private, is now almost entirely illegal. Even outdoor smoking has been banned, from stadiums to outside building entrances. A good quarter of the U.S. population (however youthful) cannot legally purchase, let alone use, the leaves of the tobacco plant. Courts have granted the "right" to corporations to terminate an employee for smoking at home.

Of course tobacco does harm and ultimately kill its users. Surely government moves against smoking show welcome concern about the health of Americans ... right?

Yet draw your attention to the curious absence of free national health care--in fact the USA is the world's only industrialized nation that doesn't guarantee medical treatment to its citizens. If the anti-smoking campaign is driven by concern for health, where is...the concern for health?

Therein lies the solution: the absence of socialized medicine tells that the capitalists' government cares not one whit for the health of its vassals. It tells as well that health care is not a right, as a normal person would innocently think. Instead it's a social benefit wrested from the Owners against their wishes and at their expense (and one they continually try to free themselves of).

Think of Owners as one corporation and non-Owners as a single mass of employees; that puts health care--along with education, clean air and drinking water, libraries etc., etc.--is in the benefit part of the work contract. It's part of the total cost of having workers--what's referred to as "the social wage."

Of course it's in the interest of capitalists to keep their costs as low as possible--and since the United States is also the only industrialized country without a mass working class political party, workers here lack the clout to win that particular benefit. In other words, as a class we're all still working at McDonald's.

But there's more to glean here. Consider that nowadays dramatically- escalating international competition is forcing Owners to "downsize" all their costs -- both numbers of employees and their benefits. Worldwide, Owners' governments are pressing to cut-back and even eliminate socialized medicine, while in the U.S. workers are forced to shoulder health insurance premiums while simultaneously facing "the elimination of welfare as we know it."

What's this have to do with smoking? Simple: U.S. capitalists will gain significant competitive advantage if they can get smoking not only out of the workplace, but out of the country. Increased efficiency, decreased lost-time and lowered medical and insurance costs for them--for free! Just use the government to make it illegal -- and, to boot, politicians get to look like crusaders for children.

Then there's a major propaganda advantage, too. The unassailable campaign against tobacco drives privatization deeply into public consciousness: if you're HIV-positive, or fat, or unhealthy, or addicted--hey, that's YOUR problem, pal. Whatever it is, it's not covered ... and don't expect ME to pay. People begin to look at each other the way the Owners do: with an eye towards who to toss out of the lifeboat.

Now whether you should spend a lifetime addicted to inhaling cigarettes' chemical-laden smoke is another matter -- but at least now you know why the U.S. government doesn't want you to. Call this mystery solved.

The Case of the Useful Dictators

For decades Americans were bombarded with horror stories about Communism. Why, it was so evil that the U.S. had to build the greatest military machine in history -- and kill more than 5 million Koreans and VietNamese -- to defend freedom against it.

But where was the freedom? Surely it's rather curious that there was little or no democracy in any U.S. client states.

In fact, Washington instead backed--and usually installed as well--virtually every dictatorship in the last 60 years, from Korea to VietNam, Chile to Zaire, Indonesia to Argentina (count Nazi Germany too, but that's a story for another time).

True, this obvious mystery was declared "solved" during the Reagan years: 'you see,' leading spokesperson Jean Kirkpatrick allowed, 'we bloc-ed with authoritarians [right-wing dictators] against totalitarians ["Communists"] because once the totalitarians get in you can't get them out.'

Well.... Leave aside, if you will, the Orwellian absurdity of supporting dictators ... in the name of democracy.

What's left is the curious--and telling--absence of efforts to weaken the counter-revolutionary police-state regimes that ruled every "Communist" country (except, of course, revolutionary Cuba).

Monsters like Stalin and Mao merely got the Saddam Hussein treatment: vilified, kept in place, and their populations punished.

In fact, when workers in East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia rose against Stalinist regimes in the fifties and sixties--demanding socialism under workers' control--they met the same fate as insurgent Kurds in the nineties: crushed by dictators' armies with tacit support from Washington.

For that matter, the U.S. bears prime responsibility for aiding the Cambodian ultra-Stalinist Pol Pot before, during, and after his unspeakable "killing fields." (Australian journalist John Pilger's excellent presentation of this can be found in this issue of SeeingRed.)

Nor is this just old news: the past six years have seen Washington tacitly--even sometimes openly--back the near-genocidal terror waged by assorted Yugoslavian Stalinists.

As you read this, the forces of Slobodan Milosevic are burning and looting their way across Kosovo -- an operation launched directly after the U.S. Ambassador publicly announced opposition to Kosovar independence and branded its supporters "terrorists."

Now over 200,000 Kosovar refugees face a potentially-lethal winter without food, possessions or housing. Meanwhile Washington provides cover for this new "ethnic cleansing" by continuing to oppose independence for Kosovo, making Milosevic's terror campaign naught by an "internal matter."

Yet from a Red viewpoint the apparent paradox of anti-democratic anti-Communism is no mystery at all: the capitalists like Stalinism and its repression of workers' rights ... just as they like Saddam Hussein's crushing of the Kurds, or any Third World dictatorship that stamps out opposition to Western plundering of their countries.

Anybody--even a "Communist"--who keeps the people down is OK in Washington's book. So call this mystery "solved."

By the way, this leaves anybody demanding U.S. military action to stop Milosevic a chump -- good-hearted, perhaps naive -- but a chump nonetheless. Calling for U.S./NATO actions to defend Kosovo is like hiring a child molester as a baby-sitter: you might want day care, but that's not what's on their mind.

For Washington it's re-establishing capitalism under Western rule ... and crushing any opposition to the Third World conditions that come along with it.

Call this case closed too -- but call the crimes still unpunished.

_____________

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