The vast majority of Venezuelans oppose military intervention and US sanctions to try to remove President Nicolás Maduro from power, according to polling by the local firm Hinterlaces.
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More than eight out of ten Venezuelans oppose international intervention, both military and non-military, in their country, as well as the crippling sanctions imposed by the United States to force leftist President Nicolás Maduro out of power.
According to a study conducted in early January 2019 by the local polling firm Hinterlaces, 86 percent of Venezuelans would disagree with international military intervention. And 81 percent oppose the US sanctions that have gravely hurt the South American nation’s economy.
This poll was conducted before the Donald Trump administration launched a political coup in Venezuela on January 23, attempting to replace its government with a right-wing opposition that has made it clear that it seeks to impose neoliberal capitalist economic policies.
Hinterlaces is led by the independent pollster Oscar Schemel, who has experience studying numerous elections in Venezuela and has a pro-business perspective. Most polling firms in the country, such as the competitor Datanálisis, tend to be pro-opposition. Hinterlaces is more neutral, and often leans toward the government, although Schemel has criticized some of Maduro’s economic policies.
English-language media outlets frequently ignore local polls done inside Venezuela, and if they do report on them, they tend to publish the results of polling firms run by pro-opposition figures.
The Grayzone has translated the findings of a Hinterlaces study conducted between January 7 and 20. The following data is based on direct interviews with 1,580 Venezuelans from all across the country, and was reported on the program José Vicente HOY on January 27.
Do you agree or disagree with the US economic and financial sanctions that are currently applied against Venezuela to remove President Maduro from power?
81% disagree
17% agree
2% not sure
Would you agree or disagree if there were international intervention in Venezuela to remove President Maduro from power?
78% disagree
20% agree
2% not sure
Would you agree or disagree if there were international military intervention in Venezuela to remove President Maduro from power?
86% disagree
12% agree
2% not sure
In general do you agree or disagree with a dialogue being held between the national government and the opposition to resolve the current economic problems in the country?
84% agree
15% disagree
1% not sure
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Ben Norton is a journalist and writer. He is a reporter for The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com, and he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.
On Saturday, January 26, Reuters reported [1] that Taliban officials said the US negotiators agreed on a draft peace pact setting out the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan within 18 months, potentially ending the United States longest war.
Confirming the news, New York Times reported [2] on Monday, January 28, that the US chief negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad stated the American and Taliban officials had agreed in principle to the framework of a peace deal in which the insurgents guaranteed to prevent Afghan territory from being used by terrorists, and that could lead to a full pullout of American troops in return for a ceasefire and Taliban talks with the Afghan government.
Moreover, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted on Saturday:
“The US is serious about pursuing peace, preventing Afghanistan from continuing to be a space for international terrorism and bringing forces home,” though he declined to provide a timeframe for the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan.
The news of drawdown of American forces is expected after the next round of peace talks is held in late February in the capital of Qatar, Doha, in which Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a close aide to the Taliban’s deceased leader Mullah Omar, will lead the Taliban delegation.
Baradar was released from captivity [3] in October by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies and was allowed to join his family in Afghanistan. He was captured in a joint US-Pakistan intelligence operation in the southern port city of Karachi in 2010. His release was a longstanding demand of the Afghan government because he is regarded as a comparatively moderate Taliban leader who could play a positive role in the peace process between the Afghan government and the Taliban.
Alongside the issues of Taliban providing guarantees it would not allow Afghan soil to be used by transnational terrorists, al-Qaeda and Islamic State Khorasan, the Taliban holding direct negotiations with the US-backed Afghan government – which the Taliban regards as an American stooge and hence refuse to recognize – a permanent ceasefire and the formation of a mutually acceptable interim government, a few other minor issues, such as the exchange and release of prisoners, removing travel restrictions on the Taliban leadership and unfreezing its bank accounts are also on the agenda of the peace talks.
Although both Reuters and New York Times reports hailed the news of the pullout of American forces from Afghanistan a diplomatic victory for Washington since the Taliban had agreed to a ceasefire and holding talks with the US-backed government of Afghanistan, in fact the withdrawal of foreign troops from the Afghan soil would be a stellar victory for the Taliban and one of the most humiliating defeats for Washington since the Fall of Saigon in 1975, because besides destroying a country of thirty-million people, Washington has failed to achieve any of its objective, including the much-touted imperialist project of “nation-building,” during its seventeen years of occupation of Afghanistan.
Regarding the presence of transnational terrorist networks on the Afghan soil, the al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden has already been killed [allegedly] in a May 2011 raid of the US Navy Seals in the Abbottabad compound in Pakistan and its second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri is on the run. Besides, the number of al-Qaeda’s Arab militants in the Af-Pak region does not exceed more than a few hundred and are hence inconsequential.
As far as Islamic State Khorasan is concerned, a number of Islamic State affiliates have recently sprung up all over the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia regions that have no organizational and operational association, whatsoever, with the Islamic State proper in Syria and Iraq, such as the Islamic State-affiliates in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and even Boko Haram in Nigeria now falls under the rubric of the Islamic State.
It is understandable for laymen to conflate such local militant outfits for the Islamic State proper in Iraq and Syria, but how come the policy analysts of think tanks and the corporate media’s terrorism experts, who are fully aware of this not-so-subtle distinction, have fallen for such a ruse?
Can we classify any ragtag militant outfit as the Islamic State merely on the basis of ideological affinity and “a letter of accreditation” from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi without the Islamic State’s Baathist command structure and superior weaponry that has been bankrolled by the Gulf’s petro-dollars?
The Western political establishments and their mouthpiece, the mainstream media, deliberately and knowingly fall for such stratagems because it serves the scaremongering agenda of vested interests. Before acknowledging the Islamic State’s affiliates in the region, the Western mainstream media also similarly and “naively” acknowledged al-Qaeda’s affiliates in the region, too, merely on the basis of ideological affinity without any organizational and operational association with al-Qaeda Central, such as al-Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula, al-Qaeda in Iraq and al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb.
Regarding the creation and composition of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, apart from training and arms which were provided to Syrian militants in the training camps located in the Turkish and Jordanian border regions adjacent to Syria by the CIA in collaboration with Turkish, Jordanian and Saudi intelligence agencies, another factor that contributed to the stellar success of the Islamic State in early 2014 when it overran Raqqa in Syria and Mosul and Anbar in Iraq was that its top cadres were comprised of former Baathist military and intelligence officers from the Saddam era.
Reportedly, hundreds of ex-Baathists constituted the top and mid-tier command structure of the Islamic State who planned all the operations and directed its military strategy. The only feature that differentiated the Islamic State from all other insurgent groups was its command structure which was comprised of professional ex-Baathists and its state-of-the-art weaponry that was provided to all militant outfits fighting in Syria by the intelligence agencies of the Western powers, Turkey, Jordan and the Gulf states.
Recently, the Islamic State’s purported “terror franchises” in Afghanistan and Pakistan have claimed a spate of bombings against the Shi’a and Barelvi Muslims who are regarded as heretics by Takfiris. But to contend that the Islamic State is responsible for suicide blasts in Pakistan and Afghanistan is to declare that the Taliban are responsible for the sectarian war in Syria and Iraq.
Both are localized militant outfits and the Islamic State without its Baathist command structure and superior weaponry is just another ragtag, regional militant outfit. The distinction between the Taliban and the Islamic State lies in the fact that the Taliban follow Deobandi sect of Sunni Islam which is a sect native to South Asia and the jihadists of the Islamic State mostly belong to Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi denomination.
Secondly, and more importantly, the insurgency in Afghanistan and the border regions of Pakistan is a Pashtun uprising which is an ethnic group native to Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan, while the bulk of the Islamic State’s jihadists is comprised of Arab militants of Syria and Iraq.
The so-called “Khorasan Province” of the Islamic State in the Af-Pak region is nothing more than a coalition of several breakaway factions of the Taliban and a few other inconsequential local militant outfits that have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State’s chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in order to enhance their prestige and draw funds and followers, but which don’t have any organizational and operational association, whatsoever, with the Islamic State proper in Syria and Iraq.
Conflating the Islamic State either with al-Qaeda, the Taliban or with myriads of ragtag, local militant groups is a deliberate deception intended to mislead public opinion in order to exaggerate the threat posed by the Islamic State which serves the scaremongering agenda of Western and regional security establishments.
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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Notes
[1] Foreign troops to quit Afghanistan in 18 months:
Riotous protesters briefly stormed the Cameroonian Embassies in Paris and Berlin over the weekend in an attempt to raise global awareness about the rolling regime change campaign back in their homeland following the reelection of President Biya to his seventh consecutive term in office late last year, possibly forcing France to choose sides in decisively throwing its weight behind either its decades-long proxy or his anti-government opponents.
The “Perfect Storm”
Most of the global media didn’t pay much attention to it but anti-government protesters briefly stormed the Cameroonian Embassies in Paris and Berlin over the weekend in an attempt to raise awareness about the rolling regime change campaign against their country’s long-serving president, who was just re-elected to his seventh consecutive term in office late last year. The West-Central African country is currently experiencing a pronounced bout of Hybrid War unrest whereby it’s suffering asymmetrical onslaughts from Anglophone separatists and Boko Haram Islamists while simultaneously having to fend off a simmering Color Revolution movement. The so-called “perfect storm” is brewing, but it hasn’t yet attracted the serious focus of any Great Power mostly because President Biya remains immensely loyal to his French patrons in spite of his Silk Road partnership with China, though the latest attention-grabbing tactic is trying to change all of that.
Hybrid War Origins
While the case can be made that the Hybrid War on Cameroon is designed to achieve the dual objectives of disrupting China’s future transcontinental Silk Road in the region (Sudan-Chad-Cameroon) and creating the conditions where the rising African Great Power of neighboring Nigeria can be more easily controlled, no Great Power has yet to throw its full weight (even just diplomatically) behind this destabilization campaign. This suggests that it might either be a “work in progress”, a “probe” intended to gauge the resiliency of regional security structures, or a short-term pressure tactic that aims to coerce certain political concessions out of Yaoundé. There’s also the chance that a large degree of these Hybrid War processes are “naturally occurring” outcomes of the ultra-diverse country’s identity fault lines finally colliding with one another. Whatever the case may be, some members of the diaspora are clearly eager to shape the situation to their favor.
Double Standards
The coordinated storming of two of a nation’s embassies over the weekend would ordinarily be a global media event but wasn’t in the case of Cameroon because the country is a medium-sized African state whose diplomats aren’t afforded much respect in the West. Had this happened to a Great Power such as France, however, the reaction would be altogether different, though the “silver lining” in this instance is that this attention-grabbing provocation has yet to get any of the Great Powers to publicly throw their weight behind the rolling regime change operation that the protesters are in support of. That might soon change, however, if the ongoing destabilization of the nation’s largest port of Douala interferes with Chad and the Central African Republic’s imports from there, possibly impeding them and therefore raising the cost everything else in those countries as a precursor to a socio-economic crisis in each landlocked state.
Rival Rumblings In Central Africa
The Central African Republic (CAR) has recently come under heavy Russian influence after Moscow received UNSC approval in late-2017 to dispatch “mercenaries” there as part of a train-and-assist program for buffeting the anti-militant capabilities of the country’s fledgling military as the central state seeks to restore its sovereignty over the rest of its mineral-rich territory. As for Chad, it periodically slips into civil war and sometimes has to fend off foreign-based militants from Sudan and Libya, but it’s nevertheless still a regional military power with impressive reach that extends as far westward as Mali. Of interest, N’Djamena recently restored relations with Tel Aviv following Netanyahu’s visit there last week, which contributed to the interesting state of regional affairs where one Central African state (Chad) is under “Israeli” influence, another (CAR) recently came under Russian influence, and the third (Cameroon) is under Chinese influence despite all three informally being part of Paris’ neocolonial Françafrique.
Time To Choose
Although France still controls each of their currencies and almost a dozen other African countries’ through the CFA franc, it’s slowly but surely losing geopolitical influence in its former colonial domain. Fretful that it won’t be able to regain its formerly strategic position in the CAR after Russia moved in there to help stabilize the situation, and possibly even Gabon as well following the US’ dispatch of troops there earlier this month before the country’s failed coup attempt, France might feel compelled for now to cling to its partner in Cameroon despite the growing “grassroots” pressure for it to betray him. That said, if the situation appears to be moving in the direction where a regime change seems “inevitable”, then Paris could be expected to turn on its proxy in a last-ditch attempt to save its influence there instead of having the country fall under American or British influence if France hasn’t prepared a replacement for him.
Is It Now Or Never For Françafrique?
Just like the Ottoman Empire was regarded as the “sick man of Europe” for some time prior to its collapse, so too might France come to be seen as the “sick man of Africa” if its Françafrique holdings continue to fall under the sway of other powers. The CFA franc might not go anywhere soon, but France’s geopolitical dominance over this transregional space might slip away if the country can’t regain control over its proxies after Russia’s recent advances in the CAR, Chad’s outreach to “Israel”, and Gabon’s surprise hosting of US troops.
China’s influence is also looming large all throughout Françafrique and Paris might soon feel pressured make a stand in Central Africa by either decisively supporting or opposing the Cameroonian President depending on which way it feels that the “wind is blowing”. Be that as it may, last weekend’s Cameroonian embassy stormings might force France to finally make a choice one way or the other.
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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.
The British political establishment is experiencing an unprecedented crisis over the issue of exiting the European Union. The Conservative government staggers from crisis to crisis over its Brexit deal while politicians off all colours bicker and argue as the UK lurches towards a potentially devastating No Deal scenario. This had lead to a huge distrust in the political class amongst the long suffering public.
As the clock ticks down towards the 29 March exit date it is worth while recalling how this crisis came about in the first place. Regardless of which Brexit option the UK takes over the next period it will not detract from the fact that there is a huge chasm between large sections of a bitterly discontented population and the political establishment that does not bode well for the future stability of a key American ally.
A recent poll of 33,000 people revealed that an overwhelming majority felt that whatever Brexit option is adopted it will not address the rampant inequalities, political alienation and disenchantment that lay behind the vote to leave the EU in 2016.
In June 2016 the UK vote to exit the EU shocked the financial and political elites and led to turmoil on global stock markets. The corporate media was full of shocked pundits lamenting the democratic decision of British people for Brexit. Brexit voters were being blamed for everything from the rise in racism against immigrant families to the increased dangers of terrorist attacks.
The corporate media both in Britain and internationally was and still are furious with the British electorate for voting for Brexit. They never saw it coming and still don’t fully understand why ordinary people voted for Brexit. More than this, they still don’t understand how the Brexit vote reveals how completely out of touch the corporate media and the political/financial elites are with the millions of working class people who voted for Brexit.
Let’s be very clear about this: the vote for Brexit was a working class rebellion against the financial and political elites of Britain who have presided over a massive redistribution of wealth in favour of the super rich leaving a fifth of the population in poverty. Analysis of the referendum vote shows how the poorer an area was the higher the vote was for Brexit.
The working class stood up to massive pressure from the Bremain camp that included: all of the mainstream political parties, the Bank of England, CBI, IMF, ECB, Obama, the World Bank and the trade union bureaucrats.
The vote for Brexit revealed how out of touch the establishment advocates of the EU are with working class people. Millions of people are struggling to get by with low wages, incessant benefit cuts, zero hour contracts, food banks and poor housing that are putting their families and communities under intense strain. On top of this, working class people suffer the most from the cuts to the welfare state and the incessant cuts to local council services.
Working class people are not stupid they can how the EU is a fundamentally undemocratic organisation that is completely unaccountable to them. The secret negotiations that took place between the EU and the Obama administration over TTIP, which members of the European Parliament had no say over, proved conclusively how this is an organisation run for the benefit of the too big to fail banks and the multi-national corporations.
They can see how the undemocratic EU has bludgeoned the people of Greece into living in permanent austerity and mass poverty despite a referendum last year that decisively rejected austerity measures. Obama’s favourite economist Paul Krugman called the EU’s intervention into Greece in 2015 a ‘coup d’etat’.
The advocates of Bremain in 2016 such as Mark Carney (ex-Goldman Sachs), then Prime Minister Cameron (from a tax avoiding banker family) then Chancellor George Osborne (son of a Baronet) warned working class people that Brexit would lower their living standards more than any other group in UK society.
However, millions of people were not taken in by the crocodile tears coming from those responsible for creating a massively unequal society. Quantitative easing and ZIRP have made the super rich fabulously richer as they have benefited from the massive bubbles on the stock market and in property. The top 10% of society own 45% of all wealth totalling over £5 trillion while the bottom 50% of society own a pathetic 9% of the wealth.
Prime Minister Cameron’s government presided over a savage attack upon welfare benefits which have led to one and half million benefit sanctions leaving people totally destitute and leading to hundreds of people committing suicide. The attack on welfare benefits for disabled people have been so severe it prompted the UN to launch an investigation into the human rights violations of disabled people. In 2018 the UN accused the UK government of ‘’systematic violations’’ of disabled people’s rights..
The political and financial elites who advocated that Britain should stay in the EU were puzzled as to why so many working class people stubbornly supported Brexit in 2016. They were and still are incapable of comprehending the anger, pain and suffering of millions of working class people who feel increasing contempt towards a political and financial elite that has no understanding of their daily lives. Over 13 million live in poverty (1 in 5 of the population) while 15 million live in inadequate housing conditions.
This inchoate anger at the daily reality that confronts them has few outlets in life. The EU referendum provided working class people with a means of sticking two fingers up at the political and financial establishment which now presides over a very divided country along lines of class and geography. This sense of alienation and disenchantment with the political establishment has only increased in the two and half years since the Brexit referendum.
The Brexit vote has led to unprecedented turmoil in both of the main political parties in Britain, particularly the Conservative Party.
The financial and political elites suffered a major defeat in 2016 Brexit vote. The Conservative Party is one of the oldest and most successful political parties in history and has served the British ruling class well for over two hundred years. Now it faces an unprecedented crisis and is unable to effectively govern.
Regardless of which Brexit option the Conservative government takes over the next period the UK will face huge challenges as the world economy continues to slow down and heads towards another devastating recession.
Most Canadians think of their country as a force for good in the world, but recent efforts by Justin Trudeau’s government to overthrow Venezuela’s elected government have once again revealed the ugly truth about the Great White North. We are an important partner in imperialism, willing to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, up to and including the use of military force, to benefit the perceived self-interest of our elites.
Over the past two years Canadian officials have campaigned aggressively against President Nicolás Maduro. Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland has repeatedly criticized Caracas’ democratic legitimacy and human rights record. Recently she said, “the Maduro regime is now fully entrenched as a dictatorship” while in September Ottawa asked (with five South American nations) the International Criminal Court to investigate the Venezuelan government, which is the first time a government has been formally brought before the tribunal by another member.
In recent weeks Canadian diplomats have played an important role in uniting large swaths of the Venezuelan opposition behind a US-backed plan to ratchet up tensions by proclaiming the new head of the opposition-dominated National Assembly, Juan Guaido, president. The Canadian Press quoted a Canadian diplomat saying they helped Guaido “facilitate conversations with people that were out of the country and inside the country” while the Globe and Mail reported that
“Freeland spoke with Juan Guaido to congratulate him on unifying opposition forces in Venezuela, two weeks before he declared himself interim president.”
Alongside Washington and a number of right-leaning Latin American governments, Ottawa immediately recognized Guaido after he proclaimed himself president on Wednesday. Canadian officials are lobbying European leaders to recognize Guaido as president as well.
Ottawa has long provided various other forms of direct support to an often-violent opposition. In recent years Canada channelled millions of dollars to opposition groups in Venezuela and 18 months ago outgoing Canadian ambassador, Ben Rowswell, told the Ottawa Citizen that
“we became one of the most vocal embassies in speaking out on human rights issues and encouraging Venezuelans to speak out.”
Alongside its support for the opposition, Ottawa expelled Venezuela’s top diplomat in 2017 and has imposed three rounds of sanctions on Venezuelan officials. In March the United Nations Human Rights Council condemned the economic sanctions the US, Canada and EU have adopted against Venezuela while Caracas called Canada’s move a “blatant violation of the most fundamental rules of International Law.”
Since its August 2017 founding Canada has been one of the most active members of the “Lima Group” of governments opposed to Venezuela’s elected government. Canada is hosting the next meeting of the “Lima Group”. Freeland has repeatedly prodded Caribbean and Central American countries to join the Lima Group’s anti-Maduro efforts.
In September, 11 of the 14 member states of the “Lima Group” backed a statement distancing the anti-Venezuelan alliance from “any type of action or declaration that implies military intervention” after Organization of American States chief Luis Almagro stated:
“As for military intervention to overthrow the Nicolas Maduro regime, I think we should not rule out any option … diplomacy remains the first option but we can’t exclude any action.”
Canada, Guyana and Colombia refused to criticize the head of the OAS’ musings about an invasion of Venezuela.
Alongside the head of the OAS, US president Donald Trump has publically discussed invading Venezuela. To the best of my knowledge Ottawa has stayed mum on Trump’s threats, which violate international law.
Why? Why is Canada so eager to overthrow an elected government? Recent headlines in the Globe and Mail (“Venezuelan crisis buoys prospects for Canadian heavy crude oil producers”) and Wall Street Journal (“Bond Prices in Venezuela Jump on Prospect of Regime Change”) suggest some short term reasons. But looking at the situation from a historical perspective confirms Noam Chomsky’s claim that international affairs is run like the Mafia. The godfather cannot accept disobedience.
Thus, while the scope of the Trudeau government’s current campaign against Venezuela is noteworthy, it’s not the first time Ottawa has supported the overthrow of an elected, left leaning, government in the hemisphere. Canada passively supported military coups against Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenzin 1954 and Brazilian President João Goulart in 1964 as well as ‘parliamentary coups’ against Paraguayan president Fernando Lugo in 2012 and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff in 2016. Ottawa played a slightly more active role in the removal of Dominican Republic presidentJuan Bosch in 1965 and Chilean presidentSalvador Allende in 1973. In a more substantial contribution to undermining electoral democracy, Ottawa backed the Honduran military’s removal of Manuel Zelaya in 2009.
Canada played its most forceful role in the removal of a progressive, elected, president in the hemisphere’s most impoverished nation. Thirteen months before Jean-Bertrand Aristide was, in his words, “kidnapped” by US Marines on February 29, 2004, Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government organized an international gathering to discuss overthrowing the Haitian president. JTF2 special forces secured the Port-au-Prince airport the night Aristide was ousted and 500 Canadian troops were part of the US-led invasion to consolidate the coup.
With regards to Venezuela it’s unclear just how far Ottawais prepared to go in its bid to oust Maduro. But, it is hard to imagine that the path Canada and the US have chosen can succeed without Venezuela being plunged into significant violence.
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A large number of prisoners, all of them senior members of Daesh (also ISIS or ISIL) terrorist group, broke out of a Taliban prison in northwest Afghanistan after US troops helped them escape through a covert operation.
According to Tasnim dispatches, American forces operating in Afghanistan carried out a secret military operation in the northwestern province of Badghis two weeks ago and helped the Daesh inmates escape the prison.
The report added that 40 Daesh ringleaders, all of them foreigners, were transferred by helicopters after American troops raided the prison and killed all its security guards.
Abdullah Afzali, deputy head of Badghis provincial council, confirmed the news.
Informed sources have given a detailed account of the US operation to rescue the Daesh forces and the developments that helped Americans pinpoint the location of the prison in the mountainous areas.
Aminullah, a man from Uzbekistan, was one of the Daesh commanders held captive in the Taliban prison. His success to escape from the prison led to the dismissal of the Taliban prison guard and his punishment.
Aminullah was one of the prominent Daesh leaders in northern parts of Afghanistan.
Informed sources suggest that the Uzbekistani national had established close contact with the American military forces since the early days of moving to Afghanistan.
Americans used to employ Aminullah as an undercover among the Taliban to acquire information for carrying out operations against the Taliban in northern Afghanistan.
That is while, before Aminullah’s escape from the Taliban prison, the American forces had launched an extensive intelligence operation using drones to locate the Taliban prison in which the Daesh forces were being held, but their failure to get any useful information had created a sense of humiliation among Americans.
The informed sources say Aminullah made contact with Americans immediately after escaping from the prison, let them know about the exact location of the jail, and helped them plan a rescue operation.
Thereafter, the US forces analyzed the geographical position of the ‘Panjboz’ village and the Taliban prison and decided to carry out an aerial and heliborne operation to release the Daesh inmates, considering the number of the Taliban fighters and that the region was inaccessible by road.
Finally, the US launched an attack on January 13 by bombing the areas around the prison and killing a number of the Taliban forces. Afterwards, the American helicopters were dispatched to the operation zone and disembarked troops who killed the prison guards, released the Daesh forces and took them away on board the choppers.
Taliban forces had earlier captured the Daesh forces in Panjboz village after heavy clashes with Daesh terrorists.
The videos here show how the Taliban fighters freed the village from Daesh and imprisoned the terrorists in one of the houses of the village.
In one of the videos received by Tasnim, one of top Taliban commanders introduces a number of Daesh’s foreign memebers and their nationality.
It was not the first time that American forces helped the Daesh forces. During the armed clashes between the Taliban and the Daesh terrorists in western Afghanistan, the US forces repeatedly bombed the Taliban positions and transferred prominent Daesh figures, including local leader Mullah Nangiyali, with copters to the military bases.
This video shows the transfer of top Daesh figures and their families by Afghan forces.
The only thing more sinister than intentionally creating refugees, is weaponizing them as leverage to further coerce nations and advance hegemonic ambitions.
The United States and its allies have done both extensively – from exploiting the flow of refugees fleeing US-led wars in Libya and Syria – to the cynical exploitation of high-profile cases like Rahaf al-Qunun of Saudi Arabia and Hakeem al-Araibi of Bahrain – both of whom are fleeing autocratic regimes armed and propped up exclusively by the West.
In addition to creating the conditions ensuring a steady stream of refugees – the West has assembled an army of faux-rights advocates – most notably Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International to shift blame from those responsible for the creation of refugees to those saddled with growing numbers of people seeking refuge within their borders.
Weaponizing Refugees in Libya and Syria
After the US-led NATO destruction of Libya, a predictable tidal wave of refugees flooded out of North Africa into Europe. At the same time, the US-led proxy war in Syria was ramping up likewise causing a steady stream of refugees fleeing the conflict.
As refugees began arriving in Europe – the result of US wars eagerly aided and abetted by many of Europe’s NATO members as well as Canada and Australia – the socioeconomic pressure they created – real or imagined – was immediately leveraged to call for bolder and more direct military intervention against Syria by the West.
Articles like a 2016 Guardian piece titled, “Refugees are becoming Russia’s weapon of choice in Syria,” would even attempt to claim Russia’s air campaign against Western-sponsored terrorists in Syria was aimed at intentionally creating a flow of refugees into Turkey and Europe to “divide the transatlantic alliance and undermine the European project.”
The article would admit that this flow of refugees served as a pretext for a proposed “no-fly zone” in northern Syria – a stated goal of US policymakers since as early as 2012 published in a Brookings Institution memo titled, “Saving Syria: Assessing Options for Regime Change” (PDF) which called for:
…the creation of safe-havens and humanitarian corridors, which would have to be backed by limited military power.3 This would, of course, fall short of U.S. goals for Syria and could preserve Asad in power. From that starting point, however, it is possible that a broad coalition with the appropriate international mandate could add further coercive action to its efforts.
It is clear now – as the Syrian government regains control of the nation’s territory and refugees begin returning home almost exclusively to territory controlled by Damascus – just how cynical the West’s refugee pretext actually was.
Propping Up Dictatorships, Leveraging Their Victims
In early January, 18 year old Saudi national Rahaf al-Qunun was detained at Bangkok’s international airport. She had claimed she was fleeing Saudi Arabia to escape both her abusive family and a despotic government.
Faux-rights groups including HRW and Amnesty International immediately seized upon the opportunity to accuse the Thai government of wrongfully detaining Qunun and preparing to send her back to Saudi Arabia.
The West’s human rights racket has systematically targeted the current Thai government in an attempt to undermine it ahead of elections the US hopes returns their favored proxies to power.
In reality, it became clear that Qunun was travelling on an Australian visa which was revoked mid-flight – stranding her in Bangkok, the Guardian would eventually admit.
Thai officials worked the entire day to ascertain the details of her case and find a favorable outcome for the stranded teen. Despite having the opportunity to place her on an early morning flight to Kuwait where she’d then be sent back to Saudi Arabia – Thai officials instead continued working on her case long before Western interests began exploiting the incident.
And despite Bangkok arranging a meeting between Qunun and representatives of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) by evening, the Western media, several Western embassies, faux rights groups – particularly HRW – and local fronts posing as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) funded by the West – had already spent the entire day smearing the Thai government.
At one point, Canadian ambassador to Thailand, Donica Pottie, attempted to post a “Save Rahaf” hashtag on social media. When it was pointed out that Canada sells billions of dollars in arms to the very Saudi regime Rahaf al-Qunun was fleeing from – she promptly deleted the post.
Canada would move to offer Qunun asylum – posing as the ultimate hero of the incident. Qunun herself would indeed thank Canada – but also the Thai government – smeared by the West including Canada – for Thailand’s role in helping her after being stranded by Australia’s visa cancellation.
Creating the Monster Rahaf al-Qunun Was Fleeing
The autocratic regime ruling Saudi Arabia receives weapons, political support, and military protection from not only Canada, but also the US. Germany, France, and the United Kingdom also help arm the regime in Riyadh.
In a Senate estimates hearing last week, the Department of Defence admitted it had made 14 approvals of military gear and services to Saudi Arabia in the past two years. On the same day, defence minister Marise Payne would not rule out an export ban, saying “all options are on the table”.
Rahaf al-Qunun had her future jeopardized by a coalition of Western nations who are responsible for propping up the very regime she was fleeing from.
At a time when these same Western nations seek to place additional sanctions on Russia and Iran for baseless accusations over various alleged misdeeds – they openly embrace Saudi Arabia as it uses its Western-made weapons to brutalize its own population – as reported by Canada’s Globe and Mail, and wage relentless war upon neighboring Yemen.
But because the West also has invested heavily in organizations posing as human rights advocates – regardless of the truth behind their central role in creating autocracies and enabling their abuses – the finger can be pointed anywhere, anytime when politically convenient – in this case, the current government of Thailand responsible for ousting a US client regime in 2014.
Rahaf al-Qunun is not Alone
Thailand has also been recently blamed for detaining Hakeem al-Araibi of Bahrain who has – since 2017 – been living in Australia. It was Australia who played a central role in issuing an Interpol Red Notice that forced Thailand to initially detain him.
A parliamentary inquiry should examine the actions of the Australian federal police which led to the arrest of Hakeem al-Araibi in Thailand, Australia’s peak union body and the Greens have said.
Al-Araibi, a 25-year-old Bahraini refugee who has permanent residency in Australia, was arrested on arrival in Bangkok for a holiday, on the basis of an Interpol red notice, which was later lifted.
The article also noted:
The red notice was erroneously issued by Interpol against its own protocols which ban the granting of red notices for refugees on behalf of the country from which the individual fled.
“It’s deeply disturbing that our own authorities would help a country to extradite an Australian resident when they are accused of torturing that person,” said the ACTU president, Michele O’Neil.
Once again, while such facts are eventually mentioned by the Western media, the vast majority of coverage – including accusations made by faux-rights organizations like HRW and Amnesty – have focused entirely on targeting Thailand.
While the Western media insists Thailand will inevitably send Hakeem al-Araibi back to Bahrain – the same was said in regards to Rahaf al-Qunun – the latter being revealed as a categorical lie.
Western embassies, their partners in the media, and faux-rights groups funded by Western governments again seek to pose as the impetus forcing Bangkok to make the “right” decision, and send Hakeem al-Araibi back to Australia – despite his dire circumstances being entirely of their own collective doing in the first place.
Bahrain – like Saudi Arabia – is a autocratic regime eagerly propped up by Western nations – armed with Western weaponry and even hosting the US 5th fleet headquarters. And like Saudi Arabia – despite being repeat human rights violators – Bahrain faces no sanctions or even condemnation from the Western governments propping up the regime.
Like in Rahaf al-Qunun’s case – Australia again played a central role in Hakeem al-Araibi’s initial arrest, before posing as a “hero” rescuing him from the “Thais.”
Fighting Back
For Thailand – its greatest weakness is a lack of an English-language news service serving the nation’s best interests.
English language newspapers like Bangkok Post and The Nation are merely echo chambers of Western propaganda. Even government-funded Thai PBS is lined with Western-trained “journalists” who prefer repeating Western narratives than any sort of independent coverage. Those few who dare step out of line find themselves with the entirety of the West’s Thailand-based correspondents and Western-funded NGOs lobbying against them.
An RT-style international news platform, truly representing Thai interests and telling Thailand’s side of any given story would have greatly benefited the nation during the Rahaf al-Qunun case – allowing the government to immediately and unambiguously state why she was being detained, what the government was attempting to accomplish, the meeting it was arranging between her and the UNHCR, and why it was impossible to “immediately” release her.
But because Thailand does not have such a media platform – professional propagandists at the BBC, Reuters, AP, AFP, and others were able to fill in the missing blanks themselves depicting Thailand in the worst possible light – with now verified lies.
At one point, Jonathan Head of the BBC claimed to have personally seen Rahaf al-Qunun’s Australian visa and “confirmed” it was still valid.
Likewise, lacking such a media platform allows the Western media and other opportunists to assign motives and predicted outcomes regarding Hakeem al-Araibi’s case – once again undermining the Thai government’s credibility even if it plans on making the right decision.
Lacking such a media platform does not entirely prevent the Thai government from coming out on top.
A single, concise, and very public statement regarding Hakeem al-Araibi’s case – and all future cases like his – including assurances that he will not be sent back to Bahrain if injustice and mistreatment are expected and that his detainment is merely administrative – would shutdown speculation as well as opportunities to attack Thailand. If Hakeem al-Araibi is wanted on solid grounds for crimes he committed in Bahrain – he allegedly vandalized a police station – Thailand could present this information – virtually omitted from all other news stories regarding his case.
For faux-rights groups like HRW and Amnesty – the fact that they have repeatedly failed to point out the central role the West – their sponsors – has played in creating the very wars and despots these refugees are fleeing from implicates and exposes them, voiding their credibility.
Only through the repeated exposure of their abuse of human rights advocacy they couch their political agendas behind, can the effectiveness of disinformation and smear campaigns like those surrounding Rahaf al-Qunun and Hakeem al-Araibi’s cases be finally put to an end.
A single refugee case – given the current influence of the West’s human rights racket – can be used to strain relations between two states, undermine the credibility of a targeted nation, or entirely undermine the sovereignty of a nation and its ability to control who can and cannot cross its borders.
By exposing and crippling the West’s human rights racket, room can be made for genuine rights advocates who seek to constructively work with governments to expose the true root of refugee crises and improve conditions and outcomes for the refugees themselves.
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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.
O anúncio do Presidente Trump, que reconhece Juan Guaidó “presidente legítimo” da Venezuela, foi preparado numa cabine de direcção subterrânea, no interior do Congresso e da Casa Branca. Descreve detalhadamente o ‘New York Times’ (26 de Janeiro). O operador principal é o Senador republicano, Marco Rubio, da Flórida, “Secretário Virtual de Estado para a América Latina, que orienta e articula a estratégia da Administração na região”, ligado ao Vice Presidente, Mike Pence, e ao Conselheiro da Segurança Nacional, John Bolton. No dia 22 de Janeiro, na Casa Branca, os três apresentaram o seu plano ao Presidente, que o aceitou.
Logo a seguir – relata o ‘New York Times’ – «O Snr. Pence ligou para Guaidó e disse-lhe que os Estados Unidos o teriam apoiado se ele tivesse reclamado a presidência”. A seguir, o Vice Presidente Pence, transmitiu para a Venezuela uma mensagem de vídeo em que aliciava os manifestantes a “fazer com que a vossa voz seja ouvida amanhã” e assegurava “em nome do Presidente Trump e do povo americano: Estamos com ustedes, estamos convosco até que seja restaurada a democracia”, definindo Maduro como “um ditador que jamais conseguiu a presidência em eleições livre”.
No dia seguinte, o indomesticado Trump proclamou oficialmente Guaidó, “Presidente da Venezuela”, apesar do mesmo não ter participado nas eleições presidenciais de Maio 2018 as quais, boicotadas pela oposição que sabia que iria perdê-las, decretaram a vitória de Maduro, com a supervisão de muitos observadores internacionais. Esses bastidores revelam que as decisões políticas são tomadas nos EUA, principalmente, pelo “Estado Profundo”, centro subterrâneo do poder real mantido pelas oligarquias económicas, financeiras e militares. São estes que decidiram convulsionar o Estado venezuelano, que possui, além de grandes reservas de minerais preciosos, as maiores reservas de petróleo do mundo, estimadas em mais de 300 biliões de barris, seis vezes superiores às dos Estados Unidos.
Para evitar o endurecimento das sanções, que impedem a Venezuela de arrecadar os dólares da venda de petróleo aos Estados Unidos, Caracas decidiu cotar o preço das vendas de petróleo não em dólares, mas em yuan chineses. Um movimento que põe em perigo o poder excessivo dos petrodólares. Daí a decisão das oligarquias norte-americanas de acelerar o calendário para sublevar o Estado venezuelano e aproveitar a sua riqueza petrolífera, não imediatamente necessária aos EUA como fonte energética, mas como instrumento estratégico de controlo do mercado mundial de energia em função anti-Rússia e anti-China.
Para este fim, através de sanções e de sabotagem, foi agravada, na Venezuela, a escassez de bens de primeira necessidade para alimentar o descontentamento popular. Ao mesmo tempo, foi intensificada a penetração de “organizações não governamentais USA: por exemplo, o ‘National Endowment for Democracy’ que financiou, durante um ano na Venezuela, mais de 40 projectos sobre a “defesa dos direitos humanos e da democracia”, cada um com dezenas ou centenas de milhares de dólares.
Visto que o governo continua a deter o apoio da maioria, está certamente em preparação, uma grande provocação para desencadear no interior do país uma guerra civil e abrir caminho para a intervenção externa. Cumplice, a União Europeia, que após ter bloqueado na Bélgica, 1.2 biliões de dóleres de fundos estatais venezuelanos, lança um ultimato em Caracas (com o acordo do governo italiano) para novas eleições. Iria supervisioná-las, a própria Federica Mogherini que, no ano passado, recusou o convite de Maduro para fiscalizar as eleições presidenciais.
L‘annuncio del presidente Trump, che riconosce Juan Guaidò «legittimo presidente» del Venezuela è stato preparato in una cabina di regia sotterranea all’interno del Congresso e della Casa Bianca. La descrive dettagliatamente il New York Times (26 gennaio). Principale operatore è il senatore repubblicano della Florida Marco Rubio, «virtuale segretario di stato per l’America Latina, che guida e articola la strategia dell’Amministrazione nella regione», collegato al vicepresidente Mike Pence e al consigliere per la sicurezza nazionale John Bolton. Il 22 gennaio, alla Casa Bianca, i tre hanno presentato il loro piano al presidente, che l’ha accettato.
Subito dopo – riporta il New York Times – «Mr. Pence ha chiamato Mr. Guaidò e gli ha detto che gli Stati uniti lo avrebbero appoggiato se avesse reclamato la presidenza». Il vicepresidente Pence ha poi diffuso in Venezuela un video messaggio in cui chiamava i dimostranti a «far sentire la vostra voce domani» e assicurava «a nome del presidente Trump e del popolo americano: estamos con ustedes, siamo con voi finché non sarà restaurata la democrazia», definendo Maduro «un dittatore che mai ha ottenuto la presidenza in libere elezioni».
L’indomani Trump ha ufficialmente incoronato Guaidò «presidente del Venezuela», pur non avendo questi partecipato alle elezioni presidenziali del maggio 2018 le quali, boicottate dall’opposizione che sapeva di perderle, hanno decretato la vittoria di Maduro, con il monitoraggio di molti osservatori internazionali. Tale retroscena rivela che le decisioni politiche vengono prese negi Usa anzitutto nello «Stato profondo», centro sotterraneo del potere reale detenuto dalle oligarchie economiche, finanziarie e militari. Sono queste che hanno deciso di sovvertire lo Stato venezuelano. Esso possiede, oltre a grandi riserve di preziosi minerali, le maggiori riserve petrolifere del mondo, stimate in oltre 300 miliardi di barili, sei volte superiori a quelle statunitensi.
Per sottrarsi alla stretta delle sanzioni, che impediscono al Venezuela perfino di incassare i dollari ricavati dalla vendita di petrolio agli Stati uniti, Caracas ha deciso di quotare il prezzo di vendita del petrolio non più in dollari Usa ma in yuan cinesi. Mossa che mette in pericolo lo strapotere dei petrodollari. Da qui la decisione delle oligarchie statunitensi di accelerare i tempi per sovvertire lo Stato venezuelano e impadronirsi della sua ricchezza petrolifera, necessaria immediatamente non quale fonte emergetica per gli Usa, ma quale strumento strategico di controllo del mercato energetico mondiale in funzione anti-Russia e anti-Cina.
A tal fine, attraverso sanzioni e sabotaggi, è stata aggravata in Venezuela la penuria di beni di prima necessità per alimentare il malcontento popolare. È stata intensificata allo stesso tempo la penetrazione di «organizzazioni non-governative» Usa: ad esempio, la National Endowment for Democracy ha finanziato in un anno in Venezuela oltre 40 progetti sulla «difesa dei diritti umani e della democrazia», ciascuno con decine o centinaia di migliaia di dollari.
Poiché il governo continua ad avere l‘appoggio della maggioranza, è certamente in preparazione qualche grossa provocazione per scatenare all’interno la guerra civile e aprire la strada a un intervento dall’esterno. Complice l’Unione europea che, dopo aver bloccato in Belgio fondi statali venezuelani per 1,2 miliardi di dollari, lancia a Caracas l’ultimatum (concordato col governo italiano) per nuove elezioni. Le andrebbe a monitorare Federica Mogherini, la stessa che l’anno scorso ha rifiutato l’invito di Maduro di andare a monitorare le elezioni presidenziali.
Ein Insaniah Center for Rights and Development in Sanaa on Wednesday released the latest statistics that included the number of civilian casualties during the 1400 days of the Saudi-led coalition war on Yemen, as well as the loss of infrastructure and basic services during the same period.
According to statistics, the number of civilian casualties has reached 40,546 killed and wounded since the start of the coalition war on Yemen.
The statistics indicated that 3,495 children were killed and other 3,497 wounded in 1,400 days of aggression.
During the same period, 2,250 women killed, and 2,524 other women were injured.
The number of men who were killed during 1,400 of the aggression amounted to 10,113, and 18,712 men were injured during the same period, according to the Statistics.
With regard to the loss of and violations of service facilities in the areas of health and education, the center reported that there were 365 hospitals and health services that were totally or partially destroyed by the coalition bombing in various parts of Yemen, during the 1400 days of the Allied Coalition attack.
While 984 schools and educational centers were completely or partially destroyed during the same period, while the alliance destroyed 1,159 mosques, in addition to the destruction of 1,552 sources and water installations, 236 archaeological sites, adding 437,167 houses during 1,400 of the coalition countries War on Yemen.
Yemen has been suffering from a Saudi-led military campaign since 2015, which has caused the worlds worst humanitarian crisis, in addition of pushing the impoverished state to the brink of famine, according to a previous statement by the United Nations.
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Just hours after The Bank of England refused to hand over $1.2 billion of Venezuela’s gold from its custody vaults (stored there after the completion of a gold-swap transcation with Deutsche Bank) to President Maduro (after heavy lobbying from US officials), The Guardian reports that a UK foreign office minister is now urging the same Bank of England to transfer the bullion to the self-proclaimed interim leader Juan Guaidó.
In a statement to British MPs, Sir Alan Duncan said the decision was a matter for the Bank and its governor, Mark Carney, and not the government. But he added:
“It is they who have to make a decision on this, but no doubt when they do so they will take into account there are now a large number of countries across the world questioning the legitimacy of Nicolás Maduro and recognising that of Juan Guaidó.”
Guaidó has already written to Theresa May asking for the funds to be sent to him.
The former chair of the foreign affairs select committee Crispin Blunt said the current Venezuelan central bank president was not legitimate, since he had not been appointed by the country’s national assembly.
Blunt has sent letters to the foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, and to the chancellor, Philip Hammond, urging a decision.
Notably, the reason the BoE initially gave for its initial refusal to release was due to its insistence that standard measures to prevent money-laundering be taken – “including clarification of the Venezuelan government’s intentions for the gold.”
“There are concerns that Mr. Maduro may seize the gold, which is owned by the state, and sell it for personal gain,” the newspaper said.
Separately, as we reported previously an official told Reuters that the repatriation plan has been held up for nearly two months due to difficulty in obtaining insurance for the shipment, needed to move a large gold cargo:
“They are still trying to find insurance coverage, because the costs are high,” an official told Reuters.
All of which appears to have suddenly been swept under the carpet now Guaidó has been installed.
Duncan said Hunt would be discussing the next steps in the European Union’s efforts to support Guaidó in Bucharest on Thursday.
However, it’s not a done deal yet as shadow foreign secretary, Emily Thornberry, cautioned against a rush to oust Maduro:
“Judging by its record in recent years, the Maduro government fits none of those descriptions, but I would also believe that it is a mistake in situations like this simply to think that changing the leader will automatically solve every problem, let alone the kind of US-led intervention being threatened by Donald Trump and [the US national security adviser] John Bolton.”
Nevertheless, with much of the Western world now backing Guaidó in his coup, it seems the gold bullion will be winging its way to The Assembly’s coffers very soon.
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Afshin Rattansi speaks to Eva Golinger about the US’ ongoing attempts at regime change in Venezuela to replace President Nicolas Maduro with Juan Guaido.
She discusses the history of US regime change in Veneuela and Latin America, the Maduro premiership and attitudes in Venezuela.
The first Senate bill of 2019 would finalize a $38 billion aid package to Israel, combat BDS, and rebut Trump’s attempt to withdraw troops from Syria….
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According to Marco Rubio, the first bill the 2019 U.S. Senate will take up is one that is focused on Israel. His twitter announcement shows a number of people suggesting that he should instead focus on getting the U.S. government running.
The four-part bill, designated S.1, is composed of measures on behalf of Israel that Congress tried and failed to pass in 2018. Some were pioneered by AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
The first component is the “Ileana Ros-Lehtinen United States-Israel Security Assistance Authorization Act of 2019” – the 2018 text can be seen here. This would give Israel $33 billion over the next ten years in addition to the $5.5 billion enacted in last year’s defense spending bill. This is reportedly the largest military aid package in U.S. history. The bill was held up by Senator Rand Paul, who threatened a filibuster against it. Most Americans feel the U.S. already gives Israel too much money.
Unlike the memorandum of understanding (MOU) that the Obama administration negotiated with Israel in 2016, this would make the $38 billion a floor rather than a ceiling and cements it into law (an MOU is non-binding). It also provides Israel additional perks, including calling for NASA to work with Israel’s space agency, despite Israel’s alleged acquisition of classified U.S. research.
Another component of the bill is the “Combatting BDS Act of 2019” (the text of the previous version is here). This allows state and local governments to prohibit contracting with any entity that participates in BDS, the boycott of Israel over Israel’s violations of human rights and international law. Many groups and individuals oppose the bill on the ground that it violates freedom of speech. AIPAC is a strong supporter of such legislation.
A third component is “The United States-Jordan Defense Cooperation Extension Act,” which would provide money to Jordan. Israel has long used U.S. aid packages to Mideast governments to enable Israel’s regional divide-and-conquer strategies.
Similarly, the fourth component is the “Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019” (2018 version here), which imposes sanctions on Syria. Roll Call reports that the bill “could serve as a rebuttal” to President Trump’s recent announcement that he was going to withdraw troops from Syria.
NBC reports: “They can’t make Trump keep troops in Syria. They’ve asked for increased sanctions on Syria instead.”
Israel and its American partisans are strongly opposed to the withdrawal.
Bill being fast-tracked
[UPDATE: The bill is scheduled to be discussed on Tues, Jan 8, at 3 pm EST.]
According to Roll Call, the composite bill, entitled “Strengthening America’s Security in the Middle East Act of 2019,” is being “expedited through a Senate procedure that allows for bypassing the committee process, and the new chairman of the committee of jurisdiction for most of the bills is on board with the approach.”
The chairman is Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho. According to Open Secrets, one of Risch’s main sources of campaign donations is the pro-Israel lobby.
Image from video of Risch’s speech at AIPAC convention; view it here.
It appears that none of the U.S. news reports on the legislation inform voters how much U.S. tax money the bill will give to Israel; many reports don’t even mention that aspect of the bill. This continues the media omission on this subject.
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A study by a Toronto-based consulting and research company has revealed that over the past fifty years mainstream reporting about Israel has been distorted to portray the Jewish state in positive terms while ignoring the plight of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation. The media study, based on a computer analysis of 50 years of data, found that major U.S. newspapers have provided consistently skewed, pro-Israel reporting on Israel-Palestine. The slanting in news coverage included subtle manipulations like using word associations favorable to Israel and derogatory to Palestinians as well as persistent publication of stories praising Israel while also avoiding reporting anything supportive of the dispossessed Arab point of view.
The researchers from 416Labs were able to evaluate headlines and articles derived from five major U.S. newspapers: the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal during the time period 1967 to 2017. June 1967 was selected as the starting point to include coverage of the Six Day War and its aftermath, when Israel attacked Jordan, Egypt and Syria to begin its military occupation of Palestinian territory on the West Bank and Gaza.
No one should be surprised by media bias in favor of Israel given the dominance of Jewish owners and editors in the major media, but the study just might have gone one step farther and noted, as did Congressman Paul Findley in his book They Dare to Speak Out back in 1985, that much of the bias stems from the overseas correspondents covering the Middle East for the U.S. and European media also being overwhelmingly Jewish. And a review of the Israel-philia might have gone back even further in time to the foundation of the state in 1948 to find similar favorable coverage.
Shaping the favorable perception of Israel has also involved the efforts of Zionist-dominated Hollywood movies and television to portray Jewish heroism while also at the same time ignoring the Zionist terrorism directed against both the indigenous Palestinian population and the British Mandate authorities prior to Israel’s statehood. The movie Exodus shaped many Americans’ perceptions of what had occurred in the Middle East, while the steady stream of films related to the so-called holocaust, which ignore the many problems with that standard narrative, perpetuate Jewish suffering and victimhood.
In truth, no one should believe any country’s creation narrative, which, since the time of Virgil’s Aeneid, has been intended to present an idealized portrait that is largely fact-free. Nationalists will inevitably distort the tale to reflect their own vision of what their homeland represents and how it came to be, but Israel’s story is unusual in that it is packed with lies from start to finish. Even before the creation of a Jewish state, Zionists encouraged Jewish emigration from Europe to the then Turkish-controlled Palestine. They coined the expression “a land without people for people without a land,” a flat out lie as Palestine was fully inhabited by Muslim and Christian Palestinian Arabs plus a small Jewish minority. This expression has been more recently replaced with another one, i.e. how Israel “made the desert bloom,” as if the land were not being cultivated before large numbers of Jews arrived, making it another lie. And it is, by the way, an expression favored by Zionist presidential aspirant Kamala Harris, a prime example of “progressive except for Israel.”
Israel was founded as a product of terrorism, some would say the “first modern” style terrorism, to include bombings of non-military targets and random massacres of civilians. In a notorious attack on the village of Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948, more than two hundred Palestinians may have been slaughtered by Jewish terrorists affiliated with the Irgun and Lehi groups. The exact count of the victims is unknown because a subsequent Zionist clean-up team systematically destroyed many of the bodies.
Given the turmoil in Palestine and the agitation by British Jews, the U.K. was eager to cut its losses, and Harry Truman, a U.S. president who benefited from Jewish financial and political support in his reelection bid, was equally willing to support the creation of a Jewish state as a quid pro quo. Even though Jews were a distinct minority in the new Israel-Palestine, they obtained nearly half of the land in spite of the United Nations mandate that the rights of the indigenous population should not be compromised by the new arrivals.
But the new arrivals from Europe and America disagreed with that even-handed approach. They assassinated the U.N. mediator Count Folke Bernadotte, who had himself saved many Jews in Nazi occupied Europe, and started to attack their Arab neighbors, intentionally driving 700,000 from their homes and killing many in the process. By that act of terror and a subsequent war fought against its neighbors, Israel obtained more land before the green line was eventually established as part of a 1949 Armistice Agreement managed by the U.N. to divide Israel from the West Bank and Gaza, which were under the jurisdiction of Jordan and Egypt respectively.
And then there came the miraculous Six Day War of June 1967, regarding which glowing media accounts described how Israel was attacked by Jordan, Syria and Egypt simultaneously but fought back hard and won a decisive victory, occupying in the process the parts of Jerusalem it did not already control as well as the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza. The only problem with that story is that Israel started the war, attacking and destroying the Arab air forces without a declaration of war while their planes were on the ground. Denied air cover, the Arab ground forces could not win.
Israel also included in its Six Day War triumph the attempted sinking of the American intelligence gathering ship the U.S.S. Liberty, which was in international waters when it was attacked on June 8th. Thirty-four crewmen were killed and 171 wounded in the only attack on a U.S. Naval vessel in peace time that was never fully investigated by the Pentagon due to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s unwillingness to offend American Jews. The Israelis and their apologists have claimed the attack was a case of either “fog of war” or “a mistake,” both of which were completely self-serving lies exposed by compelling National Security Agency collected evidence that has surfaced recently. And, by the way, the Israelis continue to receive military assistance from Washington in spite of the killing of American servicemembers, $3.8 billion per annum guaranteed for the next ten years plus special appropriations as needed.
Even when the Israelis are clearly telling lies, much of the media and chattering class has been willing to forgive them their trespasses no matter what they do or say. The whopper level lies about Israel are that it is a democracy and America’s best friend and ally. It is neither. It has more than 50 laws that discriminate against Arabs, is now self-defined as a “Jewish state,” and it has recently legalized banning non-Jews from residential areas and towns. It also occupies Palestinian territories where the original inhabitants have no rights but martial law. And the Jewish state has never been an American ally in practical terms as it is under no obligation to support Washington under any circumstances even though a U.S. Air Force general has declared that his troops are prepared to die for Israel.
Some other recent lies include the propagation of a narrative that the Palestinians do not exist as a people, that Palestine has never been a country and therefore should never become one, and that there is no peace in the Middle East because the Arabs have never accepted the generous offers made by the Israelis to settle problems with the Palestinians, who are, by the way, solely responsible for their unfortunate situation since the expanding Israeli settlements on their land are no obstacle to peace. All lies.
And another big lie concerns how Israel spies on the United States. Israel is the number one “friendly” country when it comes to stealing American secrets, both commercial and military. When Jonathan Pollard stole more U.S. classified information than any spy in history, Israel’s friends rushed to explain that it was all a mistake, that Pollard was just a one-off oddball. And the Israel government agreed to return what he had stolen but did not do so and instead used it to barter with America’s then enemy the Soviet Union in a deal to permit Jews to emigrate.
Another espionage related development which produced a whole battery of Israeli lies and evasions relates to 9/11, where Mossad almost certainly had at a minimum inside knowledge regarding what was about to occur through their illegal massive spying program inside the United States. Remember the cheering Israeli movers in New Jersey as the twin towers went down? Or the hundreds of “art students” selling their work all across the U.S., which was both a scam and part of an espionage network?
More recent lies include repeated assertions that the Iranians have a secret nuclear program, which will produce a bomb in “six months,” something Benjamin Netanyahuhas been promising since 1993. And those wily Persians are also developing ballistic missiles that can be used to attack Europe and America, a particularly dangerous lie as it has been picked up and repeated ad nauseam by the buffoonish triumvirate in Washington consisting of Bolton, Pompeo and Pence, which passes for the deep thinking in U.S. foreign policy these days. That allegation could easily lead to United States involvement in a war fought for Israel that it might reasonably avoid as it is not threatened by Iran and has no vital interests supportive of going to war against it.
But the greatest lie of all is the current claim that anti-Semitism is surging all around the world, requiring still more protection of and deference to diaspora Jews as well as to the state of Israel. It is based on a fundamental lie, that criticism of Israel is ipso facto anti-Semitic and ignores the fact that the pushback is based overwhelmingly on how Israel and Netanyahu behave. Israel, whatever its pretensions, is a country and Judaism is a religion. It is in fact particularly dangerous, and damaging to the religion, to combine the two deliberately as is being done by Netanyahu and the many American Jews who are serial apologists for Israel.
Indeed, Israel and its partisans are now using lies to change the way the public views the issue of anti-Semitism and are willing to do so by legislating to enforce how people think, to include the use of legal sanctions consisting of fines and imprisonment to silence critics. If legislation currently in congress is ever implemented fully, it will be the death of freedom of speech in the U.S. That such nonsense has gained currency at all is due to the Israeli corruption of both America’s government and its news media, which is not a lie, but the absolute truth that you won’t find discussed anywhere in your newspaper or on television reporting.
This trend to criminalize criticism of Israel has led Jewish groups and some governments to work together to promulgate “hate crime” statutes and other legal barriers to protect the Israeli wrongdoing. But Israel is not and should not be protected against criticism. It is a country that behaves very badly, and, one might add, dangerously, not only to its neighbors but also to the world as it has the potential in its hands to escalate its involvement in Syria to initiate a nuclear conflagration between the U.S. and Russia. Israel’s lies should be recognized for what they are and it should be boycotted and sanctioned until it comes to its senses or, if it does not, it should be completely shunned.
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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
There isn’t a nation in the Western Hemisphere that hasn’t at one time or another found itself caught in the far-reaching tentacles of US imperialism. Venezuela is certainly no exception. Washington has been meddling in its internal affairs since the 19th century and it continues to do so to this very day, when the specter of yet another US-backed coup, or even a direct American military intervention, looms larger by the day.
A Long History of Meddling
During most of the 20th century, US interference in Venezuela was mostly about oil, but that wasn’t always the case in earlier times. Washington’s involvement in the 1895 boundary dispute between Venezuela and Britain was a key event in the emergence of the United States as a world power as the Grover Cleveland administration, invoking the Monroe Doctrine prohibition against European colonization of the Americas, successfully sided with Venezuela. The Cleveland administration, which noted that “today the United States is practically sovereign on this continent,” issued thinly veiled threats of war against Britain, which eventually acquiesced to US demands.
Later, during the Dutch-Venezuelan crisis of 1908, the US Navy helped Venezuelan Vice President Juan Vicente Gómez seize power in a coup. Gómez, known as “The Catfish,” would rule the country either directly or through puppet presidents, until his death in 1935. His regime was one of inconceivably medieval brutality. His enforcers were fond of shackling political prisoners in grillos, leg irons that rendered many victims permanently disabled — and those were the “lucky” ones. The unlucky ones were hanged to death by meathooks through their throats or testicles.
Gómez was fantastically corrupt. He was believed to be worth a staggering $200 million, or more than $3.6 billion today, at the time of his death. However, he endeared himself to Washington and Wall Street by granting highly lucrative concessions to foreign oil companies including Standard Oil (ExxonMobil today) and Royal Dutch Shell. Rómulo Betancourt, who served two presidential terms in the mid-20th century and is considered the founding father of modern democratic Venezuela, wrote that Gómez “was the instrument of foreign control of the Venezuelan economy, the ally and servant of powerful outside interests.”
The exploitation of Venezuela’s tremendous petroleum resources has been the constant objective of US policy and action toward the South American state for over a century. This meant backing the viciously repressive dictatorMarcos Pérez Jiménez (1948-1958), whose regime forces subjected political prisoners to tortures every bit as horrific as those committed during the Gómez era. Jiménez was as generous to transnational corporations as he was cruel to his own people. The United States, which cared about the former far more than the latter, counted the despot as a close ally, even awarding him the military Legion of Merit “for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding services and achievements” and providing his dreaded Directorate of National Security (DSN) with invaluable assistance as it imprisoned, tortured and murdered thousands of innocent Venezuelans.
A few years after Venezuela shifted to democracy in 1958, most other South American nations began falling under the iron-fisted rule of US-backed military dictatorships. The military and security forces of these repressive coup regimes were often trained by the United States, at the US Army School of the Americas and elsewhere, in kidnapping, torture, assassination and democracy suppression. As US-backed death squads trained from US-authored torture manuals murdered, tortured and terrorized innocent men, women and children from Central America to Argentina, Venezuelans enjoyed decades of peace and prosperity. However, the US never stopped meddling in Venezuela’s affairs, and after the free and fair election of Hugo Chávez in 1998 and the subsequent launch of the Bolivarian Revolution, US meddling would reach levels that would shock the conscience of the world.
Bolivarian Backlash
The Bolivarian Revolution, a series of economic and social reforms that dramatically reduced poverty and illiteracy while greatly improving health and other living conditions for millions of Venezuelans, drew worldwide acclaim. The reforms, which included nationalizing key components of the nation’s economy as part of an agenda of socialist uplift, made Chávez a hero to millions of people and the enemy of Venezuela’s oligarchs. The exportation of the Bolivarian Revolution, which included forging stronger, more peaceful inter-American relations and even the provision of free home heating oil for hundreds of thousands of needy people in the United States, made Chávez a marked man in Washington.
The administration of George W. Bush — whom Chávez infamously called “the devil” in a speech before the United Nations — backed a failed military coup against Chávez in 2002. The attempted coup was closely linked to prominent neoconservatives including Elliott Abrams, the disgraced Iran-Contra criminal who played a key role in covering up massacres committed by US-backed death squads in Central America and Otto Reich, a staunch supporter of Cuban exile terrorists who have killed at least hundreds of innocent men, women and children throughout the Americas. Two key coup plotters, Army commander Efraín Vasquez and Gen. Ramirez Poveda, were trained at the US Army School of the Americas. The coup briefly ousted Chávez but loyalist forces and popular support restored his rule 47 hours later.
Barack Obama continued Bush’s policy of demonizing Chávez, whose government he called “authoritarian.” This, despite the fact that former president Jimmy Carter, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work at the election-monitoring Carter Center, called Venezuela’s election process “the best in the world.” In 2015, Obama declared Venezuela an “extraordinary threat to national security,” a bewildering assertion considering the country has never started a war in its history. The United States, on the other hand, has intervened in, attacked, invaded or occupied Latin American and Caribbean nations more than 50 times and, as Obama spoke, the US military was busy bombing seven countries in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. For decades, successive US administrations have also lavished Venezuela’s neighbor Colombia — which has been condemned for its government and paramilitary death squad massacres and deadly corporate-backed crackdowns on indigenous peoples and workers — with billions upon billions of dollars in military and economic aid.
With Friends Like These…
In an act of breathtaking yet typical US hypocrisy, President Donald Trump in July 2017 announced economic sanctions against Nicolás Maduro, who was elected president following the death of Chávez in 2013. While Maduro vowed to continue the Bolivarian Revolution, the Trump administration threatened to attack Venezuela, citing the “suffering” of its people. Meanwhile, Trump continued previous administrations’ support for some of the world’s worst human rights violators, including the Islamic fundamentalist monarchy of Saudi Arabia — which is waging a war of aggression and starvation in Yemen that has claimed tens of thousands of lives, while severely repressing its own subjects at home — as well as brutal dictators in Bahrain, Ethiopia, Equatorial Guinea, South Sudan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and elsewhere. While bashing Maduro, Trump has heaped praise upon North Korean dictatorKim Jong-un, leader of the world’s most murderous regime, Philippines’ “death squad mayor”-turned president Rodrigo Duterte, China’s “president for life” Xi Jinping, Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan,Vladimir Putin and other unsavories.
Trump’s latest moves, recognizing Venezuela’s illegitimate would-be presidential usurper Juan Guaidó and appointing the neoconservative regime change hawk Elliott Abrams as special envoy, seems designed to sow seeds of subversion and revolt within the country’s government and military. This follows National Security Adviser John Bolton — a key neocon architect and cheerleader for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and who has also advocated regime change in Iran, Venezuela and elsewhere — calling Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua a “troika of tyranny,” a hypocritical characterization reminiscent of Bush’s “axis of evil,” and one that utterly ignores the far worse, but far more subservient, regimes backed by the Trump administration.
The United States has almost always opposed — whether by slaughter, spies or sanctions — any government or movement that seeks to freely choose its own political and economic path if it diverges from the corporate capitalist order backed by Washington and Wall Street. It has long sought to crush the boldly defiant Bolivarian Revolution, just as it has crushed countless popular revolutions and movements before. The Maduro regime is far from perfect. But to call Maduro a dictator and to advocate regime change in Caracas while supporting far worse tyrants around the world just because they’re US-friendly is an exercise in the blatant, bloody hypocrisy for which the United States has long been infamous around the planet, especially among its poorer parts and peoples.
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Brett Wilkins is a San Francisco-based author and activist. His work, which focuses on issues of war and peace and human rights, is archived at www.brettwilkins.com
Featured image: Venezuelan dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez receiving the “Legion of Merit” from ambassador Fletcher Warren in 1954 (Wikimedia Commons)
Last week President Trump announced that the United States would no longer recognize Nicolas Maduro as president of Venezuela and would recognize the head of its national assembly, Juan Guaido, as president instead. US thus openly backs regime change. But what has long been a dream of the neocons may well turn out to be a nightmare for President Trump.
Why did Trump declare that the Venezuelan president was no longer the president? According to the State Department, the Administration was acting to help enforce the Venezuelan constitution. If only they were so eager to enforce our own Constitution!
It’s ironic that a president who has spent the first two years in office fighting charges that a foreign country meddled in the US elections would turn around and not only meddle in foreign elections but actually demand the right to name a foreign country’s president! How would we react if the Chinese and Russians decided that President Trump was not upholding the US Constitution and recognized Speaker Nancy Pelosi as US president instead?
Even those who would like to see a change of government in Venezuela should reject any notion that the change must be “helped” by the United States. According to press reports, Vice President Mike Pence was so involved in internal Venezuelan affairs that he actually urged Guaido to name himself president and promised US support. This is not only foolish, it is very dangerous. A Venezuelan civil war would result in mass death and even more economic misery!
Regime change has long been US policy for Venezuela. The US has been conducting economic warfare practically since Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, was first elected in 1998. The goal of US sanctions and other economic measures against Venezuela (and other countries in Washington’s crosshairs) is to make life so miserable for average citizens that they rise up and overthrow their leaders. But of course once they do so they must replace those leaders with someone approved by Washington. Remember after the “Arab Spring” in Egypt when the people did rise up and overthrow their leader, but they then elected the “wrong” candidate. The army moved in and deposed the elected president and replaced him with a Washington-approved politician. Then-Secretary of State John Kerry called it “restoring democracy.”
It is tragically comical that President Trump has named convicted criminal Elliot Abrams as his point person to “restore democracy” in Venezuela. Abrams played a key role in the Iran-Contra affair and went on to be one of the chief architects of the disastrous US invasion of Iraq in 2003. His role in helping promote the horrible violence in Latin America in the 1980s should disqualify him from ever holding public office again.
Instead of this ham-fisted coup d’etat, a better policy for Venezuela these past 20 years would have been engagement and trade. If we truly believe in the superiority of a free market system we must also believe that we can only lead by example, not by forcing our system on others.
Just four months ago President Trump said at the UN:
“I honor the right of every nation in this room to pursue its own customs, beliefs, and traditions. The United States will not tell you how to live or work or worship. We only ask that you honor our sovereignty in return.”
Sadly it seems that these were merely empty words. We know from Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc. that this will not end well for President Trump. Or for the United States. We must leave Venezuela alone!
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The rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated… obstacles and adversity fuel our potential. Here’s my first audio podcast… 2 hours to get things started, so much vital info to share while on the trail of our missing trillions…
Last time people heard from me, I was reporting on trillions of dollars in unaccounted for tax money. That is trillions, with a “t,” trillions of unaccounted for tax dollars. Trillions in unaccounted for “military” spending, so-called “military” spending.
Trillions unaccounted for… no matter how many times I say that, it just always sounds so absurd to say that, “Trillions of unaccounted for tax dollars.” How can that possibly be, right?
It’s surreal corruption. $1 trillion is $1000 billion.
To accurately report on government corruption, to accurately report on systemic corruption, to report on the corruption of our tax system, not just wasted, stolen and unaccounted for tax dollars when it comes to so-called “military” spending, it’s across our entire tax system, as I will cover in detail, most every government agency is now completely overrun with corruption, and the corruption has gotten so bad, if you accurately report on it, you are going to sound like a crazy person.
It’s surreal corruption.
However corrupt you think the government is, when you really dig into it, it’s much worse than you can imagine. New shocking details come to light all the time. The unthinkable has become normalized. I have hundreds of detailed examples, literally, hundreds of examples of shocking, mind-blowing corruption.
I’m going to get into deep detail on all of this. There are definite trends, reoccurring themes, and fundamental dynamics involved. I will break it all down and lay it out for you.
We’ve gathered so much evidence. It is hard to know where to begin with all of this. Billions lost here, billions lost there. It all adds up quickly. It’s real hard to know where to begin. We should probably start with a basic example.
Here’s the latest example that I was just reading, I was just reading a new Inspector General report from the Social Security Administration. The Social Security Administration Inspector General, the SSA IG, the Social Security Administration Inspector General just revealed that billions of dollars, that is billions, with a “b” now, billions of tax dollars have been lost to Social Security fraud over the past year, and this is nothing new. Billions of tax dollars are lost to fraud within Social Security every year now.
Now, this is just one example of many, just the latest example. So, in this most recent Inspector General report it says “at least”, “at least $10 billion” was lost to fraud last year. That’s “at least $10 billion” lost to fraud in just the past year, in one agency, and it happens every year, in many agencies, it happens across our entire tax system, across the board, and “at least $10 billion” in one agency, in one year, is just a drop in the bucket compared to what is going on in so-called “military” spending. It’s surreal corruption. It’s mind melting…
I mean, the $20+ trillion in unaccounted for military spending, so-called “military” spending, that information comes directly from the Department of Defense’s own Inspector General reports. There was one example, one annual report, in one annual Department of Defense Inspector General report there was $6.5 trillion, with a “t,” $6.5 trillion in unaccounted for military spending. $6.5 trillion in unaccounted for military spending in one year.
Do you see what I mean by surreal corruption? It’s beyond imagination. How can that be possible, right?
So one of the challenges that we keep running into: to accurately report now on systemic government corruption, if you accurately report on it, you are going to sound like a crazy person. You can read quotes verbatim from government Inspector Generals and people will think you are crazy. They won’t take you seriously, that’s how surreal the corruption has become.
This is a significant part of what I’ve been doing. I read government Inspector General reports and then I investigate and research what they are reporting on. I flesh out the context behind Inspector General’s publicly available report summaries. You know, what actual journalists would do, if there were any real investigative journalists left in this country.
Excuse me, I’m shaking things up over here. I’m drinking a protein shake. I’m going to need some energy here. We are going for a deep dive here.
So when it comes to the trillions in unaccounted for military spending, it’s not like these are just accounting errors, there are many corresponding instances of outrageous fraud and corruption all over the place that corroborate and substantiate them. We have hundreds of examples that we will go through. It’s hard to know where to begin.
We already have people who worked in the Pentagon, who worked at the Department of Defense Finance and Accounting Service who say the books are cooked as standard operating procedure. People who spent their careers working at the Defense Finance and Accounting Service say there are “plugs,” thousands of plugs, thousands of transactions, per month, with no supporting documentation. Thousands of transactions per month with no supporting documentation.
People who spent their careers working at the Defense Finance and Accounting Service said money is spent all the time without Congressional appropriations, money that Congress has not allocated. I mean, we have direct violations of the U.S. Constitution, colossal, blatant violations of the Constitution here. What more needs to be said to get some serious accountability, some serious investigations going here, some legit accountability?
It’s surreal corruption. The more you look into military spending, the crazier it gets.
We’ve even had Defense Secretaries, Defense Secretaries are in charge of military spending, we have had multiple Defense Secretaries publicly admit that they have no idea what is happening with military spending; that there are hundreds of financing operations throughout the Pentagon that lack oversight. They don’t even know how many financing operations there are. Did you get that?
There are hundreds of financing operations throughout the Pentagon that lack oversight. Robert Gates, when he was Defense Secretary, Gates said that there were unaccountable Fiefdoms operating throughout the Pentagon. Unaccountable Fiefdoms, those are Gates’ words, he said that publicly, at the American Enterprise Institute, but the mainstream media and both political parties just ignored him.
It’s all so absurd. Gates said he couldn’t even get answers to how much money was being spent; let alone what it was being spent on. Do you understand the absurdity of that? The Defense Secretary can’t get answers on how much money is even being spent in the first place.
Looks like there is a back door into the U.S. Treasury here, a wide-open back door into the U.S. Treasury, don’t you think? Do you think?
Please, think… think it through… please think it through.
And then, of course, we had Donald Rumsfeld, when he was Defense Secretary, he said in a speech at the Pentagon, he called the Pentagon a black hole where U.S. tax dollars disappear by the trillions. Did you hear that? A Defense Secretary called the Pentagon a black hole where U.S. tax dollars disappear by the trillions.
These are Defense Secretaries and Department of Defense Inspector Generals reporting this. And still, there are no serious investigations into what has been happening to trillions in taxpayer wealth. Year after year trillions of dollars are disappearing, and it just keeps getting worse. Department of Defense Inspector Generals have reported over $20 trillion is unaccounted for now, and they are ignored. It’s surreal corruption.
People don’t understand the impact that this has on their lives, will have on their lives, the inevitable consequences of all this. It’s horrifying. Our future has been set on fire. Our near-future.
The scale of the corruption is too large for the average person to comprehend.
I have so much to say about all this, but the point we want to make now, the point we want to make up front, from the beginning, one of the challenges that we keep running into: to accurately report on systemic corruption now, if you accurately report on it, you are going to sound like a crazy person. People don’t take you seriously.
To accurately report on corruption now, you will sound like an Onion article. It’s surreal corruption. Truth is much stranger than fiction these days. Right? Reality is much stranger than fiction. Real news is much stranger than fake news. Real news is much more surreal than fake news. It’s no wonder that people are confused, and don’t know what to believe anymore. We are confronted by surreal corruption.
And, again, to be clear, it is not just in military spending. It’s happening throughout the entire tax system now. The cancer of corruption is now malignant and it’s spreading rapidly.
So, anyhow, I read these Inspector General reports, whether it is from the Department of Defense Inspector General or the Intelligence Community Inspector General or the Social Security Administration Inspector General or the Environmental Protection Agency Inspector General, every single government agency has their own Inspector General whose job it is to detect and investigate corruption. So they produce report after report of mind-blowing corruption, and no one really pays attention to them. The mainstream media ignores them, most politicians completely ignore them as well. This is where you can clearly see how real journalism is absolutely dead in this country, and how utterly corrupt both political parties are.
Government Inspector Generals reveal trillions of dollars worth of shocking fraud and mind-boggling waste, and the mainstream media and both political parties just ignore them. It’s so absurd.
These are government Inspector Generals. Inspector Generals are an absolutely vital accountability mechanism built into the core functioning of our government, and they are being ignored.
Our government is fundamentally systemically corrupted. The chain of accountability is no longer functioning. It’s an all-out smash and grab imperial heist, a global imperial heist. The American people are defenseless.
We will go into deep detail on all of this, the evidence is there, if you have the patience and attention span to go through it. We have done our homework. There is no defending what is going on. They can’t defend it, that’s why they stay silent and try to cover-up and classify everything, and that’s why they do what they can to silence people who talk about it, and to suppress and censor people, and to hack people.
They can’t defend it, that’s why we are supersaturated in divide and conquer propaganda. That’s why the mainstream media is now a divide and conquer distraction machine spewing divisive rhetoric 24/7. The mainstream media is now a divide and conquer distraction machine. We’ll prove this as well, we understand the fundamental dynamics of the mainstream propaganda system very well here. Bottom line, it is imperial divide and conquer 101. Unleash divide and conquer PSYOPS, make the local population fight amongst themselves while you rob everyone blind and bury the nation in debt. Divide and conquer imperialism 101.
Ah, I don’t want to get too deep too fast. We need to be disciplined in our approach. We’ve done our homework. We need to be as disciplined as possible. I can’t get all worked up and move to fast. We need to be as methodical as possible, so we can effectively overcome divide and conquer propaganda to unite and defend the American people against predatory global imperial interests who are looting this country and setting our future on fire.
Ah… let me chill and refocus for a minute here… I’m moving too fast… One step at a time. People need context and detail first. We need to lay a solid foundation first, flesh it out, make the case clearly, in a way where the average person will understand it, in a way where the average person can relate to it. That’s the mission here. Got to be strategic. One step at a time. Layer by layer.
So… just for a vibe check, for a general overview, this is the general reoccurring theme; this is the general feeling you get over and over when you start digging into surreal systemic corruption… You see corruption in a particular government agency, and you think, “Oh my God, this is incredible corruption,” then you think, “Wait, c’mon, this couldn’t possibly be right, right?” So you start digging into it and it just keeps getting worse. You just keep peeling back layer after layer after layer of unfolding corruption, exponential corruption. It just keeps getting worse.
You fall down the rabbit hole of surreal corruption, and you go through the looking glass, and the looking glass turns into this kaleidoscopic funhouse mirror, it’s a clown mirror of corruption, surreal corruption blurs out, spirals out, expanding as it unfolds around you, in surreal Fibonacci spiraling oscillations.
I mean, look, I don’t want to sound all silly here. I don’t mean to make light of it. This no joke folks, no joke at all, but this is what we’re up against here… surreal corruption.
Now let me be more precise, let me focus in more now, let me be more technical in my reference here. This is what I mean by surreal corruption. Before diving deep, before diving too deep into the deep waters of military spending, before diving into the abyss, let’s just take this latest example that I started with, the $10 Billion that disappeared from Social Security this year. It’s not the best example, but it will make the general point. Let’s at least start with that basic example before we get into the more egregious, shockingly unbelievable examples, keep it basic.
The Social Security issue will give you a general overview, a basic idea, you can begin to see some common themes that keep reoccurring and get a lay of the land here, a lay of the surreal landscape that is spiraling, unfolding around us…
So, $10 billion lost to fraud in Social Security in just one year, right? Now, you think to yourself, “Oh, c’mon that can’t be, $10 billion lost to fraud, in one year. How can that be possible?” Right? So then, you look into it and you find out, “Oh, this is actually at least $10 billion,” as it turns out the $10 billion is not even a complete view into the overall fraud, in just Social Security, in just one year. So it’s actually more than $10 billion. “Well, wow… How much more?” Well, to be honest with you, no one is sure exactly how much more. “What? Whoa.”
Then, you find out that this happens every year, “Wait! What? c‘mon, we’re losing billions to Social Security fraud every single year, year after year? That’s unbelievable!” Right?
But wait, it gets even worse, it’s like a bad infomercial, right, “But wait, there is even more.” So you then see that this problem has been known about for years, and even worse, then you find out that solutions to the problem have been known for years as well, but they’ve never been implemented. Solutions are known, but they don’t get implemented. “Whaaaat?” This is a common reoccurring theme. Solutions are known, but they don’t get implemented.
Then you think, “C’mon, that can’t be right, right? I mean, c’mon, they’ve had a solution to the problem, but the solution was never implemented, and now they just keep losing ‘at least $10 billion tax dollars a year to fraud,’ and their not fixing it, you’ve gotta to be kidding me. C’mon, that can’t be real. That can’t be happening. Am I getting punked here? Is there a hidden camera somewhere?”
Then, as you’re digging even deeper into it, peeling back the layers, looking further into that particular instance of corruption, at that particular situation, as you’re beginning to fall down the rabbit hole of surreal corruption, peeling back the layers, it just keeps getting worse. Then you find out, that not only are we losing billions to Social Security fraud every year, and not only do we have solutions to the problem that aren’t being implemented, then you find out, in addition to all of that, “Oh, wait a second, oh no.” It turns out that $3 Trillion, there it is again, trillions, with a “t” now, $3 Trillion from the Social Security Trust Fund, $3 trillion from the Social Security Trust Fund that we now need to pay retiring Baby Boomers back, yeah, well, as it turns out that money has already been spent elsewhere. “What the? WTF?”
Now, try to keep context here, $1 trillion is $1000 billion, so $3 trillion is $3000 billion…
So $3 trillion that people, $3000 billion that workers paid into the Social Security Trust Fund, that we now need to pay back to retiring Baby Boomers now, $3 trillion that we now need is gone. “Whaaaaat? How can that be?”
Then, as everything around you begins to blur out into a surreal landscape, then you say, “But, but, wait, wait… where did that $3 trillion go?” Then this white bunny in a top hat, hops up to you, comes bouncing up to you and says, “He, he, he.. we don’t know where that $3 trillion went. He, he, he…”
I mean, this is reality now. I mean, the bunny in the top hat was a silly joke, but the rest of it is legit. 100% legit. Somehow… sadly… as hard as it is to believe, as hard as it is to believe… to accurately report on systemic corruption now, if you accurately report on it, you are going to sound like a crazy person.
So, to sum up this one of many examples that we’ll be exploring, to sum up this one of many government agencies that corruption has run amok upon, to sum up a reoccurring theme, to sum up the new normal: we are losing “at least $10 billion a year to Social Security fraud, year after year, and people have known how to solve the problem, but the solutions don’t get implemented, and on top of that, politicians have already taken $3 Trillion from the Social Security Trust Fund, that we now need, and spent it elsewhere, on God knows what. Who knows? Whoops. Shh… Don’t tell anyone. Shh.. Politicians have already taken $3000 billion from the Social Security Trust Fund, that we now need to pay people back with, now that Baby Boomers are retiring en masse, now that Baby Boomers are retiring by the millions.
“Ut oh, we have to pay people back now? But we already spent their money, ut oh.” Shh… “Where did it all go?” Shh… I don’t know. “Who knows?”
And we’re losing an additional $10 billion per year to fraud. So you see, as it turns out, that $10 billion is just the icing on the surreally corrupt cake.
Is your mind melting yet?
This is only one small piece to the surreally corrupt puzzle.
And, oh by the way, overall, when it comes to our national debt, we have already have spent more than $21 Trillion over budget. Ah, we are already $21 Trillion in debt, and that’s not even accounting for an additional, what, what is it? Another $21 trillion or so in so-called “military” spending that is unaccounted for. So you can see, in the grand scheme, what’s another $3 Trillion to throw into the surreal fire. Ah, it’s all good. No worries.
So, you see, in this context, in this overall situation, after all, at least $10 billion lost to fraud in one year, in one agency, ho hum. We’re dealing with tens of trillions now, so $10 billion, please, we can’t be bothered fixing that. That’s just another drop in the bucket. That’s just a minor rounding error in the surreally cooked books. It’s just another day in the surreally corrupt land of the free, just yet another mind blowing Inspector General report, what else is new?
There are so many examples, it gets worse than this, much worse. We are just easing in here. There is so much more to cover. The Social Security Inspector General report is just the latest example that I just read, just yet another Inspector General report to throw into the surreal fire.
The whole thing is beyond imagination. It’s surreal corruption. That’s the only way I can honestly, accurately articulate it: surreal corruption.
Our tax dollars have been disappearing by the Trillions, with a “t,” disappearing by the trillions through mind blowing fraud and mind-boggling waste. It is happening in many agencies, there are examples that are much more egregious than “at least $10 billion” tax dollars disappearing this year from just Social Security. At least $10 billion in Social Security fraud this year, that is just the tiny tip of the iceberg compared to what is going on in… lets say, so-called “military” spending.
Our tax dollars have been disappearing by the Trillions, with a “t.” I mean, again, 1$ Trillion is $1000 billion, right, do you get that? Can you comprehend that?
It is difficult to seriously wrap your mind around numbers this big. $1 Trillion is $1000 billion.
We need to let that simmer and sink in for a while. This is context that we really need to get in our mind from the beginning here. Please think it through for a while… $1 Trillion is $1000 billion.
Write that down, print it out… hang it up on the wall. Say it 5 times before you go to bed, and 5 times when you get up in the morning. $1 Trillion is $1000 billion.
Seriously, please, let that simmer for a while… put it in your mental crock-pot. Let that slow cook for a while. Think it over, every time you drive over potholes that are too expensive to fix. $1 Trillion is $1000 billion.
People can’t comprehend corruption on this scale; that’s the problem, that’s what we’re up against here. There is no frame of reference that the average person can relate to when you deal with this much money. People don’t understand the impact, the huge impact, that this will have on our future, on our lives, on our daily existence, the huge impact on our overall quality of life.
People don’t get it. We are talking tens of trillions of dollars here people. $1 Trillion is $1000 billion.
Our future has been looted. Our future has been set on fire. Rome is in flames, it’s been torched, looted, plundered, raped and pillaged. Rome is in ruins.
It’s like mafia accountants and corrupt economists got together and got all jacked up on coke and steroids and concocted some wickedly evil mad scientist science experiment, some surreal mathematical extraction formula, some quantitative voodoo derivative of some sort that sent our tax dollars through the chopshop. Our tax dollars sliced and diced times E = MC2 off into the infinite surreally corrupt future.
I mean, ah… it is hard to put all this surreal corruption into a frame of reference that people can grasp. It is hard to do it without sounding like a crazy person. Right? I know, I sound crazy now, again, I know. It’s not easy to maintain sanity in this kind of surreal landscape. It melts your mind. We’re melting minds already, and we’re just getting warmed up, literally, this is just a warm up recording. Truth is so much stranger than fiction. Real news is much more surreal than fake news.
It’s all so absurd. It’s a Banana Republic on steroids. It’s straight up Global Imperial plunder. The U.S. treasury is being looted in unprecedented fashion. It is Global Imperial plunder that is beyond imagination.
We have details, so many details, so many examples, there is so much evidence. It is happening in broad daylight. It is hidden in plain sight. Or more accurately, it is hidden in surreal sight.
It’s surreal corruption. Salvador Dali could not capture the corruption that is unfolding right now. It is happening across our entire tax system, across most every agency of our government.
I’ve been doing the best I can not to get overwhelmed by it, to be as disciplined as possible, to be as methodical as possible, so I can accurately articulate it as concisely as possible, in a way that a large number of people can understand it. To accurately articulate it as concisely as possible, in a way that a large number of people can understand it, that’s what needs to be done, that’s where the action is at. To accurately articulate it as concisely as possible, so a large number of people can understand it.
I mean, if the government is rigged, if the legal system is rigged, I think it’s time we just take all this evidence all the way to the court of public opinion. By any communication means necessary. By any communication medium possible. What do you think? What do you say?
Say something people. Speak up, the hour is late for optimistic outcomes.
You know, this is what I now realize, this is why I’m making these recordings now, once people can understand the fundamental dynamics of systemic corruption, once a critical mass knows where to focus their attention, focus their efforts, we can fix this. The hour is late, no doubt, but once people can understand the fundamental dynamics of it, we can create the change that we need.
We can absolutely fix it! We now understand the fundamental dynamics of it in such detail. We know what’s happening. We know how it is happening. This is what I’m going to lay out in this series.
I have been investigating, researching, analyzing and reporting on systemic corruption for over 20 years now. I’m getting old. For over 20 years now, I have watched closely as corruption incrementally increases year-over-year, election cycle over election cycle, presidential administration after presidential administration, corruption just keeps trending upward, tick, tick, tick, up it goes, consistently, incrementally, tick, tick, tick, and now we have hit that exponential curve, we have technically entered Peak Corruption.
I’ll flesh out what I mean by Peak Corruption throughout this new series. Yes, have I mentioned that, this new series, which we are doing right here, right now. We’re just getting warmed up, right here, right now.
Welcome aboard the Magical Mystery Tour, on the trail of our missing trillions, much, much more to come. You can consider this episode 1, much, much more to come… providing that I can actually get this vital information out. Providing that I can actually get this vital info out.
As many of you know, last you heard from me, while I was reporting on our missing trillions, my website kept getting hacked. Last you heard from me, ha, it’s been months since you last heard from me. I’ve been M.I.A. for a while, forced into exile, yet again. I’ve been M.I.A. for months now… well, I’m happy to report that the rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated… perhaps. I even believed those rumors for a while. Well, the jury is still out on those rumors actually, we’re deliberating here… demise or rise, what shall it be? We shall soon see… ha, ha…
Anyhow, last you heard from me, while I was reporting on our missing trillions, as many of you know, my website kept getting hacked. I couldn’t keep it online. I was being censored and suppressed. The whole thing turned into a very costly, time consuming, energy sucking, outrageously stressful situation, to say the least. It turned into an absolute life-consuming nightmare. My entire life got turned upside down for a while, to be bluntly honest with you. I nearly lost everything, literally.
I’ve fought some serious battles in the past. When you spend your life investigating systemic corruption, you come up against some really powerful interests, but this time I had to fight as hard as I’ve ever fought, harder than I ever thought I could possibly fight, just to get back here, to this point, with you, right here, right now, with you.
Be Here Now. Be Here Now.
I’m a little battle weary, battle-tested though. I’ve had to take on a Stoic approach, an Amor Fati mindset that says, obstacles and adversity… fuel your potential. That’s become a mantra of sorts for me, that’s the mindset we need here… obstacles and adversity fuel your potential.
So, to make long story short, I don’t want to bore you with my personal drama here. Perhaps it will be a boring documentary someday, when I’m not here anymore, that no one watches. No, no… I ain’t goin out like that, ain’t going out like that.
Anyhow, as it turns out, obstacles and adversity do indeed fuel your potential. I now have people helping me to fend off hackers and censorship. I am very grateful for them… very grateful!
There are still some good people in our government, believe it or not, people who truly care about the overall wellbeing of the American people. They are definitely a shrinking demographic within our government. I am very grateful for them though, very grateful for people that I would call, in general, Constitutional Patriots, that’s what I would call them, in general. Constitutional Patriots are definitely a shrinking demographic within our government. I’ll go into further detail on what exactly I mean by that as well throughout this series.
For right now, I’ll just say this, this is the biggest, most pivotal divide across our government right now; on one hand, there is a shrinking demographic of people who truly care about the overall wellbeing of the American people, and on the other hand, there is a growing demographic, a large number of people who are in our government, who are there just so they can cash-out to the Global Power Elite, to the Global Imperial Elite.
There are a large number of people in our government who are there just so they can enrich themselves. People who are in our government just so they can cash-out to the Global Power Elite, to enrich themselves at the expense of the American People, to enrich themselves at the expense of the American taxpayer.
However, and I want to be clear about this, there are people who still truly put the overall wellbeing of the American people before cashing-out to Global Interests. And those people, who put the interests of Americans first and foremost, those good people, at least the diverse cross-section of those people that I’ve had interaction with, those people much more often than not, they consistently bring up the Constitution. I find that, people who care about the greater good, those people consistently bring up the Constitution. And I’ve come to think of them, to see them as Constitutional Patriots, and some of them openly consider themselves to be that.
Overall though, many of them, to a person, they consistently, in their own way, they bring up the need to enforce the Constitution, and when you look at the most harmful overall corruption that is occurring, enforcing the Constitution is a vital piece to solving it.
So that’s the big, pivotal divide in our government right now, and it has nothing to do with Republicans vs Democrats. At this point in the process, when the government is fundamentally, systemically corrupted, the Republican vs Democrat dynamic is secondary, a distant second, at this point. I will explain what I mean by that in detail, I don’t want to trigger anyone here. I know how heated the partisanship is these days. We are all saturated in divisive rhetoric these days. We are supersaturated in divide and conquer propaganda.
As I briefly mentioned before, divide and conquer propaganda is something that I will be focusing on. A main theme throughout this series, a main theme here will be overcoming divide and conquer propaganda to unite the American People.
My ability to overcome divide and conquer propaganda to unite the American People, my ability to do that is the biggest reason why I’ve had success, and it is also a major reason why I’ve been continually hacked and suppressed as well.
By focusing on systemic corruption, because corruption has become so bad, by focusing on systemic corruption I have supporters with opinions across the entire political spectrum. I have just as many conservative supporters as I have liberal supporters. I have just as many libertarian supporters as progressive supporters. I have supporters who are lifelong Military and Intelligence Community Officers and I have supporters who are Peace Activists. I have supporters who are Grandparents and Great Grandparents, and I have supporters who are in high school and college. I have supporters who are religious, faith-based and spiritual, and I have supporters who are atheists. I have supporters with opinions across the political spectrum, across every demographic, from all walks of life. Corruption has become so bad, every demographic is now impacted by it.
At this point, and here’s a main point, at this point, the most pivotal dividing line is between those who are in on the corruption, and those who are not… and 99.99% of the population is not in on the corruption. This is what I’ll be proving to you, demonstrating for you.
When the government is overrun in corruption, everyone feels taken advantage of, to varying degrees, and rightfully so. There is a plenty of well-justified angst to go around. No one wants to have their tax dollars stolen or wasted. No one. No one wants to have their water supply contaminated. No one wants to breathe toxic air. No one wants to have a toxic food supply that makes us bloated and sick. No one wants to pay twice as much for healthcare than any other country pays. No one wants a rigged government.
Most people don’t want a rigged economy and a rigged stock market. Most people want a fair playing field. One set of rules for everyone, right? That is a bedrock American principal. One set of rules for everyone, right? Can we agree on that?
That’s our common ground here people, and it’s exactly what we need right now. One set of rules for everyone. Accountability. That is a bedrock American principal: accountability. The checks and balances built into the Constitution. One set of rules for everyone.
Let me say this again, because it’s a point that I will emphatically prove to you throughout this series: at this point, the most pivotal dividing line right now is between those who are in on the corruption and those who are not… and 99.99% of the population is not in on the corruption. This is something that I will lay out for you in deep detail.
We need to overcome all this divide and conquer madness.
Here’s where we are coming from. Here’s the baseline, common ground we are all coming from and aiming toward: we all want to live in a safe community, in a healthy environment that gives our families the opportunity to fulfill our potential, whatever it may be. That is the baseline, the common ground we all have here. We all want a safe, healthy community that gives our families the ability to live peaceful and healthy lives.
That’s the perspective that I’m coming from here. I am not an ideologue. I am not partisan in any way. My track record backs that up. If you aren’t familiar with my work through the years, as you will see and hear throughout this series, the proof is in the pudding.
I work hard to avoid groupthink and confirmation bias, which is not an easy thing to do, at all. It takes eternal vigilance. Confirmation bias and groupthink are always a lurking threat. It takes serious psychological bandwidth to defend against, to disciple yourself against confirmation bias and groupthink. Any serious independent, critical thinking individual knows that. The second you get a little lazy in your thinking, confirmation bias and groupthink will kick in and take over.
I think groupthink is the last refuge of the beaten mind. Groupthink and partisanship are two sides of the same coin. Groupthink and partisanship are the left and right hemispheres of the same beaten mind. And I’ve always appreciated the wisdom from the American Transcendentalists, from people like Thoreau and Emerson, wisdom that says, ‘A political party is designed to save people from the vexation of thought.’ Ain’t that the truth.
You don’t want to outsource your thoughts to either one of these political parties. That’s for damn sure. It’s not your GrandDaddy’s Republicans and it’s not your Mommy’s Democrats. That’s for sure. These political parties have been co-opted and bought out by Global Imperial Forces, straight up, no joke. The second you outsource your thoughts to partisanship or groupthink, it is all a downward spiral from there.
You need to be an eternally vigilant truth warrior to battle against groupthink. Get a little lazy in your thinking, if you don’t do your homework, if you don’t stay sharp, you will quickly devolve into a groupthinking robot, into a divide and conquer bot. You’ll turn into an unwitting groupthinking Imperial Storm Trooper, a useful idiot hell-bent on your own demise.
One thing that I’ve realized, beyond a shadow of doubt, when it comes to systemic corruption, both political parties, the Republicans and the Democrats are up to their eyes in systemic corruption, as I will point out throughout this series. When it comes to systemic corruption, it is a bi-partisan affair.
Once you understand the fundamental dynamics of systemic corruption, you’ll see how the narrow range of debate between Republican talking points and Democratic talking points is juvenile. It’s absurd. It’s amateur hour, at best. TV and radio “news” have become cartoonish. It’s Romper Room propaganda. It’s a national embarrassment, as are both political parties.
The primary problem is that the mainstream media is a divide and conquer distraction machine. Everyone is all caught up in mainstream divide and conquer narratives. Lost out to sea, in dicey divisive waters. People are saturated in Republican vs Democratic talking points. It’s all a distraction.
There is shallow, divisive rhetoric being spewed all over the place, left and right. It’s got everyone all hyped up, everyone is all worked up, fired up, pissed off, emotionally-driven divisive rhetoric is short-circuiting the neo-cortex. It’s the relentless over-stimulation of the reptilian brain complex, short-circuiting critical thought, atrophy of the critical faculties. The amputation of critical thinking skills via relentless repetitive divisive rhetoric.
The narrow limited spectrum of thinkable thought that is Republican Vs Democratic talking points has contracted everyone’s awareness. They have contracted consciousness into consciousness concentration camps, groupthinking nonsense narratives.
Everyone is all caught up in divide and conquer narratives. That’s what we need to get past, urgently. All this divide and conquer nonsense is destroying us. We are super-saturated in shallow, divisive rhetoric. We need to get passed all this divide and conquer propaganda.
When your country is under attack, when your country is being systematically, systemically destroyed, fighting amongst each other is not the way to go people. When your country is being systematically, systemically destroyed, fighting amongst each other is not the way to go.
It is imperial divide and conquer plunder. Imperial divide and conquer 101 people. Check yourself. Check for yourself.
That’s the thing about truth, the more you look into it, the brighter it gets. You just have to point people in the general direction of truth, just point to the general vicinity, and then aware people will take it from there. Once deeper truth is accurately articulated, nature will take its course. Truth resonates, naturally. Don’t underestimate the power of truth. The light of truth, truth shines brighter the more you look into it.
Discovering it first though, digging deep below all the bullshit and uncovering the truth is the hardest part, but once you uncover the truth, the Holy Grail, if it is seriously the truth, you just have to speak the truth, and if it is the real deal, it will grow louder and louder.
Truth stands hand in hand all over the world, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round. Truth resonates. Truth naturally resonates. The truth can handle the pressure. It can handle scrutiny. As a wise person once said, “The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.”
Now, of course, you have to uncover it first though. You have to dig deep to dig it up, lots of heavy lifting, for sure. But once you can accurately articulate the truth, one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round. Truth resonates. Truth naturally resonates.
So, that being said, a main theme here is overcoming divide and conquer propaganda to unite and defend the American People against predatory Global Interests, Global Imperial Interests, that’s where the real action is at.
Overcoming divide and conquer propaganda to unite and defend the American People against predatory Global Interests. Overcoming divide and conquer propaganda to unite and defend the American People against predatory Global Imperial Interests, that’s where the real action is at.
The old global imperial centralizing force that is consolidating power, wealth and resources into fewer and fewer hands, which makes the masses dependent upon this large corrupted centralized system for the basic necessities of life, for ever-increasing debt.
Here’s some basic imperial mathematics for you: 2 + 2 = ever-increasing debt. Debt is the imperial global centralizing system’s key weapon. Debt is the sword, and divide and conquer propaganda is the shield. Imperialism 101: Make the local population fight amongst themselves while you rob the nation blind and bury everyone in debt… ever-increasing debt.
It is an age-old oppressive tactic. It is an age-old tale to tell. Come gather around people, from whenever you roam, and admit that the debt around you has grown. You better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone.
All right… we’re getting carried away, let’s not get lost out to sea.
Where were we? Oh yes, debt. An age-old tale to tell. An age-old oppressive tactic.
Do you recall the biblical wisdom, in the Book of Proverbs, that says, “the borrower is slave to the lender.” That age-old imperial strategy: make the local population fight amongst themselves while you rob the nation blind and bury everyone in debt.
And, oh, what’s that we see, a deep direct correlation to present reality… we presently have all-time record-breaking national debt, and all-time record-breaking state debt, and all-time record-breaking household debt, and all-time record-breaking personal debt.
All-time record-breaking debt across the board. What do you know? Go figure.
Welcome to the Imperial Debt Death Spiral. History repeats itself, coiling off into the future…
That’s the thing about age-old wisdom. That’s the thing about the truth. Don’t underestimate the power of the truth. Truth resonates, once spoken, once accurately articulated, Logos. Speaking truth to power, or more precisely, speaking truth is power. Boom… Truth Bomb.
“Allegiance to the truth, that is the guidepost, that is the way through.”
These are divisive dicey debt-filled waters, but “the fundamental rule when operating in chaos is to tell the truth.” Truth is your guidepost. Truth is your sword and shield. Speak the Truth. Accurately articulate what is presently unfolding as concisely as possible. Truth stands hand in hand all over the world, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round. Truth resonates. Truth naturally resonates.
Don’t underestimate the power of the truth, people. As Thomas Jefferson once advised, “Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of the body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.”
Once a critical mass understands how power operates, on a global scale, once a critical mass understands the fundamental dynamics of the power that surrounds us, in its latest guise, in its latest disguise, once a critical mass can see through its mask, the global imperial centralizing jig is up.
The Iron Law of Oligarchy Dominance Hierarchy is a skin that we will shed. The metamorphosis is already underway. Calling all imaginal cells… Who hears me?
On the precipice of the abyss, an evolutionary leap is required. Let’s positive feedback loop our way into the new paradigm.
Ha, all right, I’m having a little fun with this now. We’re getting all sorts of carried away. We don’t want to get too carried away too quickly here. I was getting caught up in everything. We need to lay a solid foundation first. Discipline David, discipline. We need to be methodical here, as methodical as possible. We need to do the deep digging and heavy lifting to set up a solid foundation of understanding, a well of wisdom that we can dip into.
We will spend significant time exposing and dissecting divide and conquer narratives that are repetitiously forced down our throats. Divide and conquer narratives that are repetitiously forced upon our consciousness.
It’s repetition that influences most. It’s what Madison Ave marketers, advertisers, PR experts, it’s what propagandists have known all along: if you just keep up the exposure rate, people will be influenced. Repetition, it’s all about repetition, subconscious programming, repetition, it’s all about repetition, propaganda 101.
Throughout this series, we are going to be able to see through divide and conquer narratives with ease. We are going to be able to see through them in vivid detail. We will dismantle the illusion pixel by pixel. The disintegration of the illusion. The illusion will disintegrate before our eyes. The degradation of the illusion. We are going to pixelate the illusion. We will break it down in vivid detail, bit by bit, piece by piece, brick by brick, pixel by pixel.
It’s time for some higher resolution reality, higher definition. We will render a higher resolution navigation system. That’s what we need, a high resolution GPS that can help us navigate the power dynamics that surround us.
Ultimately, what we’re doing here… I want to provide you with a clear map of the power dynamics at play, the power dynamics surrounding us, a vivid map of the overall terrain. We’ll survey the battlefield, we’ll survey the scene, we’ll survey the playing field.
I want to provide you with a navigation system, a detailed, high resolution navigation system of the fundamental power dynamics that surround us. A navigation system, a map of how power operates around us, so you can find your own way through it. So you can find your own way out, your own way to freedom, your own way to health, success and abundance.
This is where the political becomes personal. You can consider this a survival guide, a field manual to the power dynamics surrounding us, so you can survive, self-actualize and thrive.
Ultimately, this is about empowering you toward self-actualization. This is about empowering mass transformation via self-actualization. Empowering mass transformation via self-actualization. Self-actualization, that’s the way out, that’s the way to freedom.
Once we can get an in-depth understanding of the fundamental power dynamics at play, we can then develop, hone and apply our own unique skills, in our own chosen way, to overcome and transcend the present crisis.
At this stage of evolution, at this phase in the process, there is now an ecosystem of transformation that anyone can tap into and flow with it. There is now an ecosystem of transformation, an ecosystem of self-actualization that we can come into alignment and synergy with, which I will be fleshing out for you throughout this series.
For all the major problems we are confronted by, for all the unprecedented crises we are facing, there are viable solutions. This is the main point: for all the major problems we face, there are viable solutions, multiple solutions, at this point, for every major problem.
The blessing in disguise right now: corruption has gotten so bad, the challenges we face, governmental and economic challenges, environmental and health challenges, societal and cultural challenges, at this point, the challenges we face are so apparent and so blatant that we now have an in-depth understanding of them. That’s the blessing in disguise.
We now have a deep understanding of the fundamental core dynamics that are driving the major problems that we are confronted by. We have a deep understanding of the underlying root causes and there are now viable solutions. That’s what I’m going to be laying out in detail here with you.
And to be clear, this isn’t about telling people that there is only one particular way to live, or saying that these are the list of the exact things that you have to do. This isn’t about that. This is a chose your own adventure. This is a chose your own solution adventure.
How about that? This is a chose your own solution adventure.
We are going to do a lot of shadow work here. By shadow work I mean diving deep into systemic corruption and societal problems. We are going to go deep into our collective shadow. Now, keep in mind, as a very wise person once said, “It is always darkest just before the dawn.”
We are going to do a lot of shadow work here, but the motivation and reason why I’m doing this is because I am optimistic about the future. I want to make that clear up front.
We are going to make the darkness conscious so we can effectively transcend it. “The unseen enemy is always the most fearsome.” Right? We need to make the darkness conscious. We need to illuminate the obstacles, illuminate the shadows. We need to illuminate The Shadows That Be to effectively transcend them.
Despite all the corruption and the serious problems we face, despite all the battles I’ve been fighting, I wouldn’t be doing this right now if I didn’t think that there was light at the end of the tunnel. There is much to be positive about. There is a bright future to look forward to and much to be grateful for.
I want to make this clear from the beginning right now. Despite all the challenges and obstacles that I had to battle through, and will continue to battle through, I consider myself to be a hardcore optimist who sees many fixable problems.
Once a critical mass knows where to focus their attention, they will be naturally inspired to focus their efforts, and we’ll change the game. We can fix it. We can create the change we need. That is what I truly believe. That is why I’m doing this recording right now, with you.
I’m considering this podcast as a basic introduction, an intro episode. I’m going to pre-record the first few episodes before anything is posted online. They’ll be long-form, long-format episodes like this one, and then moving forward on a consistent basis I will do shorter more time sensitive, news-based episodes, more topic, issue-specific episodes on what is presently unfolding, on the latest developments.
For now though, I want to lay the groundwork and cover the vital fundamentals first, step by step, pixel by pixel. I’m pre-recording these first few hours, so I can make sure to lay the foundation that needs to be set. We need to do the heavy lifting to set up a solid foundation of understanding, to put the conceptual framework in place. And from this base, we can then effectively confront challenges and obstacles as they unfold around us.
Having a microphone in my face and being on camera is definitely outside of my comfort zone. I’m used to working behind the scenes, investigating, researching, analyzing and writing reports on systemic corruption and how power operates. I always avoided interviews as much as possible, and now I got all this going on. When your life gets turned upside down, staying in your comfort zone isn’t exactly an option now, is it?
Yeah… that’s the thing… look, I am a little gun-shy right now, after everything I’ve been through. I’m battle weary. Every time I begin to put out information I end up getting hacked, my life gets turned upside down, and I get all sorts of censorship and suppression online. My ability to make a living doing investigative journalism becomes real difficult, real fast, to say the least.
That’s why I’m pre-recording these first few hours before anything gets posted. Even with the help that I have now, which I am very grateful for, even with the help that I have now, I just don’t know how long this going to last, to be honest with you. This is an ever-evolving battle, no doubt.
So I have to do everything I can to put out vital information, by any communication means necessary. I’m decentralizing myself now, as much as possible, across many sites, servers, platforms and networks. I’m going to be kicking out vital info by every communication medium possible… audio, video, images, text, podcasts, as best as I can.
I am grateful for the help that I now have, and I’m grateful for any help that I can get. If you are one of the people who are tapped in enough to be listening to this right now, support of any kind is greatly appreciated. Whatever you feel inspired to do is much appreciated because, look, the Iron Curtain is coming down online now.
The Algorithmic Curtain is descending over the Internet now. The Artificial Intelligence, the AI algorithmic bots are no joke. They are editing reality in real-time. The AI Algo Bots are Thought Police on steroids. This is beyond Orwellian now, seriously. The Algorithmic Curtain is descending upon our news feeds as we speak. They are editing reality in real-time. The Algorithmic Curtain is descending upon our conscious awareness as we speak.
AI Algo Bots are jamming our frequency. No joke. Do you see, ha, do you see what I mean? When you accurately articulate what is presently unfolding, you will sound like a crazy person. The AI Algo Bots, c’mon now, these are seriously surreal times.
Can you hear Paul Revere’s horse galloping? Did you get Paul Revere’s notification? Ding, ding… The AI Algo Bots are coming… Ding, ding… The AI Algo Bots are coming… ha, oh man, surreal times people, surreal times.
The globally corrupt imperial elite are in control of your social media feeds and Google search results. AI Algo Bots and PSYOPS have infiltrated the entire Internet. Technically, it’s called Full Spectrum Dominance. That’s a real thing, an actual military strategy. Full Spectrum Dominance is no joke at all.
AI Algo Bots have infiltrated your mind. Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean that you’re crazy. No joke. They harvest your personal information, your personal data, your online thought-prints. They harvest every move you make with shocking precision and effectiveness. They can do it to entire populations now.
With Big Data Analytics, AI algorithms and machine learning there are many companies who have very advanced and detailed data points, in-depth personality profiles on everyone, on everything you do. It’s called Psycho-Metrics, for real, Psycho-Metrics, that’s what they call it. In-depth personality profiles, so they know exactly how to manipulate you. I know it sounds crazy, because it is crazy.
The more you look into military spending the crazier it gets. Big Data companies, global intelligence agencies and private military contractors have thousands of data points on every American, literally, highly in-depth personality profiles with thousands of data points on every American, on everyone. I’ll cover this topic in detail throughout this series as well.
It’s shocking, it’s horrifying, the 4th Amendment has been shredded. The 4th Amendment has been rendered null and void. Modern surveillance tech has obliterated antiquated privacy laws. It’s horrifying. Especially, especially if you are someone that the Global Power Elite think can affect their power.
If you’re an investigative journalist who focuses on systemic corruption in a way that can unite the American people, if you can do that, you are targeted for all sorts of hacking, and with modern surveillance technology it is too easy for powerful people to shut people up, shut people down, to turn people’s lives upside down, it’s far too easy these days.
The power of surveillance technology is vastly underestimated when it comes to how real power operates today, I’ll tell you that.
The use of surveillance technology as a tool of control is commonplace now. Politicians all over the world, politicians all throughout the United States in particular, they’re on lockdown now. The use of surveillance technology to manipulate, undermine and control people is much more widespread now and much more commonplace now than people realize.
Whether you are a politician, even a law enforcement investigator, an Inspector General, a whistleblower, an activist or a journalist, if you can truly affect the power of the Global Power Elite, you are targeted and very effectively and efficiently undermined and neutralized.
If you are an investigative journalist who can focus on systemic corruption in a way that can pierce through the divide and conquer propaganda, if you can focus on systemic corruption in a way that can overcome divide and conquer partisanship and unite people across the political spectrum, the Global Power Elite will target you and turn your life upside down pretty easily, and the ultimate goal is to limit your ability to make a living at doing that investigative journalism.
This is what I’ve learned the hard way. You can consider this the AI Algo Bot Blues. Ha… I mean, I’m trying to make light of a dark difficult situation here people.
If you can do real legit journalism, in a way that informs people on the fundamentals of systemic corruption, informs people in a way that unites them instead of dividing them, if you can do that, the Global Imperial Elite will target you and turn your life upside down, and the ultimate goal is to limit your ability to make a living at doing that journalism. That’s the key objective. Make it impossible for anyone to do real full-time investigative journalism on systemic corruption. The ultimate goal is to limit your ability to make a living at doing serious investigative journalism.
That’s what happens, so that’s what we’re up against here. This is why journalism is dead throughout the United States. And, in the grand scheme of things, I’m just a little gnat. I’m a little gnat… a gadfly, at best, ha ha… a gadfly in the old Socratic sense I suppose.
So, I’m pre-recording this series to make sure that I can say vital things that need to be said… as the AI Algo Bots are closing in. I’m running for the fences… I’m running for the fences here people.
There is just a ton of vital information that we have to share. And to be clear, all this vital information is publicly available information. This is really important for me to make this distinction and point this out up front. I do not in anyway deal with classified information.
I have no desire to even see classified information. I avoid it like the plague. You know, basically, classified information is entrapment at this point.
I mean, the classification of information is a major issue. The classification of information has become a pivotal weak spot for the American People. The Constitution torching ability to wave the wand of National Security to cover up corruption, that is devastating to the American People right now. As we know from people like the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Grassley has said, and Senator Wyden on the Senate Intelligence Committee, you know people who have an understanding of the information that gets classified, they have consistently said that info is classified to cover up corruption. That’s basically what it is all about, at this point, that’s a major, huge issue. And I’ll be covering this issue, in detail, with publicly available info. We don’t need any classified info to report on it in an effective way.
Between FOIA, the Freedom Of Information Act, which just keeps getting weaker, by the way, but between FOIA, and Senators getting info declassified, and all the publicly available government reports, Inspector General Reports, Government Accountability Office reports, and then connecting dots from news reports, we have all the proof that we need to prove that the U.S. Constitution is being violated, often.
The U.S. Constitution is being destroyed, it’s being torched, the checks and balances, the accountability mechanisms, the chain of accountability has been completely dismantled. And we know exactly how it is being done. We know the weak points. We know the loopholes well. We can describe the process in detail so people can understand it, and at this point, we don’t need any classified info to do it.
So, my main point right now, bottom line, I don’t deal in any kind of classified information. It’s just too dangerous to begin with and at this point it is unnecessary. It’s an entrapment play. At this point in the game, there is more than enough publicly available information to understand the real score.
There is more than enough publicly available information to flesh out the inner workings of the global power dynamics that are at play around us right now. There is more than enough publicly available information to lay out how trillions of tax dollars have gone unaccounted for. There is more than enough publicly available information to demonstrate outrageous abuses of power.
At this point in the game, at this point in the process, we just need people to understand the publicly available info first and foremost. Once they understand the publicly available info, the rest will take care of itself. We have more than enough evidence.
So, I want to make that 100% clear, up front: all publicly available information here.
If you know how to connect the dots, you can flesh out the whole Global Imperial power structure, and how it operates, you can flesh it out efficiently and effectively, and you could be the judge of how well I’m going to do that, because with these recordings I’ve done, I lay it all out, as concisely as I can, so people can understand the underlying systemic corruption in a way that will unite people.
Again, at this point, the most pivotal dividing line is between those who are in on the corruption, and those who are not… and 99.99% of the population is not in on the corruption.
My hope is that I can do this in a way where a large enough number people can vividly understand it, so we can effectively unite and create the change that we need. If we can accurately articulate it, in a way that a large number of people can understand, we can create the change that we need.
Look, I’m running for the fences here. We’ve got to reach that critical mass tipping point. We need to drop a Truth Bomb into the heart of the Death Star. We need to drop a Truth Bomb onto the shadow of the Global Imperial Centralizing dark side. We need to confront our collective shadow. We need to make the darkness conscious, illuminate the dark places. So we can transcend the shadow, so we can shed this skin.
I do have some reservations about proceeding with all this. You really are a gnat compared to the powerful forces operating around us, operating around the world. At this point, I’ve traveled too far down the road to turn back now. I’ve passed the point of no return long ago. The boats have been burnt long ago, and I’m at this point now, even if I wanted to walk away my conscience won’t let me, really, to be honest with you. Every time I try to retreat, every time I get hacked, every time my life gets turned upside down, when it becomes too difficult to make a living doing journalism, every time that happens, I have to retreat, I must retreat at those points, when it’s really bad.
So I retreat, and when I do, no matter what, somehow, someway, I still end up spending all my time investigating and researching systemic corruption and how power operates. Even when I’m not publishing online, even when I can’t publish online, I retreat into and refocus on more investigation and research. I just always keep sharpening the sword. This centripetal force has a life of its own now, it has a momentum beyond me.
I’m at a point now, where I can’t sleep at night. When you have so much vital information and you don’t proactively, consistently share it, it weighs on your conscience, it tears you apart. I get a divided soul. It weighs on your conscious heavily. You can’t live with a divided soul.
It’s that old Albert Einstein quote that haunts me. Einstein said, “Those who have the privilege to know, have the duty to act.” That old Einstein haunts me. His words echo throughout my mind, “Those who have the privilege to know, have the duty to act.” If you have vital info that you know can help people, you got to share it, you got to release it. Just let it go and fearlessly flow…
We are confronted by unprecedented crises now, across the board, crisis after crisis, they just keep getting worse. Meanwhile, there are viable solutions. We have the solutions. We can fix things. We can significantly improve everyone’s quality of life. It is time for innovations, existing innovations, which are being stifled, it is time for these innovations to be unleashed so they can reach a critical mass tipping point as efficiently as possible.
We have a global centralizing system that is enforcing scarcity in areas where there no longer needs to be scarcity. We have a global centralizing system that is systematically, systemically burying everyone in debt. A global centralizing system that is consolidating wealth and resources to make the masses dependent on it for ever-increasing debt.
How many people have to be unnecessarily exploited and unnecessarily impoverished? How many people have to live lives of exploitation and spend their lives toiling in debt slavery before the existing innovations and viable solutions to our major problems can reach a critical mass tipping point?
How many people have to die unnecessarily before known innovations can reach a critical mass?
That’s the question, that’s the challenge, that is the task upon us here. And when you understand the fundamental dynamics in such detail, you have to share that info, you got to just share that wisdom, even if you know it is going to be a difficult and an incredibly challenging road.
“Those who have the privilege to know, have the duty to act.” I feel a profound sense of responsibility. I really do.
It is very hard for people to acknowledge and comprehend the level of corruption and collapse that is closing in on us, let alone to inspire people to effectively confront it. There is so much corruption and shortsighted suicidal greed, it’s overwhelming. It’s hard to focus on one thing.
To even acknowledge it, to truly acknowledge it causes you to question your reality in a deeply disturbing way, in a way that most people can’t handle or tolerate. To truly acknowledge it causes you to deeply question your reality in a deeply disturbing way.
The more traumatizing wider reality becomes, the more people indulge in their denial. People prefer comforting lies to disturbing truths. People prefer convenient, comforting lies to difficult, challenging truths.
This is how “good” people end up on the wrong side of history. Never underestimate people’s ability to block out the evil that is growing around us.
“Those who have the privilege to know, have the duty to act.”
Ultimately, at the end of the day, it is our responsibility to solve these problems. It doesn’t matter whose fault it is. It is our responsibility to solve these problems. Like it or not. There is no avoiding the consequences, the frontlines are everywhere.
To not take bold action now is a grotesque abdication of responsibility, responsibility to our nation, responsibility to our families, responsibility to our own future, and quite frankly, our responsibility to the future of life on this planet.
“Those who have the privilege to know, have the duty to act.”
It is all the unnecessary suffering; that’s what tears you apart. There is so much unnecessary suffering throughout the world. There is so much unnecessary exploitation, unnecessary death, unnecessary debt, unnecessary stress and anxiety. You know, people live under constant stress and anxiety these days, unnecessary stress and anxiety. It is such a waste of human potential. No wonder suicide rates and depression rates have skyrocketed, as well as addiction, prescription medication rates, it all correlates to all-time record-breaking debt.
There is so much unnecessary suffering throughout the world. With modern technology, with modern wealth, with present overall wealth and current technology, we can dramatically improve everyone’s quality of life.
There are three things that people vastly underestimate… once you get a deep understanding of these three things, it’s a game-changer, it’s a consciousness-expanding paradigm shift.
Here are three things that people vastly underestimate…
1) How much wealth there presently is; which we’ll be getting deep into, all three of these things that people vastly underestimate will be major areas of focus throughout this series.
1) How much wealth there presently is;
2) What is possible with modern technology;
3) How psychologically conditioned we are.
This is going to sound extreme: people vastly underestimate how psychologically conditioned, how mentally enslaved, how propagandized we all are. People vastly underestimate how psychologically manipulated we all are.
Most people can’t even imagine other ways of living. Most people can’t even imagine what is presently possible.
I’ll be going real deep into psychological conditioning. People vastly underestimate how psychologically conditioned we all are, from the cradle to the grave, Skinner Box bred in a token economy. I’ll be going real deep into all this.
“To subdue the enemy without fighting is the highest skill.” Sun Tzu said that in The Art of War.
Propaganda and psychological operations. Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds.
We are going to construct a Psychological Underground Railroad. That’s what we are going to do. It’s a revolution of consciousness. It’s an evolution of consciousness, that’s what it is. An evolution of consciousness, that’s what’s happening.
The enlightened individual is the path to freedom. The enlightened individual is the path to unity… as the paradoxical nature of it all reveals itself. An evolution of consciousness, that’s what’s happening.
At the end of the day, we are all entangled particles living in mutualistic symbiosis. We are entangled particles living in mutualistic symbiosis. Therefore, the more you empower others, the more empowered you become. What you do to the web of life, you do to yourself. Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you. Positive feedback loops.
This where science, religion and philosophies that have lasted through the ages all coalesce and converge into alignment: we are entangled particles living in mutualistic symbiosis. Therefore, the more you empower others, the more empowered you become. Positive feedback loops. What you do to the web of life, you do to yourself. Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.
The enlightened individual is the path to unity. Time for an evolution of consciousness. Mass transformation via self-actualization. Emancipate yourself. Time for a Do It Yourself, a D.I.Y. decentralized uprising. None but ourselves. That’s all we need. None but ourselves.
I’m getting a little worked up again. It’s true though. I’ll lay it all out for your skeptical mind. Much more to be said, of course. We’ll be diving deeply into all three of these topics throughout this series, all significant areas that are vastly underestimated…
1) How much wealth there is;
2) What is possible with modern technology; (It is easier to fish than it’s ever been. I think one of the distinguishing characteristics, a distinction between the old paradigm and the new paradigm: the old paradigm wants you to become dependent on centralized systems, they want to give you fish; the new paradigm empowers you to be self-sufficient when it comes to the basic necessities of life. The new paradigm gives you the tools to fish. It makes you independent of the old paradigm. So that old wisdom about teaching people to fish instead of giving them fish, that’s perfect for the distinction between the old paradigm and the new paradigm. And what is possible with modern technology now, it makes fishing easier than ever, and teaching people to fish is easier than ever. Because of modern technology it is easier than ever to teach people to fish and to give them the tools so they can effectively fish. So the 2nd underestimated thing is what is possible with modern technology. It’s all about empowering self-actualization, self-determination, self-reliance, self-sufficiency. We don’t need that old corrupted centralizing system anymore. We can become self-sufficient for the basic necessities of life at a very micro-community level. I’m going to go deep into detail on all that.)
3) How psychologically conditioned we are.
Once you understand any of those three topics, it is a consciousness-expanding paradigm shift.
Having such a deep understanding of this, having such a deep understanding of how this is all playing out, it weighs on my conscious, heavily. It seriously does, it weighs on my conscious big time. It drives everything I do.
“Those who have the privilege to know, have the duty to act.”
At this point, if I’m not doing everything I can to get vital info out, I can’t sleep at night, can’t live with myself if I’m not sharing all this info, my conscious won’t let me do anything else right now.
You know… I do have hesitations though, some fear. I’m battle weary. Look, I am battle weary, that is for sure, but it’s like, you have to speak up, at this point, you have to act, you have to do what you can do. It’s like… you know that wisdom from the Gospel of Thomas, that wise quote that says:
“If you do not bring forth what is within you,
what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
That’s so true. As above, so below, and the flip side of that wise quote is:
“If you bring forth what is within you,
what you bring forth will save you.”
There is some hardcore optimism for you. “Don’t die with your music still inside you.”
So, yeah, I do have hesitations though, admittedly, there is some fear lurking in the shadows, The Shadows That Be. I’m battle weary, but battle-tested too, full of hard-fought battle-tested wisdom. I’ve been deep into the cave that most fear to enter. I’ve taken a long walk through the valley of the shadow of death. They say to “fear no evil,” ha, yeah, easier said than done, watch out for PTSD, right, that’s for sure… “As Above, So Below,” you know?
They say to “fear no evil,” ha, yeah. It’s like a wise warrior once said, “Everyone’s got a plan, until they get punched in the face.”
“It’s not how hard you can hit, it’s how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward.” Right? A little Rocky wisdom hits hard. “Life will beat you to your knees if you let.” That’s the truth of it. “It’s how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward.” We need to keep moving forward.
“If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.” MLK sad that. We need to keep moving forward. That’s the essence of life. Obstacles and adversity fuel our potential.
“Those who have the privilege to know, have the duty to act.”
I do feel an intense sense of obligation and duty to do this. I seriously do. My whole life has led to this, one way or the other. “Don’t die with your music still inside you.”
Life is a brief burst of infinite possibility. We are all stars in the cosmic movie. Choose your role wisely. It’s a Hero’s Journey. Time to slay the dragon. Be aware… “As Above, So Below.”
I am a hardcore optimist who sees many fixable problems. I do believe that there is a bright future to build toward, but, alas, the hour is late for optimistic outcomes.
The inevitable confrontation with the collective Shadow is upon us. The inevitable confrontation with our collective unconscious. The Shadow beckons. The cave we fear to enter holds the elixir that we seek. The archetypes are all there, made manifest. The archetypes are in alignment. The archetypal resonance is profound.
In Carl Jung’s work — I’ve learned to love Carl Jung, I’ll reference him often — I have found that his work correlates very well with how power operates, globally. Profound examples of “As Above, So Below” insights, spine-tingling examples, hair-raising. So Jung says that you cannot evolve in a holistically healthy and sustainable way “until the shadow is adequately confronted.”
At this stage of evolution, at this phase of existence, we are now in a Jungian confrontation with our collective shadow. In many ways, it is a confrontation with our collective unconscious.
The old pre-existing Dominance Hierarchy, what I call the Oligarchy Dominance Hierarchy, is an old, outdated paradigm, an old paradigm that has now outlived its usefulness. It is now a shadow that needs to be adequately confronted. It is a skin that must be shed, in an evolutionary sense. I’ll describe all this much further throughout this series.
As Jung said, to become enlightened, to holistically evolve, we need to make “the darkness conscious.” We need to “illuminate the shadow.” We need to “adequately confront the shadow.” Unfortunately, based on what I’ve been able to decipher, it appears Jung was right, “As Above, So Below.”
It is a Carl Jung-esque night sea journey. It’s the maelstrom. On the precipice of the abyss, an evolutionary leap is required. Fear not though, fear not: “The Abyss appears dangerous only to those afraid to test their inner depths.” The abyss is only the end for those who are frightened to reach down into their inner depths and give their best.
Doing the best you can in challenging times is the ultimate evolutionary life force. Do the best you can do. Persevere in service to the greater good. If you have an unbreakable faith, you will eventually experience a breakthrough. An unbreakable faith will lead to a breakthrough.
This is where that Amor Fati mindset comes in. Where those insightful Stoic philosophies emerge as actionable wisdom. Obstacles and adversity fuel our potential. The battle against an obstacle propels us to a new level of functioning. The extent of the battle determines the extent of the growth. We must learn to see the obstacle as a tool propelling growth. The obstacle is a catalyst. The obstacle is an evolutionary catalyst.
The obstacle is a prerequisite to our evolution. The obstacle is an evolutionary catalyst. That’s the attitude to take, that’s hardcore optimism right there: the obstacle is an evolutionary catalyst. That’s the attitude that we need to transcend this crisis.
These Stoic philosophies tie into Carl Jung’s confrontation with the shadow as well. We can’t be holistically healthy, in a sustainable way, until the shadow is adequately confronted. We can’t just ignore our collective shadow, as we have been doing. It needs to be acknowledged, it needs to be exposed to the light and adequately dealt with.
Here is another “As Above, So Below” insight from Jung, “Only when we realize that part of ourselves which we have not hitherto seen or preferred not to see can we proceed to question and find the sources from which it feeds and the basis on which it rests.” That timely, deep wisdom, derived from the depths of depth psychology was also discovered by another prominent psychologist Ronald Laing. Laing sums up this point, and our present overall crisis in the brilliant and aptly titled book, “The Politics of Experience,” I love that title, “The Politics of Experience” indeed. In “The Politics of Experience” Laing says:
“The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.”
Indeed, ‘The cave we fear to enter holds the treasure we seek,’ as Joseph Campbell summed up the myths of the ages and the Hero’s Journey. “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” “As Above, So Below.” It’s always in that shadow, that thing that you fear the most, that thing that you would prefer to ignore, that blind spot that holds us back. We must illuminate the shadows, expose them to light, and once adequately confronted, we can then transcend them and evolve into a bright future of unprecedented abundance.
As Carl Jung put it, “The shadow, when it is realized, is the source of renewal.”
Right, the obstacle propels us to new levels of functioning. The obstacle, the shadow once realized, it becomes an evolutionary catalyst. “The shadow, when it is realized, is the source of renewal.” That was Carl Jung’s deep insight, from the depths of depth psychology. From the depths of the deep unconscious, from Jung’s exploration into the deep collective unconscious, he returned with this wisdom, “The shadow, when it is realized, is the source of renewal.”
The archetypes are all there, made manifest. They are in alignment. The archetypal resonance is profound. It’s a Hero’s Journey. It’s time to slay the dragon. The cave we fear to enter holds the elixir that we seek.
Obstacles and adversity fuel our potential. That’s the mindset we need. That’s the mindset we need as we begin to embark on our Hero’s Journey deep into The Shadows That Be.
So much vital info, a wealth of wisdom to share… It’s time to slay the dragon. Piece by piece, bit by bit, brick by brick, pixel by pixel. Dismantling of the illusion, shedding a skin, shifting a paradigm… “just when the caterpillar thought the world was ending it turned into a butterfly.”
Obstacles and adversity fuel our potential. That’s the mindset we need.
I need to get into a flow… so much vital info, a wealth of wisdom to share… just it let go and flow… just let go and fearlessly flow… so much vital info, a wealth of wisdom to share… don’t overthink it… don’t overthink it, just let go and fearlessly flow… speak the truth. Transparently flow, genuinely flow, with sincerity… authentically… just be yourself… so much vital info, a wealth of wisdom to share… battle-tested wisdom… just speak the truth, just let go and fearlessly flow…
It’s a Hero’s Journey. Time to slay the dragon.
My mission is to accurately articulate what is presently unfolding… as concisely as possible… so a large number of people can understand it…
My mission, as a journalist, and as a person trying to understand the world around us, my mission as a person trying to successfully navigate the world around us, to navigate the power dynamics that swirl around us, my mission is to accurately articulate what is presently unfolding… as concisely as possible… so we can understand it, so we can then take that info and apply it to our own life and get tangible results, positive, empowering, life-enhancing results, that’s where the action is at, where the magic is at.
Chaos Magick… to dive deeply into the swirling chaos that surrounds us and to extract deeper meaning out of it. To accurately articulate what is presently unfolding… it takes eternal vigilance to get up on that wave, to ride the ever-evolving cutting-edge of viable truth in search of useful, actionable wisdom, that’s where the action is at, where the magic is at.
To dive deeply into the ever-evolving swirling chaos that surrounds us and extract useful, actionable wisdom out of it, to translate deeper truth back to you, so you can then apply it to your own life, so it can give you a better understanding of your own situation, so you can more effectively deal with your own issues, so it can empower you and help you to navigate the power dynamics that swirl around us. So we can positively affect them to get life-enhancing results, so we can live meaningful and fulfilling lives, that’s where the action is at.
That old wisdom from Thomas Jefferson, which propelled me down this path to the present moment, to what we’re doing here, right now: “Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of the body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.”
Right, that’s Carl Jung too, “expose the shadow to light.” Right? Perhaps, if we can accurately articulate the collective shadow as concisely as possible, in a way that a large number of people can understand it. Perhaps then, we can make tyranny and oppressions vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.
We can make tyranny and oppressions vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of a new paradigm. Perhaps then, we can transcend this crisis non-violently without societal upheaval and without violent conflicts, without mass casualties. Perhaps then, we can transcend it and evolve into a new paradigm.
That’s it, yes, let’ do this… an evolution in consciousness. Yes, let’ do this… a paradigm shifting expansion of consciousness.
Let’s dive deeply into the swirling chaos that sounds us… “The fundamental rule when operating in chaos is to tell the ‘truth.; Allegiance to the ‘truth,’ that is the guidepost, that is the way through… ‘Truth’ is our sword & shield.” Let’s slay the dragon. It’s a Hero’s Journey.
Just transparently flow, so much vital info, a wealth of wisdom to share, serious hard-fought battle-tested wisdom, just let it go and fearlessly flow… just let it go and flow…
Be Here Now… where the magic is at… be present… be in the moment… be present… where the magic is at… Be Here Now… got to seize the moment… Be Here Now… got to seize the moment…
Carpe diem. Carpe diem.
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This article was originally published on Degraw.media.
The Trump regime launched an old-fashioned coup d’etat attempt to gain another imperial trophy – what it’s done scores of times before since the 19th century.
Key for the US is controlling what it’s coveted since Hugo Chavez’s election 20 years ago – control of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, the world’s largest.
They represent what the State Department said about Saudi oil in the 1940s, calling its reserves a “stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.”
The Trump regime wants Venezuelan reserves controlled by Big Oil, likely willing to do whatever it takes to achieve its aim, military intervention an option if other tactics in play fail.
New millennium resource wars are raging in the Middle East, as well as other oil and other commodity-rich parts of the world – a modern-day super-high stakes great game.
Henry Kissinger once said that
“control(ing) oil (is how to) control nations.”
He also said
“(o)il is much too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs.”
The same goes for Venezuela and other oil-rich states, mainly Russia, a nation of vast hydrocarbon and other highly valued resources, including timber, iron ore, copper, diamonds, lead, zinc, bauxite, nickel, tin, mercury, gold, silver, manganese, chromium, platinum, titanium, tungsten, and phosphates – a strategic prize the US covets.
Its strategy for unchallenged global dominance involves controlling energy resources, other high-value commodities, food to control people, and money to control everything – controlling the world depends on it.
The Trump regime called a Security Council session on Venezuela, strong-arming enough SC members to agree on holding it – including Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, the Dominican Republic, Kuwait, Peru and Poland.
Against the session were China, Russia, South Africa, and Equatorial Guinea. Indonesia and Ivory Coast abstained. Operating as an imperial tool, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres failed to condemn the US coup attempt in Venezuela.
So did a UN press statement, citing a political crisis, the country “buckling under severe shortages” – saying nothing about US responsibility for what’s going on, waging political, economic, financial, and sanctions war on the country, flagrantly breaching the UN Charter and other international law, what the world body is supposed to speak out against.
The two-day session ending Saturday had nothing to do with gaining UNSC support for regime change in Venezuela, Sino/Russian veto power able to block the attempt.
The session was all about Trump regime grandstanding on the world stage, pretending its coup attempt is the right thing to do – ignoring international and US constitutional law, along with sovereign Venezuelan rights.
Pompeo represented imperial America at the session, his remarks hostile to the rights and welfare of the Venezuelan people he and other Trump regime hardliners pretend to support – faking it.
Russia envoy Vassily Nebenzia represented right over wrong. He denounced the SC meeting as a further attempt to destabilize Venezuela, part of the “US regime change strategy in” the country, adding:
“The United States is trying to initiate a coup d’etat in Venezuela” – a flagrant breach of international law and the country’s sovereignty.
The Trump regime “is painting a confrontation between (Maduro) and people of Venezuela. This picture is far from reality. In spite of everything, the leader of Venezuela obviously has broad support among people.”
“National Assembly leader (Juan Guaido), who is currently positioned by Washington as almost a president is not supported by almost 70 percent of the people of Venezuela.”
They stand with Maduro and Bolivarian social democracy against Washington’s regime change agenda.
“The cynical, overt interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state continues. It is necessary to put an end to this,” Nebenzia stressed.
US “interference into the internal affairs of other states is nothing new…treat(ing) Latin America (and everywhere else worldwide) as its backyard with no regard to the interests of people living there” – believing it’s the “warden of the Western hemisphere” and planet earth.
Brussels, including key EU states Britain, France, and Germany, demand Caracas erase last May’s democratic election results, an open, free, and fair process won by Maduro with a two-thirds majority – hailing his triumph at the time as a victory over “imperialism.”
US vassal states in Europe now demand if he doesn’t agree to a snap election rerun in eight days, they’ll recognize Guido as an interim president, an illegitimate one – backing the attempted coup over fundamental international law.
A Final Comment
Defending his nation’s sovereignty at the SC session, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Alberto Arreaza denounced the Trump regime’s attempt to abolish democratic rule in the country, saying:
“The United States is not behind the coup d’etat. It is in advance. It’s in the vanguard of the coup d’etat. It is dictating orders, not only to the Venezuelan opposition but also to the satellite governments in the region and, it seems, in Europe and the other parts of the world.”
Calling European countries “lackeys” of the US, he denounced their ultimatum. “Europe is giving us eight days?Where do you get that you have the power to establish a deadline or an ultimatum to a sovereign people? Where do you get this? It’s almost child-like.”
He took dead aim at Guaido’s illegitimacy, telling SC member states
“I challenge you to find a legal basis for the self-proclamation of an individual who wasn’t elected by anyone as president.”
It’s an embarrassment to be an American, a gangster state run by its criminal class, at war on humanity at home and abroad, its agenda threatening everyone everywhere.
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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.”
Socialism isn’t the problem. The problem in Venezuela is the cancer of Western-supported deep state agencies that are subverting its political economy for the perceived benefit of a tiny transnational oligarch class.
The same agencies which helped to renovate the post 9/11 Canadian government, by ushering in the Harper Regime[1]— arguably a soft coup – and the on-going coup beneath the progressive veneer of the Trudeau regime, are hard at work in Venezuela.[2]
The Canadian government’s support for Juan Guaido in the name of democracy and freedom is beyond absurd because he has almost no support in Venezuela, and he was not elected to lead the country.
#Maduro got a higher competitive vote and a greater proportion of all possible votes than any of his key detractors: #Trump#Macri#Santos or #Piñera . The plain truth about #Venezuela– Prof. Tim Anderson
The Canadian government’s actions demonstrate clearly that it denies and negates democracy and freedom as policy. Nation-state sovereignty, ideological pluralism, and international law are all proven enemies to the Canadian government. This is amply demonstrated, not only in its support for the imperial puppet opposition in Venezuela, but also in the Canadian government’s support for ISIS, al Qaeda and assorted terrorists in Syria[3], as well as the government’s support for a neo-Nazi infested coup government[4] in Kiev.
Nation-state self-determination, ideological pluralism, democracy, and the rule of international law should be values that Western countries support rather than destroy.
Venezuela and its allies are fighting for us all when they oppose the deep state anti-democratic cancer of lawless imperialism.
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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.
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.
Around 66 million years ago a city-sized asteroid crashed into south-eastern Mexico, finally leaving behind it a crater almost 100 miles in diameter. The asteroid collided with a force of about one billion atomic bombs, such as the one dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II. Any living thing present within the locality was incinerated in a fraction of a second.
The impact unleashed a megatsunami, with waves over 300 feet high, that reached hundreds of miles away to what is now Texas and Florida in the United States. Furthermore, tremors following the asteroid’s contact resulted in worldwide earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, causing indescribable chaos and instability.
On that day the asteroid’s appearance signalled the end for our globe’s dinosaurs, including apex predators like Tyrannosaurus rex – which roamed in areas like Wyoming and Montana, approximately 3,000 miles north of the asteroid collision zone.
The T-rex itself may have been one of the last dinosaurs to die out, because of its broad diet and scavenging lifestyle, while it could run at speeds of up to 45 mph allowing it to catch any weakened prey. However, within a few short years, as global temperatures plummeted while food sources dwindled and disappeared, so too would the iconic carnivores. Their unavoidable decline and extinction was a fate that befell all land animals heavier than 25 kilogrammes (55 pounds).
The asteroid’s arrival entailed a rapid loss of 75% of all life on earth, known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event. For up to a decade following the asteroid strike, sunlight was unable to reach earth’s surface due to dust particles in the stratosphere, cutting off the lifeblood of plants and affecting vast sections of the food chain.
Yet what is remarkable is that anything should have survived, let alone a quarter of what was living before. The asteroid’s explosive force was equivalent to millions of the most powerful nuclear bombs humankind has created. Certain species that survived this period exist even today like the goblin shark, frilled shark, crocodile, jelly fish and leatherback sea turtle.
If our globe could absorb such an assault and rebound to once more host great varieties of life, it can surely do so again in the scenario of nuclear war – whose chances have increased with the Doomsday Clock at two minutes to midnight, although its hand did not advance this January as expected.
Humans themselves have displayed an undying fascination with dinosaurs, perhaps when viewing the gigantic reptiles they behold creatures that once ruled the planet as we do now. Humans have highlighted the lack of intelligence of dinosaurs, as a means of pointing to our own “superiority” and grandeur. However, dinosaurs dominated the globe for 175 million years, and would have continued to roam but for a certain intervention from above.
The first human ancestors arrived up to seven million years ago, while modern humans have been in existence for about 200,000 years. Today, one can say with confidence that Homo sapiens will not be commanding the world for anything like a similar time to the dinosaurs.
Continued survival of humans is, as documented, in growing jeopardy due to their leaders’ refusal in dismantling what can literally destroy the species: nuclear weapons. High intelligence, which is unique to humanity, comes at a considerable cost. The atomic bomb could not have been produced except by beings that possessed formidable brains; in this case a group of scientists working around the clock with Allied government backing, apparently immune to the consequences of their actions.
These policies are a testament to how dangerous humans can be. When one looks at the example of nuclear weapons, the reputation of Tyrannosaurus rex is practically benign by comparison. Dinosaurs, no matter how large, were not a threat to life on earth and fitted into the food chain then in place. What’s more, dinosaurs were not harming the ecosystems around them, as humans currently are leading to the planet’s sixth mass extinction.
Over the past 70 years, there has been a chilling record with weapons of mass destruction, as last minute intervention was required more than once to avert nuclear catastrophe. At other times, sheer luck played out in the face of blundering and recklessness.
In spite of everything, modernization of nuclear arsenals is continuing, led recently by the Obama administration; this overhaul is now firmly pursued by president Donald Trump at a $1.2 trillion cost “over the next 30 years”, sparking an inevitable arms race.
Come the event of nuclear war, those humans who could possibly overcome an unfolding nuclear winter, are tiny numbers like the Waorani people of remote Amazonian Ecuador. Tribal communities such as the Waorani are remarkably adept at surviving in difficult terrain over generations, and have an old saying that: “The rivers and trees are our life”. For the so-called civilized populations of the first world, increasingly detached from nature and crowded into cities, similar viewpoints have become alien and forgotten.
Other ancient societies present in the Amazon and separate rainforests, along with hardy souls like the Sami people scattered around the Arctic Circle, may also have a chance of pulling through the nuclear winter phenomenon.
Meanwhile, nuclear weapons’ ongoing existence is presented to the public as a means of safeguarding “national security”. In reality the opposite is true. The greatest threat to America’s safety, the leading military power, is that of nuclear weapons. Should America initiate a first strike nuclear attack against Russia or China, without retaliation from either, it would still destroy the western superpower because of nuclear winter.
Climate change is another cataclysmic issue, but compared to nuclear war, a warming world is not likely to pose as immediate a threat to entire humankind. Nations like Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and others – stiflingly hot already – will quite probably become uninhabitable for people in the decades ahead. Yet there are other states that still enjoy moderate, comfortable climates such as Britain, Ireland, Germany and the Netherlands, which can surely support human life for the foreseeable future. As too might extensive sections of the US, Canada and elsewhere.
While the existing global warming period, which dates to the mid-19th century, is indeed very serious and should not be underestimated, there have been many aeons of climatic alteration over the planet’s 4.5 billion year lifespan. Some of these climate ages were far harsher by comparison to what our earth is presently enduring. The globe has always survived and recovered, though innumerable species were wiped out.
More than 55 million years ago, with the dinosaurs mere bone and ash, the earth was up to eight Celsius (46 Fahrenheit) warmer than current temperatures. The planet resisted this scalding heat and life again flourished, taking about 200,000 years for something like normality to return.
Three million years ago, during the Pliocene Epoch, the world was on average two to three Celsius warmer than today, with sea levels a staggering 25 metres higher. At this stage, our early human predecessors existed and somehow came through. About 125,000 years ago the planet was slightly warmer than now, with sea levels six to nine metres above present heights, but modern humans overcame these challenges.
In more familiar times, during the age of ancient Rome, there was a “Roman Warm Period” in which the legions may have been able to grow grapes in northern England. The mild climate persisted for around 650 years (250 BC–400 AD), peaking in the first century AD, while affecting broad regions of Europe and the North Atlantic.
It was during this era of warming the Carthaginian commander Hannibal, born in 247 BC, crossed the Alps in a legendary military excursion against Rome with almost 50,000 men and 38 elephants.
Overall, the Roman Warm Period was not as severe or universal as the conditions we are now experiencing. Roughly a millenia later, another unusual occurrence of climatic variation was witnessed by modern humans during the “Medieval Warm Period”, stretching from about 950 AD to the mid-13th century. This span of heating mostly affected the Northern Hemisphere too, and as with the Roman Warm Period, it was not a uniformly global event – nor was it as dramatic as today’s temperature increases driven by massive industrialized activity. Possible causes of the Medieval Warm Period include rises in solar activity, along with a change in ocean current circulation.
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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
The favourable exchange rate between the US dollar and the highly inflated Venezuelan bolívar is a key element in respect of understanding why Washington has decided to behave so brazenly in instigating a ‘Twitter Coup‘ against Caracas. While the United States Federal Reserve has no qualms about printing money in order to readily monetise its own debt and otherwise help feed a ballooning federal government and associated military-industrial complex, when it comes to objectively defined hyperinflation, Venezuela’s is the worst in the world.
At the end of 2018, Venezuela’s inflation rate was 1,698,488%, making it the worst in the world by an exponential factor. By contrast, the country with the second highest inflation rate in the world, South Sudan stood at 117%. This means that in dollar-for-dollar terms, it is theoretically easier to “buy off” a Venezuelan official than any other in the world, because just about any easily convertible currency or asset in the world will go a long way in inflation rife Venezuela. Of course in reality, it appears that the vast majority of Venezuelan officials are loyal to their constitution and their constitutional defined elected President Nicolas Maduro. That being said, one does have to allow for human weakness when analysing such a situation and at the end of the day, shouting “solidarity” is free, but the temptation of a proverbial fist full of dollars (or frankly any other currency) is clearly a seductive prospect for anyone in Venezuela.
Against this background, it appears that the first Venezuelan domino to fall has been an erstwhile little known military attache at the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington called Colonel Jose Luis Silva (image on the right). Silva has reportedly defected from President Maduro’s government and has joined the United States in recognising self-appointed “President” Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s head of sate. Whilst there is not yet any evidence that any money or assets exchanged hands between US officials and Colonel Silva, it would not take one with a wild imagination to picture such a thing taking place, not least since Silva was already working in Washington D.C.
The legitimate Venezuelan government did not waste time in condemning Silva. According to the Defence Ministry in Caracas:
“To surrender to international interests is an act of treason and cowardice towards the homeland inherited from our liberator Simon Bolivar, so we reject the statements of Col. Jose Luis Silva, who had served as military attache to the United States”.
While this is clearly a robust statement, the fact remains that the current political crisis is not going to make Venezuela’s inflation woes any better and thus, the prospect of other top Venezuelan officials defecting to the pro-US self-proclaimed leader is not a conspiracy theory, but a very likely possibility over the course of the coming days and week.
In this respect, it must be said that the problems facing Venezuela make a strong argument for sound money. In fact, Venezuela’s President himself has realised the importance of sound money and looked to create a new crypto-currency known as El Petro. Launched last year, El Petro is pegged to the value of Venezuela’s chief asset, oil. Beyond this, Venezuela’s natural gold resources also meant that Venezuela could have and perhaps should have gone on to a gold standard. Sadly though for President Maduro, foreign powers have conspired to make Venezuela’s history of unsound monetary policy even worse.
First of all, the US government banned its citizens from purchasing El Petro and threatened sanctions upon non-US entities and civilians who traded in the digital but nevertheless sound currency. Secondly, as over $1.2 billion worth of Venezuelan gold is in the Bank of England, the gold has effectively been stolen from Caracas as the authorities in the The City of London have refused to allow Venezuela to withdraw its own gold from its own deposit at the UK’s central bank.
Thus, while Venezuelan leaders can and should be blamed for allowing hyperinflation to spiral out of control during years of low global oil prices, when at last Caracas realised that gold and an oil based currency are the best means of trying to get out of the crises, Venezuela should have been applauded rather than punished for making a decision to at least try and pivot towards a sound monetary foundation.
Yet instead of allowing markets rather than geopolitical mercantilism to determine policy, the US has predictably moved to strangle Venezuelan attempts to free up its own assets in order to develop something like a duel track currency model where the existing de-facto worthless bolívar might co-exist next to El Petro as well as some sort of gold backed currency.
This is of course not the first time that monetary policy among resource rich nations has led to the US taking action to undermine a UN recognised legitimate government. Prior to the 2003 war on Iraq, President Saddam Hussein dumped the petro-dollar and began trading Iraq’s oil in the then new Euro currency. Likewise, prior to the 2011 NATO invasion of Libya, the country’s revolutionary leader Muammar Gaddafi sought to put all of Africa on a gold standard as he prepared to finalise plans for a gold backed African dinar.
It should therefore not be a surprise that months after the launch of El Petro and weeks after Venezuela sought to withdraw some of its gold from the Bank of England – Washington pounced. The fact of the matter is that foreign competitors remaining dollar poor is a crucial foreign policy goal for a superpower whose own currency remains a global reserve currency, in spite of being backed by nothing by the international belief that the US will eventually pay back its trillions worth of debt. In this sense, because the Federal Reserve is the king of ‘voodoo monetary policy’, the US is best placed to insure its own wealth by punishing foreign nations that might otherwise develop a more sound monetary policy than that of a United States whose own currency has continually lost value since departing from the gold standard.
By contrast, if nations like Libya or Venezuela successfully adopted sound money principles, sanctions would be far less easy to enforce, whilst the domestic economies in question could thrive in a relatively inflation free environment and one in which interest rates could remain low without feeding inflation.
In this sense, while inflation had long been a problem for individual Venezuelans, now the problem is being exacerbated by the temptation that many officials will clearly have to defect to a self-proclaimed leader that is backed by the US government – which means he is also backed by a US dollar that remains stronger than Venezuela’s national currency.
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“ALL tailings ‘ponds’ are a problem. If they don’t breach and spill massive amounts of toxic sludge into the environment like at Mount Polley, they leach that contamination slowly, poisoning the waters and lands (and aquifers) around them for centuries.” – (Council of Canadians)
The two most recent Brazilian open-pit mine “accidents” that will be discussed in this extended-length Duty to Warn column, will probably require close to a trillion dollar death and disability benefits for just the following two categories:
1) the hundreds of dead and wounded miners (and their grieving families); and
2) the massive amounts of property damaged that was owned by the thousands of government and private owners whose roads, bridges, homes, land, lives and health that were destroyed or damaged after the deluge – all the way to the coast. Carefully study the photos below and visualize the St Louis River.
These realities invite the following questions for families of miners and property-owners downstream from the proposed PolyMet copper/nickel mine tailings lagoon that is supposed to be built at the headwaters of the St Louis River in northern Minnesota:
Question # 1: Did the two Brazilian mining companies Samarco and Vale and the multinational mining corporation BHP Billiton plc have sufficiently large escrow accounts to cover the compensation costs that will be owed to the 200 – 300 families whose head-of-household miners drowned in agony on January 25, 2019?
Question # 2: Is the MN DNR, the MN PCA, the MN Chambers of Commerce and the MN State Government requiring the foreign mining companies PolyMet, Glencore and Antofagasta to put aside sufficient escrow money to cover the hundreds of billions of dollars that would be required to pay for all the costs of similar mining disasters in Minnesota that could very easily
A) pollute and make inhabitable the entire St. Louis River estuary along with its fish, wildlife and wild rice;
B) destroy and make inhabitable the dozen or so northern Minnesota river towns that are located downstream from the seriously toxic PolyMet tailings lagoon (with its 250 foot high earthen dam walls (holding back billions of gallons of eternally toxic sludge) that are hoped (finger’s crossed) to not liquify, dissolve, overtop and/or burst over the next 500 years!); and, what might be the worst of all,
C) pollute the drinkable, fishable and swimmable waters of Lake Superior so that our progeny will not understand what the great lake once meant to the Northland’s ecosystem?
Question # 3: Would a trillion-dollar escrow account even be enough to cover the potential damages from a serious PolyMet dam failure that reaches Lake Superior?
Question # 4: Should Wisconsin, Michigan and Ontario have a say in what happens to Lake Superior because of the short-sighted plans of Minnesota’s lawmakers and bureaucrats?
Following are some historical and current event’s lessons for starry-eyed Minnesota politicians, bureaucrats, investors and wannabe copper miners who have been expertly bamboozled by PolyMet and assorted other foreign non-ferrous mining corporations to ignore the huge risks involved in inviting a foreign, penny stock mining corporation to dig an experimental mine in our pristine wilderness for the sake of a few hundred temporary mining jobs.
Read on to better understand the well-concealed risks and recall that corporations only have a fiduciary duty to make as much money as possible for their shareholders. They only consider the long-term environmental damage that they will leave behind if and when there is a significant possibility of serious legal ramifications.
Residents of the dozen or so river towns that are located on or near the banks of northern Minnesota’s reasonably healthy St Louis River need to be aware of the solemn warnings in this column. Those river towns include, in descending order from north to south: Hoyt Lakes, Aurora, Meadowlands, Floodwood, Brookston, Cloquet, Scanlon, Carlton, Thomson, Wrenshall, Duluth and Superior (WI).
(To better understand the geography of the St Louis River estuary, click this.)
I think most residents of and visitors to Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Ontario understand the importance of leaving behind to the next generation a healthy, drinkable, fishable and swimmable Lake Superior. Hopefully readers will pay attention to the information presented here, and then do what they can to oppose the dangerous PolyMet project.
Even state-of-the-art mine tailings ponds that use earthen dams like the one proposed for PolyMet’s mine waste lagoon, are subject to liquification, overtopping, rain deluges, earthquakes and therefore sudden dam wall breaches that can destroy for a generation or more every living thing – including fish – in the watershed downstream.
Even tributaries can be both polluted in the sudden sludge surge that can temporarily reverse the flow of a creek or river. If the toxic sludge enters a lake, the bottom will become permanently too toxic for spawning or bottom feeding, and future thermocline changes can renew the poisoning of the lake over and over again.
Multinational mining corporations have poisoned environments – sometimes gradually, sometimes catastrophically – wherever on the planet they have extracted minerals or petroleum– NO EXCEPTIONS. And the worst examples of pollution have happened in water-rich environments like Minnesota.
Giant multinational mining corporations like Vale, BHP Billiton plc and Samarco (each of which have extensive mining operations in Brazil) have again demonstrated to the world that they can’t be trusted; for on January 25, 2019, these conscienceless corporations have perpetrated another environmental catastrophe on Brazil.
This time the company’s miners and mine workers were the ones that suffered the most. Looking at the photos below will make it clear why this one was far more lethal than the Samarco disaster in 2015 that was called the worst environmental catastrophe in the history of Brazil.
Read on and come to the realization that similar disasters could easily happen to whomever and whatever happens to be downstream from the proposed PolyMet/NorthMet/Glencore sulfuric acid-producing copper/nickel mine whose earthen tailings pond is scheduled to rise to an eventually unstable height of 250 feet!!
Important parts of northern Minnesota could easily be poisoned irreparably, despite what the starry-eyed, bamboozled and/or possibly paid off politicians who haven’t thought through all of the long-term consequences of their votes and law-making efforts.
Mining-related industries spend lavish amounts of advertising money for propaganda purposes. PolyMet has also spent a lot of money on advertising in local and regional media outlets, thus creating loyal mouthpieces of those that accept that money. One example is the fact that PolyMet was a major sponsor of the Minnesota state hockey tournament for the last couple of years. A PolyMet employee once held an important position in the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce.
Even admired, well-meaning Minnesota legislators like Klobuchar, Smith, Stauber, Nolan and many others, whether GOP or DFL, has experienced some level of corporate influence – including campaign “contributions” from the paymasters of the mining industry.
The high potential for sudden environmental catastrophes similar to Mount Polley (British Columbia 2014), Brazil’s Samarco mine (Brazil 2015), and now the Brumadinho mine (Brazil 2019)) – plus a hundred others since major multinational mining corporations began their global mineral extractions on a mass scale a century ago.
There have been at least four disastrous tailings lagoon failures just in the Minas Gerais region of Brazil over the past 20 years. There are over 750 tailings dams in that province alone, and 40 of them are considered to be at high risk of liquifying and rupturing. Even the so-called “state-of-the-art” mining corporations like Vale and BHP Billiton plc have no reliable method of preventing aging or otherwise endangered earthen dam walls from failing their purpose in holding back toxic liquid mine waste for an eternity.
The photo below is the mouth of the Rio Doce River (as it enters the Atlantic Ocean), photographed a few days after the dam breach killed every fish in the river. The fish died of both asphyxiation and poisoning because of the massive and sudden toxicity of the toxic mine waste from 300 miles upstream on that fateful day on November 5, 2015. The poisoned water rapidly flowed into the ocean and the previously lucrative fishing industry was destroyed. Commercial fishing in the vicinity of the Rio Doce is still forbidden by governmental decree three years later partly because the flesh of the surviving, sickened fish is still poisonous.
It shouldn’t be necessary to point out to intelligent politicians, voters, fishermen and visitors that appreciate a clean St Louis River that something very similar could easily happen to Lake Superior.
Every sovereign state (Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan), every sovereign indigenous nation and every sovereign Canadian province that regards Lake Superior as either sacred or simply a valuable resource needs to demand that Minnesota’s Governor Walz, Wisconsin’s Governor Emmers, the elected representatives in both political parties in both states and particularly the non-elected bureaucrats in the DNR, the PCA, the US Forest Service, the IRRRB and the Chambers of Commerce put an emergency hold on all the permits that have previously granted permission for PolyMet and Glencore to proceed with their dangerous plans.
The mine waste-contaminated mouth of Brazil’s Rio Doce, once a healthy fishery, as it enters the Atlantic Ocean (which remains contaminated after 3 years). (This is what could happen to Lake Superior if the earthen wall of PolyMet’s tailings lagoon suddenly liquifies, over-tops and collapses)
The remainder of the column summarizes early news item from around the world (except in northern Minnesota) reporting on what happened in Brazil’s mine country a few days ago. Some of the reports have helpfully made the connections to the earlier, equally catastrophic – but far less lethal – tailings lagoon collapse three years ago. The Brazilian mining company Vale was the part owner of both mines.
A demolished home lies in ruins after a dam collapsed near Brumadinho, Brazil the day after the dam failure
Officials say some 200 people are missing near the southeast Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte after a tailings dam owned by a mining company (Vale) collapsed Friday, unleashing a torrent of muddy waste and debris.
The mayor of Brumadinho, where the dam is located, said seven bodies had already been recovered and that he expects the death toll to rise.
The dam is owned by the mining giant Vale, which also operates a nearby iron ore mine.
Vale’s CEO, Fábio Schvartsman, said roughly 300 workers were on site at the time of the rupture and that at least two-thirds of them are unaccounted for.
Video footage from the site showed a helicopter rescue crew hovering over a wide field of reddish-brown mud, struggling to pull victims free.
The river of sludge forced the evacuation of some residents. This local TV footage shows a rescue mission.
In a statement, Vale confirmed the dam breach at the Feijão Mine in Minas Gerais state. It’s not clear why the dam ruptured.
“The first information indicates that the tailings had reached the companies administrative area and part of the Vila Ferteco community,” it said.
Schvartsman has apologized for the disaster, calling it “unacceptable,” according to the Brazilian newspaper O Globo. He saidthat the dam was stable but in the process of being decommissioned. The company says it has initiated its “emergency plan for dams.”
Before and after photos of the area show a wide expanse of trees, fields, roads and buildings leveled by the river of sludge.
By Agence France-Presse – Manila Bulletin – January 26, 2019, 5:12 PM
Rescuers worked overnight into Saturday searching for around 300 people missing after a dam collapse at a mine in southeast Brazil killed at least nine, but the local governor said “odds are minimal” that the missing 300 would be found alive.
What’s left of the Vale mining company’s administrative buildings, a processing plant and assorted missing company buildings, including the company cafeteria and the barracks where hundreds of miners had been housed
The tailings dam, owned by Brazilian mining giant Vale, broke apart “very violently, very suddenly,” sending a massive torrent of mud over the complex where 300 mine employees were working.
Seven bodies were recovered Friday hours after the disaster, which saw a torrent of mud break through the disused dam at the iron-ore mine close to the city of Belo Horizonte, in the state of Minas Gerias, around 1:00 pm. (The tailings lagoon had apparently been decommissioned in 2014.)
By early Saturday the official death toll had risen to nine, with “nearly 300 people missing,” the local firefighters said, doubling the number of people presumed missing from the previous toll.
Up to 150 of those missing worked in the company’s administrative offices which were closest to the dam break, the firefighters said.
The mine is owned by Vale, a Brazilian mining giant that was involved in a previous 2015 mine collapse in the same state that claimed 19 lives and is regarded as the country’s worst-ever environmental disaster.
Vale shares plummeted on the new accident, losing eight percent in New York trading.
Romeu Zema, the governor of Minas Gerais, told reporters that, while all was being done to find survivors, “from now, the odds are minimal and it is most likely we will recover only bodies.”
His regional administration said 427 people had been working at the Vale mine at the time of the dam collapse, and 279 were recovered alive. The others were listed as missing.
Newly Elected, Right-wing Brazilian President Bolsonaro to Visit the Mine Site
The massive, muddy flow from the collapse barreled towards the nearby town of Brumadinho, population 39,000, but did not hit it directly.
Instead, it carved its way across roads, vegetation and farmland, taking down a bridge, and damaging or destroying homes.
Emptied-out tailings lagoon (upper left), a still-intact, water/sludge-filled tailings lagoon (lower left) – and the downstream destruction represented in the entire upper half of the photo
Television images showed people being pulled out of waist-high mud into rescue helicopters, dozens of which were in use by late Friday because of the cut-off land access.
Brazil’s new government, led by President Jair Bolsonaro, reacted to its first big emergency since taking office early this month by launching disaster coordination between the defense, mining and environment ministries and authorities in the affected state of Minas Gerais.
Bolsonaro and his defense minister were scheduled to fly over the zone on Saturday. His environment minister raced to the area late Friday.
“Where are our relatives?” wailed Raquel Cristina, one of several people demanding information about their missing kin in the mud-hit area.
“My five-year-old nephew is asking me if his dad died. What do I tell him?” asked another, Olivia Rios.
Officials said they were working through the night, conscious of the precious hours ticking away.
Around 100 fire fighters were deployed, some using earth-moving machinery to dig down to engulfed dwellings.
Would-be rescue volunteers were warned away because of the slippery, perilous piles of mud. Media were urged not to use drones to avoid collisions with the helicopters.
‘Human tragedy’
Vale CEO Fabio Schvartsman called the incident a “human tragedy” and was resigned to more deaths being confirmed at his company’s mine.
“We’re talking about probably a large number of victims — we don’t know how many, but we know it will be a high number,” he told a media conference in Rio de Janeiro.
Schvartsman, who had his two-year term renewed last month by Vale’s board of directors, said it was an “inactive dam” (that was in the process of being decommissioned) that burst apart “very violently, very suddenly.”
Its contents — tailings, or mining byproducts mixed with water — cascaded into another dam, which also overflowed, he said.
The disaster recalled the 2015 dam break near Mariana, in Minas Gerais. That accident released millions of tons of toxic iron mining waste along hundreds of kilometers. Vale was joint operator of that dam, along with the Anglo-Australian group BHP Billiton.
The Brazil office of Greenpeace, the environmental activist group, said Friday’s dam break was “a sad consequence of the lessons not learned by the Brazilian government and the mining companies.”
It said the incidents “are not accidents but environmental crimes that must be investigated,punished and repaired.”
View of toxic sludge in a large river – showing a tributary to the right where the sludge presumably moved upstream momentarily against the flow (note the fresh blue water – right upper corner of photo)
An aerial view shows a destroyed bridge after a dam collapsed in Brumadinho, Brazil
No signs of any of the remains of this dam, signifying the power of the deluge
Rescue workers vainly searching for bodies
Totally washed-out highway that may have once crossed a small river
Sludge has obliterated a highway – and much more
Searching for bodies downstream from the mine tailings pond breach
Satellite image from 12 November 2015, one week after the Samarco mine disaster
Part of a destroyed village that was downstream from Brazil’s Samarco Mine in 2015
Samarco delegates signed the agreement in Brasilia, the capital of Brazil.
The owners and operators of an iron ore mine where a burst dam flattened a village, killed 19 people and caused “the biggest environmental disaster in the history of Brazil,” settled with the government Wednesday for US$6.2 billion a year after the disaster.
The company is co-owned by Brazil’s Vale iron ore giant and the foreign-owned Anglo-Australian BHP Billiton, the world’s biggest mining company.
President Dilma Rousseff said the settlement would help heal “a tragedy without precedent.” The funds, which will go toward social and environmental damages, will be paid out over 15 years.
The Nov. 5 accident near Mariana in Minas Gerais state began when a tailings dam at Samarco’s mine failed, unleashing a flood of polluted water and mud into the River Doce, one of the most important rivers in Brazil.
A village was destroyed, drinking water supplies for hundreds of thousands of people were interrupted and damage extended to the mouth of the river on the Atlantic coast, with wildlife, tourism businesses and fishing communities all suffering. Seven people have been accused of murder over the catastrophe.
Contaminated river in Brazil, 2015 (presumably the Rio Doce) – note the large number of floating uprooted logs from the upstream tailings dam breach
A massive ravine where a small stream once flowed
The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said last November that the mud spill released from a dam collapse at an iron ore mine in Brazil earlier this month is in fact toxic, debunking claims by the mine’s operator that the mud was “chemically stable.”
Before and after satellite photos of the Atlantic Ocean showing toxic sludge from the Samarco dam collapse near the port of Regência – DigitalGlobe/Google
Citing “new evidence,” the U.N. human rights agency said in a statement the residue “contained high levels of toxic heavy metals and other toxic chemicals.”
“The scale of the environmental damage is the equivalent of 20,000 Olympic swimming pools of toxic mud waste contaminating the soil, rivers and water system of an area covering over 850 kilometers,” the U.N. agency’s special rapporteur John Knox said in the statement.
Brazil’s Globo TV reported that a previously unpublished document revealed that Samarco management had known that there were safety risks at the mine since 2013, including knowledge of the danger that the dam could burst.
The Samarco mine environmental disaster is being called the worst in Brazil’s history.
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Since his retirement from his holistic mental health practice, Dr Kohls has been writing the weekly Duty to Warn column for the Duluth Reader, Minnesota’s premier alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns, which have been re-published all around the world for the last decade, deal with a variety of justice issues, including the dangers of copper/nickel sulfide mining in water-rich northeast Minnesota, Many of his columns have been archived at a number of websites, including the following four:
Comments Off on The Experimental PolyMet Copper Sulfide Mine in Minnesota, the St Louis River, Lake Superior, and the Recent Brazilian Environmental Catastrophes
Prominent billionaire George Soros has launched an attack on China’s President Xi Jinping in his annual speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He warned that artificial intelligence and machine learning presented ‘unprecedented danger’ and ‘a mortal threat to open societies’ if used by authoritarian regimes. Soros has urged Washington to crack down on Chinese technology companies and said that President Xi’s Belt and Road investment plan was designed to promote only the interests of China.
Soros has also warned that the US and China are locked in a cold war that could soon turn into a hot one. The billionaire said that President Trump’s decision to call China a ‘strategic’ competitor was ‘too simplistic’. He said President Trump was making concessions to China while renewing his attacks on allies, which is liable to undermine the US policy objective of curbing China’s abuses and excesses.
Soros said – quote – an effective policy towards China can’t be reduced to a slogan, adding that it needs to be far more sophisticated, detailed and practical; and it must include an American economic response to the Belt and Road Initiative.
Washington and Beijing have been engaged in a trade dispute over import tariffs for months. The next round of negotiations is expected to take place at the end of January when Chinese Vice Premier Liu He meets with US officials in Washington.
Meanwhile, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said on Friday that Soros’ recent remark suggesting that Chinese President Xi Jinping is one of the strongest opponents of the concept of open societies does not even deserve to be refuted.
Radio Sputnik discussed the speech by George Soros at the World Economic Forum with Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, the Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
The US and the EU have extremely fragile economies to the extent that they depend on “Made in China” commodities.
Listen to the interview below.
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There’s a new thought policeman in town. He calls himself NewsGuard and he promises to restore “Trust and Accountability” to what one reads online. His website elaborates that “NewsGuard uses journalism to fight false news, misinformation, and disinformation. Our trained analysts, who are experienced journalists, research online news brands to help readers and viewers know which ones are trying to do legitimate journalism—and which are not…Our Green-Red ratings signal if a website is trying to get it right or instead has a hidden agenda or knowingly publishes falsehoods or propaganda.”
One might well stop reading immediately after running into “our trained analysts” with all that implies, but that would deny the greater pleasure derived from considering news-sites that have “…a hidden agenda or knowingly [publish] falsehoods or propaganda.” Excuse me, but hidden agendas, lies and propaganda are what the mainstream media is all about, note particularly the recent feeding frenzy over the Covington school incident at the Lincoln Memorial. Catholic racist white boys vs. elderly Native American war hero was how the story was framed all over the mainstream media before it became clear that the entire chosen narrative was upside down. Only a couple of news outlets bothered to apologize when the truth became known.
NewsGuard claims to have a staff of 50 that evaluates 2,000 websites in something like real time. How exactly it does that is not clear, but The New York Times repeats company claims that “the sites it rates account for 96% of online news and information engagement in the U.S.” NewsGuard also told The Times that it intends to quadruple its vetting of sites and seeks to make its coverage “ubiquitous.”
Make no mistake, NewsGuard is a neoconservative contrivance which promotes an establishment view of what is true and what is false. Its co-founder Gordon Crovitz (image on the right) is an ex-editor of The Wall Street Journal, who has enthused over the project, saying that it is “a milestone in the fight to bring consumers the information they need to counter false information, misinformation and disinformation online.” Crovitz has also been associated with the leading neocon foundation The American Enterprise Institute while the NewsGuard advisory board includes Tom Ridge, who was head of the Department of Homeland Security under George W. Bush, and Michael Hayden, who directed both the CIA and NSA. It is as government-establishment in orientation as it is possible to be.
In a sense seeking to establish “accuracy” in news reporting is nothing new as the social media, to include Facebook and Twitter, have had that objective for some time, but NewsGuard defines itself as having as its target the screening of the entire media in a politically impartial fashion, as “an information resource.” And the real danger is that it will soon be appearing on your computer or phone whether you want it there or not. It is already installed on local library computers in Hawaii and Ohio and is working with university and even high school libraries to include its software on all public computers. Worse still, NewsGuard is in partnership with Microsoft as part of the latter’s Defending Democracy Program. Microsoft currently has NewsGuard on its Edge browser and it intends to install the tool on its Microsoft 10 operating system as a built-in feature. Microsoft 10 is the standard operating system on nearly all computers sold in the United States.
When you go to a news site NewsGuard has a little shield that pops up in the corner of your screen that will tell you whether that site is a reliable source or not. A green tag displays for approved and red for not compliant. Similarly, if you do a search the responses that come up will feature a green or red shield as part of the results. The site for NBC news shows green, approved, with the heading “this website generally maintains basic standards of accuracy and accountability.” It then uses what it calls a “nutrition label” to break down the nine specific areas that were assessed, each of which also receives and individual green check for NBC. Under “Credibility” appears “Does not repeatedly publish false content; Gathers and presents information responsibly; Regularly corrects or clarifies errors; Handles the difference between news and opinion responsibly; and Avoids deceptive headlines.” Under “Accountability” appears “Website discloses ownership and financing; Clearly labels advertising; Reveals who’s in charge including any possible conflict of interest; and The site provides names of any content creators along with either contact or biographical information.”
The first thing one might observe about the system is that it is designed to favor large, well-funded establishment news sources that are staffed to go through the motions of fact checks and corrections. All of the major news networks are approved, including Fox, MSNBC and CNN, all of which editorialize heavily, almost constantly, in their news coverage. Voice of America, which is a U.S. government propaganda instrument by design, also is approved. NewsGuard also has approved all major newspapers to include The New York Times, which frequently gets the story wrong, and The Washington Post, where news stories are nearly indistinguishable from editorials through the use of evocative headlines and slanted narrative. All the U.S. media currently leadoff, for example, with stories about Russia that include the assertion that the Kremlin interfered in the 2016 election, a claim that has yet to be confirmed through actual evidence.
Russian media operating in the U.S. including RT America and Sputnik get red ratings with a warning “Proceed with caution: this website fails to basic standards of accuracy and accountability.” RT is apparently guilty of “repeatedly publishing false content,” “not gather[ing] and publish[ing] information responsibly,” “not handl[ing] the difference between news and opinion responsibly” and “not provid[ing] the names of creators.” Al-Jazeera, another news service that often criticizes the United States and its governmental policies also is rated red, suggesting that the true criterion for rejection by NewsGuard is one’s relationship to the official establishment and globalist/interventionist line being promoted by the United States.
A glaring example of NewsGuard’s political bias relates to BuzzFeed, which is an approved site. The Washington Postreported recently how a BuzzFeed story about Michael Cohen and President Trump claimed that the president had directed his lawyer to lie to Congress regarding a proposed office tower project in Moscow, which would have been both a crime and impeachable. A day later Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office intervened and described the story as untrue. The New York Times ran the first story on page one but the retraction that followed appeared on page 11.
And it was not the first major bit of fake news for BuzzFeed. The same two journalists had previously reported that Russia had financed the 2016 election.
CNN, another NewsGuard green authority, inevitably bemoaned possible consequences arising from the Cohen-Trump story by complaining that it would be used to justify “bad stereotypes about the news media,” had its own Russiagate misstep when it falsely claimed that Donald Trump Jr had had access to WikiLeaks’ DNC emails before their 2016 publication.
The BBC, yet another reliable source approved by NewsGuard, reported back in September that the U.S. government had evidence that the Syrian “regime” was continuing to develop chemical weapons. It added an assessment from the completely befuddled U.S. envoy for Syria James Jeffrey that “President Assad had ‘no future as a ruler’ in Syria…Right now [the Syrian government] is a cadaver sitting in rubble with just half the territory of Syria under regime control on a good day.”
The fact is that Jeffrey was completely wrong about developments in Syria, where the government had been extremely successful in re-asserting control over nearly all of the country, while the claims of chemical weapons use have been rebutted many times, including by actual witnesses and journalists on the ground during the alleged attack at Douma in April.
Reuters news agency, yet another NewsGuard green light, is also into the game. In November 2013 it published an article, part of a series, entitled “Khamenei controls massive financial empire based on property seizures,” which claimed that an Iranian government charitable foundation called Setad (also known as EIKO) actually exists to take control of property for the use of the government’s religious leadership.
A subsequent news report that appeared in January in the alternative media revealed that the investigative journalists who wrote the story did so from Dubai, London and New York and never visited the properties they identified, in most cases completely misrepresenting what could be seen on the ground.
Robert Fontina of Counterpunch has also rejected the depiction of Setad as anything but a charitable foundation. The truth is that Setad engages in major social projects, including rural poverty alleviation, empowering women, home and school building, and provision of healthcare. Fontina observes that American sanctions against it and similar entities hit ordinary Iranians’ lives by producing food insecurity while also restricting the supplies of needed medications. Ahmad Noroozi of the Barakat Foundation claims that numerous Iranians have already been affected by U.S.-initiated sanctions directed against his country, restricting access to cancer treatments and other pharmaceuticals.
So who gets the endorsement from NewsGuard? Those who toe the line on U.S. policy and the establishment globalist/interventionist agenda. It would be interesting to know what NewsGuard’s staff of analysts is really looking for when it researches a site or media outlet. As the examples cited above demonstrate, NewsGuard has nothing to do with taking pains to report the news accurately, nor is there any evidence of real accountability. It is all about who pays the bills and who is in charge. They give the orders and one either falls in line or goes out the door. That is the reality of today’s mainstream media.
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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.
France has once again been the scene of the “gilet jaunes” (yellow vests) demonstrations against the worsening social conditions of workers under the neo-liberal policies of La Republique en Marche government of President Emmanuel Macron.
Protests on January 26 attracted tens of thousands continuing the 11 weeks of disturbances where many have been injured, hundreds arrested and several people have lost their lives.
On January 26 there was another social variant to these developments where an alternative group calling themselves the “foulards rouges” (red scarves) said they would go into the streets the following day to oppose the level of violence which has been a hallmark of the French manifestations. The Macron administration in the early weeks of the unrest withdrew the price hike for fuel which served as a spark for the spontaneous uprising.
The situation in France is indicative of broader crises in the political systems in the leading capitalist nations, namely England and the United States. In Britain, a June 2016 referendum mandating the country’s exiting of the European Union (EU) immediately brought about the resignation of Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron leading to the ascendancy of his successor Theresa May, who has been proved incapable of winning support within the parliament for a planned departure from the continental body. May has faced two votes of no-confidence, the most recent by a razor thin margin, while the Conservative leader remains almost powerless as it relates to providing direction in such a profound political quagmire.
France yellow vest demonstrations continue for 11th week on Jan. 26, 2019
In the U.S, a 35-day partial closing of the government impacting at least 800,000 federal workers along with tens of millions of others depending upon public services was a clear reflection of the intractable dispute between the two leading capitalist parties. The Democrats and Republicans are both imperialist in their orientation although having different demographic constituencies, they therefore cannot agree on issues such as healthcare, immigration and border security.
French Discontent and the Problems of Neo-Liberalism
For the 11thstraight week the yellow vest protests continued in various French cities. On January 26 media estimates suggested that some 70,000 people took to the streets demanding a shift in the economic policies of Macron apart from his resignation.
Since November 17, two thousand people have been injured in the demonstrations where participants have blocked streets and roads along with damaging toll machines on the highways in order to emphasize the rise in fuel prices. Areas lived in and frequented by the more affluent have been trashed by elements within the yellow vest movement.
Ten people have been reported killed in direct connection with the unrest. Although the numbers of those coming into the streets have declined in recent weeks, with some four thousand marching in Paris on January 26, the demonstrators remain a significant force in disrupting normal operations in France.
Macron has responded to the more than two months of marches and rebellions, by abandoning some of the “reforms” which ignited anger among working and middle class people. In addition, the president has called for a “debate” on the issues which have generated so much controversy. Nonetheless, Macron has refused to step down from office.
The alternative intervention which occurred on Sunday January 27 when several thousand people marched against what they described as the violent character of the yellow vest protests will require a further assessment of its significance and viability. The ‘foulards rouges’ (red scarves) demonstration was carried out in defense of the Fifth French Republic saying that the participants agreed with some aspects of the demands of the ‘gilet juanes’ related to the rising cost of living. Nonetheless, they categorically rejected the violence which has occurred since mid-November saying it threatens the very character of what they perceive as the positive aspects of French society.
Interestingly enough, there were African immigrants placed in the frontlines of the red scarves protest in Paris with some quoted as saying by moving to France they were seeking to escape the instability within their countries. Although this lack of stability and sustainable development is the result of the legacy of colonialism which France and other European states have played such an integral part. Some of the yellow vest supporters are dismissing the red scarves as pawns of the Macron ruling party.
An article published by Al Jazeera raised the question as to why there are so few Africans and people from the Middle East joining the yellow vest demonstrations. The movement has been described as one representing people from the marginalized semi-rural areas of France which like the suburban districts where immigrants from oppressed communities live, are being victimized by the neo-liberal program of Macron and previous governments from both the socialist and conservative parties. (See this)
One possible explanation for the paucity of people of color in the leadership of the yellow vest protests is the general character of the French legal system which has been accused of persecuting Africans and Middle Easterners. The Adama Committee, which rose up surrounding the death in detention of 24-year-old Malian immigrant Adama Traore, say that they joined the recent demonstrations despite the failure to place racism at the center of the demands.
A leader of the Adama Committee, Youcef Brakni, was quoted in Al Jazeera saying:
“Minorities face tougher sentences, with immigrants comprising 30 percent of France’s prison population despite accounting for less than six percent of the overall population, according to a 2015 study. Brakni decided to join the movement to use the momentum of the yellow vests to shed light on his organization’s specific concerns.”
Adama Committee in France joins the Yellow Vest Movement
Britain Fails to Agree on Exit from European Union
There appears to be no end in sight to the political turmoil in Britain since June 2016 when the majority of the electorate voted to leave the EU (Brexit). The then Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron immediately resigned paving the way for Theresa May to work out a program for leaving the continental body that would not cause further economic damage to London.
However, repeated attempts to pass exit legislation in parliament have failed miserably. May has remained in office despite widespread displeasure with her leadership. After surviving two no-confidence votes in recent weeks, the British government faces the possibility of a “no deal exit” where the terms for their departure will largely depend on the decisions of the European parliament.
Meanwhile the declining standards of living in Britain has prompted an anti-austerity movement which is mobilizing tens of thousands of people demanding the resignation of the Conservative government and the implementation of social programs to benefit the workers and poor. Uncertainty surrounding the lack of an exit strategy will inevitably worsens conditions of the majority of the people inside the country. (See this)
The Labor Party alternative headed now by Jeremy Corbyn has drawn the support of some elements among the Marxist left. Nevertheless, how far will a Corbyn government, if elected, be willing to go in regard to instituting a socialist-oriented economic program for Britain?
Leading left organizations along with the some right-wing parties supported the exit from the EU in 2016. In recent months there has been a demand for a “revote” on Brexit with the idea that the majority may have shifted towards remaining in the imperialist construct. Yet there is no identifiable popular opposition that can point to a revolutionary way forward for the working class and oppressed in Britain.
Implications for Recent Developments in the United States
There has been much propaganda from the Trump administration about the purported “booming, full-employment economy.” The official jobless rate is 3.9 percent, rising two-tenths of percentage points from 3.7 earlier in 2018. Capitalist media outlets play down this rise in the unemployment rate by saying that more people are unsuccessfully looking for jobs due to positive economic data over the last two years.
Despite the 3.9 percent unemployment figure, the Labor Force Participation Rate remains at a crisis level of 62.7 percent. Consequently, many people are still discouraged with the character of the labor market going into 2019.
With the 35-day partial government shutdown consumer and worker confidence is bound to suffer a serious decline. Even though more jobs have been created over the last few years, the gap between rich and poor is continuing to rise to alarming levels. (See this)
Plant closings announced by General Motors in November 2018 in both the U.S. and Canada, portends much for the auto industry in the current period. The tax dollars of working people bailed out the car industry simultaneously with the banks and insurance companies after 2008. Therefore the ruling class interests benefitted from government intervention while working people, African Americans, Latinx and others slipped further into economic decline.
Both Democrats and Republicans represent the ruling class in the U.S. and internationally notwithstanding the existence of divergent constituencies at their base. Although there was a shift within the House of Representatives after the November midterm elections towards more women and people of color, the commanding heights of power within Congress remains under the control of the conservative and centrist forces within the Democratic Party. The putative “left” of the party is by no means socialist in any genuine sense particularly as it relates to international questions. The Democratic Party is still pro-imperialist as indicated by continued support for the State of Israel, the hostility towards Syria, Iran and Russia and the failure to oppose the Trump administration’s attempted coup against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
In order to reverse the contemporary crises there must be a new political alliance centered among the proletariat and the oppressed where the rights of the majority are held as paramount. Consequently the Pentagon war budget should be eliminated and the abolition of racism, national oppression, gender discrimination and xenophobia would have to be the cornerstone of creating a free and just society.
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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
All images in this article are from the author
Featured image: France red scarves demonstration on Jan. 26, 2019
Two things stand out about the US coup in Venezuela. First, it is unusually open. Typically, the US tries to hide its coups. Second, the coup is built on a series of obvious falsehoods, yet the bi-partisans in Washington, with a few exceptions, keep repeating them.
First, we will correct the falsehoods so readers are all working from the same facts. Second, we will describe how this coup is being defeated. It will be another major embarrassment for the Trump administration and US foreign policy.
Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world and the second largest gold reserves, as well as diamonds and other minerals such as coltan (needed for electronic devices). And, Venezuela is taking over as president of OPEC and will be in a position to push for oil payments in non-dollar currencies or in cryptocurrencies, a major threat to the US dollar.
A protest outside the United States Consulate in Sydney on January 23 to demand no US intervention in Venezuela. Photo: Peter Boyle
Correcting the Record
There are a series of false statements repeated by DC officials and corporate media to justify the coup that are so obvious, it is hard to believe they are not intentional. In his two-paragraph comment on the coup, even Senator Bernie Sanders repeated them.
1. Truth: President Nicolás Maduro is the legitimate president.
President Maduro was re-elected on May 20, 2018, in response to the opposition demanding an early election. The legitimacy of the election of Maduro is so evident that it must be assumed those who say he is illegitimate are either intentionally false or ignorant. The election was scheduled consistent with the Venezuelan Constitution and in consultation with opposition parties. When it became evident that the opposition could not win the election, they decided, under pressure from the United States, to boycott the election in order to undermine its legitimacy. The facts are 9,389,056 people voted, 46% of eligible voters. Sixteen parties participated in the election with six candidates competing for the presidency.
The electoral process was observed by more than 150 election observers. This included 14 electoral commissions from eight countries among them the Council of Electoral Experts of Latin America; two technical electoral missions; and 18 journalists from different parts of the world, among others. According to the international observers, “the elections were very transparent and complied with international parameters and national legislation.”
Venezuela has one of the best electoral systems in the world. Voter fraud is not possible as identification and fingerprints are required for each voter. Voting machines are audited before and immediately after the election. Venezuela does something no other country in the world does — a public, citizen’s audit of a random sample of 53% of voting machines that is televised. All 18 parties signed the audits.
Maduro won by a wide margin, obtaining 6,248,864 votes, 67.84%; followed by Henri Falcón with 1,927,958, 20.93%; Javier Bertucci with 1,015,895, 10.82%; and Reinaldo Quijada, who obtained 36,246 votes, 0.39% of the total.
This same voting system has been used in elections that Maduro’s party has lost in governor’s and legislative elections. Venezuela is a real democracy with transparent elections. The United States could learn a good deal about real democracy from Venezuela.
2. Truth: The economic crisis is caused by outside intervention, internal sabotage and the decline in oil prices.
There is no doubt the economic situation in Venezuela is dire. The cause is the economic war conducted by the United States, the major decline in oil prices and economic sabotage by the opposition. In essence, the United States and opposition created problems in the Venezuelan economy and now say Maduro must be replaced because of problems they created.
Oil was discovered in Venezuela in the early part of the 20th Century and has dominated the economy since then. The Dutch Disease, the negative impact of an economy based on one natural resource, causes a sharp inflow of foreign currency, which raises the value of the country’s currency, making the country’s other products less price competitive. It is cheaper to import products rather than create them. This makes it more difficult for segments of the economy like agriculture and manufacturing to develop.
Chavez/Maduro sought to diversify the economy. They put in place thousands of communes and hundreds of thousands of people working in cooperatives to build agriculture and manufacturing. When the global price of oil was cut by more than half, it collapsed Venezuela’s public finances undermining these efforts. The economic war by the US made it difficult for Venezuela to borrow and trade with some countries.
Economic sanctions against Venezuela began under President Obama, and the Trump administration escalated them with financial sanctions. United States sanctions cost Venezuela some $6 billion since August, according to an October analysis. Measures against the nation’s oil industry have prohibited the Venezuelan majority-owned company, CITGO, from sending profits back to Venezuela, a $1 billion loss to the government yearly. Now, the Bank of England is refusing to return $1.2 billion in gold reserves after US officials, including Secretary of State Michael Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton, lobbied them to cut Venezuela off from its overseas assets.
The US economic war and sabotage of the economy by business interests has been exposed as part of the effort to remove Maduro by creating social unrest and lack of confidence in the government. This has included hoarding of goods, storing essentials in warehouses and selling Venezuelan goods in Colombia.
In September 2018, Venezuela pointed to a false media campaign exaggerating migration from Venezuela. They highlighted statistics from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to affirm that Venezuela has the fewest volunteer migrants in the continent. They pointed out 5.6 million Colombians have fled violence in their country and live in Venezuela. Venezuela has programs that have helped thousands of Venezuelans return home.
Socialism strengthens economies, as demonstrated in Portugal. Indeed, one criticism of Venezuela is that the Bolivarian Process is moving too slowly to put in place a socialist economy. There is a need for more sectors to be nationalized and put under democratic control of the people.
3. Truth: The opposition is violent, not the Maduro government.
Opposition protesters have been extremely violent. One tactic of the opposition was to be violent and then film the government’s response to make the government look violent. When Abby Martin was confronted by opposition protesters, they told her, “Do not film anything that we do. Just film what the government does to us.” She reported on the violence saying, “the vast majority has been caused by either indirect or direct violence by the opposition.”
Martin reports the opposition attacked hospitals, burned down the Housing Ministry, assassinated Chavistas and attacked citizen communes such as an art commune that gave free dance and music lessons to local children. Afro-Venezuelans were burned alive. Protesters pulled drivers out of buses and torched the buses. When photos and videos of opposition violence were put on social media, Martin and her colleague, Mike Prysner, became the target of a false media campaign on social media. The opposition did all they could to prevent them from reporting the truth using hundreds of death threats and threats they would be lynched.
In 2017, Venezuela Analysis reported that violent opposition protests included an attack on a maternity hospital endangering the lives of more than 50 newborn babies. Another report described the opposition using snipers to shoot government officials and civilians. Opposition newspapers urged that blunt objects be used to “neutralize” pro-government protesters, resulting in serious injuries and death.
Steve Ellner also reported that violence was coming from the opposition. He pointed to attacks at grocery stores, banks, buses, and government buildings. Other commentators described specific incidents of violence by the opposition including killing people. Maduro ordered the arrest of a retired general who tweeted how to use wire to decapitate people on motorcycles, which happened, and how to attack armored vehicles with Molotov cocktails.
Documents show that violence was the opposition’s strategy. They sought to “Create situations of crisis in the streets that will facilitate US intervention, as well as NATO forces, with the support of the Colombian government. Whenever possible, the violence should result in deaths or injuries.”
The tales of government violence are rooted in lies. The government’s response was Maduro calling for a peace conference describing it as “a national peace conference with all the country’s political sectors … so we Venezuelans can try to neutralize violent groups.”
4. Truth: The National Assembly acted in violation of the law and is in contempt of court.
The National Assembly is not the only democratic body in Venezuela. Indeed, its actions since the opposition won a majority have violated the law and protected the violence of the opposition with an embarrassing amnesty bill.
On December 6, 2015, the opposition won a parliamentary majority in the Assembly. There were allegations of vote buying in Amazonas state that were investigated by the National Electoral Council, another branch of the government. The Supreme Court barred four legislators from Amazonas taking office, two from the opposition, one allied with the opposition and one from the ruling party. The National Assembly allowed three candidates to take office. The Assembly has been held in contempt of court since July 2016 and their decisions were nullified.
Before the court ruling, the Assembly passed an amazing amnesty law, which granted amnesty for crimes the opposition has committed since 1999 (Chavez’ election). The law is an admission of guilt and provides a well-organized catalog of crimes including felonies, crimes committed at public rallies, terrorist acts involving explosives and firearms and undermining the economy. They essentially admitted exactly what Chavez/Maduro have claimed — crimes to overthrow the government for 17 years. Venezuela’s Supreme Court ruled the amnesty law was unconstitutional. Inaccurately, the Trump administration calls the Assembly Venezuela’s only remaining democratic institution.
This January, a subsidiary of the state oil company asked the Assembly to intervene claiming the president cannot make reforms to mixed public-private oil businesses without the prior approval of the National Assembly. On January 16, the court ruled that the Assembly was still in contempt of court and could not act. This is also when the Assembly elected Juan Guaidó as their president, who would later appoint himself President of Venezuela, as part of the US-led coup. Guaidó’s election to head the legislature was illegal and nullified by the court.
The Assembly still exists but remains in a state of contempt of the judiciary. It can rectify the situation by removing the lawmakers accused of electoral fraud. The Assembly refuses to do so because their goal is to remove Maduro from office and they need a super-majority to do so.
Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK disrupts Mike Pence at the OAS. Press TV.
A Timeline of the US Coup in Venezuela
In “Anti-Maduro Coalition Grew from Secret Talks,” the Associated Press explains the coup was “only possible because of strong support from the Trump administration, which led a chorus of mostly conservative Latin American governments that immediately recognized Guaidó.”
The Wall Street Journal reports Trump has long viewed Venezuela as one of his top-three foreign policy priorities, with Iran and North Korea. Trump requested a briefing on Venezuela on his second day in office, talking of the immense potential of Venezuela to become a rich nation through its oil reserves. AP reports that Trump “personally sparked” this as he brought up regime change in Venezuela in every meeting with Latin American leaders.
After Maduro was re-elected, administration plans began taking shape, driven in part by key members in the National Security Council and anti-Maduro advocates in Congress like extreme interventionist Senator Marco Rubio.
On November 1, John Bolton zeroed in on Latin America, calling Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela a “troika of tyranny.” On January 2, Bolton met with his Brazilian and Colombian counterparts to collaborate to “return Venezuela to its democratic heritage.”
On January 10, Maduro was sworn in for his second term, Pompeo spoke with opposition leader Guaidó, pledging support. Canada also played a key role, AP reports that Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland spoke to Guaidó the night before Maduro’s inauguration offering Canada’s support. This was 13 days before Guaidó announced he was president of Venezuela.
On January 12, the State Department backed Guaidó’s move to invoke his authority as president of the assembly, saying, “It is time to begin the orderly transition to a new government.” On January 15, the National Assembly declared Maduro as illegitimate. The Trump administration worked to get allies lined up to support Guaidó’. By January 18, the Venezuela Foreign Minister was describing a US coup in progress.
The night before Guaidó’s announcement on January 23, Vice President Mike Pence put out a video message encouraging Venezuelans to overthrow their government, saying, “We are with you. We stand with you, and we will stay with you.” Guaidó also received a phone call from Pence the night before he appointed himself president where he pledged that the U.S. would back Guaidó.
Guaidó declared that Maduro’s government was illegitimate and he was assuming the presidency. In a well-coordinated charade, almost instantly, Trump recognized Guaidó as the country’s rightful leader. To further demonstrate the preconceived, tightly coordinated and efficiently carried out the coup, US allies, among them Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, and Peru, quickly recognized the coup president.
The Trump administration is claiming Guaidó represents the lawful government and is entitled to all Venezuelan revenues. The State Department notified the Federal Reserve that Guaidó is the agent for access to Venezuelan assets in US banks.
Nearly as quickly, Maduro drew statements of support from Russia, China, Turkey, Mexico, Cuba, Bolivia, and others. The Venezuelan Supreme Court called for an investigation into the National Assembly and Guaidó, regarding the illegal usurpation of Executive power. The Venezuelan military announced it supported Maduro and Russia warned the US not to intervene militarily.
“With her protest, she revealed the macabre coup plan against Venezuela, we will always prevail, thank you!”
Eighteen countries defeated the proposal.
At the UN Security Council meeting on January 26, Russia’s UN Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia accused the United States of attempting “to engineer a coup d’etat.” He demanded to know whether the Trump administration “is ready to use military force” against Venezuela. European countries gave Venezuela eight days to hold an election, a suggestion Venezuela rejected. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called Venezuela an “illegitimate mafia state.” He accused Russia and China of trying “to prop up Maduro.”
Both China and Russia have told the US not to intervene in Venezuela’s internal affairs. In December, Russia sent two nuclear-capable strategic Tu-160 bombers to Venezuela along with an An-124 heavy military transport plane and an II-62 long-haul plane. As of December, Russia has one brigade in Venezuela and was discussing sending a second military brigade to Venezuela even before the coup due to the continued threat of intervention from the United States.
China has lent over $50 billion to Venezuela through oil-for-loan agreements over the past decade and has become a partner in the Venezuelan oil industry. In December, seven months since signing a financial business venture with China, Venezuela’s oil production has doubled to 130,000 barrels per day. The take-over of Venezuela’s oil would also be an attack on China. China and Venezuela signed 28 bilateral strategic cooperation agreements on September 14 in the areas of oil, mining, security, technology, finance, and health.
Demonstrating the nature of the coup president, the first acts that Guaidó took were to seek a loan from the International Monetary Fund, which would put Venezuela in debt to western bankers and under their control, and to privatize the Venezuelan oil industry, which would rob Venezuela of the funds being used to lift up the poor and working class.
Analyst Vijay Prashad writes the coup violated the charters of the United Nations and of the Organisation of American States and describes efforts to call on the military to rise up against the government have failed. The Trump administration is now threatening a total oil embargo on Venezuela and is leaving the “military option” open.
The concerted campaign by the US and Canada to install Juan Guaidó as the new ‘self-declared’ interim President of Venezuela has been met with initial failure. Unfortunately, the illegal and undemocratic attempts to destabilize the country and overthrow the democratically-elected President will continue with harmful consequences. The people of Venezuela are rising once again to defend their country against hostile foreign intervention. It is essential that we support them in this fight. Many groups are holding solidarity rallies and issuing statements of support. Find rallies and protests here and here.
While Sanders got all the facts wrong about Venezuela, he did reach the right conclusion:
“The United States has a long history of inappropriately intervening in Latin American countries. We must not go down that road again.”
People in the United States have an important role to play in supporting Venezuela and defeating the coup.
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Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers co-direct Popular Resistance where this article was originally published. They are frequent contributors to Global Research.
Featured image is from John Zangas, DC Media Group
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869: 150 years ago this year.
There will be many tributes to Gandhi published in 2019 so I would like to add one of my own.
This reflects not just my belief that he gave the world inspiration, ideas and powerful strategies for tackling violence in a wide range of contexts but because my own experience in applying his ideas has proven their worth. This included his awareness that led him to declare that ‘If we are to make progress, we must not repeat history but make new history. We must add to the inheritance left by our ancestors.’ and his encouragement to reflect deeply and listen to one’s ‘inner voice’: ‘you should follow your inner voice whatever the consequences’ and ‘even at the risk of being misunderstood’.
In essence, we can productively learn from history but we can build on it too. And, vitally, this includes dealing more effectively with violence.
So how did Gandhi influence me?
Shortly after midnight on 1 July 1942, my Uncle Bob was killed when the USS Sturgeon, a U.S. submarine, fired torpedoes into the Japanese prisoner of war (POW) ship Montevideo Maru. The ship sank immediately and, along with 1,052 other POWs, Bob was killed.
Apart from his older brother, my father’s twin brother was also killed in World War II. In Tom’s case, he was shot down over Rabaul on his first (and final) mission. He was a wireless air gunner on a Beaufort Bomber. See ‘The Last Coastwatcher: My Brothers’.
My childhood is dotted with memories of Bob and Tom. The occasional remembrance service, war medals and the rare story shared by my father.
In 1966, the year I turned 14, I decided to devote my life to finding out why human beings kill each other and to work out how such killing could be ended. The good news about this ‘decision’ is that, at 14, it all felt manageable! But I wasn’t much older before my preliminary investigations proved that even understanding why humans are violent was going to be a profound challenge. And I intuitively understood that I needed this understanding if any strategy to end violence was to be effective.
In any case, as one might expect, my research into violence and strategies for addressing it led me to nonviolence. I came across virtually nothing about nonviolence during my own studies at school and university but was regularly presented with news reports of people participating in activities – such as demonstrations and strikes – that I later learned to label ‘nonviolent action’.
In 1981 I decided to seek out materials on nonviolence and nonviolent action so that I could learn more about it. I had not been reading for long when the routine reference to Mohandas K. (or Mahatma) Gandhi, about whom I had heard a little and knew of his role in leading the Indian independence struggle, forced me to pay more attention to his life and work. So I sought out his writing and started to read some of his published work. An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truthwas an obvious and early book but there were many others besides. I also read many books about Gandhi, to get a clearer sense of his life as a whole, as reported by his coworkers and contemporaries, as well as documented by scholars since his death. And I spent a great many hours in a library basement poring over The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi.
The thing that struck me immediately about Gandhi was that his own interest in tackling violence had a comprehensive ‘feel’ about it. That is, he was not just interested in the violence that occurs when nations fight wars or one person kills or injures another. He was interested in addressing the violence that occurs when individuals and nations exploit other individuals/nations (such as when British imperialism exploited India and Indians) and the violence that occurs when a structure (such as capitalism or socialism) exploits the individuals within it. In his words: ‘exploitation is the essence of violence’. He was interested in the violence that occurs when members of one social group (say, Hindus) ‘hate’ the members of another social group (such as Muslims). He was interested in the violence that occurs when men oppress women or caste Hindus oppress ‘untouchables’. He was interested in the violence that occurs when humans destroy the environment. And he was interested in the violence that one inflicts on oneself.
This comprehensive interest resonated deeply with me because, apart from war, my own childhood and adolescence had revealed many manifestations of violence ranging from the starvation of people in developing countries to the racism in the United States (highlighted by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1960s) to the destruction of the environment, each of which had gradually but deeply embedded itself in my consciousness. Tackling violence was a far bigger task than the large one I had originally imagined. Violence is everywhere. Most importantly, it seemed to me, there was enormous violence directed against children in the family home but little was spoken or written about this.
So how did Gandhi explain violence and what was his strategy for addressing it?
Gandhi on Conflict and Violence
For Gandhi, conflict was a perennial condition. He also viewed it positively and considered it desirable. For him, it is an important means to greater human unity precisely because their shared conflict could remind antagonists of the deeper, perhaps transcendental, unity of life, which is far more profound than the bond of their social relationship.
He viewed violence differently, however. And, as might be gleaned from the many configurations of violence that concerned him, as noted above, he considered that violence was built into social structures and not into people.
Fundamentally, as Leroy Pelton characterized it, Gandhi understood that the truth cannot be achieved through violence (‘which violates human needs and destroys life’), because violence itself is a form of injustice. In any case, violence cannot resolveconflict because it does not address the issues at stake.
To reiterate then, for Gandhi there was nothing undesirable about conflict. However, Gandhi’s preoccupation was working out how to manage conflict without violence and how to create new social arrangements free of structural violence.The essence, then, of Gandhi’s approach was to identify approaches to conflict that preserved the people while systematically demolishing the evil structure. Nevertheless, he firmly believed that structural purification alone is not enough; self-purification is also essential.
In other words, in Gandhi’s view, resolving the conflict (without violence) is only one aspect of the desired outcome. For Gandhi, success also implies the creation of a superior social structure, higher degrees of fearlessness and self-reliance on the part of both satyagrahis (nonviolent activists) and their opponents, and a greater degree of human unity at the level of social relationships.
Two Key Questions
Despite the enormous influence that Gandhi had in shaping my own conception of conflict and the precise conception of nonviolence that should be used in dealing with it, I nevertheless remained convinced that two questions remained unanswered: What is the psychological origin of the violent behavior of the individual who perpetrates it? And what theory or framework should guide the application of nonviolent action so that campaigns of all kinds are strategically effective?
The first question is important because even if someone is trapped within a social structure (such as the class system) that is violent, the individual must still choose, consciously or unconsciously, to participate (as perpetrator, collaborator or victim) in the violence perpetrated by that structure or one must choose, consciously, to resist it. Why do so many individuals perform one of the first three roles and so few, like Gandhi himself, choose the role of resister?
The second question is important because while Gandhi himself was an astonishingly intuitive strategic thinker (whose 30-year nonviolent strategy liberated India from British occupation), no one before him or since his death has demonstrated anything remotely resembling his capacity in this regard.
Hence, while nonviolence, which is inherently powerful, has chalked up some remarkable successes, vital struggles for peace (and to end war); to halt assaults on Earth’s biosphere; to secure social justice for oppressed and exploited populations; to liberate national groups from dictatorship, occupation or genocidal assault; and struggles in relation to many other just causes limp along devoid of strategy (or use one that is ill-conceived). So badly are we failing, in fact, that humans now teeter on the brink of precipitating our own extinction. See ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’.
Anyway, having studied Gandhi extensively and learned from his strategic approach to nonviolence (elements of which I was progressively including in nonviolent campaigns in which I was involved myself), I resumed my original research to understand the fundamental origin of human violence and also decided to develop a strategic theory and framework for addressing violence in the campaign context so that Gandhi’s strategic thinking could be readily copied by other nonviolent activists.
Despite my preliminary efforts in the 1990s to encourage fellow activists to use this framework, it soon became clear that only the rarest of activists has the capacity to think strategically about an issue, even when presented with a framework for doing so.
The Origin of Human Violence
Consequently, the vital importance of understanding the origin of human violence was starkly demonstrated to me yet again because I knew it would answer key supplementary questions such as these: Why to do so many people live in denial/delusion utterly incapable of perceiving structural violence or grappling powerfully with (military, social, political, economic and ecological) violence? Why is it that so many people, even activists, are powerless to think strategically? How can activists even believe that success can be achieved, particularly on the major issues of our time (such as the threats of nuclear war, ecological devastation and climate cataclysm), without a focused and comprehensive strategy, particularly given elite resistance to such campaigns? See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.
Hence, in an attempt to answer questions such as these, Anita McKone and I went into seclusion in an endeavor to understand how our own minds functioned so that we might better understand the minds of others. I hoped it would take a few months. It took 14 years.
So what is the cause of violence in all contexts and which, depending on its precise configuration in each case, creates perpetrators of violence, people who collaborate with perpetrators of violence, people who are passive victims of violence, people who live in denial/delusion, people who are sexist or racist, and activists who cannot think strategically (among many other adverse outcomes)?
Each of these manifestations of human behaviour is an outcome of the adult war on children. That is, adult violence against children is the fundamental cause of all other violence.
How does this happen? It happens because each child, from birth, is socialized – more accurately, terrorized – so that they fit into their society. That is, each child is subjected to an unrelenting regime of ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence until they offer the obedience that every adult – parent, teacher, religious figure… – demands.
So what constitutes ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence?
‘Visible’ violence includes hitting, screaming at and sexually abusing a child which, sadly enough, is very common.
But the largest component of damage arises from the ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence that we adults unconsciously inflict on children during the ordinary course of the day. Tragically, the bulk of this violence occurs in the family home and at school. For a full explanation, see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.
‘Invisible’ violence is the ‘little things’ we do every day, partly because we are just ‘too busy’. For example, when we do not allow time to listen to, and value, a child’s thoughts and feelings, the child learns to not listen to themSelf thus destroying their internal communication system. When we do not let a child say what they want (or ignore them when they do), the child develops communication and behavioral dysfunctionalities as they keep trying to meet their own needs (which, as a basic survival strategy, they are genetically programmed to do).
When we blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie to, bribe, blackmail, moralize with and/or judge a child, we both undermine their sense of Self-worth and teach them to blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie, bribe, blackmail, moralize and/or judge.
The fundamental outcome of being bombarded throughout their childhood by this ‘invisible’ violence is that the child is utterly overwhelmed by feelings of fear, pain, anger and sadness (among many others). However, mothers, fathers, teachers, religious figures and other adults also actively interfere with the expression of these feelings and the behavioral responses that are naturally generated by them and it is this ‘utterly invisible’ violence that explains why the dysfunctional behavioral outcomes actually occur.
For example, by ignoring a child when they express their feelings, by comforting, reassuring or distracting a child when they express their feelings, by laughing at or ridiculing their feelings, by terrorizing a child into not expressing their feelings (for instance, by screaming at them when they cry or get angry), and/or by violently controlling a behavior that is generated by their feelings (for example, by hitting them, restraining them or locking them into a room), the child has no choice but to unconsciously suppress their awareness of these feelings.
However, once a child has been terrorized into suppressing their awareness of their feelings (rather than being allowed to have their feelings and to act on them) the child has also unconsciously suppressed their awareness of the reality that caused these feelings. This has many outcomes that are disastrous for the individual, for society and for the biosphere because the individual will now easily suppress their awareness of the feelings that would tell them how to act most functionally in any given circumstance and they will progressively acquire a phenomenal variety of dysfunctional behaviors, including some that are violent towards themself, others and/or the Earth.
So what do we do?
Well, if you want to make an enormous contribution to our effort to end violence, you can make the commitment outlined in ‘My Promise to Children’. If you need to do some healing of your own to be able to nurture children in this way, then consider the information provided in the article ‘Putting Feelings First’.
If you want to systematically tackle violence against the biosphere, consider (accelerated) participation in the fifteen-year strategy, inspired by Gandhi, outlined in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’. This project outlines a simple plan for people to systematically reduce their consumption, by at least 80%, involving both energy and resources of every kind – water, household energy, transport fuels, metals, meat, paper and plastic – while dramatically expanding their individual and community self-reliance in 16 areas, so that all environmental concerns are effectively addressed. As Gandhi observed 100 years ago: ‘Earth provides enough for every person’s need but not for every person’s greed.’
But, critically important though he believed personal action to be, Gandhi was also an extraordinary political strategist and he knew that we needed to do more than transform our own personal lives. We need to provide opportunities that compel others to consider doing the same.
So if your passion is campaigning for change, consider doing it strategically, as Gandhi did. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy.
Gandhi was assassinated on 30 January 1948. But his legacy lives on. You can learn from it too, if you wish.
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Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is [email protected] and his website is here. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
On January 25, hundreds of Kurdish protesters stormed a Turkish military base near the northern Iraqi city of Dahuk in response to Turkish airstrikes that killed two Kurdish civilians on January 23. According to the pro-Kurdish NRT TV, Turkish soldiers opened fire at the protestors killing at least one and injuring many others. Despite resistance, protesters managed to breach the base and set it on fire. Protestors captured most of the Turkish soldiers who were inside the base and several units of military equipment. Two agents of the Turkish National Intelligence Organization, known as MIT, were injured. Later, the captured Turks were reportedly handed over to Peshmerga, a force of the Kurdistan Regional Government.
Over the past year, the Turkish Air Force has carried out multiple airstrikes on positions of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). These strikes are a part of the campaign to undermine the group’s capabilities and to prevent further PKK attacks on Turkish territory. Despite this, the Kurdish group keeps a large presence in northern Iraq having multiple bases in this area.
Ankara pursues similar goals in northern Syria claiming that the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), are just a local offshoot of the PKK.
On January 26th, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claimed that a Turkish military operation in northeastern Syria would allow millions of refugees to return to the country. The Turkish President went on to claim that the Turkish invasion in northwestern Syria has allowed 300,000 Syrians to return to their homeland. He also said that the Adana agreement justified an attack on northeastern Syria.
In response, the Syrian Foreign Ministry accused Turkey of violating the agreement since 2011 by supporting terrorism and directly occupying parts of the country.
In the Turkish-occupied areas, the YPG-linked Afrin Liberation Forces (ALF) continued attacks on Turkey-led forces. On January 25, a Turkish-backed militant was killed in Azaz. On January 22, Kurdish rebels killed three more Turkish-backed militants in Azaz with an ATGM. On January 20, 3 Turkish-backed militants were killed in an ATGM strike in Abla and another one died from sniper fire in Sherawa.
Ilham Ahmed, a co-chair of the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC) told Bloomberg that Kurdish forces are negotiating with the Damascus government in order to protect northeastern Syria from any attack that Turkey may launch after the nearing withdrawal of U.S. forces.
“If we were cornered into choosing between a Turkish militia attacking our areas,” and reaching an accord with President Bashar al-Assad, she said in an interview in Washington, “we would go with the regime,” she claimed.
The official confirmed that the SDC has provided President Bashar al-Assad and Russia with an 11-point road map reintegrating the region under the Damascus government. According to her, Syria should be “decentralized” but united.
150 ISIS fighters surrendered themselves to the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) during the clashes in the middle Euphrates Valley, pro-Kurdish media outlets reported on January 25. On January 25, the SDF press center claimed that more than 82 terrorists were killed in clashes and US-led coalition airstrikes.
On January 24th, the Syrian Army and the Russian Military Police for the first time deployed in the area north of the SDF-held town of Manbij. This development could be seen as an indication of some progress in talks between the SDC/SDF and Damascus.
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Two years after President Donald Trump signed an executive order severely restricting travel from several Muslim-majority countries, the effects of the executive order that came to be known as the Muslim ban, are still happening.
In reality, millions of Venezuelans have seen their living conditions vastly improved through the Bolivarian process. The problems plaguing the Venezuelan economy are not due to some inherent fault in socialism, but to artificially low oil prices and sabotage by forces hostile to the revolution.
With April’s elections looming, Benjamin Netanyahu has good reason to fear Benny Gantz, his former army chief. Gantz has launched a new party, named Israeli Resilience, just as the net of corruption indictments is closing around the prime minister.
Anti-government protests in Venezuela that seek regime change have been led by several individuals and organizations with close ties to the US government. Leopoldo Lopez and Maria Corina Machado– two of the public leaders behind the violent protests that started in February – have long histories as collaborators, grantees and agents of Washington.
Nobody questions the “right” of Israel to attack a sovereign state in order to impose the government it ought to have, after eight years during which the USA, NATO and the Gulf monarchies tried to demolish it with Israël, as they did in 2011 with the State of Libya.
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For weeks of front-end news, a China-Canada rift has gripped Canada. The story-line is endlessly repeated and runs like this: “Experts from both sides of the border agree that imprisonment of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou is strictly abiding by the rule of law, and China cannot or does not want to understand how the rule of law works”.
The unifying plot is that Canada must continue to hold the CFO of China’s world-leading telecommunications giant in detention on behalf of a US extradition warrant to uphold the rule of law as sacred.
That it is an extra-territorial demand for no offense committed under Canada or international law is not reported. That the offense alleged is against a unilateral US embargo of Iran by its export controls to which Canada is not a party is deleted across the media and all official statements. Anyone who does not join into this ruling story or connects the covered-up facts of its story-line is drowned out and removed from the public eye, including Canada’s own senior statesman and well-liked ambassador to China.
In general, any revealing questions are silenced. All the legal parameters of the case dissolve instead into the empty slogan ‘rule of law’. Background editors of what can be spoken on the public stage ensure at every level that no diversion is allowed.
The Designated Enemy as Syntax of the US-Canada News Cycle
I had no sooner written the above paragraphs when Canada’s Foreign Affairs was also joining the US in endorsing an ongoing coup d’etat in Venezuela to overthrow its elected socialist presidency to install, in newspeak phrase, “the only legitimate government” in its place, the leader of the opposition party.
Rule of law in each reversed as ‘the rule of law’. Venezuela is yet another variation on the story line we have seen play out since 1973 in Chile. The designated socialist enemy is destabilized by financial, market, civil and street-violence means, and reverse-blamed for the orchestrated chaos used to overthrow it. Or the designated enemy is simply a rival power, and a crisis is constructed to destabilize its relations with other nations to gain leverage in undermining it capacity to compete – as with China at same time as the Venezuela coup. Or the long-designated enemy is set up for total financial, market, diplomatic and military isolation and ruin as with Libya, Iraq and the former Yugoslavia in the past, and Iran today, whose internationally lawless US embargo is behind the US-Canada imprisonment of the CFO of China’s rising global telecommunication giant, Huawei.
In short, global domination by the Enemy syntax of the news rules by double-think slogans without factual referents, piling one on top of another in perpetual mutations allowing any claim or action at all as ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘the rule of law’, including imprisonment of the China trade competitor with the US disobeying its unilateral export embargoes.
True to Form: Canada’s Foreign Minister Serving US-led China and Venezuela Attacks
Canada’s Foreign Christina aka ‘Chrystia’ Freeland – a near slogan itself – Christian Free Land – is the speaker of the doublethink endorsement of the attempted Venezuela coup d’etat today by its opposition leader. Minister Freeland is used to legitimating coup d’etats as legitimate, even when they are by mass-murderous means led by avowed Nazis, as in she has done in Ukraine since before its violent coup in 2014. ‘Stopping Putin and Russia’ is her justification, as always the official Enemy since armed Russia resistance against NATO expansion over its traditional borders through Ukraine.
Freeland also knows how to deny hard facts and get away with it – as she has done on in lies and cover-up of her grandfather being the chief newspaper propagandist for the Nazis occupying Ukraine and Poland in the 1939-45 World War. Again the Enemy Russia is the moral baseline of thought that transforms all false news and attacks on it as freedom. .
Minister Freeland also leads the forcible arrest and detention of China’s leading global Telecomunications CFO on behalf of the US prior to her legitimizing the opposition coup of the elected President of Venezuela.
Nonetheless Canada’s senior statesman and Ambassador to China, John McCallum, has bravely cited the justiciable facts of this case. He has observed in diplomatic third-person language that Meng Wanzou the person is able to defend her case of US-led arrest in Canada as extra-territorial, arguably politically motivated, and under no Canadian law. But his observation to a small group of Chinese Canadians on January 23 was instantly denounced as ‘inconceivable’, an ‘outrage’, and ‘dangerous’ by all the media of record, and the official Conservative opposition successfully demanded he be fired immediately with – as always – no fact McCallum reports either denied or allowed into the pervasive denunciations.
Minister Freeland herself demands his firing behind the scenes, and today afterwards publicly chides his “unfortunate incident” as undercutting her “valuable work” in “uniting Canada’s allies” against China’s alleged retaliatory arrests of two non-governmental Canadian agents in China.
Canada’s Foreign Minster paradigmatically expresses the ruling syntax of the Enemy cornerstone of official culture in Canada as well as the US. It is the ‘rule of law’, even with no sovereign law supporting it. Abuse is poured on anyone reporting the facts – including on the NDP leader who has ‘written his political obituary’ for worrying that the US may be leading another coup d’etat in Latin America.
No illegal or criminal act of any kind is alleged under Canada law. Internationally lawless US trade-and-diplomatic war tactics are unspeakable even as they are undeniable facts. Beneath notice, every claim of ‘the rule of law’ refers, in fact, to another attack on a US-designated Enemy that violates international law at every turn.
In the case of the China CFO arrest, it is backed by illegal embargo against Iran that no other country including Canada has agreed to (except Israel), and is in effect an extra-territorial kidnapping of a VPI foreign subject by US warrant executed in Canada by US demand in political misuse of an extradition treaty intended for criminal offenses.
Most specifically, it is an extension of US embargo of Iran in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 2231 passed unanimously by the Security Council including the US in 2016 (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action lifting sanction on Iran). In this way, a foreign national economic leader of China out-competing the US in the world market of telecommunications – the long-time signature technology of US global hegemony – is imprisoned even as the US and China negotiate a US-initiated trade war.
The Orwellian Master Pattern From China to Venezuela to Iran and Russia
While this politically motivated US extradition is invoked as ‘the rule of law’ above politics, Canada’s Foreign Affairs then jumps on board the latest US coup d’etat of an elected government in Latin America. In fact nowhere mentioned in ‘the free press’, this latest coup d’etat campaign seeks to overthrow an instituted electoral process of presidential election of which US President Jimmy Carter has publicly reported:
“Venezuela has probably the most excellent voting system I have ever known”.
This fact too is now erased from discussion, and reversed in claim. In matters of ‘the rule of law’ and ‘legitimate elections’, stern repetition of false slogans prevail on every public front, but no fake news is even imagined in official culture. Where a US-designated enemy is involved, all parties are entitled to say whatever they want the opposite of fact and law or not. Almost the whole of the country’s corporate media and journalists can be counted on to join in indignant anathema and cries for blood. It is a permanent festival of hate license as freedom.
The US-Enemy grammar of illusion is at the same time predictable in its collective public operation. Communist China is the Enemy. Socialist Venezuela is the Enemy. Islamic Iran is the Enemy. All the while, Russia is the Enemy of all enemies being daily warred upon as NATO armies, transnational Big Oil and company march East. Everything connects, but the dots are not joined
So deep is the Enemy cornerstone of US ideology and politics that even the greatest leader ever in massive de-taxation and de-regulation of the corporate rich, President Trump, is hated most deeply by establishment powers because he does not make war on Russia.
Blaming the Victimin Moral Reversal
Oil-rich but impoverished Venezuela has been the Enemy since Hugo Chavez became president in 1999 to lead a ‘21st century socialism’ based on the country’s oil riches formerly in control of US Big Oil and its local oligarchy – the standard arrangement. .
Post-1999 Venezuela is thus targeted as an Enemy of the Free World. Yet having failed in destabilization and coup attempts in Venezuela over the 20 years since – all supported by the US and its branchplant class in Canada – a long process of financial strangling led by Wall Street behind the scenes has cumulatively succeeded in bleeding Venezuela dry.
While none of this makes its way into ‘the news’, Venezuela has been financially embargoed from all international loans on which almost all governments depend. Its medical and other life-and-death supplies have been cut off from purchase and importation. Its tar-sands oil that grounds it export economy has been systematically shorted in world markets. Its publicly subsidized foods have been stolen and sold in Columbia for huge profits. Its former US-puppet oil-oligarchy and collaborators have been on-and-off raising US-supported havoc in the streets since the last violent armed coup failed against popular uprising.
All the effects up to near starvation of food and medicine imports by suspension of normal credit and other embargoes have been blamed on the evil leadership against US Big Oil and Wall Street control of the nation. The failed strategy of armed overthrow has moved to Orange-style revolution of well-fed mobs in the street to finish the job on the completely destabilized Venezuela economy. US ‘military option’ is increasingly threatened from the top.
As always in these cases of imperial international aggression, a moral reason in which decent people believe is proclaimed with deep gravity and rectitude as the justification for what is forbidden to name – an all-fronts attack for lawless advantage and exploitation by superior power. The ‘rule of law’ is here the pretext for caving in as well as justifying the aggression. One way or the other, the Enemy designation makes all contradictions off-limits to discuss.
Spectacles of Power and Submission as Distractions from the Ruin of the Earth
Superbowl playoffs, Russiagate, China Intertel, Iran Bomb, Venezuela dictator, immigrants storming the gates – – What unites all the war games is distraction from the truly fatal threat of the cumulative pollution and despoliation of the natural and social life support systems of the world by the ruling disorder.
Sudden death sports, trade-wars, coups d’etat, big-news arrests, and so on become an endless spectacle news cycle. Pretentious diversions, whopping falsehoods, and bizarre extremes entertain screen-addicted populations as the world’s common life-ground collapses. Nothing is connected to anything else as life-and-death turning points become who can win next in the frenzy of derailment of the terrestrial life support systems of all.
This is ‘the Free World’. Yet ‘full spectrum dominance’ is the bipartisan US objective no-one calls into question. Reverse-blaming others is the method of attack. “Freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘rule of law’ are the idealized justifications. Trump’s new Space Force for “space as a war-fighting domain” expands the reverse projections into US –led military pollution and control of the earth’s skies.
Who can be opposed to more security for America against the terrorism of its enemies? Adoption of the US-Enemy framework of meaning reverses all reality and facts into their opposite with no end until the dots are publicly connected.
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John McMurtry is University Professor Emeritus at the University of Guelph and elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His work has been translated from Latin America through Europe to Japan, and he is the author/editor of UNESCO’s three-volume Philosophy and World Problems, as well as more recently, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism; From Crisis to Cure. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Come to Southeast Asia.Hang around this part of the world in whichever way you like; wearing flip-flops, shorts and t-shirts. You were told that ‘everything is easy here, that things are cheap and people are friendly and happy’. Do what you want, as almost everything is allowed, especially if you are from the West, and have plenty of cash and some credit cards in your pockets.
That’s what your simplified perception of Southeast Asia is supposed to be. This stereotype has been created, refined and fine-tuned, then finally hammered into the subconscious of the people in North America, Europe, Australia and Japan. It has been done consistently, for many years and decades, until these lies, repeated a thousand times, have replaced reality.
As a result, tens of millions of holiday-makers, sexual tourists, adventurers and single men on power trips, descend on Southeast Asia, annually. Most of them do not see anything, and they do not hear. Most of them leave for home after getting suntanned, a bit fatter, and much more confident. They come with clearly formed ideas, and they leave without learning much.
Most of the ‘visitors’ do not want to be disturbed by reality, because the reality could be extremely unsavory, even horrifying.
The ‘hidden’ and extremely uncomfortable truth is: most of Southeast Asia is actually absolutely unfit for tourism. It is deeply, and terribly injured, even, a broken part of the world which has never been allowed to leave its brutal, feudal system behind.
Its people are barely surviving in the straightjacket of extreme capitalism. All sorts of imported rubbish, from brainless pop music to the lowest grade of Hollywood films, junk food, mass media and ‘fashion’ as well as ‘me-me-me habits’ have been put to work in order to irreversibly ruin their traditional cultures. Generally, people here are unhappy; often thoroughly confused. Societies from Thailand to Indonesia and the Philippines are becoming increasingly violent. At the same time, the politically ‘pacified’ population does not rebel against the rulers in the West or its own servile elites: right-wing political and religious extremism are often the only ‘answers’ to popular outrage.
The land of Southeast Asia is devastated, as it is nowhere else on our planet; in fact, it has been totally plundered by unbridled mining, logging, palm oil and rubber plantations. The extraction of natural resources is done in a monstrous fashion; often by poisoning rivers with mercury, by cutting most of the primary forests down or by flattening entire mountains. From an airplane, places like the island of Borneo or Peninsular Malaysia appear as nothing less than hell on earth.
This vast part of the world with a total population of around 650 million, does not count on any renowned thinkers or scientists, and with the exception of Vietnam (which is Communist and therefore to a greater degree different) on even one single globally renowned writer or a film director.
All this is not supposed to be discussed ‘like this’; in this fashion. Writers and filmmakers, local and foreign both, are discouraged from describing and documenting what is right in front of their own eyes.
But why? How come that Southeast Asia has managed to escape almost entirely all the scrutiny by the Western mainstream media?
It is because what I have just described above is nothing else other than a result of the monstrous mass murder, plunder and destruction, which has been perpetrated by the West.
It has been happening all over here; in all corners of Southeast Asia. The destruction has been so appalling and frightening, that almost no liberals in Paris, London, Amsterdam, Canberra or Washington are willing to acknowledge it, instead sticking to bizarre clichés and glorification of the state to which the victims have been reduced to; in which they are forced to live.
Entire teams of academics, notably those at the Australian National University (ANU), but also at several other institutions, continuously repeat the official Western dogma, which describes Indonesia as ‘a normal country’.
But isn’t this what the so-called Western ‘political correctness’ is all about? Doesn’t it work like this: “A country is attacked, left-wing government gets overthrown, corrupt leaders put on thrones; then natural resources get plundered, and extreme right-wing ‘elites’ fully subservient to the West quickly steal everything from their country and people, while dutifully sharing the booty with Western corporations. The population gets indoctrinated, totally brainwashed and the opposition either murdered or scared into submission. And then, and then, the West ‘shows great respect’ for that local ‘culture’ and for ‘local people’. Read: respect for its own Frankenstein; for its own creations.
It goes without saying that this gangrenous monster which the West first created and then ordered everyone to ‘respect’, has nothing to do with the culture and ‘the people’.
In the end, the victims themselves, get methodically conditioned with tools such as mass media, ‘education’, and continuous propaganda dispensed by the political regime. They stop being aware of their own conditions. They become resigned.They become religious, submissive. They blame and fight each other, but never the true oppressors; never the regime.
The victims often feel they are not well, but they have no idea, why?
*
For centuries, Southeast Asia suffered terribly at the hands of the French, Dutch, US and British colonizers. For instance, at the beginning of the 20th Century, the US forces brutally massacred around 1 million Filipinos, in their Asian colony.
Official independence from European and North American colonial masters did not stop the suffering of the people.
After WWII, no other part of the world endured more Western massacres and terror than Southeast Asia. Not even Africa, the Middle East or Latin America. The numbers are truly striking.
The West’s lovely ‘holiday destinations’ inhabited by ‘friendly locals’, were carpet-bombed, and poisoned by chemical weapons. Millions of people were slaughtered; by injected military regimes, by monarchs, by elites and military juntas. Not unlike in Latin America, but with numbers astronomically higher, because the West never considered Asian people to be equal human beings (For instance: around 2 million Indonesians were slaughtered during the 1965 military coup of General Suharto. The coup perpetrated by General Pinochet in Chile, in 1973, took lives of 2-3 thousand people. Adjusted to the numbers of people living in both countries, Indonesia still lost approximately ten times more people than Chile).
Everyone knows about the suffering of Vietnam, under French brutal colonial rule, and then, during the terrorist war unleashed against the country by the US and its allies. But no one really knows, precisely, how many Vietnamese people died. The number of victims goes in to millions. At least 4 million Vietnamese citizens vanished.
Laos and the so-called ‘side-kick’ or ‘Secret War’ was even worse, on a per capita basis. Hundreds of thousands vanished in this sparsely populated country, which is inhabited by humble and gentle people. Strategic B-52s bombers were deployed against farmers and their water buffalos, using evil cluster bombs that are, to this day, killing thousands, all over the Laotian countryside. There was no reason for this brutal, monstrous genocide, except some abstract ‘concern’ in Washington that this poor nation could follow Vietnam’s example and ‘go Communist’ (it did, after it tasted true Western ‘democracy’, literally on its skin).
Cambodia – a country where the West nurtured corrupt and brutal elites in Phnom Penh, and then began the same monstrous carpet-bombing campaign as in Laos, against unarmed, desperately poor peasants, using B-52s, killing hundreds of thousands, and displacing millions. People lost their minds from the horrors of the bombing. They were also driven from their land, and began dying from famine. Dismal situation opened doors to Khmer Rouge, which the US decisively supported (on the battlefield and at the UN), even after this deranged murderous group got defeated by heroic Communist forces of Vietnam.
Thailand – country which has been choked by car industry and monstrous form of extreme capitalism, while upholding its backward feudal system. Thailand with countless military coups designed to sustain pro-Western monarchy. Thailand which accepted on its turf part of defeated Chinese anti-Communist army, and ‘put it to work ‘almost immediately’, allowing it to massacre substantial part of its own left-wing movements. Thai state that massacred and raped its own students, and butchering thousands of Cambodian refugees. Thailand that technically attacked both Vietnam and Laos, by flying Air America missions against those countries, opening its airports to the West, while selling its own women in countless brothels in Pattaya and elsewhere, to the Western pilots and ground staff.
Indonesia, where the 1965 US and UK -sponsored military coup against left-wing President Sukarno and (then) the third largest Communist Party in the world (PKI), took the lives of between 1 and 3 million people, installing perhaps the most grotesque fascist extreme-capitalist regime on earth. Indonesia, where all the great artists and thinkers were killed, or imprisoned in the Buru concentration camp, and, where the West helped to install a totally brainless system de-intellectualizing the nation and forcing it back to the Middle Ages. Indonesia, where secularism is now collapsing, and where, during the upcoming April 2019 elections, voters will decide between an inept and weak pro-capitalist leader, and a truly fascist military mass murderer.
East Timor (Timor Leste) – a tiny country which was overrun by Indonesia in 1975, shortly after it gained independence from Portugal, under the leadership of the left-wing FRETILIN movement. The right-wing dictator of Indonesia – Suharto – declared that he was ‘not going to tolerate a second Cuba near its shores’, and got a big pat on his back, as well as full support from the US, UK and Australia. The result: around 30% of the entire population of East Timor vanished during the occupation. Countless Indonesian leaders, including the former President ‘SBY’, served there. If Indonesia was a ‘normal country’, these individuals would now be facing long jail sentences for genocide, or in some cases, a firing squad.
In West Papua – hundreds of thousands of people have already died, also under the Indonesian genocidal occupation, which is fully supported by the West, because Papua, like Borneo (which is known in Indonesia as Kalimantan) is getting thoroughly plundered by multi-national companies, of course under the careful supervision of Indonesian military forces. Horrors like the state-sponsored ‘trans-migration’ policy, designed to make people of Papua a minority on their own island, are ongoing and relentless. The people, who have lost everything under the occupation, are forced to convert to Islam, and they are also forced to abandon their way of life and their land. What Indonesia does in West Papua is nothing less than genocide. It is not only the killing and rape, of which its military could be accused of. The plunder of Papuan resources is as deadly for many other reasons, it is like if the force would be used to ‘open up’ vast parts of the Amazonia or Orinoco basins in South America – areas inhabited by indigenous tribes that have never come in contact with the outside world. Even the most insane right-wing presidents of Brazil or Venezuela (of the past), would never dream about such brutal genocidal undertakings (although this may change under the fascist presidency of Bolsonaro in Brazil). In West Papua, dozens of fragile cultures are disappearing. People who have never come into contact with the ‘outside world’ are being forced out of their rainforest, as trees are cut down and mining companies, backed by the Indonesian armed forces, ransack the land. Defenseless tribal people are dying from diseases and hunger, at the same time as corrupt Indonesian officials and businessmen are burning money in Jakarta’s overprized malls, as well as in Singapore, Macau and Hong Kong. And now, thousands of Western tourists fly into West Papua, to Raja Ampat, which is becoming an ‘in place’ for diving!
Malaysia had its own share of inter-religious conflicts, although never at the level of neighboring Indonesia. Nature in Malaysia, almost like in Indonesia, is totally devastated, due to massive palm oil plantations and mining.
The Philippines lived through horrific decades of US neo-colonialism, experiencing the similar extreme capitalism that has been imposed on Indonesia. Only in the recent years, sound social policies have been introduced, and a moratorium on mining, at least in some parts of the Mindanao Island, has been enforced.
Brunei, one of the richest exporters of oil on earth, is now governed by Sharia Law, which, at least in theory, allows amputations, flogging, stoning and other religious practices. Another place where such regressive brutality is officially allowed is in an autonomous province of Indonesia – Aceh.
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I worked in this part of the world for decades. I covered countless horrors and conflicts in Indonesia. I used to live in Hanoi, and I covered in-depth the situation in Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Papua. I covered East Timor, during the occupation, and was tortured there by Indonesian forces. It happened after I exposed mass rape in Ermera town.
In Hanoi – monument to Western atrocities
Right now, I am working on a detailed and shocking documentary film about the total environmental destruction of Borneo.
As a local (I actually feel like a ‘local’ in all parts of the world), I often look at the Western travelers visiting this part of the world, and I am wondering, sincerely: are they really so ignorant about the past and the present of Southeast Asia? Or perhaps, are they making sure not to know?
Are they ‘enjoying themselves’, surrounded by devastated nature, privatized and ruined beaches, and a deranged culture? Do they feel powerful, unique, superior, because their countries managed to destroy the entire Southeast Asia, bringing it into shameful submission? Is it, at least partially, why they are here?
Don’t they see? The Indonesian islands of Bali and Lombok have become thoroughly grotesque: everything has been stolen along the coasts, people forced out of their dwellings, and the culture has been fully ruined. Bali suffers from traffic jams and pollution, from over-population, poverty and filth. There is hardly anything pristine there, now. ‘Culture’ is only for sale!
The coastline of Thailand is totally finished. The once pristine islands are now dotted with mass-produced, low quality market towns, with makeshift bungalows and ugly concrete structures. There are standardized, repetitive ‘offerings’, most of them of extremely low-quality. There are Thai and Western ‘beach food’, bad old (Western) pop music, countless massage parlors and ersatz bars. There is almost nothing truly Thai left on the Thai coastline. Thai women, the poorest of the poor, many from the north of the country, walk in flip-flops and tasteless T-shirts hand in hand with Western grandfathers, some of them in their 80’s. What a sight!
Artwork at BACC, before Thai elections
Everything feels ‘forced’, unnatural, and in terrible taste: in Indonesian ‘resorts’, on the Thai coast, and in the bars of the Philippines, as well as in Cambodia.
In and around Phnom Penh, ‘genocide tourism’ has reached its peak. It is fueled and sponsored by countless Western NGO’s, which are literally pimping the terrible Cambodian past as ‘proof’ that ‘Communism is evil’. Not a word about the fact that most of people who died here, were actually victims of the Western carpet-bombings and consequent famines, and that the Khmer Rougewas in reality a US-sponsored band of freaks, who knew very little about Communist ideology (I spent substantial time talking to them, deep in jungle, and most of them admitted that they had no clue about Marxism or Communism, when they were in power). But to the Westerners, genocide tourism is something thrilling, it represents ‘something new’; ‘something they did not experienced before’. It is good for selfies and for colorful pub stories back at home. And Cambodia is now making huge money out of all this, willing to twist its own horrid past, just to gain some cash. Go to the villages and talk to people: they know the truth. But almost nobody goes. Not even the Western media.
The West has totally stolen historic narrative, all over Southeast Asia. Academia in Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand is deeply influenced, and manipulated from abroad. ‘Soft power’ is being used; scholarships, funding and invitations to the ‘academic exchanges’.
Both the academic narrative and the mass media in Southeast Asia, are now much more “Westernized” than in the West itself.
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Clichés about this part of the world are mostly incorrect, in fact, surreal.
Despite the fact that it is suffering from the horrid religious intolerance, racism and perpetual conflicts and tensions, Indonesia is portrayed in the West as ‘tolerant’. Not having one single political party that would represent the majority (which is poor), it is branded as ‘democratic’. A place where a Chinese, black, white or Papuan person can hardly make few steps without being insulted on the street, or being mocked for his or her appearance, Indonesia is described by the Western mass media as ‘friendly’.
Thailand is the same. A staunch ally of the West during so-called Vietnam War, and ‘fight against Communism’, the Kingdom is portrayed as ‘Land of Smiles’. In fact, it has higher homicide rate per capita than the United States, and more female tourist are raped here, annually, than in South Africa. Smiles are reserved only for those who are ready to pay any price, without demanding much in return. Any confrontation here can easily deteriorate to violence. The West hardly ever criticizes outrageous capitalist models of Thailand or Indonesia, as well as collapsed infrastructure and inhuman city planning that is prioritizing motor vehicles and ruthless real estate developers over people. Bangkok and Jakarta are much more polluted than the Chinese cities, and Thai and Indonesian governments do almost nothing to change the situation. But, cliché says that it is dangerous to go to Beijing due to the air quality, while Bangkok or Jakarta are hardly ever mentioned.
In Bangkok, depiction of modern Thai reality
*
In Southeast Asia, deafening noise is often administered, in order to silence fear. Thinking is discouraged. It is considered impolite to discuss, to face terrible past and the present. Brainless banging into the phones is recommended. Social media is used here much more than anywhere in the world. While some countries like Indonesia have the lowest readership of books on earth, per capita.
Southeast Asia had been living through genocides, coups, and total submission to the Western masters and to savage capitalism. It has been robbed of its nature, and of natural resources. Its population has been ‘pacified’, forced into obedience and submission. Extreme religious concepts have been injected and upheld from abroad. Only in the Philippines, is the situation now gradually changing. In Vietnam, the state is still strongly resisting subversion from the West, although the country had also been damaged to a great degree, by Western NGOs and social media. Elsewhere, it is getting much worse.
Laos is now moving closer to China, which is literally pulling this beautiful and sparsely populated nation out of slumber, building a high speed rail system, infrastructure, factories, dams, schools and hospitals. But the more China does for Laos, the more it is demonized by the West, by its press, academia and the NGOs. It is now one big battle, over Laos. However, it is clear that the Laotian people are benefiting greatly from their proximity to China, after being literally ruined by French colonialism and the Western “Secret Wars”.
In Laos – US bombs ‘with love’
On purpose, here, I don’t mention Burma, as there, the situation is extremely complex, and ‘specific’. But later this year, I expect to publish a detailed report on the topic.
*
Southeast Asia is clearly a victim. It is also an ‘untold story’. Deep, dark story.
With the exception of Singapore and to some extent Malaysia, it is a devastated, an impoverished victim. It is also a ‘time bomb’. People here are discontent, often desperate. Often, they do not know why. Unlike in Latin America and Africa, where the political awareness of the victims is extremely high; here the victims often believe that they are treated justly and that ‘this is the only way how the society can be arranged and governed’.
If someone travels here, searching for ‘culture’ and ‘new ways to understand life’, they should think twice. In most of Southeast Asian countries, the local culture was thoroughly uprooted. What they will see are some folk shows for foreigners, hardly ever attended by locals. Most of the native music venues, as well as theatrical and other art forms, have been replaced by the most vulgar Western entertainment, by video games and naturally, by social media.
Western men often feel good here. It is because in Southeast Asia, ‘they have won’. They are often ‘respected’ here, just for being both men, and white. They are respected, the same way as the French, Dutch and British colonialists used to be respected here, a century ago. Not loved, not admired, but esteemed for belonging to the race and culture that managed to conquer, destroy and then to give orders.
In fact, for those who want to relive those days of imperialist ‘grandeur’, this is the perfect place to visit.
Naturally, Southeast Asia is glorified by the West, with the exception of the Philippines, Vietnam and Laos (and Burma, for different reasons) – countries that are trying to get away from Western dictates.
It is because this part of the world is ‘perfect’ in the eyes of rulers of the Empire. Here, human lives are freely sacrificed for the profits of corporations, both Western and local, like when a pedestrian here has to wait until the cars pass by; entire villages have to give way to the mining venues and to palm oil plantations. Social services for the citizens are not something secondary, but tertiary, almost irrelevant. Profit is all that matters. The well-being of the citizens is hardly considered.
The West is almost never criticized here. Like in any ‘good’ feudal society, the West is seen as a ‘daddy’. It is severe, but always right. It beats its ‘children’, but gives directions. Religions help to reinforce this sort of obedience, which in many other parts of the world would be synonymous with the Middle Ages.
The local ‘elites’, in the meantime, are ‘having a ball’. They govern unopposed. They are only accountable to the much bigger, mostly Western, power. They can do anything they want with their subjects. They drive their super expensive sedans and SUVs, purchased with funds stolen from the poor, and the poor bow, and bend, prostrating themselves in great respect, fear, servility and admiration.
And they do the same in front of the West.
In brief: perfect societies, observed from New York, Canberra, London or Paris.
And in Bali or Phuket, women dressed in traditional clothes dance in 5-star hotels, roll their big eyes, and twist their slender arms. In order for the foreign visitors to say: “What a great culture!” While, of course, the true great culture was killed by the military pro-Western regimes; choked and murdered in the concentration camps and inside the army barracks.
The only victims of this ‘perfect’ state of things, are the poor; in fact, the great majority in Southeast Asia (no matter what the official statistics say). But who really cares about them?
*
Did most of the Southeast Asian countries really gain their independence, some decades ago? Were the famous merdeka shouts just a big farce? Is it true that Thailand was ‘never colonized’? Is this entire huge region still a de factocolony? And if it is, can the situation change?
These are not just rhetorical questions; they are real. And the answers to them are never simple.
The People of Southeast Asia were violated, robbed and then encircled by pseudo-reality; by lies about their past and present. They were told that they are well, happy, and that what they are experiencing is progress, freedom and democracy. They were also ordered to believe that what their usurper, the West, represents, is synonymous with ‘good governance’ and honesty. Many of them have never encountered any alternative views.
After burying tens of millions of corpses, and after having their rainforests, rivers and mountains thoroughly ruined, most of the Southeast Asians are still convinced that their tormentors are fully qualified to control the world.
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Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Four of his latest books are China and Ecological Civilizationwith John B. Cobb, Jr., Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism, a revolutionary novel “Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
The three constitutional articles invoked by Juan Guaido to legitimise his presidency are: 233, 333, and 350. The latter two are broad affirmations of democracy and constitutionality, silent on Presidential lines of succession. Guaido’s claim rests entirely on 233; presented here in full:
The President of the Republic shall become permanently unavailable to serve by reason of any of the following events: death; resignation; removal from office by decision of the Supreme Tribunal of Justice; permanent physical or mental disability certified by a medical board designated by Supreme Tribunal of Justice with the approval of the National Assembly; abandonment of his position, duly declared by the National Assembly; and recall by popular vote.
When an elected President becomes permanently unavailable to serve prior to his inauguration, a new election by universal suffrage and direct ballot shall be held within 30 consecutive days. Pending election and inauguration of the new President, the President of the National Assembly shall take charge of the Presidency of the Republic.
When the President of the Republic becomes permanently unavailable to serve during the first four years of this constitutional term of office, a new election by universal suffrage and direct ballot shall be held within 30 consecutive days. Pending election and inauguration of the new President, the Executive Vice-President shall take charge of the Presidency of the Republic.
In the cases describes above, the new President shall complete the constitutional term of office.
If the President becomes permanently unavailable to serve during the last two years of his constitutional term of office, the Executive Vice-President shall over the Presidency of the Republic until such term is completed.
The opening paragraph envisions six scenarios whereby a President might no longer serve. The next paragraph sets out protocols to be followed should a President-elect become unavailable to serve pre-inauguration. The third paragraph contemplates presidential vacancies during the first four years of office. The last paragraph deals with presidential vacancies in the final two years of office.
Of the six scenarios envisioned (death, resignation etc.) Guaido relies on “abandonment of his position.” This clearly never happened. Maduro isn’t gone. He’s still there. “Abandonment” conjures images of a President fleeing on a plane freighted with bullion. Maduro, however, currently occupies presidential offices and residences. There has been no abandonment.
“Abandonment” is spun to mean “usurpation.” When did this occur? Are they suggesting that at no time since April 19, 2013 has Maduro ever been President? If Maduro was President, then he must have farcically usurped himself. “Usurp” typically means take power away from someone. There has been no usurpation.
If a President becomes unavailable to serve in the first four years of his term, then the Vice-President takes over and calls an election. If the calamity occurs in the last two years of the presidential term then the VP serves out the fallen President’s term.
Guaido, as head of the National Assembly, only becomes involved when the vacancy occurs in the twilight zone between election and inauguration. This definitely did not happen here. Moreover, by citing Article 233 Guaido implies there was a recent (lawful) election. Finally, Guaido’s January 23 self-anointment occurred 13 days after Maduro’s January 10 inauguration. He missed the boat.
Pursuant to 233, if the head of the National Assembly becomes Acting President he must immediately call an election; and serve only until the winner of that election is inaugurated. The Western media (and Wiki) butcher 233’s second paragraph, leaving only opening and closing clauses; discarding any mention of “election.” Guaido should have, at the moment of self-anointment, announced an election for February 22. For the head of the National Assembly to assume Presidential powers, and then fail to call an election so as to keep those powers, would be flagrantly unconstitutional.
This thread becomes rejoicefully rich considering the EU’s position. They are demanding Maduro call an election; …or else they will recognise Guaido. Can Maduro call an election if he is not President? By demanding Maduro hold an election they are recognising Maduro as President. If Maduro is President he has no obligation to call snap elections to satisfy foreign governments. Alternatively, if Guaido became President he would have an explicit, unavoidable constitutional obligation to call an immediate election.
Guaido is the figure-head of a coup attempt orchestrated by foreign powers without a constitutional leg to stand on.
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As the Earth continues to heat, paleoclimate evidence suggests transient reversals will result in accentuating the temperature polarities, leading to increase in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events. Pleistocene paleoclimate records indicate interglacial temperature peaks have been are consistently succeeded by transient stadial freeze events, such as the Younger Dryas and the 8.5 kyr-old Laurentide ice melt, attributed to cold ice melt water flow from the polar ice sheets into the North Atlantic Ocean. The paleoclimate evidence raises questions regarding the mostly linear to curved future climate model trajectories proposed for the 21st century and beyond, not marked by tipping points. However, early stages of a stadial event are manifest by a weakening of the North Atlantic overturning circulation and the build-up of a large pool of cold water south and east of Greenland and along the fringes of Western Antarctica. Comparisons with climates of the early Holocene Warm Period and the Eemian interglacial when global temperatures were about +1oC higher than late Holocene levels. The probability of a future stadial event bears major implications for modern and future climate change trends, including transient cooling of continental regions fringing the Atlantic Ocean, an increase in temperature polarities between polar and tropical zones across the globe, and thereby an increase in storminess, which need to be taken into account in planning global warming adaptation efforts.
Introduction
Reports of the International Panel of Climate Change (IPCC[1]), based on thousands of peer reviewed science papers and reports, offer a confident documentation of past and present processes in the atmosphere[2], including future model projections (Figure 1). When it comes to estimates of future ice melt and sea level change rates, however, these models contain a number of significant departures from observations based on the paleoclimate evidence, from current observations and from likely future projections. This includes departures in terms of climate change feedbacks from land and water, ice melt rates, temperature trajectories, sea level rise rates, methane release rates, the role of fires, and observed onset of transient stadial (freeze) events[3]. Early stages of stadial event/s are manifest by the build-up of a large pool of cold water in the North Atlantic Ocean south of Greenland and along the fringes of the Antarctic continent (Figure 2).
Figure 1.Time series of global annual mean surface air temperature anomalies relative to 1986–2005 from CMIP5 (Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project) concentration-driven experiments. Projections are shown for each RCP for the multi model mean (solid lines) and the 5–95% range (±1.64 standard deviation) across the distribution of individual models (shading).[4]
Hansen et al. (2016) (Figure 2) used paleoclimate data and modern observations to estimate the effects of ice melt water from Greenland and Antarctica, showing cold low-density meltwater tend to cap increasingly warm subsurface ocean water, affecting an increase ice shelf melting, accelerating ice sheet mass loss (Figure 3) and slowing of deep water formation (Figure 4). Ice mass loss would raise sea level by several meters in an exponential rather than linear response, with doubling time of ice loss of 10, 20 or 40 years yielding multi-meter sea level rise in about 50, 100 or 200 years.
Linear to curved temperature trends portrayed by the IPCC to the year 2300 (Figure 1) are rare in the Pleistocene paleo-climate record, which abrupt include warming and cooling variations during both glacial (Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles; Ganopolski and Rahmstorf 2001[5]; Camille and Born, 2019[6]) and interglacial (Cortese et al. 2007[7]) periods. Hansen et al.’s (2016) model includes sharp drops in temperature, reflecting stadial freezing events in the Atlantic Ocean and the sub-Antarctic Ocean and their surrounds, reaching -2oC over several decades (Figure 5).
Figure 2. 2055-2100 surface-air temperature to +1.19oC above 1880-1920 (AIB model modified forcing, ice melt to 1 meter) (Hansen et al. 2016)[8]
Figure 3.Greenland and Antarctic ice mass change. GRACE data are extension of Velicogna et al. (2014)[9]gravity data. MBM (mass budget method) data are from Rignot et al. (2011)[10].Red curves are gravity data for Greenland and Antarctica only; small Arctic ice caps and ice shelf melt add to freshwater input.[11]
Figure 4. AMOC (Sverdrup[12]) at 28◦ N in simulations (i.e., including freshwater injection of 720 Gt year−1 in 2011 around Antarctica, increasing with a 10-year doubling time, and half that amount around Greenland). (b) SST (◦C) in the North Atlantic region (44–60◦ N, 10–50◦ W).
Temperature and sea level rise relations during the Eemian interglacial[13]about 115-130 kyr ago, when temperatures were about +1oC or higher than during the late stage of the Holocene, and sea levels were +6 to +9 m higher than at present, offer an analogy for present developments. During the Eemian overall cooling of the North Atlantic Ocean and parts of the West Antarctic fringe ocean due to ice melt led to increased temperature polarities and to storminess[14], underpinning the danger of global temperature rise to +1.5oC. Accelerating ice melt and nonlinear sea level rise would reach several meters over a timescale of 50–150 years (Hansen et al. 2016)
Figure 5.Global surface-air temperature to the year 2300 in the North Atlantic and Southern Oceans, including stadial freeze events as a function of Greenland and Antarctic ice melt doubling time
Portents of collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Ocean Circulation (AMOC)
The development of large cold water pools south and east of Greenland (Rahmstorf et al. 2015[15]) and at the fringe of West Antarctica (Figures 1 and 5) signify early stages in the development of a stadial, consistent with the decline in the Atlantic Meridional Ocean Circulation (AMOC) (Figure 4). These projections differ markedly from linear model trends (Figure 1). IPCC models mainly assume long term ice melt[16], stating “For the 21st century, we expect that surface mass balance changes will dominate the volume response of both ice sheets (Greenland and Antarctica). A key question is whether ice-dynamical mechanisms could operate which would enhance ice discharge sufficiently to have an appreciable additional effect on sea level rise”[17]The IPCC conclusion is difficult to reconcile with studies by Rignot et al. (2011) reporting that in 2006 the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets experienced a combined mass loss of 475 ± 158 Gt/yr, equivalent to 1.3 ± 0.4 mm/yr sea level rise.”[18]. For the Antarctic ice sheet the IEMB team (2017) states the sheet lost 2,720 ± 1,390 billion tonnes of ice between 1992 and 2017, which corresponds to an increase in mean sea level of 7.6 ± 3.9 millimeter[19]
A non-linear climate warming trend, including stadial freeze events, bears significant implications for planning future adaptation efforts, including preparations for transient deep freeze events in parts of Western Europe and eastern North America, for periods lasting several decades (Figure 5) and coastal defenses against enhanced storminess arising from increased temperature contrasts between the cooled regions and warm tropical latitudes.
Imminent climate risks
Climate model projections for the 21stto 23rdcenturies need to take paleoclimate evidence more fully into account, including the transient stadial effects of ice melt water flow into the oceans and amplifying feedbacks of global warming from land and oceans. Radiative forcing[20], increasing with concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases and rising by about 0.04 Watt/m2/year over the last 50 years[21], totaled by more than 2 Watt/m2, equivalent to ~3.0°C (~1.5°C per W/m2)[22]. The rise of mean global temperatures to date by 0.9°C since 1880[23]therefore represents lag effect, pointing to potential temperature rise by approximately two degrees Celsius. A further rise in global temperatures would be enhanced by amplifying feedbacks from land and oceans, including exposure of water surfaces following sea ice melting, reduction of CO2concentration in water, release of methane and fires. Climate change trajectories would be highly irregular as a result of stadial events affected by flow of ice melt water into the oceans. Whereas similar temperature fluctuations and stadial events occurred during past interglacial periods (Cortese et al. 2007[24]; Figure 6), when temperature fluctuations were close to ~1oC, further rises in temperature in future would enhance the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events, entering uncharted territory unlike any recorded during the Pleistocene, rendering large parts of the continents uninhabitable.
Figure 6. A. Evolution of sea surface temperatures in 5 glacial-interglacial transitions recorded in ODP 1089 at the sub-Antarctic Atlantic Ocean. Lower grey lines – δ18O measured on Cibicidoides plankton; Black lines – sea surface temperature. Marine isotope stage numbers are indicated on top of diagrams. Note the stadial temperature drop events following interglacial peak temperatures, analogous to the Younger Dryas preceding the onset of the Holocene (Cortese et al. 2007[25]).B. Mean temperatures for the late Pleistocene and early Holocene.
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Dr Andrew Glikson, Earth and Paleo-climate science, Australia National University (ANU) School of Anthropology and Archaeology, ANU Planetary Science Institute, ANU Climate Change Institute, Honorary Associate Professor, Geothermal Energy Centre of Excellence, University of Queensland. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
On Saturday 26 January 2019, Emmanuel Macron, Pedro Sánchez, and Angela Merkel, followed by Theresa May, gave the government of Venezuela eight days within which to call elections. If the government of Venezuela does not comply with this order by then, Macron, Sánchez, Merkel and May have announced that they will recognize Juan Guaidó, who declared himself president of Venezuela on 23 January 2019.
The day following this ultimatum, French President Macron began a three-day official visit to Egypt in order to reaffirm his support for Marshal Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who is at the head of a dictatorial regime similar to, if not worse than, the Hosni Mubarak regime, which was overthrown by Egypt’s people in February 2011. Marshal el-Sisi, a favoured client of the French President, took power in 2013 in a coup, hijacking and strangling the hopes of the people who had risen up en masse to overthrow Mohamed Morsi.
Sisi is responsible for a massive and brutal repression. Tens of thousands of political prisoners languish in Egypt’s prisons; hundreds of members of the opposition have been sentenced to the death penalty by military courts; human-rights defence organisations denounce the massive persecution and the hundreds of extrajudicial executions of labour-union militants and other activists, as well as of journalists independent of the regime. The Sisi regime is literally conducting a reign of terror in Egypt and Macron visits him, supports him and sells him weapons. The British, Spanish and German governments also sell weapons to Sisi and support him.
As for the Spanish regime, remember that José María Aznar, head of Spain’s government from 1996 to 2004, supported the coup against Hugo Chávez in April 2002. Pedro Sánchez is humiliating the Spanish people by following Aznar’s example in threatening the elected president, Nicolás Maduro, and recognising the self-styled “president” Guaidó, who is directly supported by Washington and the most reactionary governments in Latin American.
None of these four European governments are denouncing the systematic murder of social leaders and violations of the peace agreement in Colombia.
The Left has many reasons to express very strong criticisms of the government of Nicolás Maduro. Among the criticisms that need to be expressed are his continuing to repay external debt instead of declaring a moratorium and using the financial resources that would thus be freed up to do more to relieve the humanitarian crisis the Venezuelan people are now suffering. In 2016 the CADTM had called on the Venezuelan government to conduct an audit of the debt with citizen participation. Other critiques of the Maduro government’s policies coming from the Left are also justified: its failure to combat the capital flight organised with the complicity of the highest authorities of the administration and the government; the continuance of the extractivist exportation model, encouraging exhaustion of the country’s natural resources; the repression against trade unionists and other activists; the development of policies of clientelism and a Constituent Assembly whose actual operation does not live up to the hopes its election had raised.
But as militants of the Left who uphold the right of peoples to self-determination, under no circumstances can we accept an ultimatum of the kind issued by Macron, Sánchez, Merkel and May, and we call on everyone to oppose the policy of Washington and the Lima Group which it controls with all possible vehemence. The coup attempt by the “self-styled president” Guaidó must be denounced.
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This article was originally published on CADTM. Translated by Snake Arbusto.
Eric Toussaintis 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.
Sábado, 26/Janeiro/2019, Emmanuel Macron, Pedro Sánchez, Angela Merkel, seguidos de There-sa May, deram 8 dias ao Governo da Venezuela para convocar eleições. No fim deste prazo, se o Governo venezuelano não ceder a esta intimação, Macron, Sanchez, Merkel e May anunciaram que reconhecerão Juan Guaidó, que se autoproclamou presidente da Venezuela a 23 de Janeiro de 2019.
„Mit seiner völlig unerwarteten Aktion hat Israel Angriffe auf militärische Ziele in Syrien offiziallisiert und die syrischen Behörden davor gewarnt, Rache an Israel zu üben“ – so berichteten die italienischen Medien über den gestrigen Angriff Israels in Syrien mit Marschflugkörpern und intelligenten Bomben. „Dies ist eine Botschaft an die Russen, die zusammen mit dem Iran das Überleben der Machtstruktur Assads ermöglichen“, kommentierte der Corriere della Sera.
Niemand stellt das „Recht“ Israels in Frage, einen souveränen Staat anzugreifen, um die Regierung durchzusetzen, die dieser haben soll, nach acht Jahren, während deren die USA, die NATO und die Golfmonarchien versuchten, ihn mit Israel zu zerstören, wie sie es 2011 mit dem Staat Libyen taten.
Niemand ist empört darüber, dass diese israelischen Luftangriffe am Samstag und Montag Dutzende von Menschenleben forderten, darunter mindestens vier Kinder, sowie schwere Schäden am internationalen Flughafen Damaskus verursacht haben. Andererseits wurde viel darüber gesprochen, dass das Skigebiet des Mount Hermon (das vollständig von Israel mit den Golanhöhen besetzt war) einen Tag lang wohlweislich geschlossen geblieben war, was den Feriengästen großen Unmut bereitete.
Niemand scheint über die Tatsache besorgt zu sein, dass die Intensivierung der israelischen Angriffe in Syrien unter dem Vorwand, dass sie als Startrampe für iranische Raketen genutzt werden, mit den Vorbereitungen für einen groß angelegten Krieg gegen den Iran begonnen hat, der mit dem Pentagon geplant ist und dessen Auswirkungen katastrophal wären.
Die Entscheidung der USA, sich aus dem iranischen Atomabkommen zurückzuziehen – ein Abkommen, das von Israel als „Kapitulation des Westens an die vom Iran angeführte Achse des Bösen“ definiert wurde – hat eine äußerst gefährliche Situation ausgelöst, nicht nur für den Großraum Nah-Ost. Israel, die einzige Atommacht im Nahen Osten – und Nicht-Unterzeichner des Atomwaffensperrvertrags, der jedoch vom Iran validiert wurde – verfügt derzeit über 200 Atomwaffen, die auf den Iran gerichtet sind (wie vom ehemaligen US-Außenminister Colin Powell im März 2015 angegeben). Unter den verschiedenen Vektoren für Atomwaffen verfügt Israel über eine erstklassige Staffel von F-35A-Kampfflugzeugen, die im Dezember 2017 in Betrieb genommen wurde.
Israel ist nicht nur das erste Land, das das neue Jagdflugzeug der fünften Generation vom US-Unternehmen Lockheed Martin kauft, sondern spielt mit seiner eigenen Militärindustrie auch eine wichtige Rolle bei der Entwicklung von Jagdflugzeugen. Im vergangenen Dezember begann Israel Aerospace Industries mit der Produktion von Tragflächenteilen, die die F-35 für Radar unsichtbar machen. Dank dieser Technologie, die auch auf italienische F-35 angewendet wird, stärkt Israel die Angriffskapazitäten seiner Atomstreitkräfte, die durch das „Programm der individuellen Zusammenarbeit mit Israel“” in das elektronische System der NATO integriert sind.
Aber wir finden nichts davon in unseren Medien, ebenso wie wir nichts darüber finden können, dass es neben den Opfern des israelischen Angriffs in Syrien weitere gibt, die viel zahlreicher sind und von dem israelischen Embargo im Gazastreifen gegen die Palästinenser heimgesucht wurden. Dort mussten aufgrund der von der israelischen Regierung verhängten Blockade internationaler Gelder für Gesundheitseinrichtungen im Gazastreifen sechs von dreizehn Krankenhäusern, darunter die beiden Kinderkrankenhäuser Nasser und Rantissi, wegen des Mangels an Brennstoff, die für die Erzeugung von elektrischer Energie notwendig sind, am 20. Januar schließen. Im Gazastreifen ist die Stromverteilung im Netz äußerst sporadisch.
Wir können nicht sagen, wie viele Opfer das bewusste Schließen der Krankenhäuser in Gaza fordern wird. Auf jeden Fall werden wir keine sachdienlichen Informationen in unseren Medien finden, die jedoch die Erklärung von Vizepremier Matteo Salvini anlässlich seines jüngsten Besuchs in Israel großflächig ausstrahlen: „Ich sichere mein ganzes Engagement zu, um das Recht auf Sicherheit für Israel, eine Bastion der Demokratie im Nahen Osten, zu unterstützen“.
Drone manufacturer, General Atomics, hosted an event in London on 24 January in order – as its press release put it – “to recognize UK companies that are contributing to operational systems such as MQ-9 Reaper and MQ-1C Gray Eagle, and the new MQ-9B SkyGuardian RPA program” (which the UK MoD is calling ‘Protector’).
As part of the day, the US company signed agreements with three major UK defence companies: Raytheon, MBDA and BAE Systems. Raytheon will supply and integrate Paveway IV bombs onto the new British drone while MBDA will integrate and supply it with the new Brimstone missile. BAE Systems, however, will play a wider role, helping to enable the new drone to be flown within the UK airspace.
Currently, large remotely controlled drones are not allowed to fly in unsegregated airspace within the UK due to safety concerns. We have previously detailed the difficulties that the MoD and General Atomics have had in convincing airspace regulators that ‘Protector’ can be flown safely in UK airspace. In July 2018, the company remotely piloted a SkyGuardian cross the Atlantic and landed it at the Fairford airbase. Severe restrictions were put in place for the flight into UK airspace with all other aircraft directed away for the period of time the drone was in the air. The aircraft was then disassembled and put into crates for its return journey to the US. Defence News reports today that ‘Detect and Avoid’ technology (still largely unproven), may be added to Protector in an effort to persuade regulators.
General Atomics reports that BAE Systems will now collaborate with them on enabling the integration of the new military drone into UK national airspace. In a graphic shared on social media, BAE said that it will support General Atomics through its experience of testing unmanned systems and “shaping the regulatory environment through participation, dialogue and strong relationships with UK and European regulatory authorities.”
BAE Systems says it will aid integration of the Protector drone into UK airspace
General Atomics is banking on gaining the support of UK regulators for its new large drone to fly in civil airspace as this will then likely open up the airspace of other countries – particularly in Europe – to its drones. CEO of General Atomics, Linden Blue stated “Protector will be an example for other allied nations to follow” adding “thereby creating more opportunities for UK aerospace industry.”
The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) is now likely to come under real pressure from BAE Systems and its political connections to approve changes which will allow the drone to fly within UK airspace. This at the same time regulators are working hard to prevent the disruption and threat of small drones in the wake of the chaos caused at Gatwick.
There has been no public or parliamentary debate about the implications and impact of large military drones flying in UK airspace even though CAA representatives express clear reservations about whether technological solutions will provide the right level of safety for the public. It should be noted that large military drones regularly crash on training flights in the US as well as on operations overseas.
Aside from the obvious safety issues, once ‘Protector’ drones are allowed to fly within the UK, as well as for training flights it is certainly possible that they will be used by what is discreetly referred to as ‘Other Government Departments‘ for security operations within the UK. It is surely right that the implication of this – and what the limitations are – should be openly discussed and debated.
The growing use of armed military drones is a real danger to global peace and security. Their integration within UK airspace will further normalise their use. This attempt by a US military drone manufacturer in collaboration with BAE Systems to put pressure on UK airspace regulators needs to be watched carefully.
Meanwhile, while the MoD has always been very coy about which UK companies are supporting US Predator and Reaper drone operations. General Atomics, however, has no such qualms and detailed in its press release which UK companies are involved with Reaper and the new ‘Protector’ drone
Abaco Systems – Provides a DO-178 and DO-254 compliant computer that processes flight critical functions for the MQ-9B Ground Control Station (GCS)
BAE Systems – Will support development of Concepts of Operations (CONOPS) for Protector operations in UK national airspace
CAE – Will develop a comprehensive synthetic training system for Protector RG Mk1 flight crews
Cobham Aviation Services, UK – Provides ongoing logistics and maintenance services for the RAF Reaper fleet
Cosworth – Provides engine development and manufacturing services for GA-ASI’s MQ-1C Gray Eagle Unmanned Aircraft System, operated by the US Army
Daco Hand Controllers – Supplies pilot Stick and Throttle hand-controllers for the GCS, as well as a specially designed hand controller that aids in target tracking
Britain rejected Venezuela’s request to withdraw $1.2bn in gold stored in the UK, according to reports. It was enough for the self-declared and US-backed ‘president’, Juan Guaido, to support the alleged move.
The Bank of England blocked Venezuela’s attempts to retrieve $1.2 billion worth of gold stored as the nation’s foreign reserves in Britain, sources told Bloomberg on Friday.
According to the media outlet, officials in Caracas have for weeks been trying to withdraw the gold, with Calixto Ortega, the head of Venezuela’s central bank, traveling to London in mid-December to seek access to the nation’s assets.
The talks were “unsuccessful,” as US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the national security advisor to President Donald Trump, John Bolton, pressured their British counterparts to freeze the Venezuelan assets, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
By some estimates, Venezuela holds more than $8 billion in foreign reserves. According to earlier reports, the amount of Venezuelan gold kept in the Bank of England doubled in recent months, growing from 14 to 31 tons.
The South American nation has reportedly experienced problems in extracting its own gold from the Bank of England in the past. Bankers in Britain were allegedly concerned that Venezuelan officials would sell the state-owned gold “for personal gain.”
The Bank of England, along with press officials for Pompeo and Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, declined to comment.
Despite the fact that the story was not confirmed, the alleged move of the British bank was swiftly praised by the self-proclaimed ‘interim president’ of Venezuela.
“The process of protecting the assets of Venezuela has begun,” Juan Guaido tweeted.
“We will not allow more abuse and theft of money intended for food, medicine and the future of our children.”
Guaido, the speaker of the national parliament, declared himself ‘interim president’ of the state earlier with week in opposition to Maduro. He was subsequently recognized as the “legitimate” leader of Venezuela by the US, Canada, and the majority of South American nations.
Maduro was backed by states like Mexico, Russia, China, and Turkey. He slammed the US for endorsing Guaido, ordering its diplomats to leave the county.
Moscow said it will continue to recognize Maduro as the sole democratically-elected leader of the country and called on others to not allow “destructive foreign interference” in Venezuelan affairs.
Venezuela has seen a series of large-scale anti-government protests in recent years. Some of them spiraled into riots and clashes with police. Nicolas Maduro blasted “foreign interference” as a source behind the unrest, while in particular accusing US officials of endorsing the rallies and Washington of planning to overthrow him. The anti-government protests were met with counter-demonstrations by Maduro supporters.
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Families split; travellers stranded; students unable to attend their universities; people being forced to be away from their loved ones.
Two years after President Donald Trump signed an executive order severely restricting travel from several Muslim-majority countries, the effects of the executive order that came to be known as the Muslim ban, are still happening.
“We’ve seen families torn apart, individuals not being able to visit loved ones, weddings that were missed, healthcare they haven’t been able to receive, students not being able to come to school – there is a real life daily impact that it has, and that’s ongoing,” Abed Ayoub, the legal director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), said.
After Trump signed his ban on 27 January 2017, demonstrators flooded airports, 1,000 State Department officials lodged a rare dissent cable, and lawyers filed a rush of lawsuits all in protest against the executive order, which put a 90-day block on citizens from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia.
The protests and early court decisions suspending the ban restored hope of a united front against the executive order and underlying bigotry behind it.
Last year, however, the Supreme Court upheld the ban after a lengthy legal battle, ruling in favour of executive power to control immigration, although Trump had professed to his discriminatory intent as a candidate in late 2015, calling for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims” coming to the US.
Now advocates say they are turning to politicians and presidential candidates to undo the ban.
Total chaos
The order left the lives of people like Syrian doctor Khaled Almilaji, who was waiting to get a visa to continue his masters programme at Brown University and return to his wife who was pregnant with their first child, in limbo.
“You can go to the website – you see your number and there is ‘pending’. This pending can take years,” he told MEE at the time, stuck in Turkey and continuing his studies remotely while his wife’s due date grew closer.
It also threw the country’s airports into an instant tailspin, as protesters and lawyers, like Sharifa Abbasi who works for the Virginia-based HMA law firm, gathered to help new arrivals, and untangle a knot of bureaucracy, so freshly spun, no one knew exactly what was going on.
“There were lawyers on the phone with the local elected official’s offices, people trying to reach Customs and Border Protection and airlines, people writing different memos, teams doing legal research, conference calls going on every day,” said Abbasi, who was volunteering at Dulles Airport.
“It was beautiful because everybody just wanted to come together and offer their support.”
As the pack of at least 50 lawyers, fed by other volunteers and surrounded by chanting demonstrators and journalists, continued to advise people, Abbasi said she felt certain that the order would be “blown out by the courts”.
“I didn’t think it was going to go on for this long, that it even stood a chance,” she said. “But unfortunately, given the political climate we are in now, anything can fly.”
Ban 3.0
In fact, the ban had gone through several incarnations before making its way to the Supreme Court last June.
It originally applied to permanent residents, before the Department of Homeland Security issued a directive exempting Green Card holders from the executive order, following some 24 hours of mass confusion at airports.
In March 2017, Trump signed what would become known as the “second Muslim ban”. The new decree excluded Iraq from the list. Baghdad had agreed to start accepting deportees from the US in exchange for the move.
The deal allowed the administration to round up dozens of Iraqi Christians who had outstanding deportation orders, even as they argued that sending them back to Iraq could amount to a “death sentence“.
In yet another amendment to the ban in September 2017, the White House removed Sudan from the list and added travel restrictions on the citizens of Chad, North Korea and Venezuela.
Robert McCaw, director of the government affairs department at Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said each version of the ban aimed to “cover up the discrimination, bigotry and unlawfulness” of the previous one.
“It’s CAIR’s position that the Muslim ban continues, not only to be discriminatory but is unconstitutional,” McCaw said.
The way forward
The Supreme Court’s ruling to uphold the ban was a “travesty of justice”, McCaw said, citing other historical missteps by the high court, including the Korematsu case that allowed the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
However, he noted that the Supreme Court’s decision is not subject for appeal.
“So now it is up to Congress to use its lawful authority to de-fund or repeal this Muslim ban executive order,” McCaw continued.
Late in 2017, Congresswoman Judy Chu and Senator Chris Murphy introduced a bill that would “prohibit the use of any funds or fees to implement” the order.
Another “legislative fix”, according to McCaw, would be to reform the Immigration and Nationality Act, on which Trump based his executive order.
McCaw acknowledged that such efforts have minimal chances of passing through Congress, as Trump’s Republican Party is still in control of the US Senate. A legislative push, however, is still important, he said.
“It is to communicate to the American public that this order can be overturned by Congress, if there is enough votes,” he said.
If Trump loses his re-election bid in 2020, his successor could overturn the ban by executive order.
A handful of Democratic politicians and activists have announced their candidacy for the upcoming presidential elections; McCaw said he is still waiting to see who will be the first candidate who will pledge to repeal the ban.
Beyond the ban
The ban has had a chilling effect on the number of people from the targeted countries coming into the US.
US State Department data shows that in the fiscal year 2018 only 819 Yemenis were granted “immediate relative visas” to join their families in the US, a stark drop from the 8,447 in 2016, President Barack Obama’s last year in office.
The fiscal year ends on 30 September, meaning the ban was fully in effect for three months in the last reporting cycle.
Beyond the direct impact of the ban on potential travellers and family members who may await them here, advocates say the executive order has created an atmosphere of fear that has contributed to the rise of Islamophobia.
“The Muslim ban itself – being discriminatory – marginalises American Muslims and paints them as being a threat to their fellow citizens and neighbours,” McCaw said.
“Since President Trump was elected and he issued the Muslim ban executive order, there has been a stark increase in hate crimes and acts of discrimination targeting American Muslims, and vandalism targeting their houses of worship and community centres.”
Ayoub echoed McCaw’s statement, adding that the ban had a “psychological impact” on Arab, Muslim and immigrant communities in the US.
“Mistrust in the government, worrying about their immigration status, worrying about loved ones, the stress – that really took a toll,” he said.
According to Ayoub, that anxiety was not limited to people from countries listed in the executive order, as people from all communities, including US citizens, started questioning if they would be targeted next.
And their concerns are warranted: Abbasi said she has noticed that the processing time for visas for people from countries with large Muslim populations not on the list – like Tunisia, Afghanistan and Pakistan – have slowed down.
“If you are already outside the country, there are a lot of people that are hopeless,” she said. “Imagine all of the talent in these past two years that really could have done something for the country.”
‘Put each other together’
One of those people was Khaled Almilaji, the Syrian doctor who was stranded in Turkey when the ban came down, hoping to return to his masters programme and to his pregnant wife, Jihan, who is also a doctor.
Almilaji, 37, was working for a pharmaceutical company and finishing up a medical residency when the war started. In September 2011, he was imprisoned for six months in Damascus. He was tortured for two weeks, including by electrocution, and one of his fingers and a rib was broken.
Yet prison authorities relied on him to treat other prisoners which he did blindfolded so he couldn’t identify anyone later on.
After he was released from prison, he spent the next five years making a major impact on healthcare services for Syrians, including his role on a task force that vaccinated 1.4 million Syrian children against polio and stopped the virus from spreading as it had in Iraq.
Two years after the ban altered their lives, Almilaji’s now 17-month-old daughter, Daria, Jihan and he are now settled in Toronto, where Khaled and Jihan were reunited in June 2017.
He is nearly done with a masters in health informatics at the University of Toronto and said he has already used what he has been learning to improve health services in northern Syria.
“I’m finishing my masters in April. It’s amazing, right?” he said on Saturday. “I was lucky that I didn’t waste more time in this.”
Jihan, who is preparing for exams to continue her medical studies, has been able to travel to visit her family in Germany. Meanwhile, Khaled has returned frequently to Turkey to work on initiatives including an underground hospital for women and children, and projects providing care for Syrians in Idlib, Aleppo and Hama.
“We were lucky that we were still able to get degrees, look for medical training jobs and, at the same time, continue doing this work. Not a lot of people had the same chance,” he said.
One day, he said, he hopes history books will detangle the chaotic political moment, and provide lessons for the world.
“It’s a mess, but it’s needed because it’s not a matter of the results of one election or another, it’s a matter of our collective behaviour. Our communities are divided, but these things showed that division,” he said.
“This is good because as a doctor you cannot fix something unless you diagnose it. It was there and now it is on the surface. We have to put each other together.”
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Military option on the table — that’s what Axios reporter Jonathan Swan was told when discussing the Venezuela crisis with Sen. Lindsey Graham. In a breaking exclusive Sunday evening, Axios has revealed key explosive contents of a recent meeting between President Trump and Sen. Graham wherein the president “mused to him about the possibility of using military force in Venezuela, where the U.S. government is currently pushing for regime change using diplomatic and economic pressures.” According to Axios:
Graham, recalling his conversation with Trump a couple weeks ago, said: “He [Trump] said, ‘What do you think about using military force?’ and I said, ‘Well, you need to go slow on that, that could be problematic.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m surprised, you want to invade everybody.’”
Graham laughed. “And I said, ‘I don’t want to invade everybody, I only want to use the military when our national security interests are threatened.'”
Sen. Graham explained further to Swan in a phone call that “Trump’s really hawkish” on Venezuela, and added the president’s willingness to use military force against the Maduro regime actually surpasses Graham’s.
Graham summarized the unusual and unexpected takeaway from the contents of his discussions with president with the conclusion that“Trump was even more hawkish than he [Graham] was on Venezuela.”
This follows a week of unrest and mass protests, along with some very limited military defections, inside the socialist country and after about a dozen countries have joined the United States in recognizing opposition held National Assembly head Juan Guaido as the “Interim President of Venezuela” possessing sole legitimacy. After Trump’s controversial declaration of Maduro’s illegitimacy as president last week, a senior administration official followed by saying that “all options are on the table”.
And now it appears the “military option” is perhaps more prominent on that table in Trump’s mind than many believed, which Axios muses is related to being “stymied at home” after the wall/government shutdown crisis, thus “Trump is now moving faster than ever on foreign policy.”
While this doesn’t mean Trump will invade Venezuela anytime soon, it increasingly appears escalating diplomatic and economic pressures could fast put Washington on such a path toward overt regime change in Caracas. Toward this end, Axios notes: “We expect the Trump administration will target Nicolás Maduro’s oil and offshore wealth in the coming weeks and try to divert that wealth to the opposition leader, Juan Guaidó…”.
The worry over potential military confrontation or civil war inside the country is increasingly looking very real as over the weekend reports surfaced online of a build-up of Venezuelan military assets along the borders, specifically near Columbia — a key US ally in Latin America.
Since taking office, and prior to the current crisis as recently as 2017, Trump has spoken of a “military option” when Venezuela policy arises; however, his aides have reportedly attempted to dissuade him from taking any hasty action.
Meanwhile, according to Bloomberg, opposition leader Juan Guaido has called for consecutive days of nationwide protests to continue this week to put pressure on Maduro to hold a new election, in accord with EU demands that he announces fresh elections within eight days. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, issued the following ultimatum Saturday alongside France, Germany and Britain:
“If within eight days there are no fair, free and transparent elections called in Venezuela, Spain will recognize Juan Guaido as Venezuelan president.”
Guaido last week specifically appealed to the military to switch sides following a local and short-lived attempt of 27 officers to lead a revolt on Monday (1/21). To encourage more such defections, which so far hasn’t appeared to penetrate the top layers of military leadership, Guaido has offered amnesty protection to any officer previously accused of corruption or human rights abuses should they defect.
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Imidacloprid – a type of neonicotinoid – changes the way that worker bees interact with the colony’s larvae: they become less social, stop nursing larvae, experience altered social and spatial dynamics within nests, and cease hive insulation construction.
A research team led by James Crall of Harvard University investigated the effects of imidacloprid using a robotic platform for continuous, multicolony monitoring of uniquely identified workers. Their research showed that the behaviours induced by imidacloprid lead to colony collapse.
“Our results show that neonicotinoids induce widespread disruption of worker behavior within the nest that may contribute to impaired growth, highlighting the potential of automated techniques for characterizing the multifaceted, dynamic impacts of stressors on behavior in bee colonies.”
Neurological and social
Many media reports characterised the bees in the study as “antisocial and lazy,” but it is crucial that we understand the larger paradigm afoot here.
While there are many studies which speak to the links between neonics and colony collapse, there are many others that decry this science as a “myth.” There will be yet another onslaught of those who say that that correlation is not causation, in response to the proposition that neonics – or imidacloprid at the very least – have a direct effect upon social behaviours that result in the loss of larvae.
This is logically true, but there is enough science on the links between colony collapse and neonics that it is time to stop reacting in bad faith to the science. Many researchers in Europe are interested to learn more about this link between bees and neonics, following a near-total ban on neonics in the EU last year.
Dr Richard Gill, a researcher from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London, and his team have explored the relationship between bumble bees and neonicotinoid-treated food. Their study shows that while at first the bumble bee bees avoided this food, they eventually come to develop a preference for neonicotinoid-treated foods.
Gill, who has worked in this field for some time, has demonstrated how neonics bind to synapses in the brains of bees, which in turn causes these bees to have seizures which he likens to an epileptic seizure. The neonics target the nicotinic acetylcholinesterase receptors in the brain. Hence, there is both a neurological reaction from the neonics as well as a social reaction in relation to them which impacts the propagation of the species.
Citizen science
The end result is the decline of bee populations but also – since bombus play key roles in the food chain acting as pollinators in temperate ecosystems – many other species have declined across Europe and North America.
The lack of quantitative data has further prevented the collation of data to make more robust conclusions about the contributing factors of colony collapse and the declining bee population.
That is until November of last year when researchers and more than fifty citizen scientists conducted surveys to determine the status of bumble bees throughout Vermont, in the northeastern United States.
From 2012 through 2014 these scientists identified and digitized bumble bee specimens from thirteen public and private collections. Having examined more than 100 years of bumble bee records, these scientists found that almost half of Vermont’s bumble bee species have either completely vanished or are in serious decline.
“Our dataset contained 12,319 records, which we separated into historic (1915–1999; n = 1669) and modern (2000–2014; n = 10,650) periods, with our survey contributing 94 percent of modern data. Of 17 species, four were not detected and four showed significant declines.”
Collaborative engineering
These findings are tragic for the ecology and the economy alike, as these bees are the primary pollinators on Vermont’s farms.
While the researchers could not state with certainty the cause for this decline, recent studies have reinforced the conclusion that it is a combination of habitat loss, disease, mite infections, parasites, pesticides, urbanisation, and climate change.
The dystopian results of recent studies do not give hope for turning around the damage done to bees, but some scientific projects are afoot which seek to understand — if not remedy — the disaster thus far.
In line with some of last fall’s scientific revelations, citizen scientists are coming to the rescue, developing apps to record bumble bee sightings and upload pertinent information such as habitat type, location of sighting, and weather. This information will then be shared with researchers who can analyze the submissions and chart out migration patterns.
Designed by Dinah Shi, John Salaveria and Luisa San Martin, in collaboration with environmental non-profit Friends of the Earth Canada, these software engineering students developed this bumble bee tracking app to enlist Canadians to contribute to helping the bee populations as citizen scientists. The mobile app also teaches users how to get involved in creating a sustainable environment for bees.
Nanotechnology
More and more research projects focussing on bee populations are enlisting the help of citizen scientists from across the United States.
One project in Idaho houses the volunteer efforts of anyone with a camera and a computer to record the various species throughout the region. In Washington, researchers are turning bees into cyborg drones, attaching chips onto their bodies tracking their movements in order to gain more insight into their decline.
In fact, with the uptick of nanotechnology in recent years and the increase of free website builders, scientists today are able to construct research projects extending far beyond their grant limits, involving local and international citizenry in crucial research needed to end the demise of bumble bee populations around the world.
The Xerces Society, for instance, is actively engaged in the Bumble Bee Watch and is entirely composed of citizen scientists.
We need to consider the risks to our planet in the eventuality that bee populations continue to decline, especially those populations that are responsible for one-third of our food pollination. Why not consider contributing your time and efforts any number of bee studies that are in need of more citizen scientists to help track the declining bee populations across North America and Europe?
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Americans have been trained by decades of Cold War propaganda to look for any confirmation that ‘socialism means poverty.’ But in the case of Venezuela and other states not governed by the free market, this cliche simply doesn’t ring true.
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The political and economic crisis facing Venezuela is being endlessly pointed to as proof of the superiority of the free market.
Images and portrayals of Venezuelans rioting in the streets over high food costs, empty grocery stores, medicine shortages, and overflowing garbage bins are the headlines, and the reporting points to socialism as the cause.
Indeed, corporate-owned, mainstream media advises Americans to look at the inflation and food lines in Venezuela, and then repeat to themselves clichés they heard in elementary school about how “Communism just doesn’t work.”
In reality, millions of Venezuelans have seen their living conditions vastly improved through the Bolivarian process. The problems plaguing the Venezuelan economy are not due to some inherent fault in socialism, but to artificially low oil prices and sabotage by forces hostile to the revolution.
Starting in 2014, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia flooded the market with cheap oil. This is not a mere business decision, but a calculated move coordinated with U.S. and Israeli foreign policy goals. Despite not just losing money, but even falling deep into debt, the Saudi monarchy continues to expand its oil production apparatus. The result has been driving the price of oil down from $110 per barrel, to $28 in the early months of this year. The goal is to weaken these opponents of Wall Street, London, and Tel Aviv, whose economies are centered around oil and natural gas exports.
And Venezuela is one of those countries. Saudi efforts to drive down oil prices have drastically reduced Venezuela’s state budget and led to enormous consequences for the Venezuelan economy.
At the same time, private food processing and importing corporations have launched a coordinated campaign of sabotage. This, coupled with the weakening of a vitally important state sector of the economy, has resulted in inflation and food shortages. The artificially low oil prices have left the Venezuelan state cash-starved, prompting a crisis in the funding of the social programs that were key to strengthening the United Socialist Party.
Corruption is a big problem in Venezuela and many third-world countries. This was true prior to the Bolivarian process, as well as after Hugo Chavez launched his massive economic reforms. In situations of extreme poverty, people learn to take care of each other. People who work in government are almost expected to use their position to take care of their friends and family. Corruption is a big problem under any system, but it is much easier to tolerate in conditions of greater abundance. The problem has been magnified in Venezuela due to the drop in state revenue caused by the low oil prices and sabotage from food importers.
The Bolivarian experience in Venezuela
Americans have been trained by decades of Cold War propaganda to look for any confirmation that “socialism means poverty.” A quick, simplistic portrait of the problems currently facing Venezuela, coupled with the fact that President Nicolas Maduro describes himself as a Marxist, can certainly give them such a confirmation. However, the actual, undisputed history of socialist construction around the world, including recent decades in Venezuela, tells a completely different story.
Hugo Chavez was elected president of Venezuela in 1999. His election was viewed as a referendum on the extreme free market policies enacted in Venezuela during the 1990s. In December, when I walked through the neighborhoods of central Caracas, Venezuelans spoke of these times with horror.
Venezuelans told of how the privatizations mandated by the International Monetary Fund made life in Venezuela almost unlivable during the 1990s. Garbage wouldn’t be collected. Electricity would go off for weeks. Haido Ortega, a member of a local governing body in Venezuela, said:
“Under previous governments we had to burn tires and go on strike just to get electricity, have the streets fixed, or get any investment.”
Chavez took office on a platform advocating a path between capitalism and socialism. He restructured the government-owned oil company so that the profits would go into the Venezuelan state, not the pockets of Wall Street corporations. With the proceeds of Venezuela’s oil exports, Chavez funded a huge apparatus of social programs.
After defeating an attempted coup against him in 2002, Chavez announced the goal of bringing Venezuela toward “21st Century Socialism.” Chavez quoted Marx and Lenin in his many TV addresses to the country, and mobilized the country around the goal of creating a prosperous, non-capitalist society.
In 1998, Venezuela had only 12 public universities, today it has 32. Cuban doctors were brought to Venezuela to provide free health care in community clinics. The government provides cooking and heating gas to low-income neighborhoods, and it’s launched a literacy campaign for uneducated adults.
During the George W. Bush administration, oil prices were the highest they had ever been. The destruction of Iraq, sanctions on Iran and Russia, strikes and turmoil in Nigeria — these events created a shortage on the international markets, driving prices up.
After the death of Chavez, Nicolas Maduro has continued the Bolivarian program. “Housing Missions” have been built across the country, providing low-income families in Venezuela with places to live. The Venezuelan government reports that over 1 million modern apartment buildings had been constructed by the end of 2015.
The problems currently facing Venezuela started in 2014. The already growing abundance of oil due to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, was compounded by Saudi Arabia flooding the markets with cheap oil. The result: massive price drops. Despite facing a domestic fiscal crisis, Saudi Arabia continues to expand its oil production apparatus.
The price of oil remains low, as negotiations among OPEC states are taking place in the hopes that prices can be driven back up. While American media insists the low oil prices are just the natural cycle of the market at work, it’s rather convenient for U.S. foreign policy. Russia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and the Islamic Republic of Iran all have economies centered around state-owned oil companies and oil exports, and each of these countries has suffered the sting of low oil prices.
The leftist president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, has already been deposed due to scandal surrounding Petrobras, the state-owned oil company which is experiencing economic problems due to the falling price of oil. Although much of Brazil’s oil is for domestic consumption, it has been revealed that those who deposed her coordinated with the CIA and other forces in Washington and Wall Street, utilizing the economic fallout of low oil prices to bring down the Brazilian president.
The son of President Ronald Reagan has argued that Obama is intentionally driving down oil prices not just to weaken the Venezuelan economy, but also to tamper the influence of Russia and Iran. Writing for Townhall in 2014, Michael Reagan bragged that his father did the same thing to hurt the Soviet Union during the 1980s:
“Since selling oil was the source of the Kremlin’s wealth, my father got the Saudis to flood the market with cheap oil.
Lower oil prices devalued the ruble, causing the USSR to go bankrupt, which led to perestroika and Mikhail Gorbachev and the collapse of the Soviet Empire.”
The history of socialist construction
Prior to the 1917 revolution, Russia was a primitive, agrarian country. By 1936, after the completion of the Five-Year Plan, it was a world industrial power, surpassing every other country on the globe in terms of steel and tractor production. The barren Soviet countryside was lit up with electricity. The children of illiterate peasants across the Soviet Union grew up to be the scientists and engineers who first conquered outer space. The planned economy of the Soviet Union drastically improved the living standards of millions of people, bringing them running water, modern housing, guaranteed employment, and free education.
There is no contradiction between central planning and economic growth. In 1949, China had no steel industry. Today, more than half of all the world’s steel is produced in China’s government-controlled steel industry.
Cuba has wiped out illiteracy, and Cubans enjoy one of the highest life expectancies in Latin America.
When the Marxist-Leninist governments of Eastern Europe collapsed in the early 1990s, economists like Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, who can be counted among capitalism’s “true believers,” predicted rapid economic growth. Since the 1990s, conditions in what George W. Bush called the “New Europe” have become far worse than under socialism. The life expectancy has decreased and infant mortality has risen. Human and drug traffickers have set up shop. In endless polls, the people of Eastern Europe repeatedly say life was better before the defeat of Communism.
Russia’s recovery from the disaster of the 1990s has come about with the reorientation of the economy to one centered around public control of its oil and natural gas resources — much like Venezuela. The Putin government has also waged a crackdown on the small number of “oligarchs” who became wealthy after the demise of the Soviet Union. Once strong state to control the economy was re-established, Russia’s gross domestic product increased by 70 percent during the first eight years of Putin’s administration. From 2000 to 2008, poverty was cut in half, and incomes doubled.
Neoliberal capitalism has failed
It is only because these facts are simply off-limits in the American media and its discussions of socialism and capitalism that the distorted narrative about Venezuela’s current hardships are believed.
When discussing the merits of capitalism and socialism, American media usually restricts the conversation to pointing out that socialist countries in the third world have lower living standards than the United States, a country widely identified with capitalism. Without any context or fair comparison, this alone is supposed to prove the inherent superiority of U.S.-style capitalism.
If the kind of neoliberal “free trade” advocated by U.S. corporations was the solution to global poverty, Mexico, a country long ago penetrated with the North American Free Trade Agreement, would be a shining example of development, not a mess of drug cartels and poverty. The same can be said for oil-rich countries like Nigeria, where exports are massive but the population remains in dire conditions.
The governments of Bangladesh, Honduras, Guatemala, Indonesia, and the Philippines have done everything they can to deregulate the market and accommodate Western ”investment.” Despite the promises of neoliberal theoreticians, their populations have not seen their lives substantially improve.
If one compares the more market-oriented economy of the U.S., not to countries in the global south attempting to develop with a planned economy, but to other Western countries with more social-democratic governments, the inferiority of the “free market” can also be revealed.
Even as the social-democratic welfare states of Europe drift closer to the U.S. economic model with “austerity cuts,” the U.S. still lags behind them in terms of basic societal health. Western European countries with powerful unions, strong socialist and labor parties, and less punitive criminal justice systems tend to have healthier societies.
The American perception that socialism or government intervention automatically create poverty, while a laissez faire approach unleashes limitless prosperity, is simply incorrect. Despite the current hardships, this reality is reflected in the last two decades of Venezuela’s history.
A punishment vote, not a vote for capitalism
The artificially low oil prices have left the Venezuelan state cash-starved, prompting a crisis in the funding of the social programs that were key to strengthening the United Socialist Party.
It is odd that the mainstream press blames “socialism” for the food problems in Venezuela, when the food distributors remain in the hands of private corporations. As Venezuelan political analyst Jesus Silva told me recently: “Most food in Venezuela is imported by private companies, they ask for dollars subsidized by the government oil sales to do that; they rarely produce anything or invest their own money.”
According to Silva, the economic sanctions imposed on Venezuela by the U.S., in addition to the oil crisis, have made it more difficult for the Venezuelan government to pay the private food importing companies in U.S. dollars. In response, the food companies are “running general sabotage.”
“Venezuela’s economy depends on oil sales. Now that oil prices are dropping down, the challenge is to get other sources of economic income,” he explained. “Meanwhile, the opposition is garnering electoral support due to the current economic crisis.”
When the United Socialist Party and its aligned Patriotic Pole lost control of Parliament in December, many predicted the imminent collapse of the Bolivarian government. However, months have passed and this clearly has not taken place.
While a clear majority cast a voto castigo (“punishment vote”) in December, punishing the government for mismanaging the crisis, the Maduro administration has a solid core of socialist activists who remain loyal to the Bolivarian project. Across Venezuela, communes have been established. Leftist activists live together and work in cooperatives. Many of them are armed and organized in “Bolivarian Militias” to defend the revolution.
Even some of the loudest critics of the Venezuelan government admit that it has greatly improved the situation in the country, despite the current hardships.
In December, I spoke to Glen Martinez, a radio host in Caracas who voted for the opposition. He dismissed the notion that free market capitalism would ever return to Venezuela. As he explained, most of the people who voted against the United Socialist Party — himself included — are frustrated with the way the current crisis is being handled, but do not want a return to the neoliberal economic model of the 1999s.
He said the economic reforms established during the Chavez administration would never be reversed. “We are not the same people we were before 1999,” Martinez insisted.
The United Socialist Party is currently engaging in a massive re-orientation, hoping to sharpen its response to economic sabotage and strengthen the socialist direction of the revolution. There is also talk of massive reform in the way the government operates, in order to prevent the extreme examples of corruption and mismanagement that are causing frustration among the population.
The climate is being intensified by a number of recent political assassinations. Tensions continue to exist on Venezuela’s border with the U.S.-aligned government of Colombia. The solid base of socialist activists is not going to let revolution be overturned, and tensions continue to rise. The Maduro and the United Socialist Party’s main task is to hold Venezuela together, and not let the country escalate into a state of civil war.
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With April’s elections looming, Benjamin Netanyahu has good reason to fear Benny Gantz, his former army chief. Gantz has launched a new party, named Israeli Resilience, just as the net of corruption indictments is closing around the prime minister.
Already, at this early stage of campaigning, some 31 per cent of the Israeli public prefer Gantz to head the next government over Netanyahu, who is only months away from becoming the longest-serving leader in Israel’s history.
Gantz is being feted as the new hope, a chance to change direction after a series of governments under Netanyahu’s leadership have over the past decade shifted Israel ever further to the right.
Like Israel’s former politician generals, from Yitzhak Rabin to Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon, Gantz is being portrayed – and portraying himself – as a battle-hardened warrior, able to make peace from a position of strength.
Before he had issued a single policy statement, polls showed him winning 15 of the 120 parliamentary seats, a welcome sign for those hoping that a centre-left coalition can triumph this time.
But the reality of what Gantz stands for – revealed this week in his first election videos – is far from reassuring.
In 2014, he led Israel into its longest and most savage military operation in living memory: 50 days in which the tiny coastal enclave of Gaza was bombarded relentlessly.
By the end, one of the most densely populated areas on earth – its two million inhabitants already trapped by a lengthy Israeli blockade – lay in ruins. More than 2,200 Palestinians were killed in the onslaught, a quarter of them children, while tens of thousands were left homeless.
The world watched, appalled. Investigations by human rights groups such as Amnesty International concluded that Israel had committed war crimes.
One might have assumed that during the election campaign Gantz would wish to draw a veil over this troubling period in his military career. Not a bit of it.
Source: Haaretz
One of his campaign videos soars over the rubble of Gaza, proudly declaring that Gantz was responsible for destroying many thousands of buildings. “Parts of Gaza have been returned to the Stone Age,” the video boasts.
This is a reference to the Dahiya doctrine, a strategy devised by the Israeli military command of which Gantz was a core member. The aim is to lay waste to the modern infrastructure of Israel’s neighbours, forcing survivors to eke out a bare existence rather than resist Israel.
The collective punishment inherent in the apocalyptic Dahiya doctrine is an undoubted war crime.
More particularly, the video exults in the destruction of Rafah, a city in Gaza that suffered the most intense bout of bombing after an Israeli soldier was seized by Hamas. In minutes, Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment killed at least 135 Palestinian civilians and wrecked a hospital.
According to investigations, Israel had invoked the Hannibal Procedure, the code name for an order allowing the army to use any means to stop one of its soldiers being taken. That includes killing civilians as “collateral damage” and, more controversially for Israelis, the soldier himself.
Gantz’s video flashes up a grand total of “1,364 terrorists killed”, in return for “three-and-a-half years of quiet”. As Israel’s liberal Haaretz daily observed, the video “celebrates a body count as if this were just some computer game”.
But the casualty figure cited by Gantz exceeds even the Israel army’s self-serving assessment – as well, of course, as dehumanising those “terrorists” fighting for their freedom.
A more impartial observer, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, estimates that the Palestinian fighters killed by Israel amounted to 765. By their reckoning, and that of other bodies such as the United Nations, almost two-thirds of Gazans killed in Israel’s 2014 operation were civilians.
Further, the “quiet” Gantz credits himself with was enjoyed chiefly by Israel.
In Gaza, Palestinians faced regular military attacks, a continuing siege choking off essential supplies and destroying their export industries, and a policy of executions by Israeli snipers firing on unarmed demonstrators at the perimeter fence imprisoning the enclave.
Gantz’s campaign slogans “Only the Strong Wins” and “Israel Before Everything” are telling. Everything, for Gantz, clearly includes human rights.
It is shameful enough that he believes his track record of war crimes will win over voters. But the same approach has been voiced by Israel’s new military chief of staff.
Aviv Kochavi, nicknamed the Philosopher Officer for his university studies, was inaugurated this month as the army’s latest head. In a major speech, he promised to reinvent the fabled “most moral army in the world” into a “deadly, efficient” one.
In Kochavi’s view, the rampaging military once overseen by Gantz needs to step up its game. And he is a proven expert in destruction.
In the early stages of the Palestinian uprising that erupted in 2000, the Israeli army struggled to find a way to crush Palestinian fighters concealed in densely crowded cities under occupation.
Kochavi came up with an ingenious solution in Nablus, where he was brigade commander. The army would invade a Palestinian home, then smash through its walls, moving from house to house, burrowing through the city unseen. Palestinian space was not only usurped, but destroyed inside-out.
Gantz, the former general hoping to lead the government, and Kochavi, the general leading its army, are symptoms of just how complete the militaristic logic that has overtaken Israel really is. An Israel determined to become a modern-day Sparta.
Should he bring about Netanyahu’s downfall, Gantz, like his predecessor politician-generals, will turn out to be a hollow peace-maker. He was trained to understand only strength, zero-sum strategies, conquest and destruction, not compassion or compromise.
More dangerously, Gantz’s glorification of his military past is likely to reinforce in Israelis’ minds the need not for peace but for more of the same: support for an ultranationalist right that bathes itself in an ethnic supremacist philosophy and dismisses any recognition of the Palestinians as human beings with rights.
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A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Anti-government protests in Venezuela that seek regime change have been led by several individuals and organizations with close ties to the US government. Leopoldo Lopez and Maria Corina Machado– two of the public leaders behind the violent protests that started in February – have long histories as collaborators, grantees and agents of Washington. The National Endowment for Democracy “NED” and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) have channeled multi-million dollar funding to Lopez’s political parties Primero Justicia and Voluntad Popular, and Machado’s NGO Sumate and her electoral campaigns.
These Washington agencies have also filtered more than $14 million to opposition groups in Venezuela between 2013 and 2014, including funding for their political campaigns in 2013 and for the current anti-government protests in 2014. This continues the pattern of financing from the US government to anti-Chavez groups in Venezuela since 2001, when millions of dollars were given to organizations from so-called “civil society” to execute a coup d’etat against President Chavez in April 2002. After their failure days later, USAID opened an Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) in Caracas to, together with the NED, inject more than $100 million in efforts to undermine the Chavez government and reinforce the opposition during the following 8 years.
At the beginning of 2011, after being publically exposed for its grave violations of Venezuelan law and sovereignty, the OTI closed its doors inVenezuela and USAID operations were transferred to its offices in the US. The flow of money to anti-government groups didn’t stop, despite the enactment by Venezuela’s National Assembly of the Law of Political Sovereignty and NationalSelf-Determination at the end of 2010, which outright prohibits foreign funding of political groups in the country. US agencies and the Venezuelan groups that receive their money continue to violate the law with impunity. In the Obama Administration’s Foreign Operations Budgets, between $5-6 million have been included to fund opposition groups in Venezuela through USAID since 2012.
The NED, a “foundation” created by Congress in 1983 to essentially do the CIA’s work overtly, has been one of the principal financiers of destabilization in Venezuela throughout the Chavez administration and now against President Maduro. According to NED’s 2013 annual report, the agency channeled more than $2.3 million to Venezuelan opposition groups and projects. Within that figure, $1,787,300 went directly to anti-government groups within Venezuela, while another $590,000 was distributed to regional organizations that work with and fund the Venezuelan opposition. More than $300,000 was directed towards efforts to develop a new generation of youth leaders to oppose Maduro’s government politically.
One of the groups funded by NED to specifically work with youth is FORMA (see this), an organization led by Cesar Briceño and tied to Venezuelan banker Oscar Garcia Mendoza. Garcia Mendoza runs the Banco Venezolano de Credito, a Venezuelan bank that has served as the filter for the flow of dollars from NED and USAID to opposition groups in Venezuela, including Sumate, CEDICE, Sin Mordaza, Observatorio Venezolano de Prisiones and FORMA, amongst others.
Another significant part of NED funds in Venezuela from 2013-2014 was given to groups and initiatives that work in media and run the campaign to discredit the government of President Maduro. Some of the more active media organizations outwardly opposed to Maduro and receiving NED funds include Espacio Publico, Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (IPYS), Sin Mordaza and GALI. Throughout the past year, an unprecedented media war has been waged against the Venezuelan government and President Maduro directly, which has intensified during the past few months of protests.
In direct violation of Venezuelan law, NED also funded the opposition coalition, the Democratic Unity Table (MUD), via the US International Republican Institute (IRI), with $100,000 to “share lessons learned with [anti-government groups] in Nicaragua, Argentina and Bolivia…and allow for the adaption of the Venezuelan experience in these countries”. Regarding this initiative, the NED 2013 annual report specifically states its aim: “To develop the ability of political and civil society actors from Nicaragua, Argentina and Bolivia to work on national, issue-based agendas for their respective countries using lessons learned and best practices from successful Venezuelan counterparts. The Institute will facilitate an exchange of experiences between the Venezuelan Democratic Unity Roundtable and counterparts in Bolivia, Nicaragua and Argentina. IRI will bring these actors together through a series of tailored activities that will allow for the adaptation of the Venezuelan experience in these countries.”
IRI has helped to build right-wing opposition parties Primero Justicia and Voluntad Popular, and has worked with the anti-government coaltion in Venezuela since before the 2002 coup d’etat against Chavez. In fact, IRI’s president at that time, George Folsom, outwardly applauded the coup and celebrated IRI’s role in a press release claiming,
“The Institute has served as a bridge between the nation’s political parties and all civil society groups to help Venezuelans forge a new democratic future…”
Detailed in a report published by the Spanish institute FRIDE in 2010, international agencies that fund the Venezuelan opposition violate currency control laws in order to get their dollars to the recipients. Also confirmed in the FRIDE report was the fact that the majority of international agencies, with the exception of the European Commission, are bringing in foreign money and changing it on the black market, in clear violation of Venezuelan law. In some cases, as the FRIDE analysis reports, the agencies open bank accounts abroad for the Venezuelan groups or they bring them the money in hard cash. The US Embassy in Caracas could also use the diplomatic pouch to bring large quantities of unaccounted dollars and euros into the country that are later handed over illegally to anti-government groups in Venezuela.
What is clear is that the US government continues to feed efforts to destabilize Venezuela in clear violation of law. Stronger legal measures and enforcement may be necessary to ensure the sovereignty and defense of Venezuela’s democracy.
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Featured image is from Postcards from the Revolution
Indian-Australian connections are particularly noteworthy now with the Indian cricket team finally beating Australia in a Test series in Australia, and vastly more importantly, increasing Indian trade with Australia and substantial Indian immigration to Australia. 26 January is Indian Republic Day that commemorates replacement of colonial British rules by the adoption of the Indian Constitution on 26 January 1950, and a formal End to Britain’s 2-century Indian Holocaust and Indian Genocide. Conversely, 26 January is also Australia Day but commemorates the British invasion of Australia on 26 January 1788 and the Start of the ongoing Australian Aboriginal Genocide and Aboriginal Ethnocide.
While Indian Independence Day (15 August) marks the anniversary of Indian Independence from the British on 15 August 1947, India’s Republic Day commemorates the adoption of the Constitution of an independent Indian republic on 26 January 1950. Thus according to Wikipedia:
“Republic Day honours the date on which the Constitution of India came into effect on 26 January 1950 replacing the Government of India Act (1935) as the governing document of India. The Constitution was adopted by the Indian Constituent Assembly on 26 November 1949, and came into effect on 26 January 1950 with a democratic government system, completing the country’s transition towards becoming an independent republic. 26 January was chosen as the Republic day because it was on this day in 1930 when Declaration of Indian Independence (Purna Swaraj) was proclaimed by the Indian National Congress as opposed to the Dominion status offered by British Regime” [1].
Thus Indian Republic Day marks the formal rules-based independence of India from the brutal and genocidally racist rule of its former colonial master, Britain. Whereas Australia Day marks the Start of over 2 centuries of Anglo-imposed Aboriginal Genocide and Aboriginal Ethnocide, Indian Republic Day marks the formal, constitutional End to over 2 centuries of genocidally racist British rule in India.
Britain’s 2-century Indian Holocaust and Indian Genocide
Before British invasion in the mid-18th century, India was responsible for about a quarter of world GDP. However under the genocidally racist British, India’s share of the world economy declined from 24.4% in 1700 to 4.2% in 1950. India’s share of global industrial output declined from 25% in 1750 to 2% in 1900 [2]. From available data on India’s GDP and India’s share of world GDP since 1700 [3, 4], one can crudely estimate that if India had remained free with 24% of world GDP as in 1700 then its cumulative GDP would have been $232 trillion greater (1700-2003) and $44 trillion greater (1700-1950) [5]. Eminent Indian economist Professor Utsa Patnaik (Jawaharlal Nehru University) has estimated that Britain robbed India of $45 trillion between 1765 and 1938 [6-8].
The massive larceny of the British in India was massively deadly because tens of million British were only able to rule several hundred million Indians by keeping them close to the edge of starvation and employing millions of well-fed Indian soldiers (sepoys) to keep control [9]. Addressing the House of Commons in 1935, racist, imperialist and mass murderer Winston Churchill made an extraordinary confession in stating of the subjugated Indians:
“In the standard of life they have nothing to spare. The slightest fall from the present standard of life in India means slow starvation, and the actual squeezing out of life, not only of millions but of scores of millions of people, who have come into the world at your invitation and under the shield and protection of British power” [9, 10, 11].
7 years later in the WW2 Bengali Holocaust (WW2 Indian Holocaust, WW2 Bengal Famine) atrocity Churchill commenced the deliberate starving to death over 4 years of 6-7 million Indians in Bengal, Orissa, Bihar and Assam as the British exported grain from India and slashed grain imports [9, 11-22]. Australia was complicit in the WW2 Bengali Holocaust by keeping grain from it huge wartime wheat stores from starving India [14]
Imposed poverty kills. Poverty-derived avoidable mortality (avoidable death, excess mortality, excess death, premature death, untimely death, deaths that should not have happened) can be estimated as the difference between the actual deaths in a country and the deaths expected for a peaceful, decently governed country with same demographics (birth rate and percentage of children) [22]. Using Indian census data 1870-1950, assuming an Indian population of about 200 million in the period 1760-1870, and estimating by interpolation from available data an Indian avoidable death rate in (deaths per 1,000 of population) of 37 (1757-1920), 35 (1920-1930), 30 (1930-1940) and 24 (1940-1950), one can estimate Indian excess deaths of 592 million (1757-1837), 497 million (1837-1901) and 418 million (1901-1947), roughly 1.5 billion in total or 1.8 billion including the Native States [21, 22]. This atrocity is a holocaust (a huge number of people killed) and a genocide (acts committed with intent to destroy a group in whole or in part).
Despite a very high birth rate, the Indian population did not increase between 1860 (292 million) and 1934 (292 million) [23]. This is indicative of massive avoidable deaths from imposed deprivation that can be estimated as 745 million (1860-1934) or an average of about 10 million Indian avoidable deaths from deprivation per year [24]. Shashi Tharoor in his book “Inglorious Empire. What the British did to India” states that “The British left a society with 16 per cent literacy, a life expectancy of 27, practically no domestic industry and over 90 per cent living below what today we would call the poverty line” ([24], page 215 [25]). The life expectancy of 27 years thus corresponded to about 10 million Indian avoidable deaths from deprivation per year.
Today after nearly 72 years after Indian Independence and 69 years after the End of British rules through the adoption of the Constitution of India, things have improved considerably in India. The life expectancy in India is now 69 years (27 years in 1947) and avoidable deaths as a percentage of population is now 0.4% (as compared to a genocidal 2.4% in 1940-1950) [14]. India has a lot to celebrate on Indian Republic Day 2019. However despite immense progress since the End of genocidal British rule, India still has a long way to go. Thus in present day India (population 1.3 billion) about 4 million people die avoidably from deprivation each year as compared to zero (0) in China, a pluralist one-party state that has abolished endemic poverty [22].
At this point it is useful to again consider the terms “holocaust” and “genocide” used here. “Holocausts” involve the deaths of huge numbers of people and indeed this term was first applied to a WW2 atrocity by N. G. Jog in 1944 [11] in relation to the WW2 Bengali Holocaust in which 6-7 million Indians were deliberately starved to death by the British with Australian complicity [9, 11-22]. The term “Holocaust” has become synonymous with the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million Jews killed through violence or imposed deprivation) that was part of a wider WW2 European Holocaust (30 million Slavs, Jews and Gypsies killed) [22]. While denial of the WW2 Jewish Holocaust is criminalized in Apartheid Israel and some European countries, the WW2 Bengali Holocaust (WW2 Indian Holocaust, WW2 Bengal Famine), the wider WW2 European Holocaust, and the WW2 Chinese Holocaust (35 million Chinese killed under the Japanese, 1937-1945) [22, 26] are overwhelmingly ignored in the West. Holocaust ignoring and genocide ignoring are far, far worse than repugnant holocaust denial and genocide denial because the latter can at least invite public refutation and public debate.
“Genocide” is defined by Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention thus:
“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” [27].
Clearly the passive mass murder of 1.8 billion Indians by the British is both an Indian Holocaust and an Indian Genocide. One notes that violent mass murder of Indians also occurred under the British. Thus Amaresh Misra has estimated that 10 million Indians may have been killed by the British in reprisals for 2,000 British deaths in the Indian Rebellion (Indian Mutiny) of 1857 [28, 29] . In relation to “intent to destroy”, in 1857 British popular writer Charles Dickens advocated the total extermination of the Indian people: “It is my intention, with all possible avoidance of unnecessary cruelty and with all merciful swiftness of execution, to exterminate the Race from the face of the earth, which disfigured the earth with the late abominable atrocities” [30, 31].
2-century Anglo-imposed Australian Aboriginal Genocide and Aboriginal Ethnocide
While on 26 January all Indians celebrate the End of British-imposed genocide, on the same day most Australians are celebrating the arrival of the British “First Fleet” i.e. the British invasion of Australia on 26 January 1788 that was the Start of an ongoing Aboriginal Genocide and Aboriginal Ethnocide.
Indigenous Australians object strongly to Australia’s National Day celebrations being held on the anniversary of the Start of the Aboriginal Genocide. Just imagine the outrage if Germany’s National Day were held on the anniversary of Kristallnacht (November 9 to November 10, 1938) when Nazi gangs in Germany burned synagogues, smashed windows in attacking Jewish homes, schools and businesses, and killed about 100 Jews [32]. In the subsequent WW2 Jewish Holocaust 5-6 million Jews were killed through violence or imposed deprivation [22, 32]. In the Australian Aboriginal Genocide (1788 to the present) about 0.1 million Indigenous Australians were killed violently and about 2 million died from deprivation and introduced disease [33, 34].
The Indigenous population dropped from about 1 million to 0.1 million in the first century after the invasion in 1788, mainly through violence, dispossession, deprivation and introduced disease. The last massacres of Aborigines occurred in the late 1920s in Central Australia in the Coniston Massacre [33-46]. Throughout much of the 20th century there was a policy of forcibly removing Aboriginal children (especially mixed race children) from their mothers, a systematic genocidal policy involving the removal of perhaps 0.1 million children (the Stolen Generations). This practice ended in the 1970s, and in 2008 Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd offered a formal apology, but removal of Aboriginal children from their mothers continues (albeit for ostensibly different reasons) at a record rate [47-49], leading Kevin Rudd to warn of a “second stolen generation”) [48].
Before the British invasion in 1788 there were 350-750 different Indigenous Australian (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) tribes and a similar number of languages and dialects, of which only 150 survive today and of these all but about 20 are endangered in a process of continuing Australian Aboriginal Ethnocide and Cultural Genocide of remaining Indigenous Australian societies [33]. Removal of Aboriginal children from their mothers and communities, removal of Federal and State government support for remote Aboriginal communities, and substantial removal of instruction of Aboriginal children in their own language are all ultra-conservative measures that threaten destruction of most of the surviving Aboriginal languages and dialects. According to a recent study (2009): “At the end of 2008 the Northern Territory Government, supported by the Commonwealth Government, all but closed bilingual education in remote Indigenous schools by determining that the language of instruction for the first four hours of school must be English. This decision could spell the death of the remaining endangered Indigenous languages in Australia” [50].
Indigenous Australian avoidable deaths from deprivation as a percentage of Indigenous population on a global comparative scale was recently estimated at 0.6% , noting that Indigenous Australia has a much higher proportion of children than non-Indigenous Australia [34]. With an Indigenous population of about 800,000, this means that about 5,000 Indigenous Australians die from deprivation each year. [33]. An alternative recent assessment of avoidable Indigenous Australian death rate comes from “Closing the Gap. Prime Minister’s Report 2018” (Figure 28, page 105 [51]) – the Indigenous death rate is 1,000 per 100,000 of population pa whereas the non-Indigenous death rate is 540 per 100,000 pa, with the difference, 460 per 100,000 pa being the Indigenous avoidable death rate. On this basis the Indigenous avoidable death rate is 0.46% pa or about 0.5% per year. By way of comparison, the avoidable death rate from deprivation as a percentage of population in impoverished India is 0.4% pa and 1.0% pa in deeply impoverished non-Arab Africa [22]. The life expectancy for Indigenous Australians is about 10 years less than for non-Indigenous Australians.
Indigenous Australians were excluded from citizenship and subject to gross human rights violation until a Referendum in 1967 (that allowed the Federal Government to make laws about Indigenous Australians and allowed them to be counted whereas formerly they were counted under a Fauna and Flora Act), the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act (that was subsequently flouted by the 2008 military invasion of Northern Territory Indigenous communities ) and the 1992 Mabo Decision of the High Court that overturned the notion of “terra nullius” (Australia as an empty land to be colonized), recognized native title for the first time, and ultimately resulted in qualified land rights, mainly in arid and remote areas. Effective slavery of surviving Indigenous people on huge rural estates on stolen land involved “wages” of sugar, tea and tobacco and exposure to the core White Australian alcohol abuse culture with present day consequences of a type 2 diabetes epidemic (with attendant obesity, cardiovascular, kidney and eye problems), alcohol-fuelled domestic violence, and huge preventable deaths and morbidity associated with smoking and drinking [34]. There are appalling differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Health. Thus Australia is the only advanced country with trachoma (an eye disease that is endemic in remote communities). Macular degeneration in the eyes is rare among Indigenous Australians because they mostly do not live long enough to acquire it [51, 52]. Compared to non-Indigenous Australians , Indigenous Australians suffer from overcrowded and substandard housing, have much higher unemployment, and have a disproportionately 10-fold higher representation in prisons.
Poverty kills and the estimated per capita income for Indigenous Australians is US $22,000 as compared to US$54,000 for Australia as a whole (0.8 million Indigenous Australians represent about 3% of the Australian population of 25 million) [34]. About 5,000 Indigenous Australians die avoidably from deprivation each year in a continuing Aboriginal Genocide.
Final comments
There is furious debate in Australia about celebrating Australia Day on the Start date for the continuing Aboriginal Genocide and Aboriginal Ethnocide. Indigenous Australians and a large body of decent Green, Socialist and Labor Left sympathizers object to the present highly offensive celebration on 26 January and cry “Change the date!”. Australian citizenship ceremonies have been held on Australia Day for 2 decades by local government, but several decent local government councils around Australia have consulted with their Indigenous inhabitants and resolved to hold these ceremonies on a non-offending day. However the extreme right wing and jingoistic Liberal Party-National Party Coalition Government led by populist PM Scott “Scomo” Morrison has responded by removing the right to hold such ceremonies from the decent councils. The Greens have responded by offering to hold such ceremonies on behalf of such “banned” councils on the basis of advice from the Parliamentary Library that MPs and senators can do this under present regulations [54]. However Rightwing Labor Opposition leader Bill Shorten (and extremely likely new Australian PM after the May 2019 Federal election) favours retention of Australia Day on 26 January, while rejecting the Coalition Government’s ban on informal dress for such ceremonies: “It will remain on the 26th of January. Having a national day is a good idea… People want to be left alone on Australia Day. I don’t want to be the fashion police telling people what they can wear at citizenship ceremonies” [55].
Meanwhile the Indigenous Australians will continue to hold Invasion Day rallies around Australia on 26 January in the face of intransigent, ignorant, offensive, look-the-other-way, and just plain stupid Mainstream Australian insensitivity to the horrible reality of over 2 centuries of Anglo Aboriginal Genocide and Aboriginal Ethnocide regardless of how offensive, racist and absurd this intransigence appears to decent folk around the world. While on 26 January India celebrates Republic Day and the formal End of British-imposed genocide, look-the-other-way White Australia offensively and shamelessly continues to celebrate Australia Day on the anniversary of the Start of the ongoing Australian Aboriginal Genocide and Aboriginal Ethnocide that represents the worst ever genocidal atrocity in human history from a qualitative perspective. Poor fellow my country.
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Dr Gideon Polya taught science students at a major Australian university for 4 decades. He published some 130 works in a 5 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text “Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds” (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London , 2003).
[6]. Utsa Patnaik in Arindam Banerjee and C. P. Chandrasekhar, editors, “Dispossession, Deprivation, and Development. Essays for Utsa Patnaik, Columbia University Press, 2018.
[9]. Gideon Polya, “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History. Colonial rapacity, holocaust denial and the crisis in biological sustainability”, G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 1998, 2008 that is now available for free perusal on the web: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/.
[10]. Winston Churchill, speech to the House of Commons about Indians (1935); 1. Hansard of the House of Commons, Winston Churchill speech, Hansard Vol. 302, cols. 1920-21, 1935.
[11]. N. G. Jog, “Churchill’s Blind-Spot: India”, New Book Company, Bombay, 1944 (Winston Churchill quoted on p195).
[12]. K.C. Ghosh, “Famines in Bengal 1770-1943” (National Council of Education, Calcutta, 2nd edition 1987).
[13]. T. Das, T. (1949), “Bengal Famine (1943) as Revealed in a Survey of Destitutes of Calcutta”, University of Calcutta, Calcutta, 1949.
[14]. Gideon Polya, “Australia And Britain Killed 6-7 Million Indians In WW2 Bengal Famine”, Countercurrents, 29 September, 2011: https://countercurrents.org/polya290911.htm.
[16]. Amartya Sen, “Famine Mortality: A Study of the Bengal Famine of 1943” in Hobshawn, E. (1981) (editor), Peasants In History. Essays in Honour of David Thorner (Oxford University Press, New Delhi).
[17]. Cormac O Grada (2009) “Famine a short history” (Princeton University Press, 2009).
[18]. Madhusree Muckerjee (2010), “Churchill’s Secret War. The British Empire and the ravaging of India during World War II” (Basic Books, New York, 2010).
[19]. Thomas Keneally (2011), “Three Famines” (Vintage House, Australia, 2011).
[20]. Paul Greenough (1982),“Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal: the Famine of 1943-1944” (Oxford University Press, 1982).
[21]. Gideon Polya, “Economist Mahima Khanna, Cambridge Stevenson Prize And Dire Indian Poverty”, Countercurrents, 20 November, 2011: https://countercurrents.org/polya201111.htm.
[22]. “Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”, including an avoidable mortality-related history of every country from Neolithic times and is now available for free perusal on the web : http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com.au/.
[30]. Gideon Polya, “Genocidal Racist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), Indian Holocaust And UK – US Muslim Genocide”, Countercurrents, 10 February, 2012: https://countercurrents.org/polya100212.htm
[40]. Chalk, F. and Jonassohn, K. (1990), “The History and Sociology of Genocide. Analyses and Case Studies” (Yale University Press, New Haven & London), “The Tasmanians”, pp204-222.
[42]. Gideon Polya, “Review: “The Cambridge History Of Australia” Ignores Australian Involvement In 30 Genocides”, Countercurrents, 14 October, 2013: https://www.countercurrents.org/polya141013.htm.
For the approximately 200 Canadian military trainers currently deployed to Ukraine, it is likely that on the first of January they would have witnessed a torch lit procession. Throughout Kiev and numerous other towns in Western Ukraine, thousands of civilians took to the streets – not to usher in the New Year – but to celebrate the 110th anniversary of the birth of a man named Stepan Bandera.
This was not the first time Ukrainian nationalists marched with torches to celebrate Bandera’s birthday, but it was the first time such a spectacle was an officially sanctioned affair.
On December 28, 2018, Ukrainian Parliament passed Resolution 9234, which, among several other notable dates, made January 1 a formal holiday in Ukraine.
The city of Lviv, which was Bandera’s birthplace, went one step further by declaring 2019 to be the ‘Year of Stepan Bandera’.
Ukrainian Independent News Agency (UNIAN) described Bandera as “a Ukrainian politician, one of the ideologists and theorists of the Ukrainian nationalists movement in the 20th Century.”
Missing from this abbreviated resume is the fact that during World War II, Bandera was not only a Nazi collaborator, but also a direct participant in Hitler’s Holocaust.
Israel’s ambassador to Ukraine, Joel Lion published a statement announcing that he was “shocked” by this official honouring of a notorious Nazi. “I cannot understand how the glorification of those directly involved in horrible anti-Semitic crimes help fight anti-Semitism and xenophobia,” wrote Lion.
In June 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Bandera was the Chairman of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). The Nazis saw Bandera and his fellow Ukrainian nationalists as natural allies in defeating the Soviets. In advance of the invasion, these ex-patriots were armed and equipped by the Germans and formed into a special unit called the Nachtigall battalion.
Roman Shukhevych was the commander of Nachtigall and he, like Bandera is currently revered as a Ukrainian nationalist hero. Unfortunately for their thousands of victims both Shukhevych and Bandera were bloodthirsty anti-Semites.
For several days at the end of June 1941, when Nachtigall had captured Lviv from the Soviets, a brutal extermination of Jews took place in the city. An estimated 4,000 – 6,000 Jews were slain in an orgy of bloodletting that shocked even the Nazi Germans.
Ambassador Lion noted that Bandera and Shukhevych are currently seen by many Ukrainians as “heroes who fought for Ukraine’s independence; whereas they were both historically a horror for the Jews.”
When the fortunes of war turned against Hitler, both Bandera and Shukevych turned against the Germans, and then in turn resisted the Soviets.
After Ukraine gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, their initial collaboration with the Nazis and participation in the slaughter of Ukrainian Jews prevented Bandera and Shukevych from being considered national role models. However, much to the consternation of the Jews, and the Poles – whom Bandera’s OUN also massacred in the thousands – over the past three decades history in Ukraine has been revised.
At the time of the Maidan uprising in 2014, the spirit of Bandera was revived by the right wing, ultra-nationalists, and, just five years later, his past crimes have been whitewashed to the point where his date of birth is a national holiday.
In Canada, we have been joining in exactly the opposite direction with regard to re-assessing our historical figures. Only last year, the City of Halifax removed a statue of Lord Cornwallis from a central park.
He is still recognized as the founder of Halifax, but his policy of putting a bounty on the Mi’kmaq tribe was deemed contemptible in retrospect. Therefore, his likeness is no longer afforded public reverence.
Canada is committing military resources to the government in Kiev. Surely this does not amount to a blank cheque wherein Canada’s Global Affairs refrain from criticizing such a questionable policy as that of glorifying a Nazi with an official holiday? A good friendship often requires a good dose of plain talk and bad manners.
In this case, Canada would be wise to side with the Israelis and the Poles in condemning torch-lit parades to commemorate the birthday of a man responsible for slaughtering Jews.
One of the justifications for our military trainers being in Ukraine is to defend and support Canadian values. Last time I checked, Canadians still reviled Nazis.
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Donald Trump is no different than his predecessors. During the campaign, he said whatever he had to in order to get elected. He promised to close down the neocon foreign wars and also fight the “deep state” by draining the swamp.
Obama also promised to end the neocon wars, but that was said with the same insincerity as his predecessor, George W. Bush, who said in 2000 he wasn’t into nation building and foreign entanglements.
It is now obvious, with the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s appointment of convicted criminal Elliott Abrams as his “point person” on Venezuela, that the neocons have taken full control of Trump’s foreign policy.
“This crisis in Venezuela is deep and difficult and dangerous and I can’t wait to get to work on it,” said Abrams after Pompeo made the announcement.
Recall the role Mr. Abrams played during the Reagan years. He helped fund the Contras in Nicaragua and is linked to the 1982 El Mozote massacre of hundreds of civilians in El Salvador. It was later estimated by a UN truth commission that 85 percent of the abuses during the civil war in El Salvador were committed by military death squads assisted by the Reagan administration.
Abrams has experience overthrowing government’s not following the neoliberal master plan. In 2002, during the Bush neocon regime, Abrams worked on a failed Venezuelan coup. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez was jailed. Supporters and a loyal military freed Chávez and likely saved him from what would later be known as the Gaddafi method of deposing disfavored leaders refusing to follow neoliberal strictures as pushed by the Council on Foreign Relations where Abrams is a senior fellow.
Rex Tillerson wanted to bring Abrams on board at the State Department, but Trump wouldn’t go for it because Abrams opposed his election and was a prominent fixture of the Never Trump movement. Now that Tillerson is gone—after characterizing Trump as a moron, but for the wrong reason—and neocons Pompeo and Bolton are in place, we can conclude that the neocon takeover of the Trump administration is all but complete. The final act is impeaching or forcing Trump’s resignation so the more amenable (for neocons) Christian Zionist Mike Pence can sit on the ceremonial throne.
“Next time, in 2020, we’ll have had 12 years of Obama and Clinton, Hillary will be in her mid-seventies, Trump will be gone, and a new generation of Republican leaders like Rubio and Cruz and Ryan and Cotton and Haley and Sasse will still be in their forties,” Abrams said in 2016.
Trump will be left to fight off endless attacks by Democrats trying to unseat him. His major campaign promise—to build the wall—will go unrealized and he will go down as one of the more ineffective presidents in US history.
Meanwhile, US foreign policy continues uninterrupted, never mind the minor turbulence of Trump declaring (again) that he will get US troops out of Syria and Afghanistan.
Bolton, Pompeo, and Abrams are in control. The wars will continue, expand—adding Iran and Venezuela to the forever war roster—and the people will be left to stand on the sidelines, ill-informed and distracted by lesser staged events.
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do,” said Karl Rove, the Bush administration fixer and former Nixon dirty trickster.
It is unknown at this point what the neocon triumvirate—Bolton, Pompeo, Abrams—will do in regard to Venezuela. For now, the US has declared the “military option” (of murder and mayhem) is “on the table” in response to re-election of Nicholás Maduro. The heavy lifting will be left to the Lima Group—Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay and Peru—and these countries may be used to inflict a “humanitarian intervention” on the people of Venezuela.
The Organization of American States has not backed the neocon and Lima Group effort to evict Maduro and return the oil-rich nation to the neoliberal orbit. It cites the OAS Charter of 1948. Article 19, Chapter IV states:
“No State or group of States has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other State. The foregoing principle prohibits not only armed force but also any other form of interference or attempted threat against the personality of the State or against its political, economic, and cultural elements.”
For a large number of Trump supporters, making America Great Again means continuing the imperial objectives of the empire—installing preferred satraps (Juan Guaidó in Venezuela) or those tolerable to Wall Street and the Chicago School version of neoliberalism.
The hypocrisy is palatable. Trump and his diehard supporters stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Democrat “Resistance” and the “liberal” media in regard to Venezuela.
“It is revealing how the supposedly anti-Trump media have closed ranks and are marching in lockstep with the administration when it comes to overthrowing Washington’s official enemies. The media are not opposing Trump or tyranny; they are enabling it,” writesAlan MacLeod.
There is very little pushback inside the United States over these grossly illegal and immoral interventions. The Trump faithful has demonstrated repeatedly there are few differences between them and the “libtards” when the issue is supporting the financial elite and their crimes.
War becomes “humanitarian” when you put the right face on it. That’s why Obama got away with killing Gaddafi in Libya and destroying Syria while maintaining the empire’s footprint in Iraq and Afghanistan. Like Reagan, he excelled at manipulating the American public.
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Despite Trump’s attempt to paint the Texas-Mexico border as a war zone, border counties are safer than the president’s own backyard. And local lawmen don’t believe a wall will do any good.
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President Trump visited McAllen earlier this month to drum up support for spending $5.7 billion to build more border wall segments on the U.S.-Mexico border. He staged a press conference surrounded by piles of confiscated drugs, guns and cash, describing the situation at the border as “a national emergency.” With the government partially shut down over Trump’s funding dispute with Congress, the president is trying to prove that there’s a new, growing “crisis” on the border to pressure Democrats to cave. But law enforcement leaders in at least two border counties, including the sheriff who patrols McAllen, say the picture Trump is painting of the Texas borderlands is inaccurate.
Hidalgo County Sheriff J.E. “Eddie” Guerra, who is in charge of policing the largest and most populous county in the Rio Grande Valley, said that crime rates in his county are at record lows, and that illegal immigration has very little effect on the safety of residents. Meanwhile, Brewster County Sheriff Ronny Dodson, who is responsible for policing the largest county in Texas, said he doesn’t support the construction of a wall along any part of the 192-mile stretch of border in Brewster County, which includes Big Bend National Park.
“Because we’re on the border, the perception is that there’s murders every day and there’s shootings every day. Yet here in our county, we don’t have that going on. It’s very, very safe,” Guerra told the Observer.
In Hidalgo County, about 20 miles of wall already exist. GUS BOVA
But don’t take the sheriffs’ word for it. In 2017 (the latest year for which data is available), there were 4.4 murders per 100,000 people in Hidalgo County — about half the rate of other metro areas in Texas and a quarter of the murder rate in Washington, D.C. It’s also lower than the 6.3 murders per 100,000 people in 2017 in Palm Beach County, Florida, where Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort is located.
In addition to fewer murders, the violent crime and property crime rates in Hidalgo County are less than half of what they were in 1999. Guerra, a Democrat who has lived in the RGV his entire life, said the majority of immigrants entering the county without papers are Central American asylum-seekers fleeing violence and poverty who turn themselves over to Border Patrol agents as soon as they can.
“They’re averaging, here in the Rio Grande Valley sector, about 600 apprehensions a day. Most are family units. These family units and unaccompanied children pose exactly zero security threat in the county,” Guerra said.
Guerra’s observations are reflected in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data: Since September, families and unaccompanied children have made up more than half of Border Patrol apprehensions. And apprehensions across the entire U.S.-Mexico border are down significantly over the last 20 years, with the number of migrants apprehended in the Rio Grande Valley falling by 44 percent from 1997 to 2017.
Since September 2018, families and unaccompanied children have made up more than half of all border apprehensions. U.S. CUSTOMS AND BORDER PROTECTION
“This is what’s been going on for years. I’m not going to argue that we have a secure border, because we don’t, but to say that all of the sudden we have a crisis going on is wrong,” Guerra said.
Five hundred miles northwest, Brewster County Sheriff Ronny Dodson says he’s seeing a similar trend. Dodson, a Democrat who has been in the post since 2001, said the migrants apprehended in his county tend to be asylum-seekers from Central America fleeing some of the most dangerous countries in the world. In 2017, the number of apprehensions in the Big Bend sector, which includes Brewster County, was less than half of what it was in 2000.
“The Guatemalans and Hondurans are not carrying drugs,” Dodson said. “For the most part, they just go on through.”
Trump has claimed in speeches and tweets that a wall would “have a huge impact on the inflow of drugs coming across” the border. But data shows this is unlikely. The majority of hard drugs, like cocaine, fentanyl and heroin, are smuggled through the mail or through ports of entry, not by individuals crossing the border illegally. The amount of marijuana seized along the U.S.-Mexico border has dropped in recent years, especially in California, where voters legalized the sale of cannabis in 2016. In other words, a wall wouldn’t do much to stem the trafficking of drugs into the United States; however, it would require the federal government to seize land along the border, a move Dodson vehemently opposes.
“We have a river, and we don’t want to cut ourselves off from that river. I know there’s a better way,” said Dodson, who told the Observer in 2014 he wished politicians like Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick would “shut up” about the border.
In Hidalgo County, about 20 miles of wall already exist. Funding for 33 more miles of border wall (25 of which will be in Hidalgo County) was approved by Congress in March, and construction is slated to start as early as next month. Guerra said that spending billions to build more border wall in his county would be a waste, partially because migrants would still find a way across.
“First of all, we already have one physical barrier, that’s the Rio Grande. To cross it, [migrants] use a raft. To cross a 22-foot-high fence, they’ll use a ladder,” Guerra said, adding that federal money would be better spent on improving technology at ports and hiring more Border Patrol agents.
Both Guerra and Dodson believe that hiring additional qualified Border Patrol agents, who work with local law enforcement, is the best way to bolster border security. The number of Border Patrol agents along the U.S.-Mexico border nearly doubled between 2000 and 2017, turning the area into one of the most surveilled and policed parts of the nation.
But recruiting new Border Patrol agents has been a challenge for CBP in recent years. Trump signed an executive order in January 2017 requiring the agency to increase its numbers by 5,000 agents. Despite “aggressive” recruiting, thousands of positions still remain open. In fact, CPB is now losing more agents than it can hire annually, thanks to competition from other Department of Homeland Security agencies, like Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which pays agents more and places them in more desirable locations.
Ironically, with the government shut down over Trump’s border wall beef with Congress, at least 200 Border Patrol agents have been furloughed in the RGV, where Guerra says they are desperately needed. Nationwide, more than 54,000 CBP employees are working without pay.
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Kate Groetzinger is a legislative fellow at the Texas Observer. She is also a second-year master’s candidate in the journalism program at The University of Texas at Austin, where she is focusing on audio reporting and podcasting. A native Texan, Kate hails from Waco and has lived in Houston, San Antonio and Austin.
Featured image: Hidalgo County Sheriff J.E. “Eddie” Guerra (left), Brewster County Sheriff Ronny Dodson (Photos courtesy of Facebook, CC, Illustration by Sonny Sone)
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro accuses the United States of trying to orchestrate a coup against him, and that allegation has resonance among many in a region where Washington has a long history of interventions—military and otherwise.
Ever since the early 19th century, the United States has involved itself in the daily affairs of nations across Latin America, often on behalf of North American capitalist interests or to support right-leaning forces against left-wing and popular democratic leaders.
In recent years, the U.S. has been accused of granting at least tacit backing to coups in Venezuela in 2002 and Honduras in 2009. The Trump administration’s leading role in recognizing Juan Guaidó as the “interim president” of Venezuela returns the U.S. once more to an assertive role in Latin American countries’ internal affairs.
Some of the most notable U.S. interventions in Latin America:
1846: The United States invades Mexico and captures Mexico City in 1847. A forced peace treaty the following year gives the U.S. more than half of Mexico’s territory—what is now most of the western United States.
1903: The U.S. engineers Panamanian independence from Colombia and gains sovereign rights over the zone where the Panama Canal would connect Atlantic and Pacific shipping routes.
1903: After the Spanish-American War, Cuba and the U.S. sign a “treaty” allowing near-total U.S. control of Cuban affairs. U.S. establishes a naval base at Guantanamo Bay.
U.S. Marines repeatedly intervene in Central America and the Caribbean throughout the first quarter of the 20th century, often to protect U.S. business interests.
1914: U.S. troops occupy the Mexican port of Veracruz for seven months in an attempt to sway developments in the Mexican Revolution.
1954: Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz is overthrown in a CIA-backed coup.
1961: The U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion fails to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro but Washington continues to launch attempts to assassinate Castro and dislodge his government for decades.
Attack near Playa Giron. April 19, 1961. (CC BY 3.0)
1964: Leftist President Joao Goulart of Brazil is overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup that installs a military dictatorship lasting until the 1980s.
1965: U.S. forces land in the Dominican Republic to intervene in a civil war.
1973: A U.S.-supported military coup overthrows the democratically-elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. He is replaced by General Augusto Pinochet, who imposes a brutal military regime and embarks on a U.S.-guided program of extreme economic privatization and de-regulation. It is later seen as the laboratory of what became known as neoliberalism.
1970s: Argentina, Chile, and allied South American nations launch a brutal campaign of repression and assassination aimed at perceived leftist threats, known as Operation Condor, often with U.S. support.
1980s: Reagan administration backs anti-Communist Contra forces against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government and backs the Salvadoran government against leftist FMLN rebels.
1983: U.S. forces invade the Caribbean island of Grenada after accusing the government of allying itself with Cuba.
1989: U.S. invades Panama to oust strongman (and rogue CIA agent) Manuel Noriega.
1994: A U.S.-led invasion of Haiti is launched to remove the government installed by a 1991 coup that had ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The invasion restores Aristide, who was later overthrown (again) by a U.S.-backed coup in 2004.
2002: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is ousted for two days in a U.S.-backed coup before retaking power following a massive outpouring of popular support.
2009: Honduran President Manuel Zelaya overthrown by the military in a U.S.-supported coup.
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This list was compiled by the Associated Press and added to by People’s World.
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What is the position of the West’s “Progressives” with regard to regime change in Venezuela?
Several prominent intellectuals are calling for a “negotiated settlement” between the Maduro government and “the opposition” led by the self proclaimed interim president Juan Guaido . It should be obvious that this proposal is redundant and contradictory. The leader of the National Assembly Juan Guaido is a US proxy (instrument of a foreign government) who will be “negotiating” on behalf of Washington.
Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, January 28, 2019
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What is now unfolding in both North America and Western Europe is fake social activism, controlled and funded by the corporate establishment. This manipulated process precludes the formation of a real mass movement against war, racism and social injustice.
The anti-war movement is dead. The war on Syria is tagged as “a civil war”.
The war on Yemen is also portrayed as a civil war. While the bombing is by Saudi Arabia, the insidious role of the US is downplayed or casually ignored. “The US is not directly involved so there is no need for us to wage an anti-war campaign”. (paraphrase)
War and neoliberalism are no longer at the forefront of civil society activism. Funded by corporate charities, via a network of non-governmental organizations, social activism tends to be piecemeal. There is no integrated anti-globalization anti-war movement. The economic crisis is not seen as having a relationship to US led wars.
In turn, dissent has become compartmentalized. Separate “issue oriented” protest movements (e.g. environment, anti-globalization, peace, women’s rights, LGBT) are encouraged and generously funded as opposed to a cohesive mass movement against global capitalism.
This mosaic was already prevalent in the counter G7 summits and People’s Summits of the 1990s and also from the inception of the World Social Forum in 2000, which rarely adopted a meaningful anti-war stance.
Through staged protest events sponsored by NGOs and generously funded by corporate foundations, the unspoken objective is to create profound divisions within Western society, which serve to uphold the existing social order as well as the military agenda.
Syria
It is worth underscoring the role of so-called “progressive” intellectuals in paying lip service to the US-NATO military agenda. This is nothing new.
Segments of the anti-war movement which opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq are tacitly supportive of Trump’s punitive airstrikes directed against Syria’s “Assad regime” allegedly involved in “killing their own people”, gassing them to death in a premeditated chemical weapons attack. According to Trump “Assad choked out the lives of helpless men women and children”.
America’s Noam Chomsky in an April 5 2017 interview with “Democracy Now” (aired two days before Trump’s April 2017 punitive airstrikes against Syria) favors “regime change”, intimating that a negotiated “removal” of Bashar al Assad could lead to a peaceful settlement.
According to Chomsky: “The Assad regime is a moral disgrace. They’re carrying out horrendous acts, the Russians with them.” (emphasis added) Strong statement with no supporting evidence and documentation provided. Apology for Trump’s war crimes? The victims of imperialism are casually blamed for the crimes of imperialism:
…You know, you can’t tell them, “We’re going to murder you. Please negotiate.”That’s not going to work. But some system in which, in the course of negotiations …[with the Russians], … he [Bashar al-Assad] would be removed, and some kind of settlement would be made. The West would not accept it, … At the time, they believed they could overthrow Assad, so they didn’t want to do this, so the war went on. Could it have worked? You never know for sure. But it could have been pursued. Meanwhile, Qatar and Saudi Arabia are supporting jihadi groups, which are not all that different from ISIS. So you have a horror story on all sides. The Syrian people are being decimated.
Update, Scan of Chomsky Interview Democracy Now, April 26, 2017
Similarly in Britain, Tariq Ali, tagged by the U.K. media as the Left’s prime leader of Britain’s anti-war movement going back to the Vietnam war, has also called for the removal of president Bashar al Assad. While adopting a progressive stanceon a number of issues, his discourse regarding Syria is not dissimilar from that of the Washington war hawks:
“He [Assad] has to be pushed out,… [ for which] the Syrian people are doing their best… The fact is that the overwhelming majority of people in Syria want the Assad family out – and that is the key thing that we have to understand and he [Assad] should understand…
Syria needs a non-sectarian national government to prepare a new constitution… If the Assad clan refuses to relinquish their stronghold on the country, sooner or later something disastrous will happen…That is the future that stares them in the face, there is no other future,” ” RT 2012 interview
Tariq Ali, who is a spokesperson for Britain’s Stop the War Coalition, fails to mention that US-NATO and their allies are actively involved in the recruitment, training and arming of a (largely foreign) terrorist mercenary army.
Under the “progressive” mantle of Britain’s anti-war movement, Ali tacitly provides legitimacy to Western military intervention on humanitarian grounds under the banner of the “War on Terrorism” and the so-called “Responsibilty to Protect”(R2P). The fact that both Al Qaeda and ISIS-Daesh are supported (covertly) by US-NATO is not mentioned.
According to British author William Bowles, Tariq Ali is one among many of the Empire’s Lefty intellectuals who has served to distort anti-war activism in both North America and Western Europe:
It exemplifies the contradiction of being an alleged socialist at home and enjoying the privilege of being part of the Empire’s intellectual elite, … whilst dictating to Syria what it should and shouldn’t do. I fail to see the distinction between Ali’s arrogance and that of the West, that called for exactly the same thing! Assad has to go!
The Existing Anti-War movement
Global capitalism finances anti-capitalism: an absurd and contradictory relationship.
There can be no meaningful anti-war movement when dissent is generously funded by those same corporate interests which are the target of the protest movement. In the words of McGeorge Bundy, president of the Ford Foundation (1966-1979),“Everything the [Ford] Foundation did could be regarded as ‘making the World safe for capitalism’”. And several “Lefty intellectuals” serve the role of “making the World safe” for the warmongers.
Today’s antiwar protest does not question the legitimacy of those to whom the protest is addressed. At this juncture, “progressives” –funded by major foundations and endorsed by the mainstream media– are an obstacle to the formation of a meaningful and articulate grassroots antiwar movement acting both nationally and internationally.
A consistent antiwar movement must also confront various forms of cooption within its ranks, namely the fact that a significant sector of so-called “progressive” opinion tacitly supports US foreign policy including “humanitarian interventions” under UN/NATO auspices.
An antiwar movement funded by major corporate foundations is the cause rather than the solution. A coherent antiwar movement cannot be funded by warmongers.
The Road Ahead
What is required is the development of a broad based grassroots network which seeks to disable patterns of authority and decision making pertaining to war.
This network would be established at all levels in society, towns and villages, work places, parishes. Trade unions, farmers organizations, professional associations, business associations, student unions, veterans associations, church groups would be called upon to integrate the antiwar organizational structure. Of crucial importance, this movement should extend into the Armed Forces as a means to breaking the legitimacy of war among service men and women.
The first task would be to disable war propaganda through an effective campaign against media disinformation.
The corporate media would be directly challenged, leading to boycotts of major news outlets, which are responsible for channelling disinformation into the news chain. This endeavor would require a parallel process at the grass roots level, of sensitizing and educating fellow citizens on the nature of the war and the global crisis, as well as effectively “spreading the word” through advanced networking, through alternative media outlets on the internet, etc. In recent developments, the independent online media has been the target of manipulation and censorship, precisely with a view to undermining anti-war activism on the internet.
The creation of such a movement, which forcefully challenges the legitimacy of the structures of political authority, is no easy task. It would require a degree of solidarity, unity and commitment unparalleled in World history. It would require breaking down political and ideological barriers within society and acting with a single voice. It would also require eventually unseating the war criminals, and indicting them for war crimes.
America’s hegemonic project in the post 9/11 era is the “Globalization of War” whereby the U.S.-NATO military machine —coupled with covert intelligence operations, economic sanctions and the thrust of “regime change”— is deployed in all major regions of the world. The threat of pre-emptive nuclear war is also used to black-mail countries into submission.
This “Long War against Humanity” is carried out at the height of the most serious economic crisis in modern history.
It is intimately related to a process of global financial restructuring, which has resulted in the collapse of national economies and the impoverishment of large sectors of the World population.
The ultimate objective is World conquest under the cloak of “human rights” and “Western democracy”.
Special counsel Mueller indicted political strategist/former Trump advisor Roger Stone on seven counts – see below.
In a politicized show of force, Stone was dramatically arrested pre-dawn on Friday at his south Florida home by around two dozen heavily armed FBI agents in bullet-proof vests and tactical gear despite facing no threat.
The scene resembled a Hollywood sound stage production, CNN notified in advance to capture the politicized arrest on video for maximum effect – an agent banging on Stone’s door, shouting “FBI! Open the door! FBI! Warrant!”
After his arrest, Stone appeared in federal court later on Friday morning. Charges are connected to Robert Mueller’s politicized Russiagate witch hunt probe, ongoing since May 2017, finding no improper or illegal connection between Trump, his team and Russia – because there’s nothing to find.
Indictments, including against Stone, have nothing to do with the special counsel’s stated purpose, nothing justifying what’s going on, no Russian US election meddling, no evidence suggesting it – no reason to continue a probe that never should have been begun in the first place.
Like Watergate to remove Richard Nixon from office on trumped up charges, targeting him for political reasons related to his social, environmental and geopolitical agenda, a similar scenario is playing out against Trump to delegitimize and undermine him for the wrong reasons.
Nixon threatened entrenched military/industrial/security and other interests, why he was marked for removal.
Trump favors improved relations with Russia and surprisingly North Korea as well – fire and fury evolving to friendship with Kim Jong-un, DLT saying “(h)e wrote me beautiful letters and we fell in love.” Who could have imagined the unimaginable – and there’s more.
While going along with endless US wars of aggression, escalating them, allowing himself to be co-opted, Trump called for scaling back in Syria and Afghanistan in favor of other priorities – polar opposite the military, industrial, military, media complex’s agenda, supporting endless wars and more of them.
Undemocratic Dems and media scoundrels never forgave him for triumphing over Hillary, a race he was supposed to lose, not win.
All of the above reasons are why he’s a marked man – justifiable reasons ignored, unjustifiable ones why dark forces want him delegitimized, removed from office, or weakened enough to be defeated for reelection in 2020.
Stone was indicted on one count of obstruction of justice, five counts of false statements, and one count of witness tampering.
Charges are unrelated to nonexistent Russian US election meddling or leaked information to WikiLeaks it revealed. No DNC hacking occurred, no evidence suggesting it. Claims otherwise were fabricated.
According to Stone’s attorney Grant Smith, “(t)here was no Russian collusion,” so what’s going on is “a clear attempt at silencing Roger,” adding:
“This was an investigation they started as about Russian collusion, and now they’re charging Roger Stone with lying to Congress about something he honestly forgot about, and as Roger has stated publicly before, he will fight the charges.”
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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.”
Lately, it has become a habit of Orientalist apologists of Western imperialism to offer reductive historical and theological explanations of Sunni-Shi’a conflict in the Middle East region in order to cover up the blowback of ill-conceived Western military interventions and proxy wars that have ignited the flames of internecine conflict in the Islamic world.
Some self-anointed “Arabists” of the mainstream media posit that the division goes all the way back to the founding of Islam, 1400 years ago, and contend that the conflict emerged during the reign of the fourth caliph, Ali bin Abi Talib, in the seventh century A.D.
One wonders what would be the American-led war on terror’s explanation of such “erudite” historians of Islam – that the cause of “the clash of civilizations” between Christians and Muslims can be found in the Crusades when Richard the Lionheart and Saladin were skirmishing in the Levant and exchanging courtesies at the same time.
Fact of the matter is that in modern times, the Sunni-Shi’a conflict in the Middle East region is essentially a political conflict between the Gulf Arab autocrats and Iran for regional dominance which is being presented to lay Muslims in the veneer of religiosity.
Saudi Arabia, which has been vying for power as the leader of Sunni bloc against the Shi’a-led Iran in the regional geopolitics, was staunchly against the invasion of Iraq by the Bush Administration in 2003.
The Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein constituted a Sunni Arab bulwark against Iran’s meddling in the Arab world. But after Saddam was ousted from power in 2003 and subsequently when elections were held in Iraq which were swept by Shi’a-dominated parties, Iraq has now been led by a Shi’a-majority government that has become a steadfast regional ally of Iran. Consequently, Iran’s sphere of influence now extends all the way from territorially-contiguous Iraq and Syria to Lebanon and the Mediterranean coast.
Moreover, during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Bush Administration took advantage of the ethnic and sectarian divisions in Iraq and used the Kurds and Shi’as against the Sunni-led Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. And during the occupation years from 2003 to 2011, the once dominant Sunni minority was politically marginalized which further exacerbated the ethnic and sectarian divisions in Iraq.
The Saudi royal family was resentful of Iran’s encroachment on the traditional Arab heartland. Therefore, when protests broke out against the Shi’a-led Syrian government in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, the Gulf states along with their regional Sunni allies, Turkey and Jordan, and the Western patrons gradually militarized the protests to dismantle the Iranian resistance axis.
A full-scale Sunni-Shi’a war has been going on in Syria, Iraq and Yemen for the last several years which will obviously have its repercussions all over the Islamic world where Sunni and Shi’a Muslims have coexisted in relative peace for centuries.
Notwithstanding, in order to create a semblance of objectivity and fairness, the American policymakers and analysts are always willing to accept the blame for the mistakes of the distant past that have no bearing on their present policy, however, any fact that impinges on their present policy is conveniently brushed aside.
In the case of the creation of the Islamic State, for instance, the US policy analysts are willing to concede that invading Iraq back in 2003 was a mistake that radicalized the Iraqi society, exacerbated sectarian divisions and gave birth to an unrelenting Sunni insurgency against the heavy-handed and discriminatory policies of the Shi’a-led Iraqi government.
Similarly, the war on terror era political commentators also “generously” accept the fact that the Cold War-era policy of nurturing al-Qaeda and myriads of Afghan so-called “freedom fighters” against the erstwhile Soviet Union was a mistake, because all those fait accompli have no bearing on their present policy.
The mainstream media’s spin-doctors conveniently forget, however, that the creation of the Islamic State and myriads of other Sunni Arab jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq has as much to do with the unilateral invasion of Iraq back in 2003 under the Republican Bush administration as it has been the legacy of the Democratic Obama administration that funded, armed, trained and internationally legitimized the Sunni militants against the Shi’a-led Syrian government since 2011-onward in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa region.
In fact, the proximate cause behind the rise of the Islamic State, al-Nusra Front, Ahrar al-Sham, Jaysh al-Islam and numerous other Sunni Arab jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq was the Obama administration’s policy of intervention through proxies in Syria.
The border between Syria and Iraq is highly porous and poorly guarded. The Obama administration’s policy of nurturing militants against the Syrian government was bound to have its blowback in Iraq sooner or later. Therefore, as soon as the Islamic State consolidated its gains in Syria, it overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in early 2014 from where the US had withdrawn its troops only a couple of years ago in December 2011.
Apart from Syria and Iraq, two other flashpoints of Sunni-Shi’a conflict in the Middle East region are Bahrain and Yemen. When peaceful protests broke out against the Sunni monarchy in Bahrain by the Shi’a majority population in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011, Saudi Arabia sent thousands of troops across the border to quell the uprising.
Similarly, when the Iran-backed Houthis, which is also an offshoot of Shi’a Islam, overran Sana’a in September 2014, Saudi Arabia and UAE mounted another ill-conceived Sunni-led offensive against the Houthi militia in Yemen in March 2015.
The nature of the conflict in Yemen is sectarian to an extent that last year, the Yemeni branch of al-Qaeda’s leader Qasim al-Raymi claimed that al-Qaeda had been fighting hand in hand with the Saudi-led alliance against the Iran-backed rebels for the last three years.
The revelation hardly comes as a surprise, though, because after all al-Qaeda’s official franchise in Syria, al-Nusra Front, has also been fighting hand in glove with the so-called “moderate” Syrian opposition against the Syrian government for the last eight years of the Syrian proxy war.
Furthermore, according to Pakistan’s National Commission for Human Rights, 509 Shi’a Muslims belonging to the Hazara ethnic group had been killed in Pakistan’s western city of Quetta since 2013. Although a southern Punjab-based sectarian militant outfit Lashkar-e-Jhangvi frequently claims responsibility for the massacre of Hazaras in Quetta, such claims are often misleading.
The hub of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi’s power mostly lies in Punjab whereas the Balochistan province’s provincial metropolis Quetta, which is almost three-hour drive from the Af-Pak border at Chaman, is regarded as the center of Taliban’s activities.
After the American invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 2001 with the help of the Northern Alliance, the top leadership of the Taliban has mostly settled in Quetta and its adjoining rural areas and Afghan refugee camps, hence it is called the Quetta Shura Taliban.
In order to understand the casus belli of the Taliban-Hazara conflict, it’s worth noting that the leadership of the Hazara ethnic group has always taken the side of the Tajik and Uzbek-led Northern Alliance against the Pashtun-led Taliban.
The Taliban has committed several massacres of the Hazara people in Afghanistan, particularly following the 1997 massacre of 3,000 Taliban prisoners by the Uzbek warlord Abdul Malik Pahlawan in Mazar-i-Sharif thousands of Hazaras were massacred by the Taliban in the same city in August 1998 for betraying the Taliban.
The Hazara people are an ethnically Uzbek, Dari (Afghan Persian)-speaking ethnic group native to the Hazarajat region in central Afghanistan but roughly 600,000 Hazaras also live in Quetta, Pakistan. Although the conflict between the Taliban and Hazaras might appear religious and sectarian, the real reasons of the conflict are political in nature, as I have already described.
Now, when the fire of inter-sectarian strife is burning on several different fronts in the Middle East and the Sunni and Shi’a communities are witnessing a merciless slaughter of their brethren in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Bahrain Afghanistan and Pakistan, then it would be preposterous to look for the causes of the conflict in theology and medieval history. If the Sunni and Shi’a Muslims were so thirsty for each other’s blood since the founding of Islam, then how come they managed to survive as distinct sectarian groups for 1400 years?
Fact of the matter is that in modern times, the phenomena of Islamic radicalism, jihadism and consequent Sunni-Shi’a conflict are only as old as the Soviet-Afghan jihad during the 1980s when the Western powers with the help of their regional allies trained and armed Afghan jihadists to battle the Soviet troops in Afghanistan.
More significantly, however, the Iran-Iraq War from 1980 to 1988 between the Sunni and Baathist-led Iraq and the Shi’a-led Iran after the 1979 Khomeini revolution engendered acrimony and hostility between the Sunni and Shi’a communities of the region for the first time in modern history.
And finally, the conflict has been further exacerbated in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011 when the Western powers and their regional client states once again took advantage of the opportunity and nurtured militants against the Arab nationalist Gaddafi government in Libya and the Baathist-led Assad administration in Syria.
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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Prime Minister Imran Khan’s “Naya Pakistan” (“New Pakistan”) just passed legislation loosening the country’s previously difficult visa procedure to allow for most of the world’s nationalities to either receive one on arrival or electronically, which will not only boost tourism and facilitate business dealings but impressively show the international community that Azad Kashmir is truly free and not “Pakistan-occupied” like India falsely alleges.
Pakistan just unprecedentedly passed legislation loosening its previously difficult visa procedure to allow for most of the world’s nationalities to either receive one on arrival or electronically as part of Prime Minister Imran Khan’s “Naya Pakistan” (“New Pakistan”) vision of revolutionizing his country’s domestic and foreign affairs, with it being expected that this will immensely boost its tourism industry and facilitate the clinching of international business deals along the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).
The future influx of tourists to Pakistan’s world-renowned mountains and beaches will help to dispel the country’s negative reputation that was manipulatively cultivated by the US and India as part of their years-long infowar on it, powerfully proving that Pakistan has been deliberately misportrayed this entire time and prompting people to question what else the Western Mainstream Media is lying about when it comes to the South Asian state.
As for the business angle of this decision, Pakistan can greatly speed up the time that it takes for it to actualize its geopolitical destiny as the “Zipper of Eurasia” in utilizing CPEC as a platform for supercontinental integration, which can ultimately culminate in it becoming the “Convergence of Civilizations” by bringing together the diverse interests of China, Central Asia, Russia, Turkey, Iran, the Arabs, and Africa and counteracting the US’ “Clash of Civilizations” stratagem.
The most immediate impact of PM Khan’s move, however, is that people will be able to see that Azad Kashmir (“Free Kashmir”) is truly free and not “Pakistan-occupied” like India falsely alleges, which can importantly help the country contradict one of the most malicious myths spread about it since independence because the rest of the world will be able to see with their own eyes that the population there doesn’t behave like their counterparts across the Line of Control.
The part of Kashmir under India’s control can legitimately be described as Indian-occupied because of how much the population is fiercely resisting New Delhi’s “authority” in response to the rampant abuses that the state regularly carries out against them, which it actually goes to great lengths to suppress by shutting down the internet and assassinating activists in cold blood, to say nothing of barring most foreigners (and especially journalists) from the region for “security purposes”.
Altogether, the grand strategic impact of “Naya Pakistan’s” visa liberalization law is that the country is confidently opening up to the outside world in order to bring regular folks, businesspeople, and ultimately even entire civilizations together on its territory, which will showcase its recent socio-economic and security successes while simultaneously having a powerful effect in reshaping international perceptions, especially when it comes to Kashmir because of how much Pakistan’s transparency contrasts with India’s secrecy.
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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.
With the rise of internet social media, patronized by multi-millions of receptive people and supplied by a small number of companies that have achieved dominance, a path way to information control was cleared.
To complete the highway, all that was required was its extension to and from Washington elites, neocon types, intelligence agencies and establishment types. These connections are being built now. They picked up speed in the last two years with the resistance to Trump and his agenda.
Microsoft now uses NewsGuard to rate news sites via an optional browser add-on; but NewsGuard’s ratings are biased, it being dominated by establishment types. Its blacklisting of the Drudge Report is an example. This is only one step in an ongoing process in which big-tech social media eliminate accounts and news sources. Facebook allied with the Atlantic Council, which houses the Digital Forensic Research Lab. Its aim is to “analyze open-source material to provide proof against false narratives”.
When the censors decide what’s false, they necessarily have beliefs about what is true. What if they are wrong? What if they are biased? What if the truth is more complex than they think it is? What if new facts come to light that tarnish or render obsolete their views? What if the censors act on behalf of interests in or close to government who want to maintain secrecy for their own purposes? What if the censors stand against Wikileaks, as NewsGuard does? What if truth-tellers sometimes get it wrong? Will they be entirely censored and cut off from certain internet avenues as is now being done?
Who will provide protection against the information protectors? Who will provide protection against false narratives that the censors believe in, which they use as benchmarks and claim are true?
There is no substitute for people thinking for themselves, and that requires handling conflicting and incomplete information. The notion of news-raters dividing the news sources into trusted and untrusted sites simply alters the problem. The problem doesn’t go away. People then have to decide which news-raters are trustworthy or not. Meanwhile, people who do not actively think about political and other issues are putty in the hands of those who control the information flows and shape the narratives.
The information control highway is in its infancy. It can go to unimaginable lengths to control speech and the distribution of speech, especially the latter. Sufficient control over distribution makes control of actual content less important to the information-controllers.
This disturbing development is going to be countered by the rise of the independents. Independent news sources and interpreters are going to find a market and build out counter-networks. The forces of censorship are going to lose this war.
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Originally, there were four parties involved in the Afghan conflict which are mainly responsible for the debacle in the Af-Pak region. Firstly, the former Soviet Union which invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. Secondly, Pakistan’s security agencies which nurtured the Afghan so-called “mujahideen” (freedom fighters) on the behest of Washington.
Thirdly, Saudi Arabia and the rest of oil-rich Gulf states which generously funded the jihadists to promote their Wahhabi-Salafi ideology. And last but not the least, the Western capitals which funded, provided weapons and internationally legitimized the erstwhile ‘freedom fighters’ to use them against a competing ideology, global communism, which posed a threat to the Western corporate interests all over the world.
Regarding the objectives of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, the then American envoy to Kabul, Adolph “Spike” Dubs, was assassinated on 14 Feb 1979, the same day that Iranian revolutionaries stormed the US embassy in Tehran.
According to recently declassified documents [1] of the White House, CIA and State Department as reported by Tim Weiner for The Washington Post, the CIA was aiding Afghan jihadists before the Soviets invaded in 1979. The then American President Jimmy Carter signed the CIA directive to arm the Afghan jihadists in July 1979, whereas the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December the same year.
That the CIA was arming the Afghan jihadists six months before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan has been proven by the State Department’s declassified documents and admitted by The Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon. The Washington Post has a history of working in close collaboration with the CIA as Bezos won a $600 million contract [2] in 2013 to host the CIA’s database on the Amazon’s web-hosting service.
Fact of the matter, however, is that the nexus between the CIA, Pakistan’s security agencies and the Gulf states to train and arm the Afghan jihadists against the former Soviet Union was formed several years earlier.
During the late 1970s, Pakistan’s then-Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto began aiding the Afghan Islamists against Sardar Daud’s government, who had toppled his first cousin King Zahir Shah in a palace coup in 1973 and had proclaimed himself the president of Afghanistan.
Sardar Daud was a Pashtun nationalist and laid claim to Pakistan’s northwestern Pashtun-majority province. Pakistan’s security establishment was wary of his irredentist claims and used Islamists to weaken his rule in Afghanistan. He was eventually assassinated in 1978 as a result of the Saur Revolution led by the Afghan communists.
Pakistan’s support to the Islamists with the Saudi petro-dollars and Washington’s blessings, however, kindled the fires of Islamic insurgencies in the entire region comprising Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Soviet Central Asian States.
The former Soviet Union was wary that its 40 million Muslims were susceptible to radicalism, because Islamic radicalism was infiltrating across the border into the Central Asian States from Afghanistan. Therefore, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 in support of the Afghan communists to forestall the likelihood of Islamic insurgencies spreading to the Central Asian States bordering Afghanistan.
“The reason Russia invaded Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia; they were right to be there.”
Incidentally, Trump also implied the reason why Soviet Union collapsed was due to the economic burden of the Soviet-Afghan War, as he was making a point about the withdrawal of American forces from Syria and Afghanistan.
Notwithstanding, in the Soviet-Afghan War between the global capitalist and global communist blocs, Saudi Arabia and the rest of Gulf’s petro-monarchies took the side of the global capitalist bloc because the former Soviet Union and Central Asian states produce more energy and consume less. Thus, the Soviet-led bloc was a net exporter of energy whereas the Western capitalist bloc was a net importer.
It suited the economic interests of the oil-rich Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries to maintain and strengthen a supplier-consumer relationship with the Western capitalist bloc. Now, the BRICS countries are equally hungry for the Middle East’s energy, but it’s a recent development. During the Cold War, an alliance with the industrialized Western nations suited the economic interests of the Gulf countries.
Why did Pakistan choose to join this unholy alliance against the global Left? In order to understand this, we need to take a cursory look at the history of Pakistan. During the British colonial rule before the independence of the subcontinent in 1947, Pakistan’s leadership used to have a patron-client relationship with the British imperialists.
The Indian leadership also used to have that relationship with the British imperialists, but in the case of Pakistan, there was an additional aggravating factor involved: the numerical weakness of the Indian Muslims and their consequent dependence on the British imperialists against the permanent numerical majority of the Hindus.
It’s not that the Hindu leaders were not afflicted with the colonial mentality, but in the case of Pakistani leaders, the myth of invincibility and infallibility of the West was cherished even more. That’s why Pakistan’s first Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan declined the request of a state visit from the former Soviet Union and went on a state visit to Washington instead.
It wasn’t just the colonial mentality of Pakistan’s leaders but certain geopolitical considerations also played into their thinking for forming a strategic alliance with the Western bloc. Immediately after the independence, India annexed the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir in violation of the agreed-upon Partition Principle that allocated the Muslim-majority provinces of the British India to Pakistan and the Hindu-majority regions to India.
Then in the 1950s, India took advantage of the Kashmiri territory, as the riverheads of Pakistani rivers are located in Kashmir, and diverted the waters of Pakistani rivers to irrigate India’s western provinces. The whole of Bahawalpur region in southern Punjab turned barren overnight and the agricultural economy of the nascent state of Pakistan suffered a tremendous blow.
With the involvement of the World Bank and the Tennessee Valley Authority of the US, Pakistan and India signed the Indus Waters Treaty in 1960, which allocated exclusive rights for the use of three eastern rivers to India, and some rights such as the right to build hydroelectric projects over the western Pakistani rivers, Jhelum and Chenab, as well.
All these incidents and Pakistan’s relative weakness vis-à-vis India made it even more dependent on the Western military and developmental aid. That’s why it joined the Washington-led, anti-communist SEATO and CENTO alliances in the region during the 1950s.
So much so that when an American U-2 spy plane was shot down in May 1960 by the Soviet Air Defense Forces while performing photographic aerial reconnaissance deep into Soviet territory, Pakistan’s then-President Ayub Khan openly acknowledged that the spy plane had flown from the American airbase in Pakistan’s northwestern metropolis, Peshawar.
When Pakistan had forged such a close alliance with Washington, it became impossible for it to stay neutral when the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Regarding the motives of the belligerents involved, the Americans wanted to take revenge for their defeat at the hands of communists in Vietnam, the Gulf countries had forged close economic ties with the Western bloc and Pakistan was dependent on the Western military aid, hence it didn’t have a choice but to toe Washington’s policy in Afghanistan.
In the end, the Soviet-Afghan War proved to be a “bear trap” and the former Soviet Union was eventually defeated and was subsequently dissolved in December 1991. It did not collapse because of the Afghan Jihad but that was an important factor contributing to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Regardless, more than twenty years before the declassification of the State Department documents as mentioned in the aforementioned Washington Post report, in the 1998 interview [4] to the alternative news outlet The Counter Punch Magazine, former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, confessed that the president signed the directive to provide secret aid to the Afghan jihadists in July 1979, whereas the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan six months later in December 1979.
Osama bin Laden and Brzezinki, 1979?
Here is a poignant excerpt from the interview: The interviewer puts the question:
“And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic jihadists, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?”
Brzezinski replies:
“What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”
Despite the crass insensitivity, one must give credit to Zbigniew Brzezinski that at least he had the courage to speak the unembellished truth. It’s worth noting, however, that the aforementioned interview was recorded in 1998. After the 9/11 terror attack, no Western policymaker can now dare to be as blunt and forthright as Brzezinski.
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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism.
Notes
[1] CIA was aiding Afghan rebels before the Soviets invaded in 1979:
Israel has attacked Syria many times during the last seven years of war imposed on Syria. It has run red-lights and broken taboos in order to provoke the “Axis of the Resistance” inside Syria, but has refrained from infuriating Hezbollah in Lebanon. Nevertheless, the most recent Israeli attack has pushed Syria and its allies beyond tolerable limits. Thus, President Assad prepared himself for a battle against Israel between the wars, knowing that such a battle could last weeks. But the president of Syria won’t be alone: Assad and Hezbollah’s Secretary general Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah will both be running any future battle against any Israeli aggression when the decision to engage will be taken.
Most recently Israel bombed the Syrian army and destroyed the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) offices and bases in Syria without inflicting any human casualties. At the same time, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put himself on the level of IRGC-Quds brigade General Qassem Soleimani, by challenging him on social media. In fact, Netanyahu fell right into the trap the Iranian general set for President Donald Trump.
Soleimani asked President Hassan Rouhani “to avoid answering this thug (Trump) who is beneath your level” and to allow him (Soleimani) to respond to Trump’s provocations of Iran. Thus Soleimani, a mere officer in the Iranian security forces, engages leaders of countries and even an arrogant Prime Minister who commands what he considers the best army in the Middle East and among the strongest in the world. But Soleimani’s style is different from Netanyahu’s. He doesn’t have a twitter account; he spends his time in the battlefield and in meetings with group leaders, officials, and sometime presidents and prime ministers. Soleimani is patient but he can be expected to respond to provocations sooner or later.
Well-informed sources say that Iran is unwilling to abide the repetitive Israeli aggressions against Syria and IRGC positions. The Axis of Resistance is aware that Netanyahu is trying to pull it into a confrontation while US forces are deployed in Northeast Syria and before the Warsaw meeting organised by Trump against Iran. It is a difficult moment for Iran to react, but that doesn’t mean its allies can’t respond.
As noted in a previous article about the decision of the central government in Damascus to establish a new rule of engagement against continuous Israeli attacks, Syria was planning retaliation against any future Israeli attacks. This Syrian decision came just before Trump’s announcement of his intention to withdraw from Syria. This statement gave pause to Syria and its allies, as they reflected upon the best way to respond.
Tel Aviv is aware of the limitation of Iran in this critical moment and understands that the Resistance Axis would rather see a US withdrawal than to retaliate against Israel continuous attacks. Nevertheless, the most recent Israeli attack has pushed Syria and its allies beyond tolerable limits. Netanyahu announced his responsibility for the multiple bombardments of Syria–an unprecedented break with Israel’s protocol of silence. He used the army as an advertising tool for his forthcoming election.
The Israeli Prime Minister perhaps doesn’t realize that Soleimani won’t reply to his provocation in Syria because Iranian targets were not bombed in Iran. Damascus, a close and strategic Syrian ally, responded to the attack by launching missiles against Israel which has driven it out of control bombarding tens of targets to avoid a larger escalation. Nevertheless, the Syrian Ambassador to the UN Bashar al-Jaafari warned that Tel Aviv airport could be bombed if Israel repeats its aggression on Syria. What al-Jaafari didn’t reveal is the fact that President Assad prepared himself for a battle against Israel between the wars, knowing that such a battle could last weeks.
Indeed, a long battle between Syria and Israel would put an end to Netanyahu’s chances to be re-elected. No Israeli Prime Minister has been elected who has exposed his country to danger and triggered the death of citizens.
But how can Syria retaliate if, as Israel claims, all Syrian and Iranian warehouses have been bombarded and destroyed with their thousands of missiles? How can Hezbollah support Syria if, as Israel claims, it has crippled all convoys transiting from Syria to Lebanon? How is it possible to re-supply Lebanon if the US is occupying the al-Tanf crossing between Syria and Iraq, allegedly to stop the flow of weapons from Tehran to Beirut?
In 2006, Israel paid the price when it believed that it had undermined Hezbollah’s arsenal and discovered, through the massacre of the Merkava at Wadi al-Hujeir and the bombing of the Saar-5 vessel, that its intelligence about Hezbollah missiles and Syrian support was poor and that the US and Israeli intelligence failed. Tel Aviv wrongly believed it could easily fulfil the US dream of establishing a “new Middle East” announced by its Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. No one in Israel expected Hezbollah to stand with its Kornet anti-tank guided missiles and its Chinese anti-ship missiles.
Today, the Resistance Axis, i.e. Syria and Hezbollah in the Levant, have not only greater experience of warfare, but they also have more modern anti-ship missiles (Yakhont) and other lethal surprises like precision missiles capable of hitting any target anywhere in Israel.
Moreover, Hezbollah has several bases for its strategic missiles on the Lebanese-Syrian borders. The group will not hesitate to generously use them against Israel if Israel attacks its ally Syria. But Hezbollah is not expected to limit its support to weaponry. Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah is not only a master orator and a skilled psychologist of warfare, but also a meticulous military planner and commander. He was present in the military operational room in every single battle against Israel and participated in every single move his men took against Israel in the 2006 war and since. Logistic-technical-military planning and command and control between Hezbollah and Syria is today united. Nasrallah knows how to fight Israel, how much fire power to use and when. Assad and Nasrallah will both be running any future battle against any Israeli aggression when the decision to engage will be taken.
Russia is aware of determination of the Resistance Axis to respond and the danger this could pose for everyone in the Levant. The Russians tipped the IRGC to evacuate their command and control bases less than an hour before they were attacked by Israel. Russian military command asked the IRGC about their new command and control bases and were told that “their bases, from today onward, will be spread over the entire Syrian geography alongside the Syrian army, in every single barracks”.
This answer pushed Russia to ask Israel, more directly and overtly, to stop bombing Syria. Russia would hate to find itself in the middle of an exchange of missiles between Syria and Israel flying above its head in the Levant.
Netanyahu’s arrogance pushed him to abandon Israel’s policy of refusing to admit responsibility for its aggression, confusing the military command. The Prime Minister transmitted his electoral gossip inside the military establishment; he prefers to become a social media star rather than to follow the discreet example of his predecessors.
If Netanyahu wants to be re-elected, he needs to avoid a battle with Syria whose outcome he cannot control; his best strategy would be to keep silent until the polls.
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Did Trump blink? Did undemocratic Dems win the 35-day standoff?
On Friday, DLT announced a deal to reopen government for three weeks without having gotten congressional border wall funding.
He vowed to build a “wall or steel barrier (in) predetermined high-risk locations” with or without congressional funding, saying if Dems don’t approve it by February 15, he’ll use executive power to address a (non-emergency) emergency.
The Trump/Dem battle over whether to build or not to build a border wall has nothing to do with national security, nothing to do with stopping criminal gangs from entering the country, a DLT perpetuated myth, nothing to do with stopping the flow of illicit drugs into the country.
They pore in through all its borders, by land, sea, and air – supported by the CIA and Wall Street, profiting hugely from what’s gone on for decades, what politicians and major media never explain.
Late Friday, Trump signed congressional legislation to reopen government, effective immediately, saying if Dems don’t approve border wall funding by mid-February, “the government will either shut down” again or he’ll act on his own to authorize funding by executive power.
Battle lines remain drawn. Things came to a head for Trump over polls showing popular sentiment against him, his approval rating dropping below 40%, along with major US airport delays because many unpaid personnel called in sick and aren’t working, an untenable situation for travelers.
A bipartisan conference committee will reportedly be established to debate the politicized issue – Trump demanding border wall funding, Dems opposing him for political advantage.
A late Friday White House statement said DLT “signed into law: HJ Res. 28, the ‘Further Additional Continuing Appropriations Act, 2019,’ which includes a short-term continuing resolution that provides fiscal year 2019 appropriations through February 15, 2019, for continuing projects and activities of the Federal Government included in the remaining seven appropriations bills.”
“Also included in the enrolled bill are provisions regarding retroactive pay and reimbursement, and extensions of certain authorities.”
The White House is preparing a draft proclamation, declaring an invented national emergency along the southern border with Mexico, earmarking $7 billion in potential funds from existing programs, draft language saying:
“The massive amount of aliens who unlawfully enter the United States each day is a direct threat to the safety and security of our nation and constitutes a national emergency” – even though it’s invented, not real, adding:
“Now, therefore, I, Donald J. Trump, by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the National Emergencies Act (50 USC 1601, et seq.), hereby declare that a national emergency exists at the southern border of the United States.”
An unnamed US official said Trump may authorize use of $681 million from Treasury forfeiture funds, $3.6 billion for military construction, $3 billion for Pentagon civil works, and $200 million of Department of Homeland Security funds for border wall construction.
Dems will surely challenge him for political advantage if he moves this way – along with its continuing agenda to delegitimize, undermine, and weaken him overall, wanting him removed from office or defeated for reelection in 2020.
With Dems controlling the House, the period ahead will likely be more tumultuous than what’s gone on since Trump’s election – a process he was supposed to lose, not win, the price for defeating media darling Hillary.
For now, partial government shutdown since December 22 is over at least until mid-February. What then remains to unfold – Dems so far ahead in the battle for political advantage, Trump weakened as planned.
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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.”
Nicolas Marduro is Venezuela’s legitimate democratically elected and reelected president.
The country’s process is scrupulously open, free, and fair, the world’s best, a model for other nations. Polar opposite to America’s fantasy democracy, the best money can buy.
Coup d’etats reflect longstanding US policy since the 19th century, numerous Latin American countries (among many others) targeted successfully and unsuccessfully.
They include Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, British Guiana, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Ecuador, Guatemala, Grenada, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, Suriname, along with Venezuela earlier and in progress.
The late William Blum explained why there will never be a coup in Washington – because there’s no US embassy there, infested with CIA operatives.
It’s not a pretty picture, “enough to give imperialism a bad name,” Blum stressed. The US interferes in the internal affairs of virtually all other countries, including their elections, independent ones like Venezuela targeted for regime change – by naked aggression, color revolutions, or old-fashioned coups.
US attempts to topple sitting governments are planned well in advance, on the shelf, updated as needed, ready to be implemented when ordered.
Juan Guaido is Washington’s latest designated puppet to serve its interests in Venezuela, a little known National Assembly head outside of the country, catapulted from obscurity to international prominence.
“(t)he night before (he illegitimately) declared himself interim president of Venezuela, (he) received a phone call from Vice President Mike Pence” – pledging to back his illegal power grab.
“That late-night call set in motion a plan that had been developed in secret” earlier by Trump regime hardliners, “culminat(ing) in Guaido’s” unconstitutional self-declaration as Venezuela’s (US designed illegitimate) interim president.
Pence reportedly told Guaido if the National Assembly invoked Article 233 of Venezuela’s Constitution (to usurp interim power), the Trump regime would back him. The article states the following:
“The President of the Republic shall become permanently unavailable to serve by reason of any of the following events: death; resignation; removal from office by decision of the Supreme Tribunal of Justice; permanent physical or mental disability certified by a medical board designated by the Supreme Tribunal of Justice with the approval of the National Assembly; abandonment of his position, duly declared by the National Assembly; and recall by popular vote.”
“When an elected President becomes permanently unavailable to serve prior to his inauguration, a new election by universal suffrage and direct ballot shall be held within 30 consecutive days. Pending election and inauguration of the new President, the President of the National Assembly shall take charge of the Presidency of the Republic.”
Nothing stated above applies to Maduro – democratically elected and reelected by a process independent monitors called open, free, and fair – his legitimacy affirmed judicially, an attempt by a foreign power to replace him a flagrant breach of international law.
Trump straightaway recognized Guaido, planned and orchestrated in advance of his announcement, most Latin and Central American countries, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, and other nations going along with the attempted coup.
Russia, China, and other states expressed opposition the attempted coup. Putin phoned Maduro, offering support, a Kremlin statement saying:
“The President of Russia expressed support for the legitimate Venezuelan authorities amid the worsening of the internal political crisis provoked from outside the country.”
“He emphasized that destructive external interference is a gross violation of the fundamental norms of international law.”
“He spoke in favor of searching for solutions within the constitutional framework and overcoming differences in Venezuelan society through peaceful dialogue.”
The statement failed to name the US or condemn the Trump regime’s coup d’etat attempt against a sovereign government and its leadership.
Nothing was said about how Putin intends supporting Maduro’s legitimacy. Rhetorically alone is meaningless when toughness against imperial lawlessness is needed – in Venezuela, Syria and elsewhere.
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev incorrectly called an old-fashioned US coup d’etat attempt in Venezuela a “quasi” one. There’s nothing remotely “quasi” about it.
So far it’s an attempt short of succeeding. Washington has lots of ways to push its agenda with toughness, military force an option, implemented many times before.
On Friday, Maduro showed weakness, not strength, saying he’s willing to meet with Guaido to try resolving differences through dialogue.
“If I have to go to talk with him I am willing because I believe in the truth. I am a democrat. I am a man of my word. Hopefully sooner rather than later the opposition will get out of the way of extremism and open a sincere dialogue,” he said.
Note: If a US official or other citizen colluded with a foreign power, declaring himself or herself interim US president, they’d likely be arrested and charged with sedition or treason.
An individual charged and convicted of seditious conspiracy to topple a sitting US president or government would face up to 20 years imprisonment.
The Constitution’s Article III, Section 3 calls treason “giving aid and comfort” to the nation’s enemies, a crime more serious than sedition. The punishment for treason in America is life imprisonment, parole possible only after incarceration for 40 years.
What’s going on in Venezuela was and remains orchestrated and controlled by Washington, Guaido following orders, Trump regime hardliners calling the shots.
Convicted neocon Iran/Contra co-conspirator, death squad supporter, Elliot Abrams was appointed DLT’s point man for regime change in Venezuela. Pompeo turned truth on its head, saying he’ll “help the Venezuelan people fully restore democracy and prosperity to their country.”
Abrams never met a tinpot despot, allied with US interests, he didn’t fully embrace and support. Convicted of lying to Congress, GHW Bush shamefully pardoned him.
He was a founding Project for a New American Century (PNAC) member – its “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” a scheme promoting US global hegemony by endless wars and other means.
Abrams was involved in Bush/Cheney’s aborted April 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela, and the regime’s 2003 war on Iraq – based on Big Lies like all wars of aggression.
He expressed eagerness “to get to work on” transforming Venezuela into another US vassal state. Controlling the country’s oil reserves, the world’s largest, is a key objective behind what’s going on – so Big Oil can exploit them.
On Friday, Trump’s Treasury Department said it won’t freeze whatever Venezuelan assets the US controls.
Instead, it’ll assure that “commercial transactions by the Venezuelan government, including those involving its state-owned enterprises and international reserves, are consistent” with Washington’s recognition of Guaido as (illegitimate) interim (puppet) president.
At stake going forward is preserving and protecting the hemisphere’s most vibrant social democracy – governance of, by, and for all Venezuelans equitably, a system Republicans and Dems abhor at home and abroad.
Venezuela’s military supports Maduro’s legitimacy as president, opposing Trump coup attempt.
Keeping its support is key, the best chance of defeating the latest US regime change attempt – preventing Washington from gaining another imperial trophy.
A Final Comment
On Friday, Reuters headlined “Exclusive: Kremlin-linked contractors help guard Venezuela’s Maduro – (unnamed) sources,” saying:
“Private military contractors who do secret missions for Russia flew into Venezuela in the past few days to beef up security for President Nicolas Maduro in the face of US-backed opposition protests, according to two (unnamed) people close to them” – and a “third (unnamed) source,” saying:
“The contractors are associated with the so-called Wagner group whose members (are) mostly ex-service personnel…”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov debunked the claim, saying “(w)e have no such information.”
Russia’s envoy to Venezuela Vladimir Zaemsky slammed the report, saying
“I don’t know about the presence of any Russian private military companies in Venezuela. This is another hoax.”
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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.”
Pompeo named Elliott Abrams as special envoy for Venezuela Friday. The Guardian reminds us of Abrams’ awful career serving in previous Republican administrations:
Abrams is widely remembered in Central America, but particularly from his time in the Reagan administration, when he tried to whitewash a massacre of a thousand men, women and children by US-funded death squads in El Salvador, when he was assistant secretary of state for human rights.
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He shrugged off the reports as communist propaganda, and insisted: “The administration’s record in El Salvador is one of fabulous achievement.”
Abrams also helped organise the covert financing of Contra rebels in Nicaragua behind the back of Congress, which had cut off funding. He then lied to Congress about his role, twice. He pleaded guilty to both counts in 1991 but was pardoned by George HW Bush.
More than a decade later, working as special Middle East adviser to former president George W Bush, Abrams was an enthusiastic advocate of the Iraq invasion. He was in the White House at the time of the abortive coup in 2002 against Hugo Chavez. The Observer reported that Abrams gave the green light to the putsch, another an inspector general enquiry found no “wrongdoing” by US officials.
That was not enough to erase his reputation as the assistant secretary of dirty wars. The message sent by his return to the front rank of US diplomacy will not missed in Caracas.
Putting Abrams in charge of any aspect of U.S. foreign policy is a horrible mistake. Putting someone with such a well-known, appalling record in charge of a regime change effort in Latin America confirms critics’ worst suspicions about this intervention in another country’s internal political dispute. It is a measure of how completely hard-liners now dominate Trump administration foreign policy that a vocal Trump critic can be brought on to lead a high-profile foreign policy initiative. Venezuela policy has been designed by Rubio and Pompeo, both of whom are notoriously hawkish, and it is going to be carried out by a neoconservative with one of the bloodiest and ugliest foreign policy records of anyone that has served in government over the last forty years. All the while, Bolton couldn’t be happier with what has been happening. Trump is letting his foreign policy be conducted by some of the very worst people in the Republican Party, and it is just a matter of time before it blows up in his face at great cost to the U.S.
The message that the Abrams appointment sends is the worst imaginable that the U.S. could send right now. Here is an official with a long record of supporting violent abuses, civil wars, and coups in Latin American countries and a backer of forcible regime change in other parts of the world, and he is being put in charge of an effort to “restore democracy” to Venezuela. That should be setting off every alarm bell there is. Pompeo could scarcely have chosen a person with a worse, more sullied reputation in the region, and by putting him charge of Venezuela policy he has all but announced that our policy is the cynical and destructive one that its opponents have feared it will be.
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We are frequently told that people in Venezuela have no food, clothing or toilet paper, and that popular discontent with the left wing government is driven by real hunger. There are elements of truth in this story, though the causes of economic dislocation are far more complex than the media would have us believe.
But I ask you to look at this photo of supporters of CIA poster-boy, the West’s puppet unelected “President” Juan Guaido, taken at a Guaido rally in Caracas two days ago and published yesterday in security services house journal The Guardian. Please take a really close look at the photo. Blow it up as big as you can. Scan individual people in the crowd, one by one.
Source: Craig Murray
These are not the poor and most certainly not the starving. As it chances I have a great deal of life experience working amongst seriously deprived, hungry and despairing people. I know the gaunt face of want and the desperate glance of need. Look at these Guaido supporters, one by one by one. This designer spectacled, well-coiffed, elegantly dressed, sleekly jowled group does not know hunger. This group does not know want. This is a proper right wing gathering, a gathering of the nicely off section of society. This is a group of those who have corruptly been siphoning Venezuela’s great wealth for decades and who want to make sure the gravy train flows properly in their direction again. It is, in short, a group of exactly the kind of people you would expect to support a CIA coup.
Those manicured hands raised in the air will never throw rocks, or get involved in violence unless against a peasant strapped to a chair for them. It is not this crowd which will suffer as public disorder is manipulated and directed by the CIA. These wealthy ones are immune, just as Davos serves as nothing but an annual reminder of how very poorly God aims avalanches.
There is real suffering in Venezuela. The CIA is working hard to stoke violence, and the genuine poor will soon start to die, both in those egged on to riot and in the security services. But do not get taken in by the complete nonsense that this is a popular, democratic revolution. It is not. It is yet another barefaced CIA regime change coup.
UPDATE Such wisdom as this blog finds is often crowd-source, and with thanks to a commenter below here is some useful information from Jill Stein.
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