Global Research

The Russian military claimed that the U.S.’ guided-missile cruiser Chancellorsville suddenly changed course early Friday morning while on a patrol in the East China Sea and almost collided with the Admiral Vinogradov destroyer that was passing through these waters at the same time.

The U.S. denied this accusation and instead said that it was the Russian vessel that was behaving unprofessionally and putting the lives of everyone involved at risk, though it should be noted that this certainly wasn’t the first time that American forces have been accused of such recklessness.

Actually, there have been several such incidents every year since the 2014 Ukrainian crisis and consequent territorial dispute of Crimea which led to a revival of Cold War tensions between the two great powers, with most of these near-misses occurring in the Baltic Sea, Black Sea, and Syria.

This is the first time that such an event happened in the East China Sea between the two rivals and proves that the Pentagon’s Pacific bellicosity of recent years is finally starting to endanger Russia just as much it’s been endangering China this entire time.

The U.S.’ so-called “freedom of navigation patrols” pass through the South China Sea and seem designed to provoke a military response from Beijing, one which Washington could then expectedly exploit to advance its demonization campaign against China.

Given what’s known about previous near-misses between the Chinese and American navies, one can assume that the U.S. was the party at fault in the latest incident with Russia because of its established pattern of aggressive behavior. Furthermore, it can’t be ruled out that the recent event might have been timed to coincide with the ongoing St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).

At SPIEF, China and Russia are discussing ways to intensify their cooperation on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which represents the most realistic opportunity to transform international relations away from the fading American-centric unipolarity and towards the more equitable emerging multipolar world order.

The U.S. is very upset that Russia and China moved much closer to one another after EuroMaidan, which interestingly also coincided with the Pentagon’s provocative activity in the South China Sea. The Russian-Chinese partnership isn’t aimed against any third party, but many in the American strategic, political, and media communities are convinced that it’s secretly intended to undermine the U.S., hence the hysterical reaction that they’re having to it.

That said, there’s no denying that Russia and China see eye-to-eye on practically every global issue of significance, and they’ve just found another commonality between them when it comes to the U.S.’ reckless military action in the Pacific.

Russian forces are now endangered by this irresponsible activity just like their Chinese counterparts have been in recent years already, which could add a renewed impetus to these two great powers’ military cooperation with one another, especially in the naval sphere.

Not only that, but Russia is already paying more attention to the Pacific as part of the geopolitical re-balancing act that it’s been engaged in for half a decade already in reaction to the West’s sanctions against it, so it’s only natural for Moscow to take this latest incident very seriously and use it as the opportunity to cooperate even more closely with Beijing than ever before.

This conceivable outcome would add further credence to the theory that the U.S.’ aggression abroad is actually self-defeating and counterproductive because it ultimately lays the basis for equal and opposite reactions that eventually undermine its stated aims.

It’s enough to remember how the U.S.’ hybrid war aggression in Ukraine and conventional naval aggression in the South China Sea brought Russia and China closer together and fulfilled the nightmare scenario that the late former national security adviser and visionary geopolitical theorist Zbigniew Brzezinski warned about in his 1997 seminal work about “The Grand Chessboard.”

The solution as always would be for the U.S. to embrace win-win cooperation with all and reject the zero-sum schemes that got it to this point, but it doesn’t seem like it’s learned its lesson just yet, especially judging by the latest incident.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on CGTN.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from CGTN

Firs published by February 15, 2015 on Washington Blog and Global Research

Fifty two years, on June 8, 1967, Israel attacked the American naval vessel USS Liberty in international waters, and tried to sink it.

After checking the Liberty out for 8 hours – and making 9 overflights with Israeli jets, within 200 feet … close enough for the pilots and the sunbathing Liberty sailors on deck to waive at each other.

Yet the Israelis attacked it with Mirage fighter jets, torpedoes and napalm.  The USS Liberty suffered 70% casualties, with 34 killed and 174 wounded.

The Israeli attack spanned two hours … as long as the attack on Pearl Harbor. The air attack alone lasted approximately 25 minutes: consisting of more than 30 sorties by approximately 12 separate planes using napalm, cannon, and rockets which left 821 holes in the ship.  The Israelis fired 30mm cannons and rockets into the boat.

Following the attack by fighter jets, three Israeli motor torpedo boats torpedoed the ship, causing a 40 x 40 foot wide hole in her hull, and machine-gunning firefighters and stretcher-bearers attempting to save their ship and crew. More than 3,000 machine-gun bullet holes were later counted on the Liberty’s hull.

After the attack was thought to have ended, three life rafts were lowered into the water to rescue the most seriously wounded. The Israeli torpedo boats returned and machine-gunned these life rafts at close range. This was followed by the approach of two large Israeli Army assault helicopters filled with armed commandos carrying what appeared to be explosive satchels (they departed after hovering over the ship for several minutes, making no attempt to communicate).

The Israelis clearly knew it was an American ship, tried to sink it, and tried to frame the Egyptians for the attack, as shown by the following evidence:

(1) The Liberty was flying a huge, brand new American flag. The flag was 5-by-8 feet.  The weather conditions were ideal to ensure the flag’s easy observance and identification, because it was clear and sunny, with a wind-speed which make for a constant ripple in the flag.  After the flag was shot up by the jets, the Liberty’s crew replaced it with a 7-by-13 foot American flag, which flew during the entire duration of the attack.

(2) The Liberty had a unique profile and didn’t look like any other boat, since it had more and bigger antennas – including large, high-tech dishes and giant towers – than any other boat in the world (it was an NSA spy ship).

(3) The Liberty was marked with uniquely American numbering and colors in front.

(4) The Israeli pilots shot out the Liberty’s communications equipment first, and specifically jammed the ship’s emergency radio signal … unique to American naval vessels in the 6th Fleet. The ships from other fleets and other nations used different frequencies, which the Israelis did not jam.

(5) The Israelis used unmarked fighter jets and unmarked torpedo boats during the attack.

(6) Recently-declassified radio transcripts between the Israeli attack forces and ground control show that – at least 3 times – an Israeli fighter jet pilot identified the craft as American, and asked whether ground control was sure he should attack.  Ground control repeatedly said, yes, attack the vessel.

(7) The Israeli torpedo boats methodically destroyed all of the Liberty’s liferafts one by one (which is a war crime).

(8) The only reason the Israelis did not successfully sink the Liberty and kill all of its crewmen was that one sailor duck-taped together antennae – and took many bullet wounds in the process – which enabled an emergency SOS to get out from the Liberty to American 6th Fleet.

(9) The Israelis later claimed that they mistook the Liberty for an Egyptian vessel.  But the Egyptian ship – the El Quseir – was an unarmed 1920s-era horse carrier out of service in Alexandria, four times smaller than the Liberty, which bore virtually no resemblance to the Liberty.

(10) President Lyndon Johnson believed the attack was intentional and he leaked his opinion to Newsweek.

Other high-level Americans agreed:

“I was never satisfied with the Israeli explanation….  Through diplomatic channels we refused to accept their explanations.  I didn’t believe them then, and I don’t believe them to this day.  The attack was outrageous.”
–U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk

“The evidence was clear.  Both Adm. Kidd and I believed with certainty that this attack … was a deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew….  Not only did the Israelis attack the ship with napalm, gunfire, and missiles, Israeli torpedo boats machine-gunned three lifeboats that had been launched in an attempt by the crew to save the most seriously wounded — a war crime….”
–Affidavit of U.S. Navy Captain Ward Boston, the legal counsel for the official investigation into the Liberty attack

“There is compelling evidence that Israel’s attack was a deliberate attempt to destroy an American ship and kill her entire crew.”
–Admiral Thomas Moorer, Chief of Naval Operations and later Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 14 January 2004

“Israeli authorities subsequently apologized for the incident, but few in Washington could believe that the ship had not been identified as an American naval vessel…. I have yet to understand why it was felt necessary to attack this ship or who ordered the attack.”
–C.I.A. Chief Richard Helms

“Yet the ultimate lesson of the Liberty attack had far more effect on policy in Israel than in America.  Israel’s leaders concluded that nothing they might do would offend the Americans to the point of reprisal.  If America’s leaders did not have the courage to punish Israel for the blatant murder of American citizens, it seemed clear that their American friends would let them get away with almost anything.”
–George Ball, U.S. Undersecretary of State at the time, The Passionate Attachment

(Sources: Congressional record and videos shown below.)

Admiral Thomas H. Moorer – former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – chaired a non-governmental investigation into the attack on the USS Liberty in 2003. The committee – which included General of Marines Raymond G. Davis, Rear Admiral Merlin Staring, former Judge Advocate General of the Navy, and former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia James E. Akins – held Israel to be culpable and suggested several theories for Israel’s possible motives, including the desire to blame Egypt and bring the U.S. into the Six Day War.

Indeed, President Lyndon Johnson dispatched nuclear-armed fighter jets to drop nuclear bombs on Cairo, Egypt.  They were only recalled at the last minute, when Johnson realized that it was the Israelis – and not the Egyptians – who had fired on the Liberty.

An NSA report from 1981 found:

A persistent question relating to the Liberty incident is whether or not the Israeli forces which attacked the ship knew that it was American . . . not a few of the Liberty’s crewmen and [deleted but probably “NSA’s G Group”] staff are convinced that they did. Their belief derived from consideration of the long time the Israelis had the ship under surveillance prior to the attack, the visibility of the flag, and the intensity of the attack itself.

Speculation as to the Israeli motivation varied. Some believed that Israel expected thatthe complete destruction of the ship and killing of the personnel would lead the U.S. to blame the UAR [Egypt] for the incident and bring the U.S. into the war on the side of Israel . . . others felt that Israeli forces wanted the ship and men out of the way.

Allegedly:

Scouring the Liberty records in the LBJ Library in Texas, Ennes [an officer on the bridge of the Liberty] stumbled upon a smoking gun – a one-page memo of the minutes of the 303 Committee [the U.S. National Security Council group that reviewed sensitive intelligence operations] held in advance of the war in April 1967.   The Committee consisted of a handful of top level intelligence and government officials who examined black operations and devised plausible deniability for the executive branch in the event of public discovery of an attack.  The memo relates to a clandestine joint US-Israeli effort to blame Egypt for the sinking of the Liberty.

We haven’t yet located a copy of the alleged memo, and so we’re not sure we believe this explosive claim. But – given that Israel (1) used unmarked jets and ships, (2) destroyed the Liberty’s communication equipment and then jammed the Liberty’s emergency distress channel, and (3) destroyed all liferafts – the logical inference is that Israel intended to frame Egypt for the attack, and didn’t want the Liberty’s crew to be able to tell the world what really happened.

The following must-watch documentaries from the BBC, Al Jazeera and an independent producer provide first-hand interviews with the crew of the USS Liberty which prove that this was a failed false flag attack:

We are now in climate crisis.  Almost every week another major scientific study hits the news, telling us we are losing this, destroying that and completely obliterating the other; whole ecological systems under threat while those with the power to take the hard decisions twiddle their thumbs and set ‘to-do’ dates that will be all too late to have any impact.  As a recent report notes: ‘Much scientific knowledge produced for climate policy-making is conservative and reticent.’  Policy makers do not want to face the inconvenient truth.

The trouble is that, even if we could somehow halt catastrophic climate change – now looking unattainable – we are also, by the way we live, destroying the ecological systems that keep us and all the earth alive, something equally catastrophic.  Plastic in the sea has nothing to do with climate change.  The loss of topsoil and soil degradation is mostly to do with industrial farming methods.  The destruction of forests is due to financial greed and while it will greatly exacerbate climate change, satisfying the desire for more money comes first.

People who think they ‘own’ the earth are those destroying it.  They are also often the ones who do not believe in climate change. Surely the rich will always have enough money to buy what they want.  But you can’t buy what you have destroyed.

Many people understand the word ‘environment’ as being something ‘green’ when it is simply a term for our surroundings.  Of course we should protect green/natural environments, but what we must really protect is the ecology of those areas.

Ecology is the way things work; it is how all life combines to support itself; it is true biodiversity, the balancing of living systems to the benefit of those systems. It is a whole thing, or it should be, but we keep destroying bits here, there and everywhere. Then wonder why the whole doesn’t seem to work any more.

We can’t pick and choose with Nature.  We can’t say ‘I want to protect that species because it’s useful, but exterminate this one because it gets in my way.’  We accept all of Nature, or we accept nothing.  And we should include ourselves in that, yet we prefer to stand outside – and rule.

How did we arrive at this state of an arrogant claim of ‘ownership’ of the earth?  Let us go back to the ‘beginning’ – Genesis, in particular Genesis 1, verses 27 and 28.

27. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

28. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

This of course is the Authorised Version of the English Bible, also known as the King James Bible, published in 1611.  Probably the most printed book in the world, the writing, though now very old fashioned, is beautiful.  It has affected and added greatly to the English language.  No modern translations can equal its power.  More importantly, people rememberthe words and unfortunately it has done a far better job than subliminal advertising.

Consider those words ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over…’  How many people over the last 4 centuries have been taught them, read them, heard them in church?  Missionaries have carried them across the world, spreading the underlying message: ‘We humans own the earth.’

The Authorised version has been updated and put into modern language many times, but out of 27 bibles in English, 23 still use the word ‘subdue’; 13 use the phrase ‘have dominion over’.  The alternatives for subdue and dominion are ‘govern’, ‘rule’, ‘rule over’, ‘reign over’, ‘be masters over…’, ‘be its master’ or bring the earth ‘under control’.  The more recent American bibles make the message clear.  The Contemporary English Version, published in 1995, says:

‘Have a lot of children!  Fill the earth with people and bring it under your control. Rule over the fish in the ocean, the birds in the sky, and every animal on the earth.’

Judaism, Christianity and Islam all use Genesis in their thinking, but this isn’t just about monotheistic religions.  Pretty well all religions put humanity first. That’s what they’re there for, to help us believe in ourselves as a species; to believe that some higher being or beings will look after us, the humans; put us, the humans, first.

It is easy to see how the West, propelled by men whose lives, regardless of their appalling acts, were based on the bible, has fulfilled the message.  Human population has been, for many years, expanding.  We do cover the earth and there are too few places left that are not under our control.  And our expanding population means an ever-growing demand that the earth must provide for us, even as we destroy the ability of the earth to provide what we need, let alone what we want.

In modern secular society people can be too wrapped up in consumerism to think about whether humans have the right to own the earth.  There is a lot of angry (and justified) discussion about how a very few people own most of the earth.  ‘How unfair!’ we cry.  But if we take that money, power and property away from the ultra rich, we will not give it to the earth where it belongs, but to ourselves, the common man.

It shows up in all shades of political thinking. Most political parties (barring the alt-right) will claim some desire to help protect the environment, by which they mean ‘manage’.  Take this example from a Socialist Party’s leaflet, with the headline ‘There is only one world’:

‘… the world’s natural and industrial resources must become the common heritage of all humanity so that they can be used to directly meet the needs of the world’s population…’

How did ancient man arrive at this attitude, this arrogance that became the rule so precisely displayed in Genesis?  It wasn’t always like this.

Hunter-gatherer societies, as described by anthropologist Douglas Fry, were small nomadic groups leading relatively stress-free lives, and they did not struggle to find the food they needed. Then farming took over, in what Jared Diamond called ‘the worst mistake’ in history.

If you grow your food you have to stay in one place in order to care for your crop – your crop, and therefore, perhaps, your land.  That one simple act changed how humans thought and lived.  It created tribes with chiefs; it created ‘territories’ and fights over land; it created civilisations with growing populations, armies and a land bled dry by overuse; civilisations that inevitably collapsed.

Growing food certainly meant more people could be fed but, as Diamond points out, ‘Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.’

The modern world believes it has a ‘right’ to the earth and all it contains, while native peoples believe they have obligations towards the earth that feeds them.  Being indigenous does not mean being perfect in the way humans treat their environment. Despite having an intimate relationship with their environment, and a deep sense of reverence for the earth, indigenous people still altered the land to enable the way they lived.

For the Algonquin peoples, living in the northeast states of America, ‘natural resources were not just passively foraged; they were actively managed, through such practices as regular burning to clear deadwood, produce pasture, and encourage the growth of nut trees and fresh browse.’

Their sometime neighbours, sometime enemies, the Iroquois farmed as well as hunted, but ‘when cornfields lost their fertility or wood and game became scarce, every decade or so’, the people moved to another location.  Really?  Ten years to empty your environment?  There was room enough to do that then.  There isn’t now.

Time and again civilisations have collapsed, often for the reasons that possibly ended the Mayan culture:

overpopulation and overuse of the land, endemic warfare and drought.  The Chaco Canyon culture died, it seems, not just because of environmental stress, but of a rigid belief system: ‘the Puebloan people survived only by letting go of tradition’.

But now our civilisation is global and we are collapsing on a global scale.  This time we have nowhere to move and start again. Forget that dream of relocating to another planet.  We haven’t the time or resources left to go wholesale into space to live on another earth-like planet.  And if we haven’t learnt from our mistakes here, another planet would be trashed.

We humans are proud of our intelligence, our inventiveness, our technology.  That pride in ownership, that greed for more control, and that push to provide more and more goods for ever-eager consumers, using resources that become less and less, has led to the ruination of the planet and now, more than likely, to our own extinction.

Now universities are studying possible technical fixes, geo-engineering, in the hope that we can bring climate change under our ‘control’.  But the danger there is that if some of these fixes appear to work, then everyone will say ‘that’s alright then’, and carry on as before in our earth-damaging way.

In humanity’s desire to own the earth, there are several things we won’t own. We won’t own the waste we create.  We won’t own the carbon emissions emitted by other countries on our behalf.  We won’t own our mistakes, or the misery they create – and we won’t own our responsibilities.

We are losing the topsoil all across the earth.  Soon, the soil that grows our food (and the food of many other life forms that populate this little planet) will be dead.  This is too big for a technological ‘fix’.

Rivers are struggling.  Some will dry up as the glaciers that feed them melt. There will come a day when there are no more glaciers and the earth will lose its major source of fresh water. This is too big for a technological ‘fix’.

Left alone, rivers have clean water, are full of life and their regular flooding has benefits.  The Nile Delta, now endangered, once owed its reputation as ‘the bread basket of the world’ to its annual floods.  But the majority of the world’s great rivers are no longer free-flowing.  We have rerouted them, dammed them, constrained them, polluted them with antibiotics, herbicides, pesticides and poured human and animal sewage into them or drained them of their waters to irrigate ‘our’ land. We have done everything except to allow them to act naturally.  This is too big for a technological ‘fix’.

With a possible major sea level rise, the oceans, poisoned and stripped of most life, will take over land that the human race has claimed as its own.  This also is too big for a technological ‘fix’.

All life has its own form of intelligence which allows it to survive by fitting in to the whole ecological system.  The natural environment should be a thing of beauty, full of busy life, something that both inspires and calms.  It has become a bleak and empty place, where you return from a walk over the hills with a mental list of the things you haven’t seen – because our collective ego has killed them.

For far too long, humanity has regarded itself as ‘outside’ Nature.  We think we are exceptional.  Our ‘intelligence’ rarely produces long-lasting benefits to anything but ourselves.  God forbid that we should be just one form of life among many, with no more ability to survive than the rest of life.  How could we, being who we have become, face that loss of importance?  There is only one thing that makes humanity truly exceptional; our desire to own and control everything, partnered by our horrible ability to destroy what we try to control.

Can we learn from Chaco Canyon and the Pueblo people?  Is it too late to ditch our rigid world view, our superiority, our belief in our ‘right’ to own and control our world?  Can we, before our much-vaunted ‘civilisation’ crashes and we die, learn instead to live kindly with this earth?

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

On the 2^nd of May 2019, the Trump Administration decided to enforce Title 111 of the Helms-Burton Act. Title 111 authorises US nationals with claims to confiscated properties in Cuba to file suits in US courts against persons that may be “trafficking “in that property.

Title 111 of the Helms-Burton Act has not been enforced before though the Act was enacted in 1996 through a move by two US legislators, a Republican Senator, Jesse Helms and a House of Representatives member, Dan Burton. It was signed into law by then US president, Bill Clinton. Since the Act allows the US president to suspend some of its provisions up to 6 months at a time, it was felt that implementing Title 111 was not necessary given that economic sanctions against Cuba aimed at throttling its economy were already all-encompassing.

But president Trump who is determined to increase pressure upon Cuba has decided to tighten the noose.  He is being egged on by some legislators from South Florida with its significant ‘Cuban exile electorate’ — an electorate that is staunch in its support of Trump — who are angry that some US companies are now trading with Cuba.  Besides, heightened harshness against Cuba is also aimed at curtailing oil shipments between Cuba and Venezuela at a time when hawks in the Trump Administration such as National Security Adviser John Bolton are pushing hard for regime change in Caracas.

Opposition to the enforcement of Title 111 has been swift from certain quarters. The Ambassador of the European Union (EU) to Cuba Alberto Navarro reiterated on 31^st May 2019 the EU’s unanimous rejection of what he viewed as a clear violation of international law. In fact, the EU had voiced its opposition to the Helms-Burton Act in its entirety when it was first enacted in 1996. A number of Latin American countries are also incensed by the US decision. Even civil society groups in the US are against this unjust measure targeting Cuba.

However, it would be a mistake to see Title 111 by itself or as nothing more than a part of the Helms-Burton Act. It should be evaluated within the context of the decades old crippling sanctions against Cuba. Since 1961, the US has imposed wide-ranging economic sanctions against Cuba mainly because the island state following the 1959 Revolution chose its own path of development inspired by socialist ideals. The sanctions not only seek to repudiate Cuba’s ideological experiment but also attempt to force the small nation of 11 million people into a state of backwardness and under-development. Because the US has failed to achieve its goals, the imperial power has become even more hostile towards its tiny neighbour.

The world rejects the US sanctions against Cuba. Year in and year out the UN General Assembly has taken the side  of the  Cuban people as they continue to resist US sanctions with courage, dignity and pride.  The nations of the world are aware that what is at stake in the US punishment of Cuba is the sovereign right of a nation to determine its own destiny. Sovereignty is intimately linked to a nation’s independence. This is one of the main reasons why US sanctions are seen as a challenge to international law which seeks to preserve the sovereignty and independence of nation-states within the international order.

Equally important is the humanitarian implication of imposing sanctions. As shown by numerous examples of the impact of sanctions upon the people of a targeted nation, ordinary people invariably suffer immensely. Hundreds of thousands have been deprived of life’s essentials. Tens of thousands have died as a result of sanctions. One of the most catastrophic in recent times would be the 650,000 children who perished in Iraq as a consequence of the punitive sanctions imposed by the US in the nineties.

In dealing with US sanctions against Cuba we have to go beyond merely criticising or condemning them. The time has come to decide whether unilateral sanctions by any one nation or a group of nations against another nation or a group of nations should be tolerated at all. Shouldn’t we prohibit unilateral sanctions of this sort?  Shouldn’t the UN General Assembly adopt a binding resolution on the prohibition of unilateral sanctions against any nation or people?  Shouldn’t such a resolution be endowed with the force of law?

If sanctions are to be imposed at all upon a state, it should be endorsed by three-quarters of the members of the UN General Assembly and monitored by a special committee of the Assembly itself. A targeted state should be universally perceived as a rogue state of the worst kind.  When there are lucid rules on why and how sanctions should be imposed, the reign of self-serving sanctions associated with the arrogance of hegemonic power will come to an end.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Dr Chandra Muzaffar is the President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST), Malaysia. He is Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

The Internet was originally promoted as a completely free and uncensored mechanism for people everywhere to exchange views and communicate, but it has been observed by many users that that is not really true anymore. Both governments and the service providers have developed a taste for controlling the product, with President Barack Obama once considering a “kill switch“ that would turn off the Internet completely in the event of a “national emergency.”

President Donald Trump has also had a lot to say about fake news and is reported to be supporting limiting protections relating to the Internet. In May, a “net neutrality” bill that would have prevented service providers from manipulating Internet traffic passed in the House of Representatives, but it is reported to be “dead on arrival” in the Senate, so it will never be enacted.

Social networking sites have voluntarily employed technical fixes that restrict some content and have also hired “reviewers” who look for objectionable material and remove it. Pending European legislation, meanwhile, might require Internet search engines to eliminate access to many unacceptable old posts. YouTube has already been engaged in deleting existing old material and is working with biased “partners” like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to set up guidelines to restrict future content. Many users of Facebook will have already undoubtedly noted that some contacts have been blocked temporarily (or even permanently) and denied access to the site.

Google now automatically disables or limits searches for material that it deems to be undesirable. If Google does not approve of something it will either not appear in search results or it will be very low on the list. And what does come up will likely favor content that derives from those who pay Google to promote their products or services. Information that originates with competitors will either be very low in the search results or even blocked. Google is consequently hardly an unbiased source of information.

In May 2017 Facebook announced that it would be hiring 3,000 new censors, and my own experience of social networking censorship soon followed. I had posted an article entitled “Charlottesville Requiem” that I had written for a website. At the end of the first day, the site managers noticed that, while the article had clearly attracted a substantial Facebook readership, the “likes” for the piece were not showing up on the screen counter, i.e., were not being tabulated. It was also impossible to share the piece on Facebook, as the button to do so had been removed.

The “likes” on sites like Facebook, Yahoo! news comments, YouTube, and Google are important because they automatically determine how the piece is distributed throughout the site. If there are a lot of likes, the piece goes to the top when a search is made or when someone opens the page. Articles similarly can be sent to Coventry if they receive a lot of dislikes or negative marks, so the approvals or disapprovals can be very important in determining what kind of audience is reached or what a search will reveal.

In my case, after one day my page reverted to normal, the “likes” reappeared, and readers were again able to share the article. But it was clear that someone had been managing what I had posted, apparently because there had been disapproval of my content based on what must have been a political judgment.

A couple of days later, I learned of another example of a similar incident. The Ron Paul Institute (RPI) website posts much of its material on YouTube (owned by Google) on a site where there had been advertising that kicked back to RPI a small percentage of the money earned. Suddenly, without explanation, both the ads and rebate were eliminated after a “manual review” determined the content to be “unsuitable for all advertisers.” This was a judgment rendered apparently due to disapproval of what the institute does and says. The ability to comment on and link from the pieces was also turned off.

Dissident British former diplomat Craig Murray also noted in April 2018 the secretive manipulation of his articles that are posted on Facebook, observing that his “site’s visitor numbers [were] currently around one-third normal levels, stuck at around 20,000 unique visitors per day. The cause [was] not hard to find. Normally over half of our visitors arrive via Facebook. These last few days, virtually nothing has come from Facebook. What is especially pernicious is that Facebook deliberately imposes this censorship in a secretive way.

The primary mechanism when a block is imposed by Facebook is that my posts to Facebook are simply not sent into the timelines of the large majority of people who are friends or who follow. I am left to believe the post has been shared with them, but in fact it has only been shown to a tiny number. Then, if you are one of the few recipients and do see the post and share it, it will show to you on your timeline as shared, but in fact the vast majority of your own friends will also not receive it. Facebook is not doing what it is telling you it is doing—it shows you it is shared—and Facebook is deliberately concealing that fact from you. Twitter has a similar system known as ‘shadow banning.’ Again, it is secretive and the victim is not informed.”

More recently, pressure to censor Internet social networking and information sites has increased, coming both from government and from various interested constituencies. In late May, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with French President Emmanuel Macron to discuss how to eliminate “hate speech” on the Internet.

The two men agreed that the United States Internet model, in spite of already being heavily manipulated, is too laissez faire, and expressed an interest in exploring the French system where it is considered acceptable to ban unacceptable points of view. Zuckerberg suggested that it might serve as a good model for the entire European Union. France is reportedly considering legislation that establishes a regulator with power to fine Internet companies up to 4% of their global revenue, which can in some cases be an enormous sum, if they do not curb hateful expressions.

So unelected, unnamed censors are operating all around the Internet to control the content, which I suppose should surprise no one, and the interference will only get worse as both governments and service providers are willing to do what it takes to eliminate views that they find unacceptable—which, curiously enough, leads one to consider how “Russiagate” came about and the current hysteria being generated in the conventional media and also online against both Venezuela and Iran. How much of the anger is essentially fake, being manipulated or even fabricated by large companies that earn mega billions of dollars by offering under false pretenses a heavily managed product that largely does what the government wants? Banning hate speech will be, unfortunately, only the first step in eliminating any and all criticisms of the status quo.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on American Free Press.

Philip Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer and a columnist and television commentator. He is also the executive director of the Council for the National Interest. Other articles by Giraldi can be found on the website of the Unz Review. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from American Free Press

Two days ago the US celebrated the 75th anniversary of D-Day with accolades to the armed forces and thanks to surviving veterans.  The country stood strongly with the military.  But today two days later is the 52 anniversary of a day of shame when Washington turned its back on the US Navy.  It was June 8, 1967 when the USS Liberty, a surveillance ship stationed off the coast of Egypt was attacked by Israeli fighter aircraft and torpedo boats.  The Israelis were unable to sink the Liberty, but managed to kill 34 American sailors and wound 174. Seventy percent of the crew were casualties of the Israeli attack.

The White House, fearing the Israel Lobby, prevented the US Navy from going to the defense of the Liberty, thus sacrificing American lives, and further dishonored the US Navy by ordering Admiral McCain, father of the former US Senator John McCain, to orchestrate a cover-up.  The surving crew were threatened with court-martial and imprisonment if they spoke about the event.  It was 20 years before one of the surving officers wrote a book about the greatest act of shame the US government ever inflicted on the US military.  

In 2003, 36 years after the Israeli attack on the Liberty, Admiral Tom Moorer, former Chief of Naval Operations and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, convened the Independent Commission of Inquiry into the Israeli Attack on USS Liberty, the Recall of Military Rescue Support Aircraft while the Liberty was Under Attack, and the Subsequent Cover-up by the United States Government. The Commission consisted of Adm. Moorer, Gen. Raymond Davis, former Assistant Commandant of the US Marine Corps, Rear Adm. Merlin Staring, former Judge Advocate General of the US Navy, and Amb. James Akins, former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

You can read the report online, here for example. 

The report is devastating.  Among the report’s conclusions, these stand out:

“That due to the influence of Israel’s powerful supporters in the United States, the White House deliberately covered up the facts of this attack from the American people;

“That due to continuing pressure by the pro-Israel lobby in the United States, this attack remains the only serious naval incident that has never been thoroughly investigated by Congress; to this day, no surviving crewmember has been permitted to officially and publicly testify about the attack;

“That there has been an official cover-up without precedent in American naval history; the existence of such a cover-up is now supported by statements of Rear Admiral Merlin Staring, USN (Ret.), former Judge Advocate General of the Navy; and Captain Ward Boston, USN, (Ret.), the chief counsel to the Navy’s 1967 Court of Inquiry of Liberty attack;

“That the truth about Israel’s attack and subsequent White House cover-up continues to be officially concealed from the American people to the present day and is a national disgrace;

“That a danger to our national security exists whenever our elected officials are willing to subordinate American interests to those of any foreign nation, and specifically are unwilling to challenge Israel’s interests when they conflict with American interests; this policy, evidenced by the failure to defend USS Liberty and the subsequent official cover-up of the Israeli attack, endangers the safety of Americans and the security of the United States.”

After interviewing many of the survivors, Captain Ward Boston, who was assigned to cover up the attack and afterward repudiated the cover-up, and Bill Knutson, the executive officer of the USS America fighter squadron that was called back on orders from the White House, and lengthy discussions with Adm. Moorer, my former colleague at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, I have written about the Israeli attack on the Liberty a number of times.  Some of them are available in the archive on this website, for example, see this. 

All who discount the influence of Israel on the US government are ignorant fools.

Netanyahu Elevates Himself to Dictator

We hear every day that “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East,” but is Israel a democracy or a dictatorship?  

In a democracy even the highest members of the government are accountable to law, but this isn’t the case with Netanyahu.  After a two-year investigation the Israeli attorney general announced his intention to indict prime minister Netanyahu on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. See this.

This is like Mueller indicting President Trump for colluding with Putin to steal the US presidential election.  All would be over for Trump, but not for Netanyahu.  Netanyahu simply removed the Israeli justice minister, Avichai Mandelblit, and appointed himself to the post, thus immunizing himself from prosecution.  See this.

As prime minister Netanyahu had already assigned himself the ministries of Defense, Health, and Education.  Now he is Justice minister as well.  How much of a government can be in the hands of one person before that person becomes a dictator?  Think about it this way:  If President Trump were also Secretary of Defense, Attorney General, Secretary of the Treasury, and Secretary of Homeland Security, would he be a president or a dictator?

Trump has none of these posts, but some Democrats accuse him of being a dictator.  What then does that make Netanyahu?

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

On June 6, joint forces of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (the former official branch of al-Qaeda in Syria), other al-Qaeda-linked groups and a coalition of Turkish-backed militants known as the National Front for Liberation launched a large-scale advance in northern Hama.

Militants attacked Syrian Army units in Jibeen and Tell Meleh forcing them to make a tactical retreat and shelled the government-held Christian town of Mahardah. It’s located 6km southeast of Tell Meleh.

The advance was named after Mu’tasim Bellah al-Madani, a prominent al-Qaeda member of Saudi origin. The army eliminated him in the same region in May.

The Syrian-Russian-Iranian alliance responded to this attack with a fresh round of airstrikes. At the same time, army units assisted by the National Defense Forces regrouped and launched a counter-attack. An intense fighting is ongoing.

The situation also remained tense north and northeast of Kafr Nabudah where army units and militants were engaged in fierce artillery duels.

An interesting fact is that photo and video evidence from the area showed vehicles, like Panthera F9 armored personnel carriers, and weapons supplied by Turkey. This fact confirms that, despite formal statements assuring its alleged commitment to the de-escalation zone agreement, Ankara de-facto supports terrorist in Idlib.

According to the de-escalation agreement reached in the framework of the Astana format between the opposition, Turkey, Iran, Syria and Russia, so-called moderate rebels should be separated from terrorist groups, which are excluded from the ceasefire. Then, terrorists have to surrender or they will be eliminated. This has never been done because Turkish-backed groups continued keeping close ties with Hayat Tahir al-Sham and other al-Qaeda linked groups.

The developing situation is another clear demonstration that the so-called moderate opposition, that allegedly opposes the terrorism, does not exist in the Idlib de-escalation zone. In this case, a military operation to defeat the terrorism and force constructive elements of Turkish-backed groups to accept a political solution of the conflict becomes more and more attractive option.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

We call upon Global Research readers to support South Front in its endeavors.

If you’re able, and if you like our content and approach, please support the project. Our work wouldn’t be possible without your help: PayPal: [email protected] or via: http://southfront.org/donate/ or via: https://www.patreon.com/southfront

Igor Sechin, the CEO of Rosneft and one of the most powerful people in Russia, isn’t jumping on the Alt-Media bandwagon of speculating about America’s supposedly imminent demise but is instead warning that it might actually be about to enter a “golden age”, albeit one that could very easily lead to “energy colonialism” all across the world.

It’s been fashionable since the invention of the internet for people to speculate about America’s supposedly imminent demise, especially since the economic crisis of the last decade and the visible return of Great Power competition with Russia and China, but one of the most powerful people in Moscow isn’t jumping on the Alt-Media bandwagon but is instead bucking the trend of talking about this wishful thinking doom-and–gloom scenario. Igor Sechin, the CEO of Rosneft, actually thinks that America might be at the dawn of a “golden age’, albeit one that could very easily lead to “energy colonialism” all across the world. Speaking at the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), he warned that:

“America’s ‘Golden Age’ can turn into the age of energy colonialism for other participants of the market. Should global energy consumers become hostage to non-stop election campaign in the US? The reality of the current situation is that the US vastly uses energy as a political weapon. The imposition of sanctions or the threat of their implementation has a devastating impact on the ecosystem of the global energy market.”

All of this goes flies in the face of the conventional narrative propagated by the Alt-Media Community alleging that America is on the “cusp of collapse” and just a short time away from “bankruptcy”, yet those predictions have just been discredited by one of the most powerful men in Russia who basically argues that America’s upcoming energy-driven “Golden Age” might lead to it becoming a bigger bully than ever before. That’s a far cry away from what many people on the internet have been indoctrinated to expect, but his words are more credible that the many op-eds in Alt-Media precisely because of who he is and what he represents. Objectively speaking, Sechin’s statement should be taken much more seriously than the words of a little-known blogger.

Going forward, Russia seems to realize that it might not be able to compete with the US in this sphere if future technologies lower the cost of its rival’s LNG exports. On top of that, apart from a few exceptions such as Germany, the US has firm control over all aspects of its NATO vassals’ energy policies, making it even more difficult for it to counter the pressure being placed on it. Although Russia could redirect the bulk of its exports to China, India, and other rising Asian powers, it’ll still face fierce competition from the US and its GCC allies. Whichever way one looks at it, the prognosis is becoming progressively grimmer, and the odds of the US exploiting Russia’s severe systemic vulnerabilities in pursuit of a lopsided “New Detente” with it are increasing by the day.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

America is commemorating the 52nd anniversary of the Israeli attack on USS Liberty.

This article was first published on November 14, 2014

Fresh evidence presented in an exclusive Al Jazeera investigation into the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty that killed 34 Americans proves the incident was not a mistake. Since 1967 the ‘official story‘ has been that Israel simply misidentified the American ship as Egyptian for several hours. Israel apologized to the United States and for several decades we’ve been led to believe that this could be the only explanation for why Israeli jets and torpedo boats would launch rockets, missiles and torpedoes at an American target for more than two hours.

A new documentary called ‘The Day Israel Attacked America” airing on Al Jazeera was produced and directed by award winning British film maker Richard Belfield. Thanks to the audio evidence obtained by Belfield, it is finally possible to prove the survivors of the attack on the USS Liberty were right all along. The survivors have always been extremely confident that Israel’s intentions were to sink that ship and kill everyone on board so Egypt could be blamed for the tragedy. Why? To convince President Lyndon Johnson (and the American public) that we needed to declare war on Egypt. This is the definition of a ‘false flag‘. (can you say 9/11?)

It appears that once again, a conspiracy theory has turned out to be conspiracy fact. You can finally take off your tinfoil hats!

“Earlier this year, I acquired a copy of the audiotape of the attack as it had unfolded, the real time conversations between Israeli Air Force pilots and their controllers back at base. It had never been broadcast before. I went to talk to Al Jazeera and after careful consideration, the network commissioned the film.” – Richard Belfield

Just sixteen minutes after Israel attacked America, the USS Liberty was confirmed by Israeli forces to be an American ship. These conversations can be heard in the documentary Al Jazeera has been airing on their station.

“To what state does she belong?” (Answer): “American”

Yet the attacks continued for an hour and a half!

Even five minutes before the first bombing you can hear Israeli Air Force pilots question whether the ship was American or not. You don’t have to be a genius to understand why these pilots would be extremely uncomfortable attacking a ship suspected to be American without being given direct orders to do so. I believe we can safely assume this attack wouldn’t have been carried out otherwise.

“Is it an American ship?” “What do you mean American?” “No comment.”

Twenty minutes after a ground controller answered “American” when asked “to what state does she belong?” by Israeli Air Force pilots, the first torpedo hit the USS Liberty. A voice can clearly be heard which confirms that this target, thought to be American at that time, was to be destroyed.

“The torpedo is talking care of the ship now.”

As soon as the first torpedo hit the USS Liberty, Israeli torpedo boats circled the ship and started machine-gunning the American target for another 40 minutes. When the USS Liberty crew lowered their lifeboats into the water to evacuate their ship, the Israelis moved closer so they could gun down the Americans attempting to save their own lives.

More than ten years ago a journalist named Arieh O’Sullivan from the Jerusalem Post was allowed to listen to these same audiotapes. He published a transcript of the Israeli military transmissions he heard directing the attack on the USS Liberty. Sixteen minutes after the attack started, just as in the recording obtained by Al Jazeera, O’Sullivan’s transcript (translated from Hebrew to English) shows the same exchange.

“Kislev, what country?” (Answer): “Apparently American.”

That is where O’Sullivan’s transcript, published over ten years ago by the Jerusalem Post, ends. There is just one major problem with that… The attack continued for another hour and a half!

Navy Admiral Thomas Moorer, who has served this country as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Chief of Naval Operations, once lead an independent commission to investigate what really happened to the USS Liberty. The commission’s findings were made public in 2003. Here are a few of the shocking conclusions.

• The attack, by a U.S. ally, was a deliberate attempt to destroy an American ship and kill its entire crew.
• The attack included the machine-gunning of stretcher-bearers and life rafts .
• The White House deliberately prevented the U.S. Navy from coming to the defense of the USS Liberty. This was the first time in naval history a rescue mission had been cancelled while an American ship was under attack.
• Surviving crew members were later threatened with court-martial, imprisonment, or worse if they talked to anyone about what had happened to them; and were “abandoned by their own government 

John Crewdson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, published in 2007 what former CIA analyst Ray McGovern has called the ‘most detailed and accurate account of the Israeli attack‘ for the Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun. You guessed it, Crewdson was fired by the Chicago Tribune just a year later after working there for 24 years. You should read his work.

“Israeli messages intercepted on June 8, 1967, leave no doubt that sinking the USS Liberty was the mission assigned to the attacking Israeli warplanes and torpedo boats as the Six-Day War raged in the Middle East. Let me repeat: there is no doubt – none – that the mission of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) was to destroy the USS Liberty and kill its entire crew.” – former CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

Journalists did not appreciate the implications for themselves of the contrived and false indictment of Julian Assange by a corrupt US government.  It was obvious to a few of us that the indictment by the US government, a government constrained by the First Amendment, of a foreign national for publishing leaked material, an action never before regarded as espionage or a crime, was the beginning of the end of any Western government ever again being held accountable by a free press.

Not that the Western World has a free press.  It has a collection of presstitutes that serve as a Ministry of Propaganda for the ruling oligarchies.

Still, in principle it was possible that governments could be held accountable.  But that possibility ended with Assange’s false indictment.

First of all, no honest government would have spent years trying to invent a way to indict a journalist for practicing journalism.

Second, no intelligent grand jurors with an ounce of integrity would have been putty in the hands of a corrupt US prosecutor and enable a prosecution that ensures the destruction of accountable government.

Third, it was obvious that once America led the way in shutting down the principle of a free press, governments of other “Western democracies” would follow as soon as they could.

And follow they did.  Assange’s indictment led to raids by the “Australian Gestapo” on the home of News Corp Australia journalist Annika Smethurst and on the headquarters of the Australian Broadcasting Corp. See this. 

The Australian government is angry about an investigative report about war crimes committed in Afghanistan by Australian participants in Washington’s war against the Taliban. What Australian troops are doing in Afghanistan remains an unexplained mystery. How much is the Australian government being paid by Washington for Australian mercenaries to die for the American Empire?

The police raids soon spread to other Australian journalists, including one whose sin was to report on “asylum seekers.”

Assange’s contrived and false indictment has also encouraged the French police to arrest journalists covering the ongoing “Yellow Vest” protests. The French government is desperate to blank out the protest against the American puppet government in Paris.

Even the San Francisco police, who tolerate massive homelessness on the streets and the associated crimes have been inspired by Assange’s indictment.  The front door of Journalist Bryan Carmody, who reported on the sudden death of a public defender, who apparently was in the way of successful police frameups, was broken down by police wielding sledgehammers.

Rather than knock on the door, the police break in. This not only costs the occupant large sums of money for repairs, but also serves to intimidate and to create a story that there was resistance that had to be overcome by breaking down the door.  This creates the necessary story for killing the occupants and the dog.

Listening to the fairy tales yesterday by Trump in Normandy about all the freedom Americans created by defeating Hitler, I wondered whose freedom he was talking about.  He was talking about the freedom of the oligarchs to rule without hindrance from the people or the First Amendment.

Not only journalists have lost First Amendment protection, but also citizens in encounters with police.  John Whitehead explains how a citizen’s exercise of constitutional rights is grounds for arrest. See this.

Communication monopolies such as Youtube, Twitter, and Google continue the censureship that teaches Americans to hold their tongues about an increasing array of subjects.  The same lesson is taught in schools and universities as speech codes gradually erase the First Amendment.  Each generation that is born is born into a country with less free speech.  As time passes, people will forget that once government and police could be held accountable.  Without free speech there is tyranny, and the road to tyranny is the road the United States and its Western vassals are on.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Silent Crow News

The US was Soviet Russia’s junior partner in the battle to defeat Nazi Germany. History taught US students otherwise. So do US presidents, Trump no exception. 

In Colleville-sur-Mer, France, the Normandy American Cemetery, commemorating the 75th D-Day anniversary, launching the West’s long-delayed second front against Nazi forces while the main battle raged in the East, pitting millions of Soviet and German forces against each other, Trump pretended the US defeated the Nazi scourge the Red Army triumphed over.

Honoring about 10,000 lost lives on D-Day and its immediate aftermath, he ignored the catastrophic price paid by a generation of Soviet soldiers and civilians, 20 million or more lives lost.

A 1993 Russian Academy of Sciences study estimated 26.6 million. Some independent Russian researchers believe 40 million died – including combatants and civilians.

Millions more suffered serious injuries. Human misery endured can’t be quantified. Large parts of Russia were devastated.

Many years of rebuilding and recouping were required to return to normalcy. Americans can’t imagine what Russians endured.

The National WW II Museum indicates 407,000 US military deaths – around 671,000 others wounded.

War didn’t touch US soil. Americans old enough to remember recall minor inconveniences – including rationing of gasoline and other goods needed for the war effort.

Except for loved ones away at war, life was largely normal. Conflict raged out of sight and mind.

Annual commemorations of Victory Day in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia is special because of the unimaginable price paid by its people to achieve it.

In May 2015, on the 70th anniversary of what Russians call the Great Patriotic War triumph over Nazi Germany, Vladimir Putin commented on the hardships his family endured during the war.

Born in 1952 seven years after it ended, he said his “father did not like even to touch this topic,” adding he learned about the lessons of war from others sharing their memories.

During the war, his father sustained a severe leg injury but survived the conflict. His older brother died from diphtheria after being evacuated during the 872-day Nazi siege of Leningrad, one of the longest and most devastating in history.

Around double the number of  lives were lost from starvation, untreated diseases, and other war-related causes than the total US death toll in WW II — against Nazi Germany, its European allies, and imperial Japan, an estimated 800,000.

Putin’s mother was close to death from illness when his father returned home at war’s end. He helped nurse her back to health.

Many of his relatives perished during the war, he said, including five of his father’s six brothers, his mother losing relatives as well.

The war was a disaster for his family, he explained. Millions of other Russians suffered the same way.

A personal note: Aged-five when war began in September 1939, on or around the day I began kindergarten, aged-10 when it officially ended in the Pacific in September 1945, I remember years of war well from daily radio broadcasts my parents and I listened to, including commentaries from noted journalists of that era, a far cry from war reporting today.

I remember minimal inconveniences of the time, including rationing of gasoline and other goods. Production of autos, metal appliances and furniture, as well as other consumer products was halted in 1942 through war’s end so plants could produce tanks, artillery, aircraft, and other weapons of war.

Dog food no longer was sold in tin cans. Buying a tube of toothpaste required turning in the empty one for recycling.

Ration stamps were required to buy limited amounts of staples taken for granted today. My parents’ 1939 Dodge auto was minimally used because of scarce availability of gasoline diverted for the war effort.

As a young boy, I barely noticed the inconveniences. Daily life seemed normal to me. My dad served in France during WW I. Many of my older male relatives were in WW II, none killed or injured during the war.

My best friend lost his older brother. My next door neighbors were holocaust survivors. When war ended, there was hope for a new enduring era of world peace.

It lasted until Harry Truman’s aggression against North Korea from June 1950 – July 1953, ending with an uneasy armistice unchanged to this day, US hostility persisting toward a nation never attacking another preemptively or threatening any now.

Instead of defeating the scourge of fascism in WW II, its headquarters was relocated from Berlin and Tokyo to Washington — with branch offices in European capitals, Tel Aviv, and elsewhere.

Like his predecessors and other US officials, Trump pretended the war was “not (waged) for control and domination, but for liberty, democracy, and self-rule” — polar opposite reality.

He turned truth on its head, calling “America…a noble nation… that inspire(s) the entire world.”

“(D)efend(ing) our way of life” is all about waging endless wars of aggression against nations threatening no one, what he failed to explain.

The first world war to end all future ones and misnamed “good war” that followed were warmups for decades of endless wars to follow.

They’re raging today in multiple theaters, plans for new ones drawn to be launched when or if ordered, along with color revolutions and old-fashioned coups to forcefully transform other nations into US client states.

Self-styled American exceptionalism and moral superiority don’t exist. The so-called “indispensable nation” represents the greatest threat to world peace and humanity’s survival.

Is another Great Patriotic War inevitable, next time to be waged with thermo-nukes and other super-weapons?

If things turn out this way, crossing a Rubicon of no return, we’ll all be doomed. That’s where things are heading if history repeats.

Humans may become the first species ever to destroy itself… ?

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

“We are at a crossroads. And the roads we take from here will determine the very future of humanity. We have to wake up to the true objectives and actions of the Bilderberg Group and its parallel kin if we hope to retain the freedoms fought for by our grandfathers in World War II.”– Daniel Estulin, from the introduction of The True Story of the Bilderberg Group (2005) [1]

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

The most wealthy and powerful individuals on the planet have mutual concerns and in spite of rhetoric about competition in the marketplace, these ruling elites have class interests in common and meet together through secretive unaccountable non- governmental groups to decide the policies that will advance their aims, potentially at the expense of the bulk of humanity.

Some of these groupings go by names like the Trilateral Commission, the Group of 30, the Systemic Risk Council, The Council on Foreign Relations, and the Bilderberg Group.

Bilderberg, in particular has evoked considerable intrigue in recent years, especially since the publication of Daniel Estulin’s 2005 book: The True Story of the Bilderberg Group . Estulin’s account reveals a network of the world’s most powerful people, comprising heads of state, leaders of industry and finance, military brass, European royalty, and select media figures, mostly men from North America and Western Europe, who engage each other annually, in person and in secret, in remote locations around the globe. No media coverage is allowed, no meeting minutes released to the public. Nevertheless, the policy decisions fleshed out through these meetings are passed on to governments who align their policies with these global elites, regardless of their partisan political affiliation.

So for example, in 1991, then Arkansas governor and aspiring US Presidential candidate Bill Clinton attended that year’s Bilderberg conference where he connected with tycoon David Rockefeller and was told that the North American Free Trade Agreement was a Bilderberg priority. Within a year of his inauguration, Clinton signed on to NAFTA.

The first Bilderberg meeting took place in Oosterbeek Netherlands, where prominent elites supposedly debated the future of the world.

Estulin built his research on private disclosures from what he calls ‘conscientious objectors’ from inside as well as outside the group’s membership.

In Estulin’s estimation, the group today constitutes a shadow government threatening to supplant the sovereignty of nation-states with one powerful corporate controlled global government.

Over the past decade and a half, independent investigators have been making a point of stalking these conferences and approaching the known participants to glean some insights into their plans, With more light being shone on these public gatherings of elites, the Bilderberg group has started to disclose their supposed itinerary of topics and guests.

This year’s Bilderberg conference was held in Montreux Switzerland. The guest list included the likes of Henri Castries, ,Chairman of the Paris-based Institut Montaigne, Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, David Petraeus, retired US Army General and former CIA Director, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Mark Rutte, Dutch Prime Minister and leader of the far-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, Bruno LeMaire, France’s Minister of Finance, and Eric Schmidt, technical advisor for Alphabet Inc, the parent company of Google Inc. Jared Kushner, son-in-law of US President Donald Trump and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were also known to be participating although they were not mentioned in the Bilderberg official guest list.

Official topics for discussion at the 4 day conference included “The Future of Capitalism”, “Russia”, “China”, “Weaponizing Social Media”, “BREXIT”, “What’s Next for Europe”; “Ethics of Artificial Intelligence” and climate change.

On this week’s Global Research News Hour radio program we do our best to ascertain the agenda of these global elites based on interviews with two informed sources.

In the first half hour, we hear from Canadian independent journalist Dan Dicks about his attempts to cover the 67th annual Bilderberg summit during the May 30-June 2nd weekend. Dicks outlines how this year’s conference differed from previous conferences he has covered, and speculates on a connection between the recent demonetization of his youtube channel and a conversation he had with one of the Bilderberg participants.

In the second half hour, Professor Peter Phillips talks about his recent book, Giants: The Global Power Elite, which provides the names and mini-biographies of the individuals and companies that wield power over billions of people world-wide, and the various instruments they utilize to secure their control over the global financial and political landscape.

Dan Dicks is a Canadian independent journalist who has traveled to no fewer than nine Bilderberg conferences in the past thirteen years. His website and YOUTUBE channel is PressForTruth.ca

Professor Peter Phillips is a professor of sociology with Sonoma State University, California since 1994. He served as Director of Project Censored from 1996 to 2010. He is the author of the 2018 book Giants: The Global Power Elite. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 263)

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca .

The Global Research News Hour now airs Fridays at 6pm PST, 8pm CST and 9pm EST on Alternative Current Radio (alternativecurrentradio.com)

Community Radio Stations carrying the Global Research News Hour:

CHLY 101.7fm in Nanaimo, B.C – Thursdays at 1pm PT

Port Perry Radio in Port Perry, Ontario –1  Thursdays at 1pm ET

Burnaby Radio Station CJSF out of Simon Fraser University. 90.1FM to most of Greater Vancouver, from Langley to Point Grey and from the North Shore to the US Border.

It is also available on 93.9 FM cable in the communities of SFU, Burnaby, New Westminister, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Surrey and Delta, in British Columbia, Canada. – Tune in  at its new time – Wednesdays at 4pm PT.

Radio station CFUV 101.9FM based at the University of Victoria airs the Global Research News Hour every Sunday from 7 to 8am PT.

CORTES COMMUNITY RADIO CKTZ  89.5 out of Manson’s Landing, B.C airs the show Tuesday mornings at 10am Pacific time.

Cowichan Valley Community Radio CICV 98.7 FM serving the Cowichan Lake area of Vancouver Island, BC airs the program Thursdays at 6am pacific time.

Campus and community radio CFMH 107.3fm in  Saint John, N.B. airs the Global Research News Hour Fridays at 10am.

Caper Radio CJBU 107.3FM in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia airs the Global Research News Hour starting Wednesday Morning from 8:00 to 9:00am. Find more details at www.caperradio.ca

RIOT RADIO, the visual radio station based out of Durham College in Oshawa, Ontario has begun airing the Global Research News Hour on an occasional basis. Tune in at dcstudentsinc.ca/services/riot-radio/

Radio Fanshawe: Fanshawe’s 106.9 The X (CIXX-FM) out of London, Ontario airs the Global Research News Hour Sundays at 6am with an encore at 3pm.

Los Angeles, California based Thepowerofvoices.com airs the Global Research News Hour every Monday from 6-7pm Pacific time.

Notes:

1.  Daniel Estulin (2005) p.xxv. ‘The True Story of the Bilderberg Group’, published by TrineDay.

Democrats want to make Donald Trump the issue in 2020.

If they do, they will lose again, the way they lost in 2016.

Instead, the 2020 election should be about corporate power in all of its manifestations, its hold on the culture, our country and both major political parties.

Take the case of the two Boeing 737 Max 8 airplane crashes — the Lion Air crash off the coast of Jakarta, Indonesia in October 2018 that killed all 189 on board and the Ethiopian Airlines crash in March 2019 that killed all 157 on board.

During his time as President of the United States, Barack Obama promoted the sale of Boeing planes — including the 737 Max 8 planes — around the world.

In November 2011, in Bali, Indonesia, President Obama announced an agreement between Boeing and Lion Air.

“For the last several days I’ve been talking about how we have to make sure that we’ve got a presence in this region, that it can result directly in jobs at home,” Obama said. “And what we see here — a multibillion-dollar deal between Lion Air — one of the fastest-growing airlines not just in the region, but in the world — and Boeing is going to result in over 100,000 jobs back in the United States of America, over a long period of time.”

“This represents the largest deal, if I’m not mistaken, that Boeing has ever done.  We are looking at over 200 planes that are going to be sold.”

In September 2014, Obama met with the Prime Minister of Ethiopia at the White House.

“We’re strong trading partners,” Obama said. “And most recently, Boeing has done a deal with Ethiopia, which will result in jobs here in the United States.”

“I’m expecting a gold watch from Boeing at the end of my presidency because I know I’m on the list of top salesmen at Boeing,” Obama said at an export forum at the White House in September 2013.

Of course, Obama got more than just a gold watch from Boeing when he left the White House.

According to a report from Bloomberg, Boeing donated $10 million to the Obama presidential library and museum in Chicago. And earlier this year, Obama dropped in to speak to a Boeing leadership retreat at a swank resort in Scottsdale, Arizona. Obama gratefully waived his $400,000 speaking fee.

While pushing the sale of Boeing planes around the world, the Obama administration was at the same time fast tracking a dangerous deregulatory process at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that effectively put the corporations in charge of the safety certification process — and that in effect put Boeing in charge of certifying it’s faulty MCAS software that led to the tragedies in Indonesia and Ethiopia.

The FAA certification system is known as the Organization Designation Authorization (ODA) program. Under that program, companies like Boeing can appoint their own representatives to act in the place of FAA inspectors.

In 2004, one of the unions representing FAA inspectors – Professional Aviation Safety Specialists (PASS) – criticized the proposed ODA program as “premature and reckless.”

“Allowing the aviation industry to self-regulate in this manner is nothing more than the blatant outsourcing of inspector functions and handing over inherently governmental oversight activities to non-governmental, for-profit entities,” PASS wrote in its 2004 comments to the FAA.

Would a more independent FAA have prevented the two recent Boeing crashes?

Yes, says Paul Hudson of Flyer’s Rights.

“The ODA program has allowed Boeing to effectively self certify the MCAS software as safe,” Hudson told Corporate Crime Reporter.

“Boeing’s CEO, whistleblowers and FAA now admit they failed to properly test, fully connect, or even disclose MCAS, much less its deadly defects and overpowering features — not to the FAA higher ups, not to airline pilots or not even to its own test pilots.”

“Air travel has gotten much safer due to both safety regulation and technical advancements,” Hudson said. “But profit seeking over safety at all costs is destroying both safety and profits.”

“Some Boeing safety inspectors have summed up the current culture as ‘safety is king but schedule is God,” Hudson said. “I asked Boeing in December after the Lion Air crash to ground the Max. Boeing refused.”

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from Zero Hedge

Many international observers have misinterpreted Trump’s termination of India’s membership in the “Generalized System of Preferences” and New Delhi’s decision to supposedly go forward with the S-400s despite CAATSA sanctions threats as the beginning of an Indo-American “trade war”, but both allied Great Powers are actually just playing games with one another in order to score better terms on the comprehensive trade deal that they’re presently negotiating.

All the talk about a seemingly impending Indo-American “trade war” is misplaced even though there are superficially convincing signs that this speculated economic conflict might have just begun. Many international observers point to Trump’s termination of India’s membership in the “Generalized System of Preferences” (GSP) and New Delhi’s decision to supposedly go forward with the S-400s despite CAATSA sanctions threats as heralding this scenario, though that’s a misinterpretation that overlooks these two Great Powers’ military-strategic alliance with one another in the “Indo-Pacific“. These considerations are much more important for India than economic ones because of the wild success that anti-Chinese fearmongering has had in shaping the views of its population and decision makers, and Prime Minister Modi is unlikely to do an about-face on the national security platforms that got him re-elected.

There’s close to little chance that India will sacrifice its military-strategic alliance with America for economic reasons when there doesn’t exist any viable alternative at all after New Delhi ruled out ever joining China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) as an act of protest over the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) that forms its key component.

As such, the back-and-forth economic “escalations” between the US and India seem designed to ensure that each of them can get a better deal from the other when it comes to the comprehensive trade deal that they’re presently negotiating, which will conceivably incorporate all dimensions of their economic relationship and form the main part of New Delhi’s promised “Big Bang” pro-business reforms that are expected to be rolled out during Modi’s second term in office.

Removing India from the GSP just increases the urgency with which New Delhi must strike a deal with the US, just as India’s desire to supposedly honor its S-400 contract with Russia signifies that Washington must urgently reveal the competitive points of its THAAD replacement deal apart from the fact that it would avoid the imposition of CAATSA sanctions. It’s difficult to imagine that the shared so-called “China threat” that has so closely united them on the military-strategic fronts could be overshadowed by a simmering economic dispute between these two allies, especially bearing in mind that India has no realistic alternative and needs the US marketplace much more than America needs India’s. Being as pro-business as he is and with his surrogates already hyping the world up to expect “Big Bang” pro-business reforms, Modi’s latest over-publicized tiff with Trump is really nothing more than a distraction from the larger deal that they’re negotiating behind the scenes.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Australian Federal Police officers raided two separate news offices within 24 hours this week, in a chilling and blatant attack on the freedom of the press, aimed at intimidating journalists who report on government misconduct and war crimes.

On Wednesday, police spent more than eight hours trawling through nearly 10,000 files, including journalists’ notes, draft versions of stories, raw footage, meeting minutes and emails, at the Sydney headquarters of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. A day earlier, police spent hours ransacking the home of a News Corp political editor, Annika Smethurst.

In both cases, the raids were triggered by the publication of leaks exposing key elements of Australia’s US-linked military-intelligence apparatus—war crimes committed by the Australian special forces in Afghanistan and plans to legalise internal mass surveillance by Australia’s electronic spy agency.

The raids have graphically confirmed the warnings issued by the World Socialist Web Site: the persecution and jailing of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is setting a precedent for the criminalisation of journalism.

By targeting journalists, as well as the individuals leaking the damning information, the Australian government is directly following the lead of the Trump administration’s charging of Assange, a journalist and publisher, with 17 counts under the US Espionage Act, for which he faces life imprisonment and possibly the death penalty.

“The arrest and prosecution of our publisher at the behest of the Trump administration is a watershed for the rest of the media—from seeking to prosecute whistleblowers, law enforcement is now being used to silence those who hold government to account,” WikiLeaks wrote on Twitter. “We have long warned that other prosecutions will follow.”

What is taking place in Australia is not the only verification of these warnings. In France, the government of Emmanuel Macron is moving to prosecute journalists from Disclose, who have exposed, in partnership with the Intercept, Radio France, Mediapart, Arte Info and Konbini, France’s complicity in Saudi Arabia’s illegal war in Yemen and the Macron government’s efforts to cover it up.

In the US itself, now that Assange is behind bars, through a conspiracy between the governments of Australia, Britain, the US and Ecuador, whisleblower Chelsea Manning has been re-imprisoned, indefinitely. She has refused to testify at a grand jury established to concoct evidence and bring further frame-up charges against the WikiLeaks publisher.

The only supposed “crime” committed by Assange and Manning has been to reveal to the people of the world the war crimes, spying, regime-change operations and mass murder carried out by the US and its allies, including Australia.

WikiLeaks continued,

“Like the WikiLeaks publications that Julian Assange is being persecuted for in the United States, the articles in question contained not only information detailing the overreach of intelligence agencies, but also evidence of war crimes including torture and unlawful killings which have so far been kept from the public.”

In fact, it is inconceivable that the Australian government would have instigated and pursued the investigation of the ABC and Murdoch media journalists without the agreement, if not urging, of Washington. Both the Special Air Service (SAS) and the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) surveillance agency are closely integrated into all the wars and war preparations of the US.

Thousands of internal ABC emails being gone through by the AFP [source: Twitter @TheLyonsDen]

The war crimes of the SAS—which include the killing of children and unarmed civilians, and the desecration of corpses—are an inseparable and inevitable aspect of the ongoing US-led invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

The ASD is part of the US-led global “Five Eyes” surveillance network. As Edward Snowden’s leaks in 2013 revealed, the ASD collaborates with the US National Security Agency in exchanging information, including on Australian citizens. The Australian government’s proposed changes in 2018, exposed by the leaks to Smethurst, would have legalised these spying operations.

The timing of the Australian raids is not accidental. Although the alleged leaks occurred in 2017 and 2018, the search warrants were executed just after Australia’s May 18 election, which saw the return of the Liberal-National Coalition, and within weeks of the April 11 arrest of Assange.

In both cases, too, the precedent set by the Assange witch-hunt is being exploited to target journalists. The police are investigating alleged offences under section 79 of the Crimes Act. Dating back to World War I, this legislation outlaws not just “communicating,” but also “receiving,” information that “prejudices the security or defence” of Australia. If convicted, journalists could be jailed for up to seven years.

As the WSWS has warned, these developments are directly related to covering up, not just the past crimes of the US and its allies, but the even greater ones now being prepared as Washington threatens Iran, Syria and Venezuela, and escalates its economic war and military confrontation with China.

Successive Australian governments, both Liberal-National and Labor, have made Australia a testing ground for the militarisation of society and the suppression of political dissent. This has included basing US Marines in the strategic northern city of Darwin and imposing legislation permitting the police and intelligence agencies to access online “metadata,” crack open encryption systems and prosecute anyone accused of “foreign interference.”

Throughout all the corporate media coverage of the Australian raids, there has been not one mention of Assange and Manning. None of the journalists voicing, legitimately, alarm at the chilling impact on freedom of speech, has referred to the obvious connection.

The global crackdown on the freedom of the press after the charging of Assange throws into relief the utterly pernicious role of all those who have played a role in the persecution of the WikiLeaks founder.

The list is long. Nearly every major news outlet—including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Guardian—has taken part in a conspiracy to calumniate and defame Assange. Middle-class pseudo-left organisations such as the Democratic Socialists of America and the now-defunct International Socialist Organization have issued statements supporting Sweden’s vindictive persecution of Assange at the behest of the United States.

It is no surprise then, that neither the Times, the Post, nor the Guardian have issued a statement condemning the raids in Australia, while Jacobin, associated with the DSA, has not even bothered to report them.

The defence of the freedom of the press will not come from these quarters.

The global crackdown on the freedom of speech is targeted squarely at the working class: against its right to know the crimes and conspiracies of the ruling elites and the state apparatuses they control.

A free press and freedom of expression online are vital for the working class to organise the struggle against war, inequality, and all the other social scourges of capitalism. As they enter into struggles all over the world, workers must take up the demand to free Assange and Manning, and to oppose the prosecution of all journalists.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image: Australia’s Federal Police, top, enter the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the national public broadcaster, during a raid on their offices in Sydney, Australia. (Credit: Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

The United States allows the use of 85 pesticides that have been banned or are being phased out in the European Union, China or Brazil, according to a peer-reviewed study published today by the academic journal Environmental Health.

In 2016 the United States used 322 million pounds of pesticides that are banned in the E.U., accounting for more than one-quarter of all agricultural pesticide use in this country, according to the study. U.S. applicators also used 40 million pounds of pesticides that are banned or being phased out in China and 26 million pounds of pesticides that are banned or being phased out in Brazil.

“It’s appalling the U.S. lags so far behind these major agricultural powers in banning harmful pesticides,” said Nathan Donley, a senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity and author of the study. “The fact that we’re still using hundreds of millions of pounds of poisons other nations have wisely rejected as too risky spotlights our dangerously lax approach to phasing out hazardous pesticides.”

The study compared the approval status of more than 500 pesticides used in outdoor applications in the world’s four largest agricultural economies: the United States, European Union, China and Brazil.

Source: Center for Biological Diversity

Report Highlights

• The U.S. EPA continues to allow use of 85 pesticides for outdoor agricultural applications that are banned or in the process of being completely phased out elsewhere, including 72 in the E.U., 17 in Brazil and 11 in China.
• The United States has banned only four pesticides still approved for use in the E.U., Brazil or China.
• Pesticides approved in the United States but banned or being phased out in at least two of the three other nations in the study include: 2,4-DB, bensulide, chloropicrin, dichlobenil, dicrotophos, EPTC, norflurazon, oxytetracycline, paraquat, phorate, streptomycin, terbufos and tribufos.
• The majority of pesticides banned in at least 2 of the 3 nations studied have not appreciably decreased in the United States over the past 25 years and almost all have stayed constant or increased over the past 10 years. Many have been implicated in acute pesticide poisonings in the United States, and some have been further restricted by individual states.

The study concludes that deficiencies in the U.S. pesticide regulatory process are the likely cause of the country failing to ban or phase out pesticides that the E.U., China and Brazil have prohibited.

The Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act gives the U.S. EPA significant discretion on which pesticides to cancel and makes the EPA-initiated, nonvoluntary cancellation process particularly onerous and politically fraught. This has, in effect, made pesticide cancellation in the United States largely a voluntary endeavor by the pesticide industry itself. As a result, pesticide cancellations in the U.S. are more often economic decisions rather than decisions made to protect human or environmental health.

“Bans are the most effective way to prevent exposures to highly hazardous pesticides and can spur the transition to safer alternatives,” said Donley. “A combination of weak laws and the EPA’s broken pesticide regulatory process has allowed the pesticide industry to dictate which pesticides stay in use. That process undermines the safety of agricultural workers and anyone who eats food and drinks water in this country.”

The U.S. EPA’s Pesticide Office has come under intense scrutiny in recent years as a result of numerous scandals, including:

• Ignoring its own established protocols to conclude that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, does not cause cancer, a finding that’s at odds with the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer, EPA’s Office of Research and Development and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry;
• Its refusal to protect endangered species from pesticides, even when it’s been demonstrated by other federal agencies that use of the chemicals could put certain species at risk of extinction;
• The agency’s industry-motivated decision to overturn a long-overdue ban on chlorpyrifos despite compelling evidence that it harms the brains of children;
• The recent approval of the largest ever expansion of medically-important antibiotics for use in plant agriculture, ignoring strong concerns about increased antibiotic resistance from the FDA, CDC and public health officials;
• Having to change the instructions on the dicamba pesticide label twice after the drift-prone pesticide damageda reported 5 million acres of crops, trees and backyard gardens over the last two years.
• It’s liberal use of an “emergency” exemption loophole that allows unapproved pesticides to be used for routine, foreseeable situations for many consecutive years.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from CounterPunch

The US Department of Energy (DOE) recently renamed US liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports “freedom gas.” But freedom for who? For Europe which already has a cheap and reliable source of natural gas, but is being forced to switch over to more expensive US gas under the threat of sanctions? Certainly not.

Or freedom for Russia who supplies Europe with much of its natural gas to compete openly and fairly with the United States? Most definitely not.

Or is it freedom from competition for the US?  Yes, indeed.

It is often contradictory branding that heralds various chapters of US injustice at home (under the draconian “Patriot Act” for example) and abroad, such as during the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq carried out under the dubious name of “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

Not the Onion

So discredited have US campaigns christened in the name of “freedom” become, that few scarcely believed the US was actually, seriously calling its natural gas exports “freedom gas.” However, it is not a headline torn from the pages of the satirical newspaper “The Onion,” but rather from the US DOE itself.

In an article from the DOE’s official website titled, “Department of Energy Authorizes Additional LNG Exports from Freeport LNG,” the DOE states (emphasis added):

“Increasing export capacity from the Freeport LNG project is critical to spreading freedom gas throughout the world by giving America’s allies a diverse and affordable source of clean energy. Further, more exports of U.S. LNG to the world means more U.S. jobs and more domestic economic growth and cleaner air here at home and around the globe,” said U.S. Under Secretary of Energy Mark W. Menezes, who highlighted the approval at the Clean Energy Ministerial in Vancouver, Canada. “There’s no doubt today’s announcement furthers this Administration’s commitment to promoting energy security and diversity worldwide.”

Aside from the almost comical reference to “freedom gas,” there is something else revealing about the DOE’s claims of  “giving America’s allies a diverse and affordable source of clean energy.”

This is in direct reference to Europe, and Europe’s current imports of Russian gas. Russian gas, delivered by pipelines to Europe will always be cheaper than US liquefied natural gas transported by sea to Europe. That is, unless the US, through the threat of sanctions not only against Russia, but against Washington’s own allies in Europe, can raise those costs to above the price of US exports.

Articles like Foreign Policy’s “U.S. Senate Threatens Sanctions Over Russian Pipeline,” make it clear just how far along the US is toward doing just that.

The article claims:

In the latest uptick of trans-Atlantic tensions, European ships involved in the construction of a controversial gas pipeline from Russia to Germany could be subject to U.S. sanctions under a new bipartisan bill that will be introduced in the U.S. Senate as early as Monday.

FP also claims:

The Trump administration has rebuked Germany for moving forward with the project, one of a raft of recent issues straining trans-Atlantic relations alongside Iran, climate change, and trade. Last July, U.S. President Donald Trump accused Berlin of being held “captive” to Russia due to its dependence on Moscow for energy, a charge German officials sharply dismissed.

Thus, Germany is not only being “rebuked” for making its own decisions regarding German economic and foreign policy, it is being threatened with US sanctions for not complying to US dictates. Calling LNG the US would seek to force nations like Germany to buy against their will “freedom gas” is an intentional insult added to economic injury Washington already seeks to inflict.

“Freedom Gas” a Smokescreen for Dictatorship  

Late last year, the US House of Representatives passed resolution 1035 – “Expressing opposition to the completion of Nord Stream II”

By passing this resolution, the United States presumed to dictate to all of Europe who they could and couldn’t do business with. And while the resolution was non-binding, it alluded to sanctions now already being put in motion.

It was clear that the resolution’s language regarding “European energy security through diversification of supplies” simply meant Washington would seek to force Europe to buy US gas over Russian gas.The very idea of Washington passing resolutions focused on “European energy security” in the first place is a full frontal assault on European sovereignty and “freedom.” Now that the resolution’s intentions are being transformed into policy – including sanctions targeting European companies – it has become an economic attack on Europe as well.

Worse still is the fact that to make US gas exports competitive, the US must resort to more than just sanctions. It must also commit to multiple conflicts hindering the delivery of Russian gas – such as in Ukraine where for 5 years now armed conflict has raged, threatening pipelines delivering Russian gas to Europe.

The US portrays Russia as a threat to European security and stability – despite the fact that Europe itself has voluntarily and jointly developed the infrastructure to bring Russian gas into Europe and jointly benefits from these imports. The US thus finds itself pushing childish gimmicks like “freedom gas” as a smokescreen for the fact that Washington – not Moscow – poses the greatest threat to European security, stability, and even prosperity.

Washington’s methods of targeting Russian hydrocarbons, or Chinese telecom technology, has revealed the US as an unreliable ally, an unreliable business partner, and lacking the means to compete in a free and fair global market. Its tactics of coercion over competition – if successful – will leave the world with inferior alternatives forced onto nations at extorted prices. The world faces a choice between “freedom gas” and actual freedom to decide what it buys and from whom it buys it from – one of the most basic freedoms of all and a freedom Washington seeks to deny the world.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Tony Cartalucci is Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from NEO

In a June 1 interview with ABC Radio Adelaide, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer warned that Julian Assange could die in prison if his persecution is not stopped immediately.

Last week, Melzer issued a scathing denunciation of Assange’s persecution, calling it “psychological torture.”

Reporter Philip Williams asked Melzer, “If your calls are ignored, do you fear that he could actually die in prison?” Melzer replied,

“Absolutely, yes. That’s a fear that I think is very real … the cumulative effects of that constant pressure, it will become unpredictable how this will end. What we see is that his health condition is currently deteriorating to the point that he cannot even appear at a court hearing. This is not prosecution; this is persecution and it has to stop here and it has to stop now.”

The full radio interview with Melzer can heard here. WikiLeaks publisher and journalist Julian Assange was sentenced to 50 weeks in jail on May 1 by a British court in a vindictive show trial on fabricated charges of “skipping bail.” Following his eviction from the Ecuadorian embassy on April 11, where Assange had sought asylum and was effectively detained for seven years, he was arrested by British authorities and is now held in Her Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh in southeast London.

Melzer’s comment about Assange’s dire condition follows a statement he issued on May 31 demanding an immediate end to the “collective persecution” by the United States and its allies.

The UN torture expert visited Assange in Belmarsh on May 9 along with a medical doctor and psychologist in order to evaluate the condition of the heroic journalist. Melzer issued his statement just one week after the US Justice Department announced 17 counts on charges of violating the Espionage Act—which carry up to 170 years in prison if convicted—and renewed the demand that the WikiLeaks publisher be extradited to the US for prosecution.

Melzer warned that the nine-year “persistent and progressively severe abuse” of Assange by US, British and Ecuadorian authorities and the threat of his being extradited to the US would pose “a real risk of serious violations of his human rights, including his freedom of expression, his right to a fair trial and the prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

Speaking from Geneva during his interview with ABC Radio Adelaide, Melzer reiterated his warning that Assange cannot get a fair trial in the US “in light of the prevalent prejudice against him and the image of the public enemy that has been portrayed over there.”

In answering a question from Williams about the role of the Australian government in the unfolding attacks on Assange, Melzer said,

“The Australian government has been the glaring absentee in this case from my perspective. I would have expected Australia to take steps to protect their national … to protect him from this excessive persecution that he is experiencing currently.”

Assange is the target of an international campaign of vilification, persecution and silencing due to WikiLeaks’ exposure to the people of the world both the war crimes American imperialism and its allies.

Melzer’s warning points to the urgent need to organize a struggle to defend Assange. We urge all of our readers to take up this fight.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from 21st Century Wire

The neoliberal establishment is wringing its hands in the wake of European elections that proved a resounding victory for populist parties across the continent, casting around for someone to blame but utterly incapable of realizing their own interference has doomed them. Doubling down on the censorship, they are determined to provoke the catastrophe they need to make free speech history.

The NGO-industrial complex was operating at maximum capacity in the weeks leading up to the election, shutting down hundreds of Facebook pages deemed “fake” or “hate speech” in the hope of controlling the messages reaching voters before they made the terrible mistake of voting for a candidate who represents their interests.

Led by Avaaz, which claims to be a “global citizens’ movement monitoring election freedom and disinformation,” this well-heeled fifth column whipped the press into paranoid frenzies with reports like “Fakewatch,” which breathlessly documented 500 “suspicious” pages and groups it claims are “spreading massive disinformation.” The groups have little in common other than their alleged “link[s] to right-wing and anti-EU organizations,” a capital offense for the promoters of “democracy,” which can only be permitted where it doesn’t stray from the center-left path of most #Resistance.

“Far-right and anti-EU groups are weaponizing social media at scale to spread false and hateful content,” the study warns, gloating that after sharing its findings with Facebook, the platform shut down an “unprecedented” number of pages on the eve of the election (77 out of the 500, according to VentureBeat, which has credulously signal-boosted every utterance of Avaaz as if it is divine truth from the Oracle of Delphi). Avaaz’s reports frame the problem as an affliction of the right wing only, even though disinformation is second nature to political operatives at both ends of the spectrum (and, more importantly, in the sanctified center).

The Computational Propaganda Project, an Oxford-based research group, made no secret of its elitist leanings, declaiming, “On Facebook, while many more users interact with mainstream content overall, individual junk news stories can still hugely outperform even the best, most important, professionally produced stories,” as if users have no choice but to consume “professionally-produced” Oxford-approved material or wallow in junk content. And Facebook’s own statistics bear out the hypothesis that coordinated inauthentic behavior has surged – the site removed almost 3.4 billion “fake” accounts from October 2018 to March 2019, more than the number of actual users.

But Facebook is not simply targeting fake accounts for takedown. Last Sunday, as Europeans prepared to head out to the polls, Facebook froze the largest group used by the Yellow Vests to organize protests and share information, silencing its 350,000+ members at a critical moment in French politics. More than one group member, reduced to commenting on existing posts, pointed out that President Emmanuel Macron met with Facebook chief executive android Mark Zuckerberg three weeks earlier to discuss a first-of-its-kind collaboration in which French government officials are being given access to material censored from users’ newsfeeds, essentially permitting them direct control of what the French are allowed to see on social media. Facebook, then, is providing France with the same techno-fascist services it provides the US government: Facebook will take on the burden of actually censoring dissent, thus skirting any pesky free-speech laws that might otherwise trip up a government that attempted to do the same.

Avaaz focused on the Yellow Vests in its coverage of the French elections, complaining RT France was getting huge quantities of views compared to native French media – perhaps because native French media have been doing Macron’s bidding and attempting to minimize the protests. By framing RT as a perpetrator of “information warfare,” the NGO was making a deliberate effort to have it deplatformed under one of Macron’s controversial police-state laws passed in 2018, by which any outlet spreading so-called “false information” can be gagged for three months leading up to an election. Yet Macron’s own interior minister, Christophe Castaner, lied on Twitter when he claimed the Yellow Vests had attacked the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, and RT was the first outlet to publish the truth about the incident. Who is the disinfo agent?

When the election results came in, Avaaz and its political allies in the neoliberal center could only gape in disbelief. Surely they had wiped La Liga and the Front National (now National Rally) from social media, salting the earth in their wake? How had they won? And what happened in Germany, where Angela Merkel’s CDU performed worse than ever in European election history? Merkel could blame YouTube – 70 influential video stars put out a call to their followers to shun her coalition – but the creators also called for shunning the far-right AfD, so the platform couldn’t be demonized as a tool of the ever-present Nazi Threat. That didn’t stop her party from trying, of course – CDU party leader Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer complained about online “propaganda” and promised to “tackle this discussion quite aggressively.”

The populist parties won in large part because of the establishment’s unseemly embrace of fascist tactics, from the UK’s totalitarian information warfare disguised as “protecting citizens” or France’s visceral police violence, maiming protesters as if for sport. Europeans voted out of disgust with an establishment so insecure in its control of the narrative that it has sought to annihilate all signs of dissent, dismissing euroskepticism as Russian astroturfing and xenophobia and plugging its ears to the legitimate grievances of its subjects. The National Rally may have beat Macron’s jackbooted thugs, who in the past two months have hauled half a dozen journalists in for questioning by intelligence agencies for publishing stories that embarrassed the regime, but nearly half of French voters refused to vote for anyone at all, according to an Ipsos poll, and Germany’s Greens mopped the floor with Merkel’s coalition among young voters.

The triumph of Nigel Farage’s Brexit party in the UK is the product of a populace wrestling with cognitive dissonance, forced to realize that the “constitutional monarchy” they believed they lived in isn’t so constitutional after all, having jettisoned its democratic mask to cling to the EU under the guise of good old British pragmatism. Even passionate Remainers are happy to see Theresa Maybe go, though it remains to be seen whether her successor will be any more inclined to honor the result of 2016’s referendum. Meanwhile, the Guardian’s embarrassing attempt to shame Farage over a handful of appearances on the Alex Jones show – the paper claimed any reference to “globalists” and “new world order” were dog-whistles for the dreaded “antisemitic conspiracy theories” – proves the establishment media will never regain narrative primacy as long as alternatives exist. Jones, for all his flaws (and they are legion), has a massive audience; the Guardian, despite being propped up by the UK government’s Operation Mockingbird-esque “Integrity Initiative” (and the award for most ironic name ever goes to…), does not.

With the vast American election-fraud apparatus scrambling to prepare itself for 2020, now enabled by Pentagon-funded, Unit-8200-approved Microsoft “election security” software from the makers of the wrongthink-babysitter browser plugin NewsGuard, the US ruling class seems to be poised to make the same mistake as its global peers. Facebook, working hand in hand with the Atlantic Council, has banned and shadowbanned legions of anti-neoliberal activists over the past year, selectively applying (and inventing) new rules in an effort to keep popular content-creators jumping through hoops instead of influencing the discourse. Facebook has been allowed its place of privilege because as a “private corporation” it is legally permitted to violate users’ free speech rights in ways the US government cannot. But if Facebook can’t deliver a victory for the “right guys” this time around, it will be punished. Indeed, a massive anti-trust probe appears to be in the offing, 14 years of Zuckerberg apologies notwithstanding.

The site learned back when it tried to roll out a “disputed” tag for “wrongthink” stories that people were actually more likely to click on those stories; it learned the lesson again when its hugely expensive Facebook Watch news show featuring Anderson Cooper flopped last year. Zuckerberg is on the record begging for government regulation; will Facebook and Twitter use the outcome of this round of elections as a springboard for further crackdowns?

YouTube already has – thousands of creators found their channels demonetized and riddled with takedown notices this week in what has been dubbed the #VoxAdpocalypse after a pathologically whiny Vox blogger became the face of the mass deplatforming, but the censorship appears to be more of a response to Macron’s Orwellian “Christchurch call” to censor “extremism” – that ill-defined conveniently-variable catch-all whose borders are perpetually expanding to engulf all inconvenient speech – aided and abetted by the ADL than Google taking pity on a thin-skinned professional victim.

A sinister coalition of MEPs, “civil society” groups, and the Transatlantic Commission on Election Integrity – a who’s who of war criminals, psychopaths, and oligarchs that includes Michael Chertoff, John “death squad” Negroponte, Victor Pinchuk, and Anders Fogh Rasmussen – has already demanded “parliamentary inquiries into the impact of the use and abuse of technology platforms on democracy and elections.” It’s no coincidence that several of these “election integrity” enthusiasts sit on the board of NewsGuard, which is currently trying to weasel into the EU’s internet regulatory framework by playing up the “disinformation” threat.

The blue-check intelligentsia has been trying for years to convince the hoi polloi that “conspiratorial” thinking is somehow detrimental to democracy. Former Obama labor secretary Robert Reich told Buzzfeed exactly that – “If we become a conspiracy society, we all carry around a degree of paranoia and that’s not healthy for democracy.” But this divorces cause from effect, as if “conspiracy theorists” have formulated their theories out of whole cloth – as if there isn’t evidence for these theories piled knee-deep, as if once-trusted institutions haven’t proven themselves time and again to be as trustworthy as tabloid tales of Elvis risen from the grave. If paranoia is unhealthy for democracy, how is a media incentivized to lie, misdirect and obfuscate any better?

The populist wave has been conflated with an uptick in “hate” in an attempt to delegitimize and demonize it. Outside of groups like the ADL, whose statistics are easily debunked, there is no credible evidence bigotry is on the rise, but as an actual Nazi once said, tell a big enough lie often enough, and it might as well be real. Beginning around 2012, the establishment media began relentlessly flogging the “white privilege” narrative in an effort to fan the flames of interracial conflict. Political science doctoral student Zach Goldberg performed an analysis of several terms using the LexisNexis database and found evidence of heavy narrative manipulation – “whiteness” was mentioned in four times as many news articles in 2017 as in 2012, “white privilege” was mentioned ten times as often in 2017 as in 2012, and “racism” was mentioned ten times as often in the New York Times alone in 2017 as in 2012. Yet even as the media has seemingly talked of nothing else, actual prejudice – by whites against non-whites, at least – has declined since 2008, according to a University of Pennsylvania study published last month, and the FBI’s own statistics show hate crimes against most minority groups are on the decline. Because few European governments separate “hate crimes” from “normal” crime statistics, information on bigotry in Europe often comes solely from NGOs and “civil society” groups that rely for their funding on the perception that Hate is on the march. Populists are capable of prejudice like anyone else, but it is their defining characteristic – a “prejudice” against oligarchy – that motivates the smears churned out by the media.

Protest votes like Trump and Brexit are cries for help from a disenfranchised populace. The European elections boasted the highest turnout in decades, and the ruling class ignores the results at its peril. When the election ritual no longer satisfies a population’s need to feel it is exerting its free will on society, we get public hexings of political figures, people reasoning black magic is more likely to solve their problems than voting. This is the same desperation that leads people like Arnav Gupta to set themselves on fire in front of the White House. Europeans have demonstrated unequivocally that they are sick of unaccountable dictatorship from Brussels, where EC President Jean-Claude Juncker, never one for sympathy with the little guy, sneers at the “populist, nationalists, stupid nationalists” who are “in love with their own countries.” They are sick of being displaced from their homes by a seemingly endless tide of migrants, just as those migrants themselves are displaced from their homes by a seemingly endless tide of American wars. Both groups are victimized by the IMF’s neoliberal austerity policies, epitomized by Juncker, who has done more than perhaps any one person to help Europe’s corporate “citizens” dodge taxes while nickel-and-diming the humans.

Instead of addressing these legitimate grievances, those in power on both sides of the Atlantic tighten the screws on online discourse – out of sight, out of mind. YouTube declares conspiracy theorizing a form of hate speech and plays whack-a-mole with a documentary confirming everyone’s long-standing suspicions that “save-the-migrants” NGOs are cashing in on the desperate human tide. Big Tech promises to work even more closely with Big Brother to crack down on dissident speech, tarring its victims as Nazis while hoping no one will point out such collusion is one of the defining characteristics of fascism.

These measures are guaranteed to further radicalize the discontent. Deleting social media accounts does not delete the people behind them, and France has already proven that starving a protest movement of media attention only makes it angrier. The ruling class may welcome their rage, aiming to use the inevitable outbreak of violence to choke off the last avenues of free expression, but once the guillotines come out, it isn’t the masses’ heads that will be rolling in the streets.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Helen Buyniski‘s work has been published at RT, Global Research, Progressive Radio Network, and Veterans Today, among other outlets. A journalist and photographer based in New York City, Helen has a BA in Journalism from New School University and also studied at Columbia University and New York University. Find more of her work at http://www.helenofdestroy.com and http://medium.com/@helen.buyniski, or follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from the author

The setbacks for centrist parties in the European elections showed that the EU’s crisis is anything but over. Yet the Left’s lack of strategy and identity has hobbled its ability to provide an alternative.

***

In 2019, the World Bank (WB) and the IMF will be 75 years old. These two international financial institutions (IFI), founded in 1944, are dominated by the USA and a few allied major powers who work to generalize policies that run counter the interests of the world’s populations.

The WB and the IMF have systematically made loans to States as a means of influencing their policies. Foreign indebtedness has been and continues to be used as an instrument for subordinating the borrowers. Since their creation, the IMF and the WB have violated international pacts on human rights and have no qualms about supporting dictatorships.

A new form of decolonization is urgently required to get out of the predicament in which the IFI and their main shareholders have entrapped the world in general. New international institutions must be established. This new series of articles by Éric Toussaint retraces the development of the World Bank and the IMF since they were founded in 1944. The articles are taken from the book The World Bank: a never-ending coup d’état. The hidden agenda of the Washington Consensus, Mumbai: Vikas Adhyayan Kendra, 2007, or The World Bank : A critical Primer Pluto, 2007.

After the Second World War, in a growing number of Third World countries, policies diverged from those of the former colonial powers. This trend encountered firm opposition from the governments of the major industrialised capitalist countries whose influence held sway with the World Bank (WB) and the IMF. WB projects have a strong political content: to curtail the development of movements challenging the domination/rule of major capitalist powers. The prohibition against taking “political” and “non-economic” considerations into account in WB operations, one of the most important provisions of its charter, is systematically circumvented. The political bias of the Bretton Woods institutions is shown by their financial support to dictatorships ruling in Chile, Brazil, Nicaragua, Congo-Kinshasa and Romania.

Anti-colonial and Anti-imperialist movements in the Third World

After 1955, the spirit of the Bandung Conference (Indonesia) [1] spread a mighty wind across much of the planet. It followed in the wake of the French defeat in Vietnam (1954) and preceded Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal. Then came the Cuban (1959) and Algerian (1954-1962) revolutions and the renewed Vietnamese liberation struggle. In more and more Third World countries, policies implemented were a rejection of the former colonial powers. This often meant import substitution and the development of policies turned towards the internal market. This approach met with firm opposition from the governments of the major industrialised capitalist countries, who held sway at the WB and the IMF. A wave of bourgeois nationalist regimes carrying out populist policies (Nasser in Egypt, Nehru in India, Peron in Argentina, Goulart in Brazil, Sukarno in Indonesia, N’Krumah in Ghana…) and outright socialist regimes (Cuba, People’s Republic of China) appeared on the scene. In this context, WB projects have an underlying political purpose: to thwart the development of movements challenging domination by major capitalist powers.

World Bank intervention powers in national economies

As early as the 1950s, the WB established a network of influence that was to serve it greatly in later years. In the Third World, the WB sought to create demand for its services. The influence it enjoys nowadays is to a large extent the outcome of the networks of agencies it built up in States that became its clients and, by so doing, its debtors. The WB exercises a real policy of influence to support its network of loans.

From the 1950s onward, one of the primary goals of WB policy was “institution building”. This most often meant setting up para-governmental agencies based in the WB’s client countries. [2] Such agencies were expressly founded as relatively financially independent entities with respect to their own governments and outside the control of local political institutions, including national parliaments. They became natural relays for the WB and owed it a great deal, including their very existence. And in some cases, their funding.

Establishing such agencies was one of the WB’s primary strategies to get a foothold in the political economies of Third World countries.

These agencies, operating according to their own rules (often developed on the basis of WB suggestions) staffed with WB-backed technocrats, were used to create a stable and trustworthy source for the WB’s needs: “viable” loan proposals. They also provided the WB parallel power bases through which it succeeded in transforming national economies, and entire societies, without going through the bother of democratic control and open debates.

In 1956, the WB founded the Economic Development Institute with significant backing from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. The Institute offered six-month training courses to official delegates from member countries “Between 1957 and 1971, more than 1300 officials had passed through EDI, a number of them already having risen to the position of prime minister or minister of planning or finance in their respective countries”. [3]

This policy had disturbing implications. The New-York based International Legal Center (ILC) study of WB policy in Colombia from 1949 to 1972 concluded that the independent agencies founded by the WB had a profound impact on the political structure and social development of the entire region, undermining the political party system and minimising the role of the legislative and judicial branches.

From the 1960s on, the WB has certainly found singular and novel means of continual involvement in the internal affairs of borrower countries. And yet, the WB vigorously denies that such involvement is political. It insists on the contrary that its policies are unrelated to power structures and that political and economic matters are separate spheres.

How political and geopolitical considerations influence WB lending policy

Article IV section 10 stipulates: “The WB and its officers shall not interfere in the political affairs of any member; nor shall they be influenced in their decisions by the political character of the member or members concerned. Only economic considerations shall be relevant to their decisions, and these considerations shall be weighed impartially in order to achieve the purposes (set by the WB) stated in Article I.”

Nevertheless, the WB has found many systematic means of getting round the prohibition on taking “political” and “non-economic” considerations into account in its operations, one of the primary stipulations of its charter. From its very beginnings, the WB refused loans to post-liberation France as long as there were Communists in the government. The day after they left the government in May 1947, the loan France had requested, blocked until then, was granted. [4]

The WB has repeatedly contravened article IV of its own statutes. In truth, the WB has made many choices based on political considerations. The quality of governments’ economic policies is not the determining element in its choices. The WB has often lent money to the authorities in countries despite the dismal quality of their economic policies and a great deal of corruption: Indonesia and Zaire are two cases in point. Specifically, WB choices relative to countries that play a major political role in the eyes of its major shareholders are regularly linked to these shareholders’ interests and outlooks, starting with the United States.

From 1947 to the collapse of the Soviet bloc [5], WB and IMF decisions were determined in large part by the following criteria:

• avoid shoring up self-reliant models;
• provide funding to large-scale projects (WB) or policies (IMF) enabling the major industrialised countries to increase exports;
• refuse to help regimes seen as a threat by the United States government or other important shareholders;
• attempt to modify the policies of certain governments in the so-called socialist countries so as to weaken the cohesion of the Soviet bloc. This is why support was granted to Yugoslavia, which had dropped out of the Moscow-dominated bloc from 1948, or to Romania from the 1970s at the time when Ceaucescu was attempting to distance himself from the Comecon and the Warsaw Pact;
• support strategic allies of the Western capitalist bloc and in particular of the US, (i.e.: Indonesia from 1965 to the present day, Mobutu’s Zaire, the Philippines under Marcos, Brazil under the dictators after the 1964 coup, dictator Somoza’s Nicaragua, Apartheid South Africa);
• attempt to avoid or to limit as far as possible, closer links between Third World countries and the Soviet bloc or China: for example, by distancing the USSR from India and Sukarno-era Indonesia.

To carry out this policy, the WB and the IMF have generalised a tactic: greater flexibility towards right-wing governments (less demanding in terms of austerity measures) facing a strong left opposition than to left-wing governments facing strong opposition from the right. Concretely, that means the IFI are more demanding and make life more difficult for left-wing governments to weaken them and ease the right’s path to power. According to the same logic, the IFI have made fewer demands on right-wing governments facing a left-wing opposition to avoid weakening them and preventing the left from coming to power. Monetarist orthodoxy has variable geometrics: the variations depend on many political and geopolitical factors.

Some concrete cases – Chile, Brazil, Nicaragua, Zaire and Romania – provide cases in point: these are choices by both the WB and the IMF since these choices are determined, overall, by the same considerations and subject to the same influences.

The IMF and WB did not hesitate to support dictatorships when they (and other major capitalist powers) found it opportune. The author of the Human Development Report published by UNDP (1994 edition) says so in black and white: “But rhetoric is running far ahead of reality, as a comparison of the per capita ODA received by democratic and authoritarian regimes shows. Indeed, for the United States in the 1980s, the relationship between aid and human rights has been perverse. Multilateral donors also seem not to have been bothered by such considerations. They seem to prefer martial law regimes, quietly assuming that such regimes will promote political stability and improve economic management. After Bangladesh and the Philippines lifted martial law, their shares in the total loans given by the WB declined”. [6]

IFI political bias: examples of financial support to dictatorships

Support to General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile
Graph 1. CHILE: The multilateral disbursements

Under Allende’s democratically elected government (1970-1973), Chile received no WB loans. Under the Pinochet government, after the 1973 military coup, the country suddenly became credible. And yet, no WB or IMF leader could fail to be aware of the deeply authoritarian and dictatorial nature of the Pinochet regime. The link between lending policies and the geopolitical context is blatant in this case.

Chile, under the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende (1970 -1973), did not receive any loans from the WB but under Pinochet, after the military coup of 1973, the country suddenly became credible. And yet, no leader of WB or IMF was unaware of the deeply authoritarian and dictatorial character of the Pinochet regime, which everybody said criminal. The link between the politics of loan and the geopolitical context is obvious in this case. One of McNamara’s principal assistants, Mahbub ul Haq, drafted in a memorandum, in 1976, a very critical note entitled “The WB’s mistakes in Chile” [7] with a view to modifying the orientation of the WB. It reads: “We failed to support the basic objectives of the Allende regime, either in our reports or publicly”. McNamara decided to ignore it. [8] Mahbub ul Haq tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade the management of the WB to suspend loans to Pinochet until such time as it should be “reasonably satisfied that Pinochet’s government is not merely restoring the unstable elitist economic society”. He adds that Pinochet’s policies have “worsened the country’s distribution of income”. [9]

Support for the Brazilian military junta after the overthrow of President Joao Goulart
Graph 2. BRAZIL: The World Bank disbursements

President Joao Goulart’s democratic government was overthrown by the military in April 1964. WB and IMF loans, suspended for three years, resumed very soon afterwards. [10]

A brief timeline: in 1958, Brazilian president Kubitschek was about to undertake negotiations with the IMF to gain access to a loan of 300 million dollars from the United States. In the end, Kubitschek refused the IMF-imposed conditions and did without the US loan. This earned him wide popularity.

His successor, Goulart, announced that he would implement a radical land reform programme and proceed to nationalise petroleum refineries: he was overthrown by the military. The United States recognised the new military regime one day after the coup. Not long afterwards, the WB and IMF resumed their suspended lending policy. As for the military, they rescinded the economic measures the United States and the IMF had criticised. Note that the International Financial Institutions were of the view that the military regime was taking sound economic measures. [11] Yet, the GDP fell 7% in 1965 and thousands of firms declared bankruptcy. The regime organised harsh repression, outlawed strikes, caused a dramatic drop in real wages, and eliminated direct ballot voting, disbanded trade unions and made systematic use of torture.

After his first trip in May 1968, McNamara visited Brazil regularly and made a point of meeting the military rulers. The WB’s public reports systematically praised the policies of the dictatorship in reducing inequalities. [12] However, inside the WB, the discussions took a bitter turn. When Bernard Chadenet, Vice-President of Project at the WB, declared that the WB’s image would suffer due to its support of the repressive government of Brazil, McNamara recognized that there was a tremendous amount of repression but he added that it “is not necessarily a great deal different from what it had been under previous governments, and it did not seem to be a lot worse than in some other member countries of the WB. Is Brazil worse than Thailand?” [13] Some days later, Mc Namara added that “No viable alternative to the Government by generals seemed open”. [14] The WB was well aware that inequalities would not diminish and that its loans in the agricultural sector would reinforce the big landowners. Nevertheless, it decided to maintain the loans because it absolutely wanted to get the government under its influence. Now, at this juncture, the WB ran into a patent failure: the military regime proved extremely wary of the WB’s desire to strengthen its presence. Finally, at the end of the 70s, they took advantage of a profusion of loans from international private bankers granted at a lower rate of interest than that of the WB.

After supporting Anastasio Somoza’s dictatorship, the WB called off its loans after the Sandinista, Daniel Ortega, was elected as president of Nicaragua.
Graph 3. NICARAGUA: The World Bank disbursements

The Somoza clan had held power since the 1930s thanks to United States military intervention. On 19 July 1979, a powerful popular movement overthrew the dictatorship and dictator Anastasio Somoza was forced to flee. The Somoza family had a stranglehold on a huge proportion of the country’s wealth and encouraged the implantation of large foreign firms, especially from the US. The people hated them. The WB had showered loans on Anastasio Somoza’s dictatorship. After the dictatorship fell, an alliance government brought together the traditional democratic opposition (led by top businessmen) and the Sandinista revolutionaries. The latter made no secret of their sympathy for Cuba nor their desire to undertake certain economic reforms (land reform, nationalisation of certain foreign firms, confiscation of Somoza clan landholdings, a literacy programme…). Washington had supported Anastasio Somoza to the bitter end but feared that the new government might spread communism in Central America. The Carter administration, in office when the dictatorship was overthrown, did not immediately take an aggressive stance. But things changed overnight when Ronald Reagan moved into the White House. In 1981, he announced his commitment to bring down the Sandinistas. He provided financial and military backing to a rebellion by former members of the National Guard (“Contrarevolucionarios” or “Contras”). The US Air Force mined several Nicaraguan ports. Faced with such hostility, the Sandinista majority government opted for more radical policies. During the 1984 elections, the first democratic ones in half a century, the Sandinista Daniel Ortega was elected president with 67% of the ballot.

The following year, the United States called a trade embargo against Nicaragua, isolating the country in relation to foreign investors. The WB had halted its loans from the time of the Sandinista presidential election victory. The Sandinistas actively urged the WB to resume its loans. [15] They were even ready to accept a draconian structural adjustment plan. The WB decided not to follow up on this and did not resume the loans until the Sandinista electoral defeat in February 1990, when Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, the US-backed conservative candidate, won the vote.

Support to the Mobutu dictatorship
Graph 4. CONGO-KINSHASA (ZAIRE UNDER MOBUTU): The World Bank disbursements

As early as 1962, a report by the United Nations Secretary-General revealed that Mobutu had looted several million dollars, earmarked to finance his country’s troops. In 1982, a senior IMF official, Erwin Blumenthal, a German banker and an ex-governor of the Bundesbank, wrote a damning report on Mobutu’s administration of Zaire. Blumenthal warned the foreign lenders not to expect repayment as long as Mobutu remained in power. Between 1965 and 1981, the Zairean government borrowed approximately 5 billion dollars abroad and between 1976 and 1981, its foreign debt was subject to four Paris Club rescheduling measures amounting to 2.25 billion dollars in all.

Mobutu’s gross economic mismanagement and systematic misappropriation of a portion of the loans did not result in the IMF and WB halting aid to his dictatorial regime. It is striking to observe, that after the Blumenthal report was submitted, WB payouts actually increased [16] (as did IMF payouts but they are not shown on the graph). It is clear that sound economic management criteria are not the deciding factor in WB and IMF decisions. Mobutu’s regime was a strategic ally of the United States and other influential powers in the Bretton Woods institutions (including France and Belgium) during the Cold War. After 1989-91, with the fall of the Berlin Wall followed soon after by the implosion of the Soviet Union, Mobutu’s regime was no longer worthy of interest. Moreover, in many African countries, including Zaire, national conferences were making democratic demands. WB loans started to dry up, and ceased completely in the mid-1990s.

WB support to the Ceaucescu dictatorship in Romania
Graph 5. ROMANIA: The World Bank disbursements

In 1947, Romania was brought into the Soviet bloc. In 1972, Romania was the first Soviet satellite country to join the WB.

Since 1965, Ceaucescu had been Secretary-General of the ruling Communist Party. In 1968, he criticised the USSR’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. Romanian troops did not take part in the Warsaw Pact operation. This distancing from Moscow clearly made up Washington’s mind to contemplate closer ties with the Romanian regime, through the WB.

As early is 1973, the WB undertook negotiations with Bucharest to determine a loan policy; very soon this reached a very appreciable level. In 1980, Romania became the eighth most important WB borrower. WB historian Aart van de Laar tells a significant anecdote from 1973. Early that year, he attended a meeting of the WB directors, with the beginning of loan grants to Romania on the agenda. Certain directors were sceptical of the lack of thorough studies on Romania, but Robert McNamara declared he had great trust in the financial morality of socialist countries in terms of debt reimbursement. The story goes that one of the WB Vice-Presidents attending piped up to ask whether Allende’s Chile had perhaps not yet become socialist enough. [17] This met with McNamara’s stony silence.

WB choices did not depend on reliable economic criteria. First, while the WB has regularly refused loans to countries that had failed to repay old sovereign debts, it began lending to Romania although the latter had not settled disputes over outstanding debts. Secondly, most of Romania’s economic exchanges took place within the Comecon in non-convertible currency. How could the country reimburse debts in hard currency? Thirdly, from the outset Romania refused to hand over the economic data the WB required. Political considerations were obviously the reason for the WB developing close relations with Romania. The lack of internal democracy and systematic police repression were no greater a stumbling block for the WB in this case than in others.

Romania became one of the WB’s biggest clients and the latter financed large-scale projects (open-face coal mines, thermal electric generators) whose negative impact in environmental terms was patently obvious. To operate the open-face coal mines, the Romanian authorities displaced former farming communities. In another field, the WB supported the population planning policy whose aim was a higher birth rate.

In 1982, when the debt crisis came to the fore internationally, the Romanian regime decided to impose shock therapy on its people. Romania slashed its imports to the bone to come up with the surplus in hard currency to pay off its foreign debt as soon as possible. “Romania was, in a sense, a “model” debtor, at least from the creditors’ point of view” [18] .

Conclusion

Contrary to section 10 of article 4 of the World Bank charter, the latter and the IMF have systematically lent to States in order to influence their policies. The examples given in this study show that the political and strategic interests of the major capitalist powers are determining factors. Regimes with the backing of major capitalist powers have received financial aid even though their economic policies did not meet official International Financial Institution (IFI) criteria or they failed to respect human rights. Furthermore, regimes seen as hostile to the major powers were deprived of IFI loans on the pretext that they were failing to respect the economic criteria set by these institutions.

These policies of the Bretton Woods institutions, far from being abandoned at the end of the Cold War, continue to the present day. They have supported Mohammed Suharto’s Indonesia until his fall in 1998, Idriss Deby’s Chad until the present day, Tunisia under Ben Ali until he was deposed in 2011, Egypt under Mubarak until he was ousted in 2011 and now under Marshal Al-Sissi…

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Translated by Marie Lagatta and Sushovan Dhar in collaboration with Vicki Briault.

Eric Toussaint is a historian and political scientist who completed his Ph.D. at the universities of Paris VIII and Liège, is the spokesperson of the CADTM International, and sits on the Scientific Council of ATTAC France.  He is the author of Bankocracy (2015); The Life and Crimes of an Exemplary Man(2014); Glance in the Rear View Mirror. Neoliberal Ideology From its Origins to the Present, Haymarket books, Chicago, 2012 (see here), etc.

Notes

The story line is going out that the economic boom is weakening and the Federal Reserve has to get the printing press running again.  The Fed uses the money to purchase bonds, which drives up the prices of bonds and lowers the interest rate.  The theory is that the lower interest rate encourages consumer spending and business investment and that this increase in consumer and business spending results in more output and employment. 

The Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, and Bank of England have been wedded to this policy for a decade, and the Japanese for longer, without stimulating business investment.  Rather than borrowing at low interest rates in order to invest more, corporations borrowed in order to buy back their stock.  In other words, some corporations after using all their profits to buy back their own stock went into debt in order to further reduce their market capitalization!

Far from stimulating business investment, the liquidity supplied by the Federal Reserve drove up stock and bond prices and spilled over into real estate.  The fact that corporations used their profits to buy back their shares rather than to invest in new capacity means that the corporations  did not experience a booming economy with good investment opportunities. It is a poor economy when the best investment for a company is to repurchase its own shares.

Consumers, devoid of real income growth, maintained their living standards by going deeper into debt.  This process was aided, for example, by stretching out car payments from three years to six and seven years, with the result that loan balances exceed the value of the vehicles.  Many households live on credit cards by paying the minimum amount, with the result that their indebtedness grows by the month. The Federal Reserve’s low interest rates are not reciprocated by the high credit card interest rate on outstanding balances.

Some European countries now have negative interest rates, which means that the bank does not pay you interest on your deposit, but charges you a fee for holding your money.  In other words, you are charged an interest rate for having money in a bank.  One reason for this is the belief of neoliberal economists that consumers would prefer to spend their money than to watch it gradually wither away and that the spending will drive the economy to higher growth.

What is the growth rate of the economy?  

It is difficult to know, because the measures of inflation have been tampered with in order to avoid cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security recepients and the payment of COLA adjustments in contracts. The consumer price index is a basket of goods that represents an average household’s expenditures.  The weights of the items in the index are estimates of the percentage of the household budget that is spent on those items.  A rise in the prices of items in the index would raise the index by the weight of those items, and this was the measure of inflation.

Changes were made that reduced the inflation that the index measured.  One change was to substitute a lower price alternative when an item in the index rose in price.  Another was to designate a rise in price of an item as a quality improvement and not count it as inflation.

Something similar was done to the producer price index which is used to deflate nominal GDP in order to measure real economic growth.  GDP is measured in terms of money, and some of the growth in the measure is due to price increases rather than to more output of goods and services.  In order to have a good estimate of how much real output has increased, it is necessary to deflate the nominal measure of GDP by taking out the price rises.  If inflation is underestimated, then real GDP will be overestimated. When John Williams of Shadowstats adjusts the real GDP measure for what he calculates is a rwo-percentage point understatement of annual inflation, there has been very little economic growth since 2009 when a recovery allegedly began, and the economy remains far below its pre-recession level in 2008.

In other words, the belief that the US has had a decade long economic recovery is likely to be an illusion produced by underestimating  inflation.  Indeed, every day experience with the prices of food, clothing, household goods, and services indicates a higher rate of inflation than is officially reported.

The low unemployment rate that is reported is also an illusion.  The government achieves the low rate by not counting the unemployed.  The economic and psychological cost of searching for a job are high.  There are the economic costs of a presentable appearance and transport to the interview. For a person without a pay check, these costs rapidly mount.  The psychological costs of failure to find a job time after time also mount.  People become discouraged and cease looking.  The government treats discouraged workers who cannot find jobs as no longer being in the work force and omits them from the measure of unemployment.  John Williams estimates that the real rate of US unemployment is 20%, not 3.5%

The decline in the labor force participation rate supports Williams’ conclusion.  Normally, a booming economy, which is what 3.5% unemployment represents, would have a rising labor force participation rate as people enter the work force to take advantage of the employment opportunities.  However, during the alleged ten year boom, the participation rate has fallen, an indication of poor job opportunities.

The government measures jobs in two ways: the payroll jobs report that seeks to measure the new jobs created each month (which is not a measure of employment as a person may hold two or more jobs)  and the household survey that seeks to measure employment. The results are usually at odds and cannot be reconciled. What does seem to emerge is that the new jobs reported are for the most part low productivity, low value-added, lowly paid jobs. Another conclusion is that the number of full time jobs with benefits are declining and the number of part-time jobs are rising.

A case could be made that US living standards have declined since the 1950s when one income was sufficient to support a family.  The husband took the slings and arrows of the work experience, and the wife provided household services such as home cooked nutritious meals, child care, clean clothes, and an orderly existence.  Today most households require two earners to make ends meet and then only barely.  Saving is a declining option.  A Federal Reserve report a couple of years ago concluded that about half of American households could not produce $400 cash unless personal possessions were sold.

As the Federal Reserve’s low interest rate policy has not served ordinary Americans or spurred investment in new plant and equipment, who has it served? The answer is corporate executives and shareholders.  As the liquidity supplied by the Federal Reserve has gone mainly into the prices of financial assets, it is the owners of these assets who have benefitted from the Federal Reserve’s policy.  Years ago Congress in its unwisdom capped the amount of executive pay that could be deducted as a business expense at one million dollars unless performance related.  What “performance related” means is a rise in profits and share price.  Corporate boards and executives achieved “performance” by reducing labor costs by moving jobs offshore and by using profits and borrowing in order to buy back the company’s shares, thus driving up the price.

In other words, corporate leaders and owners benefitted by harming the US economy, the careers and livelihoods of the American work force, and their own companies.

This is the reason for the extraordinary worsening of the income and wealth distribution in the United States that is polarizing the US into a handful of mega-rich and a multitude of have-nots.

The America I grew up in was an opportunity society.  There were ladders of upward mobility that could be climbed on merit alone without requiring family status or social and political connections.  Instate college tuition was low.  Most families could manage it, and the students of those families that could not afford the cost worked their way through university with part time jobs. Student loans were unknown.

That America is gone.

The few economists capable of thought wonder about the high price/earnings ratios of US stocks and the 26,000 Dow Jones when stock buy-backs indicate that US corporatons see no investment opportunities.  How can stock prices be so high when corporations see no growth in US consumer income that would justify investment in the US?

When President Reagan’s supply-side economic policy got the Dow Jones up to 1,000 the US still had a real economy. How can it be that today with America’s economy hollowed out the Dow Jones is 25 or 26 times higher?  Manipulation plays a role in the answer. In Reagan’s last year in office, the George H.W. Bush forces created the Working Group on Financial Markets, otherwise known as the “plunge protection team,” the purpose of which was to prevent a stock market fall that would deny Bush the Republican nomination and the presidency as Reagan’s successor.  The Bush people did not want any replay of October 1987.

The plunge protection team brought together the Federal Reserve, Treasury, and Securities and Exchange Commission in a format that could intervene in the stock market to prevent a fall. The easiest way to do this is, when faced with falling stock prices, to step in and purchase S&P futures. Hedge funds follow the leader and the market decline is arrested.

The Federal Reserve now has the ability to intervene in any financial market.  Dave Kranzler and I have shown repeatedly how the Federal Reserve or its proxies intervene in the gold market to support the value of the excessively-supplied US dollar by printing naked gold contracts to drop on the gold futures market in order to knock down the price of gold. A rising gold price would show that the dollar support arrangements that the Federal Reserve has with other central banks to maintain the illusion of a strong dollar is a contrived arrangement rejected by the gold market.

What few, if any, economists and financial market commentators understand is that today all markets are rigged by the plunge protection team.  For at least a decade it has not been possible to evaluate the financial situation by relying on traditional thinking and methods.  Rigged markets do not respond in the way that competitive markets respond.  This is the explanation why companies that see no investment opportunities for their profits better than the repurchase of their own shares can have high price/earnings ratios.  This is the explanation why the market’s effort to bring stock prices in line with realistic price/earnings ratios is unsuccessful.

As far as I can surmise, the Federal Reserve and plunge protection team can continue to rig the financial markets for the mega-rich until the US dollar loses its role as world reserve currency.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Although one cannot even attempt to get past the horrific Christchurch massacre, nonetheless Jacinda Ardern’s response as a leader to the cruel tragedy is commendable. Some of the key and necessary policy steps Ardern took was vowing not to name the attacker, ban his inhumane manifesto and ban semi-automatic as well as assault rifles in New Zealand. Nevertheless, the banned manifesto and the heinous acts of terrorism committed by the 28-year-old Australian does not take away the fact that he used semi-automatic weapons to fire indiscriminately at men, women and children, killing 50 and injuring another 50 in two Christchurch mosques. It does not negate the fact that he planned his attack well before carrying it out, so much so that he wrote a 74-page manifesto – which was initially a 240-page document – titled ‘The Great Replacement: Towards a New Society’.

The manifesto is the culmination of white nationalism and fascist ideology – which the attacker very proudly accepts to be associated with – citing the ‘white genocide’ theory that preposterously claims that white people are being driven into a demographic change. He takes inspiration from other white nationalist terrorists that also used weaponry to commit mass shootings such as Andres Breivik – who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011 – and Dylan Roof – who killed 9 African-Americans in a church in Charleston in 2015.

Al-Noor Mosque in Christchurch and the Martyrs – via Wikimedia Commons

If someone thinks that Christchurch was a one-off act of Islamophobia, and that the demented 28-year-old was merely a ‘bad apple’, they need to remind themselves of what followed the Christchurch attacks. Following day, for example, as the world was coming to terms with the tragedy in New Zealand, white men attacked a Muslim worshipper outside East London Mosque in the UK with a hammer. The next day, a 50-year-old man shouting ‘white supremacy’ stabbed a 19-year-old Muslim teenager in Surrey, UK. The same day, a 23-year-old white man rammed his car into the gates of a mosque in Queensland, Australia. The Guardian reported that there had been an increase of 593% of anti-Muslim hate crimes in Britain after the Christchurch attacks.

Christchurch Attacks – via BBC

Islamophobia – or anti-Muslim hate crimes – unfortunately is not something new. It has existed well before the advent of media and globalisation. However, tragic and inhumane acts of terrorism such as 9/11 and 7/7 bombings have surely exacerbated Islamophobia as the media – both digital and social – together with publishing industry and certain political leaders have painted Muslims as this significant ‘other’ that somehow are to blame for the all the evils in the world – especially in the West. As a result, in Europe as well as North America, there has been a great receptivity towards anti-Muslim and other xenophobic sentiments – creating fascists like the Australian in Christchurch who have taken Islamophobia to an extreme level – by militarizing it.

Militarized Islamophobia is an undeniable and unfortunate reality. A quick walk down the immediate memory lane provides a stark testament of this extremely painful truth. August 2016, New York City’s borough of Queens witnesses an imam and his associate getting shot and killed on a busy street near the mosque. December 2016, 30-year-old man enters a mosque in Zurich, Switzerland and starts firing indiscriminately. January 2017, still fresh in the memories of many, 27-year-old enters the mosque in Quebec City, Canada and starts firing on worshipers, killing 9 and injuring many others.

In all of the above incidences of militarized Islamophobia, the fact that the attackers chose the place of worship for their attack suggests that they were well-prepared – like in Christchurch – with weapons and a plan or strategy mirroring that of a military mission or operation.

Weapon used in Christchurch Attacks – via The Namal

In this day and age, where anti-Muslim hate crimes have reached the new heights of militarized Islamophobia, it is pertinent that we as humans strongly condemn and crack down on the foundation of this menace – hate speech. Hate speech is not a freedom of expression if it results in the instigation of anti-Muslim and any other xenophobic, racist or offensive sentiments. Similarly, being politically correct does not mean not respecting each other and one another’s beliefs. The foundation of any Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, xenophobic, racist or any other derogatory behaviour is the propagation and dissemination of hate speech. Whether it be the Holocaust, genocides in Srebrenica and Rwanda, or the massacre of Muslims due to Islamophobia – they all seem to have one thing in common: all were triggered by the rhetoric of hate.

As Cora Alexa Døving of Norwegian Centre for Studies of the Holocaust & Religious Minorities, as well as Sabine Schifferfrom Media Responsibility Institute Germany point out, there are significant similarities between the Islamophobic discourse being spread today and the European pre-Nazi anti-Semitism. Same views are echoed by John Esposito, Edward Said, and Sipco Vellenga who in his comparative study on Islamophobia and anti-Semitism in the Netherlands argues that “Islamophobia is, just like anti-Semitism, deeply rooted in European history.”

It is perhaps time to look more deeply into what we publish, what we say, what we share and what we read. Clearly, the attack on Muslims through ‘words’ has translated into an attack through ‘arms’ – leading towards what is arguably a non-conventional but gradual genocide of Muslims. In the words of the Holocaust survivor Susan Pollack speaking to BBC about rising hate-speech, “It starts as a small stream, but then it has the potential to erupt – and when it does, it’s too late to stop it.”

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

ISIS cells have used an IED to blow up a Syrian Army vehicle on the road between Naamer and al-Khirbet in northern Daraa, the ISIS-linked news agency Amaq said on June 4. According to the report, 3 soldiers were killed in the attack. However, these claims have not yet been confirmed by pro-government sources.

This became the first official ISIS announcement of an attack in the province of Daraa since last year when the army and former rebels that had reconciled with the government eliminated ISIS’ local branch, the Khalid ibn al-Walid Army.

The resumption of ISIS attacks in southern Syria may be a sign that the terrorist group’s core hiding in the Syrian and Iraqi deserts has had enough time to restore contacts with its cells in this part of the country. If this is the case, further attacks in the area can be expected.

Just recently, the army discovered a large ammo depot during a recent search operation in the country’s south. The ammo depot contained loads of weapons, including: 3 US-made TOW anti-tank guided missile (ATGM) launchers along with 4 missiles, 3 Russian-made Metis-M ATGM launchers along with 6 missiles and two 1PBN86-VI thermal sights, a Soviet-made Malyutka ATGM along with its launcher, 7 Bulgarian-made AT-4 Spigot ATGMs, a Bulgarian-made Konkurs ATGM and several rounds for the Yugoslav-made M79 Osa anti-tank weapon.

A swarm of armed drones attacked residential areas in the town of Jubb Ramlah in western Hama in the early hours of June 5. According to

Local sources, the Syrian Arab Air Defense Forces intercepted all the drones before they managed to cause any losses.

Opposition sources confirmed the attack attempt saying that it was a response to strikes on the Greater Idlib area.

According to pro-militant sources, Syrian and Russian forces carried out hundreds of strikes on various targets in northwestern Hama, southern Idlib and northern Lattakia over the last 24 hours. Clashes also continued in the area north of Kafr Nabudah.

At the same time, so-called moderate rebels from Jaysh al-Izza, the group that had received large quantities of weapons from the US, appeared in a new video with a badge of the Islamic Black Standard with the Seal of Muhammad. This is a well-known symbol of al-Qaeda and the official flag of ISIS.

Despite all the attempts by Idlib militant groups and their Western backers to present these “rebels” as “moderate democrats”, it’s not so easy to hide the truth.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

We call upon Global Research readers to support South Front in its endeavors.

If you’re able, and if you like our content and approach, please support the project. Our work wouldn’t be possible without your help: PayPal: [email protected] or via: http://southfront.org/donate/ or via: https://www.patreon.com/southfront

Today is the 75th anniversary of the Normandy invasion.  Once again the event is celebrated by demonization of National Socialist Germany and glorification of America’s greatness in winning the war.  

In actual fact the Normandy invasion was not a significant contributor to Germany’s defeat.  A small US/British/Canadian/French force of about 150,000 soldiers of which about 73,000 were American faced a few German divisions at half strength and short of fuel and ammo.  The real war was on the Eastern front where millions of soldiers had been fighting for several years. 

The Red Army won World War II.  The cost to the Soviets was between 9 million and 11 million military deaths.  Adding in the Russian civilian deaths, the Soviet Union won the war at the cost of between 22 million and 27 million Soviet lives.

In contrast the US had 405,000 soldiers killed during WW II of which 111,600 died fighting the Japanese in the Pacific.

The falsification of history applies to World War II just as it does to everything else in the West, and President Trump’s D-Day speech exemplifies how false our history is.  Russia is simply left out of the story.  Putin was not even invited to the celebration.  The celebrants consisted of outgoing British prime minister May, failed French president Macron, and outgoing German chancellor Merkel who was there to celebrate her own country’s defeat, but they might as well not have been present.  Trump made the occasion America’s greatness.  We defeated Germany at a cost of less than 300,000 soldiers killed.  The Russians who lost 36 times more soldiers are not considered to be sufficiently important to the victory over Germany to be invited to the celebration.  

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The late economist Milton Friedman’s notion of capitalism and freedom is polar opposite to my own views.

We’re however likeminded on the issue of illicit drugs and so-called US war on them, largely waged on Blacks and Latinos. They comprise around two-thirds of the US gulag prison system inmates, the world’s largest by far.

Over half of US incarcerated individuals are for nonviolent offenses, about half of them for illicit drug possession.

Friedman opposed the criminalization of illicit drugs and war on them. Ending it in the US would “half the number of prisons, half the number of prisoners,” and eliminate thousands of annual drug-related homicides, he maintained.

It would also help stabilize inner city communities ruptured by the devastating war on drugs, imprisoning many of its residents, depriving young children of one more parents or older siblings.

Prohibition of alcohol in the US ended because its enormous harm far outweighed anything positive. The same goes for illicit drugs to a far greater extent.

For the past half century, trafficking terrorized inner city neighborhoods, fostering violence while serving the interests of organized crime, the CIA as a key revenue source, and major Western banks, profiting from laundering dirty money.

Addressing the failure of prohibition, legal scholar Roscoe Pound once said certain human behaviors are beyond “the effective limits of legal action.”

Instead of ending alcohol abuse and addiction, prohibition drove production, distribution, and consumption of the products underground.

The illicit drug trade is a far greater problem than alcohol abuse. According to the UN  Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and Interpol, the annual dollar volume way exceeds $400 billion.

The US spends tens of billions of dollars annually dealing with the problem, money unavailable to benefit the general welfare.

The illicit drug trade let the US prison/industrial complex surge to unprecedented size. It masks racism, a form of modern-day slavery, crushing the human spirit, locking people in cages, brutalizing them in captivity, including for minor offenses, notably for possession of illicit substances.

According to California Prison Focus, “no other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its own citizens” and residents — a democracy in name only, run like a fascist police state.

Alcohol, tobacco, and drug addictions are health issues, wrongfully criminalized when it comes to substances banned by ill-conceived laws, waging war on people using them instead of focusing on helping them become drug-free.

Should overeating and other poor dietary habits be criminalized, causing far more health problems and premature deaths than illicit drugs?

The same goes for addiction to alcohol, tobacco, and other harmful behavior. Banning their use would make the solution worse than the problem.

Nationwide legalization of cannabis is long overdue. It’s coming incrementally — to Illinois effective January 1, 2020 based on passed House and Senate legislation, the Cannabis Regulation and Tax Act (CRTA), to be signed into law straightaway by Governor Jay Pritzker (image on the right), fulfilling his earlier pledge.

He called the measure “the most equity-centric approach in the nation,” adding:

“This will have a transformational impact on our state, creating opportunity in the communities that need it most and giving so many a second chance.”

The bill will make Illinois the first US state to legalize cannabis legislatively, rather than by ballot initiative.

Polls show most state residents support its use for recreational purposes. The measure lets adults aged-21 or older possess up to 30 grams of cannabis flower, 5 grams of cannabis concentrate, and 500 milligrams of THC-infused products.

It’s similar to but more liberal than laws enacted in 10 other states, permitting use of cannabis with or without marijuana card authorization.

It lets medicinal cannabis users grow their own plants at home, not recreational users. It expunges earlier low-level marijuana possession, manufacture, and intent to distribute convictions.

Along with measures enacted in other states, it’s a small step back from the near-half century human and community destructive war on drugs.

State Senator Toi Hutchinson said

“(t)he most historic aspect of (CRTA) is not just that it legalizes cannabis for adults, but rather the extraordinary efforts it takes to reduce the harm caused by the failed war on marijuana and the communities (and people) it hurt the most.”

According to Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) director Chris Lindsey, (t)he Illinois Legislature has set a standard of excellence with this bill that other states seeking to pass similar legislation should follow,” adding:

“Illinois has put in place a set of equity provisions that should serve as a national model for other state legislatures grappling with how to redress the harm caused to communities targeted in the drug war.”

Chicago NORML, Working to reform marijuana laws’ executive director Edie Moore said

“(w)e’re going to be able to look back five years from now and see that the quality of life in disadvantaged communities has been made better because of this legislation.”

Supporting the legalization of cannabis in Illinois, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx said the following:

“The failed war on drugs has disproportionately impacted communities of color” for far too long, the criminal/injustice system doing far more harm than illicit substances.

According to the ACLU, Black Americans are nearly four-times more likely to be arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned for marijuana possession than white people.

DrugPolicy.org explained that nearly 600,000 American citizens and residents were arrested in 2017 for marijuana possession. Around half the number were Black or Latino.

Arrests and convictions overwhelmingly target the poor and disadvantaged, unable to afford proper legal help available to well-off individuals.

Criminalization of substances overall should end, helping addicts recover from their illness instead of punishing them behind bars — making the problem far worse, not better.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Whether it’s eerily-specific ads popping up in our news feeds, or stories about our data leaking into the wrong hands, there’s plenty of evidence that Facebook knows quite a bit about us.

But exactly what information does Facebook have? It’s a question we may not want to know the answer to, but one that we can likely deduce. That’s right. It’s a lot.

Facebook is not the only company that collects data about you. In fact, most of the services you use on your phone, tablet, and computer are probably tracking your activity in one way or another. However, we give Facebook a lot more valuable information than to most other companies, and they know how to use this to generate lots and lots of revenue.

Interestingly, though, people seem to trust Facebook less than other companies when it comes to handling their personal information, so it’s worth delving a little deeper into exactly what this social media giant knows about us.

Facebook in 2019: Just How Big Is It?

We don’t need a bunch of statistics to know that Facebook plays an important role in our lives, but understanding just how big it is sheds some light on how important it is that Facebook has so much data about its users.

To give you an idea of just how big Facebook is, consider the following:

Sources: Macrotrend and The Hub

Facebook is More Than Just Facebook

Over the years, Facebook has grown considerably both in terms of how much revenue it makes as well as users. Here’s a snapshot of the journey Facebook has taken since its founding in 2004 to the present day.

The use of these apps means that Facebook has access to you in three different ways, and if you use all these services on a regular basis, then you can bet that Facebook knows quite a bit about who you are and what you do.

Read the full article by Broadband Search here.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on BroadbandSearch.

Featured image is from Black Agenda Report

“History shows that governments sometimes seek to regulate our lives finely, acutely, thoroughly, and exhaustively. In our own time and place, criminal laws have grown so exuberantly and come to cover so much previously innocent conduct that almost anyone can be arrested for something. If the state could use these laws not for their intended purposes but to silence those who voice unpopular ideas, little would be left of our First Amendment liberties, and little would separate us from the tyrannies of the past or the malignant fiefdoms of our own age. The freedom to speak without risking arrest is ‘one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation.’”—Justice Neil Gorsuch, dissenting, Nieves v. Bartlett (2019)

What the First Amendment protects—and a healthy constitutional republic requires—are citizens who routinely exercise their right to speak truth to power.

What the architects of the police state want are submissive, compliant, cooperative, obedient, meek citizens who don’t talk back, don’t challenge government authority, don’t speak out against government misconduct, and don’t step out of line.

For those who refuse to meekly accept the heavy-handed tyranny of the police state, the danger is all too real.

We live in an age in which “we the people” are at the mercy of militarized, weaponized, immunized cops who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”

As such, those who seek to exercise their First Amendment rights during encounters with the police are increasingly finding that there is no such thing as freedom of speech.

This is the painful lesson being imparted with every incident in which someone gets arrested and charged with any of the growing number of contempt charges (ranging from resisting arrest and interference to disorderly conduct, obstruction, and failure to obey a police order) that get trotted out anytime a citizen voices discontent with the government or challenges or even questions the authority of the powers-that-be.

Merely daring to question, challenge or hesitate when a cop issues an order can get you charged with resisting arrest or disorderly conduct, free speech be damned.

In fact, getting charged or arrested is now the best case scenario for encounters with police officers who are allowed to operate under the assumption that their word is law and that there is no room for any form of disagreement or even question.

The worst case scenario involves getting probed, beaten, tasered, tackled, searched, seized, stripped, manhandled, shot, or killed by police.

This mindset that anyone who wears a government uniform (soldier, police officer, prison guard) must be obeyed without question is a telltale sign of authoritarianism goose-stepping its way towards totalitarianism.

The rationale goes like this:

Do exactly what I say, and we’ll get along fine. Do not question me or talk back in any way. You do not have the right to object to anything I may say or ask you to do, or ask for clarification if my demands are unclear or contradictory. You must obey me under all circumstances without hesitation, no matter how arbitrary, unreasonable, discriminatory, or blatantly racist my commands may be. Anything other than immediate perfect servile compliance will be labeled as resisting arrest, and expose you to the possibility of a violent reaction from me. That reaction could cause you severe injury or even death. And I will suffer no consequences. It’s your choice: Comply, or die.

Indeed, as Officer Sunil Dutta of the Los Angeles Police Department advises:

If you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me.

This is not the attitude of someone who understands, let alone respects, free speech.

Then again, there can be no free speech for the citizenry when the government speaks in a language of force.

What is this language of force?

Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality. Contempt of cop charges.

This is not the language of freedom. This is not even the language of law and order.

Unfortunately, this is how the government at all levels—federal, state and local—now responds to those who choose to exercise their First Amendment right to speak freely.

Just recently, in fact, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling protecting police from lawsuits by persons arrested on bogus “contempt of cop” charges (ranging from resisting arrest and interference to disorderly conduct, obstruction, and failure to obey a police order) that result from lawful First Amendment activities (filming police, asking a question of police, refusing to speak with police).

In Nieves v. Bartlett, the Court ruled 6-3 to dismiss the case of Russell Bartlett, an Alaska resident who was arrested at an outdoor festival for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest after he refused to be interrogated by police and then intervened when police attempted to question other attendees about their drinking. While at a campsite party, Bartlett exercised his First Amendment right to refrain from speaking with a state trooper who was monitoring the event for underage alcohol consumption. Bartlett later intervened after observing another Trooper questioning a fellow camper in what he believed was an improper manner. At one point, one of the troopers reportedly caused Bartlett to stumble, then forced him to the ground, threatened to tase him if he resisted, and arrested him for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. The charges were later dismissed. Bartlett sued, asserting that he was arrested in retaliation for challenging the Troopers’ authority. Although the Court recognized that people have a right to be free from a retaliatory arrest over lawful First Amendment activities, it ruled that if police have probable cause for the arrest, the person cannot sue for a free speech violation unless they can show that someone else was not arrested for the same actions.

Another case currently before the Supreme Court, Ogle v. State of Texas, involves the prosecution of a Texas man who faces up to one year in jail and a $4000 fine for sending emails to police criticizing them for failing to respond to his requests for assistance. Scott Ogle was charged with sending complaints to a sheriff’s office, including one email stating that officials were “pissing” on the Constitution. The Texas law under which Ogle was charged makes it a crime to send “annoying,” “alarming” or “harassing” electronic messages. The law is so overbroad that it could be used to punish a negative review of a restaurant posted online or caustic Facebook posts.

In yet another case, a rapper was charged with making terroristic threats after posting a song critical of police on Facebook and YouTube. In refusing to hear the case of Knox v. Pennsylvania, the Supreme Court paved the way for individuals who engage in controversial and unpopular political or artistic expression, by criticizing the police for example, to be labeled terrorists and subject to prosecution and suppression by the government. Police had been actively monitoring rapper Jamal Knox’s (a.k.a. “Mayhem Mal”) social media presence when they discovered the song titled “F**k the Police” and charged Knox and his rap partner with multiple counts of terroristic threats and witness intimidation.

These cases reflect a growing awareness about the state of free speech in America: it’s all a lie.

If we no longer have the right to tell a Census Worker to get off our property, if we no longer have the right to tell a police officer to get a search warrant before they dare to walk through our door, if we no longer have the right to stand in front of the Supreme Court wearing a protest sign or approach an elected representative to share our views, if we no longer have the right to protest unjust laws by voicing our opinions in public or on our clothing or before a legislative body, then we do not have free speech.

What we have instead is regulated, controlled, censored speech, and that’s a whole other ballgame.

Remember, the unspoken freedom enshrined in the First Amendment is the right to challenge government agents, think freely and openly debate issues without being muzzled or treated like a criminal.

Protest laws, free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws, and a host of other legalistic maladies dreamed up by politicians and prosecutors are aimed at one thing only: discouraging dissent and reminding the populace that resistance to the tyranny of the police state is futile.

Weaponized by police, prosecutors, courts and legislatures, “contempt of cop” charges have become yet another means by which to punish those individuals who refuse to be muzzled.

• Deyshia Hargrave, a language arts teacher in Louisiana, was thrown to the ground, handcuffed and arrested for speaking out during a public comment period at a school board meeting.
• Fane Lozman was arrested for alluding to government corruption during open comment time at a City Council meeting in Palm Beach County, Fla.
• Dan Heyman, a reporter for the Public News Service, was arrested for “aggressively” questioning Tom Price, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services during an encounter in the West Virginia State Capitol.
• College professor Ersula Ore was slammed to the ground and arrested after she objected to the “disrespectful manner” shown by a campus cop who stopped her in the middle of the street and demanded that she show her ID.
• Philadelphia lawyer Rebecca Musarra was arrested for exercising her right to remain silent and refusing to answer questions posed by a police officer during a routine traffic stop. (Note: she cooperated in every other way by providing license and registration, etc.)

Cases like these have become typical of the bipolar nature of life in the American police state today: you may have distinct, protected rights on paper, but dare to exercise those rights and you put yourself at risk for fines, arrests, injuries and even death.

This is the unfortunate price of exercising one’s freedoms today.

Yet these are not new developments. We have been circling this particular drain hole for some time now.

Almost 50 years ago, in fact, Lewis Colten was arrested outside Lexington, Kentucky, for questioning police and offering advice to his friend during a traffic stop. Colten was one of 20 or so college students who had driven to the Blue Grass Airport to demonstrate against then-First Lady Pat Nixon. Upon leaving the airport, police stopped one of the cars in Colten’s motorcade because it bore an expired, out-of-state license plate. Colten and the other drivers also pulled over to the side of the road.

Fearing violence on the part of the police, Colten exited his vehicle and stood nearby while police issued his friend, Mendez, a ticket and arranged to tow his car. Police repeatedly asked Colten to leave. At one point, a state trooper declared, “This is none of your affair . . . get back in your car and please move on and clear the road.”

Insisting that he wanted to make a transportation arrangement for his friend Mendez and the occupants of the Mendez car, Colten failed to move away and was arrested for violating Kentucky’s disorderly conduct statute.

Colten subsequently challenged his arrest as a violation of his First Amendment right to free speech and took the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which sided with the police.

Although the Court acknowledged that Colten was not trespassing or disobeying any traffic regulation himself, the majority affirmed that Colten “had no constitutional right to observe the issuance of a traffic ticket or to engage the issuing officer in conversation at that time.”

The Supreme Court’s bottom line: protecting police from inconvenience, annoyance or alarm is more important than protecting speech that, in the government’s estimation, has “no social value.”

While the ruling itself was unsurprising for a judiciary that tends to march in lockstep with the police, the dissent by Justice William O. Douglas is a powerful reminder that, in a free society, the government exists to serve the people and not the other way around.

Stressing that Colten’s speech was quiet, not boisterous, devoid of “fighting words,” and involved no overt acts, fisticuffs, or disorderly conduct in the normal meaning of the words, Douglas took issue with the idea that merely by speaking to a government representative, in this case the police—a right enshrined in the First Amendment, by the way—Colten was perceived as inconveniencing and annoying the police.

In a passionate defense of free speech, Douglas declared:

Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? The constitutional theory is that we the people are the sovereigns, the state and federal officials only our agents. We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet. The situation might have indicated that Colten’s techniques were ill-suited to the mission he was on, that diplomacy would have been more effective. But at the constitutional level speech need not be a sedative; it can be disruptive.

It’s a power-packed paragraph full of important truths that the powers-that-be would prefer we quickly forget: We the people are the sovereigns. We have the final word. We can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy. We need not stay docile and quiet. Our speech can be disruptive. It can invite dispute. It can be provocative and challenging. We do not have to bow submissively to authority or speak with reverence to government officials.

In theory, of course, “we the people” have a constitutional right to talk back to the government.

The Constitution does not require Americans to be servile or even civil to government officials.

Neither does the Constitution require obedience (although it does insist on nonviolence).

In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded as much in City of Houston v. Hill when it struck down a city ordinance prohibiting verbal abuse of police officers as unconstitutionally overbroad and a criminalization of protected speech.

Unfortunately, the brutal reality of the age in which we live is far different from the ideals set forth in the Bill of Rights: talking back—especially when the police are involved—can get you killed.

The government does not want us to remember that we have rights, let alone attempting to exercise those rights peaceably and lawfully. And it definitely does not want us to engage in First Amendment activities that challenge the government’s power, reveal the government’s corruption, expose the government’s lies, and encourage the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

We’re in deep trouble, folks.

Freedom no longer means what it once did.

Not only do we no longer have dominion over our bodies, our families, our property and our lives, but the government continues to chip away at what few rights we still have to speak freely and think for ourselves.

If the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.

Protest laws, contempt of cop charges, and all of the other bogus violations used by cops and prosecutors to muzzle discontent and discourage anyone from challenging government authority are intended to send a strong message that in the American police state, you’re either part of the herd, marching in lockstep with the government’s dictates, or you’re a pariah, a suspect, a criminal, a troublemaker, a terrorist, a radical, a revolutionary.

Yet by muzzling the citizenry, by removing the constitutional steam valves that allow people to speak their minds, air their grievances and contribute to a larger dialogue that hopefully results in a more just world, the government is creating a climate in which violence becomes inevitable.

When there is no steam valve—when there is no one to hear what the people have to say, because government representatives have removed themselves so far from their constituents—then frustration builds, anger grows and people become more volatile and desperate to force a conversation.

As John F. Kennedy warned in March 1962, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the government is making violent revolution inevitable.
*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People  is available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected].

Even in New York, it’s not often one has an opportunity to view a sculpture exhibit on the scale of Simone Fattal’s 50-year retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art PS 1. It’s a splendid assemblage of work—247 items— from a prolific artist generously distributed over spacious galleries in a grand museum space in Long Island City, New York.

As I moved through the eight halls devoted to stages of Fattal’s work—collage, canvas paintings, work on paper, ceramic and glazed terracotta, I found her sculpted pieces particularly compelling. Many are rather whimsical; although they initially appear somber. The overriding impression from these sculptures is of movement and ‘becoming’; while the striking paintings and collages evoke contemplation, for me. Even Fattal’s stark back and white lies on canvas are heavy with deliberation.

This is not a crowded, ponderous mind we are witnessing at work; there’s some playfulness here, along with a reach into history. The range of work is not surprising given that they represent half a century, in Lebanon, California, and France.

Wounded Warriors, 2013

Accompanying captions refer to the impact of displacement and geopolitical conflict on the artist. This may apply to mystical terracotta items — mostly standing humanoid figures, their blunt torsos anchored by heavy trunk-like legs. While these pieces evoke something colossal from early times, there is nothing daunting in them. Is Fattal telling us they represent past (or present) experiences which, while they may embody dislocation, are in fact manageable and embraceable?

The headless, armless figures stand unambiguously erect, about to step forward. Speaking with Ms. Fattal at her home in Paris last week, she affirms:

“I want to show man on his feet, as witness, still standing.”

She began sculpturing long after she left Syria and then Lebanon in 1980 where she’d worked on canvas. Taking with her the detritus of war with an energy she would never lose, she turned her attention to founding a publishing house. Her Post Apollo Press featured innovative texts, mainly poetry—especially the writing of the powerful poet and painter Etel Adnan.

Settled in California, Fattal returned to the plastic arts in the late 1980s not to resume painting (some striking canvases from that period are exhibited here). She began clay sculpting, a medium she chose, she explains “because, she clay gives the sense of being alive; it retains the quality of fragility and lightness at the same time.”

By The Road, 2006 with Sirene, 2005

Too often creations of artists originating in places we associate with conflict are interpreted as cathartic; their images seem baleful or angry, we are told, to expunge or transform painful past experience. I don’t see this in Fattal’s work on exhibit in this grand New York gallery. With the mostly diminutive scale of her massive (in image, not size) ceramic and clay shapes, perhaps the artist is showing us how she prevails as an energetic being celebrating a continuous forward movement.

The reference to ancient antiquity in some sculpted forms may derive from a ‘memory’ of lost civilization. But through their color and their weightlessness, the artist transforms them into celebratory images. Those massive feet under the torsos are not irreconcilably anchored; they seem ready to spring off the platform.

Still, there’s an undisputed historical feel to many sculpted figures, especially the mystic ceramic and stoneware torsos. While possessing a sense of emergence, they simultaneously remind us of recovered, damaged reliquaries. I found myself meditating on them.

Accompanying exhibition notes inform us how Fattal draws from her personal experience in the Middle East and from the epics of Gilgamesh and Dhat al-Himma created in that cradle of civilization millennia earlier. Characters from these tales populate the exhibition and may provoke viewers to search out those classics. The art itself is however strong enough to suggest an intentional reach into the elemental aspect of civilization.

Simone Fattal is a fine example of the many women with roots in the Middle East, Asia and Africawho exist in a global 21^st century, bringing powerful messages, with courage and limitless energy that speak to all. Their female voices represent a universal past, a present and a future.

Nour ala Nour, 2008

This is an exhibition for anyone, and for any age. But I encourage women to see this display of one woman’s vision. Just as I encourage women to read the poetry and novels of the abundance of contemporary women who seem to be in the forefront of groundbreaking research, of invention, of reinterpretations, and of honest truth-telling. Fattal is in the vanguard of creative women demonstrating our ability to reinterpret history and reality, and to project the power of our gender in completely new terms. To my question to Fattal about women in the arts, she replies—

“We can pick up and move on from adversity maybe more easily than men can, perhaps because we fall from a less elevated place.”

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Barbara Nimri Aziz is a New York based anthropologist and journalist. She is the author of “Tibetan Frontier Families” and numerous articles on Tibet and Nepal, has been working in Nepal in recent weeks. Find her work at www.RadioTahrir.org. She was a longtime producer at Pacifica-WBAI Radio in NY.

All images in this article are taken by M. Gurung

When the President of Israel and the Jewish son-in-law of the President of the United States make surprisingly thoughtless statements about Palestine, they show us just how deliberately ignorant of history they are — and how uncaring they are for Palestinian suffering at a deeply subconscious level.

Hatim Kanaaneh, Palestinian doctor and author of A Doctor in Galilee: The Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel and a collection of short stories entitled Chief Complaint, doesn’t know what to make of Reuven Rivlin’s slip of the tongue in addressing his guest Mohammad Kiwan, the chairman of the Council of Muslim Leaders in Israel, at an iftar (breaking the fast) meal the Israeli president hosted at his home in celebration of Ramadan. Rivlin says to the Palestinian (with a straight face, apparently), “Your Home Is My Home.”

Kanaaneh imagines Sheikh Kiwan responding: “Had you left it standing in Damoun (Kiwan’s village), you would be welcome to enter it.” Kanaanah goes on to “try to exonerate [Rivlin] of any conscious malicious intent.”

I wish I could do the same for Jared Kushner’s calculated, ignorant and orientalist comment in an interview about the deal to liquidate Palestinian claim to their homeland:

“Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner said in an interview that the Palestinians aren’t yet able to govern themselves and declined to promise them an independent state in the White House’s long-awaited Mideast peace plan.”

Malicious intent is all over that statement. He goes on to add condescendingly,

“The hope is that they over time will become capable of governing.”

When Kushner says Palestinians are not ready “to govern themselves”, he is really calling upon their hasbara carefully-manufactured image as terrorists. Given Palestinian history of denial and desperation, they are not to be trusted, he is saying. They have yet to accept “civilized” behavior — i.e., mask their rage and pain — and reject “uncivilized behavior.”

Kushner’s statements are so outrageous, I hardly know where to begin to address them. Let me start almost exactly a hundred years ago when the Turks lost Palestine in 1918 and their rule was replaced by a “British Mandate”, an agreement between the Allied Powers in 1923, which also incorporated the ambiguous terms of the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Ever since then, Palestinian Arabs understood that the phrase “Jewish national home” with its religious connotations in the Declaration was merely a euphemism for a Jewish settler-colonial state and that ‘article 2’ of the Mandate, with its reference to “self-governing institutions”, was a fraud.

Similarly, today Kushner’s phrase implying that self-government would come later when the Palestinians were “ready” to govern is meant as a fraudulent “safeguard”. The British Mandate over Palestine of 96 years ago has simply evolved into an “Israeli Mandate”. It is blessed, not by the United Nations, but by an arm-twisting imperial power.

The deal of the 20th century (the Balfour Declaration) triggered the Great Palestinian Arab Rebellion, “probably the boldest challenge to Britain in her colonial half of the twentieth century”, according to Walid Khalidi. The deal of the 21st century will also inevitably inflame Palestinian rebellion — and for exactly the same reasons.

In the 20th century, the Arabs of all the Middle East States expected independence in return for their help to Britain during WWI. They fought against their co-religionists, the Turks, putting their faith in the principle of self-determination as enshrined then in the League of Nations. Eventually, when they were deemed “ready” for self-governance, all the Arab states eventually achieved independence, despite the negative colonialist imagery imposed on them — except for Palestine.

In the 20th century, as in the 21st, Palestine was excluded from the doctrine of self-determination in a clear strategy of dispossession. Balfour had explained to President Wilson in a memorandum: “we are dealing not with the wishes of an existing community but are consciously seeking to reconstitute a new community and definitely building for a Jewish numerical majority in the future.” [At the commencement of the Mandate, there were approximately 486,000 Muslims in Palestine, 84,000 Jews and 71,000 Christians.]

In today’s lingo “Jewish majority” also translates as “Jewish self-determination”, leaving the self-determination of Palestinian Arabs who were there and had always been there, nowhere. Pre-Zionist Palestine as well as the remnant pockets of Palestine today called the “occupied territories” have been portrayed as backward and unproductive awaiting “Western penetration and fecundation”, to use Ella Shoat’s disturbingly apt phrase, which is also morally superior to the Arab masses.

And underpinning the entire Zionist venture in Palestine, as Walid Khalidi explains, is a myth, that when “stripped down to its barest essentials may be presented as two sides of a coin. The obverse carries the Right of Return deriving from Divine Promise. The reverse carries explicitly, the dismissal of the millennia-old ‘Arab’ presence in Palestine.”

This myth played and it still does today a key role, beclouding the strategy of dispossession and tapping a huge reservoir of emotions in the West. Is Jared Kushner a White supremacist who just happens to be Jewish, or is he a Jewish supremacist as in a Jewish nationalist? Today the Jewish State which has sovereignty over all of Mandate Palestine minus Jordan has a Western ideological and political orientation despite the fact that 70% of its population is “Third-World derived” (Palestinians and Mizrahi/Sephardic Jews). Its character is anomalous, as Edward Said so often described it.

What are Trump’s motives and that of countless other American politicians for sponsoring Israel? The answers are deliberately beclouded with the myth, causing Western “purblindness” to use Walid Khalidi’s expressive word.

In Palestine under the Mandate, British policy, similar to U.S. policy today, was never to accept the principle of one-man-one-vote in Palestine, and no self-governing institutions were ever developed for the country at large. It was not possible to question the provisions of the Mandate then, just as it is impossible for Palestinian “negotiators” to question the Jewish national provisions of the Israeli government today.

During the failed Oslo process, money was poured into the occupied territories for “development” and “capacity building”. Numerous reports were and are still being written, with each one beginning, as a matter of framing, with a long list of the obstacles facing both economic development as well as capacity building in the occupied territories, and affirming that only final status negotiations could achieve an enduring development — both political and economic.

It turns out the long-awaited final status is … the status quo!

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Jerusalem Post

The escalating “trade war” between the US and China is reportedly causing some in Washington to consider imposing legal restrictions on Chinese students in the interests of national security, which shows that all the trade talk was really just a front for justifying more comprehensive “containment” measures against the People’s Republic in order to pre-empt its global rise.

Reuters released a report on Wednesday about how “U.S. lawmakers prep bills targeting China spy threat on campus“, which included details about some proposed legislation that would impose legal restrictions on Chinese students in the interests of national security. Some ideas are to prohibit Chinese students from studying in the US if they’re affiliated with a military-linked institution, as well as regulate the amount of money that universities can receive from the People’s Republic.

Other proposals include limiting access to sensitive academic research out of concern that Chinese students might take this proprietary knowledge with them back to China whenever they finally leave and therefore undercut America’s competitive know-how advantage over their homeland. Had it not been for the “trade war“, it would have been unthinkable that the US would contradict its own much-touted principles of “freedom, democracy, and respect for all” in such a way, but therein lies the crux of the matter because the “trade war” was never entirely about trade at all.

No one disputes the fact that trade forms the bedrock of American-Chinese relations and is unquestionably its most important component, but despite what most people might believe, it’s impossible to separate politics from economics in this case. Actually, US-Chinese trade is inherently political because of the strategic purpose that it’s hitherto fulfilled for the People’s Republic in enabling it to develop at an unprecedented pace due to the decades-long imbalance of hundreds of billions of dollars that ultimately compounded into countless trillions over the years. Pre-empting China’s global rise and its possible replacement of the US as the world’s most important Great Power is the chief concern of the Trump Administration, which decisively acted to curtail the trade deficit between the two through tariffs and then use the economic dimension of their competition to justify more comprehensive “containment” measures against it such as the lead-in news event about the possible legal restrictions that might be imposed on Chinese students.

The “trade war” should therefore be reconceptualized and even rebranded if it’s to be strategically accurate because it’s not about profits or lack thereof at all, but about the Great Power competition between the US and China over the future of the evolving world order, with economics being the key determinant but also comprising much more than simple trade ties. The relevancy of legal restrictions on Chinese students speaks to the fear that the US government has of them acting as fifth column proxies of the Communist Party ideologically committed to stealing American secrets in order to help their homeland surpass its main geopolitical rival. It’s not within the ambit of this analysis to argue whether such fears are justified or not, but just to point out that it’s the sovereign right of all states to regulate the entry of foreigners into their borders however they see fit, no matter how seemingly unfair or hypocritical their actions may be, though the US should understand that China might very well respond reciprocally if Congress’ proposals come to pass.

It would be absurd to allege that all Chinese students are secretly communist spies, just as it would be equally absurd to say the same about American ones vis-a-vis the CIA even if a few of each of them might really be abusing their student status as a cover for intelligence collection and other unsavory activities, meaning that Chinese students might become the first civilian casualty of the “trade war” after which American ones would probably follow soon thereafter. After reconceptualizing the “trade war” as a New Cold War and accepting that the public economic focus is really intended to mask the behind-the-scenes “containment” measures being quietly taken against China in parallel with the tariffs, it makes sense why a special category of the country’s nationals in the US (students) are now being targeted as the next phase of this Hybrid War escalation.

If it’s ever called out for hypocritically contradicting its internationally exported morals, ethics, and principles, the US can always plead “self-defense” by pointing to its national security concerns, though that nevertheless might not be convincing enough for many who are finally beginning to see the US for what it truly really was all along, which is a global hegemon that endeavors to maintain its leading position in International Affairs by hook or by crook. Soft power is an important part of its grand strategy, but is more than easily sacrificed in the interests of ensuring its hard power, practically all of which is dependent in one way or another on economics and technology. By rectifying the trade imbalance through tariffs and overreacting to intelligence threats by restricting the activities of all Chinese students in the country, the US hopes to finally regain the competitive edge that it was at risk of losing up until this point and turning the tables in the New Cold War.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Trump’s first-ever state visit to the UK was a monumental event that celebrated the history of these two Great Powers’ “Special Relationship” and also hinted at what the post-Brexit future has in store for each of them, specifically concerning the so-called “Clash of Civilizations” that American strategists are striving to implement all across Eurasia.

There’s been non-stop news coverage over the past couple of days about Trump’s first-ever state visit to the UK, with journalists focusing on practically all dimensions of his trip. The President’s tweets were given their due attention as always, as was the seating protocol during the huge state dinner that was hosted in his honor. Gossip abounded as usual and countless folks were on the edge of their seats waiting to see how the man who’s perhaps the most undiplomatic Western leader of modern times would behave around the Royal Family that’s known for their prioritization of diplomatic protocol.

Trump’s supporters saw his visit as an endorsement of Brexit, while his critics asserted that he should never have been invited at all. The entire event was both polarizing but also awe-inspiring since it captivated the imagination of the entire nation, for better and for worse, and will certainly go down in history as a monumental trip.

Looking beyond the intangibles such as the overall mood and the disproportionate attention given to the President’s tweets about London Mayor Sadiq Khan and Meghan Markle, there were three main highlights of his visit: the talk about a post-Brexit US-UK trade deal, the emphasis on how common values and shared interests unite the two Great Powers, and the 75th D-Day commemorative event. About the first, it’s well known that Brexit is in jeopardy and that many of the country’s citizens are very concerned about the possibility of leaving the EU without first striking a deal with Brussels. Trump sought to assuage their unease by discussing the possibility of a mutually beneficial trade pact in that event, which is enticing for Brexit’s supporters but certainly won’t endear its opponents to this process. The US leader at one time suggested that the NHS would have to be included in the deal, but promptly backtracked the next day after widespread backlash over what some feared would be its creeping privatization.

Regarding the second main element of Trump’s trip, the emphasis on how common values and shared interests unite the two Great Powers, it was none other than the Queen herself who said this, which therefore bestowed this grand statement with the highest level of normative value possible in that country. It not only explained the soft power basis for the “Special Relationship”, but reinforced the timelessness of their bonds with a view to the future. This is important to dwell upon because it strongly implied that the UK will always be remained allied with America irrespective of however Brexit ultimately plays out.

Her words also took for granted that Western Civilization as a whole includes both the US and Europe despite some very  noticeable differences between these two transatlantic halves, which crucially adds another level of significance (whether knowingly or not) to the 75th D-Day commemorative event that wrapped up Trump’s trip.

As the author analyzed in an earlier piece this week, that ceremony was actually a civilizational provocation after over a dozen leaders of the Allied nations (and curiously enough, even Germany) were invited to attend except for President Putin, whose country sacrificed the most out of anyone else’s in the existential struggle against the fascist war machine. This was intended to imply that Russia isn’t part of European/Western Civilization despite its centuries of involvement in continental affairs but is an “other” that doesn’t share its counterpart’s historical memory, whereas the US is evidently a more crucial component of the aforesaid even though it’s only been directly involved in transatlantic affairs since World War I. Keeping in mind what the Queen said about how common values and shared interests unite the US and UK, it’s clear to see that Trump’s trip certainly carried with it a strong degree of civilizational importance in the New Cold War.

Overall, his first-ever state visit to the UK focused on the past and the future of the “Special Relationship”. Brexit was certainly on everyone’s mind, and Trump has made no secret over the years of his support for the country’s divorce from Europe, but at the same time he didn’t seem to overly interfere in the domestic affairs of the host nation any more than the CIA and other forces already do. If anything, the visit was a feel-good reminder to the citizens of both countries about how common values and shared interests unite them, though the dark side of this civilizational focus is that it pits the West (the US, UK, and EU) against all the rest, especially Russia, China, and the Mideast. It’s on this closing note that observers should be most concerned because of the prospect of Trump applying the “Clash of Civilizations” blueprint for dividing and ruling the Eastern Hemisphere throughout the 21st century.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: President Donald Trump, along with British Prime Minister Theresa May, viewing a displayed copy of the Declaration of Independence at No. 10 Downing Street Tuesday, June 4, 2019, in London. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

An Israeli minister has called on settlers to continue entering Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa compound and thanked security officials for making their visits possible after hundreds broke into the mosque during the final days of Ramadan.

In a video released on Monday, Culture and Sports Minister Miri Regev said:

“We should do everything to keep ascending to the Temple Mount [the name used by Jews for Al-Aqsa].”

“And hopefully soon, we will pray in the Temple Mount, our sacred place,” she added.

Regev also thanked Gilad Erdan, Israel’s Interior Security Minister, and Jerusalem’s Police Chief for their “fight and contribution for Jews to ascend to the Temple Mount”.

Regev’s comments come days after Palestinians and Israeli police clashed at the compound. On Sunday, tensions ratcheted up in the city with Israel’s Jerusalem Day – a celebration of the country’s capture and occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967 – coinciding with the last days of Ramadan.

As Israelis planned to march through the Old City, including the Muslim Quarter, to observe the holiday, Palestinians were urged to occupy the Al-Aqsa compound, an act of defiance against Jewish Israelis that were expected to enter the holy site.

In response to Palestinians rallying in Al-Aqsa, Israeli police – who reportedly allowed the settlers to enter the site – raided the mosque.

The Waqf, an Islamic organisation that oversees the site, said Israeli police fired rubber bullets and used pepper spray against Palestinians as they cracked down on the rally. Two Palestinians were arrested, the Waqf said.

In a statement, the police said protesters had barricaded themselves in the Al-Aqsa Mosque and threw chairs and stones at forces who were attempting to “disperse” them.

Settlers regularly praying at holy site

The status of the Al-Aqsa compound is one of the most sensitive issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Al-Aqsa compound is one of the holiest sites in Islam and served as the first Qibla, the direction towards which Muslims must turn to pray, before that was changed to Mecca, in Saudi Arabia.

It is also the holiest site in Judaism, believed to be the location of the Jewish temple that was destroyed 2,000 years ago.

Jews are allowed to visit the site during set hours but not pray there to avoid provoking tensions. However, Israeli settlers who regularly enter the compound often perform Jewish prayers on the site and some right-wing activists have called for the mosque’s destruction to make way for another temple.

Increasingly, these activists have sought to build support for increased Jewish presence at the site despite a longstanding, joint guardianship agreement between Israel and Jordan, which retains control over Christian and Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem.

Palestinians fear settler tours inside the Al-Aqsa compound may erode their claims to the area, and further extinguish their aspirations for full rights and a state of their own, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Regev is part of a religious Zionist wave that is dominating Israeli politics, and she is a prominent figure in Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s Likud party. Also on Monday, Israeli MK Bezalel Smotrich said Israel should be governed by the Torah and return to days of King David and Solomon.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image: Israeli Minister of Culture Miri Regev in the Knesset on January 27, 2016. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Three Italians were invited to this year’s meeting of the Bilderberg Group, which was held in Montreux, Switzerland, (30 May to 2 June). Another journalist was invited with Lili Gruber, the host of the TV channel La7, and now the permanent host of the Bilderberg Group – this was Stefano Feltri, assistant director of Fatto Quotidiano, directed by Marco Travaglio. The “third man” chosen by the Bilderberg is Matteo Renzi, senator for the Partito Democratico, and ex-President of the Council.

The Bilderberg Group, formally established in 1954 on the initiative of certain US and European “eminent citizens”, was in reality created by the CIA and the British secret service MI6, in order to support NATO against the USSR[1]. After the Cold War, it continued to play the same role in support of the strategy of the USA and NATO.

The guests of these annual meetings are almost exclusively citizens of Western Europe and North America. They number approximately 130 representatives from the world of politics, economy, the military, the major media and the secret services, who, formally speaking, participate “in a personal capacity”.

They gather behind closed doors in luxurious hotels, each year in a different country, and are protected by draconian military security systems. No journalists or observers are allowed access, and no communiqué is ever published.

The participants are sworn to silence – they are not even allowed to reveal the identity of the speakers who may have given them information (in total disregard of their proclaimed “transparency”). We only know that this year, they talked mostly about Russia and China, spatial installations, a stable strategic order, and of the future of capitalism.

The most important “personalities” participating this year, as usual, were those of the USA;

Henry Kissinger, “historical figure” of the Group, closely linked to the late David Rockefeller (image right, died in 2017) who was founder of The Bilderberg and the Trilateral Commission:

Mike Pompeo, ex-head of the CIA and currently US Secretary of State[2];

General David Petraeus, ex-head of the CIA[3];

Jared Kushner, advisor (and son-in-law) of President Trump for the Middle East, and intimate friend of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Following on, Jens Stoltenberg, Secretary General of NATO, who received a second mandate for services rendered to the  USA.

For four days, in secret multilateral and bilateral meetings, these representatives, with other known or unknown figures of the major powers of the West, reinforced and expanded the network of contacts which enable them to influence government policies and the orientation of public opinion.

The results are visible. In Il Fatto Quotidiano, Stefano Feltri violently defends the Bilderberg Group, explaining that these meetings are held in secret “in order to create a context of frank and open debate which is specifically non-institutional”, and attacks the “numerous conspiracy theorists” who spread “legends” about the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission.

However, he refrains from mentioning the fact that among these “numerous conspiracy theorists” stood the late Judge Ferdinando Imposimato, (image right) Honorary President of the Supreme Court of Cassation (he died in 2018), who described the result of the enquiries he had initiated as follows:

“The Bilderberg Group is partially responsible for the strategy of tension and therefore also the massacres” – beginning with that of Piazza Fontana, in which the Bilderberg Group worked with the CIA and the Italian secret services, with Gladio and the neo-fascist groups, with the P2 lodge and the USA Masonic lodges in NATO bases[4].

Even Matteo Renzi has now been admitted into this prestigious club. Overlooking the possibility that they may have invited him because of his talents as an analyst, we are left with the hypothesis that these powerful men and women are secretly preparing some other political operation in Italy. Feltri will excuse us for joining the “numerous conspiracy theorists”.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on Il Manifesto. Translated from Italian by Pete Kimberley.

Award winning author Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

Twelve leading ocean conservancy and environmental groups have requested that Canada’s environment and health ministers take immediate regulatory action on plastic waste and pollution, under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act 1999, and call on the Government of Canada to add any plastic generated as a waste, or discharged from the use or disposal of products or packaging, to the Schedule 1 List of Toxic Substances under CEPA.

Doing so would allow the federal government to pass laws requiring producers of products containing plastics or using plastic packaging to collect and recycle them; to prevent exports of plastics to developing countries; to require recycled plastics to be used in making products and packaging; to ban single-use plastic items that aren’t collected and end up as litter and marine pollution; and to reduce microplastic waste from clothing and other products that pollute fish Canadians eat.

The 12 ocean conservancy and environmental groups that have banded together to make this formal and joint request to Canada’s environmental and health ministers include:

1. Surfrider Foundation Canada
2. The Ocean Legacy Foundation
3. Environmental Defence Canada
4. West Coast Environmental Law
5. Friends of the Earth Canada
6. Pacific Wild Alliance
7. BC Marine Trails Association
8. Coastal Restoration Society
9. Sea Shepherd Conservation Society
10. Greenwave Environmental Consulting
11. Sea Legacy
12. Association for Denman Island Marine Stewards

According to a study for Environment and Climate Change Canada, Canada’s plastics recycling rate is 9%^[1]. Canada landfills or burns 91% or 2.93 million tonnes of the waste plastic generated each year. Canada’s rivers, lakes and oceans receive an additional 29,000 metric tonnes of plastic litter – the equivalent of 9.7 billion coffee cup lids.

The scientific evidence of the impacts of this plastic pollution is clear. A systematic review of data from 139 lab and field studies by researchers at the University of Toronto concluded,

“…that there is evidence that plastic pollution of all shapes and sizes can affect organisms across all levels of biological organization. There is no doubt that plastic pollution can have an impact on wildlife, and there is compelling evidence suggesting macroplastics are already impacting marine populations, species, and ecosystems.”

On May 21, 2019 the European Union took decisive action against plastic pollution stating that:

80 to 85% of marine litter, measured as beach litter counts, is plastic, with single-use plastic items representing 50% and fishing-related items representing 27% of the total. Single-use plastic products and fishing gear containing plastic are therefore a particularly serious problem in the context of marine litter, pose a severe risk to marine ecosystems, to biodiversity and to human health and damage activities such as tourism, fisheries and shipping.

In addition to plastic pollution Canada’s failure to recycle plastics results in over 1.8 million metric tonnes of greenhouse gases^[2]as more plastic is made to replace what is lost to landfills, incinerators (thus adding even more greenhouse gases), rivers, lakes and oceans, or what is shipped to unwitting developing nations.

Chloé Dubois, President, The Ocean Legacy Foundation

“We see discarded plastic bottles, bottle caps, cigarette butts, fishing nets, buoys, crab trays, ropes and polystyrene all along the coast and in the coastal waters of British Columbia. We can see it, scientists say it is having an impact and other jurisdictions are taking action. It is time we start treating plastic pollution as a solid form oil spill that it is. We need to act now.”

Michelle Hall, Vice President, Surfrider Foundation Canada

“On December 22, 2018, Motion 151 passed unanimously in the House of Commons. It calls for, among other things, the regulation of single-use plastics, the development of a plan to clean-up derelict fishing gear and marine debris, and regulation to make companies making plastic products and using plastic packaging responsible for collection and recycling. The Canadian government has a powerful mandate from an overwhelming majority of Canadians to stop our plastic problem from being exported and to tackle it here and now.”

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

How primitive human beings dealt with the harsh conditions of life can hardly be imagined. I suppose humans emerged in racial and ethnic groups that then merged to some extent, sometimes easily, sometimes not. All, however, face the same hardships to which they responded in various ways. All people require the stuff that is essential to life. Acquiring it is what life is all about. Since all people cannot fend for themselves, these groups made arrangements to take care of the needy. The groups’ survival required it.

Political considerations are always the basis of these arrangements. Political differences always produce different economic practices. Each group has its own political-economy. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democratic Socialism, for instance, are political-economies and each has numerous variations. Economies do not exist in isolation. Any attempt to alter a society’s economic practices requires a corresponding change to its political practices.

For instance, raising the minimum wage substantially is futile unless prices are kept from rising. A large enough rise in prices can negate the effects of any pay raise. Controlling prices, however, is political.

Any attempt to compare the economies practices of different societies is also difficult. Unless the political differences are understood, the economic differences cannot be.

American society has been organized to produce ever higher levels of Gross Domestic Product which is said to be the value of all goods and services produced in a year. Although GDP is defined as domestic product, it is calculated by adding up all the money spent on consumption by households, businesses, and governments. When one year’s GDP is greater than the previous year’s, the “growth” of the economy is revealed. Growth is what American culture strives for. Economic growth brings goods and services to everyone. The more growth the better! In that way, America’s attempts to provide people with what they need to live. Growth is the solution to all human problems. Would that it were so!

GDP is said to be the value of products and services measured by the costs of consuming them. But that is not what it really measures. What it really measures is the amount of money that is moved from the pockets of consumers (buyers) to the pockets of merchants (sellers). That’s all it does; nothing more and nothing less. And that’s all the society cares about. America has been organized for the purpose of transferring money from consumers to merchants. This organization functions with enormous efficiency. The wealth of the merchant class increases by quantum amounts. Such is the greatness of America!

But the gloss of its greatness has been tarnished by its failure to provide for its needy. The word “economics” is derived from the Classical Greek οίκος νέμoμαι (household management). If household management were taken as the goal of human activities, a completely different set of data would reveal the underside of the wealthiest nation the world has ever known. But nobody cares. No economic indicators exist that display this dark underside. Wouldn’t it be helpful to know, for instance, how many employed people have gain-less jobs, jobs that provide so little income that they cannot save even a dime. Are those people employed or enslaved? When the employment rate is calculated monthly, why isn’t the gainless rate calculated? The only answer is that because nobody cares.

America is said to lack a state religion. It lacks one only in name. America’s state religion is Mammonism! Every mercantile is a temple, and every sales counter an altar.

Will Americans ever be virtuous enough to make the changes to those political practices needed to enable the necessary changes to its economic practices? Doubtful! Americans have been inured to ignoring the needy. A primitive society could not do that and survive. Today’s developed societies can. The needy are no longer needed. People no longer matter.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

John Kozy is a retired professor of philosophy and logic who writes on social, political, and economic issues. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he spent 20 years as a university professor and another 20 years working as a writer. He has published a textbook in formal logic commercially, in academic journals and a small number of commercial magazines, and has written a number of guest editorials for newspapers. His on-line pieces can be found on http://www.jkozy.com/ and he can be emailed from that site’s homepage.

Voters looking ahead to 2020 are being bombarded with soundbites from the twenty plus Democratic would-be candidates. That Joe Biden is apparently leading the pack according to opinion polls should come as no surprise as he stands for nothing apart from being the Establishment favorite who will tirelessly work to support the status quo.

The most interesting candidate is undoubtedly Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who is a fourth term Congresswoman from Hawaii, where she was born and raised. She is also the real deal on national security, having been-there and done-it through service as an officer with the Hawaiian National Guard on a combat deployment in Iraq. Though in Congress full time, she still performs her Guard duty.

Tulsi’s own military experience notwithstanding, she gives every indication of being honestly anti-war. In the speech announcing her candidacy she pledged “focus on the issue of war and peace” to “end the regime-change wars that have taken far too many lives and undermined our security by strengthening terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda.” She referred to the danger posed by blundering into a possible nuclear war and indicated her dismay over what appears to be a re-emergence of the Cold War.

In a recent interview with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, Gabbard doubled down on her anti-war credentials, telling the host that war with Iran would be “devastating,” adding that

“I know where this path leads us and I’m concerned because the American people don’t seem to be prepared for how devastating and costly such a war would be… So, what we are facing is, essentially, a war that has no frontlines, total chaos, engulfs the whole region, is not contained within Iran or Iraq but would extend to Syria and Lebanon and Israel across the region, setting us up in a situation where, in Iraq, we lost over 4,000 of my brothers and sisters in uniform. A war with Iran would take far more American lives, it would cost more civilian lives across the region… Not to speak of the fact that this would cost trillions of taxpayer dollars coming out of our pockets to go and pay for this endless war that begs the question as a soldier, what are we fighting for? What does victory look like? What is the mission?”

Gabbard, and also Carlson, did not hesitate to name names among those pushing for war, one of which begins with B-O-L-T-O-N. She then asked

“How does a war with Iran serve the best interest of the American people of the United States? And the fact is it does not,” Gabbard said. “It better serves the interest of people like [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Bibi Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia who are trying to push us into this war with Iran.”

Clearly not afraid to challenge the full gamut establishment politics, Tulsi Gabbard had previously called for an end to the “illegal war to overthrow the Syrian government,” also observing that “the war to overthrow Assad is counter-productive because it actually helps ISIS and other Islamic extremists achieve their goal of overthrowing the Syrian government of Assad and taking control of all of Syria – which will simply increase human suffering in the region, exacerbate the refugee crisis, and pose a greater threat to the world.” She then backed up her words with action by secretly arranging for a personal trip to Damascus in 2017 to meet with President Bashar al-Assad, saying it was important to meet adversaries “if you are serious about pursuing peace.” She made her own assessment of the situation in Syria and now favors pulling US troops out of the country as well as ending American interventions for “regime change” in the region.

In 2015, Gabbard supported President Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran and in 2016 she backed Bernie Sanders’ antiwar candidacy. More recently, she has criticized President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal. Last May, she criticized Israel for shooting “unarmed protesters” in Gaza, a very bold step indeed given the power of the Israel Lobby.

Tulsi Gabbard could well be the only genuine antiwar candidate that might truly be electable in the past fifty years, and that is why the war party is out to get her. Two weeks ago, the Daily Beast displayed a headline: “Tulsi Gabbard’s Campaign Is Being Boosted by Putin Apologists.” The article also had a sub-headline: “The Hawaii congresswoman is quickly becoming the top candidate for Democrats who think the Russian leader is misunderstood.”

The obvious smear job was picked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, television’s best known Hillary Clinton clone, who brought it up in an interview with Gabbard shortly thereafter. He asked whether Gabbard was “softer” on Putin than were some of the other candidates. Gabbard answered:

“It’s unfortunate that you’re citing that article, George, because it’s a whole lot of fake news.”

Politico the reported the exchange and wrote: “’Fake news’ is a favorite phrase of President Donald Trump…,” putting the ball back in Tulsi’s court rather than criticizing Stephanopoulos’s pointless question. Soon thereafter CNN produced its own version of Tulsi the Russophile, observing that Gabbard was using a Trump expression to “attack the credibility of negative coverage.”

Tulsi responded

“Stephanopoulos shamelessly implied that because I oppose going to war with Russia, I’m not a loyal American, but a Putin puppet. It just shows what absurd lengths warmongers in the media will go, to try to destroy the reputation of anyone who dares oppose their warmongering.”

Tulsi Gabbard had attracted other enemies prior to the Stephanopoulos attack. Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept described how NBC news published a widely distributed story on February 1^st, claiming that “experts who track websites and social media linked to Russia have seen stirrings of a possible campaign of support for Hawaii Democrat Tulsi Gabbard.”

But the expert cited by NBC turned out to be a firm New Knowledge, which was exposed by no less than The New York Times for falsifying Russian troll accounts for the Democratic Party in the Alabama Senate race to suggest that the Kremlin was interfering in that election. According to Greenwald, the group ultimately behind this attack on Gabbard is The Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), which sponsors a tool called Hamilton 68, a news “intelligence net checker” that claims to track Russian efforts to disseminate disinformation. The ASD website advises that “Securing Democracy is a Global Necessity.”

ASD was set up in 2017 by the usual neocon crowd with funding from The Atlanticist and anti-Russian German Marshall Fund. It is loaded with a full complement of Zionists and interventionists/globalists, to include Michael Chertoff, Michael McFaul, Michael Morell, Kori Schake and Bill Kristol. It claims, innocently, to be a bipartisan transatlantic national security advocacy group that seeks to identify and counter efforts by Russia to undermine democracies in the United States and Europe but it is actually itself a major source of disinformation.

No doubt stories headlined “Tulsi Gabbard Communist Stooge” are in the works somewhere in the mainstream media. The Establishment politicians and their media component have difficulty in understanding just how much they are despised for their mendacity and unwillingness to support policies that would truly benefit the American people but they are well able to dominate press coverage. Given the flood of contrived negativity towards her campaign, it is not clear if Tulsi Gabbard will ever be able to get her message across. But, for the moment, she seems to be the “real thing,” a genuine anti-war candidate who is determined to run on that platform. It might just resonate with the majority of Americans who have grown tired of perpetual warfare to “spread democracy” and other related frauds perpetrated by the band of oligarchs and traitors that run the United States.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was the CIA Chief of Base for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and was one of the first Americans to enter Afghanistan in December 2001. Phil is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to encourage and promote a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that is consistent with American values and interests. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

From what’s known about the scheme, subject to change, Trump’s so-called “deal of the century” has nothing to do with regional peace or treating Palestinians equitably.

It has everything to with serving US and Israeli interests at the expense of fundamental Palestinian rights — why it’s dead before arrival, why it may never be released in final form, especially if new Israeli elections end Netanyahu’s regional reign of terror.

According to Haaretz, Trump’s scheme aims to eliminate Palestinian refugees by naturalizing them as citizens of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere regionally where they reside.

It’s all about rendering UN General Assembly Resolution 194 null and void —  resolving that

“refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.”

The right of return to one’s country of origin or citizenship is inviolable international law. The fundamental right is affirmed by Fourth Geneva, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Refugees resettled as citizens of other countries lose their universally recognized legal right of return to their country of origin.

UN Charter provisions include “respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples,” along with promoting fundamental human rights on a non-discriminatory basis.

International law guarantees the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland, what Israel and the US reject for Palestinians.

Trump’s no-peace/peace plan aims to pressure or otherwise force them to abandon this fundamental right, along with getting Arab countries to go along with the scheme.

According to Haaretz, Trump’s deal of the century aims to eliminate the right of return that’s been a major obstacle whenever so-called Israeli/Palestinian peace talks were held.

At stake is the fate and rights of around six million diaspora Palestinians, mostly refugees. Trump and Netanyahu regime hardliners want what’s affirmed under international law denied them.

Lebanese law prohibits giving Palestinian refugees citizenship because it would render their right of return null and void — what its diaspora population sought since forcefully displaced from their homeland in 1948.

Jordan also rejects the idea of granting Palestinian refugees citizenship. A core element of the Trump regime plan is bribing these countries with economic incentives to go along.

“…Palestinian refugees are the supreme symbols of Palestinian nationhood,” said Haaretz, adding:

“An American deal that blatantly relies on buying up that symbol for cash, even lots of it, can’t be acceptable to the Palestinian leaders in the West Bank and Gaza.”

According to Iran’s parliament speaker Ali Larijani, the Trump regime aims “to arrange an economic deal and get its money from the miserable (cash-rich) Persian Gulf countries.”

Trump’s one-way deal of the century favoring Israel and US interests is unacceptable to Palestinians wanting statehood and freedom from occupation harshness — what hardliners in Washington and Tel Aviv want them denied.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from The Iranian

I plead with the readers of this column to click on the following links and read about the Vale Mining Corporation’s warning of an impending dissolution of yet another Brazilian mine tailings dam. Here is the link to the developing story. 

The most important part of the report is the accompanying video which should be required viewing for every Minnesotan, every politician and every lover of drinkable water, the St Louis River, Lake Superior, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) and Canada’s Quetico Provincial Park.

In the 3½ minute video, BBC journalist David Shukman does a powerful job of telling the story about the inherent dangers of tailings lagoon dams (whether old or new) and their often-unpredictable dissolutions and massive release of poisonous chemicals into the watershed and river communities downstream.

Watch the terrifying video of the actual collapse of the 2019 disaster below.

Every Minnesotan who even vaguely recognizes the names “PolyMet” or “Twin Metals” or “Glencore” or Antofagasta” needs to watch this video; and every wannabe investigative journalist, whether professional or amateur, needs to study it. Reporters who went into the news business for idealistic reasons need to examine their hearts and question their editors about their proper desire to thoroughly cover important stories such as this one.

The sobering BBC video should compel every clear-headed citizen to forward the link to his or her congresspersons, mayors and city council representatives and demand that the potentially catastrophic PolyMet and Twin Metals projects be re-considered and disallowed.

As opposed to the humane, forward-looking politics of the Green Party, the Democratic Socialist Party and the Green New Deal faction of the Democratic Party, both of Minnesota’s major political parties – Republican and DFL (and their past-appointed partisan bureaucrats in the regulatory agencies) have been embarrassingly subservient to the machinations of foreign mining and pipeline corporations by allowing them to essentially dictate how Minnesota’s natural resources are to be exploited and endangered.

In the last few election cycles experimental copper-nickel sulfide mining in water-rich Minnesota was not made into a campaign issue by either of the two parties, so neither the major party losers nor the winners were ever forced to understand that the vast majority of concerned citizens of northeast Minnesota do not want copper mining done anywhere near their endangered, still relatively unpolluted, fishable fresh water.

At this point in Minnesota’s experimental copper/sulfide mining history, there are only four copper mining companies involved that we know of Two of them are minor Penny Stock companies from Canada: PolyMet and Twin Metals. Both Penny Stock companies are essentially front groups whose business plans and stock holdings are controlled by two major foreign corporations.

PolyMet’s parent company is Switzerland’s Glencore and 100% of Twin Metals’ stock is held by Chile’s Antofagasta corporation.

If these inanimate corporations were sentient human beings, they would meet the definition of a sociopathic personality disordered entities – which makes them essentially conscienceless, pathological liars that usually only respond to legal threats, economic threats and the threat of punishment – not what is best for society or the long-term sustainability of the environment.

That means that – no matter what sociopathic corporations promise to do– they cannot really be trusted to fulfill those promises. Therefore, any professed concern about the environmental health of our water-rich region should be doubted. Wealthy sociopaths are able to afford cunning legal teams that enable them to get away with criminal misdeed after criminal misdeed. Just look at what Vale has gotten away with in Brazil, and just look at what Donald Trump’s administration is trying to get away with up north as he revoked an Obama order to prevent Twin Metals/Antofagasta from proceeding with mine development upstream from the BWCAW.

The Censored-out Stories of Mine Catastrophes Around the World

To understand the real threats the experimental copper mining presents to Minnesota, one only has to recall

1) the catastrophic 2014 Mount Polley mine earthen dam collapse in British Columbia,

2) last two equally catastrophic Brazilian tailings dam collapses in 2015 and 2019 and now

3) the impending collapse of a third Brazilian mine dam that involves a long- abandoned and un-monitored dam site that is should be the moral responsibility of the Vale Mining corporation, the largest mining company in Brazil and the fifth largest in the world. Despite its size and supposed expertise, Vale admits that it has no idea how to avert the impending collapse.

What’s left behind of a once-thriving Brazilian river town that was downstream from a collapsed mine tailings lagoon. Many of the now-dead and/or homeless occupants worked at the mine.

It needs to be pointed out that the engineer that designed the Vale dam burst in January 2019 also designed the proposed PolyMet tailings dam that the company says will eventually rise to an ultimate height of 250 feet; that is, if the project is allowed to go forward against the will of the people of Minnesota.

Clear-headed people who know the facts about copper mining in water-rich areas are justifiably concerned about the future of the St Louis River estuary, Lake Superior and the health of future generations.

(It needs to be pointed out that over 300 victims of the 2019 dam wall collapse drowned in the semi-solid sludge that had built up for decades in the tailings lagoon and that many of the bodies of the “missing” ones have been un-recoverably entombed forever, in the gradually drying sludge that hardens to the consistency of a brick. Some of that sludge has come to rest in layers that are many meters thick.)

The mouth of Brazil’s mine waste-contaminated Rio Doce as it empties into the enlarging dead zone in the Atlantic Ocean 300 miles downstream from the 2015 tailings dam collapse (This could be the St. Louis River as it empties into Lake Superior)

Last year the PolyMet project (including the weak plans for the mine tailings earthen dam walls) was approved by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR), the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (PCA) and the US Forest Service. To observers it appeared that neither the DNR n the or PCA cared about the testimony from knowledgeable citizens. The thinking was that the PolyMet proposal had actually been pre-approved well prior to what were just “cosmetic” citizen hearings.

And then, adding insult to injury, just last week a three-judge panel of the Minnesota Court of Appeals affirmed PolyMet’s amended, already dangerous plan to vastly increase the volume of daily sulfide ore production. The panel allowed PolyMet/Glencore to proceed with their development of the mine project without requiring a new Environmental Impact Statement to be presented to the DNR and PCA, even though the inherently dangerous earthen dam would likely have to be taller than the originally proposed 250 Feet in height!

The ruling, according to my reading of the court document, failed to pay much attention to the vitally important issue of the long-term storage requirements of the sulfuric acid-producing mine tailings.

I strongly suspect that the three judges are understandably unfamiliar with the many major and minor mine catastrophes that regularly occur all around the world. Such information has been carefully censored-out of the public’s consciousness by the commercial news outlets that have corporate connections, and so even highly intelligent judges can easily become unfamiliar with important issues such as sulfide mining.

Some Visuals Concerning the Mount Polley Mine Disaster of 2014

Before and after satellite images of the Mount Polley, BC tailings dam disaster

Why tailings ponds “designed” to hold back toxic sludge for an eternity are a set-up for disaster

If and when another tailings dam bursts in Brazil, the nearest downstream community will be drowned and disappeared under tens of millions of cubic meters of toxic sludge similar to what happened to the other two downstream communities that were victims of Vale’s unavoidably dangerous mine waste dams.

Twin Metals/Antofagasta intends to deliver its processed, liquified sulfuric-acid-producing waste products (which represent 99.5% of the total volume of the ore that is mined) to PolyMet/Glencore’s tailings lagoon. The eternally toxic contents of that lagoon, if it ever dissolves and drains downstream, will surely destroy the St. Louis River estuary as well as Lake Superior.

If the Twin Metals/Antofagasta rumored plan to not establish an on-site tailings lagoon is approved by the DNR and the PCA, that mine’s waste won’t directly risk the BWCAW. However, there will be other water contamination issues that are generated from both the mine and the processing plant.

That probability may explain why Canada, which aggressively controls the contiguous Quetico Provincial Park’s pristine, water-rich wilderness, is not officially making any noises objecting to the Twin Metals/Antofagasta project.

The Role of the Media in Public Unawareness of Issues Involving Big Business

PolyMet, Twin Metals and the mining industry in general don’t want – nor will they likely get – ANY serious journalistic coverage from any commercial northern Minnesota newspaper, including the Duluth News-Tribune. Most media outlets constrain themselves when they are invited to criticize sociopathic Big Businesses that could offer advertising revenue in the future. Advertising money from any given well-off corporation can affect next quarter’s profit or loss margins and can understandably trump ethics.

And we can’t expect to see any serious journalism from any of northern Minnesota’s television stations either. TV stations have even more significant conflicts of interest with the mining industry that could benefit from conscienceless resource exploitation.

Ever since 1) Mount Polley British Columbia’s 2014 catastrophe (the disaster that permanently polluted Quesnel Lake – a world-famous salmon fishery) and ever since 2) the Brazilian mining catastrophes that occurred in 2015 and 2019, there has been a lot of investigative journalism done that pointed out the fact that similar disasters are likely to happen sometime in the future with any experimental sulfide mining that is done in northeast Minnesota.

Some Comments About the So-called “Free Press” in the Corporation-saturated United States

However, none of that investigative journalism about the serious threats that experimental copper mining poses to Minnesota has been done by the Duluth News-Tribune, the several television stations that serve the area, the many radio stations in the area or in more than a few of the many smaller newspapers that should really be concerned about the health and sustainability of the region’s environment.

The Duluth Reader is only one of three newspapers in the region that has done any significant journalism exposing this vitally important issue. The other two papers are the Timberjay (a commercial newspaper out of Ely and Tower) and Duluth’s other alternative newspaper, the Zenith News. One has to ask “why”.

The Duluth Reader is the largest of the two free, Duluth-area alternative newsweekly magazines.

Neither of those papers takes any advertising money from the mining industry (nor do they take any money from most other major corporation, as far as I can tell). That freedom from corporate conflicts of interest gives the Reader and the Zenith the freedom to do honest journalism and freely publish unwelcome truths about issues that would expose and thus offend corporations – whether criminally-minded or not – that frequently advertise in “normal” commercial media outlets.

Most corporations are on the lookout for vulnerable politicians and political parties that might be willing to accept campaign “contributions” (with the implication being: “if you want more money to fund future campaigns, adhere to our particular corporate agenda”). Giving money to politicians is just another common device that wealthy elites, their foundations and their other special interest groups use to ensure that their business “investment goals” will more likely be achieved.

At any rate, the future of water-rich northeast Minnesota is again being manipulated by foreign entities that cannot be expected (due to their sociopathic tendencies) to pay much attention to the logical objections that are coming from every citizen who really understands the huge risks that copper-nickel/sulfide mining poses to our region.

Ignoring the will of the people and the future of our habitat is a serious mistake of the powers that be.  That is because when all the legal, non-violent means of exposing and opposing  a sociopathic corporate project’s deep flaws have been exhausted, certain segments of the opposition will be tempted to resort to what they consider justifiable violence to prevent what they regard as a crime both against nature and humanity.

One only has to recall what happened last year when another cabal of transnational corporate powers tried to push through their private oil company pipeline against the will of the people by using anti-democratic, “eminent domain”, pro-corporate, “fascism-lite” tactics in the Dakota Access Pipeline confrontation at Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota.

Justice-seeking groups that were opposing the police state action began with non-violent tactics. But, when they were eventually put down with violent methods by armed, corporate mercenaries that worked hand-in-hand with North Dakota’s taxpayer-paid policemen and National Guard members. (Note that none of the cowardly corporate executives that were planning of profiting from the police state action showed up.)

And who won the day at Standing Rock – at least temporarily? It was the wealthy ruling elites that make use of police state tactics (rather than the voting booth) to get what they and what makes their Wall Street investors happy. It was those with enough wealth to “own” as many politicians as they can. It was the secretive, corporate sociopaths in three-piece suits that fly in their corporate jets.

But in the case of the high risks of potential mining catastrophes similar to the ones in British Columbia, Brazil and elsewhere around the world, the courageous water defenders and lovers of the  environment are these days much more diverse and in some ways more powerful that were those that stood their ground at Standing Rock.

Anybody would be foolish to think that violent confrontations won’t occur between the knowledgeable, justice-seeking, anti-copper mine majority and the political, business, Chamber of Commerce and media types that have been either openly in favor of, quietly working behind the scenes for or employing active censorship to prevent information from being published in the regional media that would inform average folks about the high risks of allowing experimental copper mining in water-rich northeast Minnesota.

A lot of protestors who are suffering the humiliation of not being listened to by the powers-that-be are keeping track of those entities that will be fingered for blame (and also punishment) if and when a Brazilian-type disaster hits.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

The U.S. military attacked three Syrian oil tankers, destroying all and killing four of their drivers.  The tankers were carrying Syrian oil, pumped from Syrian oil wells, and driving on Syrian territory.  The U.S. justified the attack and murders while enforcing the U.S. sanctions against Syria, which prohibit the purchase or importation of any oil.  The oil was pumped from Syrian oil wells under the occupation of the U.S. ally in Syria and then sold to the Syrian government, for the needs of the civilians in the regions under Syrian control.

The far North East corner of Syria has been under occupation by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), and made up of Syrian Kurds who turned against their own country, and are working as mercenaries of the U. S. military.  The region they are occupying by military force while subjugating the civilians who are forced to live under their rule is the location of major Syrian oil wells, which had provided the domestic needs of Syria for decades. The fighters are ethnically Kurds, which is a minority in Syria.  The area they occupy is not predominantly Kurdish, as the majority of the population is Syrian Arabs and Syrian Christians. In an effort to establish a homeland on land which does not belong to them, they put their trust in America, who promised that if they fought ISIS in Reqaa, then the U.S. would support their establishing a Kurdistan in Syria, and breaking up Syria, which was a strategic goal for the U.S.: divide and conquer.

The Syrian civilians are living under an international economic siege, which is causing the suffering of unarmed civilians who are trying to survive, with hopes of recovery.  The war is over, but economic recovery cannot begin due to the sanctions imposed by the richest western nations on the survivors of eight years of conflict which has killed up to 500,000 and has displaced millions.  “I thought if we resisted the terrorists, we would be rewarded with improved conditions, but it looks like defeating the terrorists has caused America and Europe to punish us,” said an Aleppo shopkeeper.

Syria was attacked in March 2011 by an international plan headed up by the U.S. and NATO, and most of the western world signed on to the project to remove a constitutionally elected president from office and institute a Muslim Brotherhood government in Damascus, replacing the secular one.

The U.S. and EU have placed sanctions on Syria for many years, and are increasing the pressure on the civilian population who has suffered eight years of foreign-funded attacks.  Many civilians left the country as migrants to other places, in search of an income and a future free of living under sanctions.  Chemotherapy drugs used to be free at all Syrian national hospitals; but, because of the U.S. and EU sanctions, the Syrian government, and private businessmen are prohibited from importing medicines and products made abroad.  The Syrian drug lab producing chemotherapy drugs for domestic use was destroyed by U. S. cruise missiles in April 2018.

“Since the Syria crisis broke out, the country has been short of all kinds of medicines due to the sanctions from Western countries. Foreign companies stopped exporting high-quality medicines to Syria, especially anti-cancer medicines. So we have been conducting researches on anti-cancer medicines here, and three cancer drugs have been developed,” said the head of the research center destroyed by the U.S. in Damascus.

Electricity in Syria is generated by burning petroleum fuel.  One of the power plants is near Mhardeh, a Christian town of 35,000 which is North of Hama, and South of Idlib.  The terrorists who control Idlib are Radical Islamic terrorists affiliated with Al Qaeda.  They have attacked Mhardeh and the power plants repeatedly over eight years.  Earlier, about fifty terrorists dressed up with Syrian Arab Army uniforms and attempted to enter into Mhardeh for the purpose of a massacre; however, at the last moment their plan was discovered and they were stopped and captured alive.  The terrorists have used missiles to attack the power generating plant there many times.  Typically, the area of Idlib, Hama, Homs, and Latakia would plunge into darkness, and later the attack would be confirmed in the news.  Syria has a severe shortage of electricity, and the new normal is electricity cut-offs for hours on rotating schedules.

Several months ago, there were long lines at gasoline stations, as there was a severe gasoline shortage.  This was caused by sanctions, as the various oil tankers cruising toward Syrian with their cargo to be refined in Banias were blocked at the Suez Canal in Egypt, and also blocked in the Mediterranean Sea by the U.S. warships.  Several months passed in which people were walking, or sleeping in the cars while holding their place in a long line.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on InfoRos.

Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.

Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes  the mainstream media narratives on Syria. 

Voices from Syria 

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-1-6

Author: Mark Taliano

Year: 2017

Pages: 128 (Expanded edition: 1 new chapter)

List Price: $17.95

Special Price: $9.95 

Click to order

In his 1946 Fulton, Missouri “Iron Curtain” address, Winston Churchill coined the US/UK “special relationship” term.

Until its 1776 declaration and war of independence, Britain colonized the US. Now it’s the other way around.

The same is true for post-WW II, US orchestrated new world order, transforming Western European countries into virtual US colonies — what the CIA-created EU was and remains all about, wanting them controlled by a higher US power.

At Buckingham Palace on Monday, Queen Elizabeth hailed what she called US/UK “common values and shared interests” — failing to explain the destructive way they play out on the world stage. See below.

During his press conference with Theresa May, Trump hailed the US/UK “special relationship,” calling it the “greatest alliance the world has ever known.” Hyperbole, deceit, bravado, and dissembling define his rhetoric. It makes painful listening.

Britain is part of US-dominated NATO, a killing machine transformed from a defensive to an imperial offensive alliance, waging endless wars of aggression, threatening world peace and humanity’s survival.

As long as NATO exists, peace and stability will remain unattainable. Its 29 members, along with their partnered Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC), Mediterranean Dialogue, and Istanbul Cooperation Initiative (ICI) states comprise a global warmaking alliance — risking nuclear war by pushing things too far.

What’s unthinkable may be inevitable because of US rage for global dominance, Britain united with the US in pursuing it as a junior partner.

The same goes for other NATO-connected states, Israel, and their rogue partners for global conquest, colonization, control, and exploitation.

That’s what US/UK “common values and shared interests,” as well as their “special relationship” is all about — risking the destruction of planet earth and all its life forms.

Trump’s Tuesday remarks were pockmarked with bald-faced Big Lies, demonization of Iran, and demand for Britain and other NATO members to spend more for militarism at a time the only threats these nations face are invented. No real ones exist.

Trump lied about the (nonexistent) threat of “Iran…develop(ing) nuclear weapons” — ignoring the real threat posed by nuclear armed and dangerous Israel, the region’s only nuclear power along with the Pentagon’s presence.

He lied accusing Iran of “supporting and engaging in terrorism” — A US, UK, NATO, Israeli specialty, what Iran is combatting to its credit.

Theresa May’s remarks matched Trump’s in offensiveness and Big Lies. She lied about Britain’s “commitment to justice” — while her regime is slowing killing Julian Assange for the “crime” of truth-telling journalism the way it should be in deference to Washington, confining him under deplorable conditions in Britain’s Belmarsh prison.

May lied about the March 2018 Sergey and Yulia Skripal incident, falsely blaming Russia for harming them, what the Kremlin had nothing to do with, no evidence suggesting otherwise.

She lied about CW incidents in Syria, US/UK-sponsored, carried out by terrorists they support, what Damascus had nothing to do with, blaming Bashar al-Assad a bald-faced Big Lie.

She lied accusing Iran of engaging in “destabilizing activity in the region,” adding it must be “ensure(d) (that) Tehran cannot acquire a nuclear weapon” it doesn’t want, doesn’t have, and wants eliminated everywhere to prevent mass annihilation by their use.

She lied claiming “the UK continues to stand by the nuclear deal.” Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif slammed EU countries for failing to fulfill their obligations under the JCPOA, breaching an international agreement since Trump pulled out in May 2018.

She lied about China, falsely accusing its ruling authorities of “threaten(ing) our shared interests or values.” Polar opposite is true.

The shared bond between the US and UK is hostile to what just societies seek and cherish, to the rights and welfare of ordinary people everywhere, to a world safe and fit to live in.

Polls show about 80% of Brits disapprove of Trump. Tens of thousands of Brits took to the streets in protest of his presence.

On Wednesday, his three-day visit ends with commemorations marking the 75th June 6 D-Day anniversary.

In a Tuesday address, Labor party leader Jeremy Corbyn slammed Trump for spreading hatred and division, including his uncalled for denigration of London Mayor Sadiq Khan.

“I’m proud our city has a Muslim mayor – that we can chase down Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, any kind of racism in our society,” said Corbyn, adding:

“Because racism divides, exploitation of minorities divides, brings about hatred, dislike, disdain and a horrible place for individuals to live in.”

Responding to Trump’s refusal to meet him without mentioning him by name, Corbyn said

“I want to be able to have that dialogue to bring about the better and more peaceful world that we all want to live in.”

“Toxic Trump Out,” “Trump Not Welcome,” “Liar,” “Not in My Name,” “We Are the Carnival of Resistance,” and other signs showed how ordinary Brits despise him.

There’s nothing redeeming about his deplorable domestic and geopolitical agenda, responsible for harming millions at home and abroad.

There’s no end of it under one-party rule with two extremist right wings — Trump the latest in a long line of presidents serving privileged interests exclusively, at the expense of world peace and the general welfare.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image: British Prime Minister Theresa May and US President Donald Trump arrive at 10 Downing street for a joint press conferance . Photo: Getty

Boris Johnson as interim Prime Minister – even for a short period up to the next UK General Election – could prove extremely dangerous for both democratic government and for Britain as a sovereign, independent power.

Johnson is not only in thrall to US President Donald Trump but, by association, also to Netanyahu of Israel. Such a triumvirate would, in turn, generally conform to the agenda of AIPAC, the unelected Israel lobby that operates openly in Washington, and also in Westminster under the name of the CFI.  AIPAC, whilst certainly not the largest, is nevertheless probably the most powerful political lobby in the world.

Why is this detrimental to British democratic government?

The right to lobby legislators within a democratically elected government was initially enshrined in the United States as a constitutional privilege for any citizen with a grievance to bring his case before his elected representative without the necessity to recourse to litigation.  That right has now been usurped by political and commercial agencies with unlimited funds, often acting for foreign powers, exerting extreme pressure upon elected representatives, using huge sums of money in order to press their case.  This is widespread in the US but increasingly now also in Britain.

In other words, the original right to lobby has been hijacked by highly paid, political lobbyists acting for vested interests to persuade susceptible members of Congress, or Parliament, to act or vote to the benefit not of the electorate but for the agenda of a lobby.  Such lobbies are usually either commercial, as in the NRA, Big Pharma, Big Oil and the Defense Industry etc or political and acting for a foreign state, as in AIPAC the American Zionist Association and the CFI, the Conservative Friends of Israel in London.

It must by emphasised that these lobbies both in the UK and the US, whilst being a threat to democratic government in that they arrange for unelected representatives to legally infiltrate elected legislative assemblies in order to apply pressure to enact or change legislation to the favour of their employer who might be also a foreign power i.e. a diplomatic mission or foreign embassy in London – are, nevertheless, legitimate under both British and US law, as currently constituted.

Some years ago, it was proposed in the United States that all lobbyists acting for a foreign state should be registered as ‘foreign agents’, but no legislation was enacted into law because – (yes, you guessed it) – it was voted down by the those very congressmen whose primary allegiance was allegedly to a political lobby rather than to the American public who elected them.

There are at least two contenders for the leader of the Conservative Party whose allegiance to Parliament and the British electorate is beyond doubt: they are Jeremy Hunt and Dominic Raab – both highly rated politicians with strong ministerial experience whose political agenda would be exclusively for the benefit of the British taxpayer.

However, there are also other qualified contenders and there are also other lobbyists in Westminster acting on behalf of foreign interests.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Hans Stehling (pen name) is an analyst based in the UK. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Israeli Embassy

Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) is deeply concerned that Motion M-153– which purports to honour the victims of the January 29, 2017 Quebec City mosque massacre – is an attempt to avert a proper tribute to the victims of January 29. M-153, which passed second reading in the House of Commons last Thursday, a private-members motion introduced by Conservative MP Scott Reid, seeks to designate January 29 as a “National Day of Solidarity with Victims of Anti-religious Bigotry and Violence.” CJPME believes this motion fails to address the Islamophobia that inspired the January 29th massacre, instead diluting the significance of the January 29th by grouping together several dissimilar violent incidents from Canadian history.

The full text of Reid’s motion M-153 reads:

“That the House recognize that acts of violence and bigotry directed against religious believers, such as the June 23, 1985, bombing of Air India Flights 182 and 301, the September 15, 2001, firebombing of the Hindu Samaj Temple and the Hamilton Mountain Mosque, the April 5, 2004, firebombing of Montreal’s United Talmud Torah Jewish school, and the January 29, 2017, murder of Muslims at the Quebec City Islamic Cultural Centre, are inimical to a free, peaceful, and plural society and declare January 29 of every year as National Day of Solidarity with Victims of Anti-religious Bigotry and Violence.”

While each of the incidents named above convey suffering and horror, CJPME notes that the Quebec City Mosque Massacre of January 29th is the only attack resulting in fatalities at a place of worship. Moreover, it is by far the most relevant and most recent of the incidents – in fact by 13 years. CJPME points out that November 2018 Statistics Canada findings revealed that of all religious and racial minorities in Canada, Canadian Muslims are facing the highest increase in hate crimes. Parliamentarians should ask themselves why Reid is only now addressing the bigotry that inspired violence over a decade ago, while refusing to address the threat of Islamophobia today.

CJPME President Thomas Woodley responded,

“Rather than honouring the victims of the Quebec City Mosque Massacre, Reid’s motion seems to make every effort to deflect attention from the issue of increasing Islamophobia in Canada.”

CJPME notes Reid’s motivations remain suspect, given the timing of the motion and his refusal to condemn Islamophobia in 2017. CJPME has published an analysis identifying all the significant shortcomings of the motion M-153: “Motion M-153: An attempt to downplay the problems of Islamophobia in Canada.”

CJPME, for its part, launched the “I Remember January 29” campaign in October, 2018 with the Canadian Muslim Forum. This campaign calls on the government to designate January 29th as a “National Day of Remembrance and Action on Islamophobia, and other forms of religious discrimination,” as per Recommendation #30 from the Parliamentary Heritage Committee’s M-103 Report. Unlike Scott Reid’s motion, this call for a Day of Remembrance and Action has community support from hundreds of Canadian organizations, academics, and municipalities as well as over 7,000 Canadian individuals who have signed onto the campaign. CJPME believes that any commemoration of January 29th should focus on the victims of the Quebec City Mosque attack – gunned down in their place of worship – and the odious bigotry which motivated the attack.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from CJPME

Dr. Tom Dooley, whose best-selling book “Deliver Us From Evil” helped create a favorable climate of opinion for U.S. intervention in South Vietnam, has long been linked to legendary CIA officer Edward G. Lansdale and his black operations in Vietnam between 1954 and 1955. But the real story about Dooley’s influential book, which has finally emerged from more recent scholarly research, is that it was engineered by an official of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Command, Capt. William Lederer.

Lederer is best known as the co-author, with Eugene Burdick, of the 1958 novel “The Ugly American,” which was turned into a 1963 movie starring Marlon Brando. Far more important, however, is the fact that from 1951 through 1957 Capt. Lederer was on the staff of the commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet (CINCPAC), Adm. Felix Stump.

The Pacific Command was intensely interested in Dooley, because the U.S. Navy had the greatest stake of all the military services in the outcome of the conflict between the communists and U.S.-backed anti-communist regimes in Vietnam and China during the mid-1950s. And the Pacific Command was directly involved in the military planning for war in both cases.

Adm. Arthur Radford, the former CINCPAC and then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led the senior officials pressing President Dwight D. Eisenhower to approve a massive U.S. airstrike against the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu in April 1954. And between 1954 and 1955, Adm. Stump called for increasing the size of the Nationalist Chinese raids on the Chinese mainland from offshore islands. He also pushed for a U.S. attack on the mainland, including the use of nuclear weapons, if necessary, to defend those same offshore islands.

The key tactic of the Lansdale team was to print a series of “black propaganda” leaflets—designed to appear as though they came from the Viet Minh—to frighten residents of the North into leaving for South Vietnam. The most dramatic such deception involved spreading the rumor that the U.S. military was going to bomb Hanoi, a story that was further promoted by leaflets showing concentric circles of destruction of the city by an atomic bomb.

Lt. Tom Dooley, a young Irish Catholic Navy doctor, was “loaned” by the U.S. Navy to Lansdale for the operation, although Dooley apparently thought the team’s function was to gather intelligence. Dooley’s job was ostensibly to manage medical supplies needed for the movement of North Vietnamese to the South, but in fact Dooley functioned as the team’s propagandist, briefing visiting news media and sending out out reports through Catholic media in the United States that supported the CIA’s anti-Viet Minh mission.

Lederer quickly recognized Dooley as a potentially valuable propaganda asset because of his connection with Vietnamese Catholics and his penchant for telling tales of Viet Minh atrocities. It was Lederer who suggested that Dooley write a book about his experiences with North Vietnamese refugees who wanted to move to the South. The Navy gave him a leave of absence to write it, and Lederer became Dooley’s handler for the project. Dooley was a charismatic public speaker but needed Lederer’s help with writing. Lederer also introduced Dooley to Reader’s Digest—by far the most popular magazine in America, with 20 million readers. Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke officially embraced the book and even wrote the introduction to it.

Reader’s Digest published a highly condensed 27-page version of the book in its April 1956 edition, and Farrar, Straus and Cudahy immediately published the full-length version. It became a runaway bestseller, going through twelve printings.

The constantly reiterated theme of Dooley’s book “Deliver Us From Evil” was that the Ho Chi Minh government was determined to suppress the Catholic faith in Vietnam and used torture and other atrocities to terrorize Catholics into submission. That was a grotesque distortion of actual Viet Minh policy. The Ho Chi Minh government had worked hard from the beginning of the war to ensure that there was no interference with Catholics’ exercise of their faith, even establishing severe legal penalties on any infringement of that freedom.

But Dooley’s book was full of lurid descriptions of North Vietnamese Communist atrocities against Catholics that Dooley claimed to have known about from treating the victims. It told of the Viet Minh having partially torn off the ears of several teenagers with pliers and left them dangling—supposedly as punishment for their having listened to the Lord’s Prayer.

And he described the Viet Minh taking seven youths out of their classroom and forcing wooden chopsticks through their eardrums. The children, he wrote, had been accused of “treason” for having attended a religious class at night. As for the teacher, Dooley claimed the Viet Minh had used pliers to pull out his tongue, as punishment for having taught the religious class.

But it was widely recognized within the U.S. government that these stories  were false. Six U.S. Information Agency officials who had been in North Vietnam during that period, as well as former Navy corpsmen who had worked in the Haiphong camp with Dooley, all said they had never heard of any such events. And in 1992 Lederer himself, who had made 25 fact-finding trips to Vietnam since 1951, told an interviewer, “[T]hose things never happened. … I traveled all over the country and never saw anything like them.”

Many years later, in an interview with scholar Edward Palm, Lederer disclaimed any significant influence on the content or tone of Dooley’s book, even though Dooley had credited Lederer with helping put the book in final form. Lederer also told Palm he didn’t remember any such stories appearing in the first draft of the book he read.

But Palm, who obtained the first draft of the manuscript from Dooley’s papers, confirmed to this writer that the first draft did contain those stories of atrocities. And Palm’s monograph documented the fact that the last draft chapter was dated the end of July 1955 and that communications from both men at the time indicated that Lederer had met repeatedly with Dooley during June and July to help him finish the draft.

Palm also quoted from Dooley’s first draft to show that it concluded with a call for Americans to be ready for a U.S. war against communism. If negotiations with the Soviet Union failed to bring “lasting peace,” Dooley’s draft warned, “Communism will have to be fought with arms … it must be annihilated….”  Dooley concluded, “[T]here can be no concessions, no compromise and no coexistence.”

Palm pointed out that the published version of the book dropped that rabidly warlike rhetoric and instead introduced a new character named “Ensign Potts” to represent the view that America must be ready to fight a war to destroy communism. The role of the “Potts” character was to be converted to Dooley’s argument that service to the ordinary Vietnamese would be the most effective way to prevail in the Cold War—after Dooley’s tearful recounting of the story of the Viet Minh puncturing the Catholic youths’ ears with chopsticks, reduced “Potts” to tears as well.

Lederer and Burdick popularized the idea that personal kindness to the people of Southeast Asia from American could help defeat Communism in “The Ugly American” and that same idea infused Lederer’s own March  1955 Reader’s Digest article on the interactions between U.S. sailors and Vietnamese aboard a U.S. Navy ship. Lederer told Palm in a 1996 interview that he had suggested that Dooley model his book on that article.

Palm wrote that he didn’t believes Lederer’s personal preference was to promote a U.S. war in Vietnam. But Lederer had obviously approved Dooley’s portrayal of the Vietnamese Communists as an alien horde terrorizing the Catholics. Catholics were the fastest-growing religious denomination in America from 1940 to 1960, during which time their numbers doubled, and Dooley’s message was an obvious way of mobilizing American Catholics to support Adm. Stump and the Navy’s agenda for Vietnam.

Marine Lt. Col. William Corson, who was detailed to the CIA during much of his career and knew Dooley during the writing of his book, told fellow former Marine Edward Palm in a 1997 telephone interview, “Dooley was programmed toward  a particular end.” He did not say specifically what that end was, but he appeared to mean building popular support for U.S. intervention in Vietnam.

While on a nationwide book tour, Dooley was one of the featured speakers at the first conference of The American Friends of Vietnam—later known as the “Vietnam Lobby”—in Washington, D.C., on June 1, 1956. The meeting was held at a crucial moment in U.S. Vietnam policy. Eisenhower was still supporting the election for a government throughout Vietnam as called for by the 1954 Geneva Agreement, with strict conditions for a free vote. Meanwhile, hardliners in the administration were pushing for opposing that election outright on the ground that Ho Chi Minh would certainly win it, regardless of conditions.

Dooley’s contribution was to describe “Communism” as an “evil, driving, malicious ogre” and recount the “hideous atrocities that we witnessed in our camps every single day.” And he retold the story of the Viet Minh punishing the schoolchildren by puncturing their eardrums.

A few weeks after the meeting, Eisenhower reversed his previous position of supporting the all-Vietnamese Vietnamese, opening the path to deeper U.S. political and military intervention in Vietnam.

Dooley had just learned that his secret life as a gay man in the Navy had been discovered by Naval intelligence, and he was forced to quietly resign. At Lansdale’s suggestion, Leo Cherne of the International Rescue Committee helped Dooley establish a primitive medical clinic near the Chinese border in northern Laos. But Dooley had to agree to cooperate with CIA in Laos by allowing it to smuggle arms into the site of the clinic to eventually be distributed to local anti-Communist militiamen.

The Dooley Clinic in Laos helped make him a hugely popular celebrity, with two more best-selling books, feature stories in popular magazines and network television appearances. By the time Dooley died of cancer in 1961, a Gallup Poll found that Americans viewed him as the third most admired person in the world, after Eisenhower and the pope. But his role in the larger tragedy of U.S. war in Indochina was to serve as the instrument of a highly successful campaign by the U.S. Navy to create the first false propaganda narrative of the conflict—one that has endured for most of Dooley’s fans for decades.

But Dooley’s popularity and saintly image increased the power of his tales of Viet Minh atrocities against Catholics that represented the first major false U.S. propaganda narrative of the Vietnam conflict—one that helped build public support for the U.S. military intervention in Vietnam that began under President John F Kennedy in 1962.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist, historian and author who has covered U.S. wars and interventions in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen and Syria since 2004 and was the 2012 winner of the Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. His most recent book is “Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare” (Just World Books, 2014).

He may not be popular in Britain, but he still has shavings of appeal.  For a country that has time for Nigel Farage, pro-Brexit enthusiast and full-time hypocrite (he is a member of the European Parliament, the very same institution he detests), President Donald Trump will garner a gaggle of fans. 

One of them was not the London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, trenchant in his belief that the US president should never have been granted a state visit. 

“It’s quite clear that Theresa May was premature in making this invitation, and it’s backfired on her.”

But Trump’s tendency to unhinge his critics is not so much levelling as lowering: Khan’s coarse remarks a day before Trump arrived were timed to create a Twitter scene.   

Trump, he wrote spitefully in The Guardian, was leading a push from the right “threatening our hard-won rights and freedoms and the values that have defined our liberal, democratic societies for more than seventy years.”  The UK had to stop “appeasing” (that Munich analogy again) dictatorial tendencies.  (Oblivious, is Khan, to the illustrious record Britain has in providing receptions and banquets for the blood thirsty and authoritarian.)

This semi-literate historical overview had the desired result.  Just prior to landing in London, Trump tweeted that Khan “who by all accounts has done a terrible job as Mayor of London, has been foolishly ‘hasty’ to the visiting President of the United States, by far the most important ally of the United Kingdom.”  For good measure, Trump insisted that the mayor was “a stone cold loser who should focus on crime in London, not me…”

The mood was set, and the presence of the president overseeing Britain’s increasingly feral political scene reminded The New York Times of boardroom takes of The Apprentice (reality television, again) though it came uncomfortably close to an evaluation of the “rear of the year” or a wet t-shirt competition of the fugglies.  This was aided by the absence of a one-to-one meeting between Trump and the soon to depart Theresa May, there being no preliminary meeting in Downing Street. 

Trump felt at home, sizing up candidates to succeed May as British prime minister.  While he could muster choice words to describe Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove barely registered. “Would do a good job, Jeremy?  Tell me.”

A few candidates did their best to impress, a spectacle that did, at points, verge on the grotesque.

The Conservative Party is deliriously panicked: Farage’s Brexit Party is proving so threatening its pushing the old guard to acts of pure desperation.  This is riveting, if troubling stuff for political watchers such as Tim Bale of Queen Mary, University of London. 

“A lot of the constraints have come off British politics.  Whether they’ve come off permanently, or whether it’s because the Conservative Party is at panic stations, is something only time can tell.”

Foreign secretary Hunt was particularly keen to show his wet shirt to the ogling Trump.  He no doubt felt he had to, given that Johnson had already been praised as a person who “would do a very good job” as British prime minister. To repay Trump for his acknowledgment, Hunt dismissed the views of the London mayor. 

“I agree with [Trump] that it is totally inappropriate for the Labour party to be boycotting this incredibly important visit.  This is the president of the United States.” 

The situation with Johnson cannot but give some amusement.  Trump, rather memorably, had been a subscriber to the theory that parts of London had become a dystopian nightmare replete with psychotic, murderous residents of the swarthy persuasion.  Johnson, for all his faults, was happy to give Trump a nice slice of demurral on his city when mayor.  He also opined that Trump was “clearly out of his mind” in making the now infamous suggestion on December 7, 2015 for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”   But politics is an odd stew, throwing together a strange mix of ingredients.  For his part, Johnson declined an invitation to see Trump in person, preferring the comforting distance of a 20-minute phone call.   

Away from rear of the year proceedings were those who had consciously boycotted any event associated with Trump.  Prince William and Prince Harry preferred to avoid a photo opportunity with the president at Buckingham Palace.  Jeremy Corbyn of the Labour Party preferred to join protests against Trump over attending the state banquet.  The act will no doubt be seen as admirable in some quarters, but hardly qualifies as those of a potential future prime minister.

“Corbyn,” noted The Independent, “has again dodged the stately bullet and had instead taken the easy way out.” 

To the echo chamber he went.

Beyond the visit, more substantive matters are going to be troubling for diplomats in the UK Foreign Office.  One of the things touted during the Tuesday press conference was the prospect of a trade agreement between a Britain unshackled from the EU, and the United States.  Trump even went so far as to press May to stay longer for the negotiations.  Not one for briefings, he ventured a suggestion: “I don’t know exactly what your timing is but, stick around, let’s do this deal.” 

The issue is fascinatingly premature: Britain, having not yet left the EU, let alone on any clear basis, faces an orbit of sheer, jangling confusion for some time to come.  In terms of numbers, the issue is also stark: the UK has the EU to thank for half of its trade; the United States comes in at 14.7 percent.   

The troubling feature of any free trade proposal coming out of the Trump administration will be its rapacity, or, as Trump likes to call it, “phenomenal” scope.  Nothing will be exempt.  Agriculture and health are two fields of contention.  Access for US exports will entail easing limitations on animal feed with antibiotics and genetically modified crops.  More headaches, and bumps, await the relationship between troubled Britannia and groping Uncle Sam.   

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc. 

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

Washington-led Empire is a global gangster state[1]. It corrupts all organizations that stand in its way, including supposedly “non-governmental” agencies[2].

These agencies are government and/or foundation-funded. They are not neutral.  They serve and advance Empire’s crimes. They fabricate consent by propagating fake narratives, including the attribution of fake atrocity stories to target nations and their leadership. Amnesty International is one such agency. Amnesty’s statistics regarding Coalition bombing campaigns and civilian deaths provide a window into the corruption.

When the U.S.-led Coalition claimed that coalition air strikes in Syria and Iraq killed 1,302 civilians between August 2014 and the end of April 2019[3], we (including Amnesty) had every reason to be incredulous.

Ali al-Bayati, a member of Iraq’s Office of the High Commission for Human Rights claims, for example, that the coalition killed 11,800 civilians, including 2,300 children, and 1,130 women, in addition to 8,000 wounded by shelling [4] during the same period.

These figures are reinforced by the fact that the coalition carried out about 20,000 airstrikes between August 8, 2014 and July 31, 2015, and that they targeted 3,262 “ISIS buildings” which, according to Prof. Chossudovsky, were in fact Iraqi and Syrian civilian infrastructure.[5]

But Amnesty International/Air Wars’ “counter argument” that 1,600[6] civilians were killed in the 2017 Raqqa offensive  alone — that reportedly destroyed 80% of the city, and therefore constituted carpet bombing — is also dubious, first, because these statistics are not consistent with a four month long carpet bombing campaign, and second, because Amnesty International has lost its legitimacy as a reliable source of independent research.

#Raqqa has largely been reduced to rubble by US airstrike campaign. Scores of civilians, many of whom are children, have been injured. #Amaq pic.twitter.com/jl1UFnmIac

— Chris Tomson (@TheDaneChris) February 21, 2017

See note 7

Amnesty International failed when it fabricated fake narratives about Syria’s Saydnaya prison[8].

Amnesty failed when it falsely accused Syria’s highest Sunni religious leader, Grand Mufti Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun of authorizing the execution of ordinary citizens.

Amnesty failed when it falsely accused the Syrian government of carrying out a policy of extermination against its own people.

Amnesty failed when it gave the false impression that peaceful Syrian protestors were being imprisoned and executed.

Amnesty failed when it cited the Caesar photographs[9] hoax as “evidence”.

Amnesty fails when it makes accusations against Syria and ignores the Supreme International War Crimes committed by the West and its terrorist proxies[10].

Finally, Amnesty failed when it created false narratives to fabricate consent for Empire’s war crimes against Afghanistan[11], Iraq[12], Libya[13], and beyond.

Amnesty’s vision of “a world in which every person enjoys all of the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights instruments[14]” is clearly a hoax.

Shame!

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017.

Notes

[1] Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, “Terrorism with a “Human Face”: The History of America’s Death Squads

Death Squads in Iraq and Syria. The Historical Roots of US-NATO’s Covert War on Syria.” Global Research. 4 January, 2013. 14 July, 2016. (https://www.globalresearch.ca/terrorism-with-a-human-face-the-history-of-americas-death-squads/5317564) Accessed 4 June, 2019.

[2] Mark Taliano, “List of Bogus NGOs Which Are CIA/Neocon Fronts Paid to Lie to a Gullible Media.” American Herald Tribune. 1 February, 2019. (https://russia-insider.com/en/mainstream-media-corrupt-core/ri12420) Accessed 4 June, 2019.

[3] Amnesty International and Donatella Rovera, “US-led Coalition Admission of 1,300 Civilian Deaths in Iraq and Syria.” Amnesty International, 31 May, 2019. Global Research, 1 June, 2019. (https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-led-coalition-admission-1300-civilian-deaths-iraq-syria/5679226) Accessed 4 June, 2019.

[4] Alkhaleejonline.net, 20 ألفمدنيضحاياقصفالتحالفالدوليفيالعراقوسوريا,  1

16 February, 2019.

(https://alkhaleejonline.net/%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%A9/20-%D8%A3%D9%84%D9%81-%D9%85%D8%AF%D9%86%D9%8A-%D8%B6%D8%AD%D8%A7%D9%8A%D8%A7-%D9%82%D8%B5%D9%81-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA%D8%AD%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%81-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AF%D9%88%D9%84%D9%8A-%D9%81%D9%8A-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B9%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%82-%D9%88%D8%B3%D9%88%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%A7?fbclid=IwAR0S8zR1r6ed2i9c_uW7rtxm7yifeEcGP_m9MmpKy3lxhnwEQuapPEg8-UU) Accessed 4 June, 2019.

[5] Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, “Obama’s ‘Fake War’ against the Islamic State (ISIS). The Islamic State is Protected by the US and its Allies.” Global Research, 23 August, 2015, 23 February, 2015. (https://www.globalresearch.ca/obamas-fake-war-against-the-islamic-state-isis-the-islamic-state-is-protected-by-the-us-and-its-allies/5432163) Accessed 5 June, 2019.

[6] Air Wars, “U.S. coalition forces in Iraq and Syria.” June, 2019. (https://airwars.org/conflict-ar/coalition-in-iraq-and-syria-arabic/?fbclid=IwAR2fuDhJMG7PrTCNcrvN5gooGuwMSbO_NejAN1ECMcjlMoL6_H7a0_uO2mU) Accessed 4 June, 2019.

[7] Chris Tomson and Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, “Graphic Video: Raqqa City Reduced to Rubble by US Airstrikes, Scores of Residents Killed.” Global Research 24 February 2017, Al Masdar News, 21 February, 2017. (https://www.globalresearch.ca/graphic-video-raqqa-city-reduced-to-rubble-by-us-airstrikes-scores-of-residents-killed/5576434) Accessed 5 June, 2019.

[8] Rick Sterling, “Amnesty International’s ‘Kangaroo Report’ on Human Rights in Syria.” Global Research, 17 May, 2019. (https://www.globalresearch.ca/amnesty-internationals-kangaroo-report-on-human-rights-in-syria/5574195) Accessed 17 May, 2019.

[9] Rick Sterling, “The Caesar Photo Fraud That Undermined Syrian Negotiations. ‘A Pattern of Sensational But Untrue Reports That Lead to Public Acceptance of Western Military Intervention’ “ Dissident Voice, 3 March, 2018. Global Research, 7 March, 2018. (https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-caesar-photo-fraud-that-undermined-syrian-negotiations-a-pattern-of-sensational-but-untrue-reports-that-lead-to-public-acceptance-of-western-military-intervention/5512573) Accessed 4 June, 2019.

[10] Mark Taliano, “Syria’s Children: ‘Condemned to Live’, Shackled by the Scars of US-NATO Terrorism.” Global Research, marktaliano.net. 22 April, 2018. (https://www.marktaliano.net/syrias-children-condemned-to-live-shackled-by-the-scars-of-us-nato-terrorism/) Accessed 4 June, 2019.

[11] Prof. Tim Anderson, “Afghanistan: Amnesty International lauds war and occupation as ‘progress’ for women.” Links, international journal of socialist renewal. 20 May, 2012. (http://links.org.au/node/2876) Accessed 4 June, 2019.

[12] Felicity Arbuthnot,“Amnesty International: Western instrument of war propaganda.” Voltaire Network. 8 August, 2012. (https://www.voltairenet.org/article175324.html) Accessed 4 June, 2012.

[13] www.thehumanitarianwar.com/Global Research TV, “LIBYA Amnesty International confessing.” 18 January, 2012. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RnxJ6TvFZ0&feature=youtu.be) Accessed 4 June, 2019.

[14] AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL’S STATUTE, (https://www.amnesty.org/en/about-us/how-were-run/amnesty-internationals-statute/) Accessed 4 June, 2019.

Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.

Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes  the mainstream media narratives on Syria. 

Voices from Syria 

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-1-6

Author: Mark Taliano

Year: 2017

Pages: 128 (Expanded edition: 1 new chapter)

List Price: $17.95

Special Price: $9.95 

Click to order

“Narcotic: drug that produces analgesia (pain relief), narcosis (state of stupor or sleep), and addiction (physical dependence on the drug). In some people narcotics also produce euphoria (a feeling of great elation).”

Introduction

Romanticism is a philosophical movement of the nineteenth century which had a profound influence on music which can still be seen right up to today. Its main characteristics in music are the emphasis on the personal, dramatic contrasts, emotional excess, a focus on the nocturnal, the ghostly and the frightful, spontaneity, and extreme subjectivism. Romanticism in culture implied a turning inward and encouraged introspection. As Hegel wrote:

“The entire content [of romantic art] is therefore concentrated on the inner life of the spirit”.

Romanticist-influenced music increased its audience dramatically from the early theatres of the nineteenth century to the mass pop concerts of the modern era. Romanticism changed music from being a progressive force in society to being a narcotic and self indulgent individualist experience. In modern times it has been industrialised and commercialised and sells individualism and political impotence to the very people who turn to it for solace from desperation in a highly alienated society.

The most regrettable aspect of this alienation is that music has become more and more distant from people’s movements for progressive change. In the past, progressive music, i.e. music which was in tune with the history of people’s political struggles, tended to come from the people themselves, in the form of ballads or music from progressive composers and lyricists. With the commercialising of the pop music industry in the twentieth century, music moved from something to be consumed on a mass basis rather than produced by people on a local basis – by writing, playing or singing, as it was in the past with balladeers, choirs and progressive composers.

Here we will look at the influence of Romanticism on music from the Classical period in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through to the development of the pop music industry in the twentieth century. Also examined will be composers and singers who resisted the pressure of the Romantic influence and wrote and played music that was rooted in hardship and struggle and an awareness of international issues and crises as they affected the ordinary people of those countries.

Classical Music – ‘structures should be well-founded’

While classical music in general has a broad meaning the Classical period was an era of classical music between roughly 1730 and 1820. Enlightenment respect for the politics, aesthetics and philosophy of classical antiquity (Classicism) combined with the development of ‘natural philosophy’ – the precursor of the natural sciences – had a profound effect on music: “Newton’s physics was taken as a paradigm: structures should be well-founded in axioms and be both well-articulated and orderly.” The effect of Enlightenment ideas on Classical  music was to mark a change to a lighter, clearer texture compared with the Baroque music that came before it.

Thus the findings in science broadly affected or influenced culture in general. At the same time technical developments in musical instruments and the increase in size and standardisation of orchestras changed the way music was played. The major composers of this time were Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Joseph Haydn, Christoph Willibald Gluck, Johann Christian Bach, Luigi Boccherini, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Muzio Clementi, Antonio Salieri, and Johann Nepomuk Hummel.

Joseph Haydn Playing Quartets

Romantic Music – ‘more explicitly expressive and programmatic’

Romanticism originated at the end to the 18th century mainly as a reaction to the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution which were perceived to be using science to destroy nature and man’s traditional way of life. The Romantic emphasis on feeling was in direct contrast with Enlightenment ideas of progress with reason and science being the primary source of knowledge. The philosophers and scientists of the Enlightenment had desired to move away from the Feudalism and Scholasticism of the religiously dominated Middle Ages. Unfortunately, the Romantic artists, composers and poets took a new interest in aspects of medievalism that the Enlightenment philosophers had tried to defeat. Enlightenment ideas were also taken up by the new elites who used science in the exploititive ways so hated by the Romantics.

Unlike Deep Purple’s legendary ‘Smoke on the Water’ – “We all came out to Montreux, on the Lake Geneva shoreline”, the 67th Bilderberg group meetings produced no fire and no smoke at the luxurious Fairmont Le Montreux Palace Hotel.

The 130 elite guests had a jolly good – and theoretically quiet – time at the self-billed “informal discussion forum concerning major issues”. As usual, at least two-thirds were European decision-makers, with the rest coming from North America.

The fact that a few major players in this Atlanticist Valhalla are closely associated with or directly interfering with the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel – the central bank of central banks – is of course just a minor detail.

The major issue discussed this year was “A Stable Strategic Order”, a lofty endeavor that can be interpreted either as the making of a New World Order or just a benign effort by selfless elites to guide mankind to enlightenment.

Other items of discussion were way more pragmatic – from “The Future of Capitalism”, to “Russia”, “China”, “Weaponizing Social Media”, “Brexit”, “What’s Next for Europe”, “Ethics of Artificial Intelligence” and last but not least, “Climate Change”.

Disciples of Antisthenes would argue that these items constitute precisely the nuts and bolts of the New World Order.

The chairman of Bilderberg’s steering committee, since 2012, is Henri de Castries, former CEO of AXA and the director of the Institut Montaigne, a top French think tank.

One of the key guests this year was Clement Beaune, the European and G20 counselor to French President Emmanuel Macron.

Bilderberg prides itself for enforcing the Chatham House Rule, according to which participants are free to use all the precious information they wish because those who attend these meetings are bound to not disclose the source of any sensitive information or what exactly was said.

That helps ensure Bilderberg’s legendary secrecy – the reason for myriad conspiracy theories. But that does not mean that the odd secret may not be revealed.

The Castries/Beaune axis provides us with the first open secret of 2019. It was Castries at the Institut Montaigne who “invented” Macron – that perfect lab experiment of a mergers and acquisitions banker serving the establishment by posing as a progressive.

A Bilderberg source discreetly let it be known that the result of the recent European parliamentary elections was interpreted as a victory. After all, the final choice was between a neoliberal/Green alliance and Right populism; nothing to do with progressive values.

The Greens who won in Europe – contrary to the US Greens – are all humanitarian imperialists, to quote the splendid neologism coined by Belgian physicist Jean Bricmont. And they all pray on the politically correct altar. What matters, from Bilderberg’s perspective, is that the European Parliament will continue to be run by a pseudo-Left that keeps defending the destruction of the nation-state.

Just like Castries and his pupil Macron.

The derivatives clock is ticking

The great Bilderberg secret of 2019 had to do with why, suddenly, the Trump administration has decided that it wants to talk to Iran “with no preconditions”.

It all has to do with the Strait of Hormuz. Blocking the Strait could cut off oil and gas from Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and Iran – 20% of the world’s oil. There has been some debate on whether this could occur – whether the US Fifth Fleet, which is stationed nearby, could stop Tehran doing this and if Iran, which has anti-ship missiles on its territory along the northern border of the Persian Gulf, would go that far.

An American source said a series of studies hit President Trump’s desk and caused panic in Washington. These showed that in the case of the Strait of Hormuz being shut down, whatever the reason, Iran has the power to hammer the world financial system, by causing global trade in derivatives to be blown apart.

The Bank for International Settlements said last year that the “notional amount outstanding for derivatives contracts” was $542 trillion, although the gross market value was put at just $12.7 trillion. Others suggest it is $1.2 quadrillion or more.

Tehran has not voiced this “nuclear option” openly. And yet General Qasem Soleimani, head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps’ Quds Force and a Pentagon bête noire, evoked it in internal Iranian discussions. The information was duly circulated to France, Britain and Germany, the EU-3 members of the Iran nuclear deal (or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), also causing a panic.

Oil derivative specialists know well that if the flow of energy in the Gulf is blocked it could lead to the price of oil reaching $200 a barrel, or much higher over an extended period. Crashing the derivatives market would create an unprecedented global depression. Trump’s former Goldman Sachs Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin should know as much.

And Trump himself seems to have given the game away. He’s now on the record essentially saying that Iran has no strategic value to the US. According to the American source: “He really wants a face-saving way to get out of the problem his advisers Bolton and Pompeo got him into. Washington now needs a face-saving way out. Iran is not asking for meetings. The US is.”

And that brings us to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s long, non-scheduled stop in Switzerland, on the Bilderberg’s fringes, just because he’s a “big cheese and chocolate fan”, in his own words.

Yet any well-informed cuckoo clock would register he badly needed to assuage the fears of the trans-Atlantic elites, apart from his behind-closed-doors meetings with the Swiss, who are representing Iran in communications with Washington. After weeks of ominous threats to Iran, the US said “no preconditions” would be set on talks with Tehran, and this was issued from Swiss soil.

China draws its lines in the sand

Bilderberg could not escape discussing China. Geo-poetic justice rules that virtually at the same time, China was delivering a powerful message – to East and West – at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore.

The Shangri-La dialogue is Asia’s top annual security forum, and unlike Bilderberg, held like clockwork at the same hotel in Singapore’s Orchard Road. As much as Bilderberg, Shangri-La discusses “relevant security issues”.

A case can be made that Bilderberg frames the discussions as in the recent cover story of a French weekly, owned by a Macron-friendly oligarch, titled “When Europe Ruled the World”. Shangri-La instead discusses the near future – when China may be actually ruling the world.

Beijing sent a top-of-the-line delegation to this year’s forum, led by Defense Minister General Wei Fenghe. And on Sunday, General Wei laid down China’s unmistakable red lines; a stern warning to “external forces” dreaming of independence for Taiwan, and the “legitimate right” for Beijing to expand man-made islands in the South China Sea.

By then everyone had forgotten what Acting US Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan had said the day before, accusing Huawei to be too close to Beijing and posing a security risk to the “international community”.

General Wei also found time to rip Shanahan to shreds.

“Huawei is a private company, not a military company… Just because the head of Huawei used to serve in the army, does not mean his company is a part of the military. That doesn’t make sense.”

Shangri-La is at least transparent. As for Bilderberg, there won’t be any leaks on what the Masters of the Universe told Western elites about the profitability of pursuing the war on terror; the drive toward total digitalization of cash; total rule of genetically modified organisms; and how climate change will be weaponized.

At least the Pentagon has made no secret, even before Shangri-La, that Russia and China must be contained at all costs – and the European vassals must toe the line.

Henry Kissinger was a 2019 Bilderberg participant. Rumors that he spent all his time breathlessly plugging his “reverse Nixon” – seduce Russia to contain China – may be vastly overstated.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

The Kurdish separatist militia SDF and its affiliates from PYD and Asayish are burning wheat fields in the territories under their occupation northeast of Syria.

Some of the most fertile lands as well as territories rich with oil are under the occupation of the US-sponsored separatist SDF militia. The US and its illegal International Coalition of evil states are preventing the Syrian state from restoring the country from terrorists and separatists.

A video widely spread on social media shows a vehicle of the Kurdish Asayish thugs, the security arm of the PYD and SDF Kurdish militia, driving through a wheat field in the city of Qamishli northeast of the country with strong flames of fire coming from it to burn out the entire field.

Two pick-up trucks seen in the video, one of the vehicles has reportedly caught fire itself, as per some of the local activists.

Farmers who refuse to hand over their wheat to the criminals get detained, tortured, and their fields get torched by these thugs.

Kurdish separatist militias are trying to carve out a large part of Syria to establish their Israel-style entity, similar to what their brethren did under the US occupation of Iraq. The land they’re claiming belongs to the people whose grandfathers hosted the Kurd refugees who were fleeing the oppression of the Ottomans, and this is how their grandchildren are paying back.

Many US-linked news sites have been falsely claiming that the Syrian state is behind these heinous acts until the evidence indicting their own-grown terrorists is overwhelming and spreading thanks to brave activists from the region.

Syria, prior to the current  War Of Terror waged by the US and its allies including armies of terror, used to be not only self-sufficient in agriculture produce, especially wheat, but also was exporting the surplus.

Burning the wheat fields is very much a US state policy with Turkey and Israel working as the US’s lackey in our region, where they destroy local fields then provide their poisonous US-produced GMO grown wheat and maize [seeds] . Syria has banned growing and importing all sorts of GMO products in 2012 making sure the country’s population does not get harmed by these products.

Locals have been protesting the ill-treatment and heinous acts against them by the SDF militia and its affiliates east of the Euphrates in Der Ezzor, Raqqa, and Hassakah provinces. Kurdish Asayish has also ambushed and slaughtered 13 Syrian security personnel in Qamishli last September to prevent the Syrian state from protecting its citizens and farmers under the SDF/US occupation.

The separatist Kurds have worked very efficiently as Trojan horses luring in Turkey into Syria in the northwest of the country and still working on luring it in the northeast of the country, also have been working relentlessly to serve the USA and Israel as much as they could in return for recognizing them as a self-governing entity on stolen Syrian land, especially after the heavy western propaganda campaign showing them as liberating the areas from ISIS when on the ground it was merely a flag-changing act for the media under the US supervision.

While the US is continuing its destructive War Of Terror against Syria, including Economic Terrorism against our country, US sponsored forces on the ground are starving our people in all the areas they have penetrated: Rukban Concentration Camp in Tanf, Al-Hol concentration camp in Hasakah, and all the land east of the Euphrates.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from Syria News

Dear Readers,

This is a personal message. Please read carefully.

When Global Research was born in September 2001, we were convinced that “Freedom of Expression” and “The Battle of Ideas” would contribute to reversing the tide of war, while also restoring the foundations of social democracy.

Our hope and belief was that “the Big Lie” would one day be crushed by the undeniable weight of the Truth.

We still hold on to this hope.

Independent media is under attack, the search engines want to squeeze us out. A witch-hunt is being waged against independent journalists, renowned academics and scientists. Despite the wide variety of topics covered on our site by all manner of experts and academics from the world over, there is a relentless campaign against us.

Our financial situation is currently precarious. Without some major support from our readers, our future remains uncertain and the mainstream media lies rise to the top, eventually relegating any voice of dissent to the shadows.

The alternative is a world without independent voices, brought to you by corporate sponsors and hidden agendas. We are not coopted. We are not a government mouthpiece. Global Research is committed to “Freedom of Expression”, a fundamental right which is being snuffed out all over the globe.

With your help, we can continue to fight for truth to prevail, as we have always done.

When The Lie Becomes the Truth, there is no moving backwards.

Thank you for your support,

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, June 5, 2019

The decision not to invite President Putin to attend the 75th D-Day commemoration event was a civilizational provocation aimed at dividing the European Allies during World War II and reinforcing the historically revised notion that the Soviet Union was an “accidental ally” during the conflict.

Over a dozen world leaders assembled on Wednesday in the British city of Portsmouth to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Allied D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied Western Europe, which was an event of historical importance for all the continent’s people and therefore part of their shared memory. That’s why even the leaders of Poland and Slovakia, whose countries were liberated by the Red Army and not by the forces that took part in D-Day, were invited to attend, though the decision to not invite President Putin was a civilizational provocation of epic proportions. There’s been an ongoing trend for quite a while of historically revising the events of World War II in order to minimize the Soviet Union’s enormous contribution to defeating fascism, which when taken to its natural conclusion aims to portray the USSR as an “accidental ally” during the conflict and even a one-time “aggressor state” that supposedly only joined the Allies after Hitler betrayed Stalin during Operation Barbarossa.

In reality, however, the Soviet Union was imploring its European counterparts to take the rising Nazi threat seriously all throughout the 1930s but was repeatedly rebuffed out of the paranoid fear that the USSR’s warnings were just a “conspiracy theory” designed to get them to collectively destroy the only nation capable standing in the way of the “communist domination of Europe”. The subsequent Old Cold War that settled over the continent almost immediately after the Nazis were defeated was manipulated by the Western governments in such a way as to blame the Soviet Union and retroactively “vindicate” their decision not to team up with it against Hitler a decade prior before tens of millions of people were slaughtered by the fascist war machine. Instead of disappearing after the end of the Old Cold War, this narrative continued into the present and was actually “reinforced” by the new notion that Stalin was supposedly just as bad as Hitler.

Proponents of this interpretation always point to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in alleging that the USSR was a one-time “aggressor state” that only “accidentally” joined the Allies after Hitler’s betrayal. This simplistic point, however, completely ignores the fact that none other than Stalin himself tried to assemble a continental coalition against the fascist threat all throughout the 1930s and only cut a pragmatic deal with the Nazis in order to buy time for the inevitable clash that he expected to have with them sometime in the coming future, albeit one that his country was prepared to fight alone when the moment arrived after seeing how unwilling Europe hitherto was in allying with him against Hitler. Seeing as how the Soviet Union was the first one to warn about the fascist threat and suffered the most during the war, it’s nothing less than a provocation not to invite the leader of its political successor to the 75th D-Day commemorative event that’s become part of Europe’s collective memory.

The grand strategic intent behind this malicious slight wasn’t just to pettily insult President Putin and his people personally, but to divide the European Allied camp during World War II into two opposing sides that supposedly continue to confront one another to this day. The inclusion of the Polish and Slovak leaders wasn’t incidental either, as their countries were liberated by the Red Army, formed part of the Eastern Bloc for decades, but are nowadays proud NATO members. With this observation in mind, it convincingly appears as though the 75th D-Day commemorative event was meant to celebrate NATO’s formation more so than the liberation of Europe from Nazi control, which was itself mostly achieved through the sacrifices of the Soviet Union and its allied partisan fighters. In civilizational terms, the implicit message is that neither the Soviet Union nor the modern-day Russian Federation are part of European civilization but are instead something else entirely.

While Russians themselves debate whether their country is European, Asian, or Eurasian, the historic fact is that Russia has consistently played a decisive role in European history over the centuries, especially when it came to defeating the Swedes, Poles, Napoleon, and Hitler, so pretending that it isn’t a part of European civilization is very dishonest but cynically “justifies” the post-2014 military build-up of NATO’s forces (conceived in this historically revisionist paradigm as the successor of the “true” European Allied coalition) along Russia’s borders. This is extremely dangerous because it sets the stage for framing the New Cold War as a “Clash of Civilizations” between the West and Russia, thus implying that it’ll continue for the indefinite future and be seen as an existential struggle by the US and its allies, one that might radicalize its populations with Russophobia and therefore make the possibility of an eventual rapprochement all the more difficult to achieve.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

“What’s gone on this morning sends clear and dangerous signals to journalists and newsrooms across Australia.  This will chill public interest reporting.” — News Corp Australia spokesperson, The West Australian, June 4, 2019

These are dark times for journalists and publishers.  It did not seem coincidental that Annika Smethurst, a News Corp journalist and political affairs editor, would be a target of an Australian Federal Police warrant.  Chelsea Manning, courtesy of a ruling by Judge Anthony Trenga, remains in federal custody in the United States.  Julian Assange is facing decline in the maximum security abode that is Belmarsh prison in the United Kingdom.    

The story supposedly linked to the AFP warrant had been published by Smethurst on April 29, 2018. More than a year had elapsed, with little in the way of public murmurings.  Australians have, for the most part, fallen under the anaesthetist’s spell regarding intrusive, unnecessary and dangerous national security laws.  Another set of them would hardly matter. 

But since the story, titled “Let Us Spy on Aussies” broke last year, the security wallahs have been attempting to root out the source, mobilising the AFP in the process.  The account detailed information on discussions between the Home Affairs and Defence departments on the possibility of granting the Australian Signals Directorate powers to monitor the emails, bank records and text messages of Australian citizens.  Letters between Secretary of Home Affairs Mike Pezzullo and Defence Secretary Greg Moriarty featured.

When the archaic official secrets provisions of the Crimes Act 1914 (Cth) were repealed in June 29 2018, leaving way for new regulations dealing with national security information, those dealing with publishing such material felt slight relief.  A public interest defence, lodged in the National Security Legislation Amendment (Espionage and Foreign) Interference Act 2018, had been introduced, protecting those “engaged in the business of reporting news, presenting current affairs or expressing editorial or other content in news media”.  

The content in question might cover what the Act designates to be “inherently harmful information”: security classified information; information obtained by, or made by or on behalf of, a domestic intelligence agency or a foreign intelligence agency in connection with the agency’s functions; or information on “the operations, capabilities or technologies of, or methods or sources used by, a domestic or foreign law enforcement agency.” 

It always pays, when reading such sections, to consider the exceptions.  Conduct deemed a contravention of provisions regarding intelligence sources (the publication of names or identity of staff, for instance), does not satisfy the test, nor conduct deemed to assist, directly or indirectly, “a foreign intelligence agency or a foreign military organisation.”  Logical, you might say. 

The ineffectual nature of those provisions is borne out by how narrow the protection is. The Law Council’s efforts to convince the federal government to extend the public interest defence to suppliers of the information was rejected, leaving the way open for such cases as Smethurst’s: spare the journalist but attack the source.  According to Law Council president Arthur Moses, the protection is shabby, a mere “mirage because it does not cover a journalist’s source.”

The other unspoken and unscripted assumption is how anaemic public interest defences work in Australian law.  Its operation starts from a reverse premise from US analogues, privileging the necessity of ignorance against the dangers of revelation.  The government keeps you ignorant for your own good; material published might be inimical to the public interest, but that “interest” is always that of the state, not the general citizenry.

So we come to the morning of June 4, with Smethurst readying to leave for work, only to witness Australian Federal Police bearing down heavily with a warrant.  A statement from the AFP subsequently confirmed that it had “executed a search warrant at a residence in the ACT suburb of Kingston today (4 June 2019)” on a matter relating “to an investigation into the alleged unauthorised disclosure of national security information that was referred to the AFP.”  The AFP “will allege the unauthorised disclosure of these specific documents undermines Australia’s security.” 

The gravity of the allegations was affirmed in an update:

“This warrant relates to the alleged publishing of information classified as an official secret, which is an extremely serious matter with the potential to undermine Australia’s national security.”

The incident in Canberra proved catching.  Hours after the AFP’s move on Smethurst, radio 2GB Drive presenter and Sky News contributor Ben Fordham revealed that he had also been the subject of an investigation after discussing the attempt of six asylum seeker boats to reach Australia.  The story piqued the interest of a Department of Home Affairs official, who proceeded to scold Fordham’s producer for discussing “highly confidential” material.  “In other words,” explained the broadcaster bluntly, “we weren’t supposed to know about it.” 

In the course of Wednesday morning, with no settling of dust in order, a second raid by the AFP was executed against the Sydney offices of the national broadcaster, the ABC. Those named in the warrant – investigative journalists Dan Oakes and Sam Clark, along with ABC director of news Gaven Morris – were linked to The Afghan Files, a set of ghoulish stories in 2017 revealing allegations of unlawful killings by Australian special forces in Afghanistan.  Australia’s national security state has gotten very busy indeed.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, when pressed about Smethurst’s case, was untroubled.  Having played the role of fatherly minder of the Australian nation, he was not going to let any alleged breach of security go by.  Currently on a visit to the United Kingdom, he expressed little concern about the morning raid on a journalist’s home: “it never troubles me that our laws are being upheld.”

While News Corp has its demonic familiars (Rupert Murdoch’s influence hangs heavily), it was hard to disagree with the premise advanced by a spokesperson. 

“This raid demonstrates a dangerous act of intimidation towards those committed to telling uncomfortable truths.  The raid was outrageous and heavy handed.”

The Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery, voicing agreement, considered the police raid “an outrageous move that should concern all Australians who value their freedom in an open society.”  With confidence, the statement asserted that it was “in the public interest for us to know of any plan for greater powers to monitor our messages.”

Chris Merritt, legal affairs editor of The Australian, saw the raid as an ominous signal to all investigative scribblers.  “Welcome to modern Australia – a nation where police raid journalists in order to track down and punish the exposure of leaks inside the federal government”.  But such an Australia was also chugging along merrily before the raid on Smethurst’s home.  (Like the unsuspecting priest living in a dystopian surveillance state, the police finally came for them.) 

Should Assange ever make a return to the country of his birth, he is unlikely to find peace in this US satellite state, with its flimsy public disclosure and whistleblowing laws, its mirage-like protections.  Hunting publishers, journalists and their sources is de rigueur down under.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

The recent presidential elections in Ukraine ended quite unexpectedly – the comedian Volodymyr Zelensky whose bid for presidency hadn’t been taken seriously by experts and voters in early 2019, defeated Petro Poroshenko and won a landslide victory. The margin between the two candidates was stunning (72.7% to 28.2%), and the only region where Poroshenko earned the majority of votes was Lviv region. In the neighboring Ternopil and Ivano-Frankivsk regions, more than 40% of voters supported the former president.

These regions are situated in Western Ukraine with predominantly nationalist population. However, there can be another reason for the former president’s success in Lviv, Ternopil and Ivano-Frankivsk. The majority of Christians in these regions are followers of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC), and as a recently published document shows, it could have played a significant role in Poroshenko’s popularity there.

In May, Petro Poroshenko sent a letter to Sviatoslav Shevchuk, Major Archbishop of the UGCC, thanking him for his support during the electoral campaign.

“Thank you for your support during the electoral campaign for me personally and the ideas promoted by our team,” wrote Poroshenko.

At the bottom of the page, there is a phrase “Thanking you sincerely! Petro Poroshenko” personally handwritten by the former president.

What was the support given by Sviatoslav during the elections? One can only guess but it is clear that the former Ukrainian president turned to the UGCC leader for help. It’s just another example of the secular Ukrainian state’s interference in Church affairs. A year ago, Kyiv asked the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople to initiate a process of granting autocephaly to the two schismatic “Churches”: the Ukrainian Orthodox Church – Kyivan Patriarchate (UOC-KP) and Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC). The organizations united and formed the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) whose primate Metropolitan Epiphanius received the Tomos of autocephaly from Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in January 2019, a couple of months before the elections. In his speeches, Bartholomew stressed that it was Poroshenko who significantly contributed to the process of creating an independent Ukrainian Church (besides the Ukrainian Orthodox church – Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP) which, unlike the newly established UOC, is recognized by the Orthodox world). This, however, didn’t become an advantage that helped Poroshenko to win the elections.

Poroshenko’s presidency will always be a painful thing for the Orthodox believers in Ukraine to remember. Churches across the whole country are being seized and desecrated by nationalists, the state see the faithful as a tool to boost its popularity, and the Ukrainian faithful have become puppets in a geopolitical game started by Poroshenko and Patriarch Bartholomew (some Greek authors already predicted this in 2018).

What can the elected president Zelensky do in this situation? Will he continue implementing Poroshenko’s policy or become a true leader who cares for his nation? Time will show…

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from UNIAN

The current “trade war” owes its origins to the US’ failed Tiananmen Square Color Revolution that convinced the Chinese authorities that their late-Old Cold War-era American “allies” couldn’t be trusted, which in turn inspired the Communist Party to use the US’ own international trade rules against it in the emerging era of globalization in order to eventually surpass their new “frenemy”.

There’s been a lot of hype in the international media this year commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square events, which are portrayed in the West as a “brave student-led democratic uprising” that was “brutally suppressed” by the “tyrannical Chinese communist regime”. The narrative is that thousands of students were peacefully protesting for “greater rights and freedoms” just like their counterparts had begun to do by that year in practically every socialist country worldwide, but the authorities “felt threatened” by this challenge to their rule and therefore ordered the military to “savagely kill all the demonstrators”. The infamous photo of a lone protester standing in front of a column of tanks mythologized this version of events, but the problem is that the storyline that’s now taken for granted worldwide isn’t all that true.

There’s no doubt that there were massive student-led demonstrations taking place in Beijing throughout the first part of 1989, but a leaked US diplomatic cable from the time released by Wikileaks in 2011 and first published by the UK’s Daily Telegraph proves that the military didn’t “massacre” the protesters like the rest of the world has been misled to believe.

The source also recounts how a Chilean diplomat confirmed that the majority of the armed forces that intervened in the square actually weren’t “armed” at all, at least not in the sense of having firearms, because he reported that they were mostly only equipped with standard anti-riot gear like truncheons and wooden clubs. Some people were indeed killed during the clashes, but those were terrorists who attacked military forces and even killed some servicemen. It’s the deaths of those terrorists, however, which were deliberately exaggerated by the West and perverted into the narrative of “mass student killings by the military”.

A photo of Pu Zhiqiang, a student protester at Tiananmen, taken on 10 May 1989. The Chinese words written on the paper say, “We want freedom of newspapers, freedom of associations, also to support the ‘World Economic Herald’, and support those just journalists.” (Source: CC BY 2.5)

Upon closer examination, the Tiananmen Square events were actually a Color Revolution attempt just like the many others that would later mature elsewhere in the socialist world by later that year, with there being no doubt that the vast majority of the participants in every case were well-intended peaceful participants but that their political movements were exploited by foreign actors for regime change purposes that also included the use of violent provocations like the ones that took place in other parts of Beijing during the military’s intervention. The US succeeded in almost every one of its attempts to overthrow socialist governments from within through this cutting-edge Hybrid War strategy, except of course for China’s, though the very fact that the People’s Republic was targeted at all must have been somewhat surprising to it.

The Sino-Soviet split was masterfully weaponized in the most powerful geostrategic sense by Kissinger after Nixon convinced China to ally with the US against the Soviet Union in the late-Old Cold War era. In exchange for risking nuclear war between the two formerly friendly communist nations, China would receive billions of dollars of American investment for modernizing its economy, which combined with the Communist Party’s responsible management of these resources to become the world’s fastest-ever poverty-alleviation program. The Chinese therefore felt betrayed by the US’ cunning Color Revolution attempt against them and henceforth resolved to use America’s own international trade rules against it in the emerging era of globalization, which gradually led to the economic imbalance between the two Great Powers that ultimately inspired Trump’s “trade war“.

Had the US not backstabbed China, then it’s very possible that the two could have cooperated in ruling the world after the end of the Old Cold War, but that was impossible to do after the Tiananmen Square Color Revolution because the Communist Party no longer trusted the American authorities. Having committed to ensuring that it’s never betrayed again, China started taking advantage of globalization and preparing for what would later be the Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) for revolutionizing International Relations by midwifing the birth of the emerging Multipolar World Order to replace the US’ fading unipolar one that arose after the Soviet Union’s dissolution. It’s this ongoing process that the US presently seeks to sabotage by all means possible, but it probably wouldn’t even have this colossal problem on its hands to begin with had it not betrayed China in the first place.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.