World War I and the British Empire: The Gallipoli Campaign, The Untold Story

November 13th, 2018 by Gerry Docherty

The truth about Gallipoli has, unlike its victims, been buried deep. Historians like Peter Hart who describe it as “an idiocy generated by muddled thinking”1 are justified in their anger, but not their conclusions. The campaign was conceived in London as a grotesque, Machiavellian strategy to fool the Russians into believing that Britain was attempting to capture Constantinople for them. The paradox of its failure lay in its success. Gallipoli was purposefully designed to fail.

A secret cabal of immensely rich and powerful men – the Secret Elite – was formed in England in 1891 with the explicit aim of expanding the British Empire across the entire globe. They planned a European war to destroy Germany as an economic, industrial and imperial competitor and, to that end, drew France then Russia into an alliance termed the Entente Cordiale. Their massive land armies were needed to crush Germany. France would be rewarded with Alsace and Lorraine, while Russia was conned into believing she would get Constantinople.2 Thereafter, seizing the Ottoman capital became a “widespread obsession, bordering on panic” in St Petersburg.3

Had Britain encouraged the friendship of Turkey in 1914, the disaster of Gallipoli would never have happened.4The Turks generally disliked the Germans and their growing influence,5 and made three separate attempts to ally with Britain. They were rebuffed on each occasion.6 They also pleaded in vain with the French to accept them as an ally,7 and protect them against their old enemy, Russia.8 Poor fools. The French and British alliance with Russia was at the expense of the Turks, not an alliance with the Turks to save them from Russia. Britain and France planned to carve up the oil rich Ottoman Empire. To that end, the Turks had to be pushed into the German camp and defeated.

In July 1914 the majority of the Turkish cabinet was still well disposed towards Britain,9 but their faith was shattered by the seizure of two battleships being built for them in England. As an essay in provocation it was breathtaking.10 “If Britain wanted deliberately to incense the Turks and drive them into the Kaiser’s arms she could not have chosen more effective means.”11 Winston Churchill (a loyal servant of the Secret Elite) seized the dreadnoughts because they were “vital to Britain’s naval predominance.”12 The truth ran much deeper.

Back in February, Russia laid plans for her Black Sea fleet to take Constantinople by landing 127,500 troops and heavy artillery from Odessa. Arrival of the dreadnoughts from England would destroy this plan.13 Russia’s Foreign Minister Sazonov issued a thinly veiled warning to London on 30 July: “It is a matter of the highest degree of importance that… these ships must be retained in England.”14 Fearful that Russia would renege on her commitment to war should the ships be released, the Secret Elite withheld them. It kept Russia on board and helped drive Turkey into the German camp (they signed a treaty on 2 August), but it created a major problem. How to prevent the Russian Black Sea fleet from seizing Constantinople? Two German warships provided the answer. On 4 August, while off the coast of Algeria, the battle cruiser Goeben and attendant light cruiser Breslau received orders to head for Constantinople.

Vastly outnumbered (73 to 2) by French and British warships, the escape of the German cruisers to Constantinople, 1,200 miles away, is described as a “fiasco of tragic errors” by “fumbling” British Admirals.15The British Admiralty supposedly had no idea where they were heading, but the reality was very different. On 3 August, Kaiser Wilhelm telegraphed King Constantine to say that both warships would be proceeding to Constantinople. This information was transmitted to London,16 and to the British naval mission in Athens.17 Naval Intelligence in London had intercepted and decrypted the actual encoded message from Berlin to Goeben: “Alliance concluded with Turkey. Goeben and Breslau proceed to Constantinople.” The Admiralty knew,18 but relayed information to the Mediterranean fleet that “was either useless or inaccurate.”19 Goeben and Breslau were allowed to escape in order to neutralise the Russian Black Sea fleet. Foreign Secretary Sazonov was outraged that the Royal Navy had failed to prevent it.20

The Ottoman Ambassador in Berlin summed it up perfectly: “Considering the displeasure and complications which a Russian attack on Constantinople would produce in England, the British navy having enabled the German ships to take cover in the Sea of Marmora, has, with the Machiavellianism characteristic of the Foreign Office, foiled any possibility of action by the Russian Black Sea Fleet.”21 Safe arrival of the Goeben rendered a Russian amphibious operation well-nigh impossible,22 and the British Ambassador at Constantinople admitted that their presence served British interests, since “they protected the straits against Russia.”23

On 9 September Admiral Arthur Limpus, head of the British naval mission in Turkey, was recalled. Turkey, although still neutral, closed and mined the Dardanelles. In late October Goeben and Breslau bombarded Sevastopol and other Black Sea ports. Infuriated, Tsar Nicholas insisted on war with Turkey and the seizure of Constantinople for Russia. British and French fears that he would make peace with Germany if Constantinople was denied him gave the Tsar overwhelming diplomatic leverage, and it was agreed that Turkey must now be brought into the war.24

War Declared & the Secret Elites Initiate Gallipoli Campaign

On 2 November Russia declared war on Turkey. Britain and France followed suit three days later. “November 1914 brought a kind of holy war fever to the Russian Foreign Ministry.”25 With over one million Russian casualties for no gain, anti-war protests and revolution stalked the streets of Petrograd. In London, fear of Russia signing a peace treaty with Germany loomed large. How was Russia to be kept in the war with the promise of Constantinople, without actually allowing it? The solution, an attack on Gallipoli, was fraught with pitfalls. The Tsar had to be tricked into believing Britain was generously responding in his hour of need by mounting an all-out effort to take Constantinople for Russia.

The Gallipoli campaign supposedly arose from an urgent call for help from the Russian commander-in-chief Grand Duke Nikolay Nikolaevich on 31 December. Would Britain create a diversion to relieve pressure on Russian troops fighting in the Caucasus?26 This widely held view is wrong. The suggestion came not from Nikolaevich, but from the British military attaché at Petrograd, Sir John Hanbury-Williams. Intimately linked to the Secret Elite and their leader Lord Alfred Milner,27 Hanbury-Williams was frequently in close contact with Nikolaevich. He expressed anxiety about Russia’s domestic morale, but never even mentioned the Dardanelles. It was Hanbury-Williams who planted the idea of a British demonstration against the Ottoman Empire.28 Next day this was presented to the British War Council and magically transformed into a desperate plea for help from Russia.

Having already decided their strategy to keep the Russians out of Constantinople, the Secret Elite now cleverly made it appear that the idea came from Russia. It was all pre-planned, “long before any kind of military imperative in the Ottoman theatre was apparent.”29 The Secretary of the Committee for Imperial Defence, Maurice Hankey, proposed a solution that met all requirements, and it is no coincidence that Hankey was himself a member of the Secret Elite.30 The Gallipoli campaign would be mounted as a sop to the Russians, but set up to fail.

Days later the military dynamic changed. The Turkish 3rd Army was decimated in the Caucasus and, irrespective of whose suggestion it had been, there was no need whatsoever for any British intervention to help Russia. Nonetheless, on 20 January Britain informed Russia that she would undertake not just a demonstration, but a complete operation to penetrate the Dardanelles and Gallipoli. The Russians desperately wanted to take part, but were told to concentrate all efforts against Germany on the Eastern Front. The Secret Elite moved into top gear. An objective that required long months of careful preparation was rushed ahead at breakneck speed with disregard for the basic prerequisites for success.

Churchill assumed command and chose men for their ineptitude rather than ability. He turned to Vice-Admiral Sackville Carden, recently appointed commander of the Mediterranean Squadron after years in a desk-bound job, as superintendent of the Malta dockyards. Slow and ineffective,31 Carden was tasked with drawing up a plan for a naval attack on the Dardanelles, and relaying it to Churchill within days for presentation to a War Council meeting.32On 15 January Carden was informed that his plan had been accepted33 and that he would be in command. What had happened? The ‘plan’, rapidly cobbled together on the back of an envelope by a second rate officer, was to be used as the blueprint for the Gallipoli campaign. The reluctant Carden was given no option other than to get on with it,34 and was effectively set up to take the blame when it failed. For fail it must.

Rear-Admiral Arthur Limpus, an eminently more experienced and knowledgeable man who had spent years in Turkey advising on all naval matters, including the defence of the Dardanelles, was overlooked.35 Here was the man “who knew the Turks and the Dardanelles intimately,”36 yet Churchill shunned him because “the Turks might be offended” and it would be “unfair and unduly provocative” to place in command a man with an inside knowledge of the Turkish fleet.37 Limpus “knew all their secrets,”38 and more about the Dardanelles and the Turkish navy than any other naval officer, yet we are asked to believe that he wasn’t given command because it was considered ungentlemanly – “not quite cricket.”39 Limpus had been sent to the Malta dockyards to sit at Carden’s old desk. Outrageous stupidity or cold calculation?

Limpus was opposed to Churchill’s plan,40 stressing that the first stage must be an amphibious landing, not a naval attack.41 He was not alone in his opposition. In 1906, naval chiefs considered a naval assault too risky.42 Any attack on Gallipoli would “have to be undertaken by a joint naval and military expedition,”43 and Churchill himself stated in 1911 that it was “no longer possible to force the Dardanelles.”44 Rear-Admiral Carden was ignorant of the fact that any chance of success at Gallipoli was absolutely dependent on a combined naval and military operation. Without long, detailed joint planning, and a sufficient number of troops, it was impossible. Lord Kitchener, the British Secretary of State for War, refused to make troops available and Carden was ordered to proceed with a naval attack.

The Russians were turning the screw. Pressure for immediate action influenced the War Council’s decision.45On 14 February, Sazonov stated that the time for moderation had passed. Tsar Nicholas agreed, informing the French ambassador that his people were making terrible sacrifices in the war without reward. Constantinople must be incorporated into his empire.46 Sazonov implied to the British ambassador that he would resign, and be replaced by Sergei Witte, a pro-German sympathiser who would immediately seal a treaty with Germany.47 All warnings against a purely naval attack were ignored. The navy’s objective was to “bombard and take the Gallipoli peninsula with Constantinople as the objective.”48 After the disastrous failure the Dardanelles Commission asked, “How can a fleet take a peninsula? And how could it have Constantinople as its objective? If this meant… that the Fleet should capture and occupy the city, then it was absurd.”49 It was all absurd.

Naval bombardment of the outer forts of the Dardanelles began on 19 February and ran for six days. It caused some damage but destroyed all hope of surprise and merely led the Turks to strengthen their defences.50 The main naval attack took place on 18 March. On the previous day Vice-Admiral De Robek had to take charge when Carden suffered a nervous breakdown. It was no surprise. He was never fitted for the task and felt completely undermined by the Admiralty’s refusal to provide custom-built minesweepers. They were utterly essential but he was given only North Sea trawlers that could barely make headway against the strong 5-6 knot current. Eight powerful destroyers, which could have been fitted with sweeps, remained idle that fateful day while the officers sat playing cards,51 and only two out of a total of 387 mines were cleared.52 A fleet of 16 British and French battleships bombarded the coast, but were unable to penetrate the minefield and six battleships were sunk or disabled by mines. The Bouvet sank within two minutes with over 600 men trapped inside. It was the disaster predicted as far back as 1906.

A Campaign That Could Never Succeed

Orchestrated chaos shrouded a campaign that could never succeed. Kitchener meantime had changed his mind and agreed to make troops available for a combined attack, but the naval assault had gone ahead before their arrival. Maurice Hankey, acting more as strategic adviser to the War Council than its Secretary,53 stated, “combined operations require more careful preparation than any other class of military enterprise. All through our history such attacks have failed when the preparations have been inadequate.”54 He listed ten points to be met if a joint attack was to succeed. Was he saying, “it will fail as long as we do not take the following measures”? According to the War Council minutes, Hankey’s plan was not even discussed.55 In the event, every point he made was studiously ignored.

Military leadership, like naval, was barely functional. General Sir Ian Hamilton, a man in the twilight of his career who “knew little of the Dardanelles, the Turkish army or of modern warfare,” was chosen to command.56 Scared of Kitchener, and hamstrung by his long-subservience,57 he noted in his diary, “It is like going up to a tiger and asking for a small slice of venison.” During the Boer War he had witnessed Kitchener respond to an officer’s appeal for reinforcements by taking half his troops away.58 The genial Hamilton, like poor Carden, was a scapegoat made to order.

Summoned by Kitchener on 12 March, Hamilton was brusquely informed, “We are sending a military force to support the fleet now at the Dardanelles and you are to have command.” Hamilton was stunned, later admitting, “My knowledge of the Dardanelles was nil, of the Turk nil, of the strength of my own forces next to nil.” When asked if a squadron of modern aircraft with experienced pilots and observers could be made available, Kitchener testily replied, “Not one.” 150,000 men was the minimum required strength for the task, but Kitchener insisted that “half that number” would do handsomely.59 No attempt was made to co-ordinate intelligence about the defences at Gallipoli, not even at strategic level.60 Hamilton was given a cursory briefing, two small tourist guidebooks and old, inaccurate maps.61 Detailed reports from Admiral Limpus and Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Cunnliffe-Owen, another officer with considerable knowledge of Gallipoli, were kept from him.62 Hamilton set off within 48 hours, together with some inexperienced members of staff who did not even know “how to put on their uniforms.”63 So much for detailed preparation.

The chaos continued. There was no discussion, no plan, no naval/military coordination. Indeed, it was a worse situation than preceded the naval operation.64 Gallipoli was to be invaded with a mixed force of 80,000 men from Britain, France and the Empire. Raw Anzac troops and unseasoned French recruits were to be thrown into battle for the first time. Marshall Joffre, the French commander-in-chief, was profoundly opposed to the whole operation and initially refused to provide troops. Political expediency forced his hand.65 A French army Colonel who had spent years in Constantinople also opposed the attack, but like everyone else with intimate knowledge of the area, its topography and defences, he was dismissed.66 Lieutenant-Colonel Cunnliffe-Owen, the British military attaché at Constantinople in 1914, who had personally conducted a detailed survey of Gallipoli, was likewise deliberately overlooked. In London when staff were being scratched together for Hamilton’s team, Cunnliffe-Owen was passed over. His detailed reports on the peninsula were never shown to General Hamilton.67

Kitchener agreed to the deployment of 18,000 men from the British army’s 29th Division. Its commander, Shaw, had served with distinction at Mons and was considered a highly competent and “impressively professional soldier.” Two days before leaving for Gallipoli, when continuity was all-important, Shaw was inexplicably replaced by Major-General Hunter-Weston. He immediately rejected his allocated ship because it lacked first class accommodation, and was transferred to the luxury liner Andania.68 Major-General Shaw suffered the same fate as Admiral Limpus. A competent, knowledgeable man was rejected in favour of Hunter-Weston, a laughing-stock in the British Army,69 spectacularly incompetent, and “one of the most brutal commanders of the First World War.”70Ask yourself, what was going on?

Hamilton arrived to find his army scattered in confusion over much of the Mediterranean. Some battalion commanders couldn’t trace their companies. Ships came from Britain with such poorly written orders that captains did not know their destination.71 On their arrival at Mudros, the ships were found to be loaded in a shambolic fashion, and had to be taken 700 miles to Egypt to be unloaded and repacked.72 Such was the lack of preparation that even the simplest questions could not be answered. “Was there drinking water on Gallipoli? What roads existed? Were troops to fight in trenches or the open? What sort of weapons were required? What was the depth of water off the beaches? What sort of boats were needed to get the men, the guns and stores ashore? What casualties were to be expected? How were they to be got off to the hospital ships? It was simply a case of taking whatever came to hand and hoping for the best.”73

An “Amateurish, Do-It-Yourself Cock-Up”

You couldn’t make it up. There was a shortage of guns, ammunition, aircraft and, above all, troops. Hamilton’s requests for additional supplies and reinforcements were either ignored or refused.74 Gallipoli veteran Charles Watkins described the campaign as an “amateurish, do-it-yourself cock-up.”75 It was designed to be exactly that. The quality of preparation and leadership guaranteed it. General Ian Hamilton was the Secret Elite’s Patsy-in-Chief, unwittingly abetted by the incompetent Admiral Carden. These were the men chosen to fail.

The Gallipoli landings went ahead on 25 April 1915 with the terrible slaughter and wounding of many incredibly brave young men, dispensable pawns on Imperial Britain’s chessboard. Despite the fleet now having some thirty powerful destroyers equipped to sweep the mines, and many officers totally confident that the fleet could now get through, no further attempt was made to force the Dardanelles. The navy would play no further part other than ferrying the men ashore, taking off the wounded, and providing a safe haven off-shore for the likes of Hunter-Weston. Successful mine sweeping had always been the key to a successful naval assault, and with the new minesweepers and a clear run through to the Straits, the fleet could have greatly assisted the army with controlled bombardments of Turk positions from within the channel. It would, of course, also have been able to cripple Goebenand Breslau. For the above stated reasons, that would not be allowed to happen.

For years knowledgeable men had insisted that a well planned and resourced combined naval and military attack was the only type of operation that might succeed, but never at any point in the entire Gallipoli campaign was a joint assault carried out. The elites in London ordered the shambolic attack by the navy when they knew it was bound to fail, and now ordered an equally shambolic attack by the army in the full knowledge that it too could never succeed.

Gallipoli was a lie within the lie that was the First World War. The campaign ended in military defeat, but geo-strategic victory for the British Empire. By late 1915, with Russian forces pushed back on the eastern front and any likelihood of their intervention in Constantinople gone, the British government began planning withdrawal from the corpse strewn peninsula. The last Allied troops were taken off on 9 January 1916, leaving behind 62,266 of their comrades. The majority of the dead on both sides have no known graves. Many of the 11,410 Australians and New Zealanders who died76 suffered unspeakable deaths, deliberately sacrificed on the altar of British imperialism.

A Myth Obscures the terrible Truth

Over the last century, in both Britain and Australia, Gallipoli has been turned into a heroic-romantic myth,77 a myth promoted by court historians and pliant journalists in order to hide the stark truth. It was a ruse, a sop to the Russians to keep them in the war in the belief that allied forces would capture Constantinople on their behalf. Put into the hands of incompetent generals and admirals, starved of troops, determined leadership, ill-equipped, ill-advised and certain to fail, the attack on Gallipoli as an integral part of the imperial strategy was a stunning success.

We are aware of at least one renowned Gallipoli historian and writer in Australia who agrees with our thesis. Like us, he proposes that “it was the intention of the British and French governments of 1915 to ensure that the Dardanelles and the Gallipoli campaign would not succeed” and was “conceived as a ruse to keep the Russians in the war…” He believes that while the proposition has circumstantial evidence to support it, there is “little or no documentary evidence.”78 He is very unlikely to find it. As revealed in our book Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War, masses of crucial documents relating to the First World War were shredded or burned, or have been kept hidden away to this very day in a high security establishment at Hanslope Park in England. The individuals responsible for the war, responsible for Gallipoli, were many things, but they weren’t so stupid as to leave incriminating evidence lying around. Historians in Australia and New Zealand must stop protecting their comfortable careers and start acknowledging the terrible truth about Gallipoli. Peddling mythology as truth is an insult to the memory of those brave young men.

Just as in Britain, the Government of Australia seeks to be the guardian of public memory, choreographing commemoration into celebration,79 ritually condemning war while the rhetoric gestures in the opposite direction.80 The War Memorial in Sydney’s Hyde Park proudly exhorts, “Let Silent Contemplation Be Your Offering,” yet the deafening prattle of political expediency mocks the valiant dead with empty words and lies. Don’t be fooled. Those young men died for the imperial dreams of wealthy manipulators, not for ‘freedom’ or ‘civilisation’. They died deceived, expendable, and in the eyes of the power-brokers, the detritus of strategic necessity. Remember that.

The above appears in New Dawn 149: http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/gallipoli-the-untold-story-the-first-casualty-of-war-is-truth

To read exclusive extracts from their book Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War, including their latest research on Gallipoli, please visit the authors’ blog at firstworldwarhiddenhistory.wordpress.com. Hidden History is available from all good bookstores and online retailers.

The authors contributed the article “The Secret Origins of the First World War” to New Dawn Special Issue Vol 9 No 1.

Footnotes

1. Peter Hart, Gallipoli, vii

2. David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace, The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, 138; Niall Ferguson, The Pity Of War, 61

3. Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War, p.28.

4. J Laffin, The Agony of Gallipoli, 3

5. Robert Rhodes James, Gallipoli, 8

6. Hew Strachan, The First World War, 102

7. Friedrich Stieve, Isvolsky and the World War, 177

8. W W Gottlieb, Studies in Secret Diplomacy, 34

9. Dan Van Der Vat, The Dardanelles Disaster, 28

10. L A Carlyon, Gallipoli, 42

11. Gottlieb, Studies, 42

12. W.S. Churchill, The World Crisis, 221-2

13. Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War, 30-34

14. Ibid., 102

15. Ulrich Trumpener, ‘The Escape of the Goeben and Breslau’, Canadian Journal of History, September 1971, 171

16. Ibid., 178-9

17. Geoffrey Miller, The Straits, ch. 16

18. Alberto Santini, ‘The First Ultra Secret: The British Cryptanalysis in the Naval Operations of the First World War’, Revue Internationale d’Histoire Militaire, Vol. 63, 1985, 101

19. Ulrich Trumpener, ‘The Escape of the Goeben and Breslau’, Canadian Journal of History, September 1971, 181-7

20. Gottlieb, Studies, 45

21. Ibid., 46

22. McMeekin, The Russian Origins, 105-106

23. Strachan, The First World War, Vol. 1, 674

24. McMeekin, The Russian Origins, 96-97

25. Ibid., 115

26. Ronald P Bobroff, Roads to Glory, Late Imperial Russia and the Turkish Straits, 125

27. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, 56

28. McMeekin, The Russian Origins, 129-30

29. Ibid., 121

30. Quigley, Anglo-American Establishment, 313

31. Tim Travers, Gallipoli, 20-21

32. Laffin, The Agony, 21-22

33. Robin Prior, Gallipoli, The End of A Myth, 22

34. Ibid., 52

35. Rhodes James, Gallipoli, 63

36. B. H. Liddell Hart, History of the First World War, 213

37. Laffin, The Agony, 9

38. Alan Moorehead, Gallipoli, 60

39. Michael Hickey, Gallipoli, 27

40. Harvey Broadbent, Gallipoli, The Fatal Shore, 21

41. Laffin, The Agony, 9

42. Memorandum by the General Staff, 19 December 1906, National Archives, PRO. CAB/4/2/92

43. Hickey, Gallipoli, 28

44. James, Gallipoli, 3-4

45. Broadbent, Gallipoli, The Fatal Shore, 28

46. Ronald P Bobroff, Roads to Glory, Late Imperial Russia and the Straits, 126-131

47. McMeekin, The Russian Origins, 130-131

48. Laffin, The Agony, 15-22

49. Moorehead, Gallipoli 40

50. Laffin, The Agony, 31

51. Travers, Gallipoli, 29

52. Prior, Gallipoli, 53

53. Stephen Roskill, Hankey, Vol. 1, 156

54. Ibid., 163

55. War Council Minutes, 19 March, 1915, CAB 42/2

56. Prior, Gallipoli, 67

57. Peter Hart, Gallipoli, 63

58. Laffin, The Agony, 39

59. Ibid., 30

60. Ibid., 19

61. Ibid., 31

62. Hickey, Gallipoli, 67

63. Laffin, The Agony, 31

64. Prior, Gallipoli, 70

65. Laffin, The Agony, 35

66. Edmond Delage, The Tragedy of the Dardanelles, 109

67. Laffin, The Agony, 12-13

68. Hickey, Gallipoli, 57-58

69. Denis Winter, Haig’s Command, 140

70. Prior, Gallipoli, 80

71. Laffin, The Agony, 31

72. Moorehead, Gallipoli, 90

73. Prior, Gallipoli, 242

74. Moorehead, Gallipoli, 117

75. Laffin, The Agony, 217

76. Prior, Gallipoli, 242

77. Jenny Macleod, Reconsidering Gallipoli, 7-14

78. ‘Gallipoli: one great deception?’ by Harvey Broadbent, ABC, 29 Sep 2010, www.abc.net.au/news/2009-04-24/30630

79. James Brown, Anzac’s Long Shadow, 19-22

80. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, What’s Wrong With Anzac? The Militarisation of Australian History, 8

Copyright Gerry Docherty & Jim Macgregor, New Dawn Magazine, 2015

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World War I Commemoration: Macron Blasts Trump’s “America First”, Putin and Trump Shake Hands, Putin and Netanyahu Meet “Unofficially”, Netanyahu Orders Gaza Strikes

November 12th, 2018 by Prof Michel Chossudovsky

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin confirms that President Macron had “specifically asked him not to hold one-on-one meetings with US President Donald Trump…” during the Commemoration.

Putin agreed  “not violate the schedule of the host party here [France]: At their request, we will not organize any meetings here,” (RT, Interfax news agency)

The two men nonetheless “shook hands” and, according to unconfirmed reports, there was an informal Trump-Putin chat at the Elysee Palace. See the 16 seconds video below.

Visibly, Trump was the odd man out. He did not like President Emmanuel Macron’s  rebuttal  of his “America First”  brand of nationalism which was compared “to the forces that plunged Europe into conflict in the early 20th Century”.

Macron, however, was careful not to mention the name of the country or the name of its president:

“Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism… nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism. By saying our interests first [aka America First], who cares about the others, we erase what a nation holds dearest, what gives it life, what makes it great and what is essential: its moral values.”

Moreover, upon his return from Paris,  Trump complained (see his twits below) that America had not been “treated fairly” despite the rain of US  threats and trade sanctions directed against dozens of countries including several of America’s staunchest allies:

Russia Today screenshot, November 12, 2018

The Putin-Netanyahu Meeting

The Kremlin cancelled the “formal” meeting between Putin and Netanyahu in Paris.

The Russian President and the Prime Minister of Israel did however meet at the Elysee Palace on the sidelines of the Paris Commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I.

Putin meets Netanyahu, Elysée Palace, with translator: Jerusalem Post, November 12, 2018

According to the Jerusalem Post (November 12, 2018),

Netanyahu told reporters that the “conversation was very good and to the point; I would say it was very important.” He refused to elaborate any further on the conversation.  

Times of Israel, November 11, 2018

The Commemoration of the War to End All Wars.

“The Day After”: Business as Usual for War Criminal Netanyahu

And on the same day as well as on the day following the Paris Commemoration,  “Israeli fighter jets strike dozens of Gaza targets after 200 rockets rain down on towns” (RT, November 11, 2018)

 

 

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Fascismo em marcha na América Latina e na UE

November 12th, 2018 by Peter Koenig

A América Latina está a reconverter-se no “quintal” de Washington e, como atividade paralela, está a voltar à esfera fascista, semelhante, mas pior, do que nos anos 60, 70 e 80 quando ficou sob a influência da Operação ou Plano Condor, liderada pela CIA. Muitos chamam à atual tendência de direita de Operação Condor II, que está provavelmente tão próxima da verdade quanto possível. É tudo fabricado por Washington/CIA, apenas com maior rigor e sofisticação do que o Plano Condor de há 40 e 50 anos atrás. Por muito que custe dizer, depois de todos os louros e glória remetidos à América Latina – com Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro, Rafael Correa, Evo Morales, Lula, os Kirchner, José Mujica, Michelle Bachelet – mais de 80% da população da América Latina havia vivido durante cerca de 15 a 20 anos sob governos democraticamente eleitos, verdadeiramente progressistas, na sua maioria com inclinação de esquerda. Em pouco tempo, em menos de 3 anos, a “mesa virou”.

A América Latina foi durante cerca de 20 anos a única parte do mundo ocidental, que esteve totalmente afastada das garras do império. Sucumbiu novamente às forças do mal, às forças do dinheiro, às forças da corrupção total e da ganância. Os povos da América Latina traíram os seus próprios princípios. Fizeram-no novamente. Os seres humanos permanecem reduzidos, como em tempos ancestrais, aos poderes infalíveis da reprodução e do ego cum ganância. Parece que no final, o ego e a ganância vencem sempre as forças da luz, do bem, da paz e da harmonia. É por isso que até o Banco Mundial chama a corrupção como o maior obstáculo ao desenvolvimento. Referem-se ao desenvolvimento económico; Quero dizer desenvolvimento consciencioso. Desta vez, o truque usado são campanhas eleitorais falsas e fraudulentas; eleições compradas; Washington instigou golpes parlamentares – que no Brasil, levou o presidente não eleito Temer ao poder, um prelúdio para o pior, que ainda estava para vir, o fascista, misógino, racista e autoproclamado militar, Jair Bolsonaro.

A eleição presidencial de 2015 na Argentina trouxe uma vitória inteligentemente fabricada em Washington para Mauricio Macri, um amigo e ex-sócio de Donald Trump, por assim dizer. A eleição foi manipulada pelo agora bem conhecido método maquiavélico da Cambridge Analytica, de enganar os eleitores através de mensagens individualizadas espalhadas pelas redes sociais, para os fazer acreditar em todo tipo de mentiras sobre os candidatos. Os eleitores foram assim, apanhados de surpresa, quando o adversário de Macri, o esquerdista Daniel Scioli da Frente para a Vitória, que era líder nas sondagens, foi derrotado.

Atualmente, Macri, tem adotado uma agenda económica fascista, endividou o país com os pacotes de austeridade do FMI, aumentou o desemprego e a pobreza que se situavam nos 12% antes da sua eleição em 2015, para próximo dos 40% em 2018. Macri está a levar a Argentina em direção a um cenário déjà-vu dos anos 80 e especialmente 1990, quando sob pressão dos EUA, FMI e Banco Mundial, o país teve de adotar o dólar dos EUA como moeda local, ou, para ser exato, a Argentina podia manter o peso mas tinha de se comprometer com a paridade de um-para-um com o dólar americano. A explicação oficial para esta situação em termos económicos (impor o uso da moeda de um país para a economia de outro país não é apenas insano, é absolutamente criminoso) era poder parar a altíssima taxa de inflação – o que temporariamente aconteceu, mas em detrimento da classe trabalhadora, para quem produtos básicos e bens comuns se tornaram inacessíveis.

O desastre foi pré-programado. E o colapso da economia argentina aconteceu em 2000 e 2001. Finalmente, em Janeiro de 2002, o presidente Eduardo Duhalde acabou com a notória paridade peso-dólar. O peso foi primeiro desvalorizado em 40% – depois flutuou para uma desvalorização de 70% e gradualmente fixou-se em outras moedas internacionais, como o euro, o iene japonês e o yuan chinês. Por fim, a nova moeda flutuante permitiu que a economia argentina ganhasse um novo impulso e se recuperasse rapidamente. Talvez muito rapidamente, para o bem da Argentina.

A economia cresceu substancialmente sob os governos de esquerda dos Kirchner. Governos plenamente eleitos democraticamente. A economia não apenas cresceu rapidamente, como também cresceu de forma “distributiva”, o que significou a redução da pobreza avaliada em quase dois terços da população em 2001, para cerca de 12%, apenas um mês antes de Macri ser catapultado para o cargo por Washington e pela Cambridge Analytica, em Dezembro de 2015. A Argentina voltava a ser rica; agora poderia ser novamente ordenhada e extorquida pelo setor bancário e pelo corporativismo internacional, protegidos por três bases militares dos Estados Unidos recém-criadas nas províncias de Neuquen, Misiones e Tierra del Fuego. As bases  estarão inicialmente sob o Comando Sul dos EUA, mas provavelmente em pouco tempo serão convertidas em bases da OTAN. A OTAN já está na Colômbia e poderá em breve expandir-se para o Brasil de Bolsonaro.

Embora ninguém compreenda realmente o que a Organização do Tratado do Atlântico Norte tem a fazer na América do Sul – a resposta não é importante. O império adequa-se ao que se ajusta ao propósito. Não há regras, ética, nem leis – tudo vale perante o neoliberalismo. A OTAN deverá tornar-se numa força de ataque militar sob o controle de Washington e dirigida por aqueles poucos “iluminados”, que mexem os cordelinhos por trás das cortinas, desde o obscuro “Estado Profundo”.

Macri marcou o início do novo fascismo da América Latina. A América do Sul lutou por 15 a 20 anos para se tornar independente dos senhores neoliberais do norte. Foi agora reabsorvida na elite do norte, no “quintal” do império – sim, infelizmente foi nisso que a América Latina se tornou em grande parte, num mero “quintal” de Washington.

A ditadura de direita da Argentina imposta por Washington, foi precedida pelo golpe parlamentar do Paraguai em 2012, que em abril de 2013, levou ao poder Horacio Cartes, do partido de extrema-direita Colorado. O Partido Colorado foi também o partido de Alfredo Stroessner, o brutal ditador militar fascista que governou o Paraguai de 1954 a 1989.

No Chile, em 11 de Setembro de 1973, um socialista democraticamente eleito, Salvador Allende, foi derrubado sob o comando da CIA e um brutal ditador militar, Augusto Pinochet, foi instalado no poder por quase 30 anos. Depois de uma breve aparição de governos de centro e com inclinação de esquerda, o Chile, em Dezembro de 2017, voltou à política neoliberal de direita com Sebastian Piñera, ex-sócio de Pinochet. Rodeado com os seus amigos neoliberais e cúmplices próximos da Argentina, Colômbia, Brasil, Peru e até no Equador, com certeza Sebastian Piñera irá adoptar as regras económicas neofascistas de extrema direita, e assim, cairá nas boas graças dos bancos de Washington e seus instrumentos, o FMI e o Banco Mundial.

O fascismo está em marcha. Isto apesar do facto de que 99,99% da população, não apenas na América Latina, como em todo o mundo, não querem nada com o fascismo – então, onde está a fraude? Por que ninguém está a investigar os golpes e fraudes no Brasil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colômbia? – para depois se apresentar os resultados para toda a gente ver?

Entretanto, aprendemos sobre a Cambridge/Oxford Analytica (CA & OA). Como operam e enganam o eleitorado. Eles mesmos finalmente admitiram o uso de métodos dentro dos quais operam e influenciam os eleitores com recurso a mentiras – com dados roubados ou comprados das redes sociais, principalmente do Facebook; milhões e milhões de dados pessoais para chegar electronicamente a grupos específicos de pessoas – bombardeando-as com mentiras para promover ou denegrir um ou outro candidato.

E foi precisamente isso que aconteceu no Brasil. Uma semana antes do segundo turno das eleições, ocorrido no último domingo, 28 de Outubro, Fernando Haddad (PT) lançou uma investigação criminal precisamente por esse motivo contra a campanha de Bolsonaro. Claro, nada aconteceu. Todos os juízes, tribunais e advogados estão sob o controle do não-eleito governo corrupto de direita Temer – que chegou ao poder através de um golpe parlamentar implacável orquestrado no estrangeiro, impugnando sob pretensões totalmente falsas a presidente eleita democraticamente Dilma Rousseff.

E agora – não há ninguém a investigar o que aconteceu no Brasil? Como se trouxe um “menino” militar como Jair Bolsonaro até ao poder? A esquerda está morta? Estarrecida até ao esquecimento? – Por quê? Com todas as lições para serem aprendidas ao redor do mundo, e para não ir mais longe, na vizinha Argentina – como pode a esquerda brasileira ser tão cega e ingénua, ao ponto de não perceber que seguindo o sistema  legal criminoso do seu país, é seguir o caminho para a sua própria morte, cavando a sua própria cova?

Desde o primeiro dia, os EUA contam firmemente com Bolsonaro para cercar a Venezuela, juntamente com a Colômbia. O presidente Trump já expressou as suas expectativas de trabalhar “estreitamente” com o novo governo de Bolsonaro em “questões de comércio, militar – e outras coisas”. Bolsonaro já se reuniu com Mike Pompeo, o secretário de Relações Exteriores dos EUA, e este último disse-lhe que a situação na Venezuela é uma “prioridade” para o Brasil. Ai está; Washington dita aos líderes estrangeiros as suas prioridades. Bolsonaro vai obedecer, com certeza.

Acorde – ESQUERDA! – não apenas na América Latina, mas em todo o mundo.

Hoje, são os principais meios de comunicação social que aprenderam os truques e as trapaças e aperfeiçoaram a Cambridge e Oxford Analyticas; e fazem-no sem parar. Possuem todo o dinheiro falso e fiduciário do mundo para poder pagar essas campanhas falsas e enganosas – Eles são propriedade da elite militar e financeira corporativa, CIA, MI6/5, Mossad – são propriedade e administrados pelo neoliberalismo ocidental todo abrangente cum fascismo. Os grupos de elite ricos têm livre acesso à oferta monetária falsa e fiduciária – o seu governo é fornecido tanto nos EUA quanto na Europa; a dívida não é problema para eles, desde que “se comportem”.

Sim. A ênfase está no saber comportar-se. As tendências ditatoriais são também omnipresentes na UE e, em especial, na não eleita Comissão Europeia (CE) , que é quem dita as regras em todas as questões importantes. O governo eurocético  5 Estrelas da Itália apresentou o seu orçamento para 2019 em Bruxelas. Não só foi o governo italiano repreendido por estender as suas contas com um défice superior à margem de 3% da dívida imposta pela UE, como também teve que apresentar um novo orçamento num prazo de 3 semanas. É assim que um governo da UE que não se comporta bem é tratado. Que alcance tem o controlo autoritário da UE em relação a um governo soberano. E “soberania” é – a UE ostenta – a chave para uma União Europeia coerente.

Por outro lado, a França tem infringido durante anos a famosa regra dos 3%. Aconteceu novamente com o orçamento de 2019. No entanto, o governo francês apenas recebeu uma nota esboçada, dizendo: por favor, reconsiderem o défice orçamental para o próximo ano. Não houve nenhuma reprimenda. Não se repreende uma Criança dos Rothschild. Dois pesos duas medidas, corrupção, nepotismo, estão entre os atributos do fascismo. Está a crescer rapidamente em todo o Ocidente. Está a assumir vida própria. E os militares estão preparados. Em toda parte. Se ao menos eles, os militares, acordassem e ficassem do lado do povo em vez do da elite dominante que os trata como seus peões. Contudo, eles fazem parte do povo; pertencem à mais comum das pessoas. No final, eles receberão o mesmo tratamento que as pessoas – serão torturados e mortos quando não forem mais necessários, ou quando não se comportem da maneira que os neofascistas pretendem.

Então, Caros Homens e Mulheres do Exército – por que não prevenir tais riscos e ficar ao lado das pessoas desde o começo? – Todo o sistema, criminoso e falso, entraria em colapso se não tivesse a proteção da polícia e dos militares. Vocês, queridos Homens e Mulheres, formam a Polícia e os Militares, vocês têm o poder e a obrigação moral de apoiar o povo, e não defender governantes cruéis, elitistas e criminosos – à la Macri, Bolsonaro, Piñera, Duque, Macron, May. e Merkel. E há muitos mais da mesma estirpe.

Um dos primeiros sinais do que viria a acontecer em toda a América Latina para depois se espalhar pelo mundo ocidental, foi a “falsa eleição” de Macri, em 2015, na Argentina. Alguns de nós viram isso chegando e escrevemos sobre o assunto. Nós fomos ignorados, até ridicularizados. Foi-nos dito que não entendemos o processo democrático. Sim certo. Entretanto, a tendência para a direita, para um estado permanente de emergência, uma Lei Marcial de facto, tornou-se irreversível. A França incorporou o estado permanente de emergência na sua Constituição. Militares e Polícias armados são presença constante em toda Paris e nas principais cidades de França.

Existem poucas, muito poucas exceções restantes na América Latina, e na verdade, em todo o mundo ocidental.

E vamos fazer o que pudermos para salvá-los do bulldozer do fascismo.

Peter Koenig

Artigo original publicado em Global Research a 30 de Outubro, 2018.

Fascism on the March in Latin America and the EU

Traduzido por Pimenta Press

Peter Koenig é economista e foi funcionário do Banco Mundial. Trabalhou em todo o mundo, no campo do meio ambiente e recursos hídricos. Escreve regularmente para Global Research, ICH, Voice of Russia, Ria Novosti e outras páginas internet. É autor de Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – romance-reportagem baseado em 30 anos de experiências do Banco Mundial em todo o mundo.

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Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War

November 12th, 2018 by Prof Michel Chossudovsky

Today, people are finally waking up to the dangers of a world war, which might emanate from the highest levels of the US government.  

We are no longer dealing with a hypothetical scenario. The threat of World War III is real. Public opinion has  become increasingly aware of the impending dangers of an all out US-NATO led war against Iran, North Korea and the Russian Federation.  

WW III has been contemplated by the U.S. and its allies for well over fifteen years as revealed in Michel Chossudovsky’s 2012 best-seller:  “Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War“

Excerpt below

The US has embarked on a military adventure, “a long war”, which threatens the future of humanity. US-NATO weapons of mass destruction are portrayed as instruments of peace. Mini-nukes are said to be “harmless to the surrounding civilian population”. Pre-emptive nuclear war is portrayed as a “humanitarian undertaking”.

click book cover image to order directly from Global Research

While one can conceptualize the loss of life and destruction resulting from present-day wars including Iraq and Syria, it is impossible to fully comprehend the devastation which might result from a Third World War, using “new technologies” and advanced weapons, until it occurs and becomes a reality. The international community has endorsed nuclear war in the name of world peace. “Making the world safer” is the justification for launching a military operation which could potentially result in a nuclear holocaust.

Nuclear war has become a multi-billion dollar undertaking, which fills the pockets of US defense contractors. What is at stake is the outright “privatization of nuclear war”.

The Pentagon’s global military design is one of world conquest. The military deployment of US-NATO forces is occurring in several regions of the world simultaneously.

Central to an understanding of war, is the media campaign which grants it legitimacy in the eyes of public opinion. A good versus evil dichotomy prevails. The perpetrators of war are presented as the victims. Public opinion is misled.

Breaking the “big lie”, which upholds war as a humanitarian undertaking, means breaking a criminal project of global destruction, in which the quest for profit is the overriding force. This profit-driven military agenda destroys human values and transforms people into unconscious zombies.

The object of this book is to forcefully reverse the tide of war, challenge the war criminals in high office and the powerful corporate lobby groups which support them.

“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3  |  Year: 2012  |  Pages: 102 Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling) PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Ordering from Canada or the US? Save on bulk orders of “Towards a World War III Scenario”:

3 copies for $25.00

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Reviews

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.” –John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“Professor Chossudovsky’s hard-hitting and compelling book explains why and how we must immediately undertake a concerted and committed campaign to head off this impending cataclysmic demise of the human race and planet earth. This book is required reading for everyone in the peace movement around the world.” –Francis A. Boyle, Professor of International Law, University of Illinois College of Law

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.” -Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction. –Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute   

WWIII Scenario

“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” by Michel Chossudovsky Available to order from Global Research!  ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3  |  Year: 2012  |  Pages: 102 Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling) PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

For Kindle edition, click to visit Amazon.com

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Veteran’s Day. The Military Industrial Empire’s Chess Game

November 12th, 2018 by Philip A Farruggio

Each and every year at this time in November our nation remembers those who fought and died wearing a US military uniform. But only a few of what they named ‘Wars‘ were ones in which our young military were rightfully sent overseas to fight.

This writer can only think of one such time, and that was WW2. All the rest of them were disgraceful attempts by our (so called) leaders to keep a stranglehold on the world. Sadly, the dead wearing those proud US uniforms of various branches have always been transformed into heroes. Sadder still, they were not heroes, rather pawns used disgracefully in some Military Industrial Empire’s chess game. Worse still, in most cases they were sent into harm’s way by leaders, both political and military, who never had to smell the odor of instant death:

The procession of generals marches slowly

with the clouds of gunpowder behind them,

as another encounter eases to flame

and the shouts of battle burn invisibly

from what once were bunkers of manhood

reduced now to pools of slaughter-house blood

flooding charred carcasses, uniformed but in death.

And the plotters never once look back

for the optimism of victory will not allow it.

They simply smile and pat one another

and then interrupt for a quick reflection;

And their silence is for that glorious past

and all those poor pitiful pawns,

and for future harvests which will occur

on the plains now of blood and sweat

in the limbo era that is renamed WAR.

(PAF October 1970)

Times like this become a ‘Catch 22’ for we who dissent against this empire. If you mind your manners and keep your mouth shut as the hype and hypocrisy abounds all around you, you become almost as bad as them. If you stand up and speak out against the tide, they label you unpatriotic and being against our military. Well, there is a way out of this conundrum. We should show remorse for the dead and wounded and deformed for life young military personnel, but only adding our feeling that They had NO business being sent to those places to do what they did to others and, ultimately, themselves! If those of us who ‘ know better’ as to the machinations of this Military Industrial Empire remain silent, then we give it license, and never reach our young minds with Truth.

The reception of heroes began early

as do all occasions befitting dawn.

The congregation of colonels arrived first

riding in on the backs of soldiers,

and they kneeled at the altars of business,

then proceeded to receive the generals

who had by now greeted the sun.

The one stars carried the two stars

and the three stars the four stars,

in the most common fashion: piggyback.

Next arrived the right handed reverends,

blessing and saluting and saluting and blessing

(they even baptised a newborn bastard)

and they took their rightful place on stage

awaiting, as all, their newest King,

escorted by hordes of helmets.

And the King humbled all beneath him

as his rented throne awaited

(being valid for four more years).

By now the sun had sickened

and proceeded behind soft clouds,

and the applause carried through the wind

on this day of the recycling of evil.

PAF Fall 1970

Nearly 50 years and nothing ever changes, does it?

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Philip A Farruggio is a son and grandson of Brooklyn, New York, longshoremen. He has been a freelance columnist since 2001, with more than 300 of his essays posted, besides The Greanville Post, on sites like Consortium News, Information Clearing House, Global Research, Nation of Change, World News Trust, Op-Ed News, Dissident Voice, Counterpunch, Activist Post, Sleuth Journal, Truthout and many others. His blog can be read in full on World News Trust, where he writes a great deal about the need to cut military spending drastically and send the savings back to save our cities. Philip has an internet interview show, “It’s the Empire… Stupid” with producer Chuck Gregory, and can be reached at [email protected].

We Are Heading for Another Tragedy Like World War I

November 12th, 2018 by Eric Margolis

We are now before the 100th anniversary of World War I, the war that was supposed to end all wars. While honoring the 16 million who died in this conflict, we should also condemn the memory of the politicians, officials and incompetent generals who created this horrendous blood bath.

I’ve walked most of the Western Front of the Great War, visited its battlefields and haunted forts, and seen the seas of crosses marking its innumerable cemeteries.

As a former soldier and war correspondent, I’ve always considered WWI as the stupidest, most tragic and catastrophic of all modern wars.

The continuation of this conflict, World War II, killed more people and brought more destruction on civilians in firebombed cities but, at least for me, World War I holds a special horror and poignancy. This war was not only an endless nightmare for the soldiers in their pestilential trenches, it also violently ended the previous 100 years of glorious European civilization, one of mankind’s most noble achievements.

I’ve explored the killing fields of Verdun many times and feel a visceral connection to this ghastly place where up to 1,000,000 soldiers died. I have even spent the night there, listening to the sirens that wailed without relent, and watching searchlights that pierced the night, looking for the ghosts of the French and German soldiers who died here.

Verdun’s soil was so poisoned by explosives and lethal gas that to this day it produces only withered, stunted scrub and sick trees. Beneath the surface lie the shattered remains of men and a deadly harvest of unexploded shells that still kill scores of intruders each year. The spooky Ossuaire Chapel contains the bone fragments of 130,000 men, blown to bits by the millions of high explosive shells that deluged Verdun.

The town of the same name is utterly bleak, melancholy and cursed. Young French and German officers are brought here to see firsthand the horrors of war and the crime of stupid generalship.

Amid all the usual patriotic cant from politicians, imperialists and churchmen about the glories of this slaughter, remember that World War I was a contrived conflict that was totally avoidable. Contrary to the war propaganda that still clouds and corrupts our historical view, World War I was not started by Imperial Germany.

Professor Christopher Clark in his brilliant book, `The Sleepwalkers’ shows how officials and politicians in Britain and France conspired to transform Serbia’s murder of Austro-Hungary’s Crown Prince into a continent-wide conflict. France burned for revenge for its defeat in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War and loss of Alsace-Lorraine. Britain feared German commercial and naval competition. At the time, the British Empire controlled one quarter of the world’s surface. Italy longed to conquer Austria-Hungary’s South Tyrol. Turkey feared Russia’s desire for the Straits. Austria-Hungary feared Russian expansion.

Prof Clark clearly shows how the French and British maneuvered poorly-led Germany into the war. The Germans were petrified of being crushed between two hostile powers, France and Russia. The longer the Germans waited, the more the military odds turned against them. Tragically, Germany was then Europe’s leader in social justice.

Britain kept stirring the pot, determined to defeat commercial and colonial rival, Germany. The rush to war became a gigantic clockwork that no one could stop. All sides believed a war would be short and decisive. Crowds of fools chanted ‘On to Berlin’ or ‘On to Paris.’

Few at the time understood the impending horrors of modern war or the geopolitical demons one would release. The 1904 Russo-Japanese War offered a sharp foretaste of the 1914 conflict, but Europe’s grandees paid scant attention.

Even fewer grasped how the collapse of the antiquated Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires would send Europe and the Mideast into dangerous turmoil that persists to our day. Or how a little-known revolutionary named Lenin would shatter Imperial Russia and turn it into the world’s most murderous state.

This demented war in Europe tuned into an even greater historic tragedy in 1917 when US President Woodrow Wilson, driven by a lust for power and prestige, entered the totally stalemated war on the Western Front. One million US troops and starvation caused by a crushing British naval blockade turned the tide of battle and led to Germany’s surrender.

Vengeful France and Britain imposed intolerable punishment on Germany, forcing it to accept full guilt for the war, an untruth that persists to this day. The result was Adolf Hitler and his National Socialists. If an honorable peace had been concluded in 1917, neither Hitler nor Stalin might have seized power and millions of lives would have been saved. This is the true tragedy of the Great War.

Let us recall the words of the wise Benjamin Franklin: `No good war, no bad peace.’

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Remembering the Peace Makers: What the Armistice Commemorations Forgot

November 12th, 2018 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

Those in the war industry and the business of commemorating the dead have little time for peace, even as they supposedly celebrate it. For them, peace is the enemy as much as armed opposing combatants, if not more so. Dr Brendan Nelson of the Australian War Memorial is every bit the propagandist in this regard, encased in armour of permanent reminder: Do not forget the sacrifice; do not forget the slaughter.  The issue is how war, not peace, is commemorated.

That theme was repeated, for the most part, in Paris on November 11.  US President Donald Trump spoke of “our sacred obligation to memorialise our fallen heroes.”  French President Emmanuel Macron marked the 100th anniversary of the Great War by having a dig at nationalism, calling it a “betrayal of patriotism” (is there a difference?).  The nationalists, he warned, were getting busy, these “old demons coming back to wreak chaos and death”.  The intellectuals (and here, he alluded to Julien Benda’s 1927 classic, La trahison des clercs) were at risk of capitulating.

But Macron, rather slyly, was hoping that the French obsession with universal values would somehow render his message less parochial: to be French was to be an internationalist, not a tunnel-visioned, rabid nationalist.  The soldiers who perished in the Great War did so in the defence of France’s “universal values” in order to repudiate the “selfishness of nationals only looking after their own interests.”  Much room for disagreement on that score, and Marine Le Pen would have been a suitable corrective.

The peace activities of the Great War, asphyxiated, smothered and derided in texts and official narratives, are rarely discussed in the mass marketed solemnity of commemorations.  The writings of those prophets who warned that any adventurism such as what transpired in 1914 would be met with immeasurable suffering are also conspicuously absent.  Jean de Bloc, whose magisterial multi-volume The Future of War appeared in 1898 in Russian, found it “impossible” that Europe’s leaders would embark on a conflict against each other; to do so would “cause humanity a great moral evil… civil order will be threatened by new theories of social revolution”. The end would be catastrophic.  “How many flourishing countries will be turned into wilderness and rich cities into ruins! How many tears will be shed, how many will be left in beggary!”

These sceptics were the enlightened ones, scorned for not having the sense of fun that comes with joining battle and being butchered in the name of some vague patriotic sentiment.  If human beings are animals at play, then play to the death, if need be – the rational ones were sidelined, persecuted and hounded.  They are the party poopers.

Prior to the first shots of the guns of August in 1914, Europe had witnessed a slew of meetings and activities associated with the theme of peace.  From 1889, pacifists were busy with Universal Peace Congresses, while the Inter-parliamentary Union made a stab at efforts and ideas to reduce national tensions.  The Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907, with one scheduled to take place in 1915, suggested a certain sensibility, even as the military machinery of Europe was getting ominously more lethal.  At the very least, the political classes were playing at peace.

The 1,200 women who gathered at The Hague in 1915 as part of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom feature as sane if forgotten voices before the murderous machine truly got going.  Their work involved attendees from 12 countries and the passing of 20 resolutions on war. They worked to convince those engaged in the murderous machine about the folly and were dismissed accordingly as cranks and nuisances.

The peace movement was sundered by the patriotic diseases that engulfed the continent, and such organisations as the International Peace Bureau failed to reach a consensus on how best to quell warring aggressions.  In January 1915, its Berne meeting was characterised by division, best exemplified by a resolution denouncing Germany and Australia for egregious breaches of international law.  The vote was divided evenly, and unity was destroyed.

While monuments to the war makers and fallen soldiers dot the town squares of the combatant nations, lingering like morbid call cards for failed militarism, there are virtually none in the service of peace.  The tenaciously wise and farsighted Austrian noblewoman Bertha von Suttner, the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905 and suspect the motives of governments behind the Hague Peace conferences, hardly figures in commemorative statuary.  Nor does Rosa Luxemburg, who began a twelve-month sentence in Berlin’s Barnimstrasse Womens’ Prison on February 18, 1915 for “inciting public disobedience”.

Her crime, committed during the words of her famous Fechenheim address, was to call upon German workers to refuse shooting their French counterparts should war break out.

“Victory or defeat?” she would sadly reflect in her anti-war tract, The Junius Pamphlet (1915) written whilst in confinement.  “Thus sounds the slogan of the ruling militarism in all the warring countries, and, like an echo, the Social Democratic leaders have taken it up.”

As Adam Hochschild sourly noted in 2014, those who refuse to fight or barrack for war are ignored by the commemorative classes.

“America’s politicians still praise Iraq War veterans to the skies, but what senator has a kind word to say about the hundreds of thousands who marched and demonstrated before the invasion was even launched to try to stop our soldiers from risking their lives in the first place?”

Events conspicuously against the spirit of killing and maiming opponents, such as that which took place during the short lived Christmas Truce of 1914, have only been remembered – and tolerated – because of their public relations quality.  These events sell chocolates and cakes; they draw people to sites and commodities.  The truce signalled no revolution; it did not challenge the war planners.  “It’s safe to celebrate,” commented Hochschild, “because it threatened nothing.”  The sovereignty of war, the institution of state-sanctioned killing, remained, as it still does, though selling peace can be lucrative when the shells have stopped falling.

The obscenity here is that conflict, most notably that of the First World War, was meant to be cathartic, a brief bit of masculine cleansing that would end by the arbitrarily designated time of Christmas.  It was advertised as a picnic, a brief testosterone outing which would see men return intact.  Foolishly, such figures as HG Wells saw it as “the war to end war”, so get it over and done with, minimal fuss and all. (To be fair to Wells, he found disgust and despair subsequently, reflecting upon this in The Bulpington of Blup in 1932.)

This was, truly, as the title of Margaret MacMillan’s work goes, the war that ended peace, and we should not forget the political and military classes, instrumental in dashing off soldiers to their death, who engineered it with coldness and ignorance.  Foolishness and demagoguery tend to hold hands all too often, distant from that most moving sentiment expressed by the jailed US socialist activist and presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs.  “I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth; and I am a citizen of the world.”

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

Featured image is from The Times of Israel.

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Selected Articles: Are We Heading Towards the Next World War?

November 12th, 2018 by Global Research News

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World War I Centenary: “War Is a Racket”. Unlimited Imperialism

By Prof. Francis Boyle, November 12, 2018

Ten Million People died for nothing. Smedley D. Butler had it right. War is a Racket. And Woodrow Wilson murdered 116,000+ Americans in that war. The American People and Congress did not want to fight in that God-forsaken war. Wilson lied, tricked, deceived, maneuvered and finagled us into that war.

Bitter US-European Tensions Mark Centenary of World War I Armistice in Paris

By Alex Lantier, November 12, 2018

This weekend, heads of state from 70 countries met in Paris to mark the centenary of the end of World War I, amid rising conflicts between the great powers and growing popular anger. Despite the ritualistic criticisms of nationalism and calls for peace, it is clear that none of the “world leaders” in Paris had any plan to halt the accelerating collapse of international relations between the major powers.

As We Honour the 15 Million Dead of 1914-1918, a Demented US President Flies into Paris with Plans to Attack Iran

By Hans Stehling, November 12, 2018

As the leaders of Europe and the world gather in Paris to honour the millions of war dead of WW1, 100 years ago, the current US President together with his counterparts from Saudi Arabia and Israel, are even now finalising plans to attack and bankrupt Iran in a precursor to a devastating war in the Middle East that would escalate into Europe and beyond.

War Criminals in High Office Commemorate the End of World War I

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, November 12, 2018

In a bitter irony, several of the World’s leaders who were “peacefully” commemorating the end of World War I in Paris including Trump, Netanyahu, Macron and May are the protagonists of war in Afghanistan, Palestine, Syria, Libya, Iraq and Yemen.

The 100th Anniversary of The Tragic End of World War I .“Those Who don’t Know History are Doomed to Repeat It”

By Stephen Lendman, November 12, 2018

November 11 marked the 100th anniversary of WW I’s end – officially at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.

The so-called war to end all wars was prelude for much worse to come. In 1928, Kellogg-Briand policy renounced aggressive wars.

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Canada and the First World War: Opposition to Conscription in Canada and Quebec

November 12th, 2018 by TML Weekly

On the occasion of the centenary of the end of World War I, TML Weekly has been producing an excellent series of informative Supplements on the war and related matters of concern.

This is the second in the series. Click for No. 1 (How the First World War Out); N 2 (Canada and the First World War); No. 3 (British Movement of Conscientious Objectors); No. 4 (Contributions and Slaughter of Colonial Peoples in World War I);  No. 5 (Steadfast Opposition to the Betrayal of the Workers’ Movement); No. 6 (Poems on the Occasion of the Centenary of the End of World War I – Moments of Quiet Reflection.  

In August 1914, Britain declared war on the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Canada, as a dominion of the British Empire, was automatically bound to take part.

Robert Laird Borden, then Conservative Prime Minister of Canada, was eager to participate in the war. By Sunday, August 9, 1914, the basic orders-in-council had been proclaimed, and a war session of parliament opened just two weeks after the conflict began. Legislation was quickly passed to secure the country’s financial institutions and raise tariff duties on some high-demand consumer items. The War Measures Act 1914, giving the government extraordinary powers of coercion over Canadians, was rushed through three readings.[1]

1917.05.17.Anti-conscription_parade_at_Victoria_Squarecr

Montreal rally in Victoria Square on May 17, 1917 was one of many opposing conscription during WWI.

 

Businessman William Price (of Price Brothers and Company – predecessor of Resolute Forest Products) was mandated to create a training camp at Valcartier, near Quebec City. Some 126 farms were expropriated to expand the camp’s area to 12,428 acres (50 square km). “From the start of the conflict, a range of 1,500 targets was built, including shelters, firing positions and signs, making it the largest and most successful shooting range in the world on August 22, 1914. The camp housed 33,644 men in 1914.”[2] At the time Valcartier was the largest military base in Canada.

Early in the war, Prime Minister Borden had promised not to conscript Canadians into military service.[3] However, by the summer of 1917, Canada had been at war for nearly three years. More than 130,000 Canadians belonging to the Canadian Expeditionary Force had been killed or maimed.[4] The number of volunteers continuously declined with the growing refusal to serve as cannon fodder for imperialist powers and as a result of the profound impact of the war efforts on the country’s economy. There was pressure on all the commonwealth countries and British colonies to continue providing troops for the British imperial war effort, yet the government was not able to provide a convincing argument for working people to agree to sacrifice their lives for the British Empire.

The lack of enthusiasm for the war was such that the Borden government imposed conscription through the Military Service Act August 29, 1917. It stipulated that

“All the male inhabitants of Canada, of the age of eighteen years and upwards, and under sixty, not exempt or disqualified by law, and being British subjects, shall be liable to service in the Militia: Provided that the Governor General may require all the male inhabitants of Canada, capable of bearing arms, to serve in the case of a levée en masse.”

The law was in force through the end of the war.

Borden also decided that the best way to bring about conscription was through a wartime coalition government. He offered the Liberals equal seats at the Cabinet table in exchange for their support for conscription. After months of political manoeuvring, he announced a Union Government in October, made up of loyal Conservatives, plus a handful of pro-conscription Liberals and independent members of Parliament.

Borden was in his sixth year of his first term. In the months just prior to the election he engineered two pieces of legislation, stacking the Unionist side.

Under previous laws, soldiers were excluded from voting in wartime. The new Military Voters Act allowed all 400,000 Canadian men in uniform, including those who were under age or were British-born, to vote in the coming election.

The second piece of legislation, the Wartime Elections Act, gave women the right to vote for the first time in a federal election – but only women who were the relatives of Canadian soldiers overseas. With these two laws, a vast new constituency of voters, the majority of whom supported the war effort and conscription, were suddenly enfranchised in time for the election. Borden’s Unionists won that election with a majority of 153 seats, only three of which were from Quebec.

Posters to mobilize women for imperialist war. Poster on left calls on women eligible to vote under Wartime Elections Act to vote for the Union government. 

Conscription

Conscription went into effect January 1, 1918. Exemption boards were set up all over the country, before which a high percentage of men appealed their call-up for service.

Besides Quebeckers, who as a whole opposed conscription, many Canadians across the country were also opposed, including anti-imperialists, farmers, unionized workers, the unemployed, religious groups and peace activists. By February 1918, 52,000 draftees had sought exemption across the country. The lack of support for the war was reiterated by the fact that of more than 400,000 men called up for service, 380,510 appealed through the various options for exemption and appeal in the Military Service Act.

Ultimately, some 125,000 Canadians – just over a quarter of those eligible to be drafted were conscripted into the military. Of these, just over 24,000 were sent to Europe before the war’s end.

Many Canadian men simply did not show up when they were called to report and join the army. Winnipeg was second only to Montreal in the percentage of men who did not report or defaulted – almost 20 per cent of those conscripted compared to around 25 percent in Montreal, according to reports published in the Winnipeg Telegram at the time. These men were pursued by the police and could receive heavy jail sentences if caught and tried.

Opposition to the war and conscription in Quebec

Examples of the Canadian state’s clumsy Anglo-Canadian chauvinist attempts to recruit Quebeckers to its unjust cause of imperialist war, exhorting them to enlist on the basis of loyalty to the old colonial power, France; opposition to tyranny by supporting the new colonial power, Britain; or protecting themselves from foreign invasion.

On October 15, 1914, the 22nd Regiment was officially created to bolster French Canadian involvement. As the only combatant unit in the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) whose official language was French, the 22nd (French Canadian) Infantry Battalion, commonly referred to as the “Van Doos” (from vingt-deux, meaning twenty-two in French), was subject to more scrutiny than most Canadian units in the First World War. After months of training in Canada and England, the battalion finally arrived in France on September 15, 1915.[5]

In April 1916, the Van Doos participated in one of the unit’s most dangerous assignments of the entire war, the Battle of St. Eloi Craters. St. Eloi was fought on a very narrow Belgian battlefield. A fierce battle ensued with heavy casualties. Following St. Eloi, the battalion prepared to take the French village of Courcelette in the Somme sector of France. The battalion suffered hundreds of casualties. To many it showed just how violent war could really be. In the months following the Somme operations, the battalion began suffering from desertion and absence without leave. According to battalion officers, the months following Courcelette witnessed a complete breakdown in troop morale. In the next 10 months, 70 soldiers were brought before a court-martial (48 for illegal absences) and several were executed by firing squad.[6]

Despite the establishment of the Van Doos, the people of Quebec, expressing their anti-war sentiment, were at the forefront of the opposition to conscription. The Canadian establishment at the time blamed Quebeckers for the “the lack of French-Canadian participation in the war.”[7]

In Quebec, of the 3,458 individuals from the City of Hull called-up by military authorities who had not been granted an exemption, 1,902 men did not report and were never apprehended, for a total conscription evasion rate of 55 per cent. This was the highest evasion rate of all Canadian registration districts, followed closely by Quebec City at 46.6 per cent, and Montreal at 35.2 per cent. Further, 99 per cent of those called up by the City of Hull applied for an exemption, the highest application rate in all of Canada.[8]

War Measures Act Invoked

Quebeckers organized militant protests against attempts by the Canadian government to use its police powers to impose conscription on the working people and youth of Canada and Quebec. The Borden government responded by invoking the War Measures Act to quell this opposition. The government proclaimed martial law and deployed over 6,000 soldiers to Quebec City between March 28 and April 1, 1918.

On the evening of March 28, 1918, federal police raided a bowling alley and arrested the youth there. Faced with the arbitrariness and violence of the police, 3,000 people besieged the police station and continued their demonstration in the streets during the night.

1918.03.29-Qc-MarcheVersCapitole.jpg

Thousands of demonstrators march to Place Montcalm on March 29, 1918.

The next day, a crowd of nearly 10,000 gathered in front of the Place Montcalm auditorium (currently called Capitole de Quebec), where the conscripts’ files were administered. The military, with bayonets and cannons, were called in and shortly after the Riot Act was read, giving them permission to fire.

Within the conditions of the day, the ruling elite in Canada found a wall of resistance among the working people of Quebec to being forcibly sent to war. The aspirations of the Québécois for nationhood had been put down prior to Confederation through force of British arms. Along with the subjugation of the Indigenous peoples and the settlers in Upper Canada, the basis was laid for the establishment of an Anglo-Canadian state and Confederation. It is not hard to imagine that the Quebec working class would not look favourably on being mowed down on the battlefields of Europe in the service of the British Empire.

Notes

  1. “Sir Robert Laird Borden,” greatwaralbum.ca.
  2. “Les débuts du camp de Valcartier et d’une armée improvisée de toutes piéces,” Pierre Vennat, Le Québec et les guerres mondiales, December 17, 2011.
  3. Richard Foot, Election of 1917, August 12, 2015, Canadian Encyclopedia.
  4. Ibid.
  5. Maxime Dagenais, The “Van Doos” and the Great War, November 5, 2018, Canadian Encyclopedia.
  6. Ibid.
  7. “The First World War,” Sean Mills (under the direction of Brian Young, McGill University), McCord Museum website.
  8. Claude Harb, Le Droit et l’Outaouais pendant la Premi re Guerre mondiale, Bulletin de l’Institut Pierre Renouvin, 2017/1 (N 45), éditeur: UMR Sirice.

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The Case of Ginger Goodwin

1918.VancouverGeneralStrike-image-121BCLabHerMuseum-01K

Twenty-four hour Vancouver General Strike was held to coincide with Ginger Goodwin’s funeral, August 2, 1918.

Ginger (Albert) Goodwin was a coal miner from England who immigrated to Canada in the early twentieth century. He worked in coal mines in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia and Michel, British Columbia before settling in Cumberland on Vancouver Island in 1910 or early 1911. He worked in the Dunsmuir coal mine in Cumberland and participated in the strike of 1912 to 1914. He was active in the United Mine Workers of America and in 1914 became an organizer for the Socialist Party.

In 1916 he moved to Trail in the interior of BC where he worked for some months as a smelterman for the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company of Canada Limited. He was the Socialist Party of Canada’s candidate in Trail in the provincial election of 1916, coming in third, and in December of that year was elected full-time secretary of the Trail Mill and Smeltermen’s Union, a local of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (IUMMSW). The following year he was elected as vice-president of the BC Federation of Labour, president of IUMMSW’s District 6 and president of the Trail Trades and Labour Council. He was proposed by the union as deputy minister of BC’s newly founded Department of Labour, but not selected. This was a proposal supported by the trades and labour councils of both Victoria and Vancouver.

Ginger Goodwin opposed World War I for political reasons on the grounds that workers should not kill each other in economic wars. “War is simply part of the process of Capitalism. Big financial interests are playing the game. They’ll reap the victory, no matter how the war ends,” he said. Nonetheless, he registered for conscription as the law required and was classified as unfit. However, not two weeks following the start of a strike in Trail for the eight-hour day, which Goodwin led, he was ordered to undergo a medical re-examination and this time was classified as fit to serve.

His appeal against conscription was rejected in April 1918. Ordered to report to army barracks he refused to compromise his conscience and hid out with others resisting conscription in the hills near Cumberland where people from the town ensured they had food and supplies.

Goodwin was shot and killed on July 27, 1918 by Constable Dan Campbell of the Dominion Police, one of three members of a team that was hunting men who were evading the Military Service Act. The anger of the people of Cumberland and workers throughout the province was such that on August 2, 1918 there was a mile-long funeral procession in Cumberland, and BC’s first general strike the same day in Vancouver.

1918-0802-GingerGoodwinFuneralCumberlandBC

Ginger Goodwin’s funeral, Cumberland BC, August 2, 1918.

On June 24, 2018 in honour of Ginger Goodwin, labour martyr and war resister, on the 100th anniversary of his death, the Cumberland Museum along with the BC Federation of Labour and local unions, artists, musicians and actors, re-enacted the funeral procession as part of the annual Miner’s Memorial events held from June 22 to 24. On July 23, 2018, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Goodwin’s death, the BC government erected a monument at nearby Union Bay, the coal port that served the Cumberland mines, in honour of Ginger Goodwin for his fight for workers’ rights and his opposition to conscription. A section of highway near Cumberland was named “Ginger Goodwin Way” in 1996 in his honour.

Recruitment of Indigenous Peoples

When the First World War broke out on July 28, 1914, Canada had no official policy on the recruitment of Indigenous peoples into the army because they did not have status as citizens. However, in 1915, as the casualties began to mount, the British government directed the Dominions to begin recruiting Indigenous people for the war effort. Australia and New Zealand, along with Canada, recruited Indigenous soldiers to fight on the side of British imperialism in the war. It is estimated that 4,000 Indigenous men and woman served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in the First World War out of a total of some 600,000 troops from Canada. It is estimated that a third of “Status Indian” men between the ages of 18 and 45 served in the War. There are no known statistics for Métis and Inuit because the Canadian government only recognized “Status Indians” in the records.

Many First Nations, which were the main source of Indigenous recruits along with a much smaller number of Métis and Inuit, protested against the attempt to recruit them into the Canadian colonial army and opposed the arrival of recruitment officers and the Indian Agent on their reserves. Other First Nations refused to participate unless they were accorded equal status as sovereign nations and dealt with on a nation-to-nation basis by the British Crown with which they had signed their treaties.

Some Indigenous leaders and elders also reminded the government that they had received reassurances at the time of the signing of the numbered treaties with the Crown that their youth would not be serving in any wars, specially those abroad.

As well, many Indigenous women wrote to the Department of Indian Affairs demanding that the Canadian government keep its hands off their sons and husbands and that they were needed at home.

Many reasons are given for the participation of Indigenous people in the First World War. One of the reasons was the promise of a regular paycheque, another was the argument that within the First Nations, warrior societies should play their role in assisting the Crown as their relations were with the Crown, not Canada. Another argument was that after making their contributions, Indigenous relations with the Canadian state would improve when they returned.

Indigenous soldiers took part in all the major battles that the Canadian army participated in and distinguished themselves as scouts, snipers, trackers and as front line fighters winning the admiration and respect of their non-Indigenous comrades and officers. At least 50 Indigenous soldiers were decorated for bravery and heroism. In the course of the war, some 300 lost their lives and many more were wounded and others died after returning home from the effects of mustard gas poisoning, wounds that they suffered, and diseases they had contracted in Europe such as tuberculosis and influenza.

The Military Services Act passed by the the Borden Conservative government in 1917 introduced conscription including for “Status Indians.” Conscription was not only broadly opposed in Quebec, but also by Indigenous peoples who denounced this manoeuvre by the government to disregard their status as Indigenous peoples. In response to this opposition, the government was forced to grant Indigenous peoples an exemption from serving overseas.

Other injustices were also imposed on Indigenous peoples. In 1917, Arthur Meighen, Minister of the Interior as well as head of Indian Affairs, launched the “Greater Production Effort,” a program intended to increase agricultural production. As part of this scheme, reserve lands that were considered “idle” were taken over by the federal government and handed over to non-Indigenous farmers for “proper use.” After non-Indigenous and First Nations protested that this was a violation of the Indian Act, the government amended the Indian Act in 1918 to make these illegal actions legal.

Post-war brutality against Indigenous veterans

At the end of the war, returning soldiers, including Indigenous veterans, held high hopes that their contributions to the war effort would translate into a better future for themselves and their communities. Indigenous veterans thought that their status as “wards” of the state would be over and that they would be treated as equals. Instead they found that nothing changed and the racism and colonial attitudes of the Canadian government remained intact.

Many Indigenous veterans returned with illnesses such as pneumonia, tuberculosis and influenza which they had contracted overseas. Those who had suffered poison gas attacks returned with weakened lungs and became more prone to tuberculosis and other respiratory illnesses. Like their non-Indigenous fellow soldiers, Indigenous veterans suffered from the trauma of the war – which in today’s terms would be called post-traumatic stress disorder – and other illnesses such as alcoholism, which wrecked their lives and caused many problems for their families and communities. In fact, the overall standard of living in Indigenous communities declined in the years following the war as returning veterans found it extremely difficult to keep regular work and to return to their pre-war lives. In the face of these complex problems, Canada provided little support to Indigenous veterans.

Benefits and support for veterans from the Canadian government through the Soldiers Settlement Acts of 1917 and 1919, such as land and loans to encourage farming, did not extend to Indigenous veterans. To add insult to injury, through the Acts the federal government confiscated an additional 85,844 acres from reserves to provide farmland for non-Indigenous veterans.

The racist Canadian colonial state’s aim of exterminating Indigenous people by assimilating them was alive and well as expressed by the notorious Duncan Campbell Scott, architect of the Residential School System in Canada and Deputy Superintendent of the Department of Indian Affairs, who wrote in a 1919 essay:

These men who have been broadened by contact with the outside world and its affairs, who have mingled with the men of other races, and who have witnessed the many wonders and advantages of civilization, will not be content to return to their old Indian mode of life. Each one of them will be a missionary of the spirit of progress… Thus the war will have hastened that day,… when all the quaint old customs, the weird and picturesque ceremonies… shall be as obsolete as the buffalo and the tomahawk, and the last tepee of the Northern wilds give place to a model farmhouse.

The neglect of Indigenous veterans and other abuses of Indigenous peoples by the Canadian state, led Haudenosaunee veteran Frederick Loft, a Mohawk from Six Nations on the Grand River who had served as a lieutenant overseas in the Forestry Corps, to form the League of Indians of Canada in 1919.  Before his return to Canada, Loft had met with the King and Privy Council in London to express his concerns about the way Indigenous peoples in Canada were being treated. Under his leadership, the League of Indians fought to protect the lands and treaty rights of Indigenous peoples.

In particular, the League fought to preserve Indigenous rights and led the battle against the “involuntary enfranchisement” changes to the Indian Act, orchestrated by Duncan Campbell Scott and passed in 1920, aimed at extinguishing Indigenous title by giving “Status Indians” the vote, while at the same time working to undermine and sabotage the work of the League of Indians and isolating and criminalizing Loft. The League also mounted legal challenges to establish Indigenous claims to hunting, fishing and trapping rights among other things.

The League of Indians was the first attempt by Canadian Indigenous peoples to form a national organization to resist the Canadian colonial state’s assault on their rights and claims and subsequently inspired the formation of other Indigenous political organizations to battle the colonial Canadian state and its racist policies.

(With files from Indian Affairs and Northern Development Canada, Canadian Encyclopedia, Veterans Affairs Canada and Library and Archives Canada.)

The Black Construction Battalion

1916-CanadaNo2ConstructionBattalion-CdnEncyclopedia-01

While Blacks were used by the British colonialists as cannon fodder to suppress the struggles for rights of others, their own legitimate rights and claims were marginalized and denied.

When the First World War broke out, Blacks in Nova Scotia and other places tried to enlist but faced racist obstacles and justifications to keep them out. The Chief of the General Staff of the Canadian Army at the time asked in a memo: “Would Canadian Negroes make good fighting men? I do not think so.”

When a group of about 50 Black Canadians from Sydney, Nova Scotia, tried to enlist they were advised, “[T]his is not for you fellows. This is a white man’s war.”

In the face of repeated opposition to this state racism and discrimination, the Canadian government permitted the formation of No. 2 Construction Battalion (also known as the Black Battalion), based in Pictou, Nova Scotia. It was a segregated battalion that never saw military action because they were not permitted to carry weapons. Five hundred Black soldiers volunteered from Nova Scotia alone, representing 56 per cent of the Black Battalion. It was the only Black battalion in Canadian military history.

The Battalion was sent to eastern France armed with picks and shovels to dig ditches and construct trenches at the front, putting themselves in grave danger. They also worked on road and rail construction. Following the end of the War in 1918, the members of the Battalion were repatriated and the unit was disbanded in 1920.

According to Veterans Affairs Canada, another some 2,000 Black Canadians served in the front lines of World War I through other units, some with the armies of other countries.

Once returned, the Black veterans of the No. 2 Construction Battalion, and other returning Black veterans found that nothing had changed at home and that not only were their contributions to the war effort ignored, they continued to face racism and discrimination in employment, veterans’ benefits, and other social services.[1]

Note

1. The Canadian state likes to portray the participation of Blacks in the Canadian military in the most self-serving manner. Veterans Affairs Canada notes

“The tradition of military service by Black Canadians goes back long before Confederation. Indeed, many Black Canadians can trace their family roots to Loyalists who emigrated North in the 1780s after the American Revolutionary War. American slaves had been offered freedom and land if they agreed to fight in the British cause and thousands seized this opportunity to build a new life in British North America.”

A rosy picture, but far from reality. The slaves that sided with the British colonialists during the U.S. War of Independence, numbering some 30,000, escaped to the British side and served as soldiers, labourers and cooks. When the British were defeated, the British evacuated some 2,000 of these “Black Loyalists” to Nova Scotia with the promise of a better life and opportunities as free people. Others were thrown to the four winds landing in the Caribbean Islands, Quebec, Ontario, England and even Germany and Belgium. Those the British outright abandoned in the U.S. were recaptured as slaves.

Many of the Black Loyalists landed at Shelburne, in southeastern Nova Scotia, and later created their own community nearby in Birchtown, the largest Black settlement outside Africa at the time. Other Black Loyalists settled in various places around Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

Far from finding freedom, and new opportunities, most of the Black Loyalists never received the land or provisions that they were promised and were forced to make their living as cheap labour – as farm hands, day labourers in the towns or as domestics. In 1791, in order to solve the “Black problem,” the British Colonial authorities repatriated about half of these Black Loyalists from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to Sierra Leone, Africa.

Those Blacks who remained were used by the British colonial state in the War of 1812 to fight the Americans. Blacks in Ontario and also from other places were part of a colonial militia called in to suppress the Upper Canada Rebellion in 1837.

(With files from Veterans Affairs, CBC and the Canadian Encyclopedia.)

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The War Measures Act and Internment of Canadians

WWI-BanffInternmentCamp-crop

Internment camp in Banff, Alberta.

Upon Great Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, the Borden Conservative government enacted the War Measures Act, in August 1914. The law’s sweeping powers allowed the government to suspend or limit civil liberties and provided it the right to incarcerate “enemy aliens.”

The term “enemy alien” referred to the citizens of states legally at war with Canada living in Canada during the war.

From 1914 to 1920, Canada interned 8,579 persons as so-called enemy aliens across the country in 24 receiving stations and internment camps. Of that number, 3,138 were classified as prisoners of war, while the others were civilians. The majority of those detained were of Ukrainian descent, targeted because Ukraine was then split between Russia (an ally) and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, an enemy of the British Empire. Some of the internees were Canadian-born and others were naturalized British subjects, although most were recent immigrants.

Most internees were young unemployed single men apprehended while trying to cross the border into the U.S. to look for jobs – attempting to leave Canada was illegal. Eighty-one women and 156 children were interned as they had decided to follow their menfolk into the only two camps that accepted families, in Vernon, BC (mainly Germans) and in Spirit Lake near Amos Quebec (mainly Ukrainians).

19150600-FernieBCInternees-on-grounds-Joseph-Spalding

Internment camp in Fernie, BC.

Besides those placed in internment camps, another 80,000 “enemy aliens,” mostly Ukrainians, were forced to carry identity papers and to report regularly to local police offices. They were treated by the government as social pariahs, and many lost their jobs.

Alberta-CastleMountainInternmentCampMonument-01cr

Monument to those interned at the Castle Mountain camp in Alberta.

The internment camps were often located in remote rural areas, including in Banff, Jasper, Mount Revelstoke and Yoho national parks in Western Canada. Internees had much of their wealth confiscated. Many of them were used as forced labour on large projects, including the development of Banff National Park and numerous mining and logging operations. They constructed roads, cleared land and built bridges.

Between 1916-17, during a severe shortage of farm labour, nearly all internees were paroled and placed in the custody of local farmers and paid at current wages. Other parolees were sent as paid workers to railway gangs and mines. Parolees were still required to report regularly to police authorities.

Federal and provincial governments and private concerns benefited from their labour and from the confiscation of what little wealth they had, a portion of which was left in the Bank of Canada at the end of the internment operations on June 20, 1920.

A small number of internees, including men considered to be “dangerous foreigners,” labour radicals, or particularly troublesome internees, were deported to their countries of origin after the war, largely from the Kapuskasing camp in Ontario, which was the last to be shut down.

Of those interned, 109 died of various diseases and injuries sustained in the camp, six were killed while trying to escape, and some – according to a military report – went insane or committed suicide as a result of their confinement.

PetawawaInternmentCampWWI

Internment camp in Petawawa, Ontario. (Canadian War Museum, Calgary Herald, Wikipedia.)

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Our thanks to Tony Seeds for having brought this article to our attention.

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Raging California Wildfires

November 12th, 2018 by Stephen Lendman

Extreme weather related events are becoming more common in America and elsewhere, including severe hurricanes, droughts, and blazes like what’s ravaging California.

They’re likely related to global warming, a reality Trump and regime hardliners ignore. According to bioclimatologist Park Williams:

“In pretty much every single way, a perfect recipe for fire is just kind of written in California. Nature creates the perfect conditions for fire, as long as people are there to start the fires,” adding:

“But then climate change, in a few different ways, seems to also load the dice toward more fire(s) (and other extreme weather related events) in the future.”

The Trump regime’s reckless environmental agenda is part of the problem, making a bad situation worse by its indifference to responsible policymaking – putting profits and self-interest above ecosanity.

Raging wildfires are the worst in California’s history – three separate ones in the state in northern and southern areas, greatly exacerbated by seasonally high Santa Ana winds.

So far, over 250,000 residents had to evacuate areas where staying could risk death – at least 25 reported dead so far, perhaps many more before blazes are contained.

Paradise, California, a community of around 26,000, covering about 1,400 square miles, was virtually destroyed.

Resident Rex Stewart lamented that “Paradise is gone. There’s nothing to go back to.”

According to California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection Captain Scott McLean,

“(p)retty much the community of Paradise is destroyed. It’s that kind of devastation. The wind that was predicted came and just wiped it out.”

Fires continue raging in northern and southern parts of the state. The 1933 Griffith Park fire killed 29 people, the toll from current blazes likely to way exceed the earlier record number. Over 100 people are reported missing.

The Butte County northern California Camp Fire (named after Camp Creek Road) so far consumed around 105,000 acres, destroying over 6,700 structures since November 8 – including homes, schools, a nursing home and area hospital.

The blaze forced evacuation of Paradise and Magalia residents. It threatens Stirling City and Inskip. It began on the same day as the Woolsey Fire and Hill Fire.

The Woolsey blaze so far scorched around 70,000 acres, burning homes in Malibu, Westlake Village and Thousand Oaks, threatening parts of Simi Valley and West Hills – forcing evacuation of thousands of area residents.

Malibu city authorities issued a statement, saying

“(f)ire is burning out of control, heading into populated areas of (the upscale community). All residents evacuate now.”

The Hill blaze destroyed about 4,500 acres in canyons near Camarillo Springs and Cal State Channel Islands.

On November 9, the National Weather Service issued a red flag warning for most of northern California’s interior areas, along with southern parts of the state.

Trump falsely blamed poor forest management for the blazes. California Professional Firefighters president Brian Rice slammed him, calling his accusation “dangerously wrong,” explaining that around 60% of state forrest areas are federally managed.

Acting California Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

State officials said high winds and dry conditions are responsible for why ongoing blazes spread quickly.

On Friday, a White House statement said Trump declared a state of emergency in California, “order(ing) federal assistance to supplement state, tribal, and local response efforts due to the emergency conditions resulting from wildfires beginning on November 8, 2018, and continuing.”

On Saturday, Trump threatened to cut off federal help, falsely claiming state “mismanagement…Remedy now or no more Fed payments,” he roared.

Critics called him heartless. In all respects, he’s mindless about the destructiveness of his domestic and geopolitical policies – greatly harming countless millions of people he clearly doesn’t give a hoot about.

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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.”

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from Axios.

“Kosovo Will Again be a Part of Serbia”

November 12th, 2018 by Petr Bystron

Interview conducted by Dragana Trifkovic, Director of the Centre for Geopolitcal Studies with the MP of the German House of Representatives (Bundestag), Mr. Petr Bystron.

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Dragana Trifkovic: Dear Mr. Bystron, recently we have met at the International Conference on the Development of Parliamentarism in Moscow. In front of representatives of Parliaments from all around the world, international experts and journalists you held a well-received speech, calling for an end to sanctions against Russia. Why?

Mr. Petr Bystron: I demanded an end to sanctions because they have not achieved anything except harming German business. There’s no point to maintaining these useless sanctions any longer.

Dragana Trifkovic: The Russian-German relations are very complex. On the political agenda, they are burdened with the sanctions which the EU countries imposed to Russia, but on the other hand, Germany and Russia cooperate on a strategic project such as North Stream 2. How do you see the prospect of developing further relations between your country and Russia, and also how the United States relations towards the possibility of greater convergence between Germany and Russia?

Mr. Petr Bystron: Of course German companies are still trying to do business with Russia. The sanctions mainly hurt the meat and fruit exporters, as well as the machine tool industry. Exports dropped as much as 60% in the early days of sanctions in these sectors. Naturally, German businesses want to maintain their traditionally good contacts to Russia. North Stream 2 is just one example of this. But it’s no secret there is a lot of pressure from the United States to stop this project. There was a bipartisan initiative in the U.S. Senate in March supported by 39 Senators, urging the government to do everything it can it stop the pipeline. President Trump has come out against North Stream 2 as well.

I don’t think Germany should let itself be blackmailed by anyone, and should be free to get its energy supplies from wherever is best. Even during the Cold War, Russia was a reliable supplier of energy, and there’s no reason to think that will change.

Dragana Trifkovic: At the Moscow conference, we discussed about the perspective of Eurointegration of Balkan countries that are not yet members of the EU. You represent the view that the EU has no perspective and that EU candidate countries do not have much to hope for. What are in your opinion the biggest problems in the EU, and are they solvable? What kind of future can expect the EU, and can the EU be reformed and become a functional community?

Mr. Petr Bystron: There are two problems here: First of all, the EU is in no state to accept new members right now, with all its problems. The EU is in a deep crisis and is fighting for its survival. The main example is Brexit, of course: The first nations are leaving the sinking ship. If the EU doesn’t undergo far-reaching and fundamental reform, it is doomed to failure. The Euro currency system is not sustainable in its present form.

These problems have been exacerbated by the migration crisis, which was caused by Angela Merkel’s completely unnecessary and undemocratic opening of the borders in 2015. In a precarious situation like this, it is completely irresponsible to think about expanding the EU even further, especially with candidates who are not able to meet the most basic standards for joining the Union.

We already saw what problems it causes to accept members who don’t meet the criteria or even cheated to get in, as in the case of Greece. The EU now faces huge problems with Greece, Romania and Bulgaria for this reason. These are countries which shouldn’t have been accepted to the EU in the first place. Accepting the West Balkan countries in these circumstances would be tantamount to suicide.

If there is any country from this region which would qualify for membership, both economically and culturally, it is Serbia. Countries like Albania and Macedonia have huge problems in regard to corruption and economic development. And then there’s the problem with Kosovo, which is not recognized as a country by several European nations, Russia or China, for example. That’s a very unstable situation.

The EU wants very much to expand their influence in the Balkans. However, given the current state of the EU, it’s not even advisable for Serbia to want to join the EU, when countries like the UK, Italy and Eastern Europe are moving away from the broken monstrosity in Brussels. Serbia should be glad it is not in the EU, and stand up squarely for its own national interests.

Dragana Trifkovic: You are particularly interested in the problem of Kosovo and Metohija. The territory of the southern Serbian province since 1999 and the end of the NATO aggression on Yugoslavia is under occupation. The Western powers want to resolve the problem of Kosovo and Metohija outside the framework of international law and UN Security Council Resolution 1244. Negotiations on resolving this issue are underway in Brussels, although Serbia is not a member of the EU and this community has no basis to deal with this problem. How and where, in your opinion, should the issue of Kosovo and Metohija be solved?

Mr. Petr Bystron: Kosovo is a powder keg with no solution in sight. It will remain a problem for many years. I’m convinced the current situation can not be maintained. This territory was part of Serbia for centuries, an I am very sure it will belong to Serbia again in the long run. The EU protectorate in Kosovo will be short-lived.

Dragana Trifkovic: How well in the German public do you know the facts about what is happening in Kosovo and Metohija and how the so-called democracy in this territory works? Are there known facts about violence against Serbs in the presence of international forces UMNIK, KFOR and EULEX? How well do you know the results of these international missions?

Mr. Petr Bystron: The problem began with the way the EU treated the UCK. We should not be supporting a terrorist organization aiming to break up a country. A group like this would be immediately outlawed if it were trying to break up Germany, for example, and they would all be locked up. In the case of Yugoslavia, the EU and Germany for some reason supported this terrorist group, which was a tragic mistake. We are very concerned about the current situation, the human rights violations and the ethnic cleansing of Serbs in Kosovo.

An entity like Kosovo – which I refuse to call a country – based on injustice and terror, is not viable in the long term, which is evidenced by the continued need for KFOR peacekeeping forces to keep this creation alive.

Dragana Trifkovic: Recently has been an a discussion in the German Bundestag about the continuation of the mission of German soldiers in Kosovo. At KFOR, there are currently about 400 German soldiers in Kosovo. The Bundestag supported German soldiers remain in Kosovo, thanks to the votes of the ruling CDU / CSU and SPD and the Greens and Liberals (FDP). Alternative for Germany voted against it. How do you assess the mission of the German army in Kosovo and why did you vote against continuation of mission in Kosovo?

Mr. Petr Bystron: This is one of the paradoxes of German politics: That the first German combat mission since WW II was ordered by the formerly pacifist Green Party and their Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer under the Socialist Gerhard Schröder, and they continue to support the KFOR mission. The AfD does not believe in sending German troops to the Balkans, especially not to prop up an artificial entity like Kosovo.

Dragana Trifkovic: The US supports the formation of the Kosovo Army, although this is contrary to Resolution 1244. German instructors train Albanians to become part of the official army. How is it possible to prevent the taking of illegal actions and violations of the international law by the Western countries?

Mr. Petr Bystron: This is a difficult question and will be a difficult process. But in countries like Germany and the USA, governments and policies can change, thank God. So Serbia needs to be very patient, continue to stand up for itself over the long haul, and reach out to allies and supporters who will see it the same way.

Dragana Trifkovic: Have you personally, or a delegation from your party Alternative for Germany, visited Kosovo and Metohija? Is there an opportunity for you to do so in the coming period and to make sure of the state of democracy on the spot as well as to evaluate the results of the work of international missions, as well as the the German Bundeswehr?

Mr. Petr Bystron: That’s a good idea. We should definitely visit Serbia and Kosovo with an AfD delegation, to find out more about the situation on the ground. We have already been to Syria, for example, where the situation is completely different from the way it is portrayed in the Western mainstream media, so I’m sure visiting Kosovo would be very interesting.

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Petr Bystron is the Speaker of the Alternative for Germany party (AfD) on the Foreign Policy Committee of the German Bundestag. He came to Germany in 1988 as a political refugee and joined the Euro-critical AfD in 2013. He was chair of the AfD for the State of Bavaria 2015-2018. Under his leadership the party reached the best tally of all states in West Germany in the federal elections 2017. In 2018, he pushed to grant imprisoned British Islam critic Tommy Robinson political asylum in Germany, and filed criminal charges against migrant NGOs engaged in people-smuggling in the Mediterranean. He is a leading political publicist who has won several prizes for his writing and edited a book for University of Geneva with Polish Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Wałęsa. He is currently one of the 10 most popular German politicians on social media.

All images in this article are from the Center for Geostrategic Studies

Who Is Afraid of American Sanctions?

November 12th, 2018 by Dr. Elias Akleh

The American administration under Trump has become so addicted to waging economic sanctions; a new form of war, against other countries to a point where it does not hesitate to break international laws, to impose sanctions against its strategic allies, and to face the risk of international condemnation and isolation as a result.

Since his election (selection) as president, Trump has imposed economic sanctions and waged tariff wars against Russia, China, North Korea, Syria, Turkey, Sudan, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela and many European corporations. All have been added to the still going on 58 years old sanctions against the small island of Cuba; an indication that most sanctions fail to achieve planned results.

In May 2018 Trump announced that the US will withdraw from Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA) and will re-impose sanctions against Iran claiming the deal was bad for the US and needs to be replaced with another that includes a ban on Iran’s ballistic missiles. On November 5th, Trump has re-instated economic sanctions against Iran aiming to drive Iranian oil exports to zero.

The JCPOA was signed by Iran, US, Germany, England, France, Russia and China, and was unanimously approved by the UN Security Council Resolution 2231. It must be emphasized that although Iran has been complying with its commitment to the JPCOA as has been confirmed by Director General of the International Atomic energy Agency (IAEA) Yukiya Amano in September 10th 2018, the sanctions against Iran have never been lifted. The JCPOA had resolved only Iran’s nuclear program and its oil trade. Iran restricted its nuclear activities and allowed inspections of its nuclear facilities in exchange for the release of its oil money that was held by international banks.

Re-imposing the sanctions was condemned by the whole international community except, of course, by Israel, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates (UAE). The European Union issued a statement regretting the US new sanctions against Iran. It states the following:

“Our aim is to protect European economic actors, who have legitimate commercial exchange with Iran in line with European legislation and the United Nations’ Security Council resolution 2231 … the 2015 agreement is crucial for the security of Europe, the region and the entire world.”

Russia rejected the sanctions and declared them illegal. China declared that it will continue its trade with Iran in confirmation to its commitment to the nuclear deal. South Korean and Indian industries depend greatly on Iranian oil. Iran’s neighbors; Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, consider Iran their major trade partner and their economies would be devastated without such trade.

These particular unilateral American sanctions against Iran are unprecedented illegal and most dangerous events in the American history. For the first time in world history, the US; the host of the United Nations and the Security Council, is violating UNSC resolution 2231. Worst than that, Trump’s administration is threatening to punish other nations; the whole world in fact, who would abide by this particular legal resolution. This constitutes a mockery of international decisions and a criminal blackmail of responsible nations, who seek to uphold international laws and agreements. This American violation of UNSC resolution will marginalize and weaken international organizations such as the UN, SC, ICC, IAEA and others. The present international legal world order would be rendered irrelevant and could be gradually dissolved leading to international chaos.

For the first time in American history, its close allies such as EU, Japan, South Korea, India and even Turkey, firmly opposed the American policies, decided to create new financial and trade mechanism; Special Purpose Vehicle, based on barter system to circumvent American sanctions, and to continue doing business with Iran. Furthermore, the EU declared that its 1969 law would protect all and any European corporation, who wants to do business with Iran, from any lawsuit by non-European courts.

States and corporations started abandoning the use of Petro dollar and American banking systems and are using instead local currencies and local banks to pay for Iranian oil. India and Iran are using Indian currency; the rupees, to trade oil. South Korea is paying for Iranian oil via the Central Bank of Iran’s accounts at Woori Bank and the Industrial Bank of Korea.

All this could usher a new international economic and trade system independent from the hegemonic American financial system. This will gradually isolate the US further and will render its Dollar and its financial banking weaker.

Trump’s “America first” motto is perceived, although not openly expressed, by European leaders as similar to Hitler’s “Deutschland über alles”; “Germany over all” motto, and even more dangerously threatening world peace. Trump called to build the US/Mexico separation wall against “illegal criminal” Hispanic immigrants, imposed unfair trade tariffs against other nations, demanded EU to contribute more money to NATO, withdrew from climate agreement, recognized Jerusalem as capital of Israel in violation of all international agreements,  demanded UN member countries to blindly and automatically adopt American policies because the US is the largest financial contributor to the UN, cut American contributions to world organizations such as UNRWA, threatened to withdraw US from World Trade Organization, sold weapons to Saudi Arabia to continue its terrorist inhumane war against Yemen, is working to cover up the Saudi terrorist support in Syria and its local crimes against its own dissenters and journalists such as Khashoggi’s murder, is imposing unilateral illegal sanctions against other states, and lately but not lastly is withdrawing from nuclear INF treaty to allow the US to deploy advanced nuclear weapons into Europe.

Such policies had caused Donald Tusk; the President of the European Council, to warn of the emergence of“… a new phenomenon; the capricious assertiveness of the American administration … with friends like that who needs enemies… Trump’s doctrine is dangerous for Europe”

In his interview in French with Europe 1 radio Mr. Macron; the French President, criticizing Trump’s move to scrap the INF treaty with Russia that eliminated a whole class of missiles stationed in Europe, had suggested that Europe needs to form its own true European army to defend itself against Russia, China and even the US: “We have to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia and even the United States of America.” Macron’s sentiment was endorsed by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. Macron has also rebuked Trump’s nationalist policies in his speech during the WWI armistice centenary ceremony this Sunday Nov. 11th.

These strong oppositions from America’s European allies and the international condemnations of the sanctions against Iran had forced Trump’s administration to ease its sanctions by granting oil waivers to eight countries; Japan, South Korea, India, China, Taiwan, Turkey, Greece and Italy, for a period of six months. European Union did not receive such a waiver, which led Bruno Le Maire; the French economy minister, to complain to The Financial Times about Trump’s bullying stating that “Europe refuses to allow the US to be the trade policeman of the world.”

Trump’s administration is under the illusion that what they call “toughest sanctions” would bring Iran to its knees, and they are trying to sell this illusion to the public as John Bolton; the National Security Advisor, was trying to do on fox news. Bolton asserted that:

“sanctions are having enormous economic consequences … Iran is in a depression … the rial currency declined about 70% … inflation had quadrupled … the country is in recession … riots and demonstrations all around the country.”

The facts show that 40 years of real international toughest sanctions against Iran had failed to even weaken Iran’s economy and resolve. On the contrary, after all the devastation Iran had suffered during the eight years Iraq/Iran war, Iran had successfully flourished back to become one of the strongest economic and military country in the Middle East. During the last decade Iran had adopted what was described as a resistant economical plan that had modernized all Iranian industrial and technological avenues leading to self-reliance and self-sufficiency. Finally, the world was convinced that they could not accomplish any results except through negotiations that led to the 2015 JCPOA.

The American unilateral on-going 58 years long economic sanctions against the small island of Cuba had failed to bring Cuba to its knees, yet, Trump’s administration believes that its own unilateral sanctions against large powerful Iran would yield some results!

One may question what made the Trump’s administration risk losing its international political credibility, lose its closest allies, face isolation, and suffer probable economic and financial losses by imposing doomed to failure sanctions. To find the answer one must consider these sanctions as only one small piece in the puzzle of the New Middle East Project.

It is a very well-known fact by now that a Zionist Jewish elite owns and controls the Federal Reserve and almost most of the western banking systems, which fund Jewish lobbies to influence the foreign policies of most of the Western world for Israel’s benefit. It is also a well-known fact that the latest few American presidents, few of whom were not qualified for the position like Trump, would not have attained the presidency except through Jewish money. For such money and prestigious office, the selected president has to follow the dictates of the Jewish lobby, otherwise he would meet a fate similar to that of assassinated president Kennedy.

The Greater Israel Project was planned for the Middle East. The state of Israel was illegally and forcefully established on occupied Palestinian land. Yet, after three successive generations of Zionist Jewish Israeli soldiers got psychologically and emotionally exhausted by continuous wars, terrorist groups were brought into the region to destroy any Arab resistance axis to the project. Syria was the latest victim.

A military coalition of Syria, Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah was able to defeat the terrorist groups. This coalition forms an obstacle to the expansionist Greater Israel Project, and might become the seed of a new world order competing with the old American unilateral world order. Trump exposed this fear when he answered reporters who asked him about the effectiveness of the sanctions. He stated:

“when I came in office it looked like Iran would take over the Middle East, it was a question of literally less than years, very quickly, and now nobody is talking about that.”

Trump’s administration seems to have received Zionist orders to destroy this dangerous seed no matter what the cost is, including the use of economic sanctions and MESA; Arab NATO-like alliance.

The establishment of the illegal expansionist terrorist state of Israel in the heart of the Arab World has been the root of all evil in the region for the last hundred years. Unfortunately, as long as Israel exists more devastating wars are in the future of the Middle East, and the whole world will not be spared of its evil effects.

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World War I Centenary: “War Is a Racket”. Unlimited Imperialism

November 12th, 2018 by Prof. Francis A. Boyle

Don’t know how any of you feel about this. Been watching the Centenary Coverage on BBC and teaching origins of World War I to my law students because today it is looking like the run up to World War I all over again.

Ten Million People died for nothing. Smedley D. Butler had it right. War is a Racket. And Woodrow Wilson murdered 116,000+ Americans in that war. The American People and Congress did not want to fight in that God-forsaken war. Wilson lied, tricked, deceived, maneuvered and finagled us into that war.

 And then their punitive Treaty of Versailles against Germany paved the way for the rise of Hitler and the Nazis culminating in World War II where another 60 million died. As I have repeatedly told my law students the world today looks very much like it did in the run up to World War I.fab.

It is the Unlimited Imperialists along the line of Alexander, Rome, Napoleon and Hitler who are now in charge of conducting American foreign policy…

Historically this latest eruption of American militarism at the start of the 21st Century is akin to that of America opening the 20th Century by means of the U.S.-instigated Spanish-American War in 1898.  Then the Republican administration of President William McKinley stole their colonial empire from Spain in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines; inflicted a near genocidal war against the Filipino people; while at the same time illegally annexing the Kingdom of Hawaii and subjecting the Native Hawaiian people (who call themselves the Kanaka Maoli) to genocidal conditions.

Additionally, McKinley’s military and colonial expansion into the Pacific was also designed to secure America’s economic exploitation of China pursuant to the euphemistic rubric of the “open door” policy.  But over the next four decades America’s aggressive presence, policies, and practices in the so-called “Pacific” Ocean would ineluctably pave the way for Japan’s attack at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, and thus America’s precipitation into the ongoing Second World War.

Today a century later the serial imperial aggressions launched, waged, and menaced by the neoconservative Republican Bush Junior administration then the neoliberal Democratic Obama administration and now the reactionary Trump administration threaten to set off World War III.

By shamelessly exploiting the terrible tragedy of 11 September 2001, the Bush Junior administration set forth to steal a hydrocarbon empire from the Muslim States and Peoples of Color living in Central Asia and the Middle East and Africa under the bogus pretexts of

(1) fighting a war against “international terrorism” or “Islamic fundamentalism”; and/or

(2) eliminating weapons of mass destruction; and/or

(3) the promotion of democracy; and/or

(4) self-styled humanitarian intervention and its avatar “responsibility to protect” (R2P).

Only this time the geopolitical stakes are infinitely greater than they were a century ago:  control and domination of the world’s hydrocarbon resources and thus the very fundaments and energizers of the global economic system – oil and gas.  The Bush Junior/ Obama administrations targeted the remaining hydrocarbon reserves of Africa, Latin America (e.g., the Pentagon’s reactivization of the U.S. Fourth Fleet in 2008), and Southeast Asia for further conquest and domination, together with the strategic choke-points at sea and on land required for their transportation (e.g., Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Djibouti).  Today the U.S. Fourth Fleet threatens oil-rich Venezuela and Ecuador for sure along with Cuba.

Toward accomplishing that first objective, in 2007 the neoconservative Bush Junior administration announced the establishment of the U.S. Pentagon’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) in order to better control, dominate, steal, and exploit both the natural resources and the variegated peoples of the continent of Africa, the very cradle of our human species.

In 2011 Libya and the Libyans proved to be the first victims to succumb to AFRICOM under the neoliberal Obama administration, thus demonstrating the truly bi-partisan and non-partisan nature of U.S. imperial foreign policy decision-making. Let us put aside as beyond the scope of this paper the American conquest, extermination, and ethnic cleansing of the Indians from off the face of the continent of North America.  Since America’s instigation of the Spanish-American War in 1898, U.S. foreign policy decision-making has been alternatively conducted by reactionary imperialists, conservative imperialists, and liberal imperialists for the past 119 years and counting.

Trump is just another White Racist Iron Fist for Judeo-Christian U.S. Imperialism and Capitalism smashing all over the world.

Trump forthrightly and proudly admitted that the United States is in the Middle East in order to steal their oil. At least he was honest about it. Unlike his predecessors who lied about the matter going back to President George Bush Sr. with his War for Persian Gulf oil against Iraq in 1991. Just recently, President Trump publicly threatened illegal U.S. military intervention against oil-rich Venezuela. Q.E.D.

This world-girdling burst of U.S. imperialism at the start of humankind’s new millennium is what my teacher, mentor, and friend the late, great Professor Hans Morgenthau denominated “unlimited imperialism” in his seminal book Politics Among Nations 52-53 (4th ed. 1968):

The outstanding historic examples of unlimited imperialism are the expansionist policies of Alexander the Great, Rome, the Arabs in the seventh and eighth centuries, Napoleon I, and Hitler. They all have in common an urge toward expansion which knows no rational limits, feeds on its own successes and, if not stopped by a superior force, will go on to the confines of the political world. This urge will not be satisfied so long as there remains anywhere a possible object of domination-a politically organized group of men which by its very independence challenges the conqueror’s lust for power. It is, as we shall see, exactly the lack of moderation, the aspiration to conquer all that lends itself to conquest, characteristic of unlimited imperialism, which in the past has been the undoing of the imperialistic policies of this kind….

Since September 11, 2001, it is the Unlimited Imperialists along the lines of Alexander, Rome, Napoleon, and Hitler who have been in charge of conducting American foreign policy decision-making.

The factual circumstances surrounding the outbreaks of both the First World War and the Second World War currently hover like twin Swords of Damocles over the heads of all humanity.

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Francis Boyle is professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law. He is the author of many books on International Law and an outspoken critic of US policy in the Middle East.

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Bitter US-European Tensions Mark Centenary of World War I Armistice in Paris

November 12th, 2018 by Alex Lantier

This weekend, heads of state from 70 countries met in Paris to mark the centenary of the end of World War I, amid rising conflicts between the great powers and growing popular anger. Despite the ritualistic criticisms of nationalism and calls for peace, it is clear that none of the “world leaders” in Paris had any plan to halt the accelerating collapse of international relations between the major powers.

Arriving in Paris to protests by thousands of people on Republic Square, Donald Trump fired off a Tweet denouncing European Union (EU) plans to build an army aimed at the United States, Russia and China. Trump wrote, “President Macron of France has just suggested that Europe build its own military in order to protect itself from the US, China and Russia. Very insulting, but perhaps Europe should first pay its fair share of NATO, which the US subsidizes greatly!”

Macron’s call last week for “a real European army” so Europeans can “protect themselves from China, Russia and even the United States” reflected a deep breakdown of the US-EU relations. After US Ambassador to NATO Kay Bailey Hutchinson’s threat to “take out” Russian missiles in Europe and Trump’s call to cancel the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, his ability to hold on to the US Senate in the midterm elections shocked European ruling circles.

Facing the prospect of a major US nuclear arms build-up targeting Russia, and more trade war threats from the White House against hundreds of billions of dollars of European and Chinese goods, they are stepping up calls to militarize the EU.

Trump retaliated on Saturday by refusing to attend ceremonies for US war dead at the military cemetery in Belleau Wood, 50 miles from Paris. As light rain fell across the Paris metro area, the White House justified this decision by ludicrously citing “scheduling and logistical difficulties caused by the weather.”

Yesterday, the heads of state including Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel came together at the Arch of Triumph in Paris to listen to a speech by Macron. International media largely present Macron’s speech as a criticism of nationalism—and so, by implication, of Trump’s “America First” nationalism.

In fact, Macron’s speech was itself an ignorant and nationalistic paean to war. While decrying its 10 million dead, 6 million maimed, 3 million widows, 6 million orphans, and millions of civilian casualties, Macron hailed the war for supposedly allowing patriotism to overcome France’s class divisions. He said it built “one united France, rural and urban; bourgeois, aristocratic and popular; of every color, where priests and anti-clericals suffered side by side; and whose heroism and pain made us.”

Implicitly rebuking Trump’s recent boast that he is a nationalist, Macron clumsily tried to argue that his own invocation of the war was not nationalist, but patriotic. He called patriotism “the exact opposite of nationalism: nationalism betrays patriotism. By saying ‘our interests first and pay the others no heed,’ one destroys the most precious thing a Nation has, what makes it live and encourages it to be great, what is most important: its moral values.”

Macron’s moralizing deserves only contempt. The reactionary content of his invocations of nationalism was exposed last week—when he prompted shock and revulsion across France by insisting that it is legitimate to honor Philippe Pétain, the fascist dictator of France’s Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime during World War II, as a great general.

Macron’s remarks Sunday underscore that his statement of support for Pétain was not accidental, but is deeply rooted in his politics. Indeed, his hailing of war as the cement of national unity echoes the views of the fascistic groups that backed Pétain between the world wars, and then became Vichy’s social base.

In reality, across Europe and internationally, the world war was a crisis of international capitalism that escalated class tensions to the point of revolution. Under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the working class took power in Russia in October 1917 and took Russia out of the war. This led to a wave of revolutionary struggles across Europe that toppled the German and Austrian empires, and the emergence of mass communist parties in the working class in countries across the world, including France.

A century later, none of the contradictions of capitalism that led to war and social revolution—above all, that between global economy and the nation-state system—have been resolved. With trade wars and arms races spreading between the major powers, it is clear that the same inter-imperialist struggles for profit and strategic advantage that produced two world wars in the 20th century are rapidly escalating. After the G7 summit of the main NATO powers plus Japan collapsed in June, European-American relations are on the verge of disintegration.

Yesterday afternoon, Trump skipped a “Forum for Peace” held by Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel and instead went to the Suresnes American Cemetery to speak.

“We are gathered together at this hallowed resting place to pay tribute to the brave Americans who gave their last breath in that mighty struggle,” he said. “It is our duty to preserve the civilization they defended and to protect the peace they so nobly gave their lives to secure one century ago.”

Trump’s call to protect the peace is fatuous and absurd. US policy under successive administrations both Republican and Democratic over more than a quarter century since the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 has been relentless neocolonialist wars across the Middle East. The fact that this has now led Washington to repudiate all nuclear arms control treaties in order to step up nuclear threats against Russia in Europe, and China in Asia, is a warning of the enormous dangers posed to the working class and, indeed, all of humanity by imperialism.

The “Peace Forum” attended by Merkel and Macron was itself no less bankrupt. Merkel—whose Grand Coalition government in Berlin has played a major role in inciting nationalism and far-right politics, by constantly pushing to militarize German foreign policy and prepare for war—delivered a warning on the lessons of World War I.

“One hundred years later,” she said, “we look back on this war, it makes us aware of the devastating consequences that the lack of communications and unwillingness to compromise in politics and diplomacy can have.”

Merkel did not say, however, how she intended to overcome the repeated failure to reach an acceptable compromise in the rising number of disputes between Washington and the EU.

In fact, European governments’ relentless incitement of nationalism, anti-immigrant xenophobia and militarism encourages violent far-right extremists across Europe to prepare terror attacks and assassinations.

Yesterday it emerged that while investigating Franco A., a far-right extremist who had planned terror attacks in order to blame them on refugees, German police uncovered a far larger, far-right plot. Some 200 soldiers linked to the Special Forces Command (KSK) had prepared a plan for “Day X” to murder left-wing politicians. Targets allegedly included Left Party politician Dietmar Bartsch, Green Party leader Claudia Roth, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas and ex-president Joachim Gauck. Franco A. himself was released last year.

Such plots are spreading across Europe. On November 6, six far-right supporters were arrested for plotting “violent action” against Macron. Similarly, a 63-year-old former soldier was arrested with 16 firearms in Spain, for plotting to attack social-democratic Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.

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Court Orders Moratorium on Offshore Fracking Off California

November 12th, 2018 by Center For Biological Diversity

A federal court today ordered the Trump administration to stop issuing permits for offshore fracking in federal waters off the California coast. U.S. District Judge Philip S. Gutierrez concluded that the federal government violated the Endangered Species Act and the Coastal Zone Management Act when it allowed fracking in offshore oil and gas wells in all leased federal waters off California.

“Stopping offshore fracking is a big victory for California’s coast and marine life,” said Kristen Monsell, oceans program legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “We’re glad the Trump administration lost this round in its push to expand dangerous oil operations off California. This decision protects marine life and coastal communities from fracking’s toxic chemicals.”

The court order is the result of three lawsuits filed by the state of California, Center for Biological Diversity and Wishtoyo Foundation, and the Environmental Defense Center challenging the federal government’s approval and environmental review of offshore fracking in the Pacific Ocean.

“Protecting the health of our coastal waters is essential to our commitment to conserving the ecosystem and marine life necessary for our maritime culture,” said Mati Waiya, executive director of Wishtoyo Foundation. “The decision by honorable Judge Gutierrez upholds the law that ensures the health of our ocean waters. We all celebrate this decision that honors the rights of our maritime resources.”

The court held that federal officials violated the Endangered Species Act by failing to complete its consultation with expert wildlife agencies on the impacts of offshore fracking on endangered species. The court also said the Trump administration violated the Coastal Zone Management Act when it failed to let the California Coastal Commission determine whether offshore fracking is consistent with California’s coastal management program. The judge ordered the feds to complete the process with the State of California before approving any permits for offshore fracking.

“Endangered sea otters and other critters just won a reprieve from the Trump administration’s assault on our oceans for dirty oil,” Monsell said. “We plan to celebrate this great victory in the fight against climate change and dirty fossil fuels.”

At least 10 fracking chemicals routinely used in offshore fracking could kill or harm a broad variety of marine species, including marine mammals and fish, Center scientists have found. The California Council on Science and Technology has identified some common fracking chemicals to be among the most toxic in the world to marine animals.

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Shark Attack in Queensland: Fearing Monsters in the Whitsundays

November 12th, 2018 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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Federal Judge Rejects Trump’s Approval of Keystone XL Pipeline

November 12th, 2018 by 350.org

Last night, a federal judge invalidated Trump’s “presidential permit” for Keystone XL, ruling that the Administration violated key laws when it approved the pipeline.

This momentous ruling is a major delay that sends the Trump administration and TransCanada back to the drawing board on Keystone XL. While Trump suggested plans to appeal, we are ready to resist every step of the way.

TransCanada is on the ropes. If thousands of us pledge to resist Keystone XL, it could be enough to convince them that this project isn’t worth pursuing. Sign the Promise to Protect now.

This decision confirms what we’ve known all along — that Trump’s executive order and environmental review process were a sham. Big Oil may have the money to push policy and politicians in favor of their profits, but we have morality, science, and the law on our side.

This case was filed by seven groups including Indigenous Environmental Network and the Northern Plains Resource Council. The judge stated that the Trump Administration “simply discarded” the effect the project would have on climate change. This means that no work can go forward until the government more fully reviews the pipeline’s environmental impact.

From the plains of Montana, Nebraska, and South Dakota to Capitol Hill, we won’t stop until Keystone XL is gone forever. 

For over a decade, Indigenous peoples, farmers and ranchers, and their allies around the world have been fighting to stop this pipeline. Despite every obstacle thrown our way, the movement to keep fossil fuels in the ground has kept Keystone XL from being built.

And we’re just getting started. There are over 17,000 people who have already committed to take peaceful direct action to stop this pipeline and any project that threatens our climate and communities. Let’s double that number.

Read the full statement from the Promise to Protect coalition here. 

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Israeli Forces Detain 8-year-old Palestinian Child Near Hebron

November 12th, 2018 by If Americans Knew

According to Defense for Children International, Israel is the only country in the world that automatically prosecutes children in military courts that lack basic and fundamental fair trial guarantees.

The majority of Palestinian child detainees are charged with throwing stones, and three out of four experience physical violence during arrest, transfer or interrogation.

They are detained from their West Bank homes during the middle of the night by heavily armed Israeli soldiers. Interrogations tend to be coercive, including a variety of verbal abuse, threats and physical violence that ultimately result in a confession.

Unlike Israeli children living in illegal settlements in the West Bank, Palestinian children are not accompanied by a parent and are generally interrogated without the benefit of legal advice, or being informed of their right to silence.

They are overwhelmingly accused of throwing stones, an offense that can lead to a potential maximum sentence of 10 to 20 years depending on a child’s age.

Source: Ma’an News Agency

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Israeli forces detained an eight-year-old Palestinian child, on Friday afternoon, near the entrance of the town of Beit Ummar, north of the southern occupied West bank district of Hebron.

Local sources said that Israeli forces targeted eight-year-old Omar Rabie Abu Ayyash and detained him near the entrance to the town of Beit Ummar.

The reason for Ayyash’s detention remained unknown.

Defense for Children International reported that since 2000, at least 8,000 Palestinian children have been detained and prosecuted in an Israeli military detention system infamous for the systematic mistreatment and torture of Palestinian children.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) Prisoners and Former Prisoners’ Affairs Committee reported, earlier in October, that Israel had detained 35 Palestinian minors during September 2018.

The committee’s August report documented testimonies from a number of Palestinian children during their detention by Israeli forces and revealed that the children were subjected to systematic beatings and torture during and after their detention.

According to prisoners rights group Addameer, there are 270 Palestinian child prisoners being held in Israeli prisons, of whom 50 are under the age of 16.

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Poverty and Extreme Poverty: Filming in the Most Depressing City on Earth — Jakarta.

November 12th, 2018 by Andre Vltchek

It stinks, it is the most polluted city on earth, but that is not the most terrible thing about it.

You can drive for ten or even twenty kilometers through it, and see only ugliness, fences and broken pavements. But there are many miserable cities on this planet, and I have worked in almost all of them, in 160 countries.

So why is ‘Jakarta killing me’, why am I overwhelmed by depression, whenever I decide to film here, or to write about the state in which its citizens are forced to live? Why, really, do I feel so desperate, so hopeless?

I am tough. I hardly succumb to depression even in such places like the war-torn Afghanistan, Iraq, or in the middle of the toughest slums of Africa.

So, what is it, really, about Jakarta?

Here, I often speak about ‘immorality’, but again, what do I mean by this term? I am not a moralist, far from it. I have no religion, and I very rarely pass ‘moral judgements’, unless something truly outrageous unveils in front of my eyes.

So why, as so many others, do I land in this city in good spirits, and leave one or two weeks sick, broken, literally shitting my pants, full of wrath, despair?

Why? The Western mass media and local servile sheets are constantly bombarding the world, describing Jakarta as a ‘sprawling metropolis’, or to use the terminology of the Australian National University, as a ‘normal city’.

But it is not. In fact, it is the most ‘immoral’ place on earth that I know. It is one enormous monument to fascism, intellectual collapse, Western neo-colonialism and turbo-capitalism.

This time, right here, I will explain, briefly and determinately, why!

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You can actually avoid feeling this way, if you decide to land in Jakarta, work for a week or two surrounded by local ‘elites’ (usually shameless thugs), sail through life here with half-closed eyes. Or if you get paid well ‘not to see’. You can also be a Western journo who lives in one of high-rise condominiums, gets himself local bimbo for a girlfriend, and collects his ‘news’ from official briefings and press conferences.

Such foreign ‘visitors’ are warmly welcomed in Jakarta, and they get incorporated into the life of local tsars, of feudal ‘cream’, of bandits who double as businesspeople or politicians.

Double security to get into Gran Indonesia Mall

It is not so difficult! You land at that lavish Terminal 3 of Soekarno-Hatta International Airport (half of things do not work here, already, or ‘yet’, but the terminal does look lavish), you can take a luxury limo to one of so many 5-star hotels, have meetings at a steel-and-glass office tower, dine in a posh mall where nobody shops (a money laundering concept), but where those with unlimited budgets, often dine. After all this you can leave thinking that Jakarta is just cool – bit ‘shallow’, too loud and too vulgar – but a ‘kind of cool’ city.

And you can, if you choose to, never learn, that about 90% of its citizens are actually living in slums.

That is, if ‘international standards’ for what is a ‘slum’ and what is ‘poverty’ or extreme poverty, were to apply here.

You see, ‘officially’, according to the treasonous Indonesian regime, only 9.9% of Indonesians are ‘poor’. 

In Indonesia, you are not really ‘poor’, not necessarily, if you or your children are shitting into canal, and that canal is literally toxic from chemical, medical or other waste, and if, just a few meters ‘down the stream’, someone is washing clothes, or even brushing teeth, getting bit of your excrement. You are not ‘poor’ if you have no access to clean water, or to a decent electricity supply (almost nobody does in Jakarta, as the voltage fluctuates and destroys almost all electric appliances in no time). You are not poor if your children cannot afford to eat milk products and become physically or mentally ill from a lack of vitamins, minerals, or out rightly suffering from malnutrition. You are not poor if you are ‘functionally illiterate’, cannot compare and know close to nothing about the world.

In Indonesia, you are poor if your income is below Rp.400.000 per month (the definition applied since March, 2018). That is, as I write this essay, the equivalent of US$26 per month. Even the most cynical ‘absolute poverty’ line stands at U$1.25.

According to the UN declaration that resulted from the World Summit on Social Development in Copenhagen in 1995, absolute poverty is “a condition characterized by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education, and information. It depends not only on income, but also on access to services.”

If this definition were to be applied to Jakarta, at least, but probably more, than 90% of the population would have to be considered as ‘absolutely poor’. And most likely, between 95 and 98 percent of people all over the entire archipelago.

But this whole country is wrapped in a duvet of lies and fabrications. Several years ago, when I was writing my big book about Indonesia (“Archipelago of Fear”, Pluto, UK), I spoke to several leading statisticians from the UNESCO Institute of Statistics (UIS), which is based in Montreal, Canada. I was told, on the record, that Indonesia does not have 245 million people as was commonly reported, but more than 300 million. However, all international and local statisticians are strongly discouraged from disclosing the real numbers. Why? Because those 60, or probably, millions of more people simply ‘do not exist’.

If they ‘do not exist’, the state, the government, the regime, do not have to take care of them, to feed them, to even bother registering them. These are the poorest of the poor, the most vulnerable individuals.

Almost everywhere in the world, poor countries are addressing their social problems publicly, because they want to raise awareness of the plight of their people. Some nations are then combating their problems themselves (like China or Venezuela), or they are asking the international community for help.

In Indonesia, the rulers are covering-up the true horrors of the Indonesian reality. Why?

Because they don’t give a damn about the poor. They couldn’t care less about the great majority that actually lives in destitution. They don’t need ‘help’, because the people do not matter. What matters is the profits of the few who are form the ‘elites’, as well as servitude and prostitution to the Western rulers. After all, it was the West that triggered the 1965 coup in which between 1-3 million intellectuals, ‘atheists’, Communists and unionists lost their lives. And so, the Indonesian treasonous business ‘heads’, the military generals, religious leaders as well as the servile scholars and media ‘stars’ are merrily prostituting themselves, eternally grateful to Washington, London and Riyadh, for saving them from the just and egalitarian society, which the great father of the nation Soekarno and the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) were aiming at.

‘Positive statistics’, which are actually easily detectable lies, bring ‘more investment’ for their enterprises. Or so they believe. The Indonesian economy is almost exclusively based on the plunder of natural resources by foreign multi-nationals, as well as local companies. Profits end up in the pockets of very few. The business of the savage plundering of Kalimantan (Borneo), Sumatra and Papua has been monumental. The country has been almost fully stripped of its forests; it has leveled to the ground entire mountains and polluted mighty rivers. But the loot flows abroad, or it stays in the pockets of Jakarta’s chosen few, apart from ‘commodities’, Indonesia produces almost nothing of value. Its scientific research is basically nil, and its intellectual output minimal. Even judged by Western standards: the 4th most populous country on the planet, does not have one single Noble Prize laureate, and not one internationally recognizable thinker or a writer.

And so, there are those 5-star hotel towers, office buildings, and ridiculously overpriced malls and supermarkets (most of them designed and built by foreign companies), basically catering for those who steal, and never had to work for their money.

But in between, there are the so-called kampungs – ‘villages’ – where the great majority of Jakarta’s citizens live. A Kampung sounds romantic, but in reality, it is not – anywhere else on earth it would be called a slum. The slums of Jakarta and in fact of the entire Indonesia, are rat-infested, open sewage colossuses, with dark narrow alleys, toxic canals, and extremely limited access to drinking water (water in the capital was privatized by French and British companies, and as a result, the quality dropped and prices became unrealistically steep for the majority of people).

In Indonesia – officially not poor

Except for just a few tiny dirty specks of green areas, and the most of the time closed small square in the center of the city called Monas, Jakarta has no public parks. Forget about public playgrounds for children, or public exercise machines! In fact, Jakarta has nothing ‘public’ left.Nothing ‘belongs to people’ – as everything was sold, corrupted, grabbed and privatized. A family of 4 has to pay around 7 USD to even enter Ancol, the only available beach area, despite the fact that Jakarta is theoretically a maritime city. But even in Ancol, despite the entrance fee, the tiny beach is littered with garbage, and a narrow promenade is broken and outrageously filthy. Otherwise – there is nothing!

In one enormous slum (sorry, kampung), I recently filmed hundreds of children playing in the middle of a cemetery, simply because they have no other places to go.

Cemetery – the only playground in this ‘middle class’ neighborhood

On the other hand, Jakarta has more mosques per square kilometer than any other city on earth that I know (and I have visited almost all Muslim countries). Mosques and small mushollahs, are literally growing on every street, often taking over land that should be intended for public use. But unlike in Malaysia or Turkey, these religious institutions do not provide playgrounds for children, or a ‘public space’. 

The contrast between the tiny minority of extremely rich, and the destitute majority (I don’t believe that Jakarta has any substantial ‘middle class’, anymore), is so tremendous, that these two groups appear to be living on two absolutely different planets, while inhabiting the same city. The structure of Jakarta is such that the two realities often never even meet. And it is considered normal, by both the exploiters and the deprived masses.

Middle class living

Poor are used to being poor, obedient and ‘entrusting their fate into God’s hands’, in the Indonesian language called pasrah. And the rich are secretly laughing at the poor, all the way to the bank. I know them, the rich of Indonesia, too. I worked, for decades, with Indonesians from across the spectrum – from the poorest of the poor, to the richest of the rich.

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So why do I feel as I do? Why do I want to throw up?

Haven’t I worked in Mathare and the other tremendous slums of Nairobi, Kenya, or in Uganda, or India?

Yes, of course. I made films about the misery in Africa. But it is different there. In the entire city of Nairobi, which is the so-called service center of East Africa (much of the money from Uganda, Rwanda and even DRC Congo is being washed there), there is only one truly huge luxury mall, of which Jakarta has dozens. Comparing the palaces (ugly, vulgar, but palaces) that the Indonesians are building from the blood and sweat of the poor and from the theft of the natural resources, with those in Africa, the African ‘elites’ at least have some shame left. They don’t make contrasts so visible. They intuitively know that what they are doing is wrong, and often try to hide their wealth.

And in Africa, slums are called slums, and every slum dweller know that his or her life is shit.

In India, things are bad, almost as bad as in Indonesia, but at least there is some true resistance, and the Communist Parties are regularly in control of various Indian states. Left-wing guerillas are fighting a civil war all over the sub-continent, and the country has some true great thinkers and intellectuals, most of them from the left.

The Indonesian poor have no idea that they are poor, they ‘thank God’ for what they have, or, more precisely ‘do not have’. And the super-rich looters are proud of their achievements. They are hiding nothing. On the contrary – they flash their wealth, knowing that they are above the law, or any moral principles. They drive their Mercedes limos right next to the slums, without fear. They are actually respected, not only feared. The more they steal, the more they are admired.

And if they are crossed, they kill.

They kill human rights activists, peasants who refuse to give up their land, or anyone who stands in their way.

Justice is totally corrupted. Actually, everything is. Only those who pay are protected.

To even just irritate the true owners of the city can lead to death. In “Archipelago of Fear” I wrote about the case of an owner of the former Hilton Hotel, who shot a waiter point-blank in his own establishment. Why? Because he had humbly dared to inform the owner’s girlfriend that her credit card had been declined. For the murder he only got a few years, and he bribed himself out just a few months after being put behind bars.

Not long ago, they put into prison the former moderately left-wing governor of Jakarta, known as Ahok, for trying to improve the infrastructure, sanitation and public transportation. The official charge: “insulting Islam”. A bad joke, really, as almost all Indonesian linguists agreed that there was no insult whatsoever. But again, it worked: to do something for the people, one risks being branded as a socialist, or a Communist (which here is illegal). To pay too much attention to the wellbeing of the common citizens may brand you as an atheist, which is also illegal. So, if you build a few new train lines, a few sidewalks, erect a couple of parks; you are risking ending up deep behind bars. Religions – be they Wahhabism or Pentecostal Christianity – have, for decades, been fully encouraged by the West, which is gaining greatly from destitution, ignorance and the obedience of the Indonesian masses.

Yes, I have seen a lot of horrors in this world, and faced indescribable cynicism. But Indonesia is truly ‘unique’, and so is its capital city.

It is like a huge, decaying carcass of a fish, inside which 12 million people breathe the most polluted air on earth, surrounded by indescribably ugliness, gloominess and pop-ridden meaninglessness.

And there is no fight, no true rebellion against this totally fascist arrangement of the city and the society.

The poor ‘know their place’. They have obediently accepted their fate. They steal from each other, insult and oppress each other. They do not dare to take on the real usurpers and bandit rulers. Or more precisely: they do not find them to be the real reason of their plight. In Jakarta, there is so much tension and hatred, but it is not directed against those who brought the city and the nation to their knees. 

All this, while the rich do not even bother to look down at the masses, they actually do not even notice that the masses even exist. They make sure of not counting the tens of millions of monstrously poor human beings.

And the West lies, its media lies, and so do its economists.

Read the US and European newspapers and you will be told that Jakarta is a ‘sprawling metropolis’, that Indonesia is the ‘third biggest democracy’ (my god, according to them, India is No. 1), and that the Indonesian religions are moderate and tolerant.

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Jakarta is a shameless fusion of fascism and feudalism. As the great Australian painter George Burchett (the son of the legendary left-wing journalist Wilfred Burchett) once told me: “Cities are usually built for the people. But the Indonesian cities, particularly Jakarta, are built against the people.”

I have written many times about Jakarta’s ‘cultural offering’. With 12 million inhabitants, it has not one permanent concert hall. Its cinemas exclusively showing Hollywood junk, with some variations of Southeast Asian horrors and other garbage. The only art cinema at TIM has only around 30 seats and a very sporadic schedule. The few modern art museums are all privately owned, and avoid all social topics, or any criticism of capitalism and Western imperialism. But there are, of course, the paintings of Warhol and a few decadent Chinese artists mocking Communism, hanging on their walls. This way, the local elites can get even further indoctrinated, while taking their selfies.

Deeper thoughts are discouraged. Pop culture – its lowest grade – is literally everywhere. Intellectually, the city has been ruined since 1965.

Noise is everywhere, too. Loud, aggressive noise. Monstrous decibels that would be banned anywhere else in the world, beat people who are visiting malls. Mosques all over the city are, unlike their counterparts even in the Middle East or Malaysia, broadcasting entire sermons over the Orwellian-style loudspeakers, at least five hours a day, but sometimes much longer. Churches of extreme right-wing orientations preach ‘Prosperity Gospel’, periodically telling the worshipers that “God loves the rich and that is why they are rich, while hating the poor and that is the reason why they are poor.” To escape religions is impossible. To escape noise is impossible. It often appears that the people of Jakarta are terrified of silence. Silence would make them think, and thinking could lead to some extremely frightening conclusions.

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And therefore, I film.

I film broken pavements – tiny narrow sidewalks made from unmatched tiles, polluting scooters and unhygienic eateries blocking the way of the few daring pedestrians. Why is all that happening? Because nothing public is respected or put together well. Everything that is not for a fee, is simply dreadful. And it is designed to remain that way.

I am filming slums. I am filming filth, such filth which these days hardly exists even on the Sub-Continent. I cannot believe my own eyes, and so I film. I always believe my lenses.

I know the arteries of the city, big and small. I know the corners, back alleys, clogged waterways. I know the humiliated, imprisoned waterways, surrounded by miserable dwellings.

I know the old city – Kota Tua, built by the Dutch and so badly restored, that UNESCO recently refused to put it on its prestigious World Heritage Sites list.

It is easy to accuse me of being anti-capitalist, or “anti-Indonesian regime” of thieves and of barefaced collaborators. But it is impossible to accuse me of not knowing the country and its capital city. I have literally been everywhere, covering every conflict here, for more than twenty years, witnessing the atrocities committed against the people, nature and the culture.

Wherever I go in this world, I speak about Indonesia and Jakarta. It is my warning to the world.

The Indonesian nightmarish scenario has already been implemented in many parts of the world, by Western imperialism, but, has often failed as it was too monstrous for other people to swallow. The West tried to replicate Jakarta in those countries that I deeply love and call home: they tried it in Pinochet’s Chile (“Watch out, comrades, Jakarta is coming”, Allende’s people were told), but Chile rose and both the regime and the fascist system were smashed. They tried it in Yeltsin’s Russia, and again, the people rejected this horrible extremist horror show.

Jakarta is not just a city – it is a concept. Perhaps it should one day become a verb – “to Jakarta”. That would mean, to sacrifice people to greed, corruption, business, religion and foreign interests.

But it is not omnipotent. It can be confronted and defeated. We fought against Jakarta in both Santiago de Chile and Moscow. And we won.

And we will win elsewhere, too. Maybe even in Jakarta itself, one day…

All this explains why I often come to both Borneo and Jakarta – to work on films, to define and document the horror, to warn the world what has already been done to the Indonesian nation.

I try to cut through lies. I try to explain that Dilma Rousseff, the former President of Brazil who was impeached (during a constitutional coup) because of the ‘massaging of statistics’ before the elections (something that is commonly done in many countries including those in the West) would have to be, theoretically, executed by a firing squad, or quartered by a mob, if she were to do proportionally what the government of Indonesia is doing without any scruples or second thought. In Jakarta, they do not ‘massage’ – they pervert, lie, and call black, white, and day, night. And they get away with everything. No one dares to challenge them. And they get rewarded by the West – as long as they rob the country and its people of everything, and deliver huge part of the loot to the gates of Washington, Canberra, Paris and London.

I get exhausted. And ‘broke’ once in a while (because almost nobody wants to read about Indonesia, or watch films about it). And once in a while I get thoroughly depressed, temporarily losing faith in humanity. And I shit from the terrible food. And I get sick from the pollution. And I get exhausted from constant racist insults of the passers-by in this, one of the most racist countries on earth, which in just a bit over half a century has committed 3 monstrous genocides: in 1965, against the people of East Timor, and now against the Papuans. It is constant ‘bule’ (albino, or worse), but I am lucky, as my Chinese comrades suffer much worse insults, and of course my African comrades do as well, not to speak of my Papuan brothers!

Fascist Jakarta is a tough adversary. But I am tough, too. And so, I go, drive and crawl through the dirt, noise and insults. Because it is needed. Because here is buried the key to the countless other conflicts that the West has implanted all over the world.

The Economist once described Indonesia as the least documented large country on earth. Right. And there are many reasons for it. I often describe 1965 as a “Cultural Hiroshima”, because almost all the intellectuals were either, killed, imprisoned or muzzled – overnight, and on the direct suggestions and orders from the West.

This is the most intellectually and mentally damaged country on earth, which often feels like one huge mental asylum. It is the biggest untold story of the 20th Century. Too many people got killed here. Too many people had killed. Everybody fears everything. But nobody dares to speak or to define things.

Jakarta is a city where people ‘don’t know’, or they simply refuse to know that they are being robbed of everything, that they have been fooled, and that they had been thoroughly brainwashed.

Here, cheap pop culture, Western junk food and forced dependency on filthy scooters and private cars are called ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’. Watching European football is a ‘sign of progress’. Mobile phones and text messages double as culture, and so do video games. Nobody reads books.

You ask the poor about poverty, and what do you hear? Women ‘put their fate in the hands of God’. Men begin ‘analyzing’, speaking like the IMF, using business jargon: “exchange rates, global economic situation, support for small businesses…” 

In reality, the majority of local families, according to my own survey, lives on US$2-3 dollars a day (family of 4-5). Food in supermarkets costs 2-8 times more than in places like Germany. Therefore, the supermarkets are empty. The Majority of people shop at pasars – markets, where food is often full of cancerogenic chemicals, and filth is everywhere. 

But most of people do not feel poor. They feel insulted when they are told that they live in misery. All without exception answer that they have nothing against capitalism. Most of them know nothing about the world; they have never been taught to compare.

Everybody ‘hates Communists”, as demanded by the West and by the local rulers. There are entire anti-Communist museums here, and people going out to go there, even paying from their own pocket to get further indoctrinated. If you tell them that all they see is one huge lie, they get mad, angry, sometimes even violent. Their entire lives are based on myths. Their lives depend on them, psychologically. If myths were to be taken away, their entire lives would collapse, as they would lose meaning. That is why there is too much noise, and no substance. People are scared. But they don’t know what frightens them.

Everybody thinks the same. There is hardly any variety. It is scary. Indonesia feels like North Korea, as it is presented by the West and its propaganda. But North Korea is actually totally different – there I found definitely much more intellectual diversity than in Jakarta!

Nobody wants to change things – at least not the system, the essence. People want “more money and better life”. Is their life bad now? “No!” Do they hold their elites responsible? “For what?” They don’t understand – they don’t know what I am talking about, or pretend they don’t know, when I ask such questions.

And the rich? Their kids are in the US, Japan or Europe, studying how to screw their own population even more, after returning back. For them, the greatest pride is to work for some foreign company, or to be awarded with the Western diplomas, and to be given some reward from Europe or the United States.

And the city is choking on its own gasses, garbage and excrement. While the rich have their condos and villas in Australia, California, Singapore and Hong Kong. They can get out of Indonesia whenever they want, as they have already stolen millions, billions of dollars. When they come back to Indonesia, it is to rob even more.

I have to admit, it is all ‘a little bit tiring’. Fine, honestly: it is exhausting. Documenting all this is deadly. So now you know.

And I also have to admit, it is often lonely working here. No one in his or her sane mind would come here, to work. The expenses, both financial but also related to mental sanity and physical health, are tremendous. Rewards are near zero. The West does not allow the truth about Indonesia to reach the world, and therefore, no powerful criticism of the country can ever by aired by the mainstream media.

But it is my duty to speak. Therefore, I speak. And write. And film. And as my maternal Russian and Chinese grandparents did – I fight against fascism, regardless of the cost!

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This article was originally published on New Eastern Outlook.

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are 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.

All images in this article are from the author.

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As We Honour the 15 Million Dead of 1914-1918, a Demented US President Flies into Paris with Plans to Attack Iran

November 12th, 2018 by Hans Stehling

As the leaders of Europe and the world gather in Paris to honour the millions of war dead of WW1, 100 years ago, the current US President together with his counterparts from Saudi Arabia and Israel, are even now finalising plans to attack and bankrupt Iran in a precursor to a devastating war in the Middle East that would escalate into Europe and beyond.

Trump is determined to abdicate any responsibility for peace, denuclearisation and democracy in his megalomaniac bid to rule the world in a storm of strident nationalism.

As we remember the 9 million military personnel and 6 million civilians who tragically lost their lives during the Great War in order to ensure peace in Europe and the world, we are treated today to the unedifying spectacle of an American president, who has never worn a uniform, strutting about Europe like a cardboard fuehrer mouthing nonsensical platitudes about climate change propaganda and American greatness.

The fact that this trumped-up autocrat with television credentials but no concept of political leadership, international diplomacy or economic strategy could have emerged as the apparent leader of the free world, is a parody of political common sense that ridicules democracy, freedom and morality.

Today is arguably the most dangerous moment for the world that at any time since the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 when we were one minute to nuclear midnight. That was averted by the then US President Kennedy, who whatever else, was a leader of his country.  Now we have to contend with an elderly, lumbering, womanising, self-publicist whose only expertise is apparently in dealing with the Internal Revenue Service.

How the US and the world arrived at this position is not readily understood other than the fact that American democracy is predicated upon money – from casinos or any other source – instead of leadership, statesmanship, truth and integrity, unlike democratic government in the vast majority of European states.

The international community has to make a decision: appease this dangerous political nonentity from New York or cut loose; establish a European army and an alternative global reserve currency to eliminate or reduce trade and military dependence upon America.

If the world is to be a different place, let us ensure that it is not in the image of this pretentious parody of a politician.

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Hans Stehling (pen name) is a political analyst based in the UK. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from The Seattle Times

Five Countries Listened to Khashoggi Murder Tapes, Erdogan Says

November 12th, 2018 by Times of Malta

Turkey has given recordings on the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi to Saudi Arabia, the United States, Germany, France and Britain, President Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday.

Turkish sources have said previously that authorities have an audio recording purportedly documenting the murder.

Speaking ahead of his departure for France to attend commemorations to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War One, Erdogan said Saudi Arabia knows the killer of Jamal Khashoggi is among a group of 15 people who arrived in Turkey one day ahead of the October 2 killing.

Khashoggi, a critic of Saudi rulers, was killed inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

Saudi Arabia has admitted he was murdered there, but denied suggestions its royal family was involved.

It had initially maintained the writer had left the consulate unharmed.

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Featured image: People protest against the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey outside the Saudi Arabian Embassy in London. (Source:

War Criminals in High Office Commemorate the End of World War I

November 12th, 2018 by Prof Michel Chossudovsky

In a bitter irony, several of the World’s leaders who were “peacefully” commemorating the end of World War I in Paris including Trump, Netanyahu, Macron and May are the protagonists of war in Afghanistan, Palestine, Syria, Libya, Iraq and Yemen. 

To put it bluntly they are war criminals under international law.

They have blood on their hands.

What on earth are they commemorating?

In the words of Hans Stehling: “As We Honour the 15 Million Dead of 1914-1918, a Demented US President Flies into Paris with Plans to Attack Iran” [with nuclear weapons] (Global Research, November 12, 2018)

Lest we forget: War is the ultimate crime, “The Crime against Peace” as defined under Nuremberg.

 The US and its allies have embarked upon the ultimate war crime, a Worldwide military adventure, “a long war”, which threatens the future of humanity. 

The Pentagon’s global military design is one of world conquest. 

The War to End all Wars??? 

One hundred years later: What’s happening NOW in November 2018?

Major military and covert intelligence operations have been launched in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theatre operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states, not to mention economic warfare.

In the course of the last seventeen years, starting in the immediate wake of 9/11, a series of US-NATO led wars have been launched: Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Yemen, resulting in millions of civilian deaths and countless atrocities. These wars have been led by the US and its NATO allies.

It is all for a good cause:

“Responsibility to Protect”(R2P),

“Going after the bad guys”,

Waging a “Global War on Terrorism”.

It just so happens that “Outside Enemy Number One” Osama bin Laden was recruited by the CIA. And nobody actually denies it.

Image: Osama bin Laden with Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski (circa 1979)

And the Bush and the Bin Laden families are friends.

 

Confirmed by the Washington Post Osama’s brother Shafiq bin Laden was meeting with George W Bush’s Dad, George H. Walker Bush at a Carlyle business meeting at the Ritz Carleton in New York on September 10, one day before 9/11:

It didn’t help that as the World Trade Center burned on Sept. 11, 2001, the news interrupted a Carlyle business conference at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel here attended by a brother of Osama bin Laden. Former president Bush, a fellow investor, had been with him at the conference the previous day. (WaPo, March 16, 2003)

Now does that not sound like a “conspiracy theory”? While Osama was allegedly coordinating the attack on the WTC,  his brother Shafiq was meeting up with the President’s Dad, according to the Washington Post.

In turn, according to the Wall Street Journal “The bin Laden family has become acquainted with some of the biggest names in the Republican Party…” (WSJ, 27 September 2001)

Here is a rather “believe it or not” concept: if the US were to boost defence spending to go after Osama bin Laden (Enemy Number One), the bin Laden family would benefit so to speak because (in September 2001) they were partners of the Carlyle Group, one the World’s largest asset management companies:

Waging War on The Bad Guys 

Amply documented, the “Bad Guys”, namely Al Qaeda and its various affiliates including ISIS-Daesh are constructs of Western intelligence (aka so-called “intelligence assets”).

In recent developments, the US and Israel are threatening Iran with nuclear weapons. U.S. and NATO ground forces are being deployed in Eastern Europe on Russia’s immediate doorstep. In turn, the U.S. is confronting China under the so-called “Pivot to Asia” which was launched during the Obama presidency.

The US also threatens to blow up North Korea with what is described in US military parlance as a “bloody nose operation” which consists in deploying “the more usable” low yield B61-11 mini-nukes which are tagged as “harmless to civilians because the explosion is under ground”, according to scientific opinion on contract to the Pentagon.

The B61-11 tactical nuclear weapon has an explosive capacity between one third and twelve times a Hiroshima bomb.

Hiroshima, August 7, 1945

Flashback to August 6, 1945, the first Atomic Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Up to 100, 000 people were killed in the first seven seconds following the explosion.

But it was “collateral damage”: In the words of President Harry Truman:

Truman globalresearch.caThe world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.

What is at stake is a global criminal undertaking in defiance of international law. In the words of the late Nuremberg Prosecutor William Rockler:

The United States has discarded pretensions to international legality and decency, and embarked on a course of raw imperialism run amok.” (William Rockler, Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor)

We will recall that the architect of Nuremberg, Supreme Court Justice and Nuremberg Prosecutor Robert Jackson said with some hesitation:

“We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.”

Does this historical statement apply to Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and Theresa May?

In defiance of Nuremberg, the US and its allies have invoked the conduct of “humanitarian wars” and “counter-terrorism” operations, with a view to installing “democracy” in  targeted countries.

And the Western media applauds. War is now routinely heralded in news reports as a peacemaking undertaking.

War becomes peace. Realities are turned upside down.

These lies and fabrications are part of of war propaganda, which also constitutes a criminal undertaking under Nuremberg.

The US-NATO led war applied Worlwide is a criminal endeavor under the disguise of “responsibility to protect” and counter-terrorism. It violates the Nuremberg Charter, the US constitution and the UN charter. According to former chief Nuremberg prosector Benjamin Ferencz, in relation to the 2003 invasion of Iraq:

“a prima facie case can be made that the United States is guilty of the supreme crime against humanity — that being an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation.”

Ferenz was referring to “Crimes against Peace and War” (Nuremberg Principle VI): which states the following:

“The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:

(a) Crimes against peace:
(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;
(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).
(b) War crimes:
Violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the Seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.
(c) Crimes against humanity:
Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds, when such acts are done or such persecutions are carried on in execution of or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime.”
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Ireland’s President Michael D Higgins Honours 200,000 Irish Soldiers Who Fought in WWI as He Speaks of ‘Official Amnesia’ After Conflict

November 12th, 2018 by Laura Lynott

President Michael D Higgins led Ireland’s Armistice commemorations, marking one hundred years since the end of World War One and honouring the 200,000 Irish soldiers who fought in it.

Thousands of people defied wind and heavy rain today to attend Armistice Day ceremonies across Ireland for the 49,000 Irish soldiers killed in World War I.

Mr Higgins lay a wreath as members of the Defence Forces held their heads down, as a mark of respect.

Dignitaries from across the globe joined together at Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, as Victoria Cross commemorative plaques were unveiled, in memory of five fallen soldiers from Dublin, Wicklow, Sligo, Antrim and Down.

Each soldier was posthumously awarded the Cross – the highest British military award for gallantry.

Mr Higgins told the crowd, including families whose relatives died in the conflict:

“We remember, in particular, the 200,000 men from across the island of Ireland, North and south, east and west, who served in that war, and we call to mind in a special way the tens of thousands who never returned home who remain forever in the soil of Belgium, France, Greece and Turkey.”

To read complete article published by The Irish Independent click here

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Featured image: President Michael D. Higgins places a wreath on behalf of the people of Ireland at Armistice Day Commemoration Picture: Caroline Quinn

The 100th Anniversary of The Tragic End of World War I .“Those Who don’t Know History are Doomed to Repeat It”

November 12th, 2018 by Stephen Lendman

Edmund Burke put it this way, saying: “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.”

George Santanyana said “(t)hose who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Kurt Vonnegut said “I’ve got news for Mr. Santayana. We’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive.”

In his novel Bluebeard, Vonnegut said

“(i)t’s pretty dense kids who haven’t figured that out by the time they’re ten…Most kids can’t afford to go to Harvard and be misinformed.”

November 11 marked the 100th anniversary of WW I’s end – officially at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.

The so-called war to end all wars was prelude for much worse to come. In 1928, Kellogg-Briand policy renounced aggressive wars. The UN Charter’s Preamble states:

“We the Peoples of the United Nations Determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind…”

Washington, its key NATO partners and Israel wage endless wars of aggression in multiple theaters with no prospect for resolution anywhere.

Are more wars coming? Possibly with thermonuclear weapons.

What are the lessons of History? The US has been at war throughout its entire history, The business of America is war, the world’s leading purveyor of state-sponsored terrorism globally.

Hannah Arendt once said crimes of state aren’t committed by fanatics or sociopaths, just “terrifyingly normal” (people)…neither perverted or sadistic…who accepted the premises of their superiors and their state” to continue current and/or longstanding policies.

US history from the republic’s inception shows it’s addicted to endless war – glorified in the name of peace, its violent culture believing war is peace.

Pacifist nonviolence is considered sissy and unpatriotic. US foreign policy is based on pursuing interests belligerently, forcing other nations to bend to America’s will, sovereign independent ones going their own way not tolerated.

Presidents “reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend our nation and our interests,” Obama said.

Bush/Cheney operated the same way. Trump aggressively follows in their footsteps, continuing preemptive wars he inherited, escalating them, reserving the right to use first-strike nuclear weapons, including against non-nuclear states.

US presidents claim it’s to defend national security and advance the nation’s values and ideals – at a time America’s only enemies are invented ones. No real ones exist.

So-called values and ideals rape and destroy one nation after another, an endless cycle of aggressive wars – making the world safe for militarists and monied interests.

The US is virtually on a nuclear hair-trigger. Squeezing it could happen by accident or design. Trump has no understanding of what nuclear armageddon could mean, risking the end of life on earth by nuclear winter.

It’s defined as “a long period of darkness and extreme cold that scientists predict would follow a full-scale nuclear war, a layer of dust and smoke in the atmosphere cover(ing) the earth and block(ing) the rays of the sun, (causing) most living organisms (to) perish.”

Anti-nuclear expert Helen Caldicott earlier said

“(o)ne single failure of nuclear deterrence could end human history (quickly). Once initiated, it would take one hour to trigger a swift, sudden end to life on this planet.”

Nuclear disarmament followed by ending wars before they end us may be the only way humanity can survive.

A nation addicted to endless wars for wealth and power risks ending life on planet earth to own it.

Congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) in September 2001, granting carte blanche warmaking authority to presidents, may end up becoming a doomsday authorization if things are recklessly pushed too far.

If nuclear war erupts, there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle, no second chance to step back from the brink, no way to avoid the destructive power thermonukes – making Fat Man and Little Boy look like toys by comparison.

A Final Comment

During WW I, an unplanned Christmas truce occurred over the 1914 Christmas period.

Both sides stopped fighting, fraternizing instead. On both sides, soldiers left trenches over half of the front – defying orders, calling “such an attitude…dangerous (saying it) destroys the offensive spirit…”

What was unimaginable happened. Both sides took time off from fighting, shook hands, buried their dead, chatted with each other, enjoying the calm, even played football with each other.

Unofficial truces occurred other times throughout history, several times during WW I, never like Christmas 1914.

The message was clear. Ordinary people deplore war. It’s the enemy of peace, humanity’s scourge.

Good wars don’t exist, nuclear war worst of all if occurs. Power-hungry madness may doom us all if not curbed – not a hint of it so far today in Washington.

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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.”

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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Goldman ‘Bear Market Indicator’ Nears Record High: The Signal is Red.

November 12th, 2018 by Zero Hedge

“Get used to this kind of volatility,” warns Hussman Funds’ John Hussman in his latest comment.

“Unfortunately, the moment interest rates hit zero, [historical risk and valuation] limits vanished, and preemptively responding to speculative extremes became terrifically detrimental.”

“Presently, neither valuations nor internals are favorable, and that is what opens up a trap door under the market.”

Goldman  agrees, high valuations in isolation do not provide much of a timing signal for investors but, again, when combined with other factors can indicate risks of a correction or possible bear market.

Goldman aggregated these variables in a signal indicator, and took each variable and calculated its percentile relative to its history since 1948. What it found is that, heuristically, the odds of a bear market at this moment, are in the 73% percentile.

The aggregate Bear Market Risk Indicator shows the average of these factors. Historically, when the Indicator rises above 60% it is a good signal to investors to turn cautious, or at the very least recognise that a correction followed by a rally is more likely to be followed by a bear market than when these indicators are low. By the same token, when the Indicator is very low, below 40% (as was the case in 1975, 1982 and 2009), investors should see any market weakness as an opportunity to buy.

As shown below, the risk of a bear market has almost never been greater.

So where are we now? As Oppenheimer puts it simple, “The signal is red.”

While the momo-driven indices have bounced back honorably (fadin Friday), the world’s largest stock index (NYSE’s @24 trillion market cap Composite Index) has bounced and failed at key technical support…

While many eyes prefer to focus on ‘Dr.Copper’ as having the economics PhD, it is Lumber that is the real expert…

And it is flashing red…

And the bounce in the last two weeks has decoupled US equity prices from everything…

 

And if cyclicals underperformance is anything to go by, bond yields are set to tumble…

 

US Financial Conditions have tightened dramatically…

 

And as financial conditions have tightened, something dramatic changed in the way ‘smart’ money is flowing across the US equity market…

And while we have seen some panic in recent weeks, one very notable signal is not offering hope to the bulls – the put-call ratio is at its lowest since early 2017 – not the over-hedged ammunition for another exuberant leg higher in stocks…

As it appears the all-too-eager momo-chasers piled into calls on the first sign of a rebound…

Bond shorts rebuilt their positions a little last week (after 4 weeks of derisking) but previous metals bears unwound their positions further, and VIX positioning shifted further into net long territory.

Finally, we note that there is currently a record number of assets around the world with negative returns YTD…

And if 70 years of historical relationships are anything to go by, the S&P 500’s annual return over the next 10 years may be about zero.

In conclusion, we given John Hussman the final words:

“We can no longer rely on well-defined limits to speculation, as we could in previous market cycles across history.”

“In hindsight, the fix was simple: abandon the belief in any limit to the stupidity of Wall Street.”

…

“Despite its discomfort, the market decline we observed in October is only a drop in the bucket toward normalizing valuations.”

“Over the completion of the current market cycle, I fully expect the S&P 500 to lose close to two-thirds of its value from the recent peak.”

Is that what The Fed, The Deep State, or The Dems want?

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The Jeff Sessions Matter

November 12th, 2018 by Gary Leupp

(This is intended as a study-aid to anyone trying to make sense out of the unfolding scandal. I proceed from the premise that the study of history is fundamentally the study of causal relationships over time. What leads to what? Scrolling up and down this timeline, expanding it, clarifying, repeating until it’s memorized, maybe we can get some small insights into the reasons for the imminent constitutional crisis.)

Note 1: The Attorney-General of the United States is the chief legal advisor of the U.S. government. Since 1789 this officer’s duties have been defined as “to prosecute and conduct all suits in the Supreme Court in which the United States shall be concerned, and to give his advice and opinion upon questions of law when required by the President of the United States, or when requested by the heads of any of the departments.” Especially since the formation of the Justice Department in 1870 the functions of this official resemble those of Ministers of Justice elsewhere in the world. The Justice Department ranks with State, Defense and Treasury as among the four top power-centers in the regime.

Note 2: Past Attorney-Generals have included John Mitchell of Watergate fame (who served 19 months in federal prison for covering up for Nixon); and Elliott Richardson, who resigned rather than heed Nixon’s demand that he fire special Watergate Prosecutor Archibald Cox. They have included Robert Kennedy, Ramsey Clark, Robert Bork, Edwin Meese, Janet Reno, Eric Holder, John Ashcroft—a mixed bag of liberal opportunists, slowly evolving progressives, total reactionaries, weird religious fanatics.

That someone like Matt Whitaker, who three years ago was threatening a victim ripped off by his bogus firm with “criminal consequences”—positively boasting of his own status as “a former United States Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa,” adding: “and I also serve on World Patent Marketing’s Advisory Board” should not shock those of us familiar with history. (But I fear we are a small minority.)

It should surely not shock anyone who remains unshocked by Trump’s pussy-grabbing talk, his support for Roy Moore, the Kavenaugh confirmation, his apparent satisfaction with Prince MbS’s explanation for the Khashoggi murder, etc., that he would appoint (as “a great guy”) this person he says he doesn’t really know except by reputation as Minister of Justice of this benighted country.

Note 3: Understanding the power and significance of the position, and the fact that it is sometimes held by a total thug who manipulates and avoids the law at will as their power allows, we should encourage anyone entangled in the legal system in the U.S. to soberly consider the possibility that the whole damned thing is presently under constitutionally illegitimate leadership. May doubt and disillusionment reign. They make sense.

Timeline

2015

June 16, 2015: Donald Trump announces his candidacy for president.

August: Matthew Whitaker, on behalf of World Patent Marketing, in an email threatens a bilked customer asking for refund: “I am a former United States Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa and I also serve on World Patent Marketing’s Advisory Board. Your emails and message from today seem to be an apparent attempt at possible blackmail or extortion. You also mentioned filing a complaint with the Better Business Bureau and to smear World Patent Marketing’s reputation online. I am assuming you understand that there could be serious civil and criminal consequences for you if that is in fact what you and your ‘group’ are doing.”

(In May 2018 a federal judge dissolves World Patent Marketing and fines it $ 26 million for fraud.)

2016

February 18, 2016: Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) surprises the political world by becoming the first senator to endorse Trump for president.

March: Sessions attends campaign meeting with Trump in which aide George Papadopoulos mentions a Russian connection that could produce campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton. His reaction unclear.

July: Campaign staffer Carter Page tells Sessions about his Russian business and other ties later revealed by the Mueller investigation and press reports.

October 7: CIA director James Clapper accuses Russia of election interference.

November 8: Trump unexpectedly elected president.

November 18: newly-elected president Trump announces pick of Sessions as his attorney-general.

2017

January 6, 2017: U.S. intelligence community releases report, “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections,” asserts with high confidence that Russia attempted to interfere in U.S. elections.

January 10: Sessions under questioning in Congress is asked if Trump campaign had any Russian contacts; says he was unaware of any.

February 8: Congress confirms Sessions as Attorney-General, voting 52-47.

March 1: Washington Post reports Sessions had met with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyk at least twice during campaign, one privately in his Senate office.

March 2, 2017: Sessions recuses himself from Russia probe, admits to having had contacts (brief conversations) with Kislyak during campaign. Trump immediately castigates him for this recusal.

April: On tweet Trump denies plan to dismiss Sessions and replace with EPA Chief Scott Pruitt.

May 9: Trump fires FBI director James Comey, stating this is at Sessions’ recommendation. (Deputy director Rod Rosenstein may have written up the argument.) Rosenstein appoints Paul Mueller to direct investigation of Russia election interference.

May: Washington Post reports that Rosenstein threatened to resign if held responsible for Comey’s firing.

May 17: Rosenstein appoints Paul Mueller special counsel to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump, and any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.”

May 18 (4:20 AM EST): Trump tweets, ”This is the greatest witch hunt of any president in American history!”

June 21: As executive director of the (soon discredited) Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, Matthew Whittaker (former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa, 2004-9)) appears on the Wilkow Majority show and declares, “The truth is there was no collusion with the Russians and the Trump campaign. There was interference by the Russians into the election, but that was not collusion with the campaign. That’s where the left seems to be combining those two issues. The last thing they want right now is for the truth to come out, and for the fact that there’s not a single piece of evidence that demonstrates that the Trump campaign had any illegal or any improper relationships with the Russians. It’s that simple.”

August  6, 2017: Whitaker writes an opinion column for CNN entitled “Mueller’s Investigation of Trump is Going Too Far.” On same day highlights on Twitter  a Philly.com opinion article  “Note to Trump’s Lawyer: Do Not Cooperate With Mueller Lynch Mob.” Says it’s “worth a read.” Catches Trump’s attention.

September 22: Sessions appoints Whitaker as his chief-of-staff.

2018

February 21: Trump tweets that people should ask Jeff Sessions why Clinton’s crimes are not being investigated. Calls Justice Department “disgraceful.”

February 28: Washington Post says Mueller investigating Trump-Sessions relationship in relation to possible obstruction of justice.

April: Rosenberg personally orders raid on the home and office of Trump personal lawyer Michael Cohen, in a spin-off investigation from the Mueller probe. Trump infuriated.

May: Trump blames Mueller investigation on Sessions’ recusal, accuses him of disloyalty (according to NYT.)

June 5: Trump tweets, “The Russian Witch Hunt Hoax continues, all because Jeff Sessions didn’t tell me he was going to recuse himself…I would have quickly picked someone else. So much time and money wasted, so many lives ruined…and Sessions knew better than most that there was No Collusion!”

July 19: Trump tells NYT that Sessions should have told him when he nominated him for AG that he would recuse himself on the Russia thing. The same month he tells the Wall Street Journal that he feels no special appreciation for Session due to his astonishingly early and risky endorsement in July 2015. In his articulate way, Trump says: “It’s not like a great loyal thing about the endorsement. I’m very disappointed in Jeff Sessions.”

July 25: Trump tweets: “Attorney General Jeff Sessions has taken a VERY weak position on Hillary Clinton crimes (where are E-mails & DNC server) & Intel leakers!”

August 23: Trump demands, by tweet, that Sessions “look into all of the corruption on the ‘other side’ including deleted Emails, Comey lies & leaks, Mueller conflicts, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Ohr.”

August 25 tweet: “Jeff Sessions said he wouldn’t allow politics to influence him only because he doesn’t understand what is happening underneath his command position,. Highly conflicted Bob Mueller and his gang of 17 Angry Dems are having a field day as real corruption goes untouched. No Collusion.”

September 3: Blames Sessions for indicting Republican candidates. “Two long running, Obama era, investigations of two very popular Republican Congressmen [California Rep. Duncan Hunter and New York Rep. Chris Collin] were brought to a well publicized charge, just ahead of the Mid-Terms, by the Jeff Sessions Justice Department. Two easy wins now in doubt because there is not enough time. Good job Jeff……”

September  21: NYT reports that in Spring 2017 soon after Comey dismissal Rosenstein discussed with John Kelly the prospect of recording the president’s conversations and using them to employ Article 25 of the constitution.

September 24: At White House Rosenstein offers resignation to Kelly; not accepted.

October 11 (on Fox): Trump: “I can tell you Matt Whitaker’s a great guy. I mean, I know Matt Whitaker.”

November 6: Democrats sweep the House of Representatives in mid-term elections.

November 7, 2018: Sessions submits undated resignation at Trump’s request after 6 months of criticism. Replaced by his chief-of-staff Matthew Whitaker.

November  9: Trump tarmac interview: “I don’t know Matt Whitaker.”

***

Pundits suggest that the various statements Whitaker made in August 2017 were a campaign to get hired as a Justice Department lawyer, and that Trump directed Sessions to hire him (thinking he could take over when needed, to defend him against congressional inquiries). Think, people, is that really plausible?

And is it really true—what some people are saying—that the attorney-general even an acting one needs Congressional approval, and that this power transfer without that approval is invalid? Again, may doubt and disillusionment reign, because they make sense in these troubled times.

*

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Gary Leupp is a Professor of History at Tufts University, and author of numerous works on Japanese history. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Read other articles by Gary.

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Ten Lies Told About World War I

November 12th, 2018 by Dominic Alexander

This Remembrance Day will doubtless see strenuous efforts by some to justify the fruitless bloodbath that was the First World War. Revisionist commentators have long attempted to rehabilitate the conflict as necessary and just, but the arguments do not stand up. It does no service to the memory of the dead to allow any illusions in the justice or necessity of war, particularly so when the precedents will be used to argue for the next ‘necessary’ conflict. From the causes of the war, to its prosecution and its results, here are the counter-arguments to ten common pro-war ploys.

1. The war was fought in defence of democracy.

This is contradicted by the basic facts. Germany had universal manhood suffrage while in Britain, including Ireland, some 40% of men still did not qualify for the vote. In Germany also, there were attempts to justify the war on the grounds that it was being fought to defend civilised values against a repressive, militaristic state, in the form of Russian autocracy.

2. Britain went to war due to a treaty obligation to defend the neutrality of Belgium.

There was no clear and accepted obligation on Britain to do this, and, in fact, before the Belgian issue appeared, the war party in the cabinet was already pushing for British intervention on the entirely different ground that there were naval obligations to France. These obligations had been developed in secret arrangements between the military of both countries, and were never subject to any kind of democratic accountability. The Germans even offered guarantees over Belgian integrity, which the British government refused to consider at all.

3. German aggression was the driving force for war.

However aggressive the German leadership may have been in 1914, the British establishment was at least as determined to take the opportunity to go to war with its imperial rival. At one point the Foreign Office even seized on imaginary German incursions into France to justify a British declaration of war on Germany. The declaration letter had to be retrieved from the German ambassador and rewritten when it was discovered that the stories were false. The enthusiasm of the British ruling class for war undermines any justification for it based on German aggression.

4. Germany had started a naval arms race with Britain.

Imperialist competition between the two states over markets and resources preceded the arms race in the fifteen years before the war. Britain’s naval power was the vital element in its ability to restrict German access to markets and resources across the world. Unless Britain was willing to allow Germany to expand economically, the logic of capitalist competition meant that Germany was bound to challenge British naval supremacy. The latent violence of the leading imperial nation is always the context for aggressive challenges to the status quo on the part of rising powers.

5. German imperialism was uniquely vicious and had to be challenged.

The atrocities committed against the Herrero people in Namibia were indeed terrible crimes, but were hardly unique compared to the horrors committed by all those involved in the rubber industry in the Belgian Congo, to take but one example. Also, European opinion had only a few years before 1914 been horrified by the brutality of another colonial power when it was engaged in ruthlessly expanding its dominance over independent states in Africa. This was Britain in its wars of aggression against the Boer states in South Africa, during which concentration camps were first used in order to control a civilian population.

6. Public opinion was united in favour of the war, as shown by images of cheering crowds in 1914.

It is now usually admitted that the degree of enthusiasm for the war was strictly limited, and the evidence is that the crowds who gathered at the outbreak of war were by no means united in martial enthusiasm. In fact sizeable and widespread anti-war demonstrations occurred in both Britain and Germany. Had the leaderships of Labour and Socialist parties across Europe not caved into demands to support their national ruling classes in going to war, it is quite possible that the conflict could have been stopped in its tracks.

7. The morale of British troops fighting on the Western Front remained intact to the end of the war.

While Britain may not have suffered quite the same scale of mutinies as in the German and French armies, at times there were whole stretches of the front where troops became so unreliable that generals did not dare order them into combat. The evidence for widespread cynicism about war strategies, contempt for the military leadership, and grave doubts about the purpose of the war, cannot be wished away by the revisionists. In so far as soldiers carried on willingly fighting the war, the explanation needs to be sought in the habituation to obedience, as well as the threat of court-martial executions. There is no need to invoke either fervid nationalism or any kind of deep psychological blood-lust as explanations.

8. The military leadership, notably General Haig, was not a bunch of incompetent ‘donkeys’.

Attempts to rehabilitate the likes of General Haig founder on some of the basic facts about the tactics he relentlessly employed. Repeated infantry attacks on opposing trenches consistently failed to gain any clear advantage, while causing colossal casualties. On the first day of the battle of the Somme, 1st July 1916, 57,000 troops out of 120,000 were killed or wounded. Despite continuing carnage on an incredible scale, Haig carried on ordering further attacks. When any hope of a breakthrough against the German lines was clearly lost, the purpose of the battle was shifted to attrition pure and simple. The plan now was to kill more German troops than the British lost. Since there was no way of reliably measuring the casualties on the other side, Haig relied on estimating it through the losses of his own side. On this basis he began to be angered when the army suffered too few losses, as when he complained that one division in September had lost under a thousand men. There can be no defence for this kind of disregard of human life.

9. The end of the war saw the triumph of liberal capitalism, against collapsing autocratic Empires.

In fact all states involved in the war were deeply destabilised. Even the United States, whose involvement was the most limited, experienced the ‘Red Summer’ of 1919, with unprecedented labour revolts, such as the Seattle general strike, alongside savage repression of socialists and black Americans. Britain saw the beginning of the Irish war of independence, and increasing unrest in India, which marks, in effect, the point at which the Empire began to unravel. Domestically, there was also a wave of radical working-class unrest, particularly in the ‘Red Clydeside’, which culminated in troops being sent into Glasgow to impose martial law.

10. The war achieved anything worthwhile whatsoever.

The war opened up a period of endemic economic dislocation, and outright crisis. In Britain there was a decade of industrial decline and high unemployment even before the Great Depression. In effect, it was only the Second World War which brought the major capitalist powers out of the slump. The First World War saw the point at which capitalism became addicted to war and to a permanent arms economy. The war demonstrated the capacity of capitalism to create industrialised waste, carnage and destruction on a colossal scale. The remembrance of the war is appropriately a time for mourning the horror, the loss and the waste of it all, but it should also provoke a determination to resist our rulers’ insistence on promoting war to further their interests. War can achieve nothing other than to create the conditions for further wars.

Popular opinion has, ever since its ending, remembered the First World War as a time of horrendous and futile misery and slaughter, as epitomising political and military leaders’ incompetence and callous disregard for human life. That popular judgement, which has helped turn common opinion against war in general, was correct, and we must not let the war mongers dismiss this instance of the wisdom of ordinary people.

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Dominic Alexander is a member of Counterfire, for which he is the book review editor. He has been a Stop the War and anti-austerity activist in north London for some time. He is a published historian whose work includes the book Saints and Animals in the Middle Ages, a social history of medieval wonder tales

Notes

The arguments in this article are developed at greater length in the author’s review of Douglas Newton’s book The Darkest Days: The Truth Behind Britain’s Rush to War, 1914 (Verso 2014).

The specifics for General Haig’s murderous rage can be found in Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars (Pan 2013), p.209 – reviewed on this site by Lindsey German.

Featured image: An American soldier lies dead, tangled in barbed wire on the western front. Photograph: American Stock Archive/Getty Images

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Trump Bans Asylum for Unwanted Aliens

November 11th, 2018 by Stephen Lendman

Israel is the only developed nation prohibiting non-Jewish refugees and asylum seekers from entering the country – treating unwanted arrivals oppressively like criminals.

Post-9/11, America is heading in the same direction. Obama was notoriously called the nation’s “deporter-in-chief.”

Trump way exceeds his harshness – militantly hostile to Muslims, Latinos, and other people of color from designated countries – banning their entry to America.

In 2017, his regime arrested and deported more unwanted aliens than Obama in 2016. Last December, acting ICE director Thomas Homan said

“(i)f you’re in this country illegally, we’re looking for you and we’re going to look to apprehend you.”

Since Trump took office, thousands of unwanted aliens were arrested, harshly detained and deported. His policy is unrelated to protecting national security. It’s all about racial hatred toward unwanted people.

Christians and Jews are welcome, especially from favored nations. Treating them one way, people of color and Muslims another is flagrantly hostile to fundamental rule of law principles.

Refugees, asylum seekers, and others from the wrong countries are unwelcome in Trump’s America. Islamophobia and racial hatred reflect official regime policy.

Trump’s new immigration order has nothing to do with protecting national security or US sovereignty, a shameful White House statement saying the following:

“Illegal aliens will no longer get a free pass into our country by lodging meritless claims in seeking asylum. Instead, migrants seeking asylum will have to present themselves lawfully at a port of entry.”

The statement lied claiming Trump is using his authority “to manage and protect the integrity of our immigration system and our national sovereignty.”

His action is all about denying unwanted refugees and asylum seekers entry to America, violating international and constitutional law under the Supremacy Clause (Article VI, Clause 2).

It states all US laws and treaties “shall be the supreme law of the land.” International law is clear and unequivocal.

Article I of the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees calls them:

“A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of their nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail him/herself of the protection of that country.”

Post-WW II, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was established to help them.

To gain legal protection, they must:

  • be outside their country of origin;
  • fear persecution;
  • be harmed or fear harm by their government or others;
  • fear persecution for at least one of the above cited reasons; and
  • pose no danger to others.

Immihelp.com calls asylum and refugee status “closely related.” They differ “only in the place where a person asks for asylum status,” adding:

Refugee status is asked for outside countries of origin. “(A)ll people who are granted asylum status must meet the definition of a refugee.”

“The Refugee Act of 1980 regulates US asylum policy as well as governing refugee procedures.”

“The Act for the first time established a statutory basis for granting asylum in the United States consistent with the 1967 United Nations Protocol on Refugees.”

The 1951 UN Convention on Refugees restricted their status to circumstances occurring before January 1, 1951, notably relating to European ones.

The 1967 protocol removed the temporal and geographic restrictions. Trump’s new order is all about blocking thousands of Central Americans heading for the southern US border.

They’re legitimate refugees and asylum seekers, fleeing repressive US-supported regimes in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, three of the world’s most violent nations.

Days earlier, Trump lied saying caravans heading for the US are “made up of some very bad thugs and gang members.” They’re ordinary people fleeing persecution, seeking safe haven from violence and repression in their home countries.

An ACLU statement said

“(w)hen the government has the power to deny legal rights and due process to one vulnerable group, everyone’s rights are at risk.”

Trump’s new order flies in the face of international and constitutional law. It’s sure to challenged in federal courts.

With legal help, anyone denied asylum or refugee status can apply for “withholding of removal,” limited asylum while contesting Trump’s order.

According to ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project director Omar Jadwat, “Congress very specifically said you can apply for asylum if you arrive in the United States regardless of whether you’re at a port of entry.”

“(A)nyone who reaches the United States” can apply for asylum. It’s the law of the land and international law.

Presidents have no legal authority to flout it, what Trump’s immigration order intends.

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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.”

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Yemen: A US Orchestrated Living Hell

November 11th, 2018 by Stephen Lendman

Media reports on devastating war in Yemen, including from most alternative sources, fail to explain the conflict was planned and orchestrated in Washington.

It began under Bush/Cheney shortly after US naked aggression was launched in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001 – four weeks after the 9/11 state-sponsored mother of all false flags.

Both wars and all others that followed were planned months in advance. US warmaking and enlistment of terrorist groups Washington created and supports, didn’t emerge like Topsy. Strategy and tactics take months of planning in advance.

Afghanistan is America’s longest war in modern times, in its 18th year with no prospect for resolution.

The shocking, largely ignored, reality about Yemen is it’s been ongoing almost as long. The Bush/Cheney regime launched it by drone terror-bombing.

Saudi terror-bombing began, then temporarily stopped, years before full-scale war was launched in March 2015. Resolution is nowhere in sight because the US under Republicans and undemocratic Dems reject peace and stability in all US war theaters.

Saudis and the UAE are US proxies in Yemen. Washington and Britain select targets to strike, including hospitals, schools, residential neighborhoods, mosques, marketplaces, agricultural land, and other civilian sites.

The US provides intelligence, logistics support, and mid-air refueling of Saudi and UAE warplanes.

Practically none of the above hard truths are reported by Western and Israeli media. Make no mistake. The Netanyahu regime is involved in the war – serving US, UK, French, Saudi, UAE and its own interests.

The same agenda is true about Syria, IDF terror-bombing of sites in the country temporarily halted because of Russian supplied sophisticated S-300 air defense systems.

According to the Saker, Syria was supplied with the same ones delivered to Iran and China, not “some antiquated,” less effective version, adding:

“Combined with the EW systems also delivered by Russia, these air defense systems clearly are having an impact on US and Israeli operations…complicat(ing) future attacks.”

Yemen is a different story, Russia involved only in trying to resolve the war diplomatically. It’s an unattainable objective as long as the US wants it continued endlessly.

On November 3, a major Saudi/UAE ground offensive began, trying to capture, control, and cut off remaining humanitarian aid entering Yemen through the port city of Hodeidah – the campaign so far unsuccessful.

On Thursday, spokesman for Yemeni armed forces allied with Houthi fighters General Yahya Sari said the following:

“The offensive operations blocked all the land supply routes, which led to confusion among enemy (Saudi and UAE) forces, and the aggressor warplanes failed to support (their) mercenaries.”

Reportedly, Saudi and UAE forces, along with their proxy fighters, are trapped inside Hodeidah and its surrounding areas after breaking through Houthi defenses on Tuesday.

Fierce fighting continues for the strategically important port city. Houthi fighters controlled it since 2014, a humanitarian aid lifeline for food, medicines and other vital aid able to get into Yemen, far short of what’s desperately needed.

Deplorable Saudi propaganda claims the kingdom “stand(s) with the Yemeni people” – while regime terror-bombing massacres them daily. War and blocked aid risks starvation for millions, young children, the elderly, ill and infirm most vulnerable.

The notion that US aircraft will stop refueling Saudi and UAE warplanes is as hollow as Trump regime war secretary Mattis’ call for ceasefire. US supported aggression in the country escalated after his statement.

In early November, UNICEF called Yemen a “living hell,” especially for its children – severe malnutrition and starvation killing countless tens of thousands, virtually unreported in the West.

UNICEF Middle East/North Africa director Geert Cappelaere said:

“Every 10 minutes, a child is dying from diseases that can be easily prevented” – countless others from war and starvation.

Likely hundreds of thousands of Yemenis perished since March 2015 – not the phony 10,000 figure reported by major media.

Millions of Yemenis may starve to death if war and blockade continue endlessly.

Most Yemenis obtaining food subsist on about 500 calories daily, causing severe malnutrition. It’s a third or more of what’s needed to survive.

Around 80% of Yemenis are food insecure. Save the Children estimates over 50,000 Yemeni children died from starvation and untreated diseases in 2017 alone.

Because of its arid land, Yemen is dependent on food imports. What’s available is too expensive for most Yemenis, the region’s poorest country in normal times, why humanitarian aid is vital. Yet far too little is available.

According to the UN, Yemen faces the “worst famine in the world in 100 years” if war continues.

Famine is already a reality for millions of Yemenis, mass starvation ongoing, largely out of sight and mind, lip service to it alone paid in the US and other Western capitals.

Food and medical treatment deprivation is part of US orchestrated, Saudi/UAE waged war and blockade on the country.

UN humanitarian coordinator for Yemen Lise Grande said as many as 13 million civilians may die from starvation if conflict resolution remains unachieved.

There’s no prospect of it ahead because the Trump regime rejects it.

When America goes to war, the human toll is never a consideration.

*

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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.”

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Iran Sanctions – Trump Gives Waivers to Iran’s Major Customers?

November 11th, 2018 by Peter Koenig

Background

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani says the new US sanctions against Tehran show that Washington has targeted ordinary people.

Rouhani said the US has spared no effort to mount pressure on Iran through what he called wrong sanctions. He noted that Washington, however, failed in its campaign to bring Iranian oil sales to zero as it had to give waivers to Iran’s major customers. He also slammed the US for waging a psychological war against Iran, saying Washington will soon understand that it has taken a wrong path.

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PressTV: What is your take on this?

Peter Koenig: As I said on previous occasions, these and all other US sanctions, interfering in other countries’ sovereign affairs are totally illegal – by any standards of international law.

What is amazing is that this crime – which Washington inflicts with impunity to every nation that refuses to follow its dictate – this crime has grown to become a “normality” – and the rest of the western civilization simply accepts it – well “civilization” – if we can still consider ourselves a “civilization”.

Having said this – these sanctions are actually toothless, they are ineffective, as Iran will keep selling oil and gas to petrol companies and honor their long-term government contracts. Of course, there are countries afraid of being “sanctioned’ by the United States if they continue dealing with Iran. But by and large – they are few and fewer, because even the western world starts seeing that relying on Washington is like committing slow suicide.

Many have decided to go their own way – even the EU talks about it, including creating their own transfer system to avoid going through SWIFT for monetary transfers. SWIFT is the western totally privately-owned transfer system, thanks to which financial sanctions are possible. SWIFT is linked to Wall Street banks – through which all western transfers have to transit.

In the meantime, of course, Iran has been “cut off” SWIFT as mandated by Trump, but that is of little importance, because Iran has linked up – as part of her Economy of Resistance – with the eastern SCO – Shanghai Cooperation Organization – using CIPS – the Chinese International Payment System for international monetary transfers.

Of course, Mr. Trump knows it.

So, his sanctions are not much more than a constantly repeated propaganda stint, trying to impress the world, like “we can put any country to its knees, if we want to” — Sorry, Washington, no longer. These are times of the past – and your dollar hegemony is nearing the end – It’s just a question of time.

PressTV: Do you think considering all the countries that seem to defy US sanctions – has anything changed in recent times?

PK: Absolutely. A lot.

It would have been unthinkable only 5 to 10 years ago that countries like Iran, Venezuela and others trade hydrocarbons, and other goods and commodities, in other currencies than the US dollar. Today it has become a common occurrence. It started some 5 years ago with Russia and China, when they detached themselves from the dollar dictate – opening swap accounts in their respective central banks and started trading in their local currencies, circumventing the SWIFT payment system and the “obligatory” Wall street banks.

This is also reflected in the fact that the US dollar is rapidly losing its status as the world’s reserve currency. When some 20 years back more than 90% of all reserves were held in US dollar denominated securities, today that figure has shrunk to less than 60% – and is going down as we speak. The Chinese yuan is largely replacing the dollar as reserve currency. Some two years ago, the Yuan was admitted by the IMF in the basket of reserve currencies. Since then the yuan has become officially recognized also by the west as a viable reserve money. Many treasurers around the world, who may have been afraid before to divest their dollar reserves into yuans, now dare do so. – This, in the not too distant future may mean the end of the dollar hegemony.

However, coming back to your earlier question related to sanctions and their effectiveness, there is an important “Fifth Column” in Iran, and they will use these sanctions against the Iranian Government, no matter whether these sanctions have any legal standing and impact or not.

They will try to influence the Iranian people to believe that Washington is punishing them because of their government. – And that, in my opinion, is what the Iranian Government has to focus on – the Fifth Column – those infiltrated or local enemies of the state that try to damage Iran from inside.

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Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; RT; Sputnik; PressTV; The 21st Century; TeleSUR; The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, the New Eastern Outlook (NEO); and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Featured image is from Sprott Money.

This News Is Not Fake. It is just Ordinary Deceit, i.e. a Lie

November 11th, 2018 by Dr. T. P. Wilkinson

Any scanning of the headlines both in standard and critical postings, especially since the 2016 US elections, will suffice. In the interest of brevity, reference is made to almost any pages published concurrent with this remark.

All one of the anonymous speech controllers has to do is introduce some nifty expression and everyone takes it. Inventing such nifty language was once a business known by the sobriquet Madison Avenue. However this ancient weapon of psychological warfare (against the general population) was industrialized, like mass slaughter, during World War I.(1)

Now “Fake”, e.g. “fake news” seems to be the slogan of the year. This is bizarre considering that most if not all so-called “news” is fabricated, i.e. “fake”.That means it does not tell anything except what the controlling editors (and ultimately the owners) want to have said (2). The ostensible event need not even have occurred.

In the echo chambers of the “Left” everyone accuses the Establishment– to which they are the logical complement– of spreading “fake” news. This implies that there is “news” spread which is not fake, i.e. perhaps “true”, a word to be treated with the greatest of caution.

Fowler(3) would certainly have called this “vogue” language. Propaganda (or public relations/ advertising) does not acquire more substance, nor is there more precision in the fashionable term, “fake news”.

Simply sticking to the essence: fake news is just another term, a euphemism,  for “lie” circulated by one or more elements of the mass media. Thus the lie loses the quality of active deceit. Moreover the wide adoption of this vogue language marks any user as someone “up to date”, part of the herd or swarm that reports about the reporting, while propagating the specious claim that journalism is something other than the commercial exploitation of voyeuristic or solipsistic text and image production.(4)

What does “fake” mean? Does the “news” lacks authenticity? Is the underlying event not genuine? Is the source false or fraudulent? Is the dissemination itself fraudulent? Were that the case, then the mere repetition of the “fake” is collaboration in the fraud, witting or unwitting. Is the opposite of “fake” real? And if so what does that mean: A real fabrication as opposed to a fake one? Although I do not have an attribution (but do not claim one), I recall reading somewhere in a discussion of counterfeiting luxury brands that the owners of the “genuine brand” actually benefit from the counterfeiting because it perpetuates the brand mystique and the quest for the real article among all the “fakes”.

Journalistic “truth”, despite all the raving about free press (i.e. free markets) and integrity, is a luxury product, a commodity, like any other. The more “news” sold but denounced as “fake”, the higher the value of the luxury brands whose “truth” need not be questioned. One of the principal qualities of any commodity is its ultimate and infinite substitutability. Maybe the problem is that all “news” is fodder for consumption, an activity by itself very different from thinking.

Notes

1) See George Creel, How We Advertised America  (1920).

2) The newspapers of record in most countries are private property and always have been, the holy New York Times, the blessed Washington Post, the venerable (once Manchester) Guardian, just to name the most notorious. It is a testimony to the superficiality of critical thought in much of what passes for political opposition that there is a presumption of truth applied to commercial product of monopoly media, no matter how often this presumption has been rebutted. People engaged by these corporations are bound by contract to obey their employers, just like in any other employment relationship. Ironically for monopoly commercial media bona fide lies (in compliance with corporate policy) are usually protected by law and academic scholarship. A back page correction is sufficient to indemnify the publisher or the source/ informant for the lie.

3) H. Fowler, Modern English Usage

4) Joseph Pulitzer’s campaign to “professionalize” public information, e.g. with the tax-exempting bequest funding the first journalism schools at the University of Missouri (1908) and Columbia University (1912) and the eponymous prize (1917), was foremost an effort to create a cadre of writers who could be employed interchangeably to generate text product for the great newspaper cartels. It was also intended to marginalise the partisan writer (usually from somewhere Left) and discredit him/ her as biased and unprofessional. In the so-called Progressive Era of US history (late 19th century), licensed professions were created– e.g. physicians and dentists– ostensibly rooted in modern scientific training but more accurately in monopolistic and anti-democratic political and economic practices. So today’s medical profession is essentially the sales/ marketing department of the chemical/ pharmaceutical cartels. Professionalisation can be translated as “profitization”.

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Dr T.P. Wilkinson writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket between the cradles of Heine and Saramago. He is also the author of Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa. Read other articles by T.P.. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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$240-billion-a-day Market Set to “Move Out of London” Ahead of Brexit

November 11th, 2018 by Jack Peat

A $240-billion-a-day market has announced today that it is to switch London for Amsterdam ahead of Brexit.

CME Group Inc. is moving its European market for short-term financing, the largest in the region, out of London because the exchange operator wants to guarantee continental firms can continue to use it if there is a no-deal Brexit, Bloomberg has reported.

The decision is the first example of an entire major financial market leaving the UK.

John Edwards, managing director of BrokerTec Europe, as the business is known, said in an interview:

“All of our euro-denominated bonds and repo will move to Amsterdam.

“We saw no benefit in splitting liquidity pools. Our UK business will not be able to provide services to the European clients.”

Stifel Financial Corp. has also been rumoured to be planning for the worse ahead of Brexit by buying brokerage operations in Germany.

BNP Paribas SA also plans to move between 85 and 90 employees from its global markets unit in London to other European financial centres in case of a hard Brexit.

BrokerTec Europe currently employs as many as 90 people in London. A third of those are front office, with the remainder working in technology or support roles.

About 210 billion euros ($240 billion) per day of European short-term financing instruments were traded on BrokerTec in October. That market will be shifted to CME’s Dutch subsidiary, NEX Amsterdam BV.

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Jack is a business and economics journalist and the founder of The London Economic (TLE). He has contributed articles to The Sunday Telegraph, BBC News and writes for The Big Issue on a weekly basis. Jack read History at the University of Wales, Bangor and has a Masters in Journalism from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

Featured image is from The London Economic.

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US-Saudi-Israel Offensive Against Iran Damages World Peace, Global Trade and European Security

November 11th, 2018 by Hans Stehling

The JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, known as the Iran nuclear deal, is an agreement on the nuclear program of Iran reached in Vienna on 14 July 2015 between Iran, the P5+1, and the European Union.

**

**

  • Date effective: 18 October 2015 (Adoption); 16 January 2016 (Implementation);
  • Signatories: China, France, Germany, European Union, Iran, Russia, United Kingdom, United States (since withdrawn)
  • Purpose:  Nuclear non-proliferation.
  • Created: 14 July 2015

More than half of the international community was involved for more than 20 months in arduous negotiation to formulate the JCPOA Agreement with Iran.   The action of the 45th President of the United States in repudiating that accord which America signed is an act of sabotage against the international community and part of an agenda to gain control of the Middle East and its strategic oil fields.  It is an act of bad faith on behalf of the US superstate and a huge disappointment to both the U.N., the E.U. and those governments affected worldwide.

To the above, one has to add the incredulity of the international community at Trump’s politically and economically ignorant, unilateral rejection of the Paris accord on Climate Change in denial of international scientific opinion.

These actions of political stupidity constitute the greatest danger to world peace, international trade and the global balance of power that have faced the United Nations and its 193 member states, since World War 2.

There is now an urgent combined need for joint action against the foreign policies of the current administration in Washington. One action would be the creation of a new global reserve currency as a valid alternative to the US dollar that is now being used to impose American hegemonic autocracy  upon the world, led by Donald Trump, President and architect of a new world order of Right-wing warmongers.

It should be borne in mind that according to the IMF, America’s GDP of $19 trillion is dwarfed by the global GDP total of $60 trillion (excl the US).  In fact, just three states, China, Japan and Germany have a combined GDP that exceeds that of the United States.

Both Mr Trump and the US dollar need to be confined to where they belong i.e. in the only state in the world where guns (393m) outnumber people (326m) and where every week there is a new mass shooting in a school, a place of worship, a school bus or a bar.

What Europe and the rest of the world needs is a reduction in nuclear and chemical weaponisation, not an increase as favoured by the Trump warmongers.

There must be no war or so-called pre-emptive strike against Iran or any other sovereign state, particularly when there is a nuclear non-proliferation treaty in force.  Furthermore, pressure must be applied to the Israeli government to join with the international community by ratifying not only the nuclear NPT but also to join the OPCW Chemical & Biological Weapons Conventions in line with the rest of the world.  If not, then the Israeli state stands outside the membership of the United Nations as a dissident state.  And that is a distinct danger to us all.

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Hans Stehling (pen name) is a political analyst based in the UK. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102
Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling)
PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Reviews

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
–John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction.
–Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute   

WWIII Scenario

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“The Ocean is Dying”: Marine and Animal Life Die Offs, California Coast

November 11th, 2018 by Mac Slavo

This article was first published by Global Research in May 2015

It was the dying cry of Charlton Heston in the creepy 1973 film Soylent Green… and it could resemble our desperate near future.

The ocean is dying, by all accounts – and if so, the food supply along with it. The causes are numerous, and overlapping. And massive numbers of wild animal populations are dying as a result of it.

Natural causes in the environment are partly to blame; so too are the corporations of man; the effects of Fukushima, unleashing untold levels of radiation into the ocean and onto Pacific shores; the cumulative effect of modern chemicals and agricultural waste tainting the water and disrupting reproduction.

A startling new report says in no uncertain terms that the Pacific Ocean off the California coast is turning into a desert. Once full of life, it is now becoming barren, and marine mammals, seabirds and fish are starving as a result. According to Ocean Health:

The waters of the Pacific off the coast of California are a clear, shimmering blue today, so transparent it’s possible to see the sandy bottom below […] clear water is a sign that the ocean is turning into a desert, and the chain reaction that causes that bitter clarity is perhaps most obvious on the beaches of the Golden State, where thousands of emaciated sea lion pups are stranded.

[…]

Over the last three years, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has noticed a growing number of strandings on the beaches of California and up into the Pacific north-west. In 2013, 1,171 sea lions were stranded, and 2,700 have already stranded in 2015 – a sign that something is seriously wrong, as pups don’t normally wind up on their own until later in the spring and early summer.

“[An unusually large number of sea lions stranding in 2013 was a red flag] there was a food availability problem even before the ocean got warm.”Johnson: This has never happened before… It’s incredible. It’s so unusual, and there’s no really good explanation for it. There’s also a good chance that the problem will continue, said a NOAA research scientist in climatology, Nate Mantua.

Experts blame a lack of food due to unusually warm ocean waters. NOAA declared an El Nino, the weather pattern that warms the Pacific, a few weeks ago. The water is three and a half to six degrees warmer than the average, according to Mantua, because of a lack of north wind on the West Coast. Ordinarily, the north wind drives the current, creating upwelling that brings forth the nutrients that feed the sardines, anchovies and other fish that adult sea lions feed on.

Fox News added:

The warm water is likely pushing prime sea lion foods — market squid, sardines and anchovies — further north, forcing the mothers to abandon their pups for up to eight days at a time in search of sustenance.

The pups, scientists believe, are weaning themselves early out of desperation and setting out on their own despite being underweight and ill-prepared to hunt.

[…]

“These animals are coming in really desperate. They’re at the end of life. They’re in a crisis … and not all animals are going to make it,” said Keith A. Matassa, executive director at the Pacific Marine Mammal Center, which is currently rehabilitating 115 sea lion pups.

The same is true of seabirds on the Washington State coast:

In the storm debris littering a Washington State shoreline, Bonnie Wood saw something grisly: the mangled bodies of dozens of scraggly young seabirds. Walking half a mile along the beach at Twin Harbors State Park on Wednesday, Wood spotted more than 130 carcasses of juvenile Cassin’s auklets—the blue-footed, palm-size victims of what is becoming one of the largest mass die-offs of seabirds ever recorded. “It was so distressing,” recalled Wood, a volunteer who patrols Pacific Northwest beaches looking for dead or stranded birds. “They were just everywhere. Every ten yards we’d find another ten bodies of these sweet little things.”

“This is just massive, massive, unprecedented,” said Julia Parrish, a University of Washington seabird ecologist who oversees the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST), a program that has tracked West Coast seabird deaths for almost 20 years. “We may be talking about 50,000 to 100,000 deaths. So far.” (source)

100,000 doesn’t necessarily sound large, statistically speaking, but precedent in the history of recorded animal deaths suggests that it is, in fact massive. Even National Geographic is noting that these die off events are “unprecedented.” Warmer water is indicated for much of the starvation faced by many of the dead animals.

Last year, scientists sounded the alarm over the death of millions of star fish, blamed on warmer waters and ‘mystery virus’:

Starfish are dying by the millions up and down the West Coast, leading scientists to warn of the possibility of localized extinction of some species. As the disease spreads, researchers may be zeroing in on a link between warming waters and the rising starfish body count. (source)

[…]

The epidemic, which threatens to reshape the coastal food web and change the makeup of tide pools for years to come, appears to be driven by a previously unidentified virus, a team of more than a dozen researchers from Cornell University, UC Santa Cruz, the Monterey Bay Aquarium and other institutions reported Monday. (source)

Changing temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, driven by the natural cycle of gyres over decades, shifts wildlife populations, decimating the populations of species throughout the food chain, proving how fragile the balance of life in the ocean really is.

Recently, the collapse of the sardine population has created a crisis for fisheries and marine wildlife alike on the West Coast:

Commercial fishing for sardines off of Canada’s West Coast is worth an estimated $32 million – but now they are suddenly gone. Back in October, fisherman reported that they came back empty-handed without a single fish after 12 hours of trolling and some $1000 spent on fuel.

Sandy Mazza, for the Daily Breeze, reported a similar phenomenon in central California: “[T]he fickle sardines have been so abundant for so many years – sometimes holding court as the most plentiful fish in coastal waters – that it was a shock when he couldn’t find one of the shiny silver-blue coastal fish all summer, even though this isn’t the first time they’ve vanished.” [emphasis added]

[…]
“Is it El Nino? Pacific Decadal Oscillation? [La] Nina? Long-term climate change? More marine mammals eating sardines? Did they all go to Mexico or farther offshore? We don’t know. We’re pretty sure the overall population has declined. We manage them pretty conservatively because we don’t want to end up with another Cannery Row so, as the population declines, we curb fishing.” said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) official Kerry Griffin. (source)

According to a report in the Daily Mail, the worst events have wiped out 90% of animal populations, falling short of extinction, but creating a rupture in food chains and ecosystems.

And environmental factors are known to be a factor, with pollution from chemicals dumped by factories clearly tied to at least 20% of the mass die off events of wildlife populations that have been investigated, and many die offs implicated by a number of overlapping factors. TheDaily Mail reported:

Mass die-offs of certain animals has increased in frequency every year for seven decades, according to a new study.

Researchers found that such events, which can kill more than 90 per cent of a population, are increasing among birds, fish and marine invertebrates.

The reasons for the die-offs are diverse, with effects tied to humans such as environmental contamination accounting for about a fifth of them.

Farm runoff from Big Agra introduces high levels of fertilizers and pesticides which createoxygen-starved dead zones which fish and aquatic live is killed off. Also preset in agriculture waste are gender bending chemicals like those found in Atrazine, used in staple crop production, and antibiotics and hormones, used in livestock production, which creates hazardous runoff for fish populations:

Livestock excrete natural hormones – estrogens and testosterones – as well as synthetic ones used to bolster their growth. Depending on concentrations and fish sensitivity, these hormones and hormone mimics might impair wild fish reproduction or skew their sex ratios. (source)

Pharmaceutical contaminants are also to blame for changing the sex of fish and disrupting population numbers, while a study found that the chemicals in Prozac changed the behavior of marine life, and made shrimp many times more likely to “commit suicide” and swim towards the light where they became easy prey.

Fish farms also introduce a large volume of antibiotic and chemical pollution into oceans and waterways:

The close quarters where farmed fish are raised (combined with their unnatural diets) means disease occurs often and can spread quickly. On fish farms, which are basically “CAFOs of the sea,” antibiotics are dispersed into the water, and sometimes injected directly into the fish.

Unfortunately, farmed fish are often raised in pens in the ocean, which means not only that pathogens can spread like wildfire and contaminate any wild fish swimming past – but the antibiotics can also spread to wild fish (via aquaculture and wastewater runoff) – and that’s exactly what recent research revealed. (source)

Mass die offs of fish on the Brazilian coastline have linked to pollution from the dumping of raw sewage and garbage.

In the last few days it was reported that a massive die off of bottlenose dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico was connected by researchers to BP’s Deep Water Horizon oil spill. Evidence was found in a third of the cases of lesions in the adrenal gland, an otherwise rare condition linked with petroleum exposure. More than a fifth of the dolphins also suffered bacterial pneumonia, causing deadly lung infection that is likewise rarely seen in dolphin populations.

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BRICS: A Future in Limbo?

November 11th, 2018 by Peter Koenig

The BRICS are not what they intended to be, never really were.

Today it’s clear that fascist-turned Brazil is out – so we are at RICS. There is not much to argue about. The world’s fifth largest economy, Brazil, has failed and betrayed the concept of the BRICS and the world at large. Whether you consider South Africa as a valid member of the BRICS is also questionable. Much of SA’s social injustice has actually become worse since the end of apartheid. Ending apartheid was a mere political and legal exercise.

Distribution of power and money in SA have not really changed. To the contrary – it worsened. 80% of all land is still in the hands of white farmers. This is what President Cyril Ramaphosa wants to change drastically, by confiscating white farmers’ land without compensation and re-distribute it to black farmers, who have no formation of how to run these farms. This is not only utterly unjust and will create internal conflicts, the last thing SA needs, but it is also very inefficient, as farming and agricultural production will decline most likely drastically and SA, a potential exporter of farm and agricultural goods, will become a net importer, a serious hit on South African’s economy.

The principle of redistributing land to the black African society is a solid one. But not by force and not by confiscation without compensation, nor without an elaborate training program for African farmers – to lead to a peaceful transfer – all of which does takes time and cannot happen over-night. There are too many example of hush-hush land reforms that failed miserably and actually plunged entire society in poverty and famine. Land reforms – YES, but planned and well organized and strategized. Land reforms are long-term propositions. To be successful, they don’t happen over night.

On a recent trip to SA, I spoke to several people, including especially women from townships, i.e. SOWETO, who said they were better off under apartheid.

It is not a scientific statistic, but the fact that some black people dare say that the system that atrociously discriminated, exploited and raped them, was better than today’s non-apartheid system, is significant. It is a sad testimony to a generation of SA’s democracy.

So, now we could say, the BRICS are down to RIC – Russia, India and China.

Does India deserve to belong to a club that has as a goal of equality and solidarity?

The cast system, about which very little is written, is a horrible, horrible mechanism of discrimination. And there are no efforts under way to abolish it. To the contrary. The Indian elite likes it – it provides cheap labor. It’s actually legalized slavehood, totally submissive to the upper class, the higher casts. It’s cultural, they say. Is such injustice excusable under principles of tradition? Hardly. Especially as this “cultural tradition” serves only a small upper class, is devoid of any compassion and has absolutely no ambition to transform itself to an equal and level playing field. That alone is unworthy of the BRICS’ principles.

The other point, which I believe is important in considering India’s “BRICS viability”, is the fact that PM Narendra Modi is like a straw in the wind, constantly wavering between pleasing the US and leaning toward the east, Russia and China. This is certainly not an indication of stability, for a country to become a member in good standing and solidarity with a group of eastern countries, that intend to follow some rather noble human and social justice standards, like Russia and China. But that’s precisely what happened. India has weaseled her way into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

However, on 6 September 2018, The US and India signed a breakthrough security agreement, as reported by the Financial Times. According to the FT, this new compact was “cementing relations between the pair [US and India] and unlocking sales of high-tech American weaponry worth billions of dollars to the world’s top arms importer (meaning India [not considering Saudi Arabia]). Washington sees India as the linchpin of its new Indo-Pacific strategy to counter the rise of China, but has spent months pushing for closer co-operation. It wants Delhi to participate in more joint military exercises, boost its role in regional maritime security and increase arms purchases.”

“We fully support India’s rise,” said Mike Pompeo, US Secretary of State, during a visit to New Delhi. The FT continues, “later on Thursday the two countries signed Comcasa, a security agreement tailored to India that Jim Mattis, US Defense Secretary, said meant the pair could now share “sensitive technology”. All of this does not bode well for the BRICS, nor for the SCO, of which India has recently become a member.

The BRICS also have a so-called development bank, the “New Development Bank” (NDB) which so far has been and remains largely non-functional, mostly because of internal conflicts.

Then, there is the Crime of the Century committed by Indian PM Norendra Modi, who on 8 November 2016 decided to follow USAID’s advice and demonetize India’s mostly rural society – a society of almost sixty percent without access to banks, thereby committing “Financial Genocide”, in the name of Washington. Modi brutally declared all 500 (US$ 7) and 1,000 rupee-notes – about 85% of all money in circulation – invalid, unless exchanged or deposited in a bank or post office account until 31 December 2016. After this date, all unexchanged ‘old’ money is invalid. More than 98% of all monetary transactions in India take place in cash.

Thousands of Indians, mostly in rural areas, died of famine or suicide. Nobody knows the exact figures. Many rural Indians could not bear the moral burden of being unable to sustain their families, not having access to a bank and to exchange their old money for new money. This is a US-driven effort towards global demonetization. India – with 1.3 billion people – is a test case for poor countries, while demonetization, or rather digitization of money in rich western countries is already moving ahead in giant steps, i.e. in Scandinavian countries and Switzerland. See this. Modi clearly betrayed his people, following orders of the US, transmitted through the infamous USAID.

Under close scrutiny, the BRICS don’t stand the test they subscribed to in their first summit in 2009, in Yekaterinburg, Russia on June 16, 2009, and under which they were legalized and officiated in December 2010, when South Africa joined the club of four, to make it the BRICS.

At this point we are down to Russia and China – R and C are left as viable partners of the BRICS. They are also the founders of the SCO.

Washington was once again successful in dividing – according to the historic, age-old axiom, ‘divide and conquer’. The concept of the BRICS was a real threat to the western Anglo-Saxon led world order.  No more. If anything, the concept and structure of the BRICS has to be rethought, re-invented and re-drafted. Will it happen?

How much longer and how many more times the BRICS can meet in lush summits and publicly declare their solid alliance as a new horizon against western world hegemony, when in reality, they are utterly divided and full of internal ideological strife – adhering to none of the noble goals of solidarity they once committed to?

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This article was originally published on New Eastern Outlook.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; RT; Sputnik; PressTV; The 21st Century; TeleSUR; The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, the New Eastern Outlook (NEO); and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.  He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

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Iran Needs to Address the Broader Issue of Its National Economy: A Macroeconomic Strategy in Response to US Sanctions

November 11th, 2018 by Prof. Ismael Hossein-Zadeh

Faced with the relentless U.S. economic war, Iran needs a to address the broader issue of its national economy

To say that the brutal economic sanctions on Iran, which are effectively tantamount to an economic war, require a “war economy” on the part of Iran is not to suggest that Iran should respond militarily—not at all. It is rather to suggest that, to minimize or mitigate the destructive effects of economic sanctions, Iran needs a state-guided macroeconomic plan that could guide, control, manage, or monitor its vital economic sectors and industries such as international trade, money and banking, natural resources, infrastructural industries, and the like.

In this sense, the plan of a “war economy” should not, indeed, be very difficult for Iran to implement since it has a relatively successful experience of carrying out such an economic strategy: during the 8-year war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Iran embarked on an extensive state-guided economic management that effectively provided for both its military and civilian needs. Because of the  atmosphere of the time, and because of the corresponding spirit of generosity, selflessness, social cohesion, and national unity the country was able to effectively withstand both the military and economic wars launched against its territory and its people. 

Despite the extremely costly war, both in terms of blood and treasure, and despite the fact that Iran’s total output, or national income, at the time was only a fraction of what it is today, its people did not experience nearly as much economic hardship as they do today. Why? Mainly because its national resources were at the time distributed relatively equitably—unlike today where those resources are monopolized and plundered by a clique of financial oligarchs and economic mafias. 

To embark on a “war-economy route”, Iran needs, first and foremost, to revive the real (value-producing) sector of its economy, that is, manufacturing and agricultural activities. These real-value and employment generating activities, which are the physical or material sources of the wealth of a nation, as the classical economist Adam Smith put it, have become dormant under President Rouhani—largely by a persistent and out-of-control barrage of imports, both legal and illegal. 

To begin with, the government must embark on a large scale and affordable construction of housing facilities. In addition to reducing the cost of housing for low-income citizens, this would also revive many industries that tend to feed as well as feed-off this industry. It is estimated that there are nearly 200 industries that could be revived from an effective revival of the housing industry. Indeed, despite the largely unfair criticism by the Rouhani administration, the government-sponsored housing project that was carried out by the previous (Ahmadinejad) administration not only succeeded in keeping the cost of housing under control and, thereby, allowing 4.4 million low-income families to become homeowners, it also significantly contributed to economic growth and high employment rates of the time. 

To revive its semi-paralyzed economy, Iran must also embark on a policy of import-substitution, combined with a policy of export-promotion. Import-substitution simply means curtailing imports that can be substituted by domestic products. Only those products that are essential for basic consumer and manufacturing needs (but cannot be produced domestically) should be imported. Such critically-needed foreign products must be imported directly by the government and distributed through the chain networks of consumer cooperatives or municipal retail stores at subsidized, affordable prices. Due to utter paralysis of market mechanism in Iran, the government must simultaneously contain the skyrocketing inflation by administrative means, that is, by strict laws against hoarding, price gouging, and speculative transactions. To make the administrative price control effective, the government must also restore the coupon system of pricing and distribution it used during Iran-Iraq war. 

An export promotion policy means supporting exporters of domestic products, promoting their products abroad, standardizing and improving the quality of such products, thereby broadening their sales markets beyond national borders. In this connection, two important policy issues should be kept in mind. First, only those products that are above and beyond domestic consumer and manufacturing needs should be exported. Second, the export earnings of foreign exchange must be returned to the national reserves of foreign currencies. 

Liberal-Neoliberal proponents of free trade would sneer at these proposals as schemes of a planned or command economy. These proponents forget or ignore the fact that proposals of these sort are no more than development strategies of a guided capitalist economy; that almost all the presently advanced capitalist economies, including the U.K. and the U.S., resorted to such protectionist strategies in the early stages of their economic development; and that even today the core capitalist country of the world, the United States, is protecting its non-competitive industries such as steel, aluminum, automobiles, and sugar against imports from China, Europe, Canada, South Korea, and Japan. It is altogether ironic that while the most advanced capitalist country in the world is resorting to protectionism and the erection of tariff walls to support its non-competitive industries, President Rouhani and his economic advisors are singing the song of free trade. These misguided Iranian champions of free trade tend to be more catholic than the pope! 

Crucial to a successful implementation of a “war economy” is control of the country’s money and banking system, that is, of the financial sector. A radically-different management of the nation’s money and banking requires that the parasitic formation and growth of the shadow banks (or moasesat-e eatebari in Farsi), which are essentially based on Ponzi or Pyramid schemes, be terminated. It further requires that the commercial banks be prohibited by law from engaging in non-bank, speculative activities. This is, indeed, what the United States did in response to the Great Depression of the 1929-1933. That depression was blamed largely on commercial banks’ parasitic investment and speculative loan pushing, which created an unviable stock market bubble that eventually collapsed on October 29, 1929. To prevent the recurrence of such a destructive act of the banking system, the U.S. Congress instituted the landmark Glass-Steagall Act that prohibited commercial banks from engaging in non-bank activities, or speculative investments. Specifically, it prohibited them from participating in the investment banking business. 

More importantly, the power of money creation and, therefore, control of money supply must be taken away from commercial banks and delegated exclusively to the publicly-owned Central Bank of Iran (CBI). Following the Anglo-Saxon model of fractional reserve banking, the power of money creation in Iran rests not so much with the government, or Central Bank, as it does with commercial banks. When commercial banks make loans or extend credit to their clients, in effect, they create money, which is called debt money, or credit money, or bank money, as opposed to sovereign or real money created by the government. Although in essence bank money is not real money, in practice it functions just as real money. 

In theory, the ability of the banking system to create credit or debt-money is determined or limited by (a) the amount of savings or deposits they receive from households and businesses, and (b) the central bank regulation of these deposits—a regulatory mechanism which is called fractional reserve banking. In practice, however, the ability of the banking system to create credit, or bank money, is not much constrained by the amount of deposits they receive or by central bank regulation of money supply. 

The ability of the commercial banking system to create money explains why the all-important power of controlling or manipulating money supply, of financing and, therefore, of influencing national economies in most capitalist countries has increasingly come to rest with commercial banks—often mediated by central banks and treasury departments that are frequently headed by the proxies of the financial oligarchy. 

What has made the ability of the commercial banking system to create money—of course, debt or credit money—especially more dangerous in recent years is that, as the financial sector has systematically freed itself from traditional rules and regulations, most of the debt money they create is increasingly geared towards speculation, not production. This explains the exponential growth of parasitic finance in most capitalist countries. Parasitic growth of the financial sector in Iran represents an extreme case of this ominous development—a developments that has made the country’s economic landscape akin to a nationwide casino (for more information on this point please see here). 

It follows that an effective cleansing of Iran’s economy of the poisonous effects of parasitic finance requires (a) ending the commercial banks’ ability to engage in speculative or non-banking activities, and (b) ending their ability to create money. Aside from the destabilizing and destructive economic effects, private banks’ ability to create money is also problematic on legal and/or constitutional grounds. As a critically important economic decision or policy of any nation, money creation is logically a sovereign prerogative, that is, a national right; it belongs to the public, not private, domain. The right of creating money ought to exclusively be granted to the publicly-owned central bank as the monetary authority of the state. This would replace sovereign money system for the currently corrupt bank- or debt-money system based on fractional reserve banking. 

In brief, Iran needs a government that could guide, manage, monitor or control its international trade, its banking and financial markets, its foreign exchange market, its money supply, and its natural endowments, or gifts from nature, such as forests, water resource, oil, natural gas and other underground resource. It also needs to put a leash on the corrupt privatization of national resources and industries—a fraudulent practice that is used as a pretext for the looting of public domain properties, or national wealth. It further needs to embark on a state-guided extensive development or industrialization plan, along with a relatively generous social safety net program that would reduce inequality and economic hardship for the overwhelming majority of its people. 

The funding sources of such an ambitious developmental and social safety-net projects are readily available—provided that there is political will and managerial ability. One such a source of financing could be provided by a reallocation of a larger portion of the oil revenue to such projects. Since becoming president, Mr. Rouhani has reduced the share of the reconstruction and development budget of the total national budget from over 20 percent to less than 10 percent. By the same token he has drastically increased the share of the largely ceremonial and wasteful current expenditures. A re-allocation, or re-setting, of these two categories of the national budget to pre-Rouhani days could free a significant amount of funding for social and developmental expenditures. 

A second, and more important, source of financing could come from government funding through the publicly-owned Central Bank of Iran (CBI). Instead of borrowing from abroad or from domestic private banks at interest, CBI could print money (as needed) and directly spend it into the economy through social and developmental projects without going into debt and paying interest. Champions of neoclassical-neoliberal school of economic thought would scream at this suggestion, which is called deficit spending for productive investment, that it would be inflationary. But it does not have to be so. Whether it would be inflationary or not depends on the management of the funds thus created. If they are used for productive investment, they could lead to a rise of production, employment, economic development and social progress—not inflation. Indeed, all the core capitalist countries of the world, especially Germany, rebuilt their devastated economies by the Great Depression and World War II largely by virtue of deficit financing. 

Strategies of a “resistance” or war economy along the lines suggested here are rather well-known both in theory and practice. As noted earlier, most of the advanced capitalist countries of today successfully utilized such protectionist strategies of industrialization in the early stages of their development. They switched from policies of economic protection and strategic trade to policies of free trade only after they became internationally competitive under protectionist strategies of trade and development. Also as noted earlier, Iran too resorted to similar strategies of economic protection and resistance during the 8-year war with Iraq, which enabled it to successfully provide for both its civilian and military needs. Even today Ayatollah Khamenei and a number of economists such as Ebrahim Razaghi, Ahmad Tavakoli and their co-thinkers have been calling for the implementation of a protectionist developmental strategy, which they call “resistance” economics. 

The main economic problem facing Iran today is, therefore, not a lack of theoretical knowledge or practical experience; it is rather an absence of political will and managerial ability of implementing such a strategy that is crippling Iran’s economy. As I have shown in a number of previous essays (please see here, here and here), President Rouhani and his economic advisors are too deeply wedded and/or committed to the doctrine of liberal-neoliberal economics to carry out a war or resistance economic policy. Implementation of such a policy, which is essential to the revival of Iran’s paralyzed economy, requires a different administration: an inward-looking administration that would rely on domestic resources, talents and capabilities; not an outward-looking administration that pins its hopes for economic development on Western capital, expertise and markets. Obviously, this implies the need for an altogether new, revolutionary government. 

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Ismael Hossein-zadeh is Professor Emeritus of Economics (Drake University). He is the author of Beyond Mainstream Explanations of the Financial Crisis (Routledge 2014), The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (Palgrave–Macmillan 2007), and the Soviet Non-capitalist Development: The Case of Nasser’s Egypt (Praeger Publishers 1989). He is also a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion.

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BRICS and the Future of Multilateralism

November 11th, 2018 by Beenish Sultan

Ms. Beenish Sultan, a Ph.D. student at Pakistan’s National Defence University, conducted the following interview with Andrew Korybko as part of her research on the topic of BRICS and the post-Cold War order:

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Andrew Korybko: What in your opinion is the future of ‘multilateralism’ and the rise of major powers like China and Russia against the US?

Beenish Sultan: I think that we’ll see complicated and sometimes ever-changing multilateral partnerships forming in the future that are more functionally effective than the big “talking clubs” of BRICS, the G20, and other groups. What I mean is that tangible goals like defeating terrorism, bringing peace to a war-torn country, or using national currencies in trade are a lot easier to pursue than ambitious but vague ones of defeating the US, for example. Larger platforms will continue to be important in gathering like-minded states and setting broad objectives, but it’ll really come down to so-called “working groups” within these organizations to actually get something done.

Great Powers like China, Russia, and Pakistan will take the lead in actually achieving results, whereas smaller- and medium-sized states such as Nepal and Uzbekistan, for example, will generally just tag along and bandwagon. That said, it would be a mistake to overlook the strategic importance that some of these smaller- and medium-sized states could play in certain contexts, since they might be the key to making or breaking a multilateral “working group”, meaning that the most diplomatically adroit of them could “balance” between the US and its rivals to their supreme benefit. This could, however, also be exploited by America for divide-and-rule purposes.

AK: Can BRICS as an organization be the champion of multilateralism in the post-Cold War order?

BN: Personally, I’m not too optimistic about BRICS and I look at it as being more of a “talking club” than anything significant. It’s encouraging that the five countries meet every year and issue high-sounding statements about expanding their cooperation and other vague things, and it certainly makes for popular photo-ops that play enormously well to their domestic audiences, but BRICS hasn’t really accomplished anything of note. Granted, there is a currency reserve system in place and a development bank, but these still leave a lot to be desired and aren’t the driving engines behind the emerging Multipolar World Order that are needed to take multilateralism (in this instance, in the financial sense) to the next level.

A lot of BRICS’ failings have to do with the group pretty much being a collection of three bilateral relationships between Russia-China, Russia-India, and India-China, with South Africa and Brazil apparently tacked on for symbolism’s sake to say that the organization has a presence in each continent of the “Global South”. Those two aforementioned non-Eurasian members, however, barely contribute to BRICS and are treated more as objects than subjects, though that’s understandable given the power and economic asymmetries between them and the three others. On top of that, China wants to use BRICS as a platform for spreading the Belt & Road Initiative through the BRICS+ concept, while India is opposed to this and could obstruct it.

AK: What is the future of international organizations in the post-Cold War world order, particularly when it comes to BRI?

BS: International organizations and institutions will remain important in the future, especially because of BRI, but that paradigm-changing global vision will seek to establish alternative ones that can eventually replace their Western counterparts. These newer ones will prospectively be Chinese-centric, though not necessarily Chinese-controlled (even if there might be a grey line between the two). The transition from Western-/US-controlled international bodies to Chinese-centric/-controlled ones will present the opportunity for third-party entities to sprout up and “balance” between the two, but this won’t be a 21st-century revival of the Non-Aligned Movement. Instead, there might not even be a formal umbrella organizing its members, nor any official acknowledgement from any likeminded countries that this movement even exists, since it could just take place somewhat spontaneously on a case-by-case basis when it comes to “working groups” and might not be preplanned or even capable of being organized.

This development could be a double-edged sword for the US and China because each could attempt to instrumentalize this trend to undermine the international bodies that the other controls. The resultant competition could take both kinetic and non-kinetic forms. The first-mentioned will most likely be relied upon by the US in carrying out Color Revolutions, Hybrid Wars, and coups against targeted states, while the latter would probably be utilized more by China in seeking to court other countries’ “deep states” (permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies) by giving their members’ affiliated companies preferential (and ultimately very profitable) trading arrangements within BRI that are much more sustainable than the suitcases full of cash that America is known for. This will further reinforce the notion that international organizations are objects of the New Cold War between the US and China instead of independent subjects in their own right.

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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.

Maduro in the Cross-hairs: What You are not Being Told about the Crisis in Venezuela

November 11th, 2018 by Michael Welch

“When I was there, even the protestors we talked to on the ground… they just want to be filmed by the international press so then they can show it (to) the international media to create an international scandal. So they’re quite aware of what the strategy is and they’ve been at it for some time.” – Mike Prysner, from this week’s interview.

*

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While the Trump Administration is mobilizing U.S, troops to greet the arrival to the U.S. border of 7000 Central American migrants, Colombia takes in over 4000 Venezuelan migrants daily as a result of the economic crisis plaguing the country.

The economic noose has been tightening around the population of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela over the last year. The economic sanctions directed at the Maduro government have taken their toll contributing to the plight of ordinary Venezuelans.

Those sanctions were triggered in September 2017, following a call by the Association formed between Canada and the United States to “take economic measures against Venezuela and persons responsible for the current situation in Venezuela.” [1]

The Canadian and American governments cite what they considered to be anti-democratic behaviour, including the use of a National Constituent Assembly (NCA) to subvert the will of the democratically elected National Assembly. These and other countries around the globe rejected an NCA electoral process which was boycotted by the (anti-Maduro) opposition, and that they determined to be “fraught with gerrymandering and allegations of vote rigging.”[2]

Efforts to challenge these government narratives have been frustrated. National broadcasts in Canada and the U.S. have been ratcheting up the perception of President Maduro and his ‘dictatorial’ ways as a contributor to the human rights situation now plaguing the Venezuelan citizenry. Most recently, solidarity activists in Canada have been lamenting their failure, as of this date, to bring a Venezuelan Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Carlos Ron Martinez, to Canada. The claim has been made, though not yet verified, that Ottawa is deliberately blocking the Minister’s passage to Canada.

On this week’s Global Research News Hour radio program, we make an effort to counter the conventional talking points about Venezuela, and get more detail on some of the efforts to change the Canadian government’s stance.

American-based Telesur journalist Mike Prysner has done exhaustive reporting from Venezuela throughout the National Constituency election process and witnessed much of the opposition protests directed against Maduro in the last year. He brings us his perspective in our first half hour.

In the second half hour, Toronto based organizer Barry Weisleder joins us to share his thoughts about the Trudeau government’s hostility toward the Bolivarian Republic and some of the challenges, including the above mentioned setback, faced by Canadian solidarity activists.

Finally, we hear part of a speech given to a Winnipeg audience (via skype) by Venezuelan Deputy Minister Carlos Ron Martinez about the situation in Venezuela, and how they are coping.

Los Angeles based Mike Prysner is an Iraq War veteran turned anti-war activist. He has co-produced the Empire Files with noted journalist Abby Martin. He also produces the Eyes Left podcast.

Barry Weisleder is a retired teacher and union organizer and the federal secretary of Socialist action.

Carlos Ron Martinez is the Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs for North America. He had previously served in Washington D.C. as the Chief of Venezuelan business affairs in the United States. Plans to host talks by the Minister in several Canadian cities were derailed following indefinite delays in securing a visitor’s visa.

Global Research News Hour Episode 236

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM in Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca . Excerpts of the show have begun airing on Rabble Radio and appear as podcasts at rabble.ca.

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

Community Radio Stations carrying the Global Research News Hour:

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

Boston College Radio WZBC 90.3FM NEWTONS  during the Truth and Justice Radio Programming slot -Sundays at 7am ET.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Radio Fanshawe: Fanshawe’s 106.9 The X (CIXX-FM) out of London, Ontario airs the Global Research News Hour Sundays at 6am with an encore at 4pm.

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

Notes:

  1. http://www.international.gc.ca/world-monde/international_relations-relations_internationales/sanctions/venezuela.aspx?lang=eng
  2. ibid

 

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Regime dos Psicopatas. Moro Promete ‘Modelo’ da Lava Jato no Ministério da Justiça

November 10th, 2018 by Edu Montesanti

O juiz federal Sergio Moro disse nesta terça-feira (6) que atuará no comando do Ministério da Justiça e Segurança Pública, a partir de 2019, utilizando o modelo da Operação Lava Jato para combater o crime organizado.

“A ideia é replicar no ministério as forças-tarefas adotadas na Operação Lava Jato”, disse o juiz em Curitiba, na primeira entrevista coletiva concedida desde 2014, quando assumiu operação.

Questionado sobre como atuará no assassinato longe de ser elucidado – e devidamente punido – da ex-vereadora Marielle Franco e de seu motorista, Anderson Gomes em março deste ano, o novo ministro alegou nao ignorar “o problema”, demonstrando grau de indignação sem lugar a duvidas bastante abaixo, neste crime hediondo, em relação aos outros casos, longe de hediondos, que destacaram midiaticamente o novo pop star dos tribunais de primeira instancia nacionais.

“Não desconheço o problema que envolve o assassinato da ex-vereadora Marielle Franco e do senhor Anderson Gomes”.

Com toda a certeza bastante “confortante”, “encorajadora” sobretudo aos familiares de ambos os assassinados, a “posição” do juizeco em questão, não?!

Para concluir genialmente: “Eu acho [grifo nosso] que é um crime que tem que ser solucionado”. Eureca! Ele “acha” que o crime de uma militante de esquerda, mulher, negra e pobre, deve ser solucionado. Bravo, Moro! O Verde-Amarelo vive, de verdade, novos tempos!

“By the way”, pupilo de Tio Sam que aparece em cabos secretos liberados por WikiLeaks rebolando freneticamente diante dos “lords” do bem-dizer de Washington, a ver se ficou claro: Vossa Alteza pretende utilizar no referido Ministério a “indústria das delações” da Lava Jato que, periciada na Espanha no segundo semestre do ano passado (devidamente abafada pela canalhada da grande midia de imbecilização em massa), veio a detectar “panela” de advogados no comércio indiscriminado de testemunhas?

Alias, seu Ministério podera muito bem, movido pela euforia social e midiatica anticorrupção, dedicar-se a investigar tal “indústria” com base na “panela”, que tal?

E o modelo seguira tambem a linha de relacao promiscua com a imprensa, “que comprava tudo” da Operação Lava Jato segundo palavras de vossa ex-assessora de imprensa, Christiane Machiavelli?

“As facilidades fizeram com que a imprensa ‘comprasse’ a Lava Jato quase que imediatamente. Denúncias do Ministério Público eram publicadas em reportagens quase na íntegra, assim como os inquéritos da PF e as decisões de Moro.

“Foram poucos os jornalistas que se valeram daquele mundaréu de elementos para fazer o papel que cabe à imprensa: o de usar os dados para construir investigações mais aprofundadas.”

Disse Christiane em recente entrevista ao sitio The Intercept, sobre a operacao desmoralizada em todo o mundo, duramente criticada pelos mais renomados juristas internacionais pela seletividade descarada, incriminando sem provas da maneira mais visivelmente tendenciosa.
Mais um belo cardapio, acima, para a sociedade e os meios de comunicacao extravasarem toda a sua raiva contra a corrupção. Que tal?

Tudo, uma grande farsa! “Não penso, não existo, apenas assisto – Rede Globo e Record do Bispo”, dizem-nos, pelo menos, 57 milhões de ignorantes, mentalidades pautadas por meios que elas mesmas alegam lavar cerebros. E dizia o filosofo: o pior cego, é o que não quer ver.

Edu Montesanti

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Not Saving Private Ryan: The Murderous Finale of the Great War. November 11, 1918, One Hundred Years Ago

November 10th, 2018 by Dr. Jacques R. Pauwels

[Fall 1918, after the failure of the German final offensive:] The majority of the German soldiers on the western front realized that the war was lost, they wanted to get it over and done with, and go home. And they did not hide their contempt for the political and military leaders who had unleashed the conflict and thus caused so much misery. They were not willing to lose their lives for a lost cause.

The German army began to disintegrate, discipline broke down, and the number of desertions and mass surrenders skyrocketed. Some German historians have described this situation as a Kampfstreik, an undeclared “military strike” or “refusal to fight,” a “refusal to carry on with the war.”

Canadian troops arriving in Mons, November 11, 1918 (painting by Inglis Sheldon-Williams, “The Return to Mons”, Canadian War Museum Ottawa CWM 19710261-0813, c/o Wikimedia Commons)

Between mid-July 1918 and the armistice of November 11 of that year, 340,000 Germans surrendered or ran over to the enemy. In September 1918, a Tommy witnessed how German POWs laughed and applauded each time a new contingent of prisoners was brought in. Even elite soldiers capitulated in large numbers. Of the German losses at that time, prisoners represented an unprecedented 70 per cent. The German soldiers now used all kinds of tricks to avoid going to the front, a practice that became known as Drückebergerei, “shirking.” Many men who were transferred from Eastern Europe to the western front crossed into the neutral Netherlands in order to be able to await there the end of the war as internees. No less than 750,000 German soldiers allegedly deserted at that time; and just about as many were simply reported as “absent” from their unit. The number of deserters hanging around in the capital, Berlin, was estimated by the police to be in the tens of thousands.

The epidemic of desertions, mass surrenders, and shirking mushroomed during August and September 1918, so much so that this state of affairs has been described as an “undeclared military strike.” And that is certainly how the “front swine” [German soldiers] themselves saw things. The soldiers who were leaving the front often insulted men that were marching in the opposite direction, calling them “strike breakers” and Kriegsverlängerer, “war prolongers”! The influence of the Russian Revolution in all this became obvious when, in October, the sailors stationed in the port of Kiel mutinied. They refused to obey orders — especially an absurd order for the fleet to undertake a suicidal sortie against the Royal Navy — and set up councils of soldiers and workers; in other words, Russian-style soviets. Similar councils soon emerged all over Germany.

Under these circumstances, it amounted to a miracle that the Germans managed to put up an ordered and relatively effective resistance when their enemies launched a final offensive toward the end of the summer and in the fall of 1918. They had to withdraw, and did so, but slowly and in good order. Until the bitter end, the Great War thus remained the murderous enterprise it had been from the start. During the last five weeks of the war, half a million men were still killed or wounded. Even the very last day saw heavy casualties being inflicted on both sides. Some soldiers “fell” only minutes before the armistice went into effect on November 11 at 11 a.m. On November 10, British and Canadian troops arrived on the outskirts of the Belgian town of Mons, where in August 1914 the British forces had first faced the Germans in a battle. Late at night, a message reached the local commanders. In Rethondes, a hamlet in a forest near Compiègne, where General Foch, supremo of the allied armies, had installed his headquarters, an agreement had been reached with German emissaries to lay down the arms later that same day, namely at 11 a.m. The British poet May Wedderburn Cannan has saluted this long-awaited announcement in a poem entitled “The Armistice”:

The news came through over the telephone: All the terms had been signed: the war was won And all the fighting and the agony, And all the labour of the years were done.

At Mons, however, the fighting and agony were not done yet. The men could have enjoyed a leisurely breakfast and waited until 11 before sauntering into the town. However, the Canadian commander, General Arthur Currie, gave the order to take Mons early in the morning, knowing very well that the Germans would resist and that blood would flow. “It was a proud thing,” he was to explain later, “that we were able to finish the war there where we began it, and that we, the young [Canadian] whelps of the old [British] lion, were able to take the ground lost in 1914.” But his subordinates saw things quite differently. Two Canadian historians describe their reaction:

[They] openly questioned the need to advance any further . . . None of [them] wanted any part of the Mons show. They were all grumbling to beat hell. They knew the war was coming to an end and there was going to be an armistice. ‘What the hell do we have to go any further for?’ they grumbled . . . At the end of the day the men were furious about the losses.”

These losses included George Ellison and George Price, respectively the last Tommy and the last Canadian to “fall” in the Great War; they were killed within minutes before the arms were laid down. They rest in the British-German war cemetery of Saint-Symphorien, a few kilometres outside of Mons, together with John Parr, the very first British soldier to lose his life in the Great War. Hundreds of other British, Germans, and Canadians perished in and around Mons in the early stages and in that war’s final minutes. However, the very last soldier to be killed in the Great War was an American of German origin, named Henry Gunther; he fell in the village of Chaumont-devant-Damvillers, situated to the north of Verdun, just one minute before the end.

 

 

Exhausted soldiers after a battle in World War I

(photo from the Imperial War Museums)

On the last day of the Great War, November 11, 1918, all armies combined suffered 10,944 casualties on the western front, including 2,738 men killed. This was approximately twice the daily average of killed and wounded during 1914–1918. (It was also about 10 per cent more than the total casualties on D-Day, the first day of the landings in Normandy in June 1944.)

This bloodshed could have been avoided if the French and allied commander-in-chief, Marshal Foch, had not refused to accept the German negotiators’ request to declare a ceasefire as soon as the capitulation was signed in the night, rather than to wait until 11 a.m. In Mons, the disgruntled Canadian soldiers “were exhausted and just wanted a good meal, a hot shower, and a comfortable bed. They were glad the war was over, but for many it was not a cause for celebration because of the many friends they had lost . . .” There were no celebrations other than “some jumping around and things like that,” a soldier reported; and it did not help that the commanders ordered a general inspection, causing the men to have to “stand out six hours in the cold rain.”

With respect to the final minutes of the Great War, a quaint anecdote deserves to be mentioned, even though it may be apocryphal. Shortly before 11 a.m., somewhere on the western front, a German started to fire his machine gun furiously. At precisely 11 he stopped, stood up, took off his helmet, took a bow, and walked quietly to the rear.

Distinguished historian Dr. Jacques Pauwels is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

To order Dr. Jacques Pauwels book entitled the Great Class War, 1914-1918, click front cover of book

Historian Jacques Pauwels applies a critical, revisionist lens to the First World War, offering readers a fresh interpretation that challenges mainstream thinking. As Pauwels sees it, war offered benefits to everyone, across class and national borders.

For European statesmen, a large-scale war could give their countries new colonial territories, important to growing capitalist economies. For the wealthy and ruling classes, war served as an antidote to social revolution, encouraging workers to exchange socialism’s focus on international solidarity for nationalism’s intense militarism. And for the working classes themselves, war provided an outlet for years of systemic militarization — quite simply, they were hardwired to pick up arms, and to do so eagerly.

To Pauwels, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914 — traditionally upheld by historians as the spark that lit the powder keg — was not a sufficient cause for war but rather a pretext seized upon by European powers to unleash the kind of war they had desired. But what Europe’s elite did not expect or predict was some of the war’s outcomes: social revolution and Communist Party rule in Russia, plus a wave of political and social democratic reforms in Western Europe that would have far-reaching consequences.

Reflecting his broad research in the voluminous recent literature about the First World War by historians in the leading countries involved in the conflict, Jacques Pauwels has produced an account that challenges readers to rethink their understanding of this key event of twentieth century world history.

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Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi: The Most Important Torture Story Never Told, Used as a Pretext to Invade Iraq

November 10th, 2018 by Clive Stafford Smith

Sad to say, the US has taught us various things about abusing detainees in Abu Ghraib and beyond. We learned another sorry lesson in Ian Cobain and Clara Usiskin’s expose (November 6, 2018) in which they filled in some important details to the biggest torture story never fully told: that of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi.

Unfortunately, the mistakes caused by torture come in various degrees. It is one matter if the CIA abuses one of my clients into confessing falsely to a crime. True, the man suffers twice: first in the mistreatment, and then when he is locked in a legal black hole like Guantanamo Bay, as with the 40 men who continue to languish in that notorious Cuban prison.

Screenshot: Middle East Eye, November 6, 2018

Yet there is an even darker side to such secrets, and this is where Middle East Eye’s investigation is so important: some “intelligence” adduced by abuse is used to change government policy, even to start a war.

Some years ago, Shaker Aamer, one of my Guantanamo clients, told me what he knew about Libi. Shaker was being held in a cage at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan when he was taken into the same room as Libi. There, he said, he saw someone he thought was a British agent, present during the torment.

Soon after, early in 2002, he saw a coffin being carried out. It transpired that Libi was in it – very much alive, but on his way to Egypt, where the US had President Hosni Mubarak’s henchmen do their dirty work, taking an electric cattle prod to their victim.

Unsurprisingly, Libi said what the US wanted to hear – that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda. Later, I was able to report evidence declassified from Guantanamo, where a detainee being tortured there also said that Saddam’s people were developing weapons of mass destruction.

When Libi first said all this, some CIA operatives expressed doubt, but that did not stop US President George W. Bush relying on it in a speech in October 2002, or Secretary of State Colin Powell delivering his infamous presentation to the UN Security Council in February 2003.

Thus, false intelligence extracted by torture not only kept Libi in prison, but it also weighed heavily in a decision to invade Iraq later that year.

We do know the disaster that followed, but what happened to the torture victim? In the first five years after 9/11 I had a project where I tried to follow what was happening to some of the better known people who had been captured in the so-called “War on Terror”.

Secret US prisons

Although 760 prisoners appeared in Guantanamo Bay, none of the big names surfaced for a long time. We heard dark rumours that they were in secretive US prisons, scattered from Morocco to Poland.

Then, in September 2006, a number of the more notorious “High Value Detainees” appeared in Cuba – including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the supposed mastermind of the attack on the World Trade Center. Notably missing from the new arrivals was Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi.

We later learned what had happened: he had been rendered back to Libya.  As early as March 2004, British Prime Minister Tony Blair had been shaking hands with Muammar Gaddafi in the desert.

Libi was rendered there to face further mistreatment. By a stroke of good fortune, we found a way to get messages to and from him, but no sooner was this door to his story ajar than – according to Gaddafi – Libi “committed suicide”.

Only the most credulous observer believes that, but it was true that the poor man had been put in a coffin and thence into a real grave this time. He posed a problem: if he had ever been reunited with the rule of law, he would have been just too embarrassing to powerful people.

We would have learned that the US was wrong on the most basic facts – far from running an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, he did not even support Osama Bin Laden’s worldwide terror campaign, as his goal was to liberate his own country.

But most importantly, his torture had not just led (as in other cases) to a bogus trial in a kangaroo court in Guantanamo Bay, but to a calamitous war costing hundreds of thousands of lives, tipping the Middle East further into chaos. He had to disappear and Gaddafi was willing to make that happen.

It is a truism that we cannot learn the lessons of history unless we know what actually happened. When it comes to government misconduct, sunlight is the greatest disinfectant, yet there are powerful forces that would like to keep their dirty secrets well hidden – from Blair to Bush, and beyond.

Indeed, while the British have sometimes tut-tutted, and suggested that the semi-civilised Americans went a bit off-piste with their torture and rendition, the latest revelations about Libi’s treatment add another nail in the coffin of that particular lie: the British knew precisely what was going on, and even sought to “benefit” from it by sending questions into Libi’s cell of suffering.

In the end, only with the long-promised full and transparent judicial inquiry will the truth be exposed. Blair, by way of contrast, has said that freedom of information was the worst lapse in judgement of his tenure, because he would like officials to make decisions in secret.

Perhaps, when we have full disclosure, even he will see that signing up to torture, and using “intelligence” obtained through torture to start a calamitous war, was a rather bigger mistake.

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Clive Stafford Smith is an international human rights lawyer. He has represented over 300 people facing the death penalty in the USA, and secured the release of 69 prisoners from Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

Featured image: Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi was flown from Afghanistan to Egypt in a sealed coffin (Source: Middle East Eye)

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Scolding the Art World for Showcasing ‘Conspiracy Theories,’ In Defense of the Official 9/11 Narrative

November 10th, 2018 by Ted Walter

Last week, I came across something I didn’t think I would ever see. But in hindsight, it shouldn’t have surprised me: one of the country’s leading left publications, The Nation, rebuking New York art museums and galleries for showcasing critical perspectives on official narratives of major events — or what we’ve come to know as “conspiracy theories” ever since the media’s embrace of the CIA campaign in the 1960s to discredit critics of the Warren Commission.

The article, “Conspiracy Theories Are Not Entertainment,” takes aim mainly at two exhibitions that opened in September: “Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy,” on display at the Met Breuer until January 6, 2019, and Fredric Riskin’s “9/11: The Collapse of Conscience,” which ran from September 11 to October 13 at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in Soho.

Zachary Small, a young “arts journalist” and “theatremaker,” purports to be writing art criticism, but his overarching point is a purely political one: Art institutions should not legitimize, intentionally or unintentionally, anything considered by the mainstream to be “conspiracy theory.” Doing so, he argues, “mutes the destabilizing and degrading effects of conspiracy on democracy.”

Small is not entirely opposed to the idea of “Everything Is Connected.” His complaint, rather, is against the show’s combining of pieces that “take an investigative approach,” documenting things like “the very real existence of government-sanctioned torture and money laundering,” with works of “artistic interpretation” that “revel in the passion of discontent” or that “glorify the notion that the September 11 attacks were an inside job.” (The latter are the paintings of Sue Williams, one of which shows the Twin Towers with the word “nano-thermite,” somewhat smudged out, hovering almost playfully above them.) Small insists that this mix “helps mollify the viewer toward conspiracy.”

But who decides what is “very real” versus “conspiracy” toward which the viewer must not be mollified? Perhaps that line is not so sharply defined for curators Douglas Eklund and Ian Alteveer, who apparently want to nudge viewers to be more skeptical of official narratives. In the final moment of the show’s video preview, Eklund affirms: “I would like to bring back the idea of art as a way of jolting people to get rid of their preconceived notions and to hopefully question more.”

Instead of probing his own preconceived notions about the topics explored in the art, Small berates Eklund and Alteveer for believing “there is value in scavenging through the most contested chapters of American history to find plausible alternatives to today’s hard truths.” In Small’s view of the world, it seems, everything he believes is “hard truth.” Everything he doesn’t believe is “conspiracy theory.”

The blinding effect and harsh consequences of Small’s immovable boundary between truth and falsehood are on full display in the second part of his piece for The Nation, which turns into a diatribe against Fredric Riskin and his installation “9/11: The Collapse of Conscience.” The primary target of Small’s attack is Riskin’s contention that the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers and Building 7 collapsed not because of the airplane crashes, but from controlled demolition.

Partway into his assault, Small lays bare his extreme lack of knowledge about the science of the World Trade Center’s destruction when he alleges that Riskin “baldly ignores the available evidence, produced by MIT’s Civil Engineering Department less than a month after the attack.” Small goes on to call the omission of this evidence “purposefully irresponsible.”

In fact, the article by MIT professor Thomas Eagar and his research assistant, Christopher Musso, was positing a theory of the Twin Towers’ collapse that was in vogue in the first year after 9/11 but that official investigators would rule out by 2004. Eagar was hypothesizing that the “weak points . . . were the angle clips that held the floor joists between the columns on the perimeter wall and the core structure.” “As the joists . . . gave way and the outer box columns began to bow outward,” Eagar speculated, “the floors above them also fell.”

The government’s present-day explanation, though just as devoid of evidentiary support, is diametrically contrary to Eagar’s scenario. Today, the story goes that the angle clips connecting the floors and columns did not fail. Consequently, the floor trusses, sagging from the heat of the fires, pulled the perimeter columns inward — not outward — until they buckled. The failure of one wall of columns then caused the other columns to fail. The top section of each tower then fell straight down and completely destroyed the lower 60 and 90 stories of intact structure, respectively. (Never mind that the South Tower’s top section actually tips away from the rest of the structure before spontaneously disintegrating into a midair fireworks display of pulverized concrete and steel projectiles.)

Besides providing an outdated theory and a few corrections to some common misconceptions — indeed, jet fuel fires cannot burn hot enough to melt steel and steel doesn’t need to melt in order for structural failures to occur — Eagar’s article offers little substance compared with today’s large body of literature about the World Trade Center’s destruction. If Small had done any meaningful research on the subject, he surely would not have presented Eagar’s article as the totality of “available evidence.” Nor would he have implied that all of the available evidence, or even a sufficient amount of evidence to draw any conclusions, could be produced less than a month after the event. This notion flies in the face of forensic investigation principles.

Nevertheless, Small is unrestrained in his criticism of Riskin, accusing him of “pseudo-scientific observations” that devolve into “vengeful incoherence.” On the evidence of his scant research, Small is probably unaware (or he chooses to omit) that each of the statements included in Riskin’s three panels on the World Trade Center’s destruction — while delivered in Riskin’s own idiosyncratic, poetic style — echoes the arguments made by thousands of architects, engineers, and scientists.

“Building 7 . . . goes limp in a free-fall descent with pyroclastic flows of dust. Free-fall is impossible for a naturally collapsing building. It becomes the only steel structured skyscraper in the world to ever collapse due to fire.” Support for Riskin’s claims, most of which are undisputed factual observations, can be found in 9/11: Explosive Evidence — Experts Speak Out, World Trade Center 7, Part 5, and in several peer-reviewed papers, including “The collapse of WTC 7: A re-examination of the ‘simple analysis’ approach” in the Challenge Journal of Structural Mechanics. (Fredric Riskin, 9/11 The Collapse of Conscience, 20″ X 27”, Panel 24 of 43, Printed on kozo-backed Gampi using pigment inks. Courtesy the artist and Ronald Feldman Gallery, NY.)

“A structure collapsing upon itself, floor by floor, is not the path of least resistance. How is it the towers didn’t simply snap and fall like a tree struck by lightening? Instead, they pulverized.” Support for Riskin’s claims can be found in 9/11: Explosive Evidence — Experts Speak Out, World Trade Center Twin Towers, Part 3 and Part 5, and in several peer-reviewed papers, including “Some Misunderstandings Related to WTC Collapse Analysis” in the International Journal of Protective Structures. (Fredric Riskin, 9/11 The Collapse of Conscience, 20″ X 27”, Panel 23 of 43, Printed on kozo-backed Gampi using pigment inks. Courtesy the artist and Ronald Feldman Gallery, NY.)

“9/11 dust is different. It contains nano-engineered explosives. Sometimes the smallest possible element tips the scales into reveal.” Support for Riskin’s claims can be found in 9/11: Explosive Evidence — Experts Speak Out, Ground Zero, Part 3, and in several peer-reviewed papers, including “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe” in The Open Chemical Physics Journal. (Fredric Riskin, 9/11 The Collapse of Conscience, 20″ X 27”, Panel 16 of 43, Printed on kozo-backed Gampi using pigment inks. Courtesy the artist and Ronald Feldman Gallery, NY.)

When Small is not ineptly attempting to impugn the scientific validity of Riskin’s exposition, he is leveling gratuitous insults at so-called “conspiracy theorists,” a pejorative meant to degrade and dehumanize its target. As if artwork about 9/11 should not be shown on 9/11, Small blasts the Feldman Gallery for launching its show on the September 11th anniversary, likening the day to “Christmas for conspiracy theorists.” I would like to know what is Christmas-like about a father or a brother calling out for justice on the anniversary of their loved one’s murder.

Sadly for the state of our understanding of what actually took place on 9/11 — a day that almost any Nation reader will agree was used to launch a series of unjustified and disastrous wars that continue to this day — Small is not The Nation’s first writer to spew such vitriol at those who question the official narrative of that seminal event. In a 2006 diatribe, “The Conspiracy Nuts,” the late Alexander Cockburn made several remarkable statements wholly negating “the available evidence.” The most notable of those was his certain declaration that “People inside who survived the collapse didn’t hear a series of explosions.”

Cockburn posed as being well-versed on the claims of the 9/11 Truth Movement. But evidently he did not read, or he chose to ignore, the paper published two weeks earlier by Graeme MacQueen, a retired professor of Religious Studies and Peace Studies at McMaster University in Canada, titled “118 Witnesses: The Firefighters’ Testimony to Explosions in the Twin Towers.”

Based on his methodical analysis of transcribed testimonies from 503 members of the New York Fire Department (FDNY), which were made public in 2005 after The New York Times sued the City of New York for their release (no, not all of the evidence could be produced in less than a month), MacQueen found that 118 out of the 503 FDNY personnel interviewed “perceived, or thought they perceived, explosions that brought down the Towers.” Still, it’s not difficult to imagine Cockburn reading these oral histories and proceeding to lecture first responders like Captain Karin DeShore on how the phenomena she witnessed were not explosions taking down the World Trade Center. DeShore recounted in her interview:

“Somewhere around the middle of the World Trade Center, there was this orange and red flash coming out. Initially it was just one flash. Then this flash just kept popping all the way around the building and that building had started to explode. The popping sound, and with each popping sound it was initially an orange and then red flash came out of the building and then it would just go all around the building on both sides as far as I could see. These popping sounds and the explosions were getting bigger, going both up and down and then all around the building.”

The irony is that Cockburn and now Small are guilty of the very thing they seem to be crusading against: people drawing conclusions about world-changing events based more on their biases than on careful evaluation of evidence — what amounts to the ultimate act of hypocrisy for journalists.

Of course, Cockburn and Small are far from the only journalists guilty of this ultimate act of hypocrisy. The New York Times published its review of “Everything Is Connected” one day after The Nation’s review was published. More measured and positive in his assessment, Timeswriter Jason Farago reserves his only stridently negative criticism for the aforementioned piece by Sue Williams. It comes as no surprise that he brandishes the same demeaning contempt:

“And sometimes the artists here edge too close to the nutcases’ side for comfort. Sue Williams has recently painted churning, color-saturated works evoking the destruction of the World Trade Center; I bridled at one canvas’s inclusion of the word ‘nanothermite,’ an explosive often mentioned by conspiracy theorists who doubt that planes felled the twin towers.”

It is telling that of all the topics covered in the exhibition, the word “nano-thermite” —  an incendiary found in large quantities in the World Trade Center dust, as documented in a 2008 peer-reviewed academic paper and corroborated by the presence of previously molten iron spheres, by “Swiss cheese” steel members, by numerous eyewitness accounts of molten metal, and by liquid metal seen pouring out of the South Tower — is what causes Farago to bridle and resort to epithets like “nutcase” and “conspiracy theorist.” I would wager that Farago has not bothered to investigate why so-called “conspiracy theorists” believe that nano-thermite was used in the World Trade Center’s destruction.

To their immense credit, curators Douglas Eklund and Ian Alteveer refrain almost entirely from using the terms “conspiracy theorist” and even “conspiracy theory” throughout their exhibit. And herein lies the fundamental source of Small’s and Farago’s disgust: Sue Williams’ pieces about 9/11 are featured in a show whose subtitle is “Art and Conspiracy,” not “Art and Conspiracy Theory.” The exhibit’s introductory placard eschews the term “conspiracy theory” in favor of praiseful commentary. The curators write that even the “fantastical works” on display “unearth uncomfortable truths” and that “the exhibition reveals, not coincidentally, conspiracies that turned out not to be theories at all, but truths.”

Zachary Small asserts that the Met Breuer and the Feldman Gallery are “whetting their audience’s appetite for distrust, disdain, and disaffection,” thus feeding “conspiracy theories” that destabilize and degrade our democracy. I assert these developments that Small is concerned about are fed not by the actions of the Met Breuer and the Feldman Gallery, but by the cataclysmic political crimes of the past half century and the refusal of news outlets like The Nation to help expose them.

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This article was originally published on ae911truth.org.

Ted Walter is the director of strategy and development for Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth (AE911Truth). He is the author of AE911Truth’s 2015 publication Beyond Misinformation: What Science Says About the Destruction of World Trade Center Buildings 1, 2, and 7 and its 2016 publication World Trade Center Physics: Why Constant Acceleration Disproves Progressive Collapse and co-author of AE911Truth’s 2017 preliminary assessment of the Plasco Building collapse in Tehran. Ted moved to New York City two weeks before 9/11 and has lived there for most of the past 17 years. He holds a Master of Public Policy degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

Featured image: Fredric Riskin, 9/11 The Collapse of Conscience, Installation view. Courtesy the artist and Ronald Feldman Gallery, NY.

White Helmets Serve US Military Agenda in Syria: Operate Missile Detection in Idlib, Protect Al Qaeda Safe Haven

November 10th, 2018 by Mark Taliano

White Helmets terrorist factions, supported directly by the US and its allies including Canada, are currently operating missile detection systems in Idlib, Syria.

The Sentry system[1] – funded in part by the Canadian government – will warn against Syrian and Russian airstrikes, but not against U.S airstrikes. 

Special US envoy Brett McGurk recently admitted that,

“Idlib province is the largest al-Qaeda safe-haven since 9/11, tied to directly to Ayman al Zawahiri, this is a huge problem.” [2]

So clearly, the White Helmets- operated Sentry system will be protecting the West’s al Qaeda proxies.

When the West annihilated Raqqa, Syria, and countless civilians, in a four month siege, from June 6 – October 17, 2017, it offered inadequate evacuation procedures for civilians to leave, but it did provide safe passage for its ISIS proxies to redeploy elsewhere, only to re-occupy the destroyed and depopulated[3] area with SDF proxies. The siege was actually an operation that involved destruction, depopulation, and reoccupation disguised as “liberation”[4]. 

In stark contrast to the West’s criminality, when Syria and its allies – all operating in accordance with international law —- liberated Aleppo, Syria, from November-December 2016, they offered reconciliation and amnesties to occupying terrorists[5], with a view to saving lives where possible, while at the same time liberating the area from all terrorist factions.

Whereas Aleppo has been reborn, Raqqa remains a wasteland. The White Helmets are serving Empire’s agenda of mass death and destruction.

Aleppo Citadel, April 2018 (Source: Mark Taliano)

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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.

Notes

1. “Missile Detection System developed by USAID May Have Helped al Qaeda.” RT. (https://www.facebook.com/SYRIAN.SYriaRealInfosAndNews/videos/499216630541545/) Accessed 9 November, 2018. 

 2. “The Truth About Idlib in the US State Department’s Own Words. ‘The Largest Al Qaeda Safe Haven Since 9/11.’ ” Zero Hedge, 2 September 2018, Global Research, 3 September 2018.( https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-truth-about-idlib-in-the-state-departments-own-words-the-largest-al-qaeda-safe-haven-since-911/5652789) Accessed 11 September, 2018.

3. Andrew Korybko, “US Backed YPG Kurds Are Ethnically Cleansing Arabs From Raqqa, and the World Is Silent.” Global Village Space, 15 June, 2017, Global Research, 19 June, 2017. “US Backed YPG Kurds Are Ethnically Cleansing Arabs From Raqqa, and the World Is Silent.” (https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-truth-about-idlib-in-the-state-departments-own-words-the-largest-al-qaeda-safe-haven-since-911/5652789) Accessed 9 November, 2018.

4. Mark Taliano, “War Crimes as Policy.” Global Research, 17 November, 2017. (https://www.globalresearch.ca/war-crimes-as-policy/5618777?fbclid=IwAR0nGN2twxcMeNuZLVSM8VXK_nxankoyfSIbYZ-IQGn1_vRGYFFs79pmDAE) Accessed 9 November, 2018.

5. “Syria: Refugees leave Aleppo through humanitarian corridor.” RT, 30 July, 2016.  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DG2CiPnyNig) Accessed 9 November, 2018.

America Must Not Live and Die by the Gun

November 10th, 2018 by Prof. Alon Ben-Meir

When I woke up yesterday morning, I was shocked yet once again to read about Wednesday’s mass killing of 12 people during “college night” at a country music bar in southern California, sending hundreds fleeing in terror. I have young children who occasionally visit these types of bars, and I can only imagine how devastating and heart wrenching it must be for any parent to lose a child to this heartless mass shooting phenomenon, which has tragically become routine.

All we hear from Trump and his stooges in Congress are hollow and insincere expressions of sorrow and condolences to the families of the victims whose lives are shattered. Like millions of citizens, I am offended by the callous way the Trump administration is dealing with this national disaster that robs the lives of more than 3,000 innocent fellow citizens every single month.

To be sure, America is at war with itself, and the National Rifle Association (NRA) is profiting from the slaughter of Americans by Americans. Our so-called lawmakers in Congress are benefitting from the political contributions the NRA generously hands out to these corrupt politicians, who couldn’t care less that we are paying with our blood.

Every time the question of gun control is raised, the defenders of the wild west culture – of living by the gun – rush to invoke the Second Amendment that supposedly grants every American the right to bear arms for self-protection. I say supposedly because when this amendment was enacted, we were living in a different time under different circumstances, and had a different responsibility to protect ourselves and our loved ones.

The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution reads: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Today, we have “a well-regulated militia” in the form of the National Guard; we also have police forces to protect our inner cities, the FBI to investigate state-wide and interstate crimes, and of course the military. The responsibility of each branch of our collective security is well-defined, and they are accountable to a specific command structure.

Now given the changing order of our personal and collective security, the part of the second amendment that reads “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”, needs also to be reinterpreted. We are not calling for a total ban on gun ownership, we are calling for stricter gun control laws on the right to possess a firearm, including of course a background check of any individual who wishes to purchase a gun.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, there were 39,000 deaths from gun-related injuries in 2016. Of this, 456 were from mass shootings—the rest were 14,000 homicide deaths and 23,000 suicides. The gun lobby asserts that these statistics have little bearing on the number of people killed deliberately by mass shootings. True, but if guns were not readily accessible, how many of these people would have successfully committed suicide by stabbing or hanging themselves, or by swallowing deadly poison? While drowning, for example, is effective 66% of the time in attempted suicides, suicide by gun is effective 82% of the time.

Since November 2016, 10 mass shootings took place resulting in 152 deaths. Mass shooting here is defined by the Congressional Research Service, where a shooter a) kills 4 or more people; b) selects victims randomly; and c) attacks in a public place. In a looser definition (4 or more people shot but not necessarily killed at the same time and location, which includes incidents related to domestic violence and gang violence), 314 people have been killed in mass shootings in 2018.

Just think, nearly one third of the mass shootings that occur in the world have taken place in the United States—a country with five percent of the world’s population has 31 percent of all public mass shootings.

There is indisputable proof that the people who died of gunshot wounds in every single developed nation is minuscule when compared to the US. Take a look at some countries with strict gun laws; their annual death by firearms speaks for itself: in the United Kingdom, with a population of 56 million, on average 50–60 are killed; in Germany with a population of 82.29 million, an average of 165; and in Japan with a population of 129 million, 13 or (often) fewer are killed by guns.

In Australia, before enacting strict gun control laws in 1996 following the deadliest mass shooting in Australian history, there were 13 mass shootings in 18 years. In the same time period following the legislation, there were zero.

Let’s set statistics aside. Every person that dies as a result of a gunshot is one person too many. How do you console a father or a mother who lost their child without even knowing why? What do you say to a parent whose child was just gunned down, to alleviate their agony and sinking soul? What sort of condolences and prayer can you offer to assuage the penetrating pain that sucks out the parent’s heart? There are no words, no expressions, no prayer, no sympathy, and no condolences that can ease the consuming suffering and grief that a parent must endure.

The answer, Mr. Trump, is not placing armed guards in every restaurant, night club, bar, school, synagogue, church, amusement park, museum, movie theater, bank, hospital, or in every store, every street corner, every hotel, and every railway and bus station. No, this is not how we should live our lives.

No, we cannot, and we will not succumb to your and Congress’ whims to prevent effective gun control laws. And we will no longer live and die by the gun.

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Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University (NYU). He teaches courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies. [email protected]  Web: www.alonben-meir.com

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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A Decalogue: The Ten Theses of American Empire-Building: A Dialogue

November 10th, 2018 by Prof. James Petras

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First published by Global Research on August 11, 2018

Introduction

Few, if any, believe what they hear and read from leaders and media publicists. Most people choose to ignore the cacophony of voices, vices and virtues.

This paper provides a set of theses which purports to lay-out the basis for a dialogue between and among those who choose to abstain from elections with the intent to engage them in political struggle.

Thesis 1

US empire builders of all colors and persuasion practice donkey tactics; waving the carrot and wielding the whip to move the target government on the chosen path.

In the same way, Washington offers dubious concessions and threatens reprisals, in order to move them into the imperial orbit.

Washington applied the tactic successfully in several recent encounters. In 2003 the US offered Libyan government of Muammar Gaddafi a peaceful accommodation in exchange for disarmament, abandonment of nationalist allies in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. In 2011, the US with its European allies applied the whip – bombed Libya, financed and armed retrograde tribal and terrorist forces, destroyed the infrastructure, murdered Gaddafi and uprooted millions of Africans and Libyans. . . who fled to Europe. Washington recruited mercenaries for their subsequent war against Syria in order to destroy the nationalist Bashar Assad regime.

Washington succeeded in destroying an adversary but did not establish a puppet regime in the midst of perpetual conflict.

The empire’s carrot weakened its adversary, but the stick failed to recolonize Libya ..Moreover its European allies are obligated to pay the multi-billion Euro cost of absorbing millions of uprooteded immigrants and the ensuing domestic political turmoil.

Thesis 2

Empire builders’ proposal to reconfigure the economy in order to regain imperial supremacy provokes domestic and overseas enemies. President Trump launched a global trade war, replaced political accommodation with economic sanctions against Russia and a domestic protectionist agenda and sharply reduced corporate taxes. He provoked a two-front conflict. Overseas, he provoked opposition from European allies and China, while facing perpetual harassment from domestic free market globalists and Russo-phobic political elites and ideologues.

Two front conflicts are rarely successful. Most successful imperialist conquer adversaries in turn – first one and then the other.

Thesis 3

Leftists frequently reverse course: they are radicals out of office and reactionaries in government, eventually falling between both chairs. We witness the phenomenal collapse of the German Social Democratic Party, the Greek Socialist Party (PASOK), (and its new version Syriza) and the Workers Party in Brazil. Each attracted mass support, won elections, formed alliances with bankers and the business elite – and in the face of their first crises, are abandoned by the populace and the elite.

Shrewd but discredited elites frequently recognize the opportunism of the Left, and in time of distress, have no problem in temporarily putting up with Left rhetoric and reforms as long as their economic interests are not jeopardized. The elite know that the Left signal left and turn right.

Thesis 4

Elections, even ones won by progressives or leftists, frequently become springboards for imperial backed coups. Over the past decade newly elected presidents, who are not aligned with Washington, face congressional and/or judicial impeachment on spurious charges. The elections provide a veneer of legitimacy which a straight-out military-coup lacks.

In Brazil, Paraguay and Venezuela, ‘legislatures’ under US tutelage attempted to ouster popular President. They succeeded in the former and failed in the latter.

When electoral machinery fails, the judicial system intervenes to impose restraints on progressives, based on tortuous and convoluted interpretation of the law. Opposition leftists in Argentina, Brazil and Ecuador have been hounded by ruling party elites.

Thesis 5

Even crazy leaders speak truth to power. There is no question that President Trump suffers a serious mental disorder, with midnight outbursts and nuclear threats against, any and all, ranging from philanthropic world class sports figures (LeBron James) to NATO respecting EU allies.

Yet in his lunacy, President Trump has denounced and exposed the repeated deceits and ongoing fabrications of the mass media. Never before has a President so forcefully identified the lies of the leading print and TV outlets. The NY Times, Washington Post, the Financial Times, NBC, CNN, ABC and CBS have been thoroughly discredited in the eyes of the larger public. They have lost legitimacy and trust. Where progressives have failed, a war monger, billionaire has accomplished, speaking a truth to serve many injustices.

Thesis 6

When a bark turns into a bite, Trump proves the homely truth that fear invites aggression. Trump has implemented or threatened severe sanctions against the EU, China, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, North Korea and any country that fails to submit to his dictates. At first, it was bombast and bluster which secured concessions.

Concessions were interpreted as weakness and invited greater threats. Disunity of opponents encouraged imperial tacticians to divide and conquer. But by attacking all adversaries simultaneously he undermines that tactic. Threats everywhere limits choices to dangerous options at home and abroad.

Thesis 7

The master meddlers, of all times, into the politics of sovereign states are the Anglo-American empire builders. But what is most revealing is the current ploy of accusing the victims of the crimes that are committed against them.

After the overthrow of the Soviet regime, the US and its European acolytes ‘meddled’ on a world-historic scale, pillaging over two trillion dollars of Soviet wealth and reducing Russian living standards by two thirds and life expectancy to under sixty years – below the level of Bangladesh.

With Russia’s revival under President Putin, Washington financed a large army of self-styled ‘non-governmental organizations’ (NGO) to organize electoral campaigns, recruited moguls in the mass media and directed ethnic uprisings. The Russians are retail meddlers compared to the wholesale multi-billion-dollar US operators.

Moreover, the Israeli’s have perfected meddling on a grand scale – they intervene successfully in Congress, the White House and the Pentagon. They set the Middle East agenda, budget and priorities, and secure the biggest military handouts on a per-capita basis in US history!

Apparently, some meddlers meddle by invitation and are paid to do it.

Thesis 8

Corruption is endemic in the US where it has legal status and where tens of millions of dollars change hands and buy Congress people, Presidents and judges.

In the US the buyers and brokers are called ‘lobbyists’ – everywhere else they are called fraudsters. Corruption (lobbying) grease the wheels of billion dollars military spending, technological subsidies, tax evading corporations and every facet of government – out in the open, all the time and place of the US regime.

Corruption as lobbying never evokes the least criticism from the mass media.

On the other hand, where corruption takes place under the table in Iran, China and Russia, the media denounce the political elite – even where in China over 2 million officials, high and the low are arrested and jailed.

When corruption is punished in China, the US media claim it is merely a ‘political purge’ even if it directly reduces elite conspicuous consumption.

In other words, imperial corruption defends democratic value; anti-corruption is a hallmark of authoritarian dictatorships.

Thesis 9

Bread and circuses are integral parts of empire building – especially in promoting urban street mobs to overthrow independent and elected governments.

Imperial financed mobs – provided the cover for CIA backed coups in Iran (1954), Ukraine (2014), Brazil (1964), Venezuela (2003, 2014 and 2017), Argentina (1956), Nicaragua (2018), Syria (2011) and Libya (2011) among other places and other times.

Masses for empire draw paid and voluntary street fighters who speak for democracy and serve the elite. The “mass cover” is especially effective in recruiting leftists who look to the street for opinion and ignore the suites which call the shots.

Thesis 10

The empire is like a three-legged stool it promotes genocide, to secure magnicide and to rule by homicide. Invasions kills millions, capture and kill rulers and then rule by homicide – police assassinating dissenting citizens.

The cases are readily available: Iraq and Libya come to mind. The US and its allies invaded, bombed and killed over a million Iraqis, captured and assassinated its leaders and installed a police state.

A similar pattern occurred in Libya: the US and EU bombed, killed and uprooted several million people, assassinated Ghadaffy and fomented a lawless terrorist war of clans, tribes and western puppets.

“Western values” reveal the inhumanity of empires built to murder “a la carte” – stripping the victim nations of their defenders, leaders and citizens.

Conclusion

The ten theses define the nature of 21st century imperialism – its continuities and novelties.

The mass media systematically write and speak lies to power: their message is to disarm their adversaries and to arouse their patrons to continue to plunder the world.

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Prof. James Petras is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

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Counter-propaganda as an “Instrument of Peace”. Fidel Castro and the “Battle of Ideas”: The Dangers of Nuclear War.

November 10th, 2018 by Prof Michel Chossudovsky

Fidel Castro and Michel Chossudovsky, Havana 2010

This article was first published on August 13, 2016

In the words of Albert Einstein,  “Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.” And that in so few words describes Fidel Castro’s contribution to the future of humanity.  Fidel’s message is of particular relevance in relation to the “fake news” campaign directed against the independent media.

Author’s Introduction

The dangers of a Third World War are looming. Nuclear war is “on the table”.  “I want the Iranians to know that if  I’m the president, we will attack Iran ….we will obliterate them.”  says presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. 

The outright criminalization of politics. How do we instil sanity and honesty in US foreign policy. 

How do we reverse the tide, how do we dismantle the US-led military agenda?

America’s global war of conquest is supported by a vast propaganda apparatus including the Western mainstream media, segments of the online “alternative media”, the corporate foundations, the elite universities and the establishment thinks tanks. 

War is upheld as a peace-making endeavor. When war becomes peace, the lie becomes the truth. There is no turning backwards. 

 Without war propaganda, the legitimacy of the US-NATO war would collapse like a house of cards.  

War is a criminal undertaking. What is required is to break that legitimacy, to criminalize war through a global counter-propaganda campaign. The lies and  fabrications which provide legitimacy to America’s “humanitarian wars” must be fully revealed. 

In this regard, Fidel’s  “Battle of Ideas” opens up an important avenue. It serves to break a political consensus, it reveals the twisted nature of science and the social sciences, namely the inability of knowledge and analysis to provide an understanding of the true nature of an unfolding “New World Order” predicated on the destruction of representative government and the de facto criminalization of politics. 

The Battle of Ideas consists in confronting the war criminals in high office, breaking the US-led consensus in favor of war, changing the mindset of hundreds of millions of people, abolishing nuclear weapons and ultimately changing the course of world history.

The media, intellectuals, scientists and politicians, in chorus, obfuscate the unspoken truth, namely that the US-NATO led war destroys humanity.

When war is upheld as a humanitarian endeavor,  the judicial system is criminalized, the entire international legal system is turned upside down: pacifism and the antiwar movement are criminalized. Opposing the war becomes a criminal act. Meanwhile, the war criminals in high office have ordered a witch hunt against those who challenge their authority.

The Big Lie must be exposed for what it is and what it does.

It sanctions the indiscriminate killing of men, women and children.

It destroys families and people. It destroys the commitment of people towards their fellow human beings.

It prevents people from expressing their solidarity for those who suffer. It upholds war and the police state as the sole avenue.

It destroys both nationalism and internationalism.

Breaking the lie means breaking a criminal project of global destruction, in which the quest for profit is the overriding force.

This profit driven military agenda destroys human values and transforms people into unconscious zombies.

Let us reverse the tide.

Challenge the war criminals in high office and the powerful corporate lobby groups which support them.

Undermine the US-NATO-Israel military crusade.

Close down the weapons factories and the military bases.

Bring home the troops.

Members of the armed forces should disobey orders and refuse to participate in a criminal war.

This is our task, in towns and villages across the land, nationally and internationally: Counter-propaganda for peace.

The following text is the English version of  the Preface of the Spanish edition of my book,  The Globalization of War, America’s Long War against Humanity, launched in Managua, Nicaragua. June 2016.  

Michel Chossudovsky, August 13, 2016

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Counter-propaganda as an “Instrument of Peace”. Fidel Castro and the “Battle of Ideas”: The Dangers of Nuclear War

English version of the Preface to the Spanish Edition,

published in Managua, Nicaragua and Mexico City, Mexico

 

By Michel Chossudovsky

This book is dedicated to Fidel Castro Ruz, leader of the Cuban Revolution, whose practice and teachings have been the source of inspiration to grassroots revolutionary movements throughout the World. 

Fidel’s understanding of US imperialism, his writings on neoliberalism and global warfare are of crucial importance in the social struggle against the capitalist World Order including the articulation of people’s movements at national and international levels.  

In our 2010 “Conversations” (see Chapter II), Fidel focussed on the “Battle of Ideas”. He defined the role of concepts and knowledge as a powerful instrument of revolutionary change. While the “Battle of Ideas” emerged in Cuba at an earlier period, Fidel’s recent analysis focusses on the dangers of a Third World War and how to prevent it from occurring.

In the case of a Third World War, Fidel quite rightly pointed out:

“There would be ‘collateral damage’, as the American political leaders always affirm, to justify the deaths of innocent people. In a nuclear war, the ‘collateral damage’ would be the life of all humanity”. 

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For me, Fidel’s formulation had a profound significance. Following our meeting in Havana and upon returning to Canada, I started digging through piles of articles and US military documents on  America’s post 9/11 “pre-emptive” nuclear doctrine, which consists in using nukes for “self-defence” with “minimum collateral damage”: an absurd and diabolical proposal, which in the real sense of the word threatens the future of humanity. In the following year (2011),  I completed my book on this subject entitled: Towards a World War III Scenario, The Dangers of Nuclear War. 

Fidel Castro in focussing on the “collateral damage” associated with nuclear war had uncovered the “building block” of post-cold war imperialism. The Cold War concepts of “Mutually Assured Destruction” and “Deterrence” not to mention the US-Soviet Union communications “hotline” had been scrapped.

Is nuclear war part of a US policy agenda? Is it on the drawing-board of the Pentagon? The answer is a resounding Yes. Nukes are upheld as “peace-making bombs”. For Hillary Clinton in her 2016 election campaign, the use of nukes against Russia and the Middle East is “on the table”. they are also contemplated for use on a pre-emptive basis against non-nuclear states.

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The Globalization of War

The Pentagon uses the concept of “the long war” to describe what is tantamount to “a war without borders”. In the broader context of World geopolitics, Fidel upholds the “Battle of Ideas” as a means of confronting a powerful propaganda apparatus, precisely with a view to reversing the tide of global warfare which includes the “pre-emptive” first strike use of nuclear weapons.

The Battle of Ideas consists in confronting the war criminals in high office, breaking the US-led consensus in favor of war, changing the mindset of hundreds of millions of people, abolishing nuclear weapons and ultimately changing the course of world history.

The Sources of Propaganda

The structures of propaganda include the Western mainstream media, the establishment thinks tanks and research institutes whose “science” increasingly serves dominant corporate interests including the military industrial complex, Wall Street, the Anglo-american oil companies and Big Pharma.

A related form of propaganda emanates from America’s science laboratories on contract to the Pentagon, the objective of which is to provide a “human face” to  America’s so-called “defense contractors” (weapons producers).  According to “scientific opinion”, US advanced weapons systems are “instruments of peace”. Only America’s enemies produce Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD): Mini-nukes with an explosive capacity of one third to six times a Hiroshima bomb are described in official military documents as “harmless to the surrounding civilian population because the explosion is underground”.

Erasing the History of Socialism 

Academic historians are entrusted with the rewriting of colonial and imperial history. The crimes of empire are soon forgotten. America’s wars of conquest are casually described as “civil wars”. America’s “war on terrorism” is described as a humanitarian undertaking.

In turn, university social scientists both in teaching and research increasingly uphold “globalization” as an avenue of economic and social progress, as the “solution” rather than the “cause” of the Worldwide crisis.

This propaganda exercise also consists in erasing the history of socialism as well as eradicating from our collective memory the numerous nationalist movements and social struggles against US imperialism:  Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia, Indonesia, Palestine, Yugoslavia, Egypt, Tanzania, Chile, Grenada, Algeria, South Africa, Mozambique, Angola, Afghanistan, Libya, …and many more…. the list is long.

“Economic Science” 

In economics, abstract models totally divorced from reality are used to analyze reality.

Students must conform to the tenets of macro-economic theory and mathematical model building.

Economic theory ignores the reality of economics. Its abstract “pure theory” formulations constitute a pseudo-science which provides de facto legitimacy to the neoliberal monetary policies imposed by corrupt Western governments, on behalf of powerful banking institutions.

Realities are turned upside down. The neoliberal consensus prevails. Drastic austerity measures coupled with the “free market” under IMF auspices are upheld as a means to generating economic growth and alleviating poverty. Ultimately what is at stake is that science, knowledge and analysis have been moulded and manipulated to such an extent that an understanding of the “real world” is no longer possible.

It is in this context that the “Battle of Ideas” opens up an important avenue. It serves to break a political consensus, it reveals the twisted nature of science and the social sciences, namely the inability of knowledge and analysis to provide an understanding of the true nature of an unfolding “New World Order” predicated on the destruction of representative government and the de facto criminalization of politics.

My understanding of the “Battle of Ideas” is that it seeks to reveal and uphold the Truth. It  targets the fake science and knowledge practiced by establishment researchers, journalists, scientists, historians and social scientists.

In the present day and age, critical analysis is indelibly threatened:  most Western intellectuals by conforming to a broad “politically correct” consensus, are tacitly supportive of the capitalist world order. This is crucial because the “authority” of knowledge and understanding which these establishment intellectuals convey ultimately  trickles down to the grassroots of society and shapes the perceptions of the broader public.

That “authority” emanating from those who “think on behalf of the ruling elites” must be broken as a means to ultimately breaking the ruling elites. The consensus which provides legitimacy to a corrupt economic and social system must be broken.

In contrast, the role of the committed intellectual —invariably blacklisted by the Western media— consists in refuting and ultimately breaking that “politically correct” consensus: what this requires is an all out “Battle of Ideas” against media disinformation, war propaganda, think tank research and establishment scholarship.

Some people on the Left will say: what we need is to formulate an alternative paradigm, i.e.  “Another World is Possible”.  Let us be clear: we are not dealing with an ideological battle between conflicting paradigms or World views. An abstract blueprint of an “Alternative” discussed at a World Forum will not in itself lead to fundamental changes in the capitalist World order.  Proposing a “new paradigm” in the abstract removed from an understanding of how the existing social, political and economic system actually functions will not result in meaningful change.

What is required are social movements which rely on a detailed understanding (through research and empirical analysis) of the functioning of contemporary capitalism, its complex economic and social system. And that analytical understanding cannot remain solely within the sphere of intellectual debate, It must be embodied within a mass movement, it must constitute the basis for strategic action against the corporate elites.

Social and economic research must so to speak be “democratized”, namely the workings of this system have to be understood by the grassroots social movements. Ideas are thereby integrated into the revolutionary praxis of class struggle. And that can only be effectively accomplished once the neoliberal propaganda apparatus is broken.

Theory and Practice 

Concepts and analysis are never formulated in the abstract. The relationship between concepts and the concrete social realities of class struggle is fundamental. (This relationship is the essence of Marxian analysis which is often misunderstood). Concepts are built from a detailed investigation of the New World Order, its global financial system, its real economy, its institutions, its extensive military and intelligence apparatus, its historical evolution and how it impacts on fundamental economic and social relations and more fundamentally on people’s lives.

Theory cannot under any circumstances override this complex reality. Reality does not conform to theory. Quite the opposite: theory, namely conceptualization, emanates from reality. Ideas in support of a revolutionary process are not abstract theoretical concepts.  Theoretical formulations are derived from empirical analysis, through a detailed understanding of real life, of the conditions of poverty and despair affecting large sectors of the World population.

This dialectical relationship between theory and reality defines the revolutionary role of  the intellectual committed to ultimately breaking the neoliberal consensus.

Manipulating the Class Struggle: Neoliberalism Creates Social Divisions

The imposition of neoliberalism feeds on divisiveness, it encourages the creation of divisions within political parties and organizations opposed to the neoliberal consensus. The underlying strategy of the Neocons is not to crush the protest movement but to create a variety of separate protest movements which do not threaten the capitalist world order. It is in this regard that protest (supported and financed by elite foundations) becomes a ritual of dissent which accepts the legitimacy of those who are the object of the protest.

In an era marked by “humanitarian wars”, “color revolutions” and regime change, various “left” opposition coalitions have emerged.  Yet at the same time many of these social movements supported by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been highjacked. They are co-opted and financed by corporate foundations (Rockefeller, Ford, et al). The latter are not only controlled by powerful financial conglomerates, they also have links to US intelligence.

Despite the setbacks of recent years including US led wars in the Middle East, coups d’état, insurgencies, State supported terrorism, economic sanctions, regime change,… the class struggle must indelibly prevail. For it to succeed, however, the inner workings of global capitalism must be understood: And that is where the “battle of ideas” comes in.

Conceptualization and analysis of economic and social realities are to be combined with the formulation of strategies and revolutionary praxis with a view to disarming the capitalist World Order.

But that cannot be achieved when “progressive leaders”, “left intellectuals” and anti-war activists  are coopted by elite foundations. The ploy is to infiltrate people’s organizations, selectively handpick civil society leaders “whom we can trust” and integrate them into a “dialogue”, make them feel that they are “progressives” acting on behalf of their grassroots, but make them act in a way which serves the interests of the corporate establishment.

Global Capitalism 

What is ultimately at stake are the structures and institutional base of global capitalism which are characterized by fraud, money laundering, corruption and co-optation. The latter not only permeate the corporate establishment, they also characterize the “opposition” organizations coopted and financed by elite foundations.

The “Battle of Ideas” questions the legitimacy of government decision-makers in high office; concurrently it reveals the criminal nature of the State and more specifically of US foreign policy. In turn the latter are sustained by the criminalization of international law.

The ultimate objective is to to reverse the dominant imperial ideology, which upholds “humanitarian wars” as peacemaking undertakings and which upholds austerity measures, low wages, bankruptcies, privatization and the repeal of social programs as an “economic solution”.

The underlying institutional fabric of global capitalism —political as well as economic— is sustained by a vast intelligence and propaganda apparatus.  And that is what has to be broken.

Ultimately honesty, solidarity and commitment combined with carefully formulated strategies and “analysis” are the driving forces behind a genuine class struggle.

In the words of Albert Einstein,  “Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.” And that in so few words describes Fidel Castro’s contribution to the future of humanity:

“We don’t need the empire to give us anything. Our efforts will be legal and peaceful, because our commitment is to peace and fraternity among all human beings who live on this planet.” (Fidel Castro Ruz, “Brother Obama”, Grannma, March 27,  2016, Message to Barack Obama upon his visit to Cuba)

Michel Chossudovsky, Montreal, Quebec, May 2016

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Mike Pompeo, Psychopath

November 9th, 2018 by Kurt Nimmo

During an interview with BBC Persia, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the United States will starve millions of Iranians to death if the country’s leadership doesn’t bend to its will. 

Pompeo said Iran’s “leadership has to make a decision that they want their people to eat.” 

This is siege warfare. It is illegal under the Geneva Conventions, in particular the protocol relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Article 53: Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited). 

But then neocons don’t do international law. 

John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser and a neocon’s neocon, recently said the US will “use any means necessary” to push back against the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its commitment to punish war crimes. Bolton warned the US will sanction and arrest individuals investigating war crimes and the torture of detainees, the latter conducted by “patriots,” according to Bolton. He added that frustrating prosecution of war crimes “remains one of my proudest achievements.” 

In 2002, the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and China refused to sign the ICC’s founding document, thus indicating they would continue to use siege warfare, famine, torture, ethnic cleansing, rape, and wholesale murder of innocent civilians. 

For more than 70 years, Israel has shot, bombed, and ethnically cleansed Palestinian Arabs. Saudi Arabia has produced the worst humanitarian crisis in recent memory as it continues to viciously attack Yemen with the help of the United States. China continues its “strike hard” campaign against Uyghur opposition, the ethnic cleansing of Tibetan monastics, and the expansion of its laogai forced labor camps (where consumer goods are manufactured and then sold to Walmart shopping Americans). 

A normal, non-psychopathic person would undoubtedly recoil at the thought of Iranian children starving, but then we’re talking about neocons responsible for the engineered murder of 1.5 million Iraqis, including 500,000 children under the Bush-Clinton sanctions regime. 

Hillary Clinton isn’t considered a card-carrying neocon, yet she stands shoulder to shoulder with Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and John Bolton when it comes to killing recalcitrant Arabs, Muslims, and other enemies of Israel and Saudi Arabia, and prevent what the late Zbigniew Brzezinski described as vassals and barbarians coming together in organized resistance to neoliberal geostrategy of domination and exploitation. 

Mike Pompeo’s psychopathic ultimatum was not widely covered by the corporate media. The apathy and intellectual laziness of the American people make genocide, siege warfare, starvation, and other crimes against humanity possible, mostly due to incessant lies and distortions produced by a corporate media acting as a propaganda ministry for the war state.  

There has not been a viable—or even visible—antiwar movement since the days of George W. Bush, thanks in large part of the political voodoo of Barack Obama and his CFR, Trilateral Commission, and Bilderberg insiders, basically the same folks now calling the shots for the geopolitical ignoramus, Donald Trump. 

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Another Day in the Empire.

Kurt Nimmo is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Globalresearch.ca

November 9th, 2018 by Global Research News

An ongoing smear campaign against Global Research appears at the top of the search engines.

According to Canada’s Global and Mail “Globalresearch.ca is being investigated [by NATO] for the dissemination of conspiracy theories and Kremlin-friendly points of view.” 

I will not go into details or respond to this gush of derogatory statements.

Readers should consult our site and decide who is telling the truth. 

Below are comments from prominent authors and personalities.

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, November 2018.

P.S, This is not a donation drive. But if you wish to support us, click this link or the image at the bottom of the page. Your endorsement is much appreciated.

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Global Research provides penetrating analysis with breaking news for a planetary audience and remains the indispensable resource for citizens of the world. Michael Carmichael, Founder and Director of the Planetary Movement.

Global Research is the leading research source on the fundamental issues of war and peace, imperialism and resistance, on the financial crises and the alternatives… Prof Chossudovsky has provided a forum for cutting edge critical essays which challenge the principle pundits of the mass media.” Prof. James Petras, award winning author, retired Bartle Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, NY.

Global Research provides penetrating analysis of world events. The articles published by this invaluable website pull no punches in reporting on global power relations. Prof. Marjorie Cohn, distinguished author and Professor Emerita, Thomas Jefferson School of Law, University of California, San Diego. 

Today, more than ever before, war depends on deception. To oppose war without seeing through the deceptions currently being practiced by governments of the West is to act in vain. Global Research bravely takes on this task, and that is why it is a vital resource for us all.  This is why I have made its website my homepage. Prof. Graeme MacQueen, author and distinguished professor of religious studies

The articles and debates are very well documented and the information that is shared is honest and impartial. We need such professionalism in a moment where the Main Stream Media have sold their souls to the “politically correct” and forgotten their duty to inform honestly the public opinion. Mother Agnes-Mariam of the Cross, Monastery Saint James the Mutilated, author, analyst and human rights advocate based in Syria.

When I want real, up to the minute information on world events, I first check with Globalresearch.ca Its writers are some of the best journalists in the world.  Others display unique insights and local knowledge not available elsewhere in the so-called “Main Stream Media”. J. Michael Springmann, renowned author and former US State Department official. 

Global Research is one of the finest and most easily accessed research tools on the web. A vast array of articles by the best known researchers are instantly available. Michel Chossudovsky’s meticulous research, perspicacity and courageous reporting offer the reader credible and in-depth analyses of the complex and controversial events of our time.  Bonnie Faulkner, Producer/Host, Guns and Butter, The Pacifica Radio Network

Truth is rare to find nowadays. We are consistently being lied to by the mainstream media – MSM, and especially by our ‘elected’ politicians. Global Research contains articles from conscious politicians, professors, journalists, whistle-blowers, geopolitical analysts, as well as ‘common people’, who simply want to help raise global consciousness by spreading the truth. Peter Koenig, renowned economist and former World Bank official.

I absolutely count on Globalresearch.ca as the highest quality, most professional news analysis service in North America and beyond. For many ethical, well-known authors and journalists with deep investigative and critical analysis skills, Global Research is one of very few high-readership places they can seek publication now that the corporate-controlled media has shut them out.  Elizabeth Woodworth, renowned Canadian author

I have known this Website for years and did not find another one that would be of a similar quality with respect to it being truly independent, best informed, analytically deep, close to many different realities of this world, and reader-friendly. I cannot imagine to renounce on looking at globalresearch every day. Prof. Claudia von Werlhof, distinguished author, professor of political science and women’s studies, University of Innsbruck,  Austria.

Global Research is massive! I think as a resource for anyone interested in world affairs, it’s probably unrivalled in its depth and breadth. William Bowles, renowned author and geopolitical analyst.

Global Research is one of the few international news site I completely trust. I make it required reading for my Political Sociology classes. Prof. Peter Phillips Professor of Political Sociology, Sonoma State University, Cal. (image right)

We consider the globalresearch.ca website our most important source of reliable news.  We especially value its courageous coverage of state crimes against democracy, which are rarely covered by most news and analysis organization.  We trust the site’s integrity and rely on it almost exclusively. Speaking personally, I would be lost without the extraordinary information provided by globalresearch: I would not know where else to find it. Karin Brothers, Canadian author and human rights activist  

Every day I turn several times to Global Research to read the latest postings on developments at home and abroad. Under the directorship of Professor Michel Chossudovsky, a distinguished Canadian professor, Global Research provides a wide array of analysis based on facts that stand in contradiction to the official lies that are used to control the explanations fed to the public.  If you care to work your way out of The Matrix, read Global Research. Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, renowned economist and author, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under President Reagan

Primarily, I appreciate the artillery of Professor Chossudovsky’s grand statements on a variety of political issues, books, and analysis of the crimes of the US Empire in the international arena. What I also do appreciate is the guts of GR to question the official narrative of 9/11, which in itself is considered a mortal sin. To keep up with the real developments of US politics and keep one’s critical senses, GR is vital. Dr.Ludwig Watzal, Journalist and Editor based in Bonn, Germany. 

Global Research is edited by a renowned political economic scholar with no fear but much knowledge who has always in his work, since exposing the plan for genocide of democratic socialist Yugoslavia before it happened,  laid bare the horror while the privileged journals, media, academics and political climbers ignored and profited. Global Research contributors are cut from similar cloth, and track the reality otherwise unsaid – so far ahead of and deeper than the chattering ideologues in the MSM as to be an embarrassment to them and their paymasters. Prof. John McMurtry, professor of philosophy emeritus at Guelph University, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC).

In these times of great political upheaval and confusion, when the very core of civilized society appears to be disintegrating, Global Research can consistently be relied on to provide the facts with a clarity, a thoroughness and a truth like no other. Renee Parsons, distinguished author and former Mayor of Durango City, Colorado. 

Global Research is a key part of the effort to get the truth out and to provide activists with the information we need to overwhelm the corporate media. They set an example for all of us. We all need to think of ourselves as media outlets and use our social media and other outlets to put forward a narrative to support a popular movement for radical transformation. Kevin Zeese, author, human rights activist and co-director of Popular Resistance

‘I say ‘no mother and child should be in the least harmed anywhere in our still beautiful world’. But they will be and they are now: in Palestine, Yemen, Syria and a dozen other places on our globe. Humankind is on the brink. Widespread dissemination of truth and of truthful analysis is central in restoring rationality and world peace. Global Research is doing its very best in this. Dr. David Halpin, retired British surgeon and renowned human rights advocate. 

Does this unflinching commitment to deal with the facts behind the mainstream media narrative, irrespective of the consequences, create controversy? Yes. In fact, Professor Chossudovsky has been and is the target of innumerable character assassinations and disinformation regarding his views. However, he and the CRG have not only survived these obvious attempts to put a halt to their work, but collectively and individually the entire staff has blossomed even further. Wherever I go in different countries, progressive people follow GR. There is no other independent web site that has this incredible reach and scope.  Arnold August, award-winning Canadian author and political analyst of Cuba.

“Global Research is a much-needed and potent antidote to the massive doses of disinformation administered to us daily by the mainstream media, including newspapers, magazines, and of course television. Dr. Jacques R. Pauwels, prominent Canadian historian and author. 

Yemen War Intensifies After Washington and London Call for Ceasefire

November 9th, 2018 by Abayomi Azikiwe

Since March of 2015 the United States has engineered and guided a genocidal war against the people of Yemen.

Daily bombing operations by the Saudi Arabian-led Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) has killed tens of thousands of people, injured and sickened hundreds of thousands more and created the worse humanitarian crisis in the world.

At present Yemen is facing famine due to the targeting of hospitals, schools and neighborhoods in an effort to break the will of the people to resist this military onslaught. The strategic port at Hodeida is a key element in the campaign waged by the Saudi-GCC coalition to starve the Yemini population into submission.

Nonetheless, the U.S. and British-backed forces are nowhere nearer to defeating the Ansurallah-led coalition which has seized huge swaths of territory in the north, central and southern regions of the country, the most underdeveloped and impoverished in the entire West Asia. A renewed battle launched by the Saudi-allied militias to take control of Hodeida has failed amid stiff resistance by the Popular Committees committed to defending this important outlet for essential goods flowing into the country.

Even after the call for a ceasefire by the administration of President Donald Trump and the British Prime Minister Theresa May, the attacks by the Saudi-GCC coalition have escalated. Such a course of action raises serious questions about the sincerity of the appeal for the resumption of United Nations brokered talks to end the horrendous war. 

It should be reiterated that the warplanes, ordnances, refueling technology and diplomatic cover provided by Washington and London have been essential in the Saudi-GCC war against Yemen since 2015. Successive U.S. administrations and British governments continue to supply arms to the Saudi monarchy and its cohorts in the region. 

The apparent premeditated killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi embassy in Turkey has highlighted the links between Washington and Riyadh. The response to the killing of Khashoggi by the Trump administration has been cautious and muted. 

Perhaps in an effort to deflect attention away from the implicit guilt of Washington, the Trump administration called for a cessation of hostilities and the beginning of efforts to end the war which has regional implications. The political reasoning of the U.S. for their sponsoring of the genocidal onslaught in Yemen is based upon allegations that the Ansurallah movement is supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

This imperialist rationale is aimed at containing the influence of Tehran which is a major threat to the hegemony of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), both of whom are staunch participants in the broader designs for total western hegemony in the region. The inability to dislodge the Ansurallah and the Popular Committees exposes the obvious limitations of such an approach therefore emboldening resistance forces seeking a genuine independent and sovereign existence for the people of West Asia and beyond.

An article published by Press TV on November 7 based upon a speech delivered by Ansurallah leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi says:

“The US role in the military operations against our nation is pivotal. All fiendish plots against Yemen are hatched by the US, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Traitors just struggle to carry them out on the ground. Washington is speaking of peace at the same time that it is directing the Yemen war. Traitors are operating under the auspices of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and executing their orders.”

This same speech by al-Houthi points directly at the role of the U.S. noting that those “allies” of Saudi Arabia are viewed as mere pawns in the process. The Ansurallah leader claimed that the desire by Washington to reap profits from the sale of weapons to Riyadh is the driving force in the war.

Al-Houthi is quoted as emphasizing that:

“The United States has managed to reap tremendous financial gains, including arms deals, from the Saudi-led aggression on Yemen. Washington is supporting the Riyadh regime to be able to stand [on] its feet. It is also managing the violent and criminal role of Saudi Arabia. The recent uptick in attacks on Yemen comes as a number of (Persian) Gulf littoral states, notably Saudi Arabia and the UAE, are warming their relations with the Zionist regime (of Israel).”

Genocidal War Brings Yemen to the Brink of Famine

The character of the Yemen war as represented by the deliberate targeting of civilians many of whom are internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees impacted by wars throughout the region is largely being hidden from the people of the U.S. and Britain. In many cases reports on the humanitarian crisis in Yemen fail to mention the daily bombings and ground operations notwithstanding the supply of arms and other forms of assistance by the imperialists.

Assessments by the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator Mark Lowcock conveys that three-quarters of the people in Yemen, a nation of over 28 million, are in dire need of food, healthcare, medicines, potable water and housing. This same agency is predicting that the country could be the scene of the worst famine witnessed anywhere in the world in generations.

A cholera epidemic has sickened over one million people since 2017. Official figures published by the World Health Organization (WHO) indicate that approximately 2,500 have died from this disease which is contracted through the consumption of contaminated drinking water. 

Bombing and ground operations around Hodeida port has hampered the ability of healthcare facilities to provide emergency services. This siege of the port on the Red Sea represents the entry point for 85% of the food supplies imported into the country.

In a statement released on November 8 by Dr. Ahmed Al-Mandhari, the WHO Regional Director for the Eastern Mediterranean, the humanitarian specialist provides details on the current situation around the port city of Hodeida. The attempts of the Saudi-GCC coalition to dislodge the Popular Committees from the area have further endangered 2.4 million people living and working there.

Dr. Al-Mandhari in his statement said:

“The current violence in Al Hudaydah (Hodeida) is placing tens of thousands of already vulnerable people at risk, and preventing WHO from reaching them with the help they urgently need. The violence, now in close proximity to the area hospitals, is affecting the movement and safety of health staff, patients and ambulances, as well as the functionality of health facilities, leaving hundreds without access to treatment…. The people of Yemen are victims of this tragic, man-made crisis. Many have died due to the violence, some directly but most as the result of restricted access to health care, causing deaths that are normally preventable.” (See this)

Post-Elections Context for U.S. Foreign Policy in Yemen

Worldwide attention has been focused on the November 6 midterm elections in the U.S. which resulted in the Republican Party losing its majority in the House of Representatives and at the same time gaining several seats within the Senate, increasing its dominance over this legislative wing of the Congress. A split government will intensify the existing struggle over the domestic policies governing the country in the realms of immigration, healthcare, race relations and environmental regulations, etc.

Nonetheless, there have been virtually no differences related to foreign policy questions among the Democrats and the Republicans. The current phase of the war against Yemen began under the administration of former Democratic President Barack Obama. There was no serious attempt to end the war in 2015-2016, therefore the Trump administration inherited the situation and has continued the attempts to defeat the Ansurallah and its allies within the Popular Committees. 

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders earlier in 2018 sought to pass a resolution calling for an end to direct military support for Saudi-GCC war. This effort failed and there are no clear signals as to whether the incoming 2019 Democratic majority House will even debate the current military assistance provided to Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Both the Democratic and Republican parties are controlled by the U.S. ruling class. Even though the two groupings have different constituencies within the population, decisions related to war and peace has continued to favor the militarization of the society.

Resources allocated for imperialist wars abroad and state repression domestically could be utilized for the rebuilding of the cities, suburbs and rural areas of the U.S. Tens of millions remain in poverty as the gap between rich and poor widens.

These issues will only be resolved through a fundamental shift in the control of economic and political institutions in the U.S. Until the government is forced by the people to end its wasteful and genocidal war machine the world will continue to experience instability and dislocation.   

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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.

A Mother’s Plea to Save Her Son… Julian Assange, Held 8 Years Without Charge by the UK Government

November 9th, 2018 by Mairead Maguire

On 4th November, 2018, Christine Assange, mother of Julian Assange, made a deeply moving video public  appeal to  save the life of her son Julian.  

Julian Assange is Editor in Chief of Wikileaks. Because of Wikileaks reporting of acts during US/NATO’s illegal wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, etc., and the highlighting of corruption by USA/CIA and Corporate powers, and continuing his fight in disclosing the links between the private corporations and government agencies, Julian Assange has been threatened by high profile USA citizens, and a Grand Jury has been set up in America to try Julian Assange and Wikileaks, for their publications.  For this he is being persecuted and deprived of his right to liberty, basic human rights etc., Six years ago Julian Assange, aware of these extradition plans of America, sought asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy, in London, where he remains.  Julian Assange is now six years within the Ecuadorian Embassy, and has now been detained WITHOUT CHARGES for eight years.

In her appeal for her sons life, Christine Assange says he is in immediate critical danger.  He is now all alone, sick, cut off from all contacts including computer phone mail  and being persecuted in the heart of London. Ms. Assange says‚

‘for the past six years the UK Gov. has refused his request for basic health care, fresh air, sunshine for vitamin D, access to proper medical and dental care. As a result his health has seriously deteriorated.  Doctors  have said the detention conditions are life threatening. In 2016 after in-depth investigations the UN ruled that Julians legal and human rights had been violated on multiple occasions and that he has been illegally detained in 2010 and they ordered his immediate release, safe passage and compensation. The UK Gov has refused to abide by this UN decision’.   

When US Vice President Mike Pence visited Ecuador several months ago, behind scenes, Ecuador done a deal with US to have Julian Assange extradited for life to USA prison. Ecuador are trying to make this acceptable by saying that the US has agreed not to kill him. Now its a propaganda war with the US and UK to reduce his support enough to get away with  it politically. The UK/US extradition act means he could be held in Guantanamo Prison and face torture, 45 years indefinite detention and/or death penalty.

Currently there is a court case in Ecuador fighting the threats to violate his asylum given by the previous President of Ecuador.   There are strict protocol set down by the Ecuadorian Embassy regarding visitors and to date Julian has not managed to have visitors for many months now.

The Ecuadorian Embassy has admitted formal restrictions on Julian Assange  and he is gagged from saying anything about politics, foreign policy human rights abuses, in fact anything critical about any country in the world.

This is political persecution of Julian Assange by high level people and it is punishment for exposing high level corruption when he was editor of Wikileaks.

Christine Assange has appealed to save her sons life, and her appeal deserves an immediate response by us all and the Parties responsible. Mr. Assange is not asking for special treatment, he simply insists that the UK applies standard laws and procedures to him. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention’s opinion confirmed Mr. Assange’s right to liberty and right to protection. A text between Ecuador and the United Kingdom guaranteeing Assange  would not be extradited to the USA,would provide an immediate resolution to the continued illegal and arbitrary detention of Mr. Assange.

Mr. Assange is an Australian Citizen and the Australian Government have a moral and legal responsibility to renew his passport and facilitate his  safe return to  his own country, should he wish to do so. Julian Assange deserves all our admiration and gratitude for his courage and bravery in truth-telling. He is an inspiration to us all, together with his colleagues at Wikileaks, who are paying a high price for informing the public and upholding our right to know when Governments’ violate human rights and international laws.

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Why Cash and Connections Remain Somalia’s Most Popular Currencies

November 9th, 2018 by Abukar Arman

In the moral version of human history – expressed in the Quran, Bible, and Torah – corruption is considered the worst reckless impulse that caused men to fall from grace. It was the betrayal of trust and loyalty for purely selfish gains.

From that perspective, the root cause of corruption is individual moral shutdown, derailment or deficiency. On the other hand, modern-day scrutiny of corruption zooms in on institutions and good governance – professional and technocratic excellence and adherence to policies and procedures.

Much of this article will be dealing with the latter perspective, though no lasting solution to corruption can be found without considering the individual aspect. This could be the reason why corruption is scandalously ever-present in every aspect of the Somali government.

Harmonized Contradictions

Ironically, if a “Corruption Hall of Shame” were inaugurated, the majority of the top 10 list would be Muslim rulers representing nations ranking high in natural resources. Somalia would be leading the list as it has the past decade. This is the direct result of a culture of impunity and a lack of anti-corruption teachings.

However, you would not have heard this from the former UN Secretary General’s Special Representative for Somalia Michael Keating. In his briefing to the Security Council last month, he said that Somalia has “a government with a compelling reform agenda anchored in strong partnership between President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo and Prime Minister Hassan Ali Khayre.” He continued by telling the Council members that “its centerpiece is to make the country creditworthy and accountable as a step to gain full sovereignty, reduce dependency and attract both public and private investments. IMF benchmarks are being met … and debt relief is closer.”

Well, of course. Somalia’s politicians are ready for more loans and dodgy deals such as Soma Oil and Gas, whose former Executive Director for Africa is the country’s current prime minister. Never mind the glaring conflict of interests.

Being instituted a few months after Somalia emerged out of its “transitional period” in 2012, the UN Assistance Mission in Somalia (UNSOM) was established as a central bank of the donor funds and to facilitate the reconciliation process. However, UNSOM gradually morphed into the carrot-dangler that lures all across the political spectrum, the gatekeeper of the political process, and the legitimizer of any selected new government through corruption as long as it does not challenge certain dubious deals such as Soma Oil and Gas and the massive IMF and World Bank debts.

Incidentally, the United Kingdom is Somalia’s penholder at the Security Council. In other words, the U.K. has the most powerful role in all Somalia related issues. It has the exclusive authority to draft resolutions and frame any debate on the country. All three UNSOM leaders were British (guerilla) diplomats, though the latest has South African citizenship.

If I was not blunt enough in the past, let me try again. The international apparatus that was set up to “fix Somalia” is the main hoax for keeping it perpetually broken. As long as there are corrupt or pitifully credulous Somali politicians who are eager to legitimize the current system for their personal gains the nation will remain at the mercy of international and local predators.

As long as there are corrupt or pitifully credulous Somali politicians who are eager to legitimize the current system for their personal gains, the schizophrenia – journey toward sovereignty – will continue and the nation will remain at the mercy of international and local predators.

On Scale

In a 2013 article titled The Corruption Tango I wrote: “While robust functioning of all governmental institutions and policies of checks and balances are crucial to fighting corruption, the most crucial is the branch that enforces such policies.” Five years later, there is not an iota of improvement towards that end. The courts remain scandalously corrupt. Cash, clan, and connections are still the three most popular currencies in Somalia. Yet the current government audaciously claims it is committed to ending corruption.

Can a government that came to power through a manifestly corrupt process of purchasing votes through dark money “eradicate that sick mentality,” as Prime Minster Khayre said in 2017? Of course not, but it can manage perceptions and put on a good show for public relations.

Selective Enforcement and Co-option

Unlike its predecessor, the current government has a clever plan for distraction. They routinely carry out public prosecutions of petty corruption cases with media fanfare and public trumpet blasts while turning a blind eye to various shady deals that involve top officials within the government.

A few mega “corporations” practically own the entire country. Over the past two decades, these companies, especially those in the telecommunication business who are granted exclusive right to use the official gateway and country code without paying licensing fees or taxes, have been investing in keeping business as usual. It is an open secret how these mega companies co-opt key political actors by bringing them on board as stakeholders or through kickbacks to ensure their silence. Meanwhile, the old lady selling tomatoes under the scorching sun is routinely harassed by the municipality to pay her “public service” dues.

This widely accepted, flagrantly unjust clan-based system, known as the 4.5 system, remains the most potent force that maintains the culture of corruption and impunity in Somalia. Certain clans are guaranteed high ministerial positions. Once inside, these ministers are expected to suck as much as they can for their respective clans, themselves or both. Nepotism continues to be the most common practice in all branches of the government.

Defusing Scrutiny

Like the previous governments, the current administration facilitates key Members of Parliament and their family members with foreign medical services, scholarships for their children, and armored vehicles for protection.

Certain elements within the international community not only tolerate this corruption but also cultivate the right environment for it. Selected Somalian ministers may be granted easy access to funds for this or that project, or may be invited to some of those never-ending conferences in foreign cities. In return, these key individuals give those in the international community priceless cover, a patronage system, and a code of silence that sustains a two-way system of corruption.

Most of the Somalian ministers are members of the parliament, and the government is aggressively using whatever is in its disposal to co-opt the parliament. Only days after President Farmajo returned from his Qatar state visit in May, his office or the executive branch offered the Somali parliamentarians a deal none of them could refuse: an early vacation or recess and $5,000 cash per MP – so much for checks and balances.

These actions are to neutralize a restless parliament bent on advancing a “no confidence” motion to oust the current prime minister, whose long affiliation with the predatory Soma Oil and Gas and his draconian policies to silence opposition groups reached a breaking point.

You probably got the hunch now as to why a provisional constitution that fails to address key issues such as the national border has been the law of the land since 2012, why “constitutional reform” conferences are being held almost bi-monthly, and why the Constitutional Court and an Independent Reconciliation Commission are not established.

Corruption does not only erode public trust or causes division and malice. It squanders scarce resources and thus creates an existential threat. Impunity opens the gate for a culture of self-destruction (politically, economically, socially, and spiritually). Therefore, institutional tolerance of a culture of corruption is corruption.

Corruption is dangerous as it directly undermines security by making infiltration and intelligence compromise an easy endeavor. Terrorists have been going through checkpoints and security barricades very easily to reach their soft targets.

When it comes to corruption, there is no such thing as “bottom top” reform. There is only “top bottom.” Both the parliament and the executive branch are well aware of where to start if and when they become serious about fighting corruption. But knowing what kind of funky business it is in, the government remains too thin-skinned when it comes to scrutiny or criticism.

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This article was also published on The Globe Post.

Abukar Arman is a political analyst, writer, and former Somalia Special Envoy to the U.S. Contact him @Abukar_Arman

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India-Pakistan Relations: Nuclear Doctrine, Militarization and Security Dynamics of the Indian Ocean Region

November 9th, 2018 by Anum A. Khan

According to Cold War notion of strategic stability, deterrence will prevail if both countries have second strike capability due to the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). Likewise, deterrence will be fragile if only one state has second strike capability.

The Indian Ocean is a global common and is named after India in geographical sense but New Delhi has lately started self-believing that this Middle Eastern cum Afro-Asian oceanic expanse is India’s backyard. India is the first South Asian littoral State that is introducing nuclear weapons into this Ocean. Like India nuclearized South Asia in 1974, the onus of provoking a response in the Indian Ocean rests with it.

The pursuit and maintenance of nuclear capability has been important for India to project its power, to revise global order and increase its influence and prestige not only in South Asia but also the Indian Ocean rim and beyond. In November 2017, India deployed its second Arihant-class SSBN, the Arighat. Currently, India is also constructing two more Arihant-class submarines. Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has also dedicated GSAT-7 satellite which is used by Indian Navy as a multi-band military communications satellite. Aside from India’s second operational nuclear-powered submarine, it has 13 diesel-electric ones, among which about half are in service. Such Indian ambitions, growing economic and industrial and naval capabilities coupled with canisterization and MIRVing of missiles pose serious challenges not only for Pakistan’s maritime, energy and economic security but also for its conventional and strategic capabilities.

India started gaining experience of operating leased Russian nuclear powered submarines in 1980s. A sea-based nuclear strike force is a route to an assured second-strike capability beyond South Asia. New Delhi will be able to project its strategic capability globally. Major Powers which presently, do not take India as a threat might have a plan B if India shifts to its so called non-alignment policy to version 3.0.

In 2003, India revised its 1999 nuclear doctrine. The draft doctrine of 2003 relied on the principals of No First Use (NFU), Massive Retaliation, and Credible Minimum Deterrence (CMD). Having officially adopted a posture of no first use and assured retaliation, India considered it essential to acquire a capacity for continuous at-sea nuclear deterrence (CASD) to ensure the survivability of its nuclear second-strike capability. Recently, a debate has evolved on the possibility of shift in Indian nuclear doctrine. As India terms its sea-based leg of the nuclear triad as a critical enabler of doctrine of No-First-Use. The potential change in No-First Use policy and adopting the First Use doctrine does not hold logic in this paradigm.

India portrays that it faces a security trilemma due to two-front challenges in terms of security (One being China, other being Pakistan). Furthermore, by camouflaging behind South Asian Naval Nuclear Trilemma, India has plans to continue to enlarge and modernize its SSBN fleet due to alleged threat from China. Such Indian motivations and perceptions vis-à-vis China do not hold ground as Indian military program started before Chinese nuclear tests which were conducted in 1964. In 1963, Homi Bhabha who is considered the father of Indian Nuclear Program wrote to Prime Minister Nehru stating that the Chinese nuclear test will be of no military significance and Chinese possession of a few bombs will not make any difference to the military situation. Also, even when China possesses only 250 nuclear weapons, India has the capability and capacity to produce approximately 2600 nuclear weapons. This capability, if acquired and goes unchecked by the major powers, does not hold ground vis-à-vis regional ambitions. This shows Indian ambitions to opt for blue water navy and global hegemonic ambitions which may pose a serious security threats in future to the U.S. and Russia alike.

India, China and Pakistan security calculus cannot be seen in isolation from the role of the U.S. in the region. U.S. considers India as a major defence partner, providing it a bigger role in the Asia-Pacific. The Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA) between U.S. and India, coupled with Defence Technology and Trade Initiative (DTTI) which permits both India and the U.S. military forces to use each other’s bases and other infrastructure, can antagonize China and affect the Balance of Power in the region. Therefore, this situation can be termed as India, China Pakistan, U.S. Nuclear Quadrangle.

Like Pakistan reluctantly responded to nuclearization of South Asia in 1974, Islamabad has started taking restrained and minimal measures to ensure deterrence stability in the IOR. Pakistan’s navy at present operates five French diesel-electric submarines: three purchased in the 1990s and two dating from the late 1970s. In May 2012, Pakistan established its Naval Strategic Force Command (NSFC) which is the custodian of Pakistan’s sea-based developing capability to strengthen its CMD and maintain strategic stability in the region. In November 2016, Pakistan established a Very Low Frequency (VLF) communication facility that provides a secure military communication link, hence, enhancing the flexibility and reach of operations including the use of submarines. Pakistan also has developed Babur III SLCM (450 Km range).

The completion of nuclear triad by India and its naval nuclear modernization can persuade it to use non-violent compellence against Pakistan in the future. This strategy can include a naval blockade. Thus, the nuclearization of Indian Ocean by India can give it more offensive edge, prompting possibilities of coercive nuclear escalation between India and Pakistan in case of a conflict.

To stabilize deterrence, both adversaries should have an assured second strike capability. India has an unfair advantage of lead time in developing the capability and also has access to foreign technologies. Therefore, it is logical for Pakistan should also take minimal measures to stabilize deterrence.

To end with, it is imperative to address the security issues between India and Pakistan which will be reverberated due to emerging Indian maritime nuclear capabilities. It is high time to reconcile India-Pakistan nuclear deterrence with arms control.

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Anum A Khan is a Senior Research Fellow at Strategic Vision Institute (SVI), Islamabad, and a PhD Scholar at Defense and Strategic Studies Department (DSS), Quaid-e-Azam University Islamabad.

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Selected Articles: 5G Corporate Grail. Microwave Radiation

November 9th, 2018 by Global Research News

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Citizens’ Petition to Lift All Sanctions Against Venezuela Is Rejected by Canadian Parliament

By Nino Pagliccia, November 09, 2018

While Canada chooses to speak of the “dire human rights and humanitarian crisis in Venezuela” – where there is none – it ignores, condones and rather endorses Saudi Arabia in the making of one of the worst humanitarian crisis in Yemen. That is the most vicious double standard that a “democratic” country can demonstrate.

US

None Dare Call It Victory: Analysis of US 2018 Elections

By Dr. Jack Rasmus, November 09, 2018

The failure of Democratic Party leaders’ 2018 strategy to deliver as promised last night should also raise some serious questions about its strategy going forward for 2020. That strategy focused on running women and a few veterans in suburban districts and targeting the independent voter—a Suburbia Strategy—i.e. an approach apparently abandoning the 2008 successful Democratic strategy of targeting millennials, blacks and latinos, and union workers who since 2012 have been steadily reducing their support for Democrats.

Nicaragua and the U.S. Neo-fascist Offensive

By Fabián Escalante Font, November 09, 2018

A police force and army (both formed in the liberation war against the empire) have together provided security for citizens and have systematically combated drug trafficking and gangs in the region. The security they offer doesn’t exist in any other country in the area nor probably in other regions of the continent.

5G Corporate Grail. Microwave Radiation

By Joyce Nelson, November 09, 2018

There’s a lot of hype about 5G, the fifth-generation wireless technology that is being rolled out in various “5G test beds” in major cities including Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, New York, and Los Angeles. But it’s hard to see why we should be excited. Proponents talk about the facilitation of driverless vehicles and car-to-car “talk,” better Virtual Reality equipment, and, of course, “The Internet of Things” (IoT) – the holy grail of Big Tech that is just vague enough to sound sort of promising.

What is the Significance of the Reopening of the UAE Embassy in Damascus. Syria’s “Pivot” towards “Reconciliation” with Saudi Arabia?

By Andrew Korybko, November 08, 2018

It would be foolish to believe that the uber-wealthy UAE needs war-torn Syria more than the reverse, so the reported reopening of the Emirati Embassy more than likely signals a significant change in policy on Damascus’ behalf and not Abu Dhabi’s, the ramifications of which could be far-reaching for the entire region and especially Iran.

US institutions

The CIA’s Latest Greatest Failure

By Philip Giraldi, November 08, 2018

Government agencies that are skilled at invading nearly everyone’s privacy worldwide are sometimes totally inept at keeping their own internal communications secure. The problem is particularly acute for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which must maintain secure contact with thousands of foreign agents scattered all over the world.

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Video: Syrian Forces Freed All Hostages Captured by ISIS in Al-Suwayda

November 9th, 2018 by South Front

On November 8, the Syrian Special Forces freed all hostages, who had been captured by ISIS in eastern al-Suwayda and then held in eastern Homs, the Syrian state media reported. According to the report, the operation took place in the area of Hamimah east of Palmyra, where Syrian troops eliminated a group of ISIS terrorists and feed the hostages.

The SANA provided no further details. However, Syrian pro-government activists believe that Russia Special Forces may have played own role in the operation.

ISIS captured civilians in a brutal attack on the government-held area on July 25. Since then, the Damascus government had been struggling to rescue the hostages and even attempted to strike a deal on this issue with the terrorist group in October. However, only 6 civilians were saved this way. The military option appeared to be more effective.

Earlier this week, troops of the Russian Special Operations Forces reportedly arrived to the eastern part of al-Suwayda province in order to support the Syrian Army operation against ISIS in the al-Safa area.

A day earlier, Syrian pro-government sources reported that the elite 4th Division had been redeployed from northwestern Syria to positions around al-Safa. Several heavy rocket launchers were also deployed near the ISIS-held area. A source in the Syrian Army told SouthFront that government troops are preparing to launch a new attack on ISIS in al-Safa in the nearest future.

Since late July, the army has carried out several attempts to eliminate the ISIS pocket in the area, but a part of the pocket has remained in ISIS hands. Now, when the hostages are freed and the Russian military advisers are deployed ISIS is in much more complicated situation.

On November 8, the US-led coalition repelled an ISIS attempt to attack its military garrison near the al-Tanak oil field in the province of Deir Ezzor, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported. The coalition reportedly eliminated over 20 ISIS members and 7 vehicles.

The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) also deployed additional troops to boost  security in the area.

Previously, the SDF recaptured a number of positions which it had lost to ISIS near the Hajin pocket in the Euphrates Valley. However, the situation in the area remains tense because the SDF is conducting no offensive operations against ISIS there now. The reason is Turkish strikes on SDF positions as well as Ankara’s threats to kick off a large-scale military operation against the Kurdish-dominated group in northern Syria.

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UK Government Goes Full Orwellian. DNA, Fingerprint, Face, Voice: Biometric Data for Every Single Citizen in the UK

November 9th, 2018 by True Publica

We’ve been warning about this moment since the first day TruePublica went online. We said that the government would eventually take the biometric data of every single citizen living in Britain and use it for nefarious reasons.  DNA, fingerprint, face, and even voice data will be included. But that’s not all.

The excuse to be used, as ever, will be national security or terrorism, despite the huge fall in fatalities from terrorism and terror-related incidents since the 1970s.

Apart from crime-fighting, the Home Office also proposes in its long-awaited report that it will use the centralized database for vetting migrants on the streets and borders of Britain.

Not for the first time, civil rights groups argue that systems such as face recognition is faulty, dubiously legal, and collected without public consent. The outcry over Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and the EU referendum should, if nothing else, confirm that bulk data collection, used without either public debate or a legal basis is emphatically against our civil liberties.

However, the legality of the creation of a centralised biometric database will not stop a government who have been repeatedly caught breaking the law when it comes to privacy and data collection. Police, immigration, and passport agencies already collect DNA, face, and fingerprint data. On the latter, police forces across Britain now have fingerprint scanners on the streets of Britain with officers providing no more than a promise that fingerprint data taken will be erased if the person stopped is innocent of any crime.

The government’s face database already has 12.5 million people – or so it has admitted to. The Home Office, embroiled in all sorts of privacy and surveillance legal cases caused a scandal last April when an official said it would simply be too expensive to remove innocent people from its criminal face databases of mugshots.

Without proper, enforcible regulation that can be fully scrutinised by civil society, there are many opportunities for the misuse of biometric data. It means nothing when the Home Office says its collection of biometric data will be “lawful,” when it is found by the highest courts in both Britain and the EU of breaking basic surveillance and data protection laws. And what laws there are, remain deliberately ambiguous on how they will ethically collect, store, or share biometric data.

Without any obstacles put in its way, the Home Office has essentially granted itself the right to end anonymity of any type to all the people of Britain.

Big Brother Watch recently released a report detailing a staggering 90% false positive rate for its face recognition systems and then went on to describe the Home Office defence of these systems – “misleading, incompetent and authoritarian.”

The fact that on Remembrance Sunday 2017, the Metropolitan Police used automated facial recognition to find so-called ‘fixated individuals’ – people not suspected of any crime, but who might be suffering mental health issues, should be a wake-up call for us all.

TruePublica has just reported on one local authority in Thurrock using databases and algorithms to deliver public services. More particularly it is surveilling its own systems and citizens to pinpoint and target certain families, vulnerable people, the homeless and anti-social behaviour. The system is called a “predictive modelling platform” and was only revealed through a freedom of information request by a local journalist.

Council data from housing, education, social care, benefits and debt all contribute to the creation of a profile that is used to predict whether a person is at risk or what services is provided. The profiles then assign people a score that indicates whether they need attention from social services. That risk score is stored in a centre where identifiable details are replaced with artificial ones, a process known as pseudonymised data.

The warning we gave was that it wouldn’t be that long when all citizens will be given such scores by local councils, local authorities, the police and various other government agencies. The speed of implementation has surprised even us though. One should not forget that there are 78 high profile government agencies and a further 401 public bodies closely associated with them.

To be fair to Thurrock council the system has become so embedded within their social services system that it is responsible for 100 per cent of referrals to the Troubled Family programme, a government-led scheme aimed at early social work intervention. The council also claims it has an 80 per cent success rate in predicting children who are at risk and should enter safeguarding. It does not say how the system failed the other 20 per cent or how it affected them.

However, there is a dark side to this. TruePublica warned two years ago that social scoring systems were on the way. We wrote in 2016 and then again in early 2017 as a result of an in-depth report by Civil Society Futures regarding a new wave of surveillance:

“Citizens are increasingly categorised and profiled according to data assemblages, for example through data scores or by social credit scores, as developed in China. The purpose of such scores is to predict future behaviour and allocate resources and eligibility for services (or punishment) accordingly. In other words, rules will be set for citizens to live by through data and algorithms.”

The government is now building, without debate such a system for all of its agencies to access and input. Once complete the next step will be to ‘manage’ population behaviour through social credit scores.

Current common forms of biometric data collection include – fingerprint templates, iris and retina templates, voiceprint, 2D or 3D facial structure map, hand and/or finger geometry map, vein recognition template, gait analysis map, blood DNA profiles, behavioural biometric profiles and others.

These days gathering biometric data generally requires the cooperation (or coercion) of the subject: for your iris to get into a database, you have to let someone take a close-up photograph of your eyeball. That is no longer the case. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in the USA have perfected a camera that can take rapid-fire, database-quality iris scans of every person in a crowd from a distance of 10 meters. Consent is not required otherwise the technology would be worthless if it did.

In the meantime, biometric data will not be secure. It never can be, especially in the hands of the government. That’s because the hacking industry, already costing a mind-blowing $1.6 trillion annually across the world is expected to reach $2.1 trillion in just 3 months time. That’s the sum spent fighting off cyber-crime, not the sum spent of conducting it.

Identity theft directly affected 174,523 individuals in Britain last year – an increase of 125 per cent in little more than ten years. The authorities have simply been unable to stop this inescapable rise. Recent research has found that fraudsters operating on the dark web can buy a person’s entire identity, everything, the lot, for just £820. At that point your bank accounts are emptied, credit cards maxxed out – the horrendous list goes on. £4.6 billion was stolen in cyber-crime from Brits last year.

Would a new form of identity theft develop with biometric data added to the armoury of criminals?

At the very least, the government should restrict the collation of different types of biometric data into a single database. And it should certainly require that all biometric data be stored in the most secure manner possible. Currently, it is not proposing either as the database will be available to thousands of governments workers and hundreds of technology contractors.

And how easy is that theft going to be? Edward Snowden, a third-party contractor for the NSA stole 58,000 files from GCHQ sitting at his desk in Hawaii and then calmly flew off to Moscow for protection against the USA/UK. If GCHQ can have such sensitive information so easily stolen, that they claim is of national security, what guarantees can the government give that your biometric data will be safe? The short answer – is they can’t.

BigBrotherWatch Director Silkie Carlo said:

“The Government’s biometrics strategy is a major disappointment. After five years of waiting, it reads like a late piece of homework with a remarkable lack of any strategy.

While Big Brother Watch and others are doing serious work to analyse the rights impact of the growing use of biometrics, the Home Office appears to lack either the will or competence to take the issues seriously. For a government that is building some of the biggest biometric databases in the world, this is alarming.

Meanwhile, the Met today is surveilling Londoners with facial recognition cameras that they have no legal basis to even use. The situation is disastrously out of control.”

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Ukraine-Russia Tensions Rise in Church Row. The Canonical Authority of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Moscow Patriarchate (MP)

November 9th, 2018 by Dmitry Babich

The Istanbul-based Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, an authority completely outside Ukraine, on Oct. 11 stripped away the canonical authority of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church—Moscow Patriarchate (MP), sparking a crisis with Russia.

The 1030-year old church is headed by Patriarch Kirill in Russia and the Russian church responded by severing ties to the Istanbul patriarch. Tensions have now been raised even further in the crisis between Ukraine and Russia that erupted after the U.S.-backed 2014 coup in Kiev that overthrew an elected president who tilted towards Moscow.

In Washington, the events were reported in The Washington Post as part of Ukraine’s struggle to “withdraw from Moscow’s control.” In Europe, Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini made the sober warning in the Austrian newspaper Der Standard that the religious interference in Ukraine could provoke a war.

Bartholomew’s action is seen as a first step to giving full autonomy, known as “autocephaly” in the Orthodox faith, to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Kiev Patriarchate (KP), a heretical split-off that was created only in 1992 just after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Ukraine’s independence.

The KP church is headed by a self-styled leader named Mikhail Denisenko, who goes by the name Patriach Filaret. He is a defrocked former bishop in the Moscow Patriarchate of Ukraine.

The MP’s lineage goes back to the tenth century Christian conversion of all the people of Kievan Rus, the proto-state that was precursor to the nations of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Its authority in Ukraine was established in 1686 by the same Constantinople Ecumenical Patriarchate.

Bartholomew reversed his seat’s own 332-year-old decision. While the Ecumenical Patriarch is known as “the first among equals,” among Orthodoxy’s 14 autocephalic churches, he has no authority to rule over them. Unlike Roman Catholicism, Orthodoxy has no single church authority that can impose decisions over all the others.

The 14 churches are supposed to be independent of governments. But in Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, the anti-Russian president installed after the coup, and other government forces, are using the ruling to further erode Russian influence.

Members of the Moscow church in Ukraine have already been the targets of violent assaults by thugs trying to disrupt worship services, and such conflict is being fueled by politicians’ rhetoric.

In October, when Constantinople lifted Denisenko’s ex-communication, Poroshenko called the decision “a victory of good over evil, light over darkness.” He also said that recognition of the renegade Ukraine church would mean severing all links to Orthodox Russia and its “Moscow demons,” reported gazeta.ru.

Bartholomew’s decision didn’t come out of thin air, and the geopolitical implications are clear: breaking Russia’s ties to the Ukrainian people. This was demanded by Poroshenko, and supported by Denisenko, whose church has never been recognized by the 14 other churches.

On Oct. 31, Denisenko made his view clear in a statement to RFE/RL. “We will be striving to have a single Orthodox Church in Ukraine and to make sure that the Russian [Orthodox] Church is not hiding under the Ukrainian name while, in essence, it is Russian,” he said.

Moscow Responds

“Constantinople’s decision is aimed at destroying unity,” Kirill explained, as reported in Russian language media.

“We can’t accept it. That is why our Holy Synod took the decision to stop eucharistic communication with the Constantinople Patriarchate.” He added that the attack against the Orthodox in Ukraine “was having not only a political, but also a mystical dimension.”

He called for faithfulness to the canonical church, the Moscow Patriarchate, and says he’s “ready to go anywhere and talk to anyone” to prevent the schism among the Orthodox inside Ukraine and remove barriers separating the faithful in the two countries.

The break in eucharistic communication means that the priests of the two patriarchates won’t be able to hold church services together.

While Western media have played the break as an aggressive act by Moscow, the reality is more complex. The Russian Orthodox Church is the largest congregation among the approximately 300 million Eastern Orthodox Christians, and Kirill went to Istanbul to meet the Ecumenical Patriarch in August to try to avert any actions that would harm the unity.

Metropolitan Hilarion, chief spokesman on questions of schism and unity for the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow, explained, “For a church with more than 1000 years of history and ancient monasteries of some 500 to 900 years of age, the perspective of merging with some unrecognized entities, formed 20 years ago, is unacceptable.”

On October 31, Russian President Vladimir Putin referred to the action against the Ukrainian church in remarks to the World Congress of Russian Compatriots, an organization uniting people of Russian origin from all over the world.

“Politicking in such a sensitive sphere as religion has always led to grave consequences, first and foremost for the people who got involved in this politicking,” he said. He also referenced a “war” on Russian historical monuments by some forces in Ukraine.

Washington’s Hand

In the past year, discussions were held by U.S. officials with Poroshenko and Denisenko. Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback, and Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Wess Mitchell met with Denisenko in September. Then on Oct. 17, a press release in the name of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called for religion in Ukraine to be “without outside interference.”

That statement came four days after Bartholomew recognized the breakaway Ukrainian church.

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Dmitry Babich is a multilingual Russian journalist and political commentator. Born in 1970 in Moscow, graduated from Moscow State University (department of journalism) in 1992. Dmitri worked for Russian newspapers, such as Komsomolskaya Pravda and The Moscow News (as the head of the foreign department). Dmitri covered the Chechen war as a television reporter for TV6 channel from 1995 to 1997. Since 2003 he has worked for RIA Novosti, RT, and Russia Profile. Dmitry is a frequent guest on the BBC, Al Jazeera, Sky News and Press TV. 

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Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes

November 9th, 2018 by Bryant Brown

Most of us know little about John Maynard Keynes and although he lived a century ago, he continues to affect our lives. This book about him is written in a style that is as formal as the hyphenated name of the author is stuffy! Yet, the book is a delight to read. Extensive research helps to reveal a complex interesting and dedicated person. It’s a timely book because the economics of Keynes have once again become favorable after some decades of being disparaged and ignored.

Most of us have heard of Keynes and his economics. What we don’t know is much about the man, about the thinking behind the ideas, how they became popular, got into favor, were rejected for decades, then reborn. Milton Freedman’s flawed ideas replaced Keynes for decades; until the economic collapse of 2008 and then Keynes was resurrected into favor again. Throughout, we have known little about the life, the character and the values of the man.

Let’s start with the basics; he was born in 1883 into an upper middle-class English family in Cambridge. Both of his parents were Cambridge graduates. His dad, like Adam Smith a century before him, lectured in both economics and moral philosophy. Mom was active in the local community eventually becoming the Mayor of Cambridge in 1932 when she was 70. Keynes was raised with a belief nurtured by society at that time, that a career in the civil service was a good and honorable profession.  That image of the decency, honor and usefulness of civil service work has been much maligned in recent decades, but that was he aspired to do. Thus, the first of the seven lives ascribed to him in the book’s title; the altruist!

His second life was as that of a boy prodigy. He did his upper school at Eton, an old private residential school and then on to King’s College Cambridge. For both he received scholarships. He graduated with a BA in mathematics in 1902 and stayed around campus for two more years, debating and studying philosophy and taking some economics lectures. In 1905 he passed the civil service exams. For a while he worked both in the Government and in Cambridge alternating his time between the government’s India office in London … to working on campus on probability theory. In the First War, the government called on him for help planning the financing for it.

This led to his third live, that as an official. He joined the Treasury in 1915 where he managed Britain’s credit arrangements during the war. For this he was awarded honours by the king and sent as the Treasuries representative to the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. This experience, he summarized in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace in which he rightly predicted that the unfair economic penalties imposed on Germany would create the pressure for World War Two.

With this publication, he was starting to live his forth life, as a public figure. In the chapter ‘Public Man’, Davenport-Hines adds his explanation of his task as author; he sought to delineate ‘Keynes’s frame of mind as an economist; his disposition, his reactions to events, his partisan loyalties, his second thoughts and the inducements that he offered as he tried to educate opinion and alter policy.’ Keynes for his part embraced his public role and sought to use his reputation to change public opinion to views he thought were correct.

Keynes kept his fifth role just under the radar; lover. The book has a lot of detail on a lot of lovers over the years, primarily male. There was so much detail in the manuscript that the publisher asked the author to amend it and include a little less sex, a request authors today don’t usually get! In the end Keynes met and married a Russian ballerina, Lydia Lopokova and they stayed together for life.

Life number six was as a connoisseur which was so apt for a Cambridge based person. There, there was a culture shared by the biographer; life was based on the Aristotelian ideal in which people worked to live, not lived to work! Keynes thought the pursuit of money was a sickness. Instead he opted for and lived a more balanced life; he collected books and art; he enjoyed and supported opera, theatre and ballet.

The last of the seven lives was as an envoy, a diplomat and ambassador for Britain, a role that grew from his minor bit in the first World War and became increasingly meaningful. In March of 1946 he attended his last function which was on Wilmington Island, Savannah where details on the establishment of the International Monetary Fund were being worked out. Although at the height of his powers it did not go his way (as Bretton Woods earlier had not gone his way). His way was to create a universally agreeable international fund; the United States had the power, had different self-serving plans and prevailed.

Davenport-Hines sums up Keynes life; ‘…no economist had left such footprints on policy. He was peerless in developing technical theory, explaining it to doubters and apply in it to practical business. He had, too, done more than anyone to secure state funding for the arts …. (and) in doing so, he had upheld civilized values in a decade of lowest barbarism. ‘

Keynes views steadily lost popularity to the ideas of Friedrich Hayek in the nineteen sixties, the Chicago School of economics and Milton Friedman in the seventies and eighties, and then to the much-eulogized practices of Alan Greenspan who took center stage for almost twenty years ending in 2006. In 2008 the house of cards the three of them created, collapsed.

It was this crash that brought a resurgence of interest in John Maynard Keynes and indeed of Karl Marx!

The most significant economic lesson for us from Keynes is that the unregulated free market is not stable. Not only that, but worse; when it goes into recession, its natural tendency is to stay there. Without public action, it will not recover. Thus, to fix this built in weakness of capitalisms, government intervention is essential; spend in recession and tax that spending back in good times. Keynes believed in balanced budgets but balanced in the longer run.

It is essential for the government to intervene in the economy. Keynes taught us why. The years 2007 and 2008, if we paid attention; proved it. Keynes dedicated himself to the common good, the welfare of everyone and he felt our economic system should do the same. That is not a common thought in the world of today.

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Yemeni War Deaths Underestimated by Five to One

November 9th, 2018 by Nicolas J. S. Davies

In April, I made new estimates of the death toll in America’s post-2001 wars in a three-part Consortium News report. I estimated that these wars have now killed several million people.  I explained that widely reported but much lower estimates of the numbers of combatants and civilians killed were likely to be only one fifth to one twentieth of the true numbers of people killed in U.S. war zones. Now one of the NGOs responsible for understating war deaths in Yemen has acknowledged that it was underestimating them by at least five to one, as I suggested in my report.

One of the sources I examined for my report was a U.K.-based NGO named ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project), which has compiled counts of war deaths in Libya, Somalia and Yemen.  At that time, ACLED estimated that about 10,000 people had been killed in the war in Yemen, about the same number as the WHO (World Health Organization), whose surveys are regularly cited as estimates of war deaths in Yemen by UN agencies and the world’s media.  Now ACLED estimates the true number of people killed in Yemen is probably between 70,000 and 80,000.

ACLED’s estimates do not include the thousands of Yemenis who have died from the indirect causes of the war, such as starvation, malnutrition and preventable diseases like diphtheria and cholera. UNICEF reported in December 2016 that a child was dying every ten minutes in Yemen, and the humanitarian crisis has only worsened since then, so the total of all deaths caused directly and indirectly by the war must by now number in the hundreds of thousands.

Another NGO, the Yemen Data Project, revealed in September 2016 that at least a third of Saudi-led air-strikes, many of which are conducted by U.S.-built and U.S.-refueled warplanes using U.S.-made bombs, were hitting hospitals, schools, markets, mosques and other civilian targets. This has left at least half the hospitals and health facilities in Yemen damaged or destroyed, hardly able to treat the casualties of the war or serve their communities, let alone to compile meaningful figures for the WHO’s surveys.

In any case, even comprehensive surveys of fully functioning hospitals would only capture a fraction of the violent deaths in a war-torn country like Yemen, where most of those killed in the war do not die in hospitals. And yet the UN and the world’s media have continued to cite the WHO surveys as reliable estimates of the total number of people killed in Yemen.

The reason I claimed that such estimates of civilian deaths in U.S. war zones were likely to be so dramatically and tragically wrong was because that is what epidemiologists have found whenever they have conducted serious mortality studies based on well-established statistical principles in war zones around the world.

Epidemiologists recently used some of the same techniques to estimate that about 3,000 people died as a result of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. The results of studies in war-ravaged Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have been widely cited by Western political leaders and the Western media with no hint of controversy.

When some of the very same public health experts who had worked in Rwanda and the DRC used the same methods to estimate how many people had been killed as a result of the U.S. and U.K.’s invasion and occupation of Iraq in two studies published in the Lancet medical journal in 2004 and 2006, they found that about 600,000 people had been killed in the first three years of war and occupation.

Wide acceptance of these results would have been a geopolitical disaster for the U.S. and U.K. governments, and would have further discredited the Western media who had acted as cheerleaders for the invasion of Iraq and were still blaming the Iraqi victims of the illegal invasion of their country for the violence and chaos of the occupation.  So, even though the U.K. Ministry of Defence’s Chief Scientific Advisor described the Lancet studies’ design as “robust” and their methods as “close to best practice,” and British officials admitted privately that they were “likely to be right,” the U.S. and U.K. governments launched a concerted campaign to “rubbish” them.

In 2005, as American and British officials and their acolytes in the corporate media “rubbished” his work, Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health (now at Columbia), the lead author of the 2004 study, told the U.K. media watchdog Medialens, “It is odd that the logic of epidemiology embraced by the press every day regarding new drugs or health risks somehow changes when the mechanism of death is their armed forces.”

Roberts was right that this was odd, in the sense that there was no legitimate scientific basis for the objections being raised to his work and its results. But it was not so odd that embattled political leaders would use all the tools at their disposal to try to salvage their careers and reputations, and to preserve the U.S. and U.K.’s future freedom of action to destroy countries that stood in their way on the world stage.

By 2005, most Western journalists in Iraq were hunkered down in Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, reporting mainly from the CENTCOM briefing room.  If they ventured out, they were embedded with U.S. forces traveling by helicopter or armored convoy between fortified U.S. bases. Dahr Jamail was one of a few incredibly brave “unembedded” American reporters in the real Iraq, Beyond the Green Zone, as he named his book about his time there.  Dahr told me he thought the true number of Iraqis being killed might well be even higher than the Lancet studies’ estimates, and that it was certainly not much lower as the Western propaganda machine insisted.

Unlike Western governments and the Western media over Iraq, and UN agencies and the same Western media over Afghanistan and Yemen, ACLED does not defend its previous misleadingly inadequate estimates of war deaths in Yemen. Instead, it is conducting a thorough review of its sources to come up with a more realistic estimate of how many people have been killed. Working back from the present as far as January 2016, it now estimates that 56,000 people have been killed since then.

Andrea Carboni of ACLED told Patrick Cockburn of the Independent newspaper in the U.K. that he believes ACLED’s estimate of the number killed in 3-1/2 years of war on Yemen will be between 70,000 and 80,000 once it has finished reviewing its sources back to March 2015, when Saudi Arabia, the U.S. and their allies launched this horrific war.

But the true number of people killed in Yemen is inevitably even higher than ACLED’s revised estimate.  As I explained in my Consortium News report, no such effort to count the dead by reviewing media reports, records from hospitals and other “passive” sources, no matter how thoroughly, can ever fully count the dead amid the widespread violence and chaos of a country ravaged by war.

This is why epidemiologists have developed statistical techniques to produce more accurate estimates of how many people have really been killed in war zones around the world.   The world is still waiting for that kind of genuine accounting of the true human cost of the Saudi-U.S. war on Yemen and, indeed, of all America’s post-9/11 wars.

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Nicolas J S Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq and of the chapter on “Obama At War” in Grading the 44th President: A Report Card on Barack Obama’s First Term as a Progressive Leader.

Featured image is from Hugh Macleod / IRIN/Creative Commons

Millions in Yemen Are Starving and UK, US and France Are ‘Behind This’: Oxfam Representative

November 9th, 2018 by RT News

The US, UK, and French governments are behind millions of people starving in Yemen because they are “supporting this war,” an Oxfam representative told RT, urging London to stop beefing up Saudi Arabia’s military.

“We have 14 million people starving,” Richard Stanforth, Oxfam UK’s regional policy officer for the Middle East, said.

British, French, American governments are all behind this, they are all supporting this war.

Stanforth blamed the British government in particular, saying that London should stop its arms sales to Saudi Arabia, which is accaused of targeting food supplies and even no-strike locations in Yemen.

“We’ve seen attacks on water infrastructure, on hospitals, warehouses of food. This pattern is continuing. Certainly, it’s the airstrikes that are killing most civilians,” he said.

Stanforth says Riyadh’s bombing is not sparing humanitarian sites either… including that of Oxfam. Saudi Arabia is “aware of many of these locations” and along with the UAE, it is still hitting them, he added.

Western states have been widely criticized by rights groups for their continued arms sales to Riyadh. However, turning the tide on multibillion-dollar deals may not be so easy.

Following the killing of exiled Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, US President Donald Trump issued strong words to Riyadh. He was not prepared, however, to cancel a $400 billion arms deal, saying there are other ways to “punish” America’s Middle East ally.

Trump’s position was echoed by the attitude of Canadian PM Justin Trudeau, who said it is “very difficult” (or… costly, to be precise) to get out of the arms deals with Saudi Arabia.

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Netanyahu Approves Death Penalty Targeting Palestinian Prisoners

November 9th, 2018 by Ace Hoffman

The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, approved passing a bill into law that allows execution of Palestinian prisoners, Hebrew-language news sites reported on Monday.Netanyahu reportedly gave the green light, on Sunday, to members of his Likud policitical party to support the law on the execution of Palestinian prisoners, a law introduced in 2017 by the Yisrael Beiteinu party, which is headed by the Israeli Defense Minister, Avigdor Lieberman. 

At the time, Lieberman said that the bill would be a powerful deterrent to Palestinians,

“We must not allow terrorists to know that after a murder they have committed, they will sit in prison, enjoy the conditions and may be released in the future.”

Despite that Israel currently has a law allowing death penalty, it has not been carried out since 1962 when the Jewish state executed Nazi SS officer Adolf Eichmann.However, the current law allows Israeli military courts to only hand down the death penalty if a panel of three judges impose a unanimous decision.The proposed bill would remove this condition which would allow Israeli civilian and military courts to carry out executions against Palestinians convicted of murder. In addition, it would require military courts to carry out executions by a majority of only two judges instead of full consensus by all judges.

Many Palestinian politicians and human rights activists have already denounced the bill and expressed concern that it will give Israel “legal cover to target Palestinians,” and argued that although it does not define a specific group, it is “intended mainly for the Palestinian people.”The controversial bill had previously passed its preliminary vote in January with 52 votes in favor and 49 opposing.

According to prisoners rights group Addameer, currently there are 5,640 Palestinian prisoners currently being held in Israeli prisons, of whom 465 are in administrative detention, 53 are female prisoners, 270 are child prisoners, and 50 are under the age of 16.

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Featured image is from Ma’an News Agency.