Global Research

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The USA and the European Union invested in the past years billions of dollars and euros in brain research. Perfect maps of the brain were developed thanks to this research, including the areas of the brain that control different body organ activity, and higher brain functions such as where speech and thought are taking place. The information inside of the brain is transfered by frequency and number of nervous impulses. Today it is well known which frequencies correspond to those different activities in the brain. So the brain, just like computers, functions in a digital way. It is now so much easier to understand or control the brain with computers.

Doctor Sarah Lisanby from the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland can use those brain maps to make different parts of the human body move by the magnetic stimulation of its brain even against his own will (see this). To do this, she is using a magnetic coil which pulsates a magnetic field in a specific frequency, corresponding to the frequency of the activity of neurons in the brain spot, which controls the movements of a specific body part. The magnetic field can produce electric currents in the neurons, responsible for those movements, across the skull.

The brain research financed by the USA and the European Union produced a discovery of the new technology of the control of the activity of the human brain. It is called optogenetics and it is using light. To make this work, it is necessary to introduce special proteins into neurons in the brain by means of special viruses.

Then the light, blinking in the brain in a specific frequency will produce the same neuronal activity as normal neuronal activity in the brain would produce.

Mice which are used to experiment with this new technology, can be made to run in circles (see this) or their psyche can be manipulated. Scientists managed to produce false memories of fear in the mice and then delete them, and as well they were able to turn their positive emotional memories into a negative ones and vice versa (see this and this).

At the University in Berkeley this technology is now being perfected still with the use of mice. The research, that should follow, should make it possible to edit human sensations, paste images people have never seen into their brains, or insert non-existent scents into their memories. To achieve this the scientists are using computer-generated holographic projections into the brains of mice and in this way activate or suppress ultimately thousands of neurons at once in frequencies simulating the neurons natural activities. They believe they will manage to read the brain activity “online” and decide about its reactions, which would help people with neurological damages caused by degenerative diseases or injuries. (See this) If the scientists would not have to make neurons to react to light and implant a source of light into the brain, they would work on a method on how to control the human brain and human behavior at a distance.

But in the 30’s of the past century research already began on the effects of microwaves inside of the human brain. In 1974 the experiment was published, where pronounced numbers from 1 to 9 were tramsitted into the brain of a subject of experiment by means of pulsed microwaves and he could understand them. In this experiment the pronounced number must have been converted into the microwave pulses in frequencies corresponding to the normal nervous activity during the perception of words (see this, this). The assertion that at present time it is impossible to control the activity of the human nervous system at a distance is made questionable in a principal way by this experiment.

Thanks to the knowledge of specific locations of different centers in the brain and frequencies of the neuronal activity in them the teams of physicians are today capable to help many people, who were in the past, for different reasons, unable to participate in a normal life. Today there exist prosthesis, which are controlled directly from the brain centers that normally control the movement of the limbs (see this) and enable people, who lost them, to use the prosthesis in a way similar to the way normal people use their limbs. People, who were paralyzed and completely separated from communication with the world, have been reconnected to the world by this modern neuroscience. In 2006 scientists placed into the brain of a completely paralyzed man an implant, which transfered the activity of his brain into different devices and enabled him to open his e-mail box, control his TV set and robotic arm. Other paralyzed people were able to search on the Internet, play computer games, and drive their electrical wheelchairs (see this) .

The computers were taught to understand the neuronal activity so much that nowadays they are capable of using the activity of our brain to reproduce our perceptions. Canadian scientists demonstrated an experiment, where the computer could interpret the electroencephalographical recordings from the brain to produce a painting of a face that the subject of experiment was perceiving (see this).

In the opposite way the data, processed by the computer in the way that will make them intelligible for the nervous system, can be transmitted into the brain and there produce a new reality. When an implant is placed in the brain and connected to a camera, placed on spectacles, for people whose photoreceptors in their retina stopped working, the sight is at least partially restored. In this case the camera on the spectacles is transmitting into the implant light frequencies and the implant re-transmits them in frequencies which „understand“ the neurons processing the visual perceptions (see this).

Those discoveries are already making their way into the industry. The Japanese car maker Nissan was at the beginning of this year testing a cap with electrodes reading the brain activity and communicating it to the car driving system. In this way the car is capable to start breaking by 0.2 to 0.5 second faster then the driver could be able to do it. (See this and this)

In 2014 some chinese corporations ordered their employees to wear caps, recording their brain activity and transmitting it to the offices of their bosses. From the data, sent to their offices, the bosses can find out about the emotional state of their employees – if they became angry, began to feel fear or became sad. With drivers of high speed trains the caps verify whether they are concentrated and not falling asleep. The information collected by bosses in this way resulted in some employees being sent home for one day to relax (see this).

Scientists believe that they will manage to increase the distance between brains and devices, which are collecting the activity of the brain or controlling it. In 2013 Italian scientists used electrodes and internet to interconnect brains. In this way they realized extrasonsorial communication between several couples of volunteers, when their brain frequencies synchronized their activities at large distances. In one experiment they made the hand of a distant volunteer press a key and in another one they made a person percieve light flashes, which were actually being percieved by someone else.

The scientists then speculated, that the same interconnection of two brains could be achieved by means of quantum entanglement. In this concept of quantum physics two systems may be non-locally connected and imitate their reactions at whatever distance. The authors said: „For example in the Generalized Quantum Theory [5,6], entanglement can be expected to occur if descriptions of the system that pertain to the whole system are complementary to descriptions of parts of the system. In this case the individual elements within the system which are described by variables complementary to the variable describing the whole system, are non-locally correlated.

Reasoning by analogy, we hypothesized the possibility of entangling two minds, and consequently two brains as complementary parts of a single system and studying their interactions at distance without any classical connections (see this and this).

This year the historian Juval Noah Harari was invited to deliver a speech at the World economic Forum in Davos. The editor of the British Daily Financial Times stressed, when introducing him, that it is not usual to invite a historian to speak to the world’s most important economists and politicians. Juval Noah Harari warned in his speech against the rise of new totality, based on the access to the human brain. He said:

“Once we have algorithms that can understand you better than you understand yoruself, they could predict my desires, manipulate my feelings and even make decisions on my behalf. And if we are not careful the outcome can be the rise of digital dictatorships. In the 21st century we may be enslaved under digital dictatorships”.

In a similar way a Stanford University researcher in neurology and Dolby Labs’ chief scientist Poppy Crum warned at the conference in Las Vegas:

“Your devices will know more about you than you will. I believe we need to think about how [this data] could be used”. (See this)

In California scientists developed a device, which can register the brain waves and, using analysis, find among them consonants and vowels and in this way transform our thoughts to words. A paralyzed man could write in this way without using a keyboard and even, with the help of synthetizer, he could talk. At present time the accuracy of the device reached 90%. Scientists believe that within five years they will manage to develop a smart phone, to which their device could be connected. Naturally the device would also disclose secret thoughts of a paralyzed man or woman (See this and this).

As a matter of fact the Apple and Samsung companies have already developed prototypes of necessary electroencephalographical equipment and they expect that the direct connection with brains will gradually replace computer keyboards, touch screens, mice, and voice orders as well. (See this)

In 2013 scientists in the USA could infer from the brain activity the political views of people and distinguish democrats from republicans and in 2016 scientists used transcranial magnetic stimulation to make subjects of experiment more positive towards criticism to their country, than the participants whose brains were unaffected. (See this)

When people open their brains up to access to computers and smart phones, it will be no trouble for intelligence agencies to collect data from their brains and with no big trouble they will find as well the ways how to control and manipulate the activity of citizen’s brains in a way to make them fit the needs of governments.

In April 2017 the neuroethicist at the University of Basel Marcello Ienca and Roberto Andorno, a human rights lawyer at the University of Zurich, writing in the journal Life Sciences, Society and Policy, published the article “Toward new human rights in the age of neuroscience and neurotechnology” (See this and this) where they called for the creation of legislation which would protect human right to freedom and other human rights from the abuse of technologies opening access to the human brain. In the article they wrote that

“the mind is a kind of last refuge of personal freedom and self-determination” and “At present, no specific legal or technical safeguard protects brain data from being subject to the same data-mining and privacy intruding measures as other types of information“.

In their article they noted that access to the human brain also could be used for advertisement and that some companies like Google, Disney, CBS and Frito-Lay already use services of neuromarketing companies for measurements of customer preferences and impact of their advertisement on customers. Neuromarketing companies EmSense, Neurosense, MindLab International a Nielsen regularly use technics of nervous activity analysis to analyse and predict the customer’s behavior and even to influence it.

Marcello Ienca and Roberto Andorno also drew attention to the fact that there are already lie detectors, based on analysis of nervous activity working with the accuracy of 90% and that their use could be in conflict with legal principles guaranteing that the suspect is not obliged to testify against himself.

They did not omitt to mention the fact that intelligence and military agencies as well are engaged in the brain research and that

“it has been reported that over the last decades violations of human rights might have taken place in experiments involving brain electrodes, LSD, hypnosis, the creation of Manchurian candidates, the implantation of false memories and induction of amnesia” and that “many of these experiments were conducted on unwitting civilians”, suggesting thus the danger that mind control experiments may be conducted on unwitting citizens of democratic states at present time.

However they did not mention the fact that pulsed microwaves could be used for remote control of the activity of human nervous system.

Apparently among legal experts the discussions on this subject are not new. Marcello Ienca and Roberto Andorno quote the conclusion of one of them: “the right and freedom to control one’s own consciousness and electrochemical thought processes is the necessary substrate for just about every other freedom” (see this).

In the years 2016 and 2017 10 European organizations asked the European Commission to launch a work on legislation, which would ban the electromagnetic inferference with the activity of human nervous system and brain (see this).

The European Commission did not produce any positive response to this request. There is no doubt that the longer the world governments will postpone their reaction to this threat to democracy, the closer they will be getting to the totalitarian system, based on the control of the brains of their citizens. The question is whether the citizens will defend themselves if they will not be told by the authorities, that their brain activity can be controled by pulsed microwaves transmitted for example by cell phone systems (more information on this subject can be found here in the article “Psychoelectronic Threat to Democracy“). Evidently the governments know well, why they are suppressing this information in major media.

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Media blackout?

As much as the Mainstream Media (MSM) loves to feast upon sensational stories of chaos and unrest, little coverage has been allotted to the ongoing crisis in Haiti except brief pieces about “imperiled” missionary groups and other Americans desperate to get off the island, or calls from the American embassy in Port-au-Prince for more Marines to protect them.  It has been reported that at least three Haitians, tragically, have died in demonstrations.  Without exception in MSM reports, the explanation for protests, destruction of property and looting is the fuel price increases announced by the Haitian government. As reported by Le Nouvelliste, Haitian daily, gas prices would go up 38% which would in effect make many expenses rise: food, dry goods, bus fares and other services; kerosene, which most Haitians depend on for power in their homes would rise a whopping 51% and diesel 47%. [1] 

The racist insinuation that Haitians are dangerous is clear despite the evidence and that, in spite of crushing poverty, Haiti ranks among the lowest crime and homicide rates in the hemisphere.  Meanwhile the U.S. mass shooting epidemic continues and many cities continue to challenge and set new yearly homicide records, as my own city Indianapolis did last year and threatens to repeat in 2018.

A frame of reference, the reasons for outrage are not so simplistic

One can imagine what the reaction of Americans to the announcement of price hikes in the form of a tax, including gas by 38% by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo would be.  The degree to which Americans would suffer varies widely but a large sector of the population would be outraged and likely demonstrate and vandalize gas stations and corporations.

But of course missing from the official narratives of dangerous protests in “the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere” is the historical and present context in which today’s events are unfolding.

This type of understanding will not be achieved through sporadic MSM reports of lies and half-truths utilized to program people into accepting the Imperial plans the U.S. and allies have for Haiti.  My own awakening that much was amiss about American foreign policy regarding our close neighbor Haiti came around 2003 when examining the United States’ refugee resettlement regime:  the numbers of Haitian refugees accepted for resettlement and the numbers and percentages of Haitian asylees accepted or refused (both were very low and especially in light of a comparable situation in Cuba where its refugees were welcomed almost without exception).

Image on the right: Ezili Danto [2]

Soon after, fortunately I found the passionate and tenacious work of Haitian American lawyer Ezili Danto where one can find all the history, context and breadth of knowledge about Haiti and the centuries-old attempts by the U.S., France and others to subjugate this proud nation, the first modern republic established by Africans and African-descended peoples.  Ezili Danto has dedicated her life to freeing Haiti from the insatiable Neoliberal monster and you can find her work and related links here.

I recall back in on January 29 of 2016, that I was briefly encouraged by a headline to the op-ed written by the editorial board at the Chicago Tribune. [3]  But I was soon brought back to Earth by the familiar theme of blaming the victim they so clearly expressed.  Their opinions encapsulated a hundred other mainstream media articles and of course was absent of all context, present reality and historical legacies of repeated imperial aggression and resource plunder.

In the midst of another political crisis forced upon the population by the United States, France, Canada, Brazil, Israel, the United Nations, and in particular Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, ruling Haitian oligarchs and many others, attempts to force yet another president upon Haitians in the election process, one hand-picked by the aforementioned were underway.  Haiti once had what Americans only dream about:  a direct democracy, direct votes for choosing presidents; it was the U.S. who manipulated and eventually installed a sort of electoral college as America has now. [4]  The headline the editorial board offered on January 29:  “Haiti should decide who will be its next president” of course, to informed and discerning readers turns out to be the only hopeful part of the piece which devolves into opinions that are nonsensical, ethnocentric, racist, condescending, and serving a neocolonial, imperialist agenda.

A brief sample of helpful contexts to remember

At the time, I collected a few truths absent from this narrative and which continue to be absent in the message the Empire wants to program into citizens when they consider Haiti.  Without any sort of context, we are expected to believe all these events (political crises, demonstrations) happen out of the blue or in a vacuum but the following have made a difference in shaping Haiti’s history, and present situation, wouldn’t you think?:

• France forced tiny Haiti (who beat France and Napoleon in a brutal war for its own independence in 1804, a war that cost Haiti half of its population) to pay reparations for their lost slave colony!  $21 billion dollars they finished paying only in 1947 after refinancing and the U.S. took over the debt in 1915!
• U.S. Marines invaded and occupied Haiti from 1914-1934 to “stabilize and restore order”!
• Haiti was led by ruthless, brutal dictators, with horrendous human rights abuses, with full support of the U.S.; Duvalier reign of terror, father and son from 1957-1986 and were given billions of dollars by the U.S., none of which went to the people.  Meanwhile, thousands of asylum seekers were denied entrance to U.S.!  While refugees fled Cuba and benefitted from the U.S.’s decades-long “wet foot, dry foot” policy, meaning if Cubans touched foot on the sand of Florida, they were already granted asylum, Haitians who made the perilous journey in rickety wooden boats to flee murderous leaders and death squads were regularly interdicted at sea by Coast Guard ships starting in the Ronald Reagan days through the Bush senior era and continuing whenever deemed necessary.  President Trump no doubt admires this method which, with very few exceptions sent the Haitians back to their birthplace where imprisonment, torture and execution was often the fate that awaited them.

Haitian Interdiction Operation 2013  U.S. Coast Guard Photo, Wikimedia Commons [5]

• Starting in the 1980s, then governor of Arkansas Bill Clinton subsidized his farmers’ rice and dumped enormous quantities on Haitian people, which effectively killed the local rice farming economy, a good, popular (and ancient traditional) rice underpriced by an inferior subsidized variety.
• Jean-Bertrand Aristide became the first democratically elected president of Haiti in 1991 but was deposed in a George H. W. Bush (former CIA head) ordered coup. The Catholic priest was trying to share wealth with all Haitians!
• Again, after returning, the popular President Aristide was removed from office in a coup d’etat, kidnapped and whisked to Central African Republic by U.S. Marines in 2004!

It goes on and on but here are a few lowlights:

Hillary Clinton and the U.S. hijacked elections installing their puppet Michel “Sweet Mickey” Martelly (the misogynist non-politician) in 2011; billions (more than 13!) raised by The Clinton Foundation, The Red Cross, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush Fund for Haiti, etc. after the horrific 2010 earthquake that killed more than 300,000 never reached Haitians (Bill Clinton was wholly coincidentally appointed special UN envoy to Haiti months before the earthquake); U.S. military blocked aid and emergency groups from landing after the earthquake; U.S.- supported UN troops occupied Haiti from 2004 until 2017 and some workers brought cholera and many solicited sex from children for food; UN and U.S.-backed militias killed thousands of Haitians; Haiti has enormous reserves of oil, potentially bigger than Saudi Arabia’s, and gold, copper, and iridium, known by the U.S. many decades, possibly going back to first references to oil in Haiti from 1908!

Sweet Mickey was in no hurry to leave office as he was due to and knowing another rigged election was underway, the politically savvy Haitian public voted by not voting in huge numbers so as not to give legitimacy to another fiasco.  Thousands demonstrated against the meddling of Hillary Clinton’s State Department, the UN and OAS.  The State Department admitted, bragged about investing tens of millions of dollars in democracy for Haiti.  In response to some destruction of property, the U.S. declared that the protests were violent and elections were postponed because of “security concerns”. Hillary finagled results to position Jovenel Moise into a runoff vote and in results questioned by many observer groups, and most Haitians, Moise, who was indeed handpicked by the Colonizers and Martelly himself took the presidency.  Martelly proclaimed “Give them the Banana!” as he departed in reference to Moise, the banana magnate, and possibly other messages.

Martelly, the former Tonton Macoute death squad member tells what he did with billions of dollars he stole from Venezuela’s Petrocaribe that should have went to earthquake recovery, fuel relief and social programs for Haitians in a video Ezili Danto refers to:  he gave it to Western hotels chains in Haiti! [6]  This information is quite useful in understanding why many of these hotels were targeted by protesters’ fires and vandalism.

Which brings us to the current President Jovenel Moise and his government which recently tells the people during the World Cup no less, that things will get worse, much worse, with the IMF structural adjustments, higher prices for fuel, much higher.  Haitians have had quite enough.  But people like the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune continue to feign ignorance about the wishes of Haitians or perhaps they really are that ignorant.  The vast majority of people of Haiti did not want Moise for president to begin with yet here is the picture that accompanied the board’s editorial and please notice the irony of the caption they inserted:

Source: Getty Images

The “possible installation of a transitional government” was underway and the leader was pictured in those nice signs picturing Moise.  It has been suggested that many Moise supporters and demonstrators were paid for their efforts and that many donned head coverings and sunglasses to avoid identification as one can see above.  The State Department millions had to be spent.

Haitians are not the perpetrators of their own poverty and “instability”:  it has been imposed and enforced by the U.S.-led West!  Like many of the other “poorest nations in the world” like Afghanistan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti is one of the resource-richest.  According to Leopoldo Espaillat Nanita, the “former president of the Dominican Petroleum Refinery (REFIDOMSA)…There is a multinational conspiracy to illegally take the mineral resources of the Haitian people”. [8]

Besides the great potential of corporations to make huge profits in the future from Haiti’s resources, banks, as seen lately in IMF and World Bank machinations, want to use “the pearl of the Caribbean” as their golden goose.  Sweatshops, hotels and tourism industries abroad as well as relief and development (the misery complex) hope to continue cashing in on Haiti.

And perhaps the biggest source of illicit money pouring into coffers for CIA, DARPA, weapons development, destabilizations, black ops and even geoengineering projects is the drug trade that passes through Haiti on its way to Miami and then on to American cities for the pacification, death and mass incarceration of millions of citizens who become addicted to heroin, cocaine, etc. or get caught up in the crossfire of resulting drug dealer and gang violence.  Good for Senator Marco Rubio to get after and investigate the intimidation of DEA workers and others and the widespread tentacles of illegal drug trade operating out of Haiti, but is this really a new revelation?  Where was everyone when Jeb Bush was governor of Florida and his brother the President?  Perhaps we should fill him in on Afghanistan, poppy fields, heroin imported to the U.S.?

The U.S. embassy in Haiti is variously described as being between the 3^rd and 5^th largest of its embassies globally and was unscathed during the 7.0 catastrophic earthquake of January 12, 2010, (U.S. Marines were wholly coincidentally drilling for disaster relief in Miami the day before in case of a hurricane in Haiti).  So geo-strategically, Haiti is kept by the U.S. for safekeeping when they are ready to illegally invade other countries in the Western Hemisphere such as Venezuela, Cuba or Bolivia.

But perhaps most important in U.S. and Western calculations into continuing to punish Haiti is that they must be made an example of.  Haiti fought against all odds, overthrowing their oppressors and beating Napoleon and the greatest navy on Earth.  Since then they have been made to pay for this outrage quite literally.  Why did Ronald Reagan order the Marines to invade tiny Grenada?  Because they were a threat to national security?  Of course not.  They had to be made an example of.

Haiti is indeed an example, and an inspiration to millions around the world including this author.  Haitians remind me to never give up despite the injustice that often seems to prevail on our small planet.  The vast majority of Haitians continue to strive for justice and freedom despite all ideals the U.S. pays lip service to and especially in our holiday just past, The 4^th of July, our own Independence Day.

*

Philip Linder has worked professionally in refugee resettlement for five years and as a volunteer since 2007. He teaches anthropology at universities in Indiana and has a master’s in international relations and can be reached at [email protected] 

Notes

[1] Le Nouvelliste  https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=http://lenouvelliste.com/&prev=search

[2] Ezili Danto website  http://www.ezilidanto.com/

[3] The Editorial Board  Haiti should decide who will be its next president  Chicago Tribune  January 29, 2016  http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-haiti-election-martelly-edit-0201-20160129-story.html

[4] Ezili Danto  “American Celebrities Useful Idiots Part 2”  October 2, 2017  YouTube  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pVlzAHWZ00

[5] File:  Haitian Interdiction Operation DVIDS1070492.jpg  Coast Guard Photo, Wikimedia Commons, public domain, 2013.

[6]  Ezili Danto  “American Celebrities Useful Idiots Part 2”  October 2, 2017  YouTube  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pVlzAHWZ00

[7] Retamal, Hector, AFP/Getty Images, photograph for The Editorial Board  Haiti should decide who will be its next president, photograph  Chicago Tribune  January 29, 2016  http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-haiti-election-martelly-edit-0201-20160129-story.html

[8] ESPACINSULAR  There is a multinational conspiracy to illegally take the mineral resources of the Haitian people  November 17, 2009.  http://www.margueritelaurent.com/pressclips/oil_sites.html

The world today is controlled by a small elite group that has been increasingly concentrating power and wealth in their own hands. There are many observable facets to this power structure, including the military security complex that president Eisenhower warned against, the fossil fuel interests, and the neocons that are promoting U.S.  hegemony around the world, but the most powerful and overarching force is “the money power” that controls money, banking, and finance worldwide. It is clear that those who control the creation and allocation of money through the banking system are able to control virtually every other aspect of global society.

Having taken control of the political leadership in North America and western Europe, they are determined to use military force, if necessary, to create a unipolar world order in which the power elite enjoy “full spectrum dominance.” Based on a long established pattern of covert and overt interventions, it is evident that they are willing to employ, either directly or through proxies, a wide range of tactics, including propaganda, bribery, cooptation, deception, assassinations, false-flag attacks and war. Large segments of the media and entertainment industries, education, and the military power have been captured to help manufacture public consent.

Be that as it may, I believe that the natural course of human evolution tends toward a multi-polar world order based on honesty, openness, compassion, cooperation, and fairness, but that requires a well-educated and informed populace and “broad spectrum” participation in the political process. Fortunately, the internet and world wide web have enabled people to be better informed than ever before and to engage with one another directly, bypassing intermediaries that control and limit what people can share. On the other hand, the political machinery has been so thoroughly taken over by the power elite that the will of the people has thus far been of little consequence in deciding the course of world affairs.

So what can be done to turn the tide? How can we the people empower ourselves to effectively assert our desires for a more fair, humane and peaceful world order? Is it possible to influence the behavior of those in power? Or is it possible to install new leaders who will act more responsibly and in accordance with the popular will? Or is necessary, or even possible, to reinvent and deploy political and economic structures by which people can more directly assert themselves?

It seems reasonable to assert that action must be taken on all levels, but I am inclined to believe that the greatest possibility of bringing about the desired changes lies in economic and political innovation and restructuring.

The monopolization of credit

I came to realize many years ago that the primary mechanism by which people can be, and are controlled, is the system of money, banking, and finance. The power elite have long known this and have used it to enrich themselves and consolidate their grip on power. Though we take it for granted, money has become an utter necessity for surviving in the modern world. But unlike water, air, food, and energy, money is not a natural substance—it is a human contrivance, and it has been contrived in such a way as to centralize power and concentrate wealth.

Money today is essentially credit, and the control of our collective credit has been monopolized in the hands of a cartel comprised of huge private banks with the complicity of politicians who control central governments. This collusive arrangement between bankers and politicians disempowers people, businesses, and communities and enables the elite super-class to use the present centralized control mechanisms to their own advantage and purpose. It misallocates credit, making it both scarce and expensive for the productive private sector while enabling central governments to circumvent, by deficit spending, the natural limits imposed by its revenue streams of taxes and fees. Thus, there is virtually no limit to the amounts of resources that are lavished on the machinery of war and domination.[i]

In today’s world, banks get to lend our collective credit back to us and charge interest for it while central governments get to spend more than they earn in overt tax revenues, relying on the banking system to monetize government debts as needed. These two parasitic drains on the economy, interest and inflationary monetization of government debts, create a growth imperative that is destroying the environment, shredding the social fabric, and creating ever greater disparities of income and wealth. At the same time, this scarcity and misallocation of money, which belies the abundance that exists in the real economy, leads to violent conflicts and provides the power elite with the means to pursue policies of domination, even at the risk of global nuclear war.

What most people still fail to recognize is that regardless of the nominal form of their government, their political power has been neutralized and exhausted by the political money and banking system. Democratic government in today’s world is more an illusion and a hope than a reality. As Prof. Carrol Quigley wrote in his book, Tragedy and Hope (1966),

“… the powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.”[ii]

In the succeeding decades since Quigley’s revelation, their control mechanisms have been refined and extended to include the intelligence services and military power, political think tanks, the media, and virtually every segment of society. The U.S. agenda of regime change over the past several years[iii] is not so much about taking mineral and petroleum resources, that is a side benefit. By examining the pattern of interventions by the U.S. and NATO powers, it is clear that the primary objective is to force every country of the world into a single global interest-based, debt-money regime. No exceptions will be tolerated. Thus, Saddam Hussein had to go, Gaddafi had to go, Assad has to go, and Putin has to go (but deposing Putin will not be so easy). The war against Islam is also related because a significant proportion of Islamists are serious about eliminating riba (usury) which is an essential feature in the creation of all political money throughout the world today. The United States military is the enforcer that is used when threats, bribes, cooptation and covert operations prove insufficient. Thus, the United States, Britain and their NATO allies have become the greatest perpetrators of state-sponsored terror in the post-World war II era.

How can such a power be confronted?

Fortunately, we the people have in our hands the means of our own liberation. It is the power to allocate our credit directly without the use of banks or political money. How to effectively assert that power is the main theme of my most recent book, The End of Money and the Future of Civilization.

Over the years there has been a long parade of “reformers” who wish to take the power to create money away from the banks. This is an admirable objective that I wholeheartedly endorse. But the alternatives that they propose have been either to revert to commodity money, like gold, which has proven to be inadequate, or to transfer the money-issuing power to the central government—what I call the “greenback solution.” The latter harks back to Abraham Lincoln’s scheme for financing the Civil War. That proposal calls for the federal government to bypass the Federal Reserve and the banks by issuing a national currency directly into circulation from the Treasury. At first glance that may seem like a good idea, but there are many flies in that ointment. First of all, the greenback solution does not propose to end the money monopoly but merely to put it under new management. But it is a gross delusion to think that the Treasury is, or might become, independent of the interests that now control the Federal Reserve and the major banks. Consider the fact that most of the recent Treasury secretaries have been former executives of Goldman Sachs, the most powerful financial establishment in the country. It is naïve to expect that they will serve the common good rather than the money power that has spawned them.

Second, central planning of complex economic factors has been shown to be unworkable. That is especially true with regard to money. Neither the Fed nor the treasury is qualified to decide what kind of money and how much of it is necessary for the economy to function smoothly. The issuance and control of credit money should be decentralized in the hands of producers of needed and desired goods and services. Thus the supply of money (credit) must automatically rise and fall in accordance with the quantity of goods and services that are available to be bought and sold. If private currencies and credit clearing exchanges are allowed to develop and grow without interference from the vested interests in political money, their superiority will quickly become apparent.

Third, the greenback solution does nothing to eliminate deficit spending and inflation which are enabled by legal tender laws. As long as political currencies are legally forced to circulate at face value, the abusive issuance of money, the debasement of national currency value, and the centralization of power will continue. All government programs, including social programs and the military budget, ought to be funded by legitimate government revenues, not by the underhanded means of monetary debasement. Centralized control of credit money and the imposition of legal tender laws enable the hidden tax that is called inflation. Salmon P. Chase, who as Lincoln’s Treasury Secretary presided over the issuance of greenbacks, argued later as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court that the issuance of greenback currency was unconstitutional and exceeded the powers of the federal government. He said,

“the legal tender quality is only valuable for the purposes of dishonesty.”

Finally, the political process has been so thoroughly corrupted and taken over by the power elite that political approaches to solving the money problem have virtually no chance of passage anyway.

Toward effective means of empowerment

Business people, farmers, professionals, and others who are engaged in productive enterprise are clamoring to gain access to credit, credit which they fail to recognize is already in their collective hands. Under the present arrangements, we give our credit to the banks, then beg them to lend some of it back to us, and pay them interest for the “privilege.” But there is no good reason for credit to be monopolized. Business routinely offer credit to one another when they deliver goods and services then allow some period of time for payment to be made. This practice can be extended and organized on a multilateral basis.

The real solution to the problem lies in creating new structures for allocating credit based on the legitimate needs and the resources of businesses, workers, and state and local governments. Competition in currency can transcend the dysfunctions that are inherent in the present centralized system and ensure that there will be sufficient amounts of exchange media to enable all desirable trades. Competing currencies will also ensure that political currencies (like the dollar, euro, pound, etc.) cannot be abused without losing patronage in the market. Rather than establishing the state as the money power, we need to promote the separation of money and state by deploying exchange mechanisms that decentralize and democratize the control of credit.

Money is first and foremost a medium for facilitating the exchange of goods and services and other forms of real value, but the exchange function can be effectively and efficiently provided outside the banking system and without the use of conventional political money.[iv] This is already being done through credit clearing exchanges and through the issuance of private currencies or vouchers by businesses that produce real valuable goods and services. Both approaches have the capacity to provide exchange media that can be also be used by general public to mediate all manner of transactions.

Is there any practical possibility of organizing producers on a sufficiently large scale to achieve this? I strongly maintain that there is. This approach, based on private initiative, is far more practical and empowering than any political approach to reform of money and banking that is currently on offer. Improvement in the human condition have always stemmed from the creativity, industriousness, and goodwill of people. A cooperative, compassionate, society can emerge from the creation of exchange alternatives based on voluntary, free-market, and community-based initiatives that enable people to transcend the money monopoly and the “war machine.”[v]

This is begun at the local level by utilizing the credit of local producers to mediate the exchange of goods and services that are locally produced or sold. There are many historical examples of successful private currencies that have been circulated in various times and places. Call them vouchers, scrip, credits, certificates, or coupons—sound private and community currencies can be SPENT (issued) into circulation by any trusted producer or reseller who is ready, willing, and able to reciprocate by accepting it back (redeem it) as payment for real value, i.e., the goods or services that are their normal stock in trade and are in regular demand. There is nothing mysterious or complicated about this process.[vi]

The exchange of goods and services is also enabled on a moneyless basis by using a process of direct credit clearing among buyers and sellers. This is already being done by the scores of commercial trade exchanges (sometimes called “barter” exchanges) that have been operating successfully around the world for more than 40 years. These commercial credit circles, comprised of thousands of businesses of all kinds, presently mediate an estimated 20 to 30 billion dollars’ worth of trades annually, and these numbers continue to grow. As operational improvements are made and credit management procedures become standardized, these exchanges will be networked together to more fully realize the vast potential of moneyless credit clearing arrangements.[vii] In this emerging worldwide web of exchange, members of each local circle or node are known to one another and allocate credit to one another based on their reputation and ability to provide valuable goods and services. Thus we can eventually have an independent system of non-monetary payment in which credit is locally controlled but globally useful.

In conclusion, I maintain that it is essential and entirely feasible that we reduce our dependence upon the banking system and conventional political monies. Through the deployment of innovative mechanisms of exchange, like private currencies and credit clearing networks, individuals, businesses and communities can empower themselves economically and politically to build a society that is free, fair, prosperous and peaceful.  The way forward is clear. The blueprints have been drawn. What remains is for entrepreneurs, business leaders, and community activists to act boldly to implement these exchange mechanisms in ways that are sound, credible, effective, and scalable.

*

Thomas H. Greco, Jr. is an educator, author, and consultant dedicated to economic equity, social justice, and community empowerment. He specializes in the design and implementation of private and community currencies and mutual credit clearing networks. His latest book is The End of Money and the Future of Civilization. His main website is https://beyondmoney.net/. He can be reached at [email protected].

Notes

[i] As E.C. Riegel put it in his book, A New Approach to Freedom, “…as long as our governments are vast counterfeiting machines, Mars can laugh at peace projects.”

[ii] This and other works of Carroll Quigley can be downloaded at the Quigley website, http://www.carrollquigley.net/ .

[iii] View General Wesley Clark’s two minute revelation at https://youtu.be/9RC1Mepk_Sw.

[iv] An animated video that makes clear the credit nature of money and its sound basis is The Essence of Money, https://youtu.be/uO7uwCpcau8.

[v] My 15 minute video, Disruptive Technologies Making Money Obsolete, https://youtu.be/ty7APADAa8g, describes how communities and businesses can escape the debt trap and become more resilient and self-reliant.

[vi] These arguments are more fully developed in my book, The End of Money and the Future of Civilization. My Solar Dollar white paper at https://beyondmoney.net/2016/08/26/solar-dollars-a-private-currency-with-multiple-benefits/ provides the basic framework for the design and issuance of a private currency.

[vii] Some details on how to do this are outlined in chapter 15 of my book, an excerpt of which can be found at https://beyondmoney.net/excerpts/limiting-factors-in-the-operation-of-commercial-trade-exchanges/.

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President Trump slaps tariffs on imports from many of the US’s traditional allies, condemning their leaders for unfair treatment. The mainstream media warns of the erosion of the global order.

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23 Years ago: 11 July 1995, The Srebrenica Massacre

First published by GR in February 2013.

Renowned author Dr. Edward Herman spoke with John Robles of the Voice of Russia regarding the facts surrounding the Srebrenica Massacre, the pretext for the “humanitarian” invasion of the former Yugoslavia, and takes apart the “official” ; version that has always been promoted by the West.

Dr. Herman reveals that there were in fact multiple massacres at Srebrenica, and that the killing of Bosnian-Muslim soldiers at Srebrenica (the West’s pretext) was in response to the killing of over 2,000 Serb civilians, mostly women and children, at the location.

Robles: My first question is about “The Srebrenica massacre” and the way that the establishment manipulated the media. Can you tell us, or give us some insights, on that?

Herman: The Srebrenica massacre, actually I always put it in quote marks, because actually there were lots of massacres in the Srebrenica area, the one before July 1995 there were vast numbers of Serbs killed by Muslim, Bosnian Muslim, forces who went out of Srebrenica.

One estimate is that there were more than 150 Serbs villages that were totally wiped out and one study gives actually gives the names of 2,383 Serb civilians who were killed between 1992 and July, 1995. So then we’d call that “the first Srebrenica massacre”. Then in July 1995…

Robles: Just to be very clear, these were Serbs, that were being killed.

Herman: Yes! We’re talking about 2,383 Serb civilians killed before July 1995. And the Bosnian Serb Army took over Srebrenica in July, 1995, and there were deaths and executions after that. That’s what’s called in the West “the Srebrenica massacre”, but, in fact, that’s really mainly a political construct.

The numbers executed there were probably in the order of between 500 and 1,000. In other words, less than half of the number of Serbs civilians killed before July, 1995.

And the Western claim is that 8,000 men and boys were executed in the quote Srebrenica massacre, but notice these were men, always men, all men, they were all soldiers, whereas those 2,383 civilians killed included very large numbers of women and children.

We’re talking about the execution in the second massacre of essentially army people. And of course they had never proved that there were 7,000 or 8,000, even men and boys killed. The bodies in the graves added up to something like 2,500.

A lot of those bodies were combat deaths. One of the beauties of the Western propaganda system is that all the bodies they found after July, 1995, they count as executed, even though we know very well that a large number were killed in combat.

Reminder

Herman: Also another important fact about the Srebrenica massacre is that all those killings of Serbs took place coming out of an area that was supposed to be a “safe haven”. Srebrenica was a safe place, a safe haven. It was supposed to be demilitarized, but it never was.

So the Bosnian Muslim soldiers would come out to Srebrenica and they would kill Serb civilians. This is all completely ignored in the Western media. It’s as if the Serbs came in July and started to kill arbitrarily.

In fact, the U.N. military in that area, a French offical name Phillip Morillon, was asked by the Yugoslav tribunal, “Why the Serbs did it?”

He said he’s absolutely convinced that they did it because of what the commander of Srebrenica’s Bosnian Muslims did to the Serbs before July 1995.

This is the UN Army head, but you won’t see that in the Western press!

In other words, the first massacre is what led to the lesser second massacre of namely military aged people.

The whole business of the Srebrenica massacre is a gigantic political fraud. There was a massacre, but it was a responsive vengeance massacre, women and children were not killed.

One of the features of the “quote” Srebrenica massacre, that is the second one, is that 20,000 Srebrenica women and children were bussed to safety by the Serb army. Women and children were not killed, only military aged people and a very large fraction of those that did die, died in combat.

So my own estimate, as I said, is that maybe there were 500 to 1,000 executions. Vengeance executions.

Robles: I’m sorry. How many?

Herman: 500 to 1,000 I would say.

Robles: 500 to 1,000.

Herman: Yes. So there was a significant massacre, but put it in its context! This was a war, this was an army that had seen their own civilians massacred on a much larger scale. That is completely suppressed in the West, as if the Serbs came in to Srebrenica and started to kill because of a blood lust! It’s absolutely a fraud!

So, I regard the Srebrenica massacre as a tremendous propaganda triumph. The West wanted to go after Serbia and they avoided peace. They needed this massacre.

Robles: You said, about 2,380 civilians, women and children mainly…

Herman: Serbian women and children, yes.

Robles: … were killed initially. This was the Srebrenica…

Herman: The first massacre between 1992 and July 1995. These were Serb civilians. There were also hundreds of Serb military killed in that period, I am just talking about civilians!

Robles: The civilians, right! And then in retaliation approximately 2,500 Muslim… Bosnian Muslims soldiers were killed.

That’s misleading, because the thrust of the 8,000 claim is that they were executed but those 2000-plus that were killed, a very large fraction were killed in combat.

Robles: In combat. Okay, I see. I see.

Herman: Yes, and the executions were, as I say probably in the order of 500 to 1,000.

Robles: Okay. So those were Bosnian Muslims who were found to be directly responsible for killing massive numbers of Serbian civilians. Right?

Herman: The Serbs actually had lists of Bosnian Muslim soldiers they wanted to get, but I can’t honestly say they were the only ones who were executed. But certainly, a significant number of those executed were on those lists, those vengeance lists.

Edward S. Herman is an American economist and media analyst with a specialty in corporate and regulatory issues as well as political economy and the media. He’s a Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He’s also the author of several books, namely “Manufacturing Consent” which he wrote with Noam Chomsky and “The Srebrenica Massacre: Evidence, Context and Politics”.

Stop NATO website and articles:

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Israel finally built an access road to the West Bank village of Khan Al Ahmar last week, after half a century of delays. But the only vehicles allowed along it are the bulldozers scheduled to sweep away its 200 inhabitants’ homes.

If one community has come to symbolise the demise of the two-state solution, it is Khan Al Ahmar.

It was for that reason that a posse of European diplomats left their air-conditioned offices late last week to trudge through the hot, dusty hills outside Jerusalem and witness for themselves the preparations for the village’s destruction. That included the Israeli police viciously beating residents and supporters as they tried to block the advance of heavy machinery.

Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain have submitted a formal protest. Their denunciations echoed those of more than 70 Democratic lawmakers in Washington in May – a rare example of US politicians showing solidarity with Palestinians.

It would be gratifying to believe that Western governments care about the inhabitants of Khan Al Ahmar – or the thousands of other Palestinians who are being incrementally cleansed by Israel from nearby lands but whose plight has drawn far less attention.

After all, the razing of Khan Al Ahmar and the forcible transfer of its population are war crimes.

But in truth Western politicians are more concerned about propping up the illusion of a peace process that expired many years ago than the long-running abuse of Palestinians under Israeli occupation.

Western capitals understand what is at stake. Israel wants Khan Al Ahmar gone so that Jewish settlements can be built in its place, on land it has designated as “E1”.

That would put the final piece in place for Israel to build a substantial bloc of new settler homes to sever the West Bank in two. Those same settlements would also seal off West Bank Palestinians from East Jerusalem, the expected capital of a future Palestinian state, making a mockery of any peace agreement.

The erasure of Khan Al Ahmar has not arrived out of nowhere. Israel has trampled on international law for decades, conducting a form of creeping annexation that has provoked little more than uncomfortable shifting in chairs from Western politicians.

Khan Al Ahmar’s Bedouin inhabitants, from the Jahalin tribe, have been ethnically cleansed twice before by Israel, but these war crimes went unnoticed.

The first time was in the 1950s, a few years after Israel’s creation, when 80 per cent of Palestinians had been driven from their homes to clear the path for the creation of a Jewish state.

Although they should have enjoyed the protection of Israeli citizenship, the Jahalin were forced out of the Negev and into the West Bank, then controlled by Jordan, to make way for new Jewish immigrants.

A generation later in 1967, when they had barely re-established themselves, the Jahalin were again under attack from Israeli soldiers occupying the West Bank. The grazing lands the Jahalin had relocated to with their goats and sheep were seized to build a settlement for Jews only, Kfar Adumim, in violation of the laws of war.

Ever since, the Jahalin have dwelt in a twilight zone of Israeli-defined “illegality”. Like other Palestinians in the 60 per cent of the West Bank declared under Israeli control by the Oslo peace process, they have been denied building permits, forcing three generations to live in tin shacks and tents.

Israel has also refused to connect the village to the water, electricity and sewage grids, in an attempt to make life so unbearable the Jahalin would opt to leave.

When an Italian charity helped in 2009 to establish Khan Al Ahmar’s first school – made from mud and tyres – Israel stepped up its legal battle to demolish the village.

Now, the Jahalin are about to be driven from their lands again. This time they are to be forcibly re-settled next to a waste dump by the Palestinian town of Abu Dis, hemmed in on all sides by Israeli walls and settlements.

In the new location they will be forced to abandon their pastoral way of life. As resident Ibrahim Abu Dawoud observed: “For us, leaving the desert is death.”

In another indication of the Palestinians’ dire predicament, the Trump administration is expected to propose in its long-awaited peace plan that the slum-like Abu Dis, rather than East Jerusalem, serve as the capital of a future pseudo-Palestinian state – if Israel ever chooses to recognise one.

Khan Al Ahmar’s destruction would be the first demolition of a complete Palestinian community since the 1990s, when Israel ostensibly committed to the Oslo process.

Now emboldened by Washington’s unstinting support, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is racing ahead to realise its vision of a Greater Israel. It wants to annex the lands on which villages like Khan Al Ahmar stand and remove their Palestinian populations.

There is a minor hurdle. Last Thursday, the Israeli supreme court tried to calm the storm clouds gathering in Europe by issuing a temporary injunction on the demolition works.

The reprieve is likely to be short-lived. A few weeks ago the same court – in a panel dominated by judges identified with the settler movement – backed Khan Al Ahmar’s destruction.

The Supreme Court has also been moving towards accepting the Israeli government’s argument that decades of land grabs by settlers should be retroactively sanctioned – even though they violate Israeli and international law – if carried out in “good faith”.

Whatever the judges believe, there is nothing “good faith” about the behaviour of either the settlers or Israel’s government towards communities like Khan Al Ahmar.

Saeb Erekat, the Palestinians’ veteran peace negotiator, recently warned that Israel and the US were close to “liquidating” the project of Palestinian statehood.

Sounding more desperate than usual, the Europe Union reaffirmed this month its commitment to a two-state solution, while urging that the “obstacles” to its realisation be more clearly identifed.

The elephant in the room is Israel itself – and its enduring bad faith. As Khan Al Ahmar demonstrates all too clearly, there will be no end to the slow-motion erasure of Palestinian communities until western governments find the nerve to impose biting sanctions on Israel.

*

A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.

Featured image is from The National.

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What a rotten guest, but then again, that was to be expected.  Ahead of his visit to Britain, there was some indignation that US President Donald Trump should even be visiting in the first place.  Protesters were readying their assortment of paraphernalia in anticipation.  Walls of noise were promised.  Trump, on the other hand, was bullish after his NATO performance, which did a good deal to stir and unsettle partners and leaders.  On leaving Brussels, his singular account was that all partners had, in fact, agreed to a marked rise in defence spending. 

Having settled into dinner with British Prime Minister Theresa May at Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, there was a whirring buzz that the president had been busy, having given an interview to that infamous rag of reaction The Sun newspaper.  It was spectacularly poor form, featuring a series of pot shots against his host on how she had handled Brexit negotiations so far.  Not that May’s handling has been brilliantly smooth. Characterised by Tory saboteurs, confusion and ill-expertise, the British tangle with the European Union has persisted with barnacle tenacity.

This did not inspire confidence from Trump, and the Chequers agreement that May had reached with cabinet members was deemed “very unfortunate”.  For the president, a Brexit softened and defanged to keep it bound up in some form in the EU could well spell an end to a separate, post-separation trade pact with the United States.

“If they do a deal like that, we would be dealing with the European Union instead of dealing with the UK, so it will probably kill the deal.”

The sting was greater for the fact that May was using the dinner to pitch her case for a separate trade arrangement.

“As we prepare to leave the European Union, we have an unprecedented opportunity to do more.”

Any free trade agreement between the countries, she asserted, would create “jobs and growth here is in the UK and right across the United States.” Bureaucracy would be defeated in the transatlantic venture.

Trump, as he tends to, was operating on a different frequency, claiming that he, brilliant chap that he is, had the formula for how May might best get a workable Brexit through. If only the prime minister had listened instead of chasing her own flight of fancy.

May was not the only British politician rostered for a tongue lashing.  London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who reached some prominence criticising Trump’s election promise to temporarily suspend Muslim immigration to the United States, also came in for special mention.

“I think allowing millions and millions of people to come into Europe is very, very sad.”

Reflecting on the problems facing European cities as a result, he told The Sun that London had “a mayor who has done a terrible job in London.  He has done a terrible job.”  The mayor had blotted his copybook by doing “a very terrible job on terrorism” and, just for good measure, crime in general.

Not content at leaving it at that, Trump revealed that childish vulnerability typical in unstoppable, and encouraged egomaniacs. This had undoubtedly been spurred on by Khan’s refusal to ban the flying of a 20ft blimp depicting Trump as an indignant, orange infant, nappy and all.

“I think [Khan] has not been hospitable to a government that is very important.  Now he might not like the current President, but I represent the United States.”

Having said earlier in the week that the issue of whether May should continue a British prime minister was “up to the people”, Trump was less judicious in his liberating interview. In what could be construed as an act of direct meddling (foreign interference for the US imperium is genetic, programmed and inevitable), Trump had his own views about who would make a suitable replacement.  The blundering, now ex-foreign secretary Boris Johnson, a person with his own conditioning of Trumpism, would “make a great prime minister.”

For those incensed by Trump’s say in the matter, it is worth noting that his predecessor was no less terse in warning, not just the Cameron government, but the British people, that leaving the EU would banish Britain to the end of any trade agreement queue.  Britain was far better being part of a collective voice generated by the EU, rather than a single power going its own way.  At “some point down the line,” President Barack Obama explained at a press conference held at the Foreign Office on a visit in April 2016, “there might be a UK-US trade agreement, but it’s not going to happen any time soon because our focus is in negotiating with a big bloc, the European Union, to get a trade agreement done.”

Perhaps the most striking delusion that runs so deeply through the Brexit pathology is the idea the Britannia’s flag will again fly high, and that power shall, mysteriously, be reclaimed by a nation made anew.  Other powers will heed that; respect shall be observed.  What Presidents Obama and Trump have shown from different sides of the coin is that such hopes might be terribly misplaced.

*

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]

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The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allies regained the areas of Tafas, Yadudah and Tal Ashary in the northwestern countryside of Daraa after militants there had surrendered. Units of the Russian Military Police were deployed in Tafas.

Separately, government forces seized French-made APILAS anti-tank weapons from local members of the Free Syrian Army. According to Syrian pro-government activists, these weapons were supplied to militants through Jordan.

The SAA also repelled an ISIS attack in the key hills of Brakat and Alia in eastern al-Suwayda killing several members of ISIS. According to pro-militant sources, there were also casualties among SAA troops.

On July 10 and 11, the Syrian Air Force carried out a series of strikes on positions of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its allies in  al-Rami, Mozra, al-Najeya, Kinda, Urum al-Jawz, Frikeh, Muhambal and Bsanqul in the province of Idlib.

These strikes were a response to a recent successful attack by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham on SAA positions in northern Latakia in which at least 25 SAA soldiers and officers were killed.

The US-led coalition has supplied the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) with 200 more trucks with weapons, Turkey’s TRT TV reported on July 10 quoting a source in the SDF. According to TRT, the new supplies are aimed at supporting the SDF’s operation against ISIS cells in the southern part of Hasakah province.

Despite claims of Turkish leadership that Washington agreed on Ankara’s request to halt military supplies to the SDF, the US continued providing the group with weapons and munition. These supplies continue to fuel tensions between Washington and Ankara.

*

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The Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity

Michel Chossudovsky

The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-6-0

Year: 2015

Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

Special Price: $15.00

Click here to order.

Due Summit, ambedue a Bruxelles a distanza di due settimane, rappresentano lo status della situazione europea. La riunione del Consiglio europeo, il 28 giugno, ha confermato che l’Unione, fondata sugli interessi delle oligarchie economiche e finanziarie a partire da quelle delle maggiori potenze, si sta sgretolando per contrasti di interesse non solo sulla questione dei migranti.

Articolo in Italiano (il manifesto) :

Usa e Nato soppiantano la Ue in crisiL’arte della guerra

Hoje e amanhã, desenvolve-se em Bruxelas a CIMEIRA NATO  ao nível de Chefes de Estado e de Governo, dos 29 países membros. Confirma ao mais alto nível o fortalecimento da estrutura de comando, principalmente, na função anti-Rússia. Serão estabelecidos:

• um novo Comando Conjunto para o Atlântico, em Norfolk, nos EUA, contra os “submarinos russos que ameaçam as linhas de comunicação marítima entre os Estados Unidos e a Europa”
• um novo Comando Logístico, em Ulm, na Alemanha, como “dissuasor” contra a Rússia, com a tarefa de “mobilizar mais rapidamente as tropas em toda a Europa em qualquer conflito”.

Em 2020, a NATO terá, na Europa, 30 batalhões mecanizados, 30 esquadrilhas aéreas e 30 navios de combate, apetrechados em 30 dias ou menos, contra a Rússia. O Presidente Trump terá, portanto, cartas mais fortes na Cimeira bilateral, que  terá a 16 de Julho, em Helsínquia, com o Presidente Putin, da Rússia. Daquilo que o Presidente dos EUA estabelecer na mesa de negociações, dependerá, fundamentalmente, a situação na Europa.

O raio de expansão da NATO vai muito além da Europa e dos próprios membros da Aliança. Ela tem vários parceiros ligados à Aliança por vários programas de cooperação militar. Entre os vinte incluídos na Parceria Euro-Atlântica, figuram a Áustria, a Finlândia e a Suécia. A parceria mediterrânica inclui Israel e a Jordânia, que têm missões oficiais permanentes na sede da NATO, em Bruxelas, e Egipto, Tunísia, Argélia, Marrocos e Mauritânia. A parceria do Golfo inclui o Kuwait, o Qatar e os Emirados, com missões permanentes a Bruxelas, além do Bahrein. A NATO também tem nove “Parceiros globais” na Ásia, na Oceania e na América Latina – Iraque, Afeganistão, Paquistão, Mongólia, Coreia do Sul, Japão, Austrália, Nova Zelândia e Colômbia – alguns dos quais “contribuem, activamente, para as operações militares da NATO”.

A NATO – criada em 1949, seis anos antes do Pacto de Varsóvia, baseada formalmente no princípio defensivo estabelecido pelo Artigo 5 – foi transformada numa aliança que, de acordo com o “novo conceito estratégico”, compromete os países membros a “liderar operações de resposta a situações de crise não previstas no artigo 5.º, fora do território da Aliança”. Segundo o novo conceito geoestratégico, a Organização do Tratado do Atlântico Norte estendeu-se às montanhas afegãs, onde a NATO está em guerra há 15 anos.

O que não mudou, na mutação da NATO, foi a hierarquia dentro da Aliança. É sempre o Presidente dos Estados Unidos que nomeia o Comandante Supremo Aliado na Europa, que é sempre um general dos EUA, enquanto os Aliados se limitam a ratificar a sua escolha. O mesmo aplica-se aos outros comandos chave. A supremacia dos EUA fortaleceu-se com a ampliação da NATO, pois que os países do Leste europeu estão mais vinculados a Washington do que a Bruxelas.

O próprio Tratado de Maastricht, de 1992, estabelece a subordinação da União Europeia à NATO, da qual fazem parte 22 dos 28 países da UE (com a Grã-Bretanha de saída da União). O mesmo estabelece no artigo 42.º, que “a União respeita as obrigações de alguns Estados Membros, que consideram que a sua defesa comum se efectue através da NATO, no âmbito do Tratado do Atlântico Norte”. E o protocolo n. 10 sobre a cooperação estabelecida pelo art. 42 salienta que a NATO “continua a ser a base da defesa” da União Europeia. A Declaração Conjunta sobre a Cooperação NATO/UE, assinada em 10 de Julho em Bruxelas, na véspera da Cimeira, confirma esta subordinação: “A NATO continuará a desempenhar a sua função única e essencial como pedra angular da defesa colectiva para todos os aliados, e os esforços da UE também fortalecerão a NATO”. A PESCO e o Fundo Europeu para a  Defesa, sublinhou o Secretário-Geral Stoltenberg, “são complementares e não alternativas à NATO”. A “mobilidade militar” está no centro da cooperação NATO/UE, consagrada na Declaração Conjunta. Igualmente importante é a “cooperação marítima NATO/UE no Mediterrâneo, para combater o tráfico de migrantes e, assim, aliviar o sofrimento humano”.

Sob pressão dos EUA e neste contexto, os aliados europeus e o Canadá aumentaram a sua despesa militar em 87 biliões de dólares, desde 2014. Apesar disso, o Presidente Trump vai bater com os punhos na mesa da Cimeira, acusando os aliados porque, todos juntos, gastam menos do que os Estados Unidos. “Todos os aliados estão a aumentar as despesas  militares”, afirma o Secretário Geral da NATO, Stoltenberg.

Os países que destinam à despesa militar, pelo menos 2% do seu PIB, aumentaram para 3%, em 2014, e para 8%, em 2018. Prevê-se que, desde agora até 2024, os aliados europeus e o Canadá aumentarão a sua despesa militar em 266 biliões de dólares, expandindo a despesa militar da NATO para mais de 1 trilião de dólares por ano. A Alemanha, em 2019, ampliará para uma média de 114 milhões de euros por dia e planeia aumentá-la em 80% até 2024. A Itália comprometeu-se a alargá-la dos actuais 70 milhões de euros por dia, para cerca de 100 milhões de euros/dia. Como exige aquele que, no programa do governo, é definido como “o aliado privilegiado da Itália”.

Manlio Dinucci

il manifesto, 11 de Julho de 2018

Artigo original em italiano :

La Nato espandibile e sempre piùcostosa si allarga sull’Europa

Tradutora: Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos

Time and again, we have seen how deceptive reports have sent the West headlong into conflict after conflict: Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, … the list is long and growing.

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Seanad Éireann in Solidarity with Palestine: Irish Senate Votes in Favour of Occupied Territories Bill

By Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin, July 12, 2018

Yesterday the Irish Seanad voted in favour of the Occupied Territories Bill which will prohibit the importation of goods or services from illegal settlements in occupied territories, including Israel’s settlements in Palestine which violate the Geneva Conventions.

Harvard’s Discriminatory Admissions Practices

By Stephen Lendman, July 12, 2018

An ongoing November 2014 federal lawsuit filed by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) accused Harvard of “employing racially and ethnically discriminatory policies and procedures in administering the undergraduate admissions program” – Asian-American applicants harmed by the practice.

Human Psychology: The Delusion ‘I Am Not Responsible’

By Robert J. Burrowes, July 12, 2018

One of the many interesting details to be learned by understanding human psychology is how a person’s unconscious fear works in a myriad of ways to make them believe that they bear no responsibility for a particular problem.

North Korea Advances in Sustainable Farming and Renewable Energy

By Kim Soobok, July 12, 2018

At the construction site of the Chongchon River Multi-tiered Power Plant, too, “rear operation” workers raise pigs and chickens and research the best way to grow fresh tomatoes and cucumbers in the vegetable garden while loud construction clamor can be heard on the other side of the plant. The “rear operation” team is responsible for the regenerative work of feeding and sustaining the workers constructing the power plant.

European Powers Prepare to Scrap Dollar in Iran Trade as Disgust with “America First” Policies Mount

By Elliott Gabriel, July 12, 2018

While the White House’s frenzied anti-Iran campaign has entailed unprecedented attempts to twist the arms of the United States’ traditional European allies, the pressure may be backfiring – a reality made all the more clear by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s claims that Europe’s three major powers plan to continue trade ties with Iran without the use of the U.S. dollar.

German Parliament: US Presence in Syria Is Illegal

By Worlds Truth, July 12, 2018

Members of Parliament in Germany have concluded that the presence of the United States military in Syria is illegal. 

Alexander Neu, a Member of Parliament for the Left Party in Germany, requested an opinion on the legality of the military presence and operations by U.S., Russia and Israel in Syria.

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The war on Syria is remarkable on many levels.  One of these levels is the success of Western propagandists to prevent the truth from attaining widespread acceptance.

The truth has always been available, but rarely accepted, even when admissions of culpability in the highest of crimes comes from credible Western sources. What could be more damning than these admissions?

Similarly, reputable researchers confirmed long ago what broad-based Western audiences still refuse to accept:

On-the-ground evidence of liberated areas continues to reveal the monstrous crimes of the West’s terrorist proxies, and it continues to demonstrate the on-going culpability of the West in the highest of international crimes. What could be more straightforward than this? (There’s even a note explaining that the “gifts” are from the USA.)

What the Syrian Army found in al-Hirak, Daraa: "Assistance to the Syrian people from the USA"

Did US give TOW-2A missiles to FSA so they could share them with
al-Nusra (al-Qaeda) to help them kill Syrians?https://t.co/WXjHBsdVsH #Syria
(video via @r_u_vid ) pic.twitter.com/NTnCaQOrrY

— the Lemniscat (@theLemniscat) July 3, 2018

Perhaps what is missing is another truth.  Nobody except a tiny transnational oligarch class benefits from all of this death and misery.  And the benefits accrued to this parasitical class are all short-term besides.

All of the public monies that the Pentagon and the military industrial complexes of a host of nations (including Canada) are siphoning from the masses serves to impoverish all but the “elites”.

Much of North America is being increasingly “thirdworldized” (to borrow a term from Michael Parenti).   Prof. James Petras, for his part, explains that 

“Billionaires in the arms industry and security/mercenary conglomerates receive over $700 billion dollars from the federal budget, while over 100 million US workers lack adequate health care and their children are warehoused in deteriorating schools.” 1

Maybe these obscured realities will help drive home the point that the West’s current trajectories of globalized war and poverty need to be terminated, NOW.

*

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.

Note

1. Prof. James Petras, “How Billionaires Become Billionaires.” Global Research. 5 October, 2017.  (https://www.globalresearch.ca/how-billionaires-become-billionaires/5612125) Accessed 11 July, 2018.

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Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes  the mainstream media narratives on Syria. 

Voices from Syria 

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-1-6

Author: Mark Taliano

Year: 2017

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At the NATO meeting going on in Brussels (July 11-12), Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tries to outsmart the US master of deception, Donald Trump, with old-fashioned Canadian rhetoric. [1] But no such luck for Canada.

Trump appears to up the antes for the NATO members by asking to increase their contributions to 4% of GDP from just asking to fulfill their current commitment of paying 2%. This seems to be the classic bargain; ask for double in order to settle for half.

Trudeau basically replies, forget the money; let’s focus on the work NATO has to do better. And he goes on suggesting

“to promote the peace, security, and strength of our true democracies and those democratic principles, which are under threat everywhere around the world it seems.”

We have to admit that he is totally in sync with his minister of foreign affairs, Chrystia Freeland, on this.

Never mind that it doesn’t make any logical sense to have the largest military organization in the world to “promote” peace, or “security”, or “true democracies”, when the opposite is precisely what is happening in front of our collective eyes. If there are any “democratic principles…under threat”, it is at the hands of the NATO member states, including Canada.

However, Trump’s bait was thrown and Trudeau bit it for the second time. The first time was when Trump called him “weak” following the G-7 meeting about a month ago.

The insecure Trudeau must have been preparing for this in order to show that he is strong, and surely wanted to sound very tough on the first day of the NATO meeting calling on the US emperor. But he didn’t realize that now he will have to put Canada’s military (and budget) where his mouth is! Canada is already spending 1.3% of its GDP on defense. Defense from what? We may ask. Are Canadians ready to forego our own peace, security and democratic principles in order to interfere and cause havoc in foreign sovereign countries? Are Canadians prepared to fork out more money for the military? Remember this question when the next budget comes down the pipe in Parliament.

And now Trudeau cannot and will not turn back on his implied pro-war commitment because he really dug in further by saying that the NATO alliance is “as necessary now as it was at the height of the Cold War.” I am sure that Chrystia Freeland must have added this statement in his speech.

If Trump had designed his tactic, I would start to believe that he is really a good “negotiator”, but actually I believe that the Trudeau government foreign policy is really out of sync. 

*

Nino Pagliccia is an activist and writer based in Vancouver, Canada. He is a Venezuelan-Canadian who writes about international relations with a focus on the Americas. He is editor of the book “Cuba Solidarity in Canada – Five Decades of People-to-People Foreign Relations” http://www.cubasolidarityincanada.ca. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Note

[1] https://sputniknews.com/world/201807111066267572-trudeau-vs-trump-nato-summit/ 

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“Collusion continues not between Trump and Russians, but between intelligence agencies, the media and American politicians with hidden agendas.”

Most people believe that Donald Trump owes his presidency to Russian activity because they have been told this repeatedly for the past two years. There was indeed high level collusion taking place in the 2016 presidential campaign but it wasn’t carried out by Trump. It was Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee who acted in concert with intelligence assets in the United States and in the United Kingdom.The British government continues to manufacture false flag incidents, force international agencies to do its bidding, and push for regime change in Syria. Having failed to defeat Trump, they kept up the campaign to cover their tracks, escape blame for Hillary Clinton’s failure, and maintain the foreign policy status quo.

A law firm retained by the Democratic National Committee paid for the opposition research undertaken by former MI6 agent, Christopher Steele . Steele produced a dossier alleging that Trump was compromised by the Russian government and shopped it to the FBI, CIA, influential journalists and politicians like Senator John McCain. The dossier was used to obtain a FISA surveillance warrant against Trump aide Carter Page but the DNC connection was not disclosed to the judge.

“Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee acted in concert with intelligence assets in the United States and in the United Kingdom.”

Steele isn’t the only British spook in the story. A man named Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6, is a business partner of Stefan Halper, a CIA asset who also spied on Donald Trump. Halper had contacts with Page and George Papadopoulos, two men now under indictment by Robert Mueller’s special investigation. The lesser lights of the Trump team were no match for seasoned professionals who get protection from the New York Times. The Times calls Halper “an FBI informant ” and tries to claim that is somehow different from being a spy.

While Russia is vilified at every turn the British government conducts very public and very shady business which could conceivably impact both countries. The case of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal has the British government’s finger prints all over it. There is no reason for Russia to poison a former spy whom they had swapped eight years earlier. The only logical conclusion is that the act was carried out with the goal of embarrassing Vladimir Putin and creating a possible pretext for war. The Skripal case was soon followed by questionable reporting of yet another chemical weapons attack in Syria which resulted in a short lived United States, British and French attack on that country.

“The Skripal ‘poisoning’ was carried out with the goal of embarrassing Vladimir Putin and creating a possible pretext for war.“

It is the British who use lies and trickery to sway public opinion into supporting a wider war in Syria. Three months after the Skripals were attacked another pair of Britons are said to have been poisoned with Novichok, a chemical weapon originally produced by Russia but which now can be made anywhere. One of the victims died and the claims of Russian involvement have suddenly become much more dangerous.

This second poisoning took place less than one week after the UK pressured the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to take on the role of judge and juror. No longer will the OPCW just determine if chemical weapons have been used, but they will also be tasked with assigning blame, too. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson proudly stated,

“The U.K. has led the diplomatic efforts to secure this action.”

Collusion continues not between Trump and Russians, but between intelligence agencies, the media and American politicians with hidden agendas. While the public are fed a steady diet of tales of an unfree press in Russia, it is the British press which has been censored by its government. A Defence and Security Media Advisory Notice (D Notice) has been issued which prevents them from reporting fully on the Skripal case. Most Americans are unaware that the British government may prevent the media from reporting on any subject or person they choose. The person being protected now may be a man named Pablo Miller.

“While the public are fed a steady diet of tales of an unfree press in Russia, it is the British press which has been censored by its government.”

Miller was Skripal’s MI6 handler and was also employed at Christopher Steele’s firm Orbis. Miller and Steele may have involved Skripal in writing the anti-Trump dossier. While Americans are given endless misinformation making Russia look like the foreign interloper in their nation’s affairs it is actually the British deep state that is well connected to American media and politicians.

The Russiagate purveyors constantly say, “Connect the dots.” If there are any dots to connect they run from the DNC to former MI6 spies to CIA assets to Russian double agents to American intelligence to alleged chemical weapons attacks used to justify war or to stop the upcoming Trump and Putin summit. It is all being used to further the now obligatory anti-Russian propaganda that is pervasive on both sides of the Atlantic.

Anti-Russia sentiment has been stoked for two years straight and with expert precision. Any counter narratives have been obscured with equal precision. Honest discourse is now nearly impossible and the likelihood of public support for anything up to and including hot war between nuclear powers has increased. The world is a more dangerous place but not because of Russia. As always the United States and its allies are the cause of turmoil. This time they may have created dangers that they are unable to contain.

*

Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at [email protected].

Featured image is from the author.

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Historians may say in the future that July 2018 was one of the most significant months, not only the fact that 2018, the 100th anniversary of the end of WW1, being also the most important year of the early part of the 21st Century.

This July we will have ‘a strategic reset’ of the World order effecting all counties on the planet.

• Trump in Brussels now for critical NATO meetings has brought interesting results and repositioning by many NATO members.
  
• Trump goes to UK in the coming hours today amid British Government Ministerial resignations, possibly imminently Prime Minister May’s too, while the BREXIT conundrum looms large.
  
• Regardless of the fact that the global mainstream media doesn’t seem to acknowledge it, the EU is on the point of imploding and the very future existence of the EURO is in question.
  
• Russia, very well described by Trump on the 12th of July in a Brussels Press Conference, is a competitor not an enemy.
  
• Nationalism and Christianity are on the rise everywhere that counter the Immigration and Muslim popular liberal narrative.
  
• The most important meeting will be the first formal Trump-Putin one on the 16th July in Helsinki.

After we learn the results of the above July meetings, we will be in a position to understand how world relationships will be reformed. We all wait for the outcomes of these meetings with extreme interest.

Only then can analysts start to think of what the rest of the 21st Century is going to look like.

Anticipation is high and for some, a reason for optimism in a world where possibly America and Russia could start to agree on a variety of issues.

One of many losers could be Britain particularly due to the issue of the alleged Novichok poisoning’s in Salisbury, England.

A few months ago Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper published an opinion piece by then British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson describing the military grade nerve-agent attack as one in a long line of assassinations by Russia in Britain, without, in the Salisbury cases, Johnson providing any evidence whatsoever. Johnson is no longer a Minister; he’s gone for good soon to be followed by Prime Minister May many people speculate.

So a most unfortunate prediction one can make today is the possibility of a potential much weakened, politically, Britain a result of any form of rapprochement between America and Russia. A sad end of the empire that once was Great Britain.

We live in interesting times!

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Okay, well, Trump did it again. Antagonizing allies. This time it was Germany that took the main hit, over the fact that it pays Russia billions of dollars for oil and gas while relying on the US for its defense … against Russia. And yes, that is a strange situation. But it’s by no means the only angle to the story. There are many more.

For one thing, The US has by far the largest military industry. So it makes a lot of money off the billions already spent by NATO partners on weaponry. Of course Raytheon, Boeing et al would like to see them spend more. But once they would have done that, they would clamor for even more after.

At some point one must ask how much should really be spent. How much is enough, how much is necessary. The military-industrial complex (MIC) has every reason to make the threat posed by ‘enemies’ as big as they possibly can. So knowing that, we must take media reports on this threat with tons of salt.

And that is not easy. Because the MIC has great influence in politics and the media. But we can turn to some numbers. According to GlobalFirePower, the US in 2018 will spend $647 billion on its military, while Russia is to spend a full $600 billion less, at $47 billion. And the US Senate has already voted in a $82 billion boost recently.

There are other numbers out there that suggest Russia spends $60 billion, but even then. If Moscow spends just 10% of the US, and much less than that once all NATO members’ expenditure is included, how much of a threat can Russia realistically be to NATO?

Sure, I’ve said it before, Russia makes weapons to defend itself, while America makes them to make money, which makes the latter much less efficient, but it should be glaringly obvious that the Russia threat is being blown out of all proportions.

Problem with that is that European nations for some reason love playing the threat card as much as America does. After all, Britain, France and Germany have major weapons manufacturers, too. So they’re all stuck. The Baltic nations clamor for more US protection, so does Sweden, Merkel re-focused on Putin just days ago, the game must go on.

Another way to look at this is to note that UD GDP in 2017 according to the IMF was $19.3 trillion, while Russia’s was $1.5 trillion. NATO members Germany France, Britain, Italy and France all have substantially higher GDP than Russia as well. European Union GDP was $17.3 trillion in 2017.

If this economically weak Russia were really such a threat to NATO, they would be using their funds so much better and smarter than anyone else, we’d all better start waving white flags right now. And seek their help, because that sort of efficiency, in both economics and defense, would seem to be exactly what we need in our debt-ridden nations.

The solution to the problems Trump indicated this morning is not for Germany et al to spend more on NATO and their military in general, but for the US to spend less. Much less. Because the Russian threat is a hoax that serves the interests of the MIC, the politicians and the media.

And because America has much better purposes to spend its money on. And because we would all be a lot safer if this absurd theater were closed. To reiterate: developments in weapons technology, for instance hypersonic rocket systems make most other weapons systems obsolete. Which is obviously a big threat to the MIC.

Russia attacking NATO makes as much sense as NATO attacking Russia: none whatsoever. Unwinnable. Russia attacking Germany and other European countries, which buy its oil and gas, makes no sense because it would then lose those revenues. From that point of view, European dependence on Russian energy is even a peacemaker, because it benefits both sides.

Can any of the Russiagate things be true? Of course, Russia has ‘bad’ elements seeking to influence matters abroad. Just like the US does, and France, Britain, Germany, finish the list and color the pictures. How about the UK poisoning stories? That’s a really wild one. Russia had no reason to poison a long-lost double spy they themselves let go free years ago, not at a time when a successful World Cup beckoned.

342 diplomats expelled and risking the honored tradition of exchanging spies and double agents from time to time. Not in Moscow’s interest at all. Britain, though, had, and has, much to gain from the case. As long as its people, and its allies, remain gullible enough to swallow the poisoned narrative. Clue: both poisonings, if they are real, occurred mere miles from Porton Down, Britain’s main chemical weapons lab.

And c’mon, if Putin wants his country strong and independent, the last thing he would do is to risk his oil and gas contracts with Europe. They’re simply too important, economically and politically. Trump may want some of that action for the US, understandably, but for now US LNG can’t compete with Russian pipelines. Simple as that.

Let’s hope Trump and Putin can talk sense in 5 days. There’s a lot hanging on it. Let’s hope Trump gets his head out of NATO’s and the US and EU Deep State’s asses in time. There’s no America First or Make America Great Again to be found in those dark places. It’s time to clear the air and talk. America should always talk to Russia.

Funny thing is, the more sanctions are declared on Russia, the stronger it becomes, because it has to learn and adapt to self-sufficiency. Want to weaken Russia? Make it depend on your trade with it, as opposed to cut off that trade. Well, too late now, they won’t trust another western voice anymore for many years. And we’re too weak to fight them. Not that we should want to anyway.

We’re all captive to people who want us to believe we’re still stuck in the last century, because that is their over-luxurious meal ticket. But it’s all imaginary, it’s an entirely made-up narrative. NATO is a con game.

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Following day-one of July 11 and 12 summit talks in Brussels, NATO issued a declaration, signed by all member state leaders, including Trump and Turkey’s Erdogan.

It’s unacceptably hostile to Russia – “accusing us of provocative activities and…gnashing its teeth,” according to its Foreign Ministry.

The  lengthy declaration, prepared ahead of the summit, accused Russia of occupying Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova. It turned truth on its head claiming Moscow “illegitimate(ly) annex(ed) Crimea.” A further litany of Big Lies about Russia followed.

The summit declaration criticized Moscow’s legitimate defensive military activities in its own territory, threatening no one – unlike US-dominated NATO, threatening world peace and stability, waging endless wars of aggression against sovereign nations.

The declaration accused Russia of “aggressive actions, including the threat and use of force to attain political goals, challenge the Alliance and…undermining Euro-Atlantic security and the rules-based international order” – a bald-faced lie!

It pretended opposition to “(t)errorism in all its forms and manifestations” its member states support, heavily arming ISIS and likeminded jihadists, using them as imperial proxies in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere.

The declaration turned truth on its head, claiming

“NATO…strive(s) for peace, security, and stability in the whole of the Euro-Atlantic area…united in our commitment to…the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”

Polar opposite is true. US-dominated NATO aggression shows what the alliance is all about – hostile to what it claims to support.

NATO is an aggressive imperial alliance, not a “defensive” one as falsely claimed. There are no external threats against its members – nothing justifying its existence.

Claiming the alliance “face(s) a dangerous, unpredictable, and fluid security environment, with enduring challenges and threats from all strategic directions; from state and non-state actors; from military forces; and from terrorist, cyber, and hybrid attacks” is a bald-faced lie.

So is accusing Russia of “aggressive actions, including the threat and use of force to attain political goals.”

Cold, hard reality is inimical to NATO’s belligerent agenda. A phony Russia threat, a phony terrorist threat, and so forth are convenient pretexts for continuing a US-dominated alliance, used as an instrument of its aggressive imperial agenda.

Ahead of summit talks, hawkish neocon US envoy to NATO, former senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, turned truth on its head claiming Moscow is trying to “flip” Turkey and other alliance members, adding the Kremlin “want(s) to destabilize the strongest defense alliance in the history of the world” – a killing machine, she failed to explain.

As long as NATO exists, endless US-led wars of aggression will continue. World peace and stability will remain unattainable.

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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research based in Chicago.

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The British government, having ignored warnings about the wisdom of allowing the non-EU, non-NATO member, Israel, to be a contractor to the UK Ministry of Defence, now faces the possibility of a seriously compromised national security.

Israeli Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu, is Trump’s nuclear lapdog in the Middle East and the Israeli position as a Defence Contractor to the British Armed Forces is now a serious embarrassment and a potential danger to the UK.

For our national defence to be in the hands of the only secret nuclear weapon state in the world with an estimated 400 undeclared warheads, and one that treats the UN with open contempt, was always a dangerous miscalculation. Now, with a rift having been opened between US-Israel and Europe, all military co-operation is suspect and Britain could become dangerously exposed.

The current trade war with the United States has shown, beyond doubt, how international relations can change overnight and when they do it is imperative that Britain’s security is not dependent on an American vassal state in the Middle East.

The government needs to take action now by putting an immediate embargo on all bilateral military trade and co-operation with the state of Israel and to deal only with EU/ NATO member suppliers and contractors.

We would not allow Russian President Putin to attend a COBRA meeting, in Parliament, and neither must we allow Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who represents over a million ethnic Russian Israeli citizens and who is so closely allied with his armaments supplier and logistics director, Donald John Trump, TV game show host, property developer and current President of the United States.

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

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Yesterday the Irish Seanad voted in favour of the Occupied Territories Bill which will prohibit the importation of goods or services from illegal settlements in occupied territories, including Israel’s settlements in Palestine which violate the Geneva Conventions. The Bill was introduced by the well-known Irish singer Frances Black whose albums feature both Irish ballads and traditional music. She was elected to Seanad Éireann as an independent Senator on her first attempt in 2016.

The Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign welcomed the Seanad vote (25 in favour, 20 against) in support of Senator Frances Black’s ‘Control of Economic Activities (Occupied Territories) Bill. According to the IPSC Chairperson, Ms. Fatin Al Tamimi (a Palestinian-Irish citizen):

“We in the IPSC, and Palestinians around the world, warmly welcome this historic vote, the first of its kind in any Western country. Once again, Ireland is making history and leading the way in its solidarity with the Palestinian people. We thank and salute all those Senators and parties who have pledged to support the Bill, and we will be asking the Irish people to ensure that these politicians support its passage at all stages of the lawmaking process.”

Black has been campaigning for some time now for the rights of the Palestinian people. She states:

“I have long been passionate about the struggle of the Palestinian people, which shows clearly how trade in settlement goods sustains injustice. In the occupied territories, people are forcibly kicked out of their homes, fertile farming land is seized, and the fruit and vegetables produced are then sold on Irish shelves to pay for it all. We condemn the settlements as illegal but support them economically. As international law is absolutely clear that the settlements are illegal, then the goods they produce are the proceeds of crime. We must face up to this – we cannot keep supporting breaches of international law and violations of human rights.”

Video: Frances Black discusses the Bill that would support banning goods from Israel’s settlements.

According to an explanatory note on the bill’s main provisions:

“Under international criminal law, the transfer by a State of its civilian population into a territory it has militarily occupied is a ‘war crime’, as well as a ‘grave breach’ of international humanitarian law. Importantly, it is also a crime under Irish law, no matter where in the world it is committed. Ireland has a duty to ensure these laws are respected and to uphold the humanitarian principles outlined in them. To this end, the Control of Economic Activity (Occupied Territories) Bill 2018 seeks to prohibit trade with and economic support for illegal settlements in territories deemed occupied under international law. It would restrict the import and sale of goods produced in such settlements, Irish involvement in the provision of services in such settlements, and the extraction of resources from occupied territories without the consent of the legitimate authority of that territory. This economic support underpins the long-term continuation of illegal settlements, established in clear violation of international law. In tabling this bill we are stating that Ireland should not provide economic or political support for them, wherever they arise.”

The Bill, inter alia, specifically covers the importation and sale of settlement goods:

“6. Importation of settlement goods

(1) It shall be an offence for a person to import or attempt to import settlement goods.

(2) It shall be an offence for a person to assist another person to import or attempt to import settlement goods.

(3) For the purpose of the Customs Act 2015, the import of settlement goods is hereby prohibited.

7. Sale of settlement goods

(1) It shall be an offence for a person to sell or attempt to sell settlement goods.

(2) It shall be an offence for a person to assist another person to sell or attempt to sell settlement goods.”

Many Irish politicians believe that the passing of the Occupied Territories Bill will send a strong message that the issue of illegal settlements is being taken seriously and needs to be addressed.

The Israeli Embassy in Ireland has been highly critical of the Bill and commented that:

“The absurdity in the Seanad Éireann initiative is that it will harm the livelihoods of many Palestinians who work in the Israeli industrial zones affected by the boycott.”

However, the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) is a Palestinian-led movement for freedom, justice and equality. BDS upholds the simple principle that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of humanity. It was Palestinian Civil Society that called for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel as a form of non-violent pressure on Israel until it complies with international law and universal principles of human rights in 2005.

Source: Trocaire

Ms. Fatin Al Tamimi also commented that:

“These have been great months for Palestine in Ireland, a country which punches well above its weight when it comes to solidarity. At least seven local councils have voted to support the Palestinian-led global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, including Dublin, the first EU capital to take this stand, and most recently Mid-Ulster Council and Fermanagh & Omagh District Council.”

As the activist for Palestinian human rights, Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh says:

“I find that ingenuity in resistance, the ability to persevere — what we call sumud — to be tremendously inspiring. Our people are able to continue their lives despite the incredible odds arrayed against them and not only to persist but also to find some measure of success. As the graffiti on the wall says, to live is to resist.”

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Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist, lecturer and writer. His artwork consists of paintings based on contemporary geopolitical themes as well as Irish history and cityscapes of Dublin. His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art and politics along with research on a database of Realist and Social Realist art from around the world can be viewed country by country here. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

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A personal note. I attended Harvard College, receiving a BA degree in 1956.

In March 2017, my alma mater unwittingly honored me by inclusion in its University Library fake guide to “fake news, misinformation and propaganda.”

“Fair Harvard,” the university’s alma mater, lacks fairness. Its motto “VERITAS” on its seal and class rings belies its establishment and admissions practices.

An ongoing November 2014 federal lawsuit filed by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) accused Harvard of “employing racially and ethnically discriminatory policies and procedures in administering the undergraduate admissions program” – Asian-American applicants harmed by the practice.

According to the suit, Harvard uses racial “quotas” and “racial balancing” in admitting undergraduates, adding:

The university “uses ‘holistic’ admissions to disguise the fact that it holds Asian Americans to a far higher standard than other students and essentially forces them to compete against each other for admission.”

A study covering 20 years of admissions showed Asian-American applicants scored much better than other racial groups on academic merit, worse on personal attributes evaluated.

Since 2000, Asian-Americans had the lowest admission rate of any racial group despite higher test scores.

SFFA head Edward Blum said findings “expose(d) the startling magnitude of Harvard’s discrimination against Asian-American applicants,” adding:

“We believe that the rest of the evidence will be released in the next few weeks, and it will further confirm that Harvard is in deliberate violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.”

The ongoing lawsuit accused university officials of attempting to suppress data revealing its discriminatory practices.

In June 2013, the Supreme Court upheld race-conscious admissions at the University of Texas by a 4 -3 ruling.

Majority Justices Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Kennedy held that the university’s admissions practice didn’t violate the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee. Justices Ginsburg, Breyer and Sotomayor disagreed.

Elena Kagan recused herself for prior involvement in the case as US Solicitor General.

Writing for the majority in Fisher v. University of Texas, Justice Kennedy claimed

“(a) university is in large part defined by those intangible ‘qualities which are incapable of objective measurement but which make for greatness,’ “ adding:

“Considerable deference is owed to a university in defining those intangible characteristics, like student body diversity, that are central to its identity and educational mission.”

Treating university applicants (or anyone else) differently based on race, ethnicity and/or religion is clearly discriminatory. Despite the High Court ruling, SFFA plaintiffs continue their pursuit of admissions fairness – despite little likely chance of prevailing following the Supreme Court’s ruling, setting a disturbing new millennium precedent.

In the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education unanimous ruling, the Supreme Court upheld the Equal Protection Clause of the 5th and 14th Amendment’s, affirming that no state shall deny to anyone under its jurisdiction “equal protection of the laws,” including the right to life, liberty and property – along with adherence to international, constitutional and US statute laws.

Brown v. Board of Education is the basis of ruling racial segregation illegal, the same applying to other discriminatory practices based on race, ethnicity or religion.

In 2013, Harvard’s Office of Institutional Research (OIR) found that College admissions policies produce “negative effects” for Asian-Americans – along with advantaging legacy students and athletes over their low-income counterparts.

OIR findings showed Asian-American applicants ranked significantly better in test scores, academics, and alumni interview evaluations.

White students ranked higher only in personal qualities, assigned by the Admissions Office.

In Orwell’s novel “Animal Farm,” some animals were more equal than others – the way it is at Harvard, in America, other Western countries and most elsewhere.

Discrimination is common practice in most societies, corporate enterprises, academia, and interpersonal relations overall.

It violates the letter and spirit of human and civil rights laws – yet continues widespread anyway.

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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research based in Chicago.

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According to the Metropolitan Police investigation into the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, here is a timeline of events on 4th March:

• 13:40: Sergei and Yulia arrived at the Sainsbury’s upper level car park in The Maltings. The pair go to The Mill pub.
• Approximately 14.20: They eat at Zizzi restaurant on Castle Street
• 15:35: They leave the restaurant
• 16:15: Emergency services are called by a member of the public to the bench where Sergei and Yulia are slumped on a bench

So: car park, pub, restaurant, bench. Simples? Not so, as we shall see.

On 28th March, an article appeared in the Sun, which talked about a 12-year-old boy from Salisbury, Aiden Cooper, who was apparently in a park with his parents, when he saw the Skripals and went over to them to feed the ducks:

“A schoolboy told yesterday how he was caught up in the poison spy drama after assassination target Sergei Skripal gave him bread to feed ducks. Aiden Cooper, 12, was playing in a park with pals when they saw Skripal and daughter Yulia beside a stream. They were handed bread and are among the last people to have had contact with the retired Russian military intellig­ence colonel, now fighting for his life.“

Of course, I would always want to have a large bucket of salt on standby when reading anything in The Sun, but in this case I see no reason why they, or the people quoted in the article, would make this up. In any case, the story was repeated in a number of other outlets (The Mirror, The Mail and Metro for instance), and it mentions that the parents only found out about the identity of the breadman when they were contacted by police.

Now, the interesting thing about The Mirror, The Mail and Metro pieces is that they are all either very wrong or very vague about a quite crucial detail. The Mirror and The Mail both tell us that the incident took place “near the Avon Playground”. And Metro tells us that the incident took place at “Riverside Park”.

For those of you not familiar with Salisbury, let me shed some light. The Avon Playground mentioned by The Mirror and The Mail is next to the Avon River, and it is also about 50 yards or so from the bench where the Skripals were found (as an aside, this is not the same Avon as in Stratford-upon-Avon. Avon is a Celtic word meaning river). As for Riverside Park mentioned by Metro, this may be a figment of their imagination, as no such named park exists in Salisbury. But the important point is that from the details given in these articles, nobody would think anything other than that the duck-feeding incident took place in the same park as the bench on which the Skripals were found.

Yet all three of these media outlets are wrong, and in a way that may well be very significant. Turning back to the report in The Sun, we find that it is by far the most detailed of all the reports on the duck incident. In fact, it appeared three days after the others appeared, with The Sun sending a reporter to interview the boy and his parents. Here is a snippet:

“Aiden and his pals are thought to be the youngest of 130 exposed to the nerve agent Novichok, said to have been unleashed in Salisbury by President Vladimir Putin…

Aiden’s family were alerted after cops traced him from CCTV pics.

Aiden’s civil engineer dad Luke, 33, said: ‘Obviously we had seen the incident on the news but didn’t think we were involved at all. Aiden was playing in the park with his friends when they spotted the Russian gentleman and his daughter. Kids being kids they went over and he gave them some bread and they fed the ducks. We didn’t think anything of it until two weeks later when then the police knocked on our door.’

It was terrifying. We took Aiden to hospital for a load of tests and then the police told us they had to burn everything Aiden was wearing that day.’”

So presumably, Aiden and his friends were seen on camera, as was Sergei Skripal and possibly Yulia, and this was on 4th March. We aren’t told when in the day this was, but given that the police traced the family, and Aiden then had to go to hospital, it clearly must have been after the police claim Mr Skripal came into contact with nerve agent on his door handle.

But here’s the significant fact (I am indebted to a lady who contacted me to point it out, and I must say I kicked myself for not having realised it before). Unlike the media outlets mentioned above, The Sun doesn’t mention the name of the park, but the piece is accompanied by four photographs of Aiden with his parents in the park where they saw the Skripals, and indeed one of them has the caption “Aiden with his parents by the pond where he spoke to Skripal”. Here is one of the pictures:

But do you know something? This isn’t the Avon Playground. It isn’t even the non-existent Riverside Park. Do you want to know where it is? It happens to be Queen Elizabeth Gardens.

Why is this important? As you are probably aware, Queen Elizabeth Gardens is now a focal point of Skripal 2.0, as it is alleged to be the place where Dawn Sturgess, who has now sadly passed away, picked up a syringe or a container with the toxic substance in. And whilst I’m not entirely sure whether the location of the duck incident being in Queen Elizabeth Gardens, rather than the Avon Playground, has any bearing in terms of the cases themselves, it does raise three huge questions:

Firstly, according to the Metropolitan Police timeline at the top of this piece, there is no mention of Mr Skripal and Yulia going to Queen Elizabeth Gardens. Why is this, since according to the parents of Aiden Cooper, the police knew that they had been there, having seen footage of them feeding the ducks with their son and his friends?

Secondly, if the police knew that Mr Skripal and Yulia had been in Queen Elizabeth Gardens, and that this was after they were poisoned (as they claim), why was Queen Elizabeth Gardens not closed off immediately and subject to a clean-up operation, as were other places in the City where the Skripals were known to have visited?

Thirdly, assuming the latest official narrative, did the failure to close off and clean up Queen Elizabeth Gardens back in March, when it was known the Skripals had been there, make it more or less likely that someone would come into contact with the alleged nerve agent container at some point?

These are serious questions. I think you’ll agree that they deserve serious answers.

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Postscript

One or two comments suggest that a map would be helpful. Again, I am indebted to the lady who pointed the Queen Elizabeth Gardens connection out to me, who has helpfully created a map with the main areas of interest (see below).

Can I just caution about one thing though. The point of my post was not to try and work out whether Queen Elizabeth Gardens is important as regards the original case. I think we could go down endless rabbit holes trying to work out where the Skripals went, when they went there, and what this might mean. Unfortunately, we simply do not know this, as there is too much information that we are not party to.

What I am trying to do at the moment is exploit holes in the official story (of which there are more than a few). The police have not included QEG in their timeline, and yet they apparently know that the Skripals were there that day. Why have they not included it? Why did they not close the Gardens down? And had they done so, could this have prevented others from coming into contact with the substance?

I am not saying that I necessarily think there was a substance there. There may or may not have been. However, the point is that the authorities are saying this and yet those same authorities apparently know that the Skripals were there on 4th March, but have hushed this up. Therefore, we need to turn up the volume on it and they need to explain themselves.

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All images in this article are from the author.

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This is the second of two articles about the coming end of NATO as we know it and what can be done. The first you find here. It may be good to have at least browsed that one before you read on here.

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The Banality of Militarism

In the field of science, business and culture, new ideas, innovative methods, doing new things and doing old things in new ways are activities usually rewarded and admired. That keeps these fields vibrant, alive and interesting to others too.

However, in the field of the all-pervasive, omni-present paradigm of basic military defence and security thinking and policy – drop peace because no one has a peace policy – no such dynamics exist.

The same old tune is played over and over again – to make you fearful and pay:

“There is an enemy – here or there, today or upcoming – against which we (as your government) need to protect our country and you, our citizen. To do so, we need more weapons (troops, deployments, bases…) the purpose of which is to create ‘stability, security and peace’. We are the good guys having done nothing wrong, but they can’t be trusted: look what they have done or the nasty plans we know they have but cannot tell you.

We have good intentions but too little capacity, they have bad intentions and too much capacity. We seek balance, they seek superiority. While our weapons have long-range capacity, we have only defensive doctrines and we are, therefore, not a threat to them; we’ll only fight if we are attacked. But their long-range weapons are a threat to us. Thus, we need to increase the military budget. For your own sake, cough up more money for new weapons.”

It’s called the arms race and takes various shapes. It’s like two or more scorpions in a bottle, paid by taxpayers with nothing of real value – peace, for instance – given back to them.

Trillions of dollars is spent on this generalised, repetitive, never-failing intellectual garbage.

It promises citizens – falsely – that they will get protection, security and peace. Well, it’s like pissing in your pants: Because a few years later, new – invented – threats appear and stability, security and peace is threatened and, thus, we need more – for instance 2 per cent of GDP: A stupid discussion because that measure is related to size of the economy and not to any threat assessment.

These are, grosso modo, the mechanisms. NATO and its leaders say the same, year after year. So ask yourself:

What happened to the peace our governments promised would follow a few years ago? What happened to the UN Charter goal that we should solve conflicts and make peace, first of all, by peaceful means? What happened to cooperation, confidence-building and the over all better world we have been promised, decade after decade since 1945? Why are we in a new Cold War in Europe – why all those hot wars in the Middle East and elsewhere? IF these trillions were the rice for real peace?

Imagine what would happen if we separated the gigantic military costs – some US$ 1700 billion worldwide from the tax declaration and instead forced political leaders, the military and the weapons corporations to beg their bread from door to door for war – like humanitarian organisations have to do to help repair the damage these militarist policies cause (citizens pay twice, first for destruction and then for re-construction)? Most of all this peace-preventing cancer would disappear.

Hannah Arendt told us about the Banality of Evil. Today there is a much more evil and anonymous MIMAC – Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex – which practises this Banality of Militarism – of which you and I are nothing but paying victims.

How come so many believe in this banality? Because fearology is applied to them: making citizens believe that they are constantly and existentially threatened and that more and better weapons is thesolution. Even when, like after the Cold War ended, the MIMAC invented new enemies – one after the other – to keep itself (and NATO) look relevant and profit.

The militarist Emperor is pretty naked – but a great perpetuum mobile. Until citizens and enough people inside that system begin to think and practise moral courage and civil disobedience, it will continue down the drain and, at some point, lead to either worldwide destruction or, simply, implode and make the West a sad periphery to the Rest.

NATO – North Atlantic Treaty Obsolescence – in a new key

So, let’s try instead just a little new thinking. For heuristic purposes, let’s assume there are three scenarios for NATO within the next 5-10 year:

1) The Crisis-Dissolution Road

Continue down the present crisis road outlined in the first article, leading to its dissolution à la the Warsaw Pact. We gave 9 reasons in the first article, here is a 10th in a macro-perspective:

10. Change or fall: NATO is doomed to change or fall because the rest of the world (order) is changing. What is usually called the West – not to be confused with “the international community” – is losing power on all power scales to the Rest, China and other Asia in particular.

It will, therefore, be much better for NATO to do some early warning on its own existence and prepare for a fundamental change and new role in that rapidly emerging world order – which, one can safely predict, will not be dominated by the U.S. Empire, nor by NATO members and also not by the EU as such. It will be a multi-polar, cooperative world order.

Europe – including NATO Europe – itself is facing a multitude of crises – economic, management, vision, refugee management, populism, racism and more. It is faces with one big wake-up call: the end of Transatlantic trust and with Brexit, i.e. the likely future departure (more or less) of Britain and the U.S.

Contrary to the common understanding of the European/EU situation, this should be seen as a golden historic opportunity for Europe – the EU and other Europe, including Russia.

But that will require a new creative thinking independent of the paradigm imposed since 1945 on European allies and friends by the US. Europe will have to think on its own and stand on its own and find its own role – and one more with than against Russia – in the new future, multipolar Orient-led world order.

As a matter of fact, Empires do go down and with the relative weakening of the West, there is now only adaptation left for the West – not resistance and not full-spectrum dominance over The Rest.

The US is fighting all kinds of war it can’t win. The Europeans, including European NATO, can be smarter.

If such a change isn’t coming about soon, it means Crisis and Dissolution. But let’s remain hopeful.

So what about NATO’s future?

There could be these two if Crisis-Dissolution is avoided:

2) Humanitarian NATO:

Strip NATO of its weapons policies and arsenals and turn it into humanity’s largest humanitarian transport and communications agency directly under the UN. Since a large number of crises are already at hand and will get worse because of political inaction – or insufficient action – and new crises and war will emerge, there will be an increasing need for a benign, well-financed agency for doing good where people become victims of natural and man-made disasters.

3) New peace and security NATO:

Change its philosophy back to its original Treaty provisions (see below) and take it from there to build an entirely new regional peace and security (in that order) system that would be good for both the Europeans/Russia/Middle East and the Rest of the world – whether or not the U.S. would like it.

There may be others, of course, including some kind of combination of these two.

But any scenario that builds primarily on military security, confrontation with Russia, interventionism, war-fighting without prior conflict-management by “civilian means”, nuclear weapons and constant quarrels about increasing military budgets spells doom for NATO.

Such scenarios create more conflict, deeper hatred of and terrorism against the West thanks to failed wars, cause more refugees to flee and consume funds that, in times of economic crisis which we are in, should and can be spent better for civilian purposes.

2. New Humanitarian NATO

With the starving out of the UN and the systematic undermining of its authority by leading NATO countries since Yugoslavia, if not before, it should be obvious to everyone who cares to see and hear that the UN cannot repair the world after war or solve all the socio-economic problems caused by the global capitalist system. Particularly not when the war-system gets about US$ 1700 million worldwide and the UN budget is less than US$ 50 billion.

So take all the weapons away from NATO, the obsolete, and use the organisation, its management, communication, transport capability and its very broad professional skills, for something constructive.

And integrate it with the UN, preferably a rapidly reformed UN.

The world would then have a global agency that could intervene in humanitarian crisis situations, rescue people, quickly bring in tents and aid, build refugee camps o other safe zones and provide them with all that is needed for as long as it is needed – all of course in cooperation with local, regional and global humanitarian civil society organisations.

It’s doable if the vision, the cooperation and the political will is there.

And what would be more beautiful for NATO than becoming the world’s leading UN agency for humanitarian aid, for doing good? I believe that if NATO’s own employees were asked: Would you like to spend your life here on preparing for war-fighting and killing or would you rather work every day to save lives worldwide, it must be assumed that the great majority of these good women and men would choose to devote themselves to the latter.

New Peace and Security regional Euro-NATO

That – surprisingly – means becoming what it was originally meant to be and what is embedded in its North Atlantic Treaty of April 1949 from which I gladly quote at length – the italics added by me:

The Preamble:

“The Parties to this Treaty reaffirm their faith in the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments.

They are determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.”

Article 1:

“The Parties undertake, as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations, to settle any international dispute in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered, and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.”

Article 5:

“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations…”

The UN Charter is about nonviolence and the abolition of war. It’s about using peaceful means to achieve peace and only use – UN-organised – military means, detailed in Chapter 7 – if and when all civilian means have been tried and found to be in vain.

Only self-defence, defensive weapons and postures

Think if NATO adhered to such principles in its day-to-day policies. Today it does the exact opposite and wraps it all in boringly predictable rhetoric and the three mantras to explain and legitimize whatever it does: Security, stability and peace – none of them having emerged yet since the end of the First Cold War.

“I’ve met the enemy and he is us” – applies beautifully to militarism that can never produce peace

A new NATO that would thus go back to its original Treaty provisions and build its new policies on them, would be very acceptable to the world, seen as no threat to anybody. It would be entirely defensive and only take action if one of its members were first attacked. That’s a basically defensive posture and in complete unity with moral principles and international law.

And with a Kantian thinking about world peace: Do only yourself what can be elevated to a general principle adhered to be all others in the system. Defensive postures – self-defence – can be done by everyone without upsetting the system. Offensive “defence” is nonsense and simply can’t, it will lead to eternal armament and militarism. That’s the reason that the UN Charter’s Article 51 talk about self-defence.

What is defensive? Weapons with limited firepower and range. Offensive, on the contrary, means long-range and large, or unlimited, firepower, or destructive potentials. And when can you feel secure? When your own defensive capacity is strong enough to withstand the offensive capacity of the opponent.

Today’s Banal Militarism thinking is that “our” defence begins far away – the US sees itself threatened and as having defensive needs anywhere on earth – which can only be perceived as threatening by anybody who is not a close ally.  That philosophy means war without end…

So much for the military dimension – and as long as citizens believe in the utility of weapons, democracy compels us to accept that. But not any military posture, then. Only defensive. So what will need to be done is: Disarmament of all offensive weapons, including of course nuclear weapons, and re- or transarmament towards new exclusively defensive thinking, weapons, doctrines and policies.

Arms races would then stop, militarism would stop. Threatening everybody else with destruction on their territory would stop. Fear would diminish. But – of course imperialism, interventionism and war-fighting on somebody else’s territory would also be a thing of the past.

That’s a small prize to pay by a few to achieve that much more civilised world!

Multi-dimensional defence – civil defence and nonviolence

Of course, military means would not be enough in this new European system. You’d need civil protection too, you’d need in a crisis to be quite self-reliant and increase, in peacetime, your survival capacity on whatever you can provide yourself. It will also make you defensively strong and increase survival capacity.

Call it civil defence – which has many dimensions. And add to that non-violent resistance that must be separated from the defensive military in time and space – for instance be well-prepared for the eventuality that your country is occupied in spite of its strong defence. Think of things like civil disobedience, ridiculing the occupier, denying it legitimacy, demonstrations, petitions, peaceful sabotage of things – but no killing of course. Much more can be said on all this – but enough to here.

Intelligent conflict-handling

Using weapons/violence to handle conflicts is un-intelligent, counterproductive.

When did you last solve a conflict in your own life and make friends or peace by slapping the other’s face or humiliating him or her? Well, that sort of behaviour is, unfortunately, called “state(wo)manship” in today’s world.

One thing is to have a conflict – and like shit conflicts happen – and conflicts can be something good. But the moment you use violence, you add a dimension to the conflict – humiliating, wish for revenge, hatred, never-trust again attitude – and those things make it, invariably, much more difficult to solve the original conflict.

So conflict-intelligent governments and nations use non-violence first – “Let’s make nonviolence great again!” – and violence only as an absolutely last resort and only with a mandate from the UN or other international-regional structures that may emerge in the future world.

Using violence will soon be seen as unacceptable to civilisation – the way we look today upon cannibalism, absolute monarchy, slavery, child labour, pedophilia, rape and #MeToo.

And why not?

Think of two streets you walk down: Violent Street has people walking and driving by who all carry guns and on the rooftops of the houses you pass there are submachine gun positions. At Peaceful Street people walk unarmed but are all trained in JuJutsu. There are no weapons, no threats, no fears and if there is a quarrel, there would be a local neighbourhood guard service and mediators at standby, nearby.

Which would be the more pleasant and safe to you? And why on Earth do we continue to build Violent Streets all over the place?

So, what we are talking about here is a new European peace system that would be secured in many, dense and multi-layerd ways, including the use of the good sides of a new NATO, that could cultivate another defence – built on component such as conflict early warning, intelligent conflict-management, early non-violent intervention in crisis, mediation, consultations, provisions of good offices, peace-keeping, -making- and -building in the spirit of the UN Charter and NATO’s own Treaty. And everything else necessary to achieve negotiated solutions to conflicts and other problems.

Such a new Euro-NATO – something like Gorbachev’s European House that coordinates/integrated also with the OSCE and EU would be an attractive partner for the world, the Middle East in particular. Finally, after more than 100 years of ‘modern’ interventions for ‘mission civilisatrice’, Europe/NATO itself would have become civilised.

In lieu of a conclusion

Why must car drivers have a driving licence and know traffic rules? In order to get from A to B in the safest way for themselves, reduce violence to people and property and because it is a win-win solution for all. It would be good if those who handle violence in today’s world would have to have a sort of driving licence and know something before they can pull the trigger on other countries and their people.

Peace can be learnt! If we want to.

The better we learn to handle conflicts, the less violence we’ll need. Only the conflict-illiterate uses violence at an early stage – not because of evil or lack of intelligence (well, in some cases yes…) but because the civil and intelligent means are not part of the discourse and have no budget. Weapons have huge budgets and they are on the shelves ready to use. The MIMAC seeks to maintain that situation, violence being its core interest.

We’ve got to think differently to survive. Most wars and other violence will disappear the day people begin to think and educate themselves in using all the other tools.

How we can do defence, security and peace much much better than hitherto has been the case should be the main focus when NATO turns 70 next year. Just return to your Treaty’s words and spirit, scrap what you are and do today, and dare think what a wonderful world it could be when we turn into Peace Street from Violence Street.

Mr. Stoltenberg, its’ your turn to make history. Since NATO is meant to defend democracy and freedom, you have the freedom to say something free and creative at your next press conference, take off your mental uniform and become a leading figure in the history of peace. Or resign with honour.

The rest of shall discuss and use all the nonviolent means at hand to rid the world of militarism and present alternatives – the latter being something the peace movement people are still weak on. “No to…” – “Down with…” and angry caricatures isn’t quite enough. The only armament the world needsis intellectual and ethical.

Remember Gandhi’s subtle smile when saying that Western civilisation would be a good idea…

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Featured image: German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas

While the White House’s frenzied anti-Iran campaign has entailed unprecedented attempts to twist the arms of the United States’ traditional European allies, the pressure may be backfiring – a reality made all the more clear by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s claims that Europe’s three major powers plan to continue trade ties with Iran without the use of the U.S. dollar.

The move would be a clear sign that the foremost European hegemons – France, Germany, and the United Kingdom – plan to protect the interests of companies hoping to do business with Iran, a significant regional power with a market of around 80 million people.

Lavrov’s statement came as Trump insisted that European companies would “absolutely” face sanctions in the aftermath of Washington’s widely-derided sabotage of the six-party Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).  On May 8, the former host of NBC’s “The Apprentice” blasted the agreement and said that the U.S. would reinstate nuclear sanctions on Iran and “the highest level” of economic bans on the Islamic Republic.

Speaking in Vienna at the ministerial meeting of the JCPOA, Lavrov blasted the

U.S. move as “a major violation of the agreed-upon terms which actually made it possible to significantly alleviate tensions from the point of view of the military and political situation in the region and upholding the non-proliferation regime.”

He added that “Iran was meticulously fulfilling its obligations” at the time that Trump destroyed the U.S.’ end of the agreement.

Continuing, Lavrov explained:

The Joint Commission … will be constantly reviewing options which will make it possible, regardless of the US decision, to continue to adhere to all commitments undertaken within the JCPOA framework and provide methods for conducting trade and economic relations with Iran which will not depend on Washington’s whims.

What they can do is to elaborate collectively and individually such forms of trade and settlements with Iran that will not depend on the dollar and will be accepted by those companies that see trade with Iran more profitable than with the US. Such companies certainly exist – small, medium and large.”

Lavrov noted that the move wasn’t so much meant to “stand up for Iran” but to ensure the economic interests and political credibility of the European signatories to the accord. The Russian top diplomat added that large firms such as Total, Peugeot and Renault have already departed the country, having analyzed the situation and decided that the U.S. market is of far more vital importance.

France, Germany and the U.K. have pleaded with the “America First” president to exempt EU companies, writing a letter to U.S. Secretary-Treasurer Steve Mnuchin and right-wing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that the nuclear accord remains the “best means” to prevent Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear deterrent given the lack of any credible alternative. Given the hard-line stances of Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton, the pleas were likely greeted with bemusement.

The opening salvo or “snap-back” of sanctions hitting Iran’s automotive sector, gold trade, and other industries will hit the country on August 4, while further sanctions will hit the country’s oil industry and central bank on November 6.

Signaling the likelihood of major clashes to come, Lavrov noted:

Everyone agrees that [stepped-up U.S. sanctions on Iran] is an absolutely illegitimate practice. It cannot be accepted as appropriate, but it is a policy that can hardly be changed. Severe clashes are expected in the trade, economic and political spheres.”

Patience reaches its limits on all sides

A blistering recent speech by German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas signaled the European exasperation with Trump’s go-it-alone policies, which have largely seen the U.S. break from its transatlantic partners while pursuing what he called an “egoistic policy of ‘America First’” in relation to the Paris Climate Agreements, Iran nuclear deal, and introduction of tariffs and other protectionist measures.

Maas further questioned the continued viability of the transatlantic partnership:

Old pillars of reliability are crumbling under the weight of new crises and alliances dating back decades are being challenged in the time it takes to write a tweet … the Atlantic has become wider under President Trump and his policy of isolationism has left a giant vacuum around the world.”

He added:

The urgency with which we must pool Europe’s strength in the world is greater than ever before … our common response to ‘America First’ today must be ‘Europe United!’”

Highlighting how “the Trump administration’s conduct is posing completely new challenges to Europe,” the German foreign minister noted that the White House now “overtly calls [European] values and interests into question,” requiring a more robust and assertive stance – and “the first test of this approach will be the nuclear agreement with Iran.”

While such talk surely signals major tensions between the allies, Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization director Ali Akbar Salehi offered caustic words stressing Iran’s doubt in Europe’s ability to follow through with its independent foreign policy, stating:

Iran understands that Europe and the United States are strategic partners, but they are not lovers who share the same bed … European independence vis-a-vis the US is under threat. In the eyes of the whole world, Europe has become the U.S.’ lackey.

We are faced with an American administration whose decisions have left the world in shock.

Mr. Trump is punishing foreign companies that do business with us and threatening countries that buy our petrol. He’s after fast results. But the EU, Russia and China didn’t expect to be put under so much pressure.

The EU is still under shock. The bloc is like a boxer that has been hit with an uppercut. It needs time to pull itself together.”

As Western capitals brace themselves for Wednesday’s two-day summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Iranians and Europeans alike are hoping that EU leaders can finally put their money where their mouth is and unshackle themselves from the U.S.-imposed hegemonic bondage constraining them since the end of the Second World War.

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Elliott Gabriel is a former staff writer for teleSUR English and a MintPress News contributor based in Quito, Ecuador. He has taken extensive part in advocacy and organizing in the pro-labor, migrant justice and police accountability movements of Southern California and the state’s Central Coast.

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Featured image: Alexander Neu

Members of Parliament in Germany have concluded that the presence of the United States military in Syria is illegal. 

Alexander Neu, a Member of Parliament for the Left Party in Germany, requested an opinion on the legality of the military presence and operations by U.S., Russia and Israel in Syria.

Moonofalabama.org reports: The result (pdf, in German) is quite clear-cut:

Russia was asked by the recognized government of Syria to help. Its presence in Syria is without doubt legal under International Law.

U.S. activities in Syria can be seen as two phases:

Regime Change

The provision of arms to insurgents in Syria by the U.S. (and others) was and is illegal. It is a breach of the Prohibition on the Use of Force in international law specifically of the UN Charter Article 2(4):

All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

Fight against ISIS

The U.S. argues that its presence in Syria is in (collective) self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter because the Islamic State in Syria threatens to attack the United States. That, in itself, would be insufficient as Syria is a sovereign state. The U.S. therefore additionally claims that the Syrian state is “unwilling or unable” to fight against the Islamic State.

The Scientific Services says that the claim of “unwilling or unable” was already dubious when the U.S. operation started. This for two reasons:

• It is not law or an internationally accepted legal doctrine. (The 120 members of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and others have argued strongly against it.)
• The Syrian government itself was fighting ISIS, but it could not operation in large parts of its territory where the Islamic State had taken control. Some argue that this justified the “unable” argument. But ISIS is largely defeated and it no longer has any significant territorial control.

The already dubious legal case for the presence of U.S. (and other ‘coalition’ troops in Syria) can thus no longer be made. The U.S. presence in Syria is illegal.

Israel’s attack on Hizbullah and Iranian units and installations in Syria, as well as against Syria itself, are claimed by Israel to be ‘anticipatory self-defense’ under UN Charter Article 51. But ‘anticipatory self-defense’ could only be claimed when attacks against Israel were imminent. That case has not been made. The Israeli attacks are thus ‘pre-emptive self defense’ which is not an accepted doctrine of International Law.

The service was not asked for an opinion on Turkey’s incursion into Syria but it notes that claims of ‘self defense’, as Turkey makes in its fight against Kurdish entities in Syria, are often abuses for Geo-strategic purposes.

So far the Scientific Services opinion.

The given legal arguments are not new. Other have long reasoned along the same lines and came to the same result.

But Germany is a partner of the U.S. coalition of the willing against ISIS. Its military has flown reconnaissance missions from Turkey and Jordan in support of the U.S. operation under the same legal argument the U.S. made. The German parliament is now unlikely to renew the mandate for the anti-ISIS operation. Other countries will likely follow and end their participation in the U.S. coalition.

While this is will not change the situation on the ground in Syria it does change the international political atmosphere. It also ‘rehabilitates’ the Syrian government in the European public eye as it can no longer be depicted as an ‘enemy.’

One of the many interesting details to be learned by understanding human psychology is how a person’s unconscious fear works in a myriad of ways to make them believe that they bear no responsibility for a particular problem.

This psychological dysfunctionality cripples a substantial portion of the human population in ways that work against the possibility of achieving worthwhile outcomes for themselves, other individuals, communities and the world as a whole. In an era when human extinction is now a likely near-term outcome of this dysfunctionality, it is obviously particularly problematic. So why does this happen and how does it manifest?

In essence, if a person is frightened by the circumstances of others or a particular set of events, their fear will often unconsciously delude them into believing and behaving as if they bear no responsibility for playing a part in addressing the problem. This fear works particularly easily when the person or people concerned live at considerable social and/or geographic distance or when the events occur in another place. But it can also work with someone who is socially or geographically close, or with an event that occurs nearby. Let me illustrate this common behaviour with several examples which might stimulate your awareness of having witnessed it too.

I first became seriously interested in this phenomenon after hearing someone, who had just returned from India, describe the many street beggars in India as ‘living a subsistence lifestyle’. As I listened to this individual, I could immediately perceive that they were very frightened by their experience but in a way that made them not want to help. Given that this individual has considerable wealth, it was immediately apparent to me that the individual was attempting to conceal from themselves their unconscious guilt (about their own wealth and how this was acquired) but I could perceive an element of anger in their response as well. This anger was obviously shaping the way in which street beggars were perceived so that there was no apparent need to do anything. So what was the unconscious anger about? Most probably about not getting help themselves when they needed it as a child.

A widespread version of this particular fear and the delusion that arises from it, is the belief that it is the direct outcome of the decisions of others that make them responsible for the circumstances in which they find themselves. Obviously, this belief is widespread among those who refuse to take structural violence, such as the exploitative way in which the global economy functions, into account. If the victim can be blamed for their circumstances then ‘I am not responsible’ in any way. Men who like to blame women who have been sexually assaulted for their ‘provocative dress’ are also exhibiting this fear and its attendant delusional behaviour.

But perhaps the most obvious manifestation of evading responsibility occurs when instead of doing what they can to assist someone in need, a person laments ‘not being able’ to do something more significant. And by doing this, their fear enables them to conceal that they might, in fact, have done something that would have helped. This often happens, for example, when someone is too scared to offer help because it might require the agreement of someone else (such as a spouse) who (unconsciously) frightens them. But there are other reasons why their fear might generate this behaviour as well.

Another common way of evading taking responsibility (while, in this case, deluding yourself that you are not) is to offer someone who needs help something that they do not need and then, when they refuse it, to interpret this as ‘confirmation’ that they do not need your help.

A variation of this behaviour is to dispose of something that you do not want and to delude yourself that you are, in fact, ‘helping’. I first became fully aware of this version of evading responsibility (and assuaging guilt) when I was working in a refugee camp in the Sudan at the height of the Ethiopian war and famine in 1985. Companies all over the world were ‘giving’ away unwanted stock of unsaleable goods (presumably for a tax benefit) to aid agencies who were then trying to find ways to use it. And not always successfully. I will never forget seeing the Wad Kowli Refugee Camp for the first time with its wonderfully useless lightweight and colourful overnight bushwalking tents instead of the large, heavy duty canvas tents normally used in such difficult circumstances. Better than nothing you might say. For a week, perhaps, but only barely in 55 degrees Celsius.

Another popular way of evading responsibility is to delude yourself about the precise circumstances in which someone finds themselves. For example, if your fear makes you focus your attention on an irrelevant detail, such as the pleasantness of your memory of a town as a tourist destination, rather than the fact that someone who lives there is homeless, then it is easy to delude yourself that their life must be okay and to behave in accordance with your delusion rather than the reality of the other person’s life.

One way that some people evade responsibility is to delude themselves that a person who needs help is ‘not contributing’ while also deluding themselves about the importance of their own efforts. This is just one of many delusions that wealthy people often have to self-justify their wealth while many people who work extremely hard are paid a pittance (or nothing) for their time, expertise and labour.

Variations of another delusion include ‘I can only give what I have got’ and ‘I can’t afford it’ (but you might know of others), which exposes the fear that makes a person believe that they have very little irrespective of their (sometimes considerable) material wealth. This fear/delusion combination arises because, in the emotional sense, the person probably does have ‘very little’. If a person is denied their emotional needs as a child, they will often learn to regard material possessions as the only measure of value in the quality of their life. And because material possessions can never replace an emotional need, no amount of material wealth can ever feel as if it is ‘enough’. For a fuller explanation of this point, see ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’. http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1305/S00186/love-denied-the-psychology-of-materialism-violence-and-war.htm/

If someone is too scared to accept any responsibility for helping despite the sometimes obvious distress of a person in need, they might even ask for reassurance, for example by asking ‘Are you okay?’ But the question is meaningless and asked in such a way that the person in need might even know that no help will be forthcoming. They might even offer the reassurance sought despite having to lie to do so.

A common way in which some people, particularly academics, evade responsibility is to offer an explanation and/or theory about a social problem but then take no action to change things themselves.

Another widespread way of evading responsibility, especially among what I call ‘the love and light brigade’, is to focus attention on ‘positives’ (the ‘good’ news) rather than truthfully presenting information about the state of our world and then inviting powerful responses to that truth. Deluding ourselves that we can avoid dealing with reality, much of which happens to be extremely unpleasant and ugly, is a frightened and powerless way of approaching the world. But it is very common.

Many people evade responsibility, of course, simply by believing and acting as if someone else, perhaps even ‘the government’, is ‘properly’ responsible.

Undoubtedly, however, the most widespread ways of evading responsibility are to deny any responsibility for military violence while paying the taxes to finance it, denying any responsibility for adverse environmental and climate impacts while making no effort to reduce consumption, denying any responsibility for the exploitation of other people while buying the cheap products produced by their exploited (and sometimes slave) labour, denying any responsibility for the exploitation of animals despite eating and/or otherwise consuming a range of animal products, and denying any part in inflicting violence, especially on children, without understanding the many forms this violence can take. See ‘Why Violence?’ http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’. http://anitamckone.wordpress.com/articles-2/fearless-and-fearful-psychology/

Ultimately, of course, we evade responsibility by ignoring the existence of a problem.

Despite everything presented above, it should not be interpreted to mean that we should all take responsibility for everything that is wrong with the world. There is, obviously, a great deal wrong and the most committed person cannot do something about all of it. However, we can make powerful choices, based on an assessment of the range of problems that interest us, to intervene in ways large or small to make a difference. This is vastly better than fearfully deluding ourselves and/or making token gestures.

Moreover, powerful choices are vital in this world. We face a vast array of violent challenges, some of which threaten near-term human extinction. In this context, it is unwise to leave responsibility for getting us out of this mess to others, and particularly those insane elites whose political agents (who many still naively believe that we ‘elect’) so demonstrably fail to meaningfully address any of our major social, political, economic and environmental problems.

If you are interested in gaining greater insight into violent and dysfunctional human behaviour, and what you can do about it, you might like to read ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’ mentioned above.

And if you are inclined to declare your own willingness to accept some responsibility for addressing these violent and dysfunctional behaviours, you might like to sign the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’ and to join those participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’. http://tinyurl.com/flametree

You might have had a good laugh at some of the examples above. The real challenge is to ask yourself this question: where do I evade responsibility? And to then ponder how you will take responsibility in future.

Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence

His email address is [email protected] and his website is here. http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com

Author’s Note

This article was originally published by Global Research  in February 2010 under the title: Europe’s Five “Undeclared Nuclear Weapons States”

The media, politicians and scientists have remained silent. The focus is persistently on North Korea and Iran’s non-existant nuclear weapons. 

Double Standards?  All eyes on North Korea

Amply documented, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Turkey are in possession of nuclear weapons which are deployed under national command against Russia, Iran and the Middle East.

Following the failed July 2016 military coup in Turkey, the media reported on Turkey’s nuclear weapons stored and deployed at the Incirlik airbase. 

The US National Resources Defense Council in a February 2005 report confirmed Turkey’s deployment of 90 so-called tactical B61 nuclear weapons, some of which were subsequently decommissioned    

The stockpiling and deployment of tactical B61 in these five “non-nuclear states” are intended for targets in the Middle East. Moreover, in accordance with  “NATO strike plans”, these thermonuclear B61 bunker buster bombs (stockpiled by the “non-nuclear States”) could be launched  “against targets in Russia or countries in the Middle East such as Syria and Iran” ( quoted in National Resources Defense Council, Nuclear Weapons in Europe , February 2005, emphasis added) 

The accuracy of the numbers of bombs quoted in the media reports remains to be acertained. Some of the bombs were decommissioned. Some of them may have been replaced with a more recent version  including the B61-11. 

It should be emphasized that in the last few years, the Pentagon has developed a more advanced version of the B61, namely the B61-12, which is slated to replace the older versions currently stored and deployed in Western Europe including Turkey.

Nuclear weapons are on the table: A 1.2 trillion dollar nuclear weapons is now being contemplated by the Trump administration with a view to “making the World Safer”. A financial bonanza for the  “defense contractors”

click image to order Michel Chossudovsky’s book, which outlines the Dangers of Nuclear War

The notion of deterrence has been scrapped  These so-called mini-nukes are intended to be used.

Under The Pentagon’s so-called Life Extension Program, the the B61 nuclear weapons are  intended to “remain operational until at least 2025.” 

Are these five countries undeclared nuclear powers?

Should we be concerned?

The number of nuclear bombs deployed is far greater than those of the DPRK, which is object of  economic sanctions and war threats. 

Turkey,  Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany and Italy possess B61 nuclear bombs, deployed under national command and targeted at Russia, Iran and the Middle East. 

Michel Chossudovsky, July 12, 2018

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Europe’s Five “Undeclared Nuclear Weapons States”

by Michel Chossudovsky

Global Research

February 12, 2010

“Far from making Europe safer, and far from producing a less nuclear dependent Europe, [the policy] may well end up bringing more nuclear weapons into the European continent, and frustrating some of the attempts that are being made to get multilateral nuclear disarmament,” (Former NATO Secretary-General George Robertson quoted in Global Security, February 10, 2010)

“‘Is Italy capable of delivering a thermonuclear strike?… Could the Belgians and the Dutch drop hydrogen bombs on enemy targets?… Germany’s air force couldn’t possibly be training to deliver bombs 13 times more powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima, could it?… Nuclear bombs are stored on air-force bases in Italy, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands — and planes from each of those countries are capable of delivering them.” (“What to Do About Europe’s Secret Nukes.”Time Magazine, December 2, 2009)

The “Official” Nuclear Weapons States

Five countries, the US, UK, France, China and Russia are considered to be “nuclear weapons states” (NWS), “an internationally recognized status conferred by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)”. Three other “Non NPT countries” (i.e. non-signatory states of the NPT) including India, Pakistan and North Korea, have recognized possessing nuclear weapons.

Israel: “Undeclared Nuclear State”

Israel is identified as an “undeclared nuclear state”. It produces and deploys nuclear warheads directed against military and civilian targets in the Middle East including Tehran. Iran There has been much hype, supported by scanty evidence, that Iran might at some future date become a nuclear weapons state. And, therefore, a pre-emptive defensive nuclear attack on Iran to annihilate its non-existent nuclear weapons program should be seriously contemplated “to make the World a safer place”. The mainstream media abounds with makeshift opinion on the Iran nuclear threat. But what about the five European “undeclared nuclear states” including Belgium, Germany, Turkey, the Netherlands and Italy. Do they constitute a threat?

Belgium, Germany, The Netherlands, Italy and Turkey: “Undeclared Nuclear Weapons States”

While Iran’s nuclear weapons capabilities are unconfirmed, the nuclear weapons capabilities of these five countries including delivery procedures are formally acknowledged. The US has supplied some 480 B61 thermonuclear bombs to five so-called “non-nuclear states”, including Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey.

Casually disregarded by the Vienna based UN Nuclear Watchdog (IAEA), the US has actively contributed to the proliferation of nuclear weapons in Western Europe. As part of this European stockpiling, Turkey, which is a partner of the US-led coalition against Iran along with Israel, possesses some 90 thermonuclear B61 bunker buster bombs at the Incirlik nuclear air base. (National Resources Defense Council, Nuclear Weapons in Europe , February 2005) By the recognised definition, these five countries are “undeclared nuclear weapons states”.

The stockpiling and deployment of tactical B61 in these five “non-nuclear states” are intended for targets in the Middle East. Moreover, in accordance with  “NATO strike plans”, these thermonuclear B61 bunker buster bombs (stockpiled by the “non-nuclear States”) could be launched  “against targets in Russia or countries in the Middle East such as Syria and Iran” ( quoted in National Resources Defense Council, Nuclear Weapons in Europe, February 2005)

Does this mean that Iran or Russia, which are potential targets of a nuclear attack originating from one or other of these five so-called non-nuclear states should contemplate defensive preemptive nuclear attacks against Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Turkey? The answer is no, by any stretch  of the imagination.

While these “undeclared nuclear states” casually accuse Tehran of developing nuclear weapons, without documentary evidence, they themselves have capabilities of delivering nuclear warheads, which are targeted at Iran.  To say that this is a clear case of “double standards” by the IAEA and the “international community” is a understatement.

Click to See Details and Map of Nuclear Facilities located in 5 European “Non-Nuclear States”

The stockpiled weapons are B61 thermonuclear bombs.  All the weapons are gravity bombs of the B61-3, -4, and -10 types.2 . Those estimates were based on private and public statements by a number of government sources and assumptions about the weapon storage capacity at each base .(National Resources Defense Council, Nuclear Weapons in Europe , February 2005)

Germany: Nuclear Weapons Producer

Among the five “undeclared nuclear states”, “Germany remains the most heavily nuclearized country with three nuclear bases (two of which are fully operational) and may store as many as 150 [B61 bunker buster ] bombs” (Ibid). In accordance with “NATO strike plans” (mentioned above) these tactical nuclear weapons are also targeted at the Middle East. While Germany is not categorized officially as a nuclear power, it produces nuclear warheads for the French Navy. It stockpiles nuclear warheads (made in America) and it has the capabilities of delivering nuclear weapons.

Moreover,  The European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company – EADS , a Franco-German-Spanish  joint venture, controlled by Deutsche Aerospace and the powerful Daimler Group is Europe’s second largest military producer, supplying .France’s M51 nuclear missile. Germany imports and deploys nuclear weapons from the US. It also produces nuclear warheads which are exported to France. Yet it is classified as a non-nuclear state.

Related Article Rick Rozoff, NATO’s Secret Transatlantic Bond: Nuclear Weapons In Europe, Global Research, December 4, 2009

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

by

Michel Chossudovsky

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Modern conventional medicine has increasingly become a culture of scientific and historical denialism. Although portending to be an objective discipline of consistent progress, the medical establishment more often than not denies the insights, discoveries, medical systems and methodologies of the distant past and non-Western cultures. Rather, Western medicine is racing more rapidly towards a retro-future with a blind faith in the promises of new engineered, synthetic drugs. Sadly, this pursuit is misconstrued as synonymous with important medical breakthroughs and the evolution of scientific medicine in general. Yet as the statistics show, modern medicine is on a collision course with itself. This is most evident in the increasing failures conventional medicine faces in fighting life-threatening diseases and the annual increases in iatrogenic injuries and deaths.  

Upon graduation, every new physician repeats

“I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan.”

The Oath composed by the wise Greek medical sage, Hippocrates, goes on to say

“I will use those dietary regimens which will benefit my patients according to my greatest ability and judgement, and I will do no harm or injustice to them.”

Hippocrates was a naturalist. Unlike physicians today, he was expert in the healing powers found in the natural world and was a keen observer about the health benefits of different foods, plants and herbs. However, modern allopathic doctors are not only largely ignorant about the natural world but also the epigenetic, environmental and behavior causes of diseases and the means to prevent them. They have also removed themselves from honoring the Hippocratic Oath.

How well has modern medicine lived up to its Oath?  Adverse drug events (ADEs) are rising. They have become a plague upon public health and our healthcare system. As of 2014, prescription drug injuries totaled 1.6 million events annually. Every day, over 4,000 Americans experience a serious drug reaction requiring hospitalization. And over 770,000 people have ADEs during hospital stays.[1]  The most common ADEs are hypertension, congestive heart failure, atrial fibrillation, volume depletion disorders and atherosclerotic heart disease.[2]  According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2016 there were 64,070 deaths directly associated with prescription overdoses; this is greater than the number of American soldiers killed during the entire Vietnam War.[3] For 2017, the CDC reported over 42,000 deaths from prescription opioid drugs alone.[4] Yet this figure is probably much higher due to the CDC’s practice of reporting statistics very conservatively and many cases not getting properly reported. So when we consider that there were over 860,000 physicians in the US practicing in 2016, potentially most physicians in America have contributed to ADEs.

No legitimate and highly developed alternative or natural medical practice has such a dismal track record of illness and death. Nevertheless, when a rare ADE, poisoning or death occurs Skeptics in the radical fringe Science-Based Medicine (SBM) movement, who rabidly oppose Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), are quick to report the incident as a national crisis and condemn the use of traditional natural medicine altogether. Yet if we look at the potential number of iatrogenic injuries and deaths over the last four decades since the start of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology boom in the late 1980s, we are looking at over 60 million ADE incidences caused by conventional Western medicine alone. This is nothing celebrate and no concerted national effort within the medical establishment nor among the followers of SBM is being made to challenge the dominant medical paradigm responsible for this crisis.

According to the World Health Organization, 80% of the world’s population uses herbal medicine. And this trend is increasing exponentially.[5] Skeptics have few viable and rational explanations to account for this trend. Since they regard traditional herbal medical systems as quackery, everyone experiencing relief or having a successful treatment from botanicals is simply having a placebo effect conversion experience. Fortunately in the US and other Western nations, the public is rapidly losing its trust and satisfaction with conventional Western medical practice and is seeking safer alternatives. With healthcare costs escalating annually and prescription ADE’s on the increase as more and more drugs are fast-tracked through federal regulatory hurdles, relying solely upon allopathic medicine is a dangerous bargain. Dr. Dominic Lu at the University of Pennsylvania and president of the American Society for the Advancement of Anesthesia and Sedation recommends that Chinese herbal and Western medicine might complement each other if we make the effort to investigate their synergistic therapeutic effects. Lu believes oriental concepts of human anatomy should be further included in higher educational health science curriculums.[6] In addition, we would also note that with conventional medicine in a crisis people are accessing the numerous resources on the internet to educate themselves about the medicinal properties of plants, herbs, supplements and foods as part of their personal therapeutic protocols.

In our previous article in this series exposing the scientific denialism and ideological agenda of Skepticism’s and Wikipedia’s role in promoting SBM’s regressive agenda to turn people away from non-conventional drug-based medicine, we tackled SBM’s and Wikipedia’s attack on acupuncture. In this segment we will focus upon Chinese botanical medicine. In mainland China, acupuncture and herbology are treated as separate disciplines; therefore we will only look at Chinese botanical medical.

Wikipedia has a noteworthy amount to say about traditional Chinese herbal medicine. However, its major criticisms rely heavily upon five-plus year old reviews of the peer-reviewed research. Some references in fact have nothing to do with Chinese herbology. The majority of clinical research into Chinese botanicals and medical preparations are only found in Chinese databases. Therefore, Western analytical reviews, including the Cochrane reports, are extremely limited, inconclusive and biased. Critics of TCM frequently criticize published Chinese research as “incomplete, some containing errors or were misleading.”[7] These are the same Skeptic criticisms Wikipedia levels against traditional herbal medical systems in general.  With over 181,000 peer-reviewed research papers and reviews listed in the National Institutes of Health PubMed database referring to TCM, it is ridiculous and disingenuous to assume Wikipedia’s editors have scoured this massive body of science to make any sound judgement about TCM’s efficacy.

Under the heading “Chinese Herbology,” Wikipedia states, “A Nature editorial described TCM as “fraught with pseudoscience,” and said that the most obvious reason why it has not delivered many cures is that the majority of its treatments have no logical mechanism of action… Research into the effectiveness of traditional Chinese herbal therapy is of poor quality and often tainted by bias, with little or no rigorous evidence of efficacy.”[8] Nature’s editorial, which reflects the same ill-informed opinions frequent in Skeptical criticisms about natural health, does not cite any research to support its sweeping prejudiced opinion. The editorial is primarily a diatribe against the growing popularity of traditional medicine in the Chinese domestic market, estimated by the Boston Consulting Group to be worth $13 billion in 2006.[9]  In addition, as noted above, Wikipedia’s sources include a review of herbal medicine published in the South African Medical Journal that only looked at six African botanicals, none which are part of the Chinese pharmacopoeia.[10]

We would be negligent to not state a serious concern that readers should be aware of regarding Chinese medicinal herbs and preparations. This has been rightly noted by the SBM writers and Wikipedia; that is the high levels of toxic contaminants, notably arsenic, lead and other toxic chemicals found in Chinese herbs and formulas being exported. However Wikipedia fails to note the real reasons for this warning. Rather it frames caution as a means to discredit Chinese botanical medicine altogether. The export of toxic herbs is largely due to the enormous and out-of-control environmental problem including toxic atmospheric particulate matter from over-pollution, toxic dumping and waste spills in water supplies and poor agricultural practices. However, in some countries such as Japan and Taiwan, federal regulations for the import and export of medical botanicals are stricter and clean, non-toxic botanical herbs and preparations are readily available. There remain very reliable sources for getting highly quality grown Chinese herbs.

One of SBM’s leading spokespersons David Gorski would like us to believe that Mao Tse-tung should be condemned for restoring traditional Chinese medicine in mainland China. [11] But this is a blatant half-truth. In fact, Gorski and his colleagues have far more in common with Chairman Mao based upon the historical facts. It was during Mao’s reign that classical Chinese medicine took an enormous leap backwards. The ancient system was originally banned during the Chinese Nationalist movement in the early 20th century because its leaders believed the old ways were preventing the nation from modernizing. Mao initially made a small effort to restore the practice when he came to power. However, it was after the Communist Revolution when Mao turned against traditional medicine. The Cultural Revolution again outlawed the practice. Traditional doctors who retained the most extensive knowledge and wisdom about classical Chinese anatomical theory and knowledge of medicinal herbs were systematically gathered for Communist conversion programs, imprisoned and/or killed. TCM nearly died out altogether from the mainland. Years later when the Communists attempted to resurrect the ancient medical wisdom, only a few hundred doctors could be found throughout the country with sufficient knowledge to start TCM anew. Yet Mao remained ambiguous. He wrote,

“Even though I believe we should promote Chinese medicine… I personally do not believe in it. I don’t take Chinese medicine.”[12]

Unfortunately what is commonly called Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) today is a partial reconstruction of the original ancient system that had developed over thousands of years. Much has been lost. The government’s effort failed. According to Dr. Brigetta Shea,

“once the government decided to reinstate some form of China’s traditional medicine, they did it with an emphasis on combining it with Western medical theory. This shifted even acupuncture theory, as Western anatomical teaching was adopted and esoteric subtle anatomy was discarded.”[13]

The result has been that TCM today is a mere shadow of what it was in the past, and is little more than a watered down system contaminated with Western reductionist medical theories.  Fortunately, growing interest in TCM is inspiring young researchers and practitioners to travel to China, Taiwan, Japan and Korea to try to recover the more ancient classical medical teachings that were not included in the standardized TCM curriculums.

SBM founder Stephen Novella remarks,

“TCM is a pre-scientific superstitious view of biology and illness, similar to the humoral theory of Galen, or the notions of any pre-scientific culture. It is strange and unscientific to treat TCM as anything else. Any individual diagnostic or treatment method within TCM should be evaluated according to standard principles of science and science-based medicine, and not given special treatment.”[14]

The remainder of Novella’s argument is an example of taking TCM terms literally and not penetrating their deeper functions to discover their correlations with scientifically identified biomolecular substances and events. Novella also believes that the Chinese medical theories of qi and the acupuncture meridians share the same magical thinking as “ether, flogistum, Bigfoot, and unicorns.”[15]

The master physicians and pioneers of the advanced traditional medical systems of Greece, India, China and Tibet, were very skilled and astute in identifying metabolic disturbances in their patients. Although on the surface, the humors may appear to be outdated or primitive mythological terms, a deep study of the traditional medical texts reveals they have direct correspondences to biochemical and biological processes that are well known in modern medicine. For example, according to the recent translators of the enormous medical corpus composed by one of the world’s greatest medical doctors Avicenna in the 11th century, who revived the medical theories of Galen at the height of Islamic civilization’s golden age, Dr. Hakima Amri, professor of molecular biology at Georgetown University and Dr. Mones Abu-Asab, a senior scientist and expert in phylogenetic systematics at the National Institutes of Health, discovered the ancient descriptions of the humors have a direct correlation to properties of fats, proteins and organic acids  — the cornerstones of metabolic changes. Due to its linear and non-systematic way of analyzing health and disease, modern medicine focuses upon single metabolic pathways and fails to consider that these pathways work in concert and are co-dependent with others. For example, a patient with high LDL cholesterol will be prescribed a statin without fully understanding the biological imbalances that increased LDL. But traditional herbal systems, including Chinese botanical medicine, provide more parameters such as a tissue’s hydration and energy production in the case of abnormal cholesterol levels. Western medicine does not take into account hydration and energy production in making an accurate diagnostic assessment of the reasons for a patient’s cholesterol imbalance. This is where the ancient theory of humors, or the fundamental “fluids” in the body — traditionally defined as blood, phlegm and yellow and black bile —  provides clues. 

Western medicine has no equivalent to what traditional systems refer to as “dystemperament” in a biological system or organ.  Dystemperament was understood as an imbalance in a person’s unique personalized physical, genetic and psychological disposition. Today the rapidly growing discipline of Functional Medicine finds agreement with this principle for diagnosing and treating an illness.  In fact, conventional medicine still endeavors to define the causes of many diseases at a singular cellular or molecular level. It also faces a serious predicament in being based upon a one-drug-one-target paradigm in drug research and development. Traditional systems, including Chinese herbology, being far more complete and efficient medical systems, don’t struggle with this dilemma.  For half a century we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on reductionist biomedical research to identify genes, proteins and metabolic biochemical changes that contribute to disease. But despite the enormous body of knowledge and data we have gathered from astronomic costly projects there have been few practical and meaningful results to find safe and effective treatments outside of prescribing potentially lethal drugs.

Dried herbs and plant portions for Chinese herbology at a Xi’an market (Source: Creative Commons)

Most evidence-based medical reviews of research conducted on the efficacy of specific Chinese herbs fail to take into account that Chinese herbology is a complete system. It is unrealistic to research a single traditional Chinese herb and draw a definitive conclusion. An herbal concoction can include up to 18 or more ingredients, and these may be fermented or simmered for hours to produce pharma-therapeutic properties useful for the treatment of disease. This was noted in a Cochrane review of Chinese medical herbs for treating acute pancreatitis.[16] It is estimated that there are over 13,000 different medicinal ingredients found in the annals of Chinese medical texts and well over 100,000 unique decoctions and recipes. While the vast majority of substances used in Chinese medicinal preparations are plant-based, parts of animals and specific minerals may also be included.[17,18]

Regardless of the Skeptics’ and Wikipedia’s invective to diminish Chinese medicine’s efficacy and successes, TCM is booming and extraordinary research continues to pump out positive discoveries. Even Bayer Pharmaceutical purchased the Chinese herbal company Dihon Pharmaceutical Group in 2014 because of the huge potential for discovering powerful phytochemicals to treat a wide variety of diseases. Helmut Kaiser Consultancy in Germany predicts that annual revenues in Chinese botanicals will triple by 2025 from 2015 revenues of $17 billion.[19] A Morgan Stanley 2012 review found that even among Chinese physicians trained in Western medical schools, TCM is being used as the first line of defense against disease in 30% of medical cases.[20]

Curiously Skeptics and Wikipedia fail to acknowledge that the 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to China’s scientist Tu You-you for her use of the Chinese medical remedy artemisia to develop an anti-malarial drug.[21]  In 2015, researchers at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute and the Center for Integrative Protein Science in Munich published their findings in Science of an alkaloid in an ingredient of the Chinese formula Han Fang Ji that protected human white blood cells from the Ebola virus.[22]  And in 2006, the FDA gave its first drug approval to an ointment based upon Chinese botanicals, including green tea leaves, for the treatment of genital warts caused by human papillomavirus.[23]  In a bioinformatics database analysis comparing phytochemicals in Chinese plants with the modern Comprehensive Medical Chemistry database of pharmaceutical drug ingredients, over 100 Chinese herbal phytochemicals had direct correlates with ingredients used in approved pharmaceutical drugs on the market.[24]

Taking one excellent example of the synergistic effects of herbal combinations in TCM is the duo Coptidis rhizoma and Evodia rutaecarpa. In classical Chinese medical practice, this formula has been given for centuries to treat gastric conditions including rapid healing of ulcers. Modern research has shown that together these herbs inhibit the bacterium Helicobacter pylori, which frequently accompanies ulcers. In the US approximately 20% of people under 40 years and over 50% of those above 60 years are estimated to have an H. pylori infection which can be responsible for gastritis, stomach and duodenal ulcers, gastric lymphoma and stomach cancer. The herbs were also found to contain limonene used in drugs as an antineoplastic molecule and gamalenic acid used in as an ingredient in pharmaceutical anti-tumor drugs.[25]

Finally, we might take a look at the 2017-2018 flu season. In fact, the influenza vaccine for this past season was a dud and failed to protect most recipients from infection. According to the CDC, the vaccine was 36% effective.[26] Almost 100 pediatric flu deaths were reported. However, later research at Rice University determined the vaccine was at best only 20% efficacy.[27]  With conventional medicine and our federal health agencies failing to protect the public, tens of thousands of people experiencing the onset of flu-like symptoms rushed to purchase the Chinese herbal cold formula Nin Jiom Pei Pa Koa. The formula costs as little as $6 in New York City’s Chinatown.  Pei Pa Koa is one of the most popular cold, flu and cough remedies across East Asia and Singapore. It was first formulated during the Qing dynasty in the 17th century.  The results are often immediate. When we desire relief from a health condition that is all that matters.

Therefore, we have absolutely no need for Skeptics preaching from their bully pulpits. There is no need to read the vitriol of Science-based medicine’s priesthood. And we certainly have no need to refer to Wikipedia’s encyclopedia of biased misinformation parroting Skepticism’s paranoia and deceptive efforts to censor natural health. We don’t need any of them to tell us that the relief we experience after taking a medicinal herb or natural formula is only a placebo effect or a figment of our imagination because the scientific research doesn’t meet their standards. The fact of the matter is that the science will never meet their standards because fundamentalists, either religious or science-based, cannot be persuaded by factual evidence that conflicts with their ingrained psychological ideologies and fears.  And this is the fundamental fallacy and blatant hypocrisy that runs throughout SBM Skepticism and Wikipedia.  It is not “science-based” because it is impoverished of the necessary inquisitive open-mindedness that defines those who are authentic scientists.  SBM is faith-based, and holds fealty with a grossly reductionist, petulant and brattish mentality incapable of seeing the forest from the trees.  In his criticism of TCM, Novella brings the absurdity of Skepticism to a climax.

“I maintain that there are many good reasons to conclude that any system [i.e. TCM] which derives from everyday experience is likely to be seriously flawed and almost entirely cut off from reality.”[28]

However, for thousands of years there have been countless people who experienced and claimed the benefits from Chinese botanical medicine. We have no need for Skepticism’s scientific reductionist validation to prove the reality of natural medicine.

*

Richard Gale is the Executive Producer of the Progressive Radio Network and a former Senior Research Analyst in the biotechnology and genomic industries.

Dr. Gary Null is the host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on alternative and nutritional health and a multi-award-winning documentary film director, including Poverty Inc and Deadly Deception.

Notes

1  Weiss AJ, Freeman WJ, Helsin KC, Barrett ML. “Adverse Drug Events in U.S. Hospitals, 2010 Versus 2014”  Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project. January 2018 

2  Bond CA, Raehl CL. “Adverse drug reactions in United States hospitals.” Pharmacotherapy 2006 May; 26(5): 601-8

3  Welsh, A. “Drug overdoses killed more Americans last year than the Vietnam War,” CBS News. October 17, 2017 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/opioids-drug-overdose-killed-more-americans-last-year-than-the-vietnam-war/

4  CDC. “Drug Overdose Death Data.”  https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/statedeaths.html

5  Ekor, Martin. “The growing use of herbal medicines: issues related to adverse reactions and challenges in monitoring safety.” Front Pharmacol. 2013; 4: 177.  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3887317/

6  Lu WI, Lu DP. “Impact of Chinese herbal medicine on American society and health care system,” Evid-Based Complement Altern Med. Volume 2014, Article ID 251891. 

7  Wikipedia. “Acupuncture.”  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acupuncture   

8  Wikipedia “Chinese Herbology.”  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_herbology

9   “Hard to swallow,” Nature. Volume 448, 12 July 2007, pp 105-6.

10   Siegfried, N. L; Hughes, G (2012). “Herbal medicine, randomised controlled trials and global core competencies”. South African Medical Journal. 102 (12): 912–3. doi:10.7196/samj.6392

11  Gorski, D.  “In the tradition of Chairman Mao, traditional Chinese medicine gets a new boost by the Chinese government.” ScienceBasedMedicine. January 2, 2017

12   Lily Kuo. “Traditional Chinese medicine is a getting a voice at the World Health Organization.” Quartz  March 13, 2015  https://qz.com/362182/traditional-chinese-medicine-is-getting-a-voice-at-the-world-health-organization/

13  Shea, Brigette. Handbook of Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda. Celestial Arts Press: Rochester VT, 2018.

14  Novella, S. “What is traditional chinese medicine,” ScienceBasedMedicine. July 25, 2012

15   Novella, S. Ibid.

16  Wikipedia “Chinese Herbology.”  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_herbology

17  Chen K, Bei Yu. “Certain progress of clinical research on Chinese integrative medicine.”  Chinese Medical Journal. 1999, 112 (10), p. 934, 

18   Foster, S, Yue, C.  Herbal emissaries: bringing Chinese herbs to the West.  Healing Arts Press, 1992

19  Helmut Kaiser Consultancy. “Traditional Chinese medicine: In China and worldwide 2015-2025 with History.” Updated March 2017. http://www.hkc22.com/chinesemedicine.html

20  Bayer.  “Bayer completes acquisition of Dihon Pharmaceutical Group Co in China: Transaction strengthens consumer care business and moves Bayer Healthcare to a leading OTC position.” Published November 3, 2014

21  Shea, Brigette. op cit.

22  “Tetrandrine: Compound from Japanese, Chinese herbs shows promise for blocking Ebola virus.” Science News. February 27, 2015

23  Tung, A.  “Chinese medicine increasingly recognized in US.” China Daily, December 4, 2010. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-12/04/content_11653206.htm

24  Kong DX, Xue JL, Tang GY, Zhang HY.  “How Many Traditional Chinese Medicine Components Have Been Recognized by Modern Western Medicine? A Chemoinformatic Analysis and Implications for Finding Multicomponent Drugs.”  ChemMedChem 2008, 3, 233 – 236

25  Ibid.

26  Ducharme, J. “CDC estimates this year’s flu vaccine is only 36 percent effective.” Time. February 15, 2018. 

27   Melia E Bonomo, Michael W Deem. Predicting Influenza H3N2 Vaccine Efficacy from Evolution of the Dominant Epitope. Clinical Infectious Diseases, 2018; DOI: 10.1093/cid/ciy323

28   Novella, S. “What is traditional Chinese medicine,” ScienceBasedMedicine. July 25, 2012

From the beginning, Donald Trump’s administration has been marred by corruption and outright contempt for the rule of law – with the president’s firing of FBI Director James Comey “because of the whole Russia thing” and persistent efforts to undermine Robert Mueller’s Russia probe; with his refusal to divest himself of private businesses, his attacks on judges who rule against him, and much else besides. Trump’s shameless claim to unbounded executive power manifested itself recently in repeated calls to deprive unauthorized immigrants of their due process rights. The conditions in migrant detention centers are horrifying, and photos from one facility in McAllen, Texas showed children being held in cages. According to Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Facebook report, this border facility is an enormous warehouse “filled with cages. Cages for men. Cages for women. Cages for mamas with babies. Cages for girls. Cages for boys.”

Such an unconscionable state of affairs makes the current exhibition of Alberto Giacometti at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City all the more electrifying. The show features more than one hundred and seventy-five sculptures, paintings, and drawings, spanning more than forty years and across all the various media with which he worked.

Art After Dark: July 13, 2018, 9 pm to Midnight, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

The show is a major retrospective of one of the twentieth century’s most significant artists: a painter and sculptor who sought the core of life – the alienation, and isolation, the terror of living, of walking through modernity, its cities, and city squares, its lonely crowds, its stricken men and women. The exhibition reveals an obsessive artist, one who returned again and again to the same motifs, including cages and bars; wiry, naked human figures, with outsized feet, sometimes in movement, sometimes utterly still and erect – but ultimately they are homeless, living in a “no-man’s land… lost in infinite nothingness.”

Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) was born in the Swiss village of Borgonovo, the eldest son of Giovanni Giacometti, a recognized post-impressionist painter. In 1922 he moved to Paris and quickly joined the Parisian avant-garde movement. He would remain in Paris for the majority of his life. His early work experimented with cubism; and in 1930, under the influence of André Breton, he would join the surrealists.

The embrace of surrealism was announced with Giacometti’s unveiling of Suspended Ball (1930-31), a sculptural composition which proved to be a turning point in the artist’s career. The work displays a notched plaster ball hanging from a string in a metal cage; while just below the gouged out slit is a crescent-shaped object, with distinctly phallic overtones. Salvador Dali observed that, “The beholder instinctively feels the urge to slide the ball over this edge…” – and it was on the basis of this sculpture that he developed the concept of the “symbolically functioning object.”

Woman with Her Throat Cut (1932) is a nightmarish composition in bronze: the female, more animal than human, lies splayed on the ground, her throat rendered as an exposed windpipe with the carotid slashed. It is a profoundly disquieting work, unsettling in the suggestion of rape and murder, and the insect-like morphology of the figure. While it resonates with themes that run throughout the show, it is also quite unlike anything else we find.

Hands Holding the Void or Invisible Object (1934) (see image on the right), a large-scale depiction of an entire female figure, is one of Giacometti’s masterpieces, and the last he composed while still a member of the surrealists. The figure’s stance and positioning of her arms has echoes of Mesoamerican cultic statuary; the odd rectangular base, however, reveals itself to be some form of incarceration, so that once again we have an evocation of violence and subjugation. It is an extraordinary and mysterious work, with a hauntingly strange beauty.

By 1935, Giacometti had turned away from surrealism and a decade of low productivity followed. However, in the mid-1940s, with the end of World War II, the artist enjoyed a new burst of creativity. It is the work beginning from this period that established Giacometti as the artist of modern alienation par excellence. His figures are bereft of all social connection; they are utterly and irretrievably alone even when surrounded by others. As the artist once observed: “A man who suffers from solitude can suffer alone, but he can also suffer in the midst of other people.” A man might feel isolated even in a crowded space. “The sublime, the mystery,” he would say, “lies precisely in the faces of these lone individuals…”

The Nose (1949) displays a shrieking head hanging in a cage, with a grotesquely long nose protruding beyond the bars. It is a terrifying sculpture, and one that speaks, or screams rather, across the decades. Indeed, like so much of what Giacometti does, there is a timeless quality to the work: it is an expression of the postwar era, and the anxieties of that period; while at the same time a universal statement of existential dread, transcending the historical moment from which it arose.

One of the standout paintings from this period is Two Standing Women and Figurine in a Cage (1950) (see image on the left). An oil painting on wood panels that were once part of the walls of Giacometti’s studio in Stampa, Switzerland, the work is yet another example of the cage as a recurring motif throughout the artist’s career. Giacometti’s portraits tend to be dark, making use of a gray palette – almost monochrome save for the use of dramatic highlights – and present their subjects as fundamentally ungraspable: the other cannot be known, and always remains essentially outside our reach.

His work is not about creating beautiful or enjoyable objects, it is not about producing pleasurable experiences or delighting the viewer. Indeed, in some cases his work seems designed to do quite the opposite: to cause us discomfort, to make us uneasy, to make us feel the anguish and the burden of existence. Giacometti’s art is essentially a tragic one: there is little relief, even less humor – his is an art that returns compulsively to the beginning, seeking simply to start, to commence truthfully. Sartre was certainly right when he said that there was no progress in art for Giacometti. All of art was there at the beginning; and, not surprisingly, in Giacometti we find a fascination with primitive styles – including African, Oceanic, and Cycladic.

The exhibition comes to a close with The Dog (1961), the sole sculpture of an animal to be included – and one that was apparently a kind of self-portrait: “One day I saw myself in the street just like that. I was the dog.” It is an immediately appealing work: a scraggly canine with a long snout pointing to the ground, large floppy ears and a generous tail. Like so many of his human individuals, this is a creature that knows what it is to be alone and dejected, and it is a fitting end to a thoroughly mesmerizing show. It is the final proof – if any were needed – that here is an artist who sought “To bite into reality… to see better, to understand better the things around me… to be more free… to discover new worlds…”

To cure the ills of society is too much to ask of any art or artist. But when a body of work – because it comes from a place of truth and universality – is able to reflect the horrors of the moment in which we live, then it is incumbent upon us to give it serious attention.

Whatever else we might say, Giacometti’s oeuvre offers an important corrective to the Trumpian conviction that we can safely know and essentialize the other, which the president consistently demonstrates both in his dehumanizing speech (referring to people as “animals”) and actions (throwing them into cages). In short, we cannot afford to overlook a body of work as timely as this.

*

Sam Ben-Meir is a professor of philosophy and world religions at Mercy College in New York City. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Read earlier installments here: Part I, II, III.

On my visit to the Namhung Youth Chemical Complex in 2012, I learned about the place as merely a production plant for chemical fertilizers and plastic products. The total number of people at the plant at the time was 12,000, but they said only a fraction of them — 3000 to 4000 — were workers at the plant and the rest did “other work.” Back then, I didn’t understand nor did I know enough to question what that means. Only after learning about the methods North Korea was introducing to encourage local food self-sufficiency did I understand that the remaining 8000 people not directly involved in production at the chemical complex were part of what they call “rear operation.” They are responsible for the reproductive work of raising pigs, chicken and ducks as well as growing rice and vegetables to feed the workers at the plant and their families.

At the construction site of the Chongchon River Multi-tiered Power Plant, too, “rear operation” workers raise pigs and chickens and research the best way to grow fresh tomatoes and cucumbers in the vegetable garden while loud construction clamor can be heard on the other side of the plant. The “rear operation” team is responsible for the regenerative work of feeding and sustaining the workers constructing the power plant.

Similarly, all units of North Korean society — cooperative farms, factories, businesses, military units, universities, large construction sites, apartment complexes, etc. — have “rear operation” teams that raise livestock and grow fresh vegetables to autonomously take care of their own food needs. And most have adopted an organic farming method called the “closed-loop production system,” an energy-efficient way of producing food by recycling waste to minimize resource inputs.

The best example of the closed-loop production system I witnessed was at the Satellite Scientists Residential Complex in Pyongyang — a 1.3 square kilometer complex of residential facilities for scientists involved in North Korea’s satellite launch program. It was built in 2014 adjacent to the State Academy of Sciences and is dedicated to the country’s scientists in appreciation of their service and to encourage high-tech research and innovation.

One thousand households of scientists reside in twenty-four apartment buildings, and each building has a communal vegetable garden where the residents grow vegetables and harvest what they need for their households. The complex also has four greenhouses that grow tomatoes, cucumbers, chives, and other fresh vegetables all year long.

On my visit there in May 2015, I was delighted to find that the person in charge of the greenhouses at the Satellite Scientists Residential Complex is Ryang Hae-ok, the wife of the great grandson of the renowned North Korean chemist Ri Sung-gi (see the introduction to this series for a brief description of the life and work of Ri Sung-gi). When I told Ryang that Ri’s work on developing the Juche textile vinalon is what had inspired my own journey of studying North Korea’s science and technology, she was overjoyed and gave me a warm welcome and a personal tour of the greenhouse.

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Neoliberal capitalist dogma pervades mainstream media. A case in point is coverage of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s resounding victory in Mexico’s presidential election.

Referring to the president-elect by his commonly used acronym, the New York Times’ Azam Ahmed and Paulina Villegas (7/1/18) claimed that

one of AMLO’s biggest challenges will be to convince foreign investors that Mexico will remain open for business. If he fails to convince the markets that he is committed to continuity, or makes abrupt changes to the current economic policy, the country could find itself struggling to achieve even the modest growth of prior administrations.

According to the authors, keeping Mexico “open for business” for “foreign investors” should be a priority, a call for maintaining the economic status quo in a country where nearly half the population lives below the poverty line. Ahmed and Villegas suggest that “continuity” is necessary, even as they themselves say earlier in the article “that the nation’s desire for change outweighed any of the misgivings the candidate inspired”; evidently pleasing “the markets” matters more than carrying out the will of the populace.

The authors note López Obrador’s “sense of economic nationalism,” which “some fear could reverse important gains of the last 25 years.” Which gains these are and who made them is unspecified; economist Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (7/1/18) pointed out:

Poverty is worse than a quarter century ago, real wages are lower than in 1980, inequality is worsening, and Mexico ranks 18th of 20 Latin American countries in terms of income growth per person in the 21st century.

Another New York Times article (7/2/18), this one by Ahmed and Kirk Semple, said that López Obrador “must still convince investors that his policies will be business friendly.” Ensuring that “investors” are happy is apparently a nonnegotiable imperative.

Revealingly, the authors failed to consider how this supposed essential can co-exist with another necessity they describe, which is that “Mr. López Obrador will also have to deliver on his promises to address widespread poverty and yawning inequality.” Ahmed and Semple decline to point out the contradiction here: “Investors” rarely deem policies that “address widespread poverty and yawning inequality”—say, a higher minimum wage and the redistribution of wealth through social programs—to be “business friendly.” By glossing over such inconsistencies, and proffering magical thinking according to which capital can be appeased while poverty and inequality are successfully fought, the authors performed a service for advocates of neoliberal capitalist scripture.

The Washington Post (7/2/18) editorialized on AMLO’s win:

It may be that Mr. López Obrador’s promise of radical reform will amount to reversing the hard-won progress of his predecessors in shifting the statist, autocratic Mexico of the 20th century toward a modernizing liberal democracy. The new president…is likely to slow a partial privatization of the oil industry.

According to this perspective, privatization is synonymous with “progress.” A society advances, it would seem, when profits from and control of its resources are taken from the public and turned over to a small number of wealthy, unaccountable people.

A reference Ahmed and Semple (New York Times, 7/2/18) made to US/Mexico relations illustrates the same servile attitude to ruling-class interests:

Mr. Trump has badgered Mexico since he announced his candidacy, criticizing its migrants, threatening to abandon the North American Free Trade Agreement and promising to build a wall between the two countries.

The ideology of pro-corporate trade deals runs so deep that the possibility of ending NAFTA is presented as being as dangerous and as contemptible as racist slurs against migrants and plans to further militarize the US/Mexico border.

Bad comparisons

Neoliberal capitalist orthodoxy bifurcates the world between believers and unbelievers, often without parsing the differences among the heretics. Thus, as I wrote for FAIR (6/26/18) shortly before Mexico’s election, Trump and López Obrador are lumped together, even though the former is a racist warmonger who has given the rich $5 trillion and has boasted of sexually assaulting women, while the latter has a record of solidarity with campesinos and indigenous people, subsidizing transit, and providing stipends to seniors and single mothers.

The Post wrote that AMLO

is a product of the political left, but his victory is part of the global story of rising populist leaders. Like many of them, including President Trump, Mr. López Obrador promises to overturn the reigning political establishment, says he alone is capable of delivering on his far-fetched promises, and assails the media, courts, civil society groups and all others who might check his personal power. Like other populists, the incoming Mexican leader also has been vague and occasionally contradictory about the specific policies he may pursue, even while insisting he will bring about a “transformation” comparable to Mexico’s achievement of independence. In that, he is sure to fail; the question is how much damage he may do to the democratic system that enabled him to gain power.

Saying that AMLO is like Trump because both are “populists” in a vague, vacuous sense, is akin to putting pet food and rat poison in the same category because both are intended to be eaten by animals. While Trump calls for strict voter ID laws that will undermine democracy by disenfranchising the poor and minorities, there is a dearth of compelling evidence that López Obrador’s will do “damage…to the democratic system.”

Ahmed and Villegas claimed that

the allure of López Obrador message is steeped in the language of nostalgia for a better time….In this way, and others, the parallels between Mr. López Obrador and President Trump are hard to ignore. Both men are tempestuous leaders, who are loath to concede a political fight. Both men lash out at enemies, and view the media with suspicion.

These comparisons between the two politicians are ankle-deep, overlooking as they do that Trump has sought a massive increase to the hundreds of billions of dollars that the US spends killing people around the world, while López Obradorhas promised to launch a public-works program to employ 2.3 million young people and to raise pensions for the elderly.

The neoliberal capitalist catechism also manifests itself by maligning those who have challenged its doctrines with any degree of success. This is evident in coverage of AMLO’s win that considers the commonplace comparison between him and the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. When corporate media outlets examine this analogy, they do so on the assumption that it will be bad for Mexico if López Obrador adopts policies similar to Chávez’s.

A New York Times editorial (7/2/18) asked whether López Obrador was like Chávez or Trump or both, and concludes that “unlike Mr. Chávez and Mr. Trump, the president-elect is a lifelong politician with firm faith in democracy.” The accusation that Chávez was undemocratic is false. Every election he won was certified free and fair. When Chávez was president, the Venezuelan government launched a program called Barrio Adentro (“Inside the Neighborhood”), designed to foster mass political participation and improve public health, that proved to be “especially popular with the poorer sections of the society” (Globalizations, 1/3/13).

Ahmed and Semple write that “for as long as Mr. López Obrador has been running for president, accusations that he will sink the economy have chased him. He was likened in the news media to Hugo Chávez, the former socialist leader of Venezuela,” a comparison that the authors describe as “overblown.”

Ahmed and Semple take for granted that Chavez “[sunk] the economy,” but when Chávez was leader, Venezuela’s rates of poverty, inequality, illiteracy, child mortality and malnutrition sharply declined. If that’s what it means to “sink the economy,” one could be forgiven for hoping AMLO’s nautical skills are in line with Chávez’s.

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Gregory Shupak teaches media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto. His book, The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media, is published by OR Books.

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The US backed Iranian opposition are neither “revolutionary,” nor even “in” Iran. Yet they have been designated as Washington’s proxies of choice, and an alternative government they seek to place into power in Tehran. 

As the US-led proxy war in Syria reaches a relative stalemate and with time on Damascus and its allies’ side, Washington’s wider agenda of using the conflict as a stepping stone toward regime change in Iran is leading into a much larger conflict.

Geopolitical expert F. William Engdahl has pointed out the means through which Western oil corporations have orchestrated global schemes to raise oil prices to make American shale oil production profitable. At the same time, the US has for years now used sanctions against Iran, political subversion in Venezuela, war in Libya, and proxy war in Ukraine to prevent Tehran, Caracas, Libya’s opposition, and Moscow from benefiting long-term from higher oil prices.

For Iran, undermining its oil revenues and reintroducing sanctions and secondary sanctions on nations that refuse to recognize America’s withdrawal from the so-called Iran Nuclear Deal, is done in tandem with direct, covert subversion inside Iran itself.

Together, these efforts seek to cripple Iran as a functional nation state, as well as reduce its influence through the Middle Eastern and Central Asian regions.

US Portrays Terrorist Cult as “Iranian Opposition”

Just as the US has done in Libya and Syria, it is using terrorist organizations to attack and undermine the Iranian state.

With Iranian-backed militias already fighting Al Qaeda and its multitude of affiliates including the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” (ISIS) in Syria and Iraq, the likelihood of these militant forces being exported into Iran itself – should Iranian-backed militias be pushed out of Syria and Iraq and destabilization inside of Iran itself reach that threshold – is high.

But there is another, lesser known group the US is portraying as the voice of Iran’s opposition, a group that is – by its own US sponsors’ admission – undemocratic, terroristic, and cult-like.

It is the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, also known as the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK).

Until 2012, MEK was listed by the US State Department as a foreign terrorist organization. Only through immense lobbying was MEK delisted. Since being delisted, no evidence suggests the fundamental aspects of MEK that make it a terrorist organization have changed. In fact, US-based corporate-financier policy think tanks that have advocated MEK’s use as a proxy against Iran have admitted as much.

The Brookings Institution in a 2009 policy paper titled, “Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran” (PDF), would openly admit (emphasis added): 

Perhaps the most prominent (and certainly the most controversial) opposition group that has attracted attention as a potential U.S.  proxy  is  the  NCRI  (National  Council of Resistance of  Iran),  the  political  movement  established  by  the  MeK  (Mujahedin-e  Khalq). Critics believe the group to be undemocratic and unpopular, and indeed anti-American.  

Brookings would elaborate regarding its terrorist background, stating (emphasis added):

Undeniably, the group has conducted terrorist attacks—often excused by the MeK’s advocates because they are directed against the Iranian government. For example, in 1981, the group bombed the headquarters of the Islamic Republic Party, which was then the clerical leadership’s main  political organization, killing an estimated 70 senior officials. More recently, the group has claimed  credit for over a dozen mortar attacks, assassinations, and other assaults on  Iranian civilian and  military targets between 1998 and 2001.

Brookings also mentions MEK’s attacks on US servicemen and American civilian contractors, noting:

In the 1970s, the group killed three U.S. officers and three civilian contractors in Iran.

Brookings would also emphasize (emphasis added):

The group itself also appears to be undemocratic and enjoys little popularity in Iran itself. It has no  political base in the country, although it appears to have an operational presence. In particular, its  active participation on Saddam Husayn’s side during the bitter Iran-Iraq War made the group widely  loathed. In addition, many aspects of the group are cultish, and its leaders, Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, are revered to the point of obsession.  

Brookings would note that despite the obvious reality of MEK, the US could indeed use the terrorist organization as a proxy against Iran, but notes that:

…at the very least, to work more closely with the  group (at least in an overt manner), Washington would need to remove it from the list of foreign  terrorist organizations.  

And in 2012, after years of lobbying, that is precisely what the US did. Regarding that decision, the US State Department’s 2012 statement titled, “Delisting of the Mujahedin-e Khalq” would claim:

With today’s actions, the Department does not overlook or forget the MEK’s past acts of terrorism, including its involvement in the killing of U.S. citizens in Iran in the 1970s and an attack on U.S. soil in 1992. The Department also has serious concerns about the MEK as an organization, particularly with regard to allegations of abuse committed against its own members.

The Secretary’s decision today took into account the MEK’s public renunciation of violence, the absence of confirmed acts of terrorism by the MEK for more than a decade, and their cooperation in the peaceful closure of Camp Ashraf, their historic paramilitary base.

Nothing in the US State Department’s statement indicates that MEK is no longer a terrorist organization. It simply notes that it has publicly – as a means of political expediency – renounced violence. It should be noted that the Brookings Institution’s 2009 policy paper’s mention of MEK is under a chapter titled, “Inspiring an Insurgency,” inferring armed violence all but guaranteeing MEK militants will indeed be one of several fronts carrying out that violence in their capacity as US proxies.

It would be the “cultish” MEK leader, Maryam Rajavi, whom prominent American politicians and political lobbying groups would work with for years before MEK was removed from the US list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations in 2012. This includes prominent pro-war advocates – particularly war with Iran – now current National Security Adviser John Bolton, Newt Gingrich, and current legal adviser for US President Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani.

This year at the annual “Free Iran” conference held in Paris, US State Department-funded and directed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty would report in its article titled, “Trump Allies Tell Paris Rally ‘End Of Regime’ Near In Iran,” that:

Close allies of U.S. President Donald Trump have told a “Free Iran” rally in Paris that the end of the Iranian regime is near and that sanctions against the country will be “greater, greater, and greater.”

“We are now realistically being able to see an end to the regime in Iran,” legal adviser Rudy Giuliani said on June 30 at the rally, organized by exiled opponents including the former rebel People’s Mujahedin, which is banned in Iran.

Giuliani pointed to recent protests that have erupted in Iran amid continued financial hardships following Trump’s decision to pull out of the 2015 nuclear deal and reimpose sanctions on Tehran.

Thus, virtually every aspect of the 2009 Brookings paper is being openly pursued as a matter of US foreign policy, including US support for MEK – an organization that has previously killed US servicemen and American civilian contractors, and by its own supporters’ admissions, is still involved in terrorism.

The ultimate irony is that these same US MEK supporters claiming the MEK and its political NCRI wing will overthrow the “dictatorial ayatollahs,” admit the MEK itself is “undemocratic” and “cultish,” everything Iran’s government is accused of by US politicians and pundits.

The MEK May Help Destroy Iran, But Will Never Rule It 

Just as other “pro-democracy” groups have been promoted by Washington amid previous regime change efforts, “Iranian” MEK terrorists will be used to destabilize, pressure, and possibly even overthrow the Iranian government, but Iran will be left in fractured ruins.

MEK and its NCRI political wing will never rule a functional and unified Iranian nation-state, just as US-backed terrorists in Libya preside – and only tenuously so – over fractions of Libya’s territory and resources.

This further exposes what the US intends to do regarding Iran, and that it has nothing to do with improving the lives or prospects of the Iranian people – especially considering Iran’s collective plight is owed not to Iran’s current leadership, but to America’s decades-long policy to encircle, contain, undermine, and overthrow Iran’s institutions.

America’s foreign policy in regards to Iran must be understood in this context – that it is merely a continuation of Washington’s use of violent, terrorist fronts to divide and destroy targeted nations to eliminate competitors and their influence from regions of the globe US special interests seek to reassert themselves in – and nothing more.

The high costs continued conflict with Iran will represent will be paid by the American taxpayers, and should this conflict be allowed to escalate, by the blood of American service members. The result – should this foreign policy continue forward, will not be in the interests of either Americans or Iranians – who will collectively suffer the consequences of future conflict, just as the American people and nations invaded by the US have suffered in the past.

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

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There is a certain haunting similarity between the President of the United States and the now former foreign secretary of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson.  This does not merely extend to mad, oddly positioned hair, and misshaped mullets.  Both share a philosophy of upending the order and permanent disruption, impossible for those on their putative side of politics to measure, predict or contain. 

Last Friday, Prime Minister Theresa May thought that her cabinet, moulded by cabinet responsibility, would be able to go forth with the bare bones of a plan for negotiations with the European Union for Britain’s departure.  Johnson, with characteristic muddling, had signed on to the Chequers statement, but had issued public utterances about his dissatisfaction.  He was on board, but only in wobbly fashion.

Having first seen which way the wind would turn, Johnson waited for the initial resignations of the Brexit team led by David Davis to take the plunge. His resignation was intended as an improvised explosive device, timed to blow up in the prime minister’s face just before she was to address members of parliament on Monday.

The letter has all the elements of BJ the opportunist, the cad, the slippery debater.  It has no definite shape in terms of what should be done, but is filled with defiance and, dare one say it, hope. Central to the argument is a defence of the “British people”, those subjects for whom he supposedly speaks for.  “They were told that they would be able to manage their own immigration policy, repatriate the sums of UK cash currently spent by the EU, and, above all, that they would be able to pass laws independently and in the interests of the people of this country.”

He warned, with irate frustration, that the “dream is dying, suffocated by needless self-doubt.”  Decisions had been postponed on vital issues “with the result that we appear to be heading for a semi-Brexit, with large parts of the economy still locked in the EU system, but with no UK control over that system.”

Ever chancing his arm, and interpretation of events, Johnson brought a touch of drama into the note.  The new plan proposed by May, he argued, seemed to take Britain further back since the last Chequers meeting in February.  Then, he described frustrations

“as Mayor of London, in trying to protect cyclists from juggernauts.  We had wanted to lower the cabin windows to improve visibility; and even though such designs were already on the market, and even though there had been a horrific spate of deaths, mainly of female cyclists, we were told that we had to wait for the EU to legislate on the matter.”

Ever forceful with the dire scenario, Johnson insisted that the May plan would put Britain into a “ludicrous position” of asserting that “huge amounts” of EU law would have to be accepted “without changing an iota”, while shutting Britain out from influencing them. “In that respect we are truly headed for the status of a colony”.

Such imagery qualifies as both entertainment and conceit.  Labour’s Shadow Brexit Secretary Sir Keir Starmer summed up the Johnson approach in a sentence:

“Boris Johnson’s whole political career has been characterised by self-promotion and spreading misinformation.”

On the issue of introducing cab design changes to improve visibility for trucks, Johnson conveniently avoided the European Parliament’s vote in 2014 requiring such improvements to be made, a point subsequently decreed by a 2015 directive.  A more complex picture to emerge from here is one of institutional lethargy and foot dragging across a range of institutions, of which Johnson’s own stint as London mayor may count as one.

The resignation has been read in some circles of British commentary as decisively damning for Johnson’s future influence over the Tories.  His stint as foreign secretary, suggested Stephen Bush of The New Statesman, was so gaffe-strewn as to erode “his standing among MPs”. Where his effect becomes different is in the realms of disruption: encouraging Tory members to press for a confidence motion in the prime minister.  A mere 15 percent of Conservative MPs are needed to sign letters calling for such a vote.

Such readings of Johnson ignore the beguiling force he retains in politics.  His buffoonery and populism do have retail value.  Deemed unelectable at points of his career, let alone beyond promotion, he managed to win the mayorship of London.  He was indispensable to swinging the mood to Brexit prior to the 2016 referendum.  To that end, dismissive interpretations of Johnson’s career suffer, to some extent, from a rational view that sees politics as predictable and reasonable.  It was exactly such an approach that missed, almost in its entirety, the furious rise of Donald Trump.

“Johnson,” went William Davies in the London Review Books on March 8 this year, “approaches public life as a game in which he commits sackable offences as a way of demonstrating his unsackability.”

Making him foreign secretary had served only one purpose: a restraint, and a means of minimising any potential damage to May. But his presence, his bravado and his disruptive penchant made Davies wonder whether Trumpism was, as matter of reality, a British problem. “Johnson,” he admitted, “is as close as British politics has to a Trump problem; and his seniority suggests that Trumpism has permeated our political culture more deeply than we like to admit.”  This streak of British-styled Trumpism is bound to provide Johnson more nourishment, though its duration, and depth, remain questionable.

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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]

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After opening arguments kicked off in California state court on Monday for a Bay Area man’s landmark lawsuit alleging that Monsanto’s popular weedkiller Roundup caused him to develop cancer, a federal judge on Tuesday ruled that hundreds of unrelated but similar cases against the agrochemical company can also proceed to trial.

U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco concluded that although he believes the evidence presented by attorneys representing the cancer patients and their families, “seems too equivocal to support any firm conclusion that glyphosate,” the active ingredient Roundup, causes in cancer, the matter should be taken up by a jury. As Reuters noted, his decision “followed years of litigation and weeks of hearings.”

It also follows the first day of trial for DeWayne “Lee” Johnson‘s suit in California’s San Francisco Superior Court. Johnson is a 46-year-old father of three who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma after years of working as a groundskeeper for school district, a position which regularly exposed him to a pair of Monsanto products containing glyphosate.

Although the state of California and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)—a branch of the World Health Organization (WHO)—have classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen, U.S. and European regulators continue to defy scientists and anti-pesticide activists’ warnings by allowing farmers to keep spraying the world’s most common herbicide.

While Monsanto maintains that its products are safe—with a company attorney claiming in court on Monday that “scientific evidence is overwhelming that glyphosate-based products do not cause cancer”—some 4,000 plaintiffs have alleged that Monsanto’s glyphosate products such as Roundup have made them sick. However, Johnson’s case is the first to go trial.

During opening statements on Monday, the Guardian reports, Johnson’s attorney Brent Wisner showed jurors photographs of legions on his client’s body that were a result of his cancer and declared:

“The simple fact is he’s going to die. It’s just a matter of time.”

As Johnson reportedly lowered his head and his wife cried beside him, Wisner added,

“Between now and then, it’s just nothing but pain.”

The attorney argued that Monsanto—which recently merged with German pharmaceutical giant Bayer—”has specifically gone out of its way to bully…and to fight independent researchers.

“Wisner,” the newspaper noted, “presented internal Monsanto emails that he said showed how the agrochemical company rejected critical research and expert warnings over the years while pursuing and helping to write favorable analyses of their products.”

In addition to internal documents, Wisner also said the trial will feature depositions from 10 former or current Monsanto employees, and that there is “a mountain of data,” going back to 2000, which shows that exposure to glyphosate can cause genetic damage that could lead to the type of cancer Johnson has.

“We’re going to see for the first time evidence that nobody has seen before, evidence that has been in Monsanto’s files that we’ve obtained from lawyers and the people in Monsanto,” co-counsel Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the San Francisco Chronicle. “I don’t think it’s a surprise after 20 years Monsanto has known about the cancer-causing properties of this chemical and has tried to stop the public from knowing it, and tried to manipulate the regulatory process.”

Kennedy added that he believes this case will help the hundreds of other clients he is representing in cases filed against the company.

“So many people have been exposed to this chemical, this group of chemicals, and many of them have been injured,” he said. “The science is on our side. It is mountainous.”

*

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Henrietta Fore of UNICEF reports on the appalling conditions in Yemen:

Further north, a similar scene is unfolding at the Al Sabeen hospital in Sanaa. Up to 30 new young patients stream in every day to the hospital’s malnutrition ward [bold mine-DL]. In the neonatal intensive care unit, newborn babies in incubators struggle for every breath.

Keeping babies alive in a country where nothing works any more is a real challenge: There are not enough respirators and not enough medicine. Health staff diligently report to work even though they have not received their salaries in two years. The malnutrition ward is packed. Parents have no money for health care and by the time they bring their sick babies in, it is often too late.

This is what a collapsing health system in a war zone looks like. It has the face of a mother who looks on, powerless, as her eight-month-old child, who has the weight of a newborn baby, fights for his life. It has the face of a father who has to choose between buying food for the whole family or buying medicine for his sick wife.

As Fore reminds us, a Yemeni child dies from preventable causes every ten minutes. That adds up to almost 50,000 dead children every year in a war that has dragged on for more than three years. These children are perishing because of starvation created by the Saudi coalition blockade and bombing campaign and from outbreaks of preventable disease that the blockade and bombing campaign have made much harder to combat. The blockade impedes delivery of essential food and medicine and makes them prohibitively expense for most people in a country whose economy has been devastated.

This humanitarian catastrophe was foreseeable and it was foreseen from the very start, but the Saudi coalition has persisted in purposefully strangling the civilian population for three years. It is an entirely man-made disaster, and the Saudi coalition and their Western backers are its chief authors. Millions more Yemeni lives are at risk, and even if things don’t get significantly worse many more thousands of Yemeni children will needlessly lose their lives because of the coalition blockade and bombing campaign. If conditions worsen because of the ongoing coalition offensive on Hodeidah, the loss of life will be in the hundreds of thousands and possibly in the millions.

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Featured image is from Hugh Macleod / IRIN/Creative Commons.

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

by Michel Chossudovsky

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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”.

While one can conceptualize the loss of life and destruction resulting from present-day wars including Syria and Yemen, 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.

Excerpt by author Michel Chossudovsky:

“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.

Break the American Inquisition.

Undermine the US-NATO-Israel military crusade.

Close down the weapons factories and the military bases.

Members of the armed forces should disobey orders and refuse to participate in a criminal war.

Bring home the troops.”

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

ISBN: 978-0-9737147-5-3 | Year: 2012 | Pages: 102

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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

“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

DETAILED TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

A New War Theater in North Africa
Operation Odyssey Dawn
Nuclear Weapons against Libya? How Real is the Threat?
America’s Long War: The Global Military Agenda
How to Reverse the Tide of War
World War III Scenario
Acknowledgments

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION

The Cult of Killing and Destruction
America’s Mini-nukes
War and the Economic Crisis
Real versus Fake Crises

CHAPTER II: THE DANGERS OF NUCLEAR WAR

Hiroshima Day 2003: Secret Meeting at Strategic Command Headquarters
The Privatization of Nuclear War: US Military Contractors Set the Stage
9/11 Military Doctrine: Nuclear Weapons and the “Global War on Terrorism”
Al Qaeda: “Upcoming Nuclear Power”
Obama’s Nuclear Doctrine: The 2010 Nuclear Posture Review
Post 9/11 Nuclear Doctrine
“Defensive” and “Offensive” Actions
“Integration” of Nuclear and Conventional Weapons Plans
Theater Nuclear Operations (TNO)
Planned Aerial Attacks on Iran
Global Warfare: The Role of US Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM)
Nuclear Weapons Deployment Authorization
Israel’s Stockpiling of Conventional and Nuclear Weapons
The Role of Western Europe
Germany: De Facto Nuclear Power
Pre-emptive Nuclear War: NATO’s 2010 Strategic Concept
The World is at a Critical Crossroads

CHAPTER III: AMERICA’S HOLY CRUSADE AND THE BATTLE FOR OIL

America’s Crusade in Central Asia and the Middle East
“Homegrown Terrorists”
The American Inquisition
Washington’s Extrajudicial Assassination Program
The Battle for Oil
The Oil Lies in Muslim Lands
Globalization and the Conquest of the World’s Energy Resources

CHAPTER IV: PREPARING FOR WORLD WAR THREE

Media Disinformation
A “Pre-emptive” Aerial Attack Directed Against Iran would Lead to Escalation
Global Warfare
US “Military Aid”
The Timetable of Military Stockpiling and Deployment
World War III Scenario
The United Nations Security Council
The American Inquisition: Building a Political Consensus for War

CHAPTER V: TARGETING IRAN WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Building a Pretext for a Pre-emptive Nuclear Attack
“Theater Iran Near Term”
The Military Road Map: “First Iraq, then Iran”
Simulated Scenarios of a Global War: The Vigilant Shield 07 War Games
The Role of Israel
Cheney: “Israel Might Do it Without Being Asked”
US Israel Military Coordination
Tactical Nuclear Weapons directed against Iran
Radioactive Fallout
“The Mother of All Bombs” (MOAB) Slated to be Used Against Iran
Extensive Destruction of Iran’s Infrastructure
State of the Art Weaponry: “War Made Possible Through New Technologies”
Electromagnetic Weapons
Iran’s Military Capabilities: Medium and Long Range Missiles
Iran’s Ground Forces
US Military and Allied Facilities Surrounding Iran

CHAPTER VI: REVERSING THE TIDE OF WAR

Revealing the Lie
The Existing Anti-War Movement
Manufacturing Dissent
Jus ad Bellum: 9/11 and the Invasions of Yugoslavia and Afghanistan
Fake Antiwar Activism: Heralding Iran as a Nuclear Threat
The Road Ahead
The Antiwar Movement within the State Structure and the Military
Abandon the Battlefield: Refuse to Fight
The Broader Peace Process
What has to be Achieved

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Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, Editor of Global Research.  He has taught as visiting professor in Western Europe, Southeast Asia, the Pacific and Latin America. He has served as economic adviser to governments of developing countries and has acted as a consultant for several international organizations. He is the author of eleven books including The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003), America’s “War on Terrorism” (2005), The Global Economic Crisis, The Great Depression of the Twenty-first Century (2009) (Editor), Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War (2011), The Globalization of War, America’s Long War against Humanity (2015). He is a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.  His writings have been published in more than twenty languages. In 2014, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit of the Republic of Serbia for his writings on NATO’s war of aggression against Yugoslavia.

Grande importanza simbolica viene attribuita al fatto che è il primo Summit convocato nel nuovo quartier generale dell’Alleanza, costato finora 1,3 miliardi di euro (ma il prezzo reale, di cui il 7% a carico dell’Italia, èancora da stabilire): una struttura di oltre 250000 metri quadri, quasi il doppio della precedente, dove lavora permanentemente uno staff di circa 4000 militari e civili, dotata di 18 grandi sale dove si svolgono annualmente oltre 5000 riunioni con una partecipazione media di 500 ospiti al giorno. La struttura, attualmente costituita da 8 ali maggiori e 4 minori collegate a un lungo corpo centrale, è di tipo modulare: quindi espandibile man  mano che la Nato continuerà a espandersi.

Nel 1990, alla vigilia dello scioglimento del Patto di Varsavia, il Segretario di stato Usa James Baker assicurava il Presidente dell’Urss Mikhail Gorbaciov che «la Nato non si estenderàdi un solo pollice ad Est». Ma nel 1999, mentre demoliva con la guerra la Federazione Jugoslava, la Nato inglobava i primi tre paesi dell’ex Patto di Varsavia: Polonia, Repubblica Ceca e Ungheria. Quindi, nel 2004, si estendeva ad Estonia, Lettonia, Lituania (già parte dell’Urss); Bulgaria, Romania, Slovacchia (già membri del Patto di Varsavia); Slovenia (già parte della Federazione Jugoslava). Nel 2009 includeva Albania (un tempo membro del Patto di Varsavia) e Croazia (già parte della Federazione Jugoslava); nel 2017, il Montenegro, anch’esso un tempo parte della Federazione Jugoslava.

Dopo essersi estesa nel 1999-2017 da 16 a 29 membri, la Nato lascia «la porta aperta»ad altri ingressi: sono in attesa di entrare Ucraina e Georgia, giàparte dell’Urss; Bosnia-Herzegovina e Macedonia, già parte della Federazione Jugoslava. Per questo la Nato si è dotata di un quartier generale espandibile.

Manlio Dinucci

Si svolge oggi e domani a Bruxelles il Summit Nato a livello di capi di stato e di governo dei 29 paesi membri. Esso conferma al massimo livello il potenziamento della struttura di comando principalmente in funzione anti-Russia. Saranno costituiti un nuovo Comando congiunto per l’Atlantico, a Norfolk negli Usa, contro «i sottomarini russi che minacciano le linee di comunicazione marittima fra Stati uniti ed Europa», e un nuovo Comando logistico, a Ulm in Germania, quale «deterrente» contro la Russia, con il compito di «muovere più rapidamente le truppe attraverso l’Europa in qualsiasi conflitto».

Entro il 2020 la Nato disporràin Europa di 30 battaglioni meccanizzati, 30 squadriglie aeree e 30 navi da combattimento, dispiegabili entro 30 giorni o meno contro la Russia. Il presidente Trump avrà così in mano carte più forti al Summit bilaterale che terrà, il 16 luglio a Helsinki, col presidente russo Putin. Da ciò che il presidente Usa stabiliràal tavolo negoziale dipenderà fondamentalmente la situazione dell’Europa.

Il raggio di espansione della Nato va ben oltre l’Europa e gli stessi membrl dell’Alleanza. Essa ha una serie di partner, collegati all’Alleanza da diversi programmi di cooperazione militare. Tra i venti che rientrano nella Partnership euro-atlantica, figurano Austria, Finlandia e Svezia. La partnership mediterranea comprende Israele e Giordania, che hanno missioni ufficiali permanenti al quartier generale Nato a Bruxelles, Egitto, Tunisia, Algeria, Marocco e Mauritania. Quella del Golfo comprende Kuwait, Qatar ed Emirati, con missioni permanenti a Bruxelles, più il Bahrain. La Nato ha inoltre nove «Partner globali» in Asia, Oceania e America Latina – Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mongolia, Corea del Sud, Giappone, Australia, Nuova Zelanda e Colombia – alcuni dei quali «contribuiscono attivamente alle operazioni militari Nato».

La Nato – costituitasi nel 1949, sei anni prima del Patto di Varsavia, formalmenre in base al principio difensivo stabilito dall’Articolo 5 – è stata  trasformata in alleanza che, in base al «nuovo concetto strategico», impegna i paesi membri a «condurre operazioni di risposta alle crisi non previste dall’articolo 5, al di fuori del territorio dell’Alleanza». In base al nuovo concetto geostrategico, l’Organizzazione del Trattato del Nord Atlantico si è estesa fin sulle montagne afghane, dove la Nato èin guerra da 15 anni.

Ciò che non è cambiato, nella mutazione della Nato, è la gerarchia all’interno dell’Alleanza. Èsempre il Presidente degli Stati uniti a nominare il Comandante Supremo Alleato in Europa, che è sempre un generale statunitense, mentre gli alleati si limitano a ratificare la scelta. Lo stesso avviene per gli altri comandi chiave. La supremazia Usa si è rafforzata con l’allargamento della Nato, poiché i paesi dell’Est sono legati piùa Washington che a Bruxelles.

Lo stesso Trattato di Maastricht del 1992 sancisce la subordinazione dell’Unione europea alla Nato, di cui fanno parte 22 dei 28 paesi della Ue (con la Gran Bretagna in uscita dall’Unione). Esso stabilisce, all’articolo 42, che «l’Unione rispetta gli obblighi di alcuni Stati membri, i quali ritengono che la loro difesa comune si realizzi tramite la Nato, nell’ambito del Trattato del Nord Atlantico». E il protocollo n. 10 sulla cooperazione istituita dall’art. 42 sottolinea che la Nato «resta il fondamento della difesa» dell’Unione europea. La Dichiarazione congiunta sulla cooperazione Nato-Ue, firmata ieri a Bruxelles alla vigilia del Summit, conferma tale subordinazione: «La Nato continueràa svolgere il suo ruolo unico ed essenziale quale pietra angolare della difesa collettiva per tutti gli alleati, e gli sforzi della Ue rafforzeranno anche la Nato». La Pesco e il Fondo europeo per la Difesa, ha sottolineato il segretario generale Stoltenberg, «sono complementari, non alternativi alla Nato». La «mobilità militare» è al centro della cooperazione Nato-Ue, sancita dalla Dichiarazione congiunta. Importante anche la «cooperazione marittima Nato-Ue nel Mediterraneo per combattere il traffico di migranti e alleviare così le sofferenze umane».

In tale quadro, sotto pressione degli Usa, gli alleati europei e il Canada hanno aumentato la loro spesa militare di 87 miliardi di dollari dal 2014. Nonostante ciò, il presidente Trump batterà i pugni sul tavolo del Summit, accusando gli alleati perché, tutti insieme, spendono meno degli Stati uniti. «Tutti gli alleati stanno aumentando la spesa militare», assicura il segretario generale della Nato Stoltenberg. I paesi che destinano alla spesa militare almeno il 2% del pil aumentano da 3 nel 2014 a 8 nel 2018. Si prevede che da ora al 2024 gli alleati europei e il Canada  accresceranno la loro spesa militare di 266 miliardi di dollari, portando la spesa militare complessiva della Nato oltre i 1000 miliardi di dollari annui. La Germania la porterà nel 2019 a una media di 114 milioni di euro al giorno e pianifica di accrescerla dell’80% entro il 2024. L’Italia si èimpegnata a portarla dagli attuali 70 milioni di euro al giorno a circa 100 milioni di euro al giorno. Come richiede quello che, nel programma di governo, viene definito «l’alleato privilegiato dell’Italia».

Manlio Dinucci

Immagine :

https://www.politico.eu/article/nato-donald-trump-defense-spending-give-due-europe-must-spend-more/

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German-Polish Rivalry

Trump raised eyebrows this morning when he told NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg during breakfast that

“Germany is captive of Russia because it is getting so much of its energy from Russia. They pay billions of dollars to Russia and we have to defend them against Russia.”

Prima facie, he makes a simplistic point about the incongruence of the US supposedly “defending” Germany from Russia while Berlin pays billions to Moscow for energy, but there’s a lot more to his statement than initially meets the eye because the end game behind it is to deepen American control over Germany while supporting Poland’s regional leadership aspirations.

It’s common knowledge that the US is opposed to the Nord Stream II pipeline under construction between Russia and Germany not just for the overall strategic reason that it could make the EU’s leader more predisposed to Moscow-influenced multipolarity, but also because Washington wants to deprive the bloc of low-priced and reliable energy access so that it’s instead compelled to purchase much costlier LNG from its transatlantic “ally”. It also helps that America’s top partner in the continent, Poland, is also opposed to this pipeline, albeit for more ideological reasons stemming from its suspicions of any Russian-involved project than anything else.

Poland and Germany are presently squaring off against one another over a variety of issues including migration and Warsaw’s domestic judicial policies, which altogether represent proxy competitions for the larger struggle between these two states over the future path of the EU. Warsaw is leading the Three Seas Initiative of Central & Eastern European states that’s fighting for the decentralized reform of the bloc into a collection of sovereignty-respecting and identity-proud nation-states while Berlin wants to disguise its power-centralizing intentions under the cover of a superficially devolved “federation of regions” composed of identity-less and “politically correct” amorphous blobs that are easier to control via divide-and-rule tactics.

Three Seas Rising

Whereas Germany is publicly in favor of retaining the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal that the US unilaterally withdrew from in May, Poland is taking a non-partisan stance by largely refusing to take a side and instead offering up its possible services to mediate between the US and the EU. Moreover, Poland is actively courting the establishment of permanent US and NATO bases on its territory to the point of even offering to pay up to $2 billion to bring them to the country, which has speculatively set itself up to replace Germany as the Pentagon’s new centerpiece in Europe.

That would actually make the most sense from an American military perspective too because Poland represents everything that NATO traditionally stands for. The country is vehemently opposed to anything Russia-related and is a 110% committed US ally, one that’s also taking steps to phase out its import of Russian energy supplies. On top of that, while Germany’s continental leadership model is under strain and showing signs of failure, Poland’s regional one in the strategic Three Seas space is showing much more promise and also importantly covers the part of Europe that China’s focusing onthrough its Balkan Silk Road and corresponding 16+1 framework.

The strategic winds are obviously blowing in Warsaw’s favor and Berlin isn’t oblivious to this obvious trend, nor is Washington for that matter either, and that’s why the US is putting so much pressure on Germany nowadays because it’s “going in for the kill” and expects a full capitulation from the country in the coming future. NATO’s original anti-Russian purpose has no relevance for German geopolitics in the New Cold War apart from being indirectly leveraged to keep Russian out of the Ukrainian marketplace to Germany’s economic advantage, which is why Berlin takes such a blasé approach to the bloc.

The Chinks In The Teutonic Knight’s Armor 

Trump relishes in highlighting the hypocrisy of what he dismissively regards as the socialist clique in charge of the EU and that’s why he couldn’t help but take a swipe at Germany earlier today during breakfast, but he’s also smart enough of a deal-making businessman to understand that Berlin will get the message that he’s about to turn the screws on Merkel through a multitude of interconnected ways. Firstly, Germany’s export-driven economy is highly vulnerable to tariffs, which is why the so-called “trade war” stands to hurt it much more than the US, to say nothing of the threatened “secondary sanctions” if it continues doing business with Iran.

The second point is that German industry is dependent on its reliable access to Russian resources, the real cost of which Trump is threatening to spike through his strategic partnership with Poland against Nord Stream II. While the transaction of purchasing Russian gas might in and of itself always be cheaper than buying US LNG, the “secondary” costs that Washington will peg onto that first-mentioned purchase through possible sanctions or at the very least the “blacklisting” of Germany businesses involved with that trade could ultimately make it more expensive. In addition, Trump is pressing Germany to fulfill its obligation to commit 2% of its GDP to defense in solidarity with NATO.

Altogether, the “method behind the madness” is that Trump is waging Hybrid War against Germany through economic means, which is also the case when it comes to the possibility of relocating some US and NATO bases from that country to neighboring Poland. While it might not seem like it, the millions of dollars that American servicemen pump into those local economies is a godsend for many of them, and depriving their communities of those funds could be an incremental yet creative hit to the German economy to compound the many other larger ones that the US is preparing to inflict.

Replacing Germany With Poland

It’s conceivable that the “nuclear option” of moving military assets from Germany to Poland might just be a tradeable poker chip that could be exchanged if Berlin enters into tariff and energy concessions towards the US (and relatedly, if Russia coordinates Iran’s “phased withdrawal” from Syria with the US), but that would then lead to its strategic capitulation in the face of renewed American assertiveness under the Trump Doctrine. At the same time, however, German leadership of the EU might finally end if its export-oriented economic model of neo-imperial control can’t sustain itself under the heavy costs that Trump is threatening to impose upon it.

The Polish Three Seas model of nation-state sovereignty would prospectively replace German influence in Central & Eastern Europe, while Italy would continue leading similar reform efforts in Western Europe that could collectively culminate in the entire EU’s systemic transformation in the New Cold War on par with the dramatic consequences that the “Spring of Nations” had for the Communist Bloc in the Old Cold War. Sensing the immense pressure that it’s under, Germany decided to turn towards China, but not wholeheartedly enough to the point where it might make any real difference because it continues to fear Beijing’s future “domination” of its captive EU market.

The word “dilemma” has been bandied around so many times by pundits that it’s come close to losing its true meaning, but it needs to be objectively recognized that Germany’s present strategic situation is the very definition of this concept. Lacking the will and leadership to make a decisive choice between the unipolar and multipolar blocs, partially influenced by the unprecedented political uncertainty at home, Merkel is like a deer in headlights, utterly paralyzed by the shock of “The Kraken” taking her by surprise and upsetting the continental leadership plans that she’s spent her entire career pursuing.

Concluding Thoughts

Trump’s Russian gas rhetoric therefore needs to be seen as part of the holistic Machiavellian strategy that it is in forcing Germany’s full capitulation to America and its eventual replacement in importance with Poland, which is driven by the President’s ideological affinity with the Warsaw-led EuroRealist model of nation sovereignty that he openly favors over Berlin’s EuroLiberal globalist one of elite control. Germany’s grand strategic position has never been more precarious since its reunification, and for the first time in a generation Europeans can realistically imagine a future without its dominance, albeit one that’s brought about by the US’ “readjustment” of its “Lead From Behind” approach to hegemonically “managing” continent.

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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.

Featured image is from therussophile.org.

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Long gone from the High Court are towering figures like William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, the Court’s finest hours during their tenure – champions of justice for all.

Law Professor Stephen Gillers once said Brennan deserves “much of the credit for fashioning the legal theories that could support the progressive decisions (during his tenure on the High Court), and for then persuading a majority of his colleagues to accept them.”

Thurgood Marshall was a pillar in the battle for racial justice. One admirer called him the “great dismantler of Jim Crow, a colossus of US history.”

The likes of him, Brennan, and likeminded Supremes are long gone from the High Court, equal justice for all in the nation’s courts gone with them most often.

Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court is likely. All 49 undemocratic Dems against him aren’t enough – getting two Republican senators to join their opposition possible but unlikely.

ACLU legal director David Cole issued the following statement in response to his nomination, saying:

“Brett Kavanaugh may bring the requisite experience, but given Donald Trump’s promise to overturn Roe v. Wade, the decision that recognized the right to an abortion, and efforts to reverse progress on civil rights and civil liberties, that’s not enough.”

“It’s incumbent on Congress to determine whether Kavanaugh’s legal views are compatible with the powerful role he will play for generations.”

“If confirmed, Kavanaugh could very well be the decisive vote Trump needs in the Supreme Court to give his concerted campaign to undermine civil liberties and civil rights long-term impact.”

“And in light of President Trump’s promise to appoint justices who would overturn Roe, this nomination could jeopardize the right to an abortion millions of women and families have relied on for more than four decades.”

“Justice Kennedy kept the court in the mainstream by having an open mind and a commitment to an evolving Constitution.”

“Senators should ask Kavanaugh whether he agrees that constitutional law evolves with the times, as it did in recognizing that segregation is unconstitutional, that sex discrimination violates the Equal Protection Clause, and that marriage equality is constitutionally guaranteed.”

ACLU reproductive freedom project director Talcott Camp said the following:

Trump’s vow “to only nominate justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, (raises) serious concern about women’s continued ability to access abortion if Kavanaugh is confirmed.”

Since the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade High Court ruling, Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) permitted states to impose their own restrictions to abortion access – at least 400 instances so far.

They include shutting down clinics providing abortions on the phony pretext of protecting women’s health.

Lower court rulings at times successfully challenged state-imposed restrictions. So did the Supreme Court in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt (2016).

In a 5 – 3 ruling, the Court struck down two Texas laws restricting abortion, Justice Kennedy siding with the majority.

Kavanaugh replacing him, if confirmed, would shift the High Court’s balance against retaining Roe as the law of the land.

Numerous states have legislation prepared to enact, abolishing a woman’s right to choose if the Supremes overturn Roe.

A GOP-controlled Congress could ban abortions legislatively, following a High Court ruling against it.

Kavanaugh’s judicial history shows he’s on the wrong side of numerous issues just societies cherish.

Net Neutrality is a key one, what digital democracy is all about, the last frontier protecting it, what Trump wants eliminated.

His FCC voted to kill it, enabling cable and telecom giants to establish toll roads or premium lanes, charge extra for speed and free and easy access, control content, as well as stifle dissent and independent thought – transforming the Internet into another corporate-controlled swamp of disinformation and fake news if the ruling isn’t challenged and overturned.

If the issue reaches the High Court, Kavanaugh’s opinion could be decisive. He opposes Net Neutrality.

In a May 2017 DC Court of Appeals dissent, he said the

“net neutrality rule is one of the most consequential regulations ever issued,” calling it “unlawful and must be vacated.”

He argued that restricting ISP actions intruded on their “editorial discretion,” claiming it violated their First Amendment protections – while ignoring this protection for all US citizens as constitutionally mandated.

In November 2015, he argued that government metadata collection (mass surveillance) “is entirely consistent with the Fourth Amendment,” claiming that it doesn’t constitute “unreasonable” searches – siding with Big Brother intrusiveness, ignoring the right of privacy.

Following his nomination, Kavanaugh fooled no one, saying he’d “keep an open mind in every case…and…will always strive to preserve the Constitution of the United States and the American rule of law” – as he interprets it, he failed to explain.

Will undemocratic Dems go all-out to block Kavanaugh’s appointment, or will they pretend outrage, then cave in the end?

Will Dems fail to have two GOP senators side with them against Trump’s SCOTUS nominee?

Will the nation’s High Court be transformed into a hard-right body for the next generation if Kavanaugh is confirmed, serving privileged interests exclusively over equal justice for all?

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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research based in Chicago.

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Featured image: Raw footage posted to YouTube by Iraqi television station Al-Mawsleya appears to show an FGM-148 Javelin anti-tank missile and launcher among a cache of weapons recovered just outside Tal Afar, Iraq. (Source: Al-Mawsleya TV/YouTube)

With the heart of ISIS’s self-proclaimed “caliphate” in Mosul in ruins and Secretary of Defense James Mattis in Baghdad to assess the U.S.-led campaign against the terror group, Iraqi security forces are working overtime to expunge more than 2,000 militants from the strategically crucial city of Tal Afar. The offensive could signal “the end of ISIS’s military presence” in the country’s northern region, according to a spokesman for the U.S. coalition, but the ISF and their Western military partners have run into a familiar obstacle: American-made anti-tank weapons.

Raw footage posted to YouTube by Iraqi television station Al-Mawsleya appears to show an FGM-148 Javelin anti-tank missile and launcher among a cache of weapons recovered just outside Tal Afar. The Javelin has a range of up to 2.7 miles with an 18-pound tandem warhead (two shaped charges, one to pierce reactive armor the other to wreak havoc) and designed to penetrate even the toughest armor — including the skin of the Pentagon’s beloved M1 Abrams tank.

The discovery of the Javelin is disturbing. Despite ISIS’s reliance on unconventional weaponry like their beloved vehicle-borne IEDs, this isn’t the first time militants have wielded heavier American-made weapons against the very troops meant to carry them. An ISIS propaganda video released in June 2015, after the capture of the Syrian city of Palmyra, revealed militants targeting Syrian government forces with U.S.-made BGM-71 TOW anti-tank missiles. One year later, the same missiles, allegedly fired by U.S.-backed Syrian rebels, were used to down a Russian Mi-25 assault helicopter.

It’s likely ISIS fighters came upon the Javelin in the same way it acquires most of its other conventional weapons: by looting Syrian and Iraqi military weapons caches. A 2003 Government Accountability Office report published after the invasion of Iraq found that at least 36 Javelin missile command launch-units had gone missing in the country as a result of lax chain-of-custody standards at U.S. weapons depots. If more are in enemy hands, those launchers would be added to the tons of armored vehicles, Humvees, artillery, surface-to-air missiles, and Turkish variants of the U.S.-made M72 LAW anti-tank weapons and Russian RPGs that are confirmed to be in ISIS’s arsenal. Most of those arms were simply abandoned by the Iraqi Army and left for militants to pick up.

But the anti-tank weapons like the Javelin and TOW didn’t just turn up in Iraq and Syria amid the chaos of the 2003 invasion: they were sent there more recently by the U.S.-led coalition in Syria. Under Timber Sycamore, the covert CIA program established during the Obama administration to arm Syrian rebels locked in a protracted civil war against the Bashar al-Assad regime, at least 500 TOW missiles were reportedly transferred through Saudi Arabia to the Free Syrian Army in late 2015. And in February 2016 Washington Post reporter and Marine veteran Thomas Gibbons-Neff identified a Javelin in the hands of Kurdish YPG forces at work in northern Syria. (The Pentagon and State Department both denied sending any anti-tank weapons to regional forces fighting ISIS in Syria.)

In July, President Donald Trump moved to end Timber Sycamore, telling the Wall Street Journal,

”It turns out it’s — a lot of al-Qaeda we’re giving these weapons to.”

He’s not totally wrong: the complex mosaic of rebel forces operating in a theater defined by complicated and shifting allegiances makes weapons transfers an even riskier proposition than arming the Afghan security forces in Kabul. Indeed, the Pentagon announced on July 27 that it would for the first time end of military support for a Syrian rebel group for pursuing objectives outside of OIR’s strict anti-ISIS mandate, namely going AWOL from the At Tanf garrison that saw escalating clashes and tensions between OIR and pro-regime forces this summer.

But despite all that, the Trump administration has continued to pursue weapons transfers to the Syrian Democratic Forces, as if the new program is without the problems that made Timber Sycamore a goldmine for American “allies” in Syria. As we’ve noted before, the Pentagon is shit at monitoring weapons transfers: A 2016 analysis revealed that DoD could barely account for half of the 1.5 million weapons provided to Afghan and Iraqi security forces since the start of the invasions there, while, while a previous 2014 report found 43% of the weapons the ANSF received simply vanished. All of these weapons flow freely between ISIS forces across the Middle East.

Perhaps the appearance of the Javelin in an ISIS cache will induce the administration to reconsider its arms transfers to the SDF. If a Taliban fighter can wave around a fully accessorized SOCOM 7.62mm assault rifle, what makes the DoD think he can’t get his hand on a U.S. anti-tank missile? In July, Gibbons-Neff received a flaccid answer to that question from OIR spokesman Col. Ryan S. Dillon:

“Whenever we sign up for something, you know, we go through every serial number.”

Fat fucking chance.

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Jared Keller is a senior editor at Task & Purpose and contributing editor at Pacific Standard. Follow Jared Keller on Twitter @JaredBKeller

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UK, US, and French bombs inflicted mass loss of civilian life in ISIS-held Raqqa, according Amnesty International. A new report has also accused coalition forces of bombing areas where they knew civilians were trapped.

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Featured image: Nine-year-old Rima was deeply affected after the death of her mother [Sam Tarling/Save the Children]

“I wake up and I witness war every day… I don’t want to go through another war.” These are the words of 10-year-old Rahaf, a child from Iraq who has known nothing but death and destruction.

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Featured image: A massive peace march was held on July 8, 2018, in Managua showing support for the Nicaraguan government. (Source: UK Morning Sun)

There is a great deal of false and inaccurate information about Nicaragua in the media. Even on the left some have simply repeated the dubious claims of CNN and Nicaragua’s oligarchic media to support removal of President Ortega.

This article seeks to correct the record, describe what is happening in Nicaragua and why. As we write this, the coup seems to be failing, people have rallied for peace (as this massive march for peace held Saturday July 7 showed) and the truth is coming out. It is important to understand what is occurring because Nicaragua is an example of the types of violent coups the US and wealthy use to put in place business dominated, neoliberal governments. If people understand these tactics, they will become less effective.

Mixing up the Class Interests

In part, US pundits are getting their information from media outlets, such as Jaime Chamorro-Cardinal’s La Prensa, and the same oligarchical family’s Confidencial, that are the most active elements of the coup media. Repeating and amplifying their narrative delegitimizes the Sandinista government and presents unconditional surrender by Daniel Ortega as the only acceptable option. These pundits provide cover for nefarious internal and external interests who have set their sights on controlling Central America’s poorest and yet resource-rich country.

The coup attempt brought the class divisions in Nicaragua into the open. Piero Coen, the richest man in Nicaragua, owner of all national Western Union operations and an agrochemical company, personally arrived on the first day of protests at the Polytechnic University in Managua, to encourage students to keep protesting, promising his continued support. 

The traditional landed oligarchy of Nicaragua, politically led by the Chamorro family, publishes constant ultimatums to the government through its media outlets and finances the roadblocks that have paralyzed the country for the last eight weeks. 

The Catholic Church, long allied with the oligarchs, has put its full weight behind creating and sustaining anti-government actions, including  its universities, high schools, churches, bank accounts, vehicles, tweets, Sunday sermons, and a one-sided effort to mediate the National Dialogue. Bishops have made death threats against the President and his family, and a priest has been filmed supervising the torture of Sandinistas. Pope Francis has called for peace dialogue, and even called Cardinal Leonaldo Brenes and Bishop Rolando Alvarez to a private meeting in the Vatican, setting off rumors that the Nicaraguan monseñores were being scolded for their obvious involvement in the conflict they are officially mediating.  The church remains one of the few pillars keeping the coup alive.

A common claim is Ortega has cozied up to the traditional oligarchy, but the opposite is true. This is the first government since Nicaraguan independence that does not include the oligarchy. Since the 1830s through the 1990s, all Nicaraguan governments– even during the Sandinista Revolution– included people from the elite “last names,” of Chamorro, Cardenal, Belli, Pellas, Lacayo, Montealegre, Gurdián. The government since 2007 does not, which is why these families are supporting the coup.

Ortega detractors claim his three-part dialogue including labor unions, capitalists and the State is an alliance with big business. In fact, that process has yielded the highest growth rate in Central America and annual minimum wage increases 5-7% above inflation, improving workers’ living conditions and lifting people out of poverty. The anti-poverty Borgen project reports poverty fell by 30 percent between 2005 and 2014. 

The Ortega economy is the opposite of neoliberalism, it is based on public investment and strengthening the safety net for the poor. The government invests in infrastructure, transit, maintains water and electricity within the public sector, and moved privatized services. e.g., health care and primary education into the public sector. This has ensured a stable economic structure that favors the real economy over the speculative economy. 

What liberal and even leftists commentators overlook is that unlike the Lula government in Brazil, which reduced poverty through cash payouts to poor families, Nicaragua has redistributed productive capital in order to develop a self-sufficient popular economy. The FSLN model is better understood as an emphasis on the popular economy over the State or capitalist spheres.

While the private sector employs about 15% of Nicaraguan workers, the informal sector employs over 60%. The informal sector has benefitted from $400 million in public investments, much of it coming from the ALBA alliance funds to finance micro loans for small and medium-sized agricultural enterprises. Policies to facilitate credit, equipment, training, animals, seeds and subsidized fuel further support these enterprises. The small and medium producers of Nicaragua have led the country to produce 80-90% of its food and end its dependence on IMF loans. 

As such, workers and peasants– many of whom are self-employed and who accessed productive capital through the Sandinista Revolution and ensuing struggles– represent an important political subject of the stable, postwar social development of the last decade, including the hundreds of thousands of peasant farmers who have received land title and the nearly one-quarter of the national territory that has been given collective title as territory of indigenous nations. The social movements of workers, peasants, and indigenous groups were the base of popular support that brought the FSLN back into power. 

Land titling, and assistance to small businesses have also emphasized equality for women, resulting in Nicaragua having the lowest level of gender inequality in Latin America and ranked 12 out of 145 countries in the world, just behind Germany. 

Over time, the FSLN government has incorporated this massive self-employed sector, as well as maquiladora workers (i.e. textile workers in foreign-owned plants located in free trade zones created by previous neoliberal governments), into the health care and pension system, causing the financial commitments to grow which required a new formula to ensure fiscal stability. The proposed reforms to Social Security were the trigger for the private sector and student protests on April 18th. The business lobby called for the protests when Ortega proposed increasing employer contributions by 3.5% to pension and health funds, while only slightly increasing worker contributions by 0.75% and shifting 5% of pensioners’ cash transfer into their health care fund. The reform also ended a loophole which allowed high-income individuals to claim a low income in order to access health benefits. 

This was a counter-proposal to the IMF proposal to raise the retirement age and more than double the number of weeks that workers would need to pay into the pension fund in order to access benefits. The fact the government felt strong enough to deny the IMF and business lobby’s austerity demands was a sign that the bargaining strength of private capital has declined, as Nicaragua’s impressive economic growth, a 38% increase in GDP from 2006-2017, has been led by small-scale producers and public spending. However, the opposition used manipulative Facebook ads presenting the reform as an austerity measure, plus fake news of a student death on April 18th, to generate protests across the country on April 19th. Immediately, the regime change machine lurched into motion.

The National Dialogue shows the class interests in conflict. The opposition’s Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy has as its key figures: José Adan Aguirre, leader of the private business lobby; Maria Nelly Tellez, director of Cargill in Nicaragua and head of the US-Nicaragua Chamber of Commerce; the private university students of the April 19^th Movement; Michael Healy, manager of a Colombian sugar corporation and head of the agribusiness lobby; Juan Sebastian Chamorro, who represents the oligarchy dressed as civil society; Carlos Tunnermann, 85-year-old ex-Sandinista minister and ex-chancellor of the National University; Azalea Solis, head of a US government-funded feminist organization; and Medardo Mairena, a “peasant leader” funded by the US government, who lived 17 years in Costa Rica before being deported in 2017 for human trafficking. Tunnermann, Solis and the April 19^th students are all associated with the Movement for Renovation of Sandinismo (MRS), a tiny Sandinista offshoot party that nonetheless merits special attention.

In the 1980s, many of the Sandinista Front’s top level cadre were in fact the children of some of the famous oligarchic families, such as the Cardenal brothers and part of the Chamorro family, in charge of the revolutionary government’s ministries of Culture and Education and its media, respectively. After FSLN’s election loss in 1990, the children of the oligarchy staged an exodus from the party. Along with them, some of the most notable intellectual, military and intelligence cadre left and formed, over time, the MRS. The new party renounced socialism, blamed all of the mistakes of the Revolution on Daniel Ortega and over time took over the sphere of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Nicaragua, including feminist, environmentalist, youth, media and human rights organizations. 

Since 2007, the MRS has become increasingly close with the extreme right-wing of the US Republican Party. Since the outbreak of violence in April, many if not most of the sources cited by Western media (including, disturbingly, Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!), come from this party, which has the support of less than 2% of the Nicaraguan electorate. This allows the oligarchs to couch their violent attempt to reinstall neoliberalism in leftist-sounding discourse of former Sandinistas critical of the Ortega government.

It is a farce to claim that workers and peasants are behind the unrest. La Vía Campesina, the National Union of Farmers and Ranchers, the Association of Rural Workers, the National Workers’ Front, the indigenous Mayangna Nation and other movements and organizations have been unequivocal in their demands for an end to the violence and their support for the Ortega government. This unrest is a full-scale regime change operation carried out by media oligarchs, a network of NGOs funded by the US government, armed elements of elite landholding families and the Catholic Church, and has opened the window for drug cartels and organized crime to gain a foothold in Nicaragua. 

Nicargua meeting of the National Dialogue for Peace by Óscar Sánchez.

The Elephant in the Room

Which brings us to US government involvement in the violent coup.

As Tom Ricker reported early in this political crisis, several years ago the US government decided that rather than finance opposition political parties, which have lost enormous legitimacy in Nicaragua, it would finance the NGO civil society sector. National Endowment for Democracy (NED) gave more than $700,000 to build the opposition to the government in 2017, and has granted more than $4.4 million since 2014. The overarching purpose of this funding was to “provide a coordinated strategy and media voice for opposition groups in Nicaragua.” Ricker continues:

“The result of this consistent building and funding of opposition resources has been to create an echo chamber that is amplified by commentators in the international media – most of whom have no presence in Nicaragua and rely on these secondary sources.” 

NED founding father, Allen Weinstein, described NED as the overt CIA saying,

“A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

In Nicaragua, rather than the traditional right-wing, NED funds the MRS-affiliated organizations which pose left-sounding critiques of the Sandinista government. The regime change activists use Sandinista slogans, songs and symbols even as they burn historic monuments, paint over the red-and-black markers of fallen martyrs, and physically attack members of the Sandinista party.

Of the opposition groups in the National Dialogue, the feminist organization of Azalea Solis and the peasant organization of Medardo Mairena are financed through NED grants, while the April 19th students stay in hotels and make trips paid for by Freedom House, another regime change organ funded by NED and USAID. NED also finances Confidencial, the Chamorro media organization. Grants from NED finance the Institute of Strategic Studies and Public Policy (IEEPP), whose Executive Director, Felix Maradiaga, is another MRS cadre very close to the US Embassy. In June, Maradiaga was accused of leading a criminal network called Viper which, from the occupied UPOLI campus, organized carjackings, arsons and murders in order to create chaos and panic during the months of April and May.

Maradiaga grew up in the United States and became a fellow of the Aspen Leadership Institute, before studying public policy at Harvard. He was a secretary in the Ministry of Defense for the last liberal president, Enrique Bolaños. He is a Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum and in 2015, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs gave him the Gus Hart Fellowship, past recipients of which include Cuban dissident Yoani Sánchez and Henrique Capriles Radonski, the Venezuelan opposition leader who attacked the Cuban embassy during the coup attempt of 2002. 

Remarkably, Maradiaga is not the only leader of the coup attempt who is part of the Aspen World Leadership Network. Maria Nelly Rivas, director in Nicaragua of US corporate giant Cargill, is one of the main spokespersons for the opposition Civic Alliance. Rivas, who currently also heads the US-Nicaragua Chamber of Commerce, is being groomed as a possible presidential candidate in the next elections. Beneath these US-groomed leaders, there is a network of over 2,000 young people who have received trainings with NED funds on topics such as social media skills for democracy defense. This battalion of social media warriors was able to immediately shape and control public opinion in Facebook in the five days from April 18th to 22nd, leading to spontaneous violent protests across the country. 

Protesters yell from behind the roadblock they erected as they face off with security forces near the University Politecnica de Nicaragua in Managua, Nicaragua, April 21, 2018. Source: Voice of America

On the Violence

One of the ways in which reporting on Nicaragua has ventured farthest from the truth is calling the opposition “nonviolent.” The violence script, modeled on the 2014 and 2017 guarimba protests in Venezuela, is to organize armed attacks on government buildings, entice the police to send in anti-riot squads, engage in filmed confrontations and publish edited footage online claiming that the government is being violent against nonviolent protesters. 

Over 60 government buildings have been burned down, schools, hospitals, health centers attacked, 55 ambulances damaged, at least $112 million in infrastructure damage, small businesses have been closed, and 200,000 jobs lost causing devastating economic impact during the protests. Violence has included, in addition to thousands of injuries, 15 students and 16 police officers killed, as well as over 200 Sandinistas kidnapped, many of them publicly tortured. Violent opposition atrocities were misreported as government repression. While it is important to defend the right of the public to protest, regardless of its political opinions, it is disingenuous to ignore that the opposition’s strategy requires and feeds upon violence and deaths.

National and international news claim deaths and injuries due to “repression” without explaining the context. The Molotov cocktails, mortar-launchers, pistols, and assault rifles used by opposition groups are ignored by the media, and when Sandinista sympathizers, police or passers-by are killed, they are falsely counted as victims of state repression. Explosive opposition claims like massacres of children and murders of women have been shown to be false, and the cases of torture, disappearances and extrajudicial executions by police forces have not been corroborated by evidence or due process. 

While there is evidence to support the opposition claim of sniper fire killing protesters, there is no logical explanation for the State using snipers to add to the death toll, and counter-protesters have also been victims of sniper fire, suggesting a “third party” provocateur role in the destabilizing violence. When an entire Sandinista family was burned to death in Managua, the opposition media all cited a witness who claimed that the police had set fire to the home, despite the house being in a neighborhood barricaded off from police access.

The National Police of Nicaragua has been long-recognized for its model of community policing (in contrast to militarized police in most Central American countries), its relative lack of corruption, and its mostly female top brass. The coup strategy has sought to destroy public trust in the police through egregious use of fake news, such as the many false claims of assassinations, beatings, torture, and disappearances in the week from April 17^th to 23^rd. Several young people whose photos were carried in opposition rallies as victims of police violence have turned out to be alive and well. 

The police have been wholly inadequate and underprepared for armed confrontations. Attacks on several public buildings on the same night and the first major arson attacks led government workers to hold vigils with barrels of water and, often, sticks and stones, to fend off attackers. The opposition, frustrated at not achieving more police conflicts, began to build roadblocks across the country and burning the homes of Sandinistas, even shooting and burning Sandinista families in atrocious hate crimes. In contrast to La Prensa’s version of events, Nicaraguans have felt the distinct lack of police presence, and the loss of safely in their neighborhoods, while many were targeted by violence.

Since May, the strategy of the opposition has been to build armed roadblocks across the country, closing off transport and trapping people. The roadblocks, usually built with large paving stones, are manned by between 5 and 100 armed men with bandannas or masks. While the media reports on idealistic young people running roadblocks, the vast majority of roadblocks are maintained by paid men who come from a background of petty crime. Where large areas of cities and towns are blocked off from government and police forces, drug-related activities intensify, and drug gangs now control many of the roadblocks and pay the salaries.

These roadblocks have been the centers of violence, workers who need to pass through roadblocks are often robbed, punched, insulted, and, if suspected of being Sandinistas, tied up, stripped naked, tortured, painted in blue-and-white, and sometimes killed. There are three cases of people dying in ambulances unable to pass roadblocks, and one case of a 10-year-old girl being kidnapped and raped at the roadblock in Las Maderas. When organized neighbors or the police clear roadblocks, the armed groups run away and regroup to burn buildings, kidnap or injure people in revenge. All of the victims that this violence produces are counted by the mainstream media as victims of repression, a total falsehood.

The Nicaraguan government has confronted this situation by largely keeping police off the streets, to prevent encounters and accusations of repression. At the same time, rather than simply arrest violent protestors, which certainly would have given the opposition the battle deaths it craves, the government called for a National Dialogue, mediated by the Catholic Church, in which the opposition can bring forward any proposal for human rights and political reform. The government created a parliamentary Truth and Peace Commission and launched an independent Public Ministry query.

As a result, a process of organizing self-defense developed. Families who have been displaced, young people who have been beaten, robbed or tortured, and veterans of the 1979 insurrection and/or the Contra War, hold vigil round the Sandinista Front headquarters in each town. In many places they built barricades against opposition attacks and have been falsely labeled paramilitary forces in the media. In the towns that do not have such community-organized barricades, the human toll from opposition violence is much greater. The National Union of Nicaraguan Students has been particularly targeted by opposition violence. A student delegate of the National Dialogue, Leonel Morales, was kidnapped, shot in the abdomen and thrown into a ditch to die in June, to sabotage the dialogue and punish him for challenging the April 19th students’ right to speak on behalf of all Nicaraguan students.

There have been four major opposition rallies since April, directed toward mobilizing the upper-middle class Nicaraguans who live in the suburbs between Managua and Masaya. These rallies featured a who’s-who of high society, including beauty queens, business owners and oligarchs, as well as university students of the April 19^th Movement, the moral high-ground for the opposition. 

Three months into the conflict, none of the mortal victims have been bourgeois. All have come from the popular classes of Nicaragua. Despite claims of total repression, the bourgeois feels perfectly safe to participate in public protests by day — although the last daytime rally ended in a chaotic attack by protesters against squatters on a property of, curiously enough, Piero Coen, Nicaragua’s richest man. The nighttime armed attacks have generally been carried out by people who come from poor neighborhoods, many of whom are paid two to four times the minimum daily wage for each night of destruction.

Unfortunately, most Nicaraguan human rights organizations are funded by NED and controlled by the Movement for Sandinista Renovation. These organizations have accused the Nicaraguan government of dictatorship and genocide throughout Ortega’s presidency. International human rights organizations, including Amnesty International have been criticized for their one-sided reports, which include none of the information provided by the government or individuals who identify as Sandinistas. 

The government invited the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the OAS, a Washington-based entity notoriously unfriendly to leftist governments, to investigate the violent events of April and determine whether repression had occurred. The night of a controversial skirmish in the highway outside the Agrarian University in Managua ended a negotiated 48-hour truce, IACHR Director Paulo Abrao visited the site to declare his support for the opposition. The IACHR ignored the opposition’s widespread violence and only reported on the defensive violence of the government. Not only was it categorically rejected by Nicaraguan chancellor Denis Moncada as an “insult to the dignity of the Nicaraguan people,” a resolution approving the IACHR report was supported by only ten out of 34 countries.

Meanwhile, the April 19th Movement, made up of current or former university students in favor of regime change, sent a delegation to Washington and managed to alienate much of Nicaraguan society by grinning into the camera with far-right interventionist members of the US Congress, including Rep. Ileana Ros Lehtinen, Sen. Marco Rubio and Sen. Ted Cruz. M19 leaders also cheered Vice-President Mike Pence’s bellicose warnings that Nicaragua is on the short list of countries that will soon know the Trump Administration’s meaning of freedom, and met with the ARENA party of El Salvador, known for its links to the death squads that murdered liberation theologist Archbishop Oscar Romero. Within Nicaragua, the critical mass of students stopped demonstrating weeks ago, the large civic protests of April and May have dwindled, and the same-old familiar faces of Nicaraguan right wing politics are left holding the bill for massive material damage and loss of life.

Nicaraguan students meet with right-wing Republicans, Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Ileana Ros Lehtinen  in Washington, DC. Source Twitter Truthdig.

Why Nicaragua?

Ortega won his third term in 2016 with 72.4 percent of the vote with 66 percent turnout, very high compared to US elections. Not only has Nicaragua put in place an economy that treats the poor as producers, with remarkable results raising their standard of living in 10 years, but it also has a government that consistently rejects US imperialism, allying with Cuba, Venezuela, and Palestine, and voices support for Puerto Rican independence and a peaceful solution to Korean crisis. Nicaragua is a member of member of Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, a Latin American alternative to the OAS, neither include the US or Canada. It has also allied with China for a proposed canal project and Russia for security cooperation. For all of these reasons the US wants to install a US-friendly Nicaraguan government. 

More important is the example Nicaragua has set for a successful social and economic model outside the US sphere of domination. Generating over 75% of its energy from renewable sources, Nicaragua was the only country with the moral authority to oppose the Paris Climate Agreement as being too weak  (it later joined the treaty one day after Trump pulled the US out, stating “we opposed the Paris agreement out of responsibility, the US opposes it out of irresponsibility”). The FMLN government of El Salvador, while less politically dominant than the Sandinista Front, has taken the example of good governance from Nicaragua, recently prohibiting mining and the privatization of water. Even Honduras, the eternal bastion of US power in Central America, showed signs of a leftward shift until the US-supported military coup in 2009. Since then, there has been massive repression of social activists, a clearly stolen 2017 election, and Honduras has permitted the expansion of US military bases near the Nicaraguan border. 

In 2017, the US House of Representatives unanimously passed the Nicaraguan Investment Conditionality Act (NICA Act), which if passed by the Senate will force the US government to veto loans from international institutions to the Nicaraguan government. This US imperialism will cripple Nicaragua’s ability to build roads, update hospitals, construct renewable energy plants, and transition from extensive livestock raising to integrated animal-forestry systems, among other consequences. It may also signify the end of many popular social programs, such as subsidized electricity, stable bus fares, and free medical treatment of chronic diseases. 

The US Executive Branch has used the Global Magnitsky Act to target the finances of leaders of the Electoral Supreme Court, the National Police, the city government of Managua and the ALBA corporation in Nicaragua. Police officers and public health bureaucrats have been told their US visas have been revoked. The point, of course, is not whether these officials have or have not committed acts that merit their reprimand in Nicaragua, but whether the US government should have the jurisdiction to intimidate and corner public officials of Nicaragua.

While the sadistic violence continues, the strategy of the coup-mongers to force out the government has failed. The resolution of the political crisis will come through elections, and the FSLN is likely to win those elections, barring a dramatic and unlikely new offensive by the right-wing opposition.

Latin American Presidents Zelaya (Honduras), Correa (Ecuador), Chavez (Venezuela), Ortega (Nicaragua), and Morales (Bolivia) celebrate Correa’s inauguration for a second term, in Quito, Ecuador. (Prensa Presidencial)

An Upside Down Class War

It is important to understand the nature of US and oligarch coups in this era and the role of media and NGO deception because it is repeated in multiple Latin American and other countries. We can expect a similar attack on recently elected Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico, if he seeks the changes he has promised. 

The US has sought to dominate Nicaragua since the mid-1800s. The wealthy in Nicaragua have sought return of US-allied governance since the Sandinistas rose to power. This failing coup does not mean the end of their efforts or the end of corporate media misinformation. Knowing what is really occurring and sharing that information is the antidote to defeating them in Nicaragua and around the world.

Nicaragua is a class war turned upside down. The government has raised the living standards of the impoverished majority through wealth redistribution. Oligarchs and the United States, unable to install neoliberalism through elections, created a political crisis, highlighted by false media coverage to force Ortega to resign. The coup is failing, the truth is coming out, and should not be forgotten.

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This article was also published on Popular Resistance.

Kevin Zeese is an attorney who co-directs the US-based Popular Resistance.

Nils McCune is on the Technical team of IALA Mesoamerica (Agroecological Institute of Latin America in Nicaragua) and agroecological education of La Via Campesina.

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He has been compared to Alfred Dreyfus, the iconic 19th-century French victim of false accusation and racism. The entire spectrum of the Canadian press has covered his unfolding story since its inception in 2007. His return to Canada from France in January 2018 was breaking news. An Ottawa sociology professor, Dr. Diab is the Canadian citizen who, at the behest of France, was sought for extradition. Subject to allegations of involvement in the bombing of a Paris synagogue in 1980, he was pursued and harassed by the RCMP in 2008. Arrested on November 13th of that year, denied bail, and jailed in the disreputable Ottawa Carleton Detention Centre, he was then released in April 2009, only to be placed under the most draconian house arrest conditions. In 2014, after prolonged and suspect hearings, his extradition to France was sealed.

A decisive moment came on July 28, 2009 when Dr. Diab’s summer teaching appointment at Carleton University became public. The news provoked a most vilifying statement from the B’nai B’rith, which the latter sent post haste to Carleton University:

“The safety and security of the community as a whole … are of great concern to us. … The last place in the world where this man belongs is in a university classroom, in front of impressionable students.”

Carleton University yielded to this external pressure and unceremoniously terminated Dr. Diab’s summer contract.

Warm welcome for Hassan at Ottawa airport, January 15, 2018. (Source: The Bullet)

Extradited to France

Between 2010 and 2011, Dr. Diab endured a highly prolonged, dubious, and exasperating process of extradition hearings, grounded in secret, unsourced intelligence that confounded even the extradition judge. Barely convinced by the convoluted logic of the case, the judge nonetheless ordered the extradition. Dr. Diab’s lawyer, Don Bayne, produced an eminently powerful appeal that was denied at every court level. His eloquent plea to the Minister of Justice (Rob Nicholson) was cavalierly dismissed. In 2014, Dr. Diab was extradited to France.

Compelled to leave in haste, he departed with but four items of clothing and no chance to say goodbye. His wife and toddler were left hanging in utter desperation. Thus began the next phase of Dr. Diab’s ordeal – three years and two months in a maximum-security French prison (Fleury-Mérogis) for a crime he never committed and for which he was never even charged.

Rania Tfaily, his wife, describes his coerced departure as a nightmare. As if sucked down the vortex of a black hole, he remained incommunicado for an entire month. She received no direct word of his whereabouts or of his welfare. A Carleton University professor, she was seven months pregnant with her second child at the time, left to agonize in solitude with no relief from her nightmare. The heart-wrenching questions from her bewildered toddler daughter came regularly: “Where’s daddy?”

The case of Dr. Diab represents a shocking miscarriage of justice, committed by sundry Canadian and French authorities that presumed him guilty, and were driven to see that such a perception would stick in the public’s mind. Their actions upended Dr. Diab’s life, subjected him, along with his wife, to years of torment and humiliation, all on a contrived allegation – involvement in a terrorist bombing at a Paris synagogue in 1980 – a groundless accusation issued by a foreign state and inflamed by rumour and racism.

Dr. Diab’s ordeal can be attributed in part to France. CBC recently learned that when French authorities made a formal extradition request to Canada, they “were aware of – and failed to disclose – fingerprint evidence that ultimately helped to clear Hassan Diab of committing a terrorist attack … [C]ourt documents show French prosecutors denied the evidence even existed.” Having already analyzed Dr. Diab’s fingerprints in 2008, and having ascertained a mismatch months before making the extradition request, they knowingly pursued the wrong man.

Canada Implicated

But Canada is equally implicated in this affair. Our deeply defective extradition law, which overrides the individual’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, allowed blatantly false evidence from France to justify sending Dr. Diab to indefinite “purgatory,” to languish in solitary confinement in a maximum-security prison for more than three years. But it was not only the law that facilitated this unjust extradition; it was also agents of the law who “pro-actively” sought it.

Three key elements stand out in this embroiled narrative and they are now the object of intense public concern: 1) France framed Dr. Diab by denying that it knew (already in 2008) that his fingerprints did not match those of the suspected bomber; 2) Canada’s flawed extradition law deprives the sought individual of the right to invoke evidence in his own defense beyond the record of the case (e.g., Hassan Diab was not in France during the 1980 bombing attack, but was not allowed to bring forth this alibi); and 3) Canadian officials in the Department of Justice, at the direction of a senior lawyer, Claude Lefrançois, actively propped up the French extradition case, delaying court procedures and withholding vital information.

In November 2009, Lefrançois requested a comparative analysis of fingerprints. In early 2010, the RCMP produced the analysis. The fingerprints did not match. Lefrançois would have known this throughout the extradition hearings, yet he never shared the information with the defence or showed it to the Canadian judge who made the extradition order. In fact, Lefrançois “…regularly exchanged memos with his French counterparts pushing for and obtaining court delays until the French authorities could find a “smoking gun” – handwriting analysis that would guarantee Dr. Diab’s extradition. And while “that hunt for case-saving evidence continued, court transcripts show Lefrançois repeatedly told the court he had no direct knowledge of what France was doing – despite having directed France to find the evidence.”

For a decade, then, France concealed possession of fingerprint evidence that would have refuted allegations against Hassan Diab. But for eight years, Canadian government officials also knew that Dr. Diab’s fingerprints did not match those of the suspected bomber. They concealed this fact from the court, acting underhandedly to abet a French extradition request that was tainted from the outset.

These alarming disclosures beg fundamental questions: how and why did our former government facilitate the extradition of one of its citizens by withholding critical information that would otherwise have saved him years of torment? Given this egregious irregularity in judicial and government proceedings, and given that Canada’s extradition law offers few, if any, safeguards to protect the requested individual from extradition, it behooves all Canadians to ponder seriously the extent of their civil liberties.

One Man’s Ordeal

The case of Hassan Diab recalls the canary in the mine. From the depths of one man’s ordeal, it illuminates a warning sign that we must all heed. Any one of us, however innocent, could fall into the same dark hole of hell that swallowed Dr. Diab for ten years.

Now fully informed of Dr. Diab’s story, Canadians are petitioning the Government to set up an independent and public inquiry: 1) to study the actions of Canadian officials involved in abetting the cause of a foreign state by actively promoting the extradition of Dr. Diab; and 2) to launch a substantive revision of Canada’s extradition law that trumps Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Government must act expeditiously on this matter, on behalf of every one of us, but most importantly, on behalf of Dr. Diab and his family. Only then will justice be served.

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Michelle Weinroth is a writer and teacher living in Ottawa.

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The upcoming Trump/Putin summit is hampered by the crazed portrait of Russia painted by presstitutes. Jonathan Chait, Amy Knight, Max Bergmann, Yaroslav Trofimov, Roger Cohen, and the rest of the conscious or de facto CIA assets that comprise the Western presstitute media have turned Putin into a superhuman who controls election outcomes throughout the West, murders people without rhyme or reason, and has President Trump under his thumb doing Putin’s bidding. Who could imagine a more extreme conspiracy theory?

Jonathan Chait in New York magazine writes that

“the dark crevices of the Russia scandal run deep,” so deep that “it would be dangerous not to consider the possibility that the summit is less a negotiation between two heads of state than a meeting between a Russian-intelligence asset and his handler.”

So here is Chait, who brands truth-tellers “conspiracy theorists” coming up with the greatest conspiracy theory of our time that President Trump has been a Kremlim asset since 1987. Chait provides a ”crazy quilt of connections” to illustrate his absurd conspiracy theory that “it’s not necessary to believe that Putin always knew he might install Trump in the Oval Office to find the following situation highly plausible: Sometime in 2015, the Russian president recognized that he had, in one of his unknown number of intelligence files, an inroad into American presidential politics.”

Chait believes that Russia is also behind the UK’s exit from the European Union.

“Driving Britain out of the European Union advanced the decades-long Russian goal of splitting Western nations apart, and Russia found willing allies on the British far right.”

Chait gets even more conspiratorial. He admits that Paul Manafort’s indictments for alleged white collar crimes are not related to Trump’s election, having occurred years previously in Ukraine. Nevertheless, Chait is certain that Manafort is shielding Trump even though according to Chait Manafort is facing many years in prison. Why would Manafort shield Trump? Chait’s answer:

“One way to make sense of his behavior is the possibility that Manafort is keeping his mouth shut because he’s afraid of being killed. That speculation might sound hyperbolic, but there is plenty of evidence to support it. In February, a video appeared on YouTube showing Manafort’s patron Deripaska on his yacht with a Belarusian escort named Anastasia Vashukevich.”

Chait’s article is long and heavily weighted with innuendo. Chait, or whoever wrote the article, possibly the person who wrote the Steele Dossier, collects every disparaging fact and fantasy about Trump and assembles them in a way to paint a portrait of a person who must also, without much doubt, be a Russian agent. If the public can be convinced of this, the military/security complex can assassinate Trump and blame Putin for getting rid of an asset who was exposed by the Russiagate investigation, no longer useful, and perhaps prepared to spill the beans.

Another conspiracy theorist, Amy Knight, writes that

“The real question is where does the Russian criminal state end and the criminal underworld begin, and how do they work together in what amounts to a new murder incorporated?”

Yaroslav Trofimov tells us in the Wall Street Journal (July 7) that “Putin maps out his own empire” to replace the lost Soviet one.

In the Washington Post Max Bergmann tells us that Trump is going to sell out NATO in Helsinki. This line leads to the supposition that Putin is using Trump to unleash the Russian military on Europe. Many conspiracy theorists have come together on the view that first the Baltic States will be invaded and then Putin will move on to Germany and the rest of Europe. The New York Times’ Roger Cohen even pulls Marine Le Pen into the plot which widens to include ethnically cleansing the West of the refugees from Washington’s wars.

This is the level of absurdity that the American media delivers to the public’s understanding of foreign affairs.

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This article was originally published on Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy.

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

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As the US-Russia Summit approaches, the media grows positively shrill in its warnings of disaster. Fears that a conversation with no witnesses (not even a translator!) could be fatal to America’s leadership of the world, that our ‘naive’ president, who hates to read, will give away the store, overrule any sense of reality.

Since President Trump’s meeting with Kim Jong Un, our media stalwarts have been reminding us that the North Koreans never keep their word, discounting their justified resentment at being told by our Secretary of State what steps to follow in their commitment to denuclearization. This is added to ‘Russia’s disregard for national borders’, in blatant denial of the fact that WE created the mess in Ukraine. (Even the Atlantic Council has finally acknowledged this, however it manages to make it look as though that’s a detail.)

Americans concerned about our steady build-up to war should recognize the playbook by now: According to the 1995 Wolfowitz Doctrine which declares that no country should even dream of challenging our world hegemony, we must prevent that from happening by taking down those with the possibility of succeeding, i.e., Russia and China. Starting with Russia, since we already have NATO in place in Europe, right up to that country’s borders, we foment color revolutions in its near abroad, baiting President Putin to intervene in defense of Russian populations being aggressed by our puppets, then accuse him of failing to respect post-World War II internationally agreed borders. We tried it in Georgia in 2008, then did a ‘better job’ in Ukraine in 2014.  

I have not heard a single mainstream journalist signal either that Crimea had been Russian since the reign of Catherine the Great until Khruschev gifted it to Ukraine in 1953, or that its Russian-speaking inhabitants voted overwhelmingly to return to Russia in a May 2014 referendum similar to the one NATO sponsored in Kosovo in the nineteen-nineties, the soldiers guarding the streets while it was underway being seconded from the naval base conceded to Russia under a 1997 Agreement, whose details can be read as supporting either side claim to legality.

However one chooses to read that agreement, Russia’s sponsorship of a referendum can hardly be compared to the fomenting of the so-called ‘Maidan’ (independence, sic) coup that set off the latest Russia-Ukraine crisis in a centuries long history of moving borders along Europe’s eastern march. And yet, upon this dubious claim to legality, the United States prepares for war, claiming its European allies are fearful of a Trump-Putin entente that would, in fact, result in them no longer being its inescapable battlefield.

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Deena Stryker is an international expert, author and journalist that has been at the forefront of international politics for over thirty years. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Her blog is www.otherjones.com. 

Featured image is from Sky News.

More than ten thousand Americans are currenty living independently in Russia. What are some of the reasons for their choice and how has it affected their view of the wider world. Illustrated with many color photographs from the author’s on site experience.

Title: Russia’s Americans

Author: Deena Stryker

Publication Date: March 22, 2018

ASIN: B07C91JSC8

Click here to order.

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They have been falling like ninepins at one of the most unpredictable World Cups in generations.  Even before the kick-off in the tournament, Italy’s absence was conspicuous.  By the time the first phase of matches had been concluded, Germany, whose teams have made it to the elimination phase for eighty years, found itself in exit mode, a victim of exhaustion, desperation and South Korean determination.  Die Welt deemed the performance an embarrassment of perfection, the team’s performance “harmless, unimaginative, listless”.  

Spain, who won the 2010 World Cup, found its adventure prematurely aborted in the round-of-sixteen, falling to the inspired Russian team on penalties.  Portugal, in their defeat before the hard set Uruguayans, went the same way in that round.  (Christian Ronaldo was distinctly off the boil.)  Not enough credit, however, was given in shocked observations to the other side of the show, the performances of those giant killing teams which have added to the fogginess of any crystal ball.

One colossus did seem dangerously predictable in advancing.  Brazil threatened at points to overcome a furiously talented Belgian team, but failed to transform possession into goals.  The Belgians made their chances count and duly dispatched another giant from the competition.

Image on the right: Brazil team’s Neymar

A sense prevailed that Brazil were their own worst enemy.  This was not the team of jogo bonito, jaunty, ruthless representatives of the beautiful game.  Neymar was both talismanic and deficient, an asset rolled into a liability.  His drama strewn efforts, which involved diving and rolling as much as it involved natural ability, did not provide the ballast his team required.  Such attitude, it has been surmised, might have been born from past serious injuries, be it the broken back he sustained in 2014, and a broken foot in February this year.

“I can say,” wrote Neymar in an Instagram post, “that this is the saddest moment of my career, it is incredibly painful because we knew we could get there, we knew we had conditions to go further, to make history.”

It proved “hard to find the strength to play soccer again, but I’m sure God will give me strength enough to face anything”.

The shocks have been marked and frequent, with the ground left for exhilarating performances.  Giants Argentina did not vanquish Iceland, the match concluding with a goal a piece. In an absorbing match, it was that other footballer of genius Lionel Messi, who took the penalty after a collision between Sergio Agüro and Hördur Björgvin Magnússon.  He botched it, and Hannes Thór Halldórsson made the save.  Another team of minnows had done their country exhilaratingly proud.

Croatia, with its own smattering of talented players, subsequently rumbled Messi’s side with three answered goals, despite both sides going into the second half without having scored.  France, in a thrilling bout involving seven goals and the incessant efforts of the 19-year-old Kylian Mbappé, issued the coup de grace.

The host team Russia was a thrill with Croatia, also going down to penalties.  England, albeit with a soft line of the draw, found themselves in their first semi-final in major international competition since 1996.  An exorcism of sorts has been taking place with this team, with manager Gareth Southgate, waistcoat and all, becoming very much a figure of veneration in a nation bruised and battered by the trauma of Brexit negotiations.  Both dedicated Leavers and grieving Remainers have at last found something they can agree about.

As the BBC noted with a smattering of affection, this “affable man” had done what a host of experienced highly credentialed predecessors hadn’t.  Sven-Goran Eriksson, Fabio Capello, Steve McClaren and Roy Hodgson had failed “despite more than 80 [matches] between them.”  While the football nation has historical pedigree, and not short of its stellar complement, team efforts have tended to founder when it mattered most, notably during the psychological wear-and-tear of the penalty shootout. Southgate’s skill has been to temper expectations and the hysterical overconfidence that has accompanied previous World Cups.

The tournament has also thrown up a dilemma for managers: How best to incorporate the hero of the side, the glorious figure who shines in a team of lesser mortals who await for the powder to be lit, the flames to be stoked?  Teams studded with Neymar, Messi and Ronaldo may be Olympian on the field, but team value and effect is something else, material drawn from the machinery of collective spirit and mutual encouragement.

Truism as it is, teams, well functioning, telepathically linked and good of understanding, win matches.  Caesars deft of foot and brimming with talent are less significant, even if they are capable of landing killer blows.

“When you have somebody who can turn the game in a flash,” asks Kris Voakes, “do you select them at all costs regardless of their fitness in the hope that they supply that moment of genius?”

France, the sole giant and finalist in this competition, has no such dilemma, a team bristling with talent but compact in purpose.

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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]

Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court would cement a conservative majority for decades. Like Neil Gorsuch, Kavanaugh favors the ”deconstruction of the administrative state.” That’s shorthand for gutting any environmental, labor or consumer protection measure that gets in the way of corporate profits.

Deregulation serves the interests of big business, a key conservative goal. Kavanaugh supports expansive presidential power, which would appeal to Trump as Robert Mueller’s investigation looms large. And Kavanaugh recently voted against a pregnant immigrant teenager’s right to abortion. His right-wing bona fides are solid and he will likely be confirmed.

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Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and an advisory board member of Veterans for Peace. An updated edition of her book, Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues, was recently published. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from National Review.

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Below is a statement from Dr. Swee Ang in response to the invitation to join the last leg of Freedom Flotilla from Europe to Gaza.

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There I fell in love passionately with a generous, kind, honest and gentle people – the Palestinians. They were forced out of Palestine in 1948, and found themselves refugees. Despite the dispossession, persecution and injustice they remained human. About 3 weeks after my arrival, more than three thousand of them were cruelly massacred. My heart was broken and trampled on, and would have remained dead and buried in the rubble of their bulldozed homes. But the survivors even while burying their own loved ones nurtured me back to life with their tears and love. The children filled with courage, hope and dignity inspired me and gave me strength to walk on with them.

“We are not afraid Doctora come with us”.

It is now 70 years since the Palestinian Nakba and Diaspora in 1948. When will their journey home begin?

Today, six million Palestinians dispersed in various refugee camps are denied the right of return to their ancestral Palestine; the other six million lived under occupation in Gaza and West Bank.  For twelve years, two million Palestinians have been imprisoned under a brutal land and sea military blockade in Gaza. During this time there were three major military assaults where Gaza was relentlessly bombed for weeks. Recently, since 30 March 2018, unarmed Gaza demonstrators calling for the Right of Return are shot at with high grade military assault rifles leaving more than 124 dead and 13,000 severely wounded with hundreds of amputees and potential amputees.

The Flotilla brings hope to the besieged Palestinians. They are praying for us in their mosques and churches in the Gaza Strip. They know we are making this journey for them. Even if we are to be abducted, imprisoned and deported, may we remain faithful in solidarity and love for the people of Palestine and Gaza.

July 2018

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I’m writing this short communication to share my observations after watching the 2009 Documentary “The Largest Factory in the World and Chinese Labor” as part of informative article “China and the Restoration of Capitalism. The Largest Cheap Labor Factory in the World” by Professor Michel Chossudovsky.

First allow me to point out a few condensed but essential historical marks in regard to China and its late capitalist development after its triumphant Socialist Revolution. Any analysis about China needs to be a conscious one. In general, instead of proceeding from existence to consciousness -a scientific method of investigation- an impatient or confused political economist starts with a subjective reality to examine the actual existence. In this regard, China has been an amazing field test for these economists.

They have described the Chinese economy by many names except capitalist. As Professor Michel Chossudovsky explains in the mentioned article, any talk about the restoration of capitalism in China was either “taboo” or rejected harshly as “an impossibility” that “goes against the laws of history”! They argued after all “China was a socialist country” and “it could not be reversed”.

In fact since 1949, Chinese leaders had to experiment different economic plans to maintain their power in the backward China as a “Socialist country”. The vast majority of Chinese peasants for centuries were accustomed to literally work with their hands and mainly to feed their families, they rarely had a chance to sell or exchange their surplus produce if any at the farm market. In China, modern agricultural machinery and technology were needed to transfer these scattered rural gardeners to be sufficient producers for a growing economy. At the same time, in order to manufacture equipment in cities, modern factories needed to be built from scratch.

Millions of workers needed to be trained to run these factories which in return needed to be fed, housed and paid. Upon this scenario, at the end of the 20th century, Chinese bureaucrats, in order to be relevant as a modern power had to push faster for modernization. They found the solution in inviting foreign investment and encouraging the private sector. The process of the restoration of capitalism in China started in the 1980’s and at the dawn of 21st century it was completed. However, it is needless to say that this new capitalist state was different from the imperialists’ model which was implemented to plunder the resource-rich China before the 1949 revolution.

Today, the capitalist dimension of the Chinese state is no longer debatable. Although there are some intellectuals who would like to entertain us with the notion that China represents a new trend in the modern history or as the second economic power is a deterrent force against the U.S. imperialist ambition. The fact is that capitalist China just like its competitors -the Western capitalists – wakes up every morning with a fear of impending foreign intervention and domestic revolt. In the case of China, suppression of the producing forces is extreme. This brings us to the core of my observation from the video about a giant factory in China which is as big as a city!

The capitalists in the West have been trying so hard to develop robots that could act like human, however in China they already have succeeded in making humans act like robots! As they say “A picture is worth a thousand words”, this video provides us an opportunity to observe the cruelty of the Red Capitalists against Chinese Workers! After a few minutes of watching the video, we see a factory where the concept of “work” is a constant matter and never stops.

We immediately observe that there are yellow parts in the factory, row after row, which don’t look quiet mechanical as fixed tools in the factory, yet in harmony move around in their tiny spaces and assemble parts as have been instructed. They are the workers who have been trained to work hour after hour to make sure their “team” creates the most “surplus value” in the history of capitalism! One might inquire how this is possible. The answer is obvious, while capitalists in the West look for a faster result as financier rather than industrialist; the capitalist China attempts to maximize the manufacturing production scientifically with its vast cheap army of laborer. The video clearly illustrates this fact. In these modern factories, we will find a new generation of workers who are disconnected from the revolutionary heritage and experience of toilers who participated in 1949 Chinese Revolution.

The documentary reveals that these giant factories have also introduced the principle of slavery but in a humane framework. Even the most savage slave owner in the U.S. wanted to have healthy slaves who could work longer hours on his plantations. The video shows that the control over the life of workers is not limited to time that workers spend on the floor in the factory. For management the question of healthy productive workers is a real concern. What the workers eat is as important as the quality of products that are shipped out of the factory! In short, as video demonstrates all aspects of workers life is part and parcel of the productivity. Young workers who have passed the initial tests and are hired by the giant factory, become the factory’s unofficial property. They have apartments which are cheap and in walking distance from their work place. In contrast to the factories in the West which are not concerned at all about their workers affairs after they leave the factory facilities; the giant Chinese factories control over the workers is not limited to the duration of the workers punched time cards. They even encourage LOVE and intimate relationships among the workers; the company even pays for group weddings since they believe married couples are more loyal to the factory!

However, in general each year the condition of workers in China has turned from bad to worse. The harsh and unsafe working environment routinely takes the lives of the workers. It has been recorded that cheap Chinese products come with the cost of Chinese workers broken bones. The Chinese products are possible only by unbelievable low wages, lack of inherent workers organizations and unions.

What this video shows is that workers in China and around the world share the same problems. The workers in Hunan or Houston live in fear of losing their jobs at any moment because of the unstable economy. Meanwhile the Red and White Capitalists both are preparing their massive army for impending wars, at the same time they are passing laws and policies to control their own domestic foe, the working people.

Only an independent outlook could open the path to an alternative peaceful solution where production is based on a planned economy that nurture the weak and flourish the potential of a strong society- a system that puts people over profit.

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Massoud Nayeri is a graphic designer and an independent peace activist based in the United States. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Joe Meadors, a survivor of the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty,  has joined the 2018 Gaza Freedom Flotilla as the delegate from the United States. He will board the Al Awda (The Return), which left Corisca Sunday night for  the final 1,000 miles to Gaza.  Al Awda is one of four boats on the 75-day voyage from Scandinavia.

Meadors was a signalman on the bridge of the USS Liberty, a surveillance vessel operating in international waters of the Mediterranean Sea near Gaza during the 1967 Six-Day Arab-Israreli war.

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While the world watched and waited with bated breath for the outcome of the substantial global effort – involving over 100 cave divers from various countries, 1,000 members of the Thai Army and 10,000 others in various roles – to rescue a team of 12 young football players and their coach, who were trapped inside a flooded cave in Thailand for 17 days, 850,000 children were killed by human adults in other parts of the world, many of them simply starved to death in Yemen or other parts of Africa, Asia and Central/South America.

But other children were killed in ritual sacrifice, many children were killed after being sexually trafficked, raped and tortured, many were killed in wars (including in Yemen), many were killed while living under military occupation, many died as child soldiers or while working as slave laborers, and vast numbers of other children suffered violence in a myriad other forms ranging from violence (including sexual violation) inflicted in the family home to lives of poverty, homelessness and misery in wealthy industrialized countries or as refugees fleeing conflict zones. See ‘Humanity’s “Dirty Little Secret”: Starving, Enslaving, Raping, Torturing and Killing our Children’.

Why did the world’s corporate media highlight the flooded Thai cave story so graphically and why do so many ordinary people respond with such interest – meaning genuine emotional engagement – in this story? But not the others just mentioned?

And what does this tell us about human psychology and geopolitics?

Needless to say, a great deal.

Image on the right: British divers near the Thai cave (Source: Idaho Statesman)

During the Thai cave drama, major corporate media outlets, such as the Washington Post and the BBC, were routinely releasing ‘breaking news’ updates on the status of the rescue effort. At high points in the drama, reports on this issue were overshadowing major political and other stories of the day. At the same time, there were no ‘breaking news’ stories on any of the many myriad forms of violence against children, which were (and are still) killing 50,000 children each day.

So why the corporate media interest in this essentially local (Thai) story about a group of 12 children trapped in a cave? And why did it attract so much support, including foreign cave divers, engineers and medics as well as technology billionaire Elon Musk, who flew in to investigate rescue options and assist with the rescue effort. They and their equivalents are certainly not flying in to rescue children in a vast number of other contexts, including where the provision of simple, nourishing meals and clean water would do wonders.

Well, in essence, the story was a great one for the corporate media, simply because it reported on something of little consequence to those not immediately impacted and enabled the media to garner attention for itself and other (western) ‘heroes’ drawn into the story while engaging in its usual practice of distracting us from what really matters. And it was an easy story to sell simply because the media could use a wide range of safe emotional triggers to draw people into the dramatized story without simultaneously raising difficult questions about the (appalling) state of the world and responsibility for it.

In simple language: like sports events and other forms of entertainment, the cave rescue provided a safely contained time and space for people to feel emotionally engaged in (this case) a real-life drama (with feelings like fear and relief allowed an outlet) while carefully reinforcing their unconscious feeling of powerlessness to do anything about it and their acceptance of this. This is why it was so important that expert rescue efforts were highlighted: the key media message was that ‘there is nothing you can do’.

Of course, in this context, this was largely true. The problem is that the corporate media coverage wasn’t aimed at this context. It was aimed at all those other contexts which it wasn’t even discussing, let alone highlighting: the vast range of issues – including the many ongoing wars and endless military violence, the threat of nuclear war, the climate catastrophe and innumerable threats to our biosphere posed by such activities as rainforest destruction, the refugee crisis, military occupations, as well as the ongoing violence against children in so many contexts as touched on above – that need a great deal of our attention but for which the elite uses its corporate media to distract us and reinforce our sense of powerlessness.

Another aspect of the story was the way in which it highlighted the ‘accidental’ nature of the incident: no one was really responsible, even the hapless coach who was just trying to give his young players an interesting excursion and whom, according to reports, none of the parents blamed.

By focusing on the logistical details of the story (the distance into the cave, the narrowness of certain passages, rescue possibilities, equipment, the threat of monsoon rains…), without attributing blame, the media could reinforce its endless message that ‘no-one’ is responsible for the state of the world. Hence, no individual and no organization is responsible for doing anything either. Again, this message is designed to deepen a sense of powerlessness and to make people disinclined to act: to make them powerless observers rather than active participants in their own fate.

As an aside, of course, it should be noted that in those contexts where it serves elite interests to attribute blame, it certainly does so. Hence, elites might contrive to blame Muslims, Russians, Palestinians or the other latest target (depending on the context) for some problem. However, in these contexts, the story of ‘blame’ is framed to ensure that elites have maximum opportunity to act as they wish (often militarily) while (again) engendering a sense of powerlessness among the rest of us.

The tragedy of the Thai cave incident is that one man died and many boys spent 17 days in a situation in which they were no doubt terrified and suffering genuine physical privation. But elite media cynically used the event to distract us from vitally important issues, including ongoing grotesque violence against children in a large number of contexts, and to reinforce ‘The Delusion “I Am Not Responsible”’.

In short, while the 12 boys and their coach were rescued after 17 days trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand which required a sophisticated and expensive international effort, during the same period around the world, 850,000 children were killed by human adults. Even in Thailand during this 17-day period, apart from those children violated and killed as a result of sex trafficking and other violence, 119 children drowned (at the rate of seven each day). See ‘Swim Safe: Preventing Child Drowning’. Obviously, these children were ignored because there was no profit in reporting their plight and helping to mobilize an international effort to save them.

So what can we do?

Well, for a start, we can boycott the corporate media and certainly not spend any money on it. What little truth it contains is usually of even less value (and probably gets barely beyond a good sports report). Instead, invest any money you previously spent on the corporate media by supporting progressive news outlets. They might not have reported events in relation to the Thai cave rescue but they do report on the ongoing violence inflicted on children in more grotesque circumstances such as the war in Yemen. They will also report and analyze important global events from a truthful and life-enhancing perspective and will often offer strategies for your engaged involvement.

If you want to understand why most people are suckered by the corporate media, whose primary function is to distract and disempower us, you will get a clear sense from reading how adults distract and disempower children in the name of ‘socialization’. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

If you want to nurture children to be powerful agents of change who will have no trouble resisting attempts (whether by the corporate media or any other elite agent) to distract and disempower them, you are welcome to consider making ‘My Promise to Children’.

If you are easily conned yourself, you will vastly enhance your capacity to discriminate and focus on what matters by ‘Putting Feelings First’ which will, among other things, restore your conscience, intuition and ‘truth register’, vital mental functions suppressed in most people.

You are also welcome to consider participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ which maps out a fifteen-year strategy for creating a peaceful, just and sustainable world community so that all children (and everyone else) has an ecologically viable planet on which to live.

And for the vast range of other manifestations of violence against children touched on above, you might consider using Gandhian nonviolent strategy in any context of particular concern to you. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy or Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.

You might also consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’ which explicitly identifies the role of the corporate media, among many other elite agencies, in promoting violence.

Am I pleased that the 12 children and their coach in Thailand were rescued? Of course I am. I just wish that an equivalent effort was being made to rescue each of the 50,000 children we will kill today, tomorrow, the next day and the day after that….

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Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is [email protected] and his website is here. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Zee News.

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Last month a freelance journalist named Joshua Cohen published an article in The Washington Post about the Ukraine’s growing neo-Nazi threat.  Despite a gratuitous swipe at Russia for allegedly exaggerating the problem (which it hasn’t), the piece was fairly accurate. 

Entitled “Ukraine’s ultra-right militias are challenging the government to a showdown,” it said that fascists have gone on a rampage while the ruling clique in Kiev closes its eyes for the most part and prays that the problem somehow goes away on its own.

Thus, a group calling itself C14 (for the fourteen-word ultra-right motto, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”) not only beat up a socialist politician and celebrated Hitler’s birthday by stabbing an antiwar activist, but bragged about it on its website.  Other ultra-nationalists, Cohen says, have stormed the Lvov and Kiev city councils and “assaulted or disrupted” art exhibits, anti-fascist demos, peace and gay-rights events, and a Victory Day parade commemorating the victory over Hitler in 1945.

Yet nothing has happened to stop this.  President Petro Poroshenko could order a crackdown, but hasn’t for reasons that should be obvious.  The U.S.-backed “Euromaidan” uprising not only drove out former president Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, who had won an OSCE-certified election, but tore the country in two, precisely because ultra-rightists like C14 were in the lead.

When resistance to the U.S.-backed coup broke out in Crimea and parts of the country’s largely Russian-speaking east, the base of Yanukovych voters, civil war ensued.  But because the Ukrainian army had all but collapsed, the new, coup government had no one to rely on other than the neo-fascists who had helped propel it to power.

So an alliance was hatched between pro-western oligarchs at the top – Forbes puts Poroshenko’s net worth at a cool $1 billion – and neo-Nazi enforcers at the bottom.  Fascists may not be popular.  Indeed, Dmytro Yarosh, the fire-breathing leader of a white-power coalition known as Right Sector, received less than one percent of the vote when he ran for president in May 2014.

But the state is so weak and riddled with so many ultra-rightists in key positions – Andriy Parubiy, founder of the neo-Nazi Social-National Party of Ukraine, is speaker of the parliament, while ultra-rightist Arsen Avakov is minister of the interior – that the path before them is clear and unobstructed.  As Cohen points out, the result is government passivity on one hand and a rising tide of ultra-right violence on the other.  In the earlier stages of the civil war, for instance, the rightwing extremists burned more than 40 people alive in a labor union building in Odessa, a horrific incident downplayed by Western media.

Confusing its Readers

Cohen’s article may have Washington Post readers scratching their heads for the simple reason that the paper has long said the opposite.  Since Euromaidan, the Post has toed the official Washington line that Vladimir Putin has exaggerated the role of the radical right in order to discredit the anti-Yanukovych revolt and legitimize his own alleged interference.

Inside Kiev Town Hall. (Source: Consortiumnews)

Sure, anti-Yanukovych forces had festooned the Kiev town hall with a white supremacist banner, a Confederate flag, and a giant image of Stepan Bandera, a Nazi collaborator whose forces killed thousands of Jews during the German occupation and as many as 100,000 Poles.  And yes, they staged a 15,000-strong torchlight parade in Bandera’s honor and scrawled an SS symbol on a toppled statue of Lenin. They also destroyed a memorial to Ukrainians who had fought on what Bandera supporters regard as the wrong side of World War II, that is, with the Soviets and against the Axis.

But so-called responsible, mainstream journalists are supposed to avert their eyes to avoid being tarred as a “useful idiot” whom Putin supposedly employs to advance his “anti-American agenda.”  Ten days after Yanukovych’s departure, the Post dutifully assured its readers that Russian reports of “hooligans and fascists” had “no basis in reality.”

A week or so later, it said “the new government, though peppered with right-wing politicians, is led primarily by moderate, pro-European politicians.”  A few weeks after that, it described Bandera as no more than “controversial” and quoted a Kiev businessman as saying:

“The Russians want to call him a fascist, but I feel he was a hero for our country.  Putin is using him to try to divide us.”

Thus, the Post and other corporate media continued to do its duty by attacking Putin for plainly saying “the forces backing Ukraine’s government in Kiev are fascists and neo-Nazis.”  But who was wrong?

The New York Times was no better. It assailed Russia for hurling “harsh epithets” like “neo-Nazi,” and blamed the Russian leader for “scaremongering” by attributing Yanukovych’s ouster to “nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes, and anti-Semites.”  The Guardian’s Luke Harding –  a leading Putin basher – said of the far-right Svoboda Party:

“Over the past decade the party appears to have mellowed, eschewing xenophobia, academic commentators suggest.  On Monday, the U.S. ambassador in Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt, said he had been ‘positively impressed’ by Svoboda’s evolution in opposition and by its behavior in the Rada, Ukraine’s parliament.  ‘They have demonstrated their democratic bona fides,’ the ambassador asserted.”

This is the party whose founder, Oleh Tyahnybok (image on the right), said in a 2004 speech that “a Moscow-Jewish mafia” was running the Ukraine and that Bandera’s followers “fought against the Muscovites, Germans, Jews and other enemies who wanted to take away our Ukrainian state.”  Had the leopard really changed its spots, according to Pyatt?  Or was it simply a matter of America not giving a damn as long as Svoboda joined the fight to encircle Russia and advance NATO’s drive to the east?

As someone named Marx once observed, “Who you gonna believe, me or your own two eyes?”  As far as Ukraine was concerned, the answer for the corporate press came from the U.S. State Department.  If Foggy Bottom said that Ukrainian neo-Nazism was a figment of Russia’s imagination, then that’s what it was, regardless of evidence to the contrary.

Someday, historians will look back on Euromaidan Ukraine as one of the looniest periods in western journalism – except, of course, for all the ones that have followed. But if one had to choose the looniest story of all, one that best reflects the abject toadyism of the reporting classes, it would have to be “Why Jews and Ukrainians Have Become Unlikely Allies,” a 1,400-word article that ran on the Post-owned Foreign Policy website in May 2014.  Four years later, it stands as a model of how not to write about an all-important political crisis.

Cohen’s Conversion

The piece begins with the usual hand-wringing about Svoboda and Right Sector and expresses remorse that the latter still venerates the “controversial” Bandera, whose followers “fought on the side of the Nazis from 1944 until the end of World War II.”  (Actually, they welcomed the Germans from the start and, despite rocky relations with the Slav-hating Nazis, continued to work with them throughout the occupation.)

But then it gets down to business by asserting that as bad as Ukrainian nationalists may be, Russia is doubly worse.

“Despite the substantial presence of right wing nationalists on the Maidan during the revolution,” it says, “many in Ukraine’s Jewish community resent being used by Putin in his propaganda war.”

The proof is an open letter signed by 21 Ukrainian Jewish leaders asserting that the real danger was Moscow.

“We know that the political opposition consists of various groups, including some that are nationalistic,” the letter declared.  “But even the most marginal of them do not demonstrate anti-Semitism or other forms of xenophobia.  And we certainly know that our very few nationalists are well-controlled by civil society and the new Ukrainian government – which is more than can be said for the Russian neo-Nazis, who are encouraged by your security services.”

This was music to Washington’s ears.  But if neo-Nazis are free of “anti-Semitism or other forms of xenophobia,” how does one explain the white-power symbols in the Kiev town hall?  If nationalists were “very few” in number, why did  journalists need to explain them away?  If Russian security forces really encouraged neo-Nazis, where were the torchlight parades and portraits of Bandera-like collaborators hanging from public buildings in Moscow?

The article might have noted that Josef Zissels, the Jewish community leader who organized the letter, is a provocative figure who has long maintained close relations with Ukraine’s far right.  A self-styled Zhydobanderivets – a word that roughly translates as “Kike follower of Bandera” – he has since infuriated other Jewish leaders by criticizing California Congressman Ro Khanna for sending a letter to the State Department asking that pressure be brought on the governments of Poland and Ukraine to combat Holocaust revisionism in their countries.

Forty-one Jewish leaders were so angry, in fact, that they sent out a letter of their own thanking Khannna for his efforts, expressing “deep concern at the rise of anti-Semitic incidents and expressions of xenophobia and intolerance, including attacks on Roma communities,” and “strongly proclaim[ing] that Mr. Iosif Zissels and the organization VAAD do not represent the Jews of Ukraine.”  A Jewish community leader in Russia was so outraged by the pro-Bandera apologetics of Zissels and a Ukrainian-Jewish oligarch named Igor Kolomoisky that he said he wanted to hang both men “in Dnepropetrovsk in front of the Golden Rose Synagogue until they stop breathing.”

So Foreign Policy used a highly dubious source to whitewash Ukraine’s growing neo-Nazi presence and absolve it of anti-Semitism.  As crimes against the truth go, this is surely one of the worst. But now that the problem has gotten too big for even the corporate media to ignore, overnight muckrakers like Joshua Cohen are seeing to it that getting away with such offenses will no longer be so easy. Before his abrupt about-face, the author of that misleading Foreign Policy piece was Joshua Cohen.

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Daniel Lazare is the author of The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American politics. He has written for a wide variety of publications from The Nation to Le Monde Diplomatique, and his articles about the Middle East, terrorism, Eastern Europe, and other topics appear regularly on such websites as Jacobin and The American Conservative.  

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Trump’s gaffes are piling up, all within 18 months of his presidency. The tweets are coming at breakneck speeds causing mass confusion.

Trump scrapped the Paris climate accord, then pulled out of TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership) trade agreement, tore JCPOA P5+1 with Iran to shreds, humiliated EU leaders specifically close allies Macron of France and Merkel of Germany, keeps hitting snags with Mexico and Canada over NAFTA and recently humiliated Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the G7 in Quebec, slapped trade tariffs on America’s closest allies Canada and EU citing national security section 232 (factors, to determine whether steel and aluminum imports threaten American economic security and military preparedness).

Next Trump with support from trade hawks Peter Navarro, Steve Mnuchin and Wilbur Ross started trade spats with China. Then he met his adversary Kim Jong Un of N. Korea in Singapore on July 12, 2018 and did an about turn lauding praises on him with claim that N. Korea has agreed to complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization (CVID). Would the “Rocket Man” agree to such a deal without China blessing it? China will not bless it.

Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met N. Korea’s Kim Yong Chol, former intelligence chief on July 6. The N. Korean Foreign Ministry said in a statement that

“the U.S. betrayed the spirit of last month’s summit between Trump and Kim by making unilateral and gangster-like demands on North Korea for CVID” and furthermore “the U.S. side did not offer constructive measures that would help build trust based on the spirit of the leaders’ summit”.

In sharp contrast Pompeo called the meeting with Chol as productive. After scrapping the JCPOA, China, N. Korea or any other country will have no reason to trust Trump and his team of “ political and trade” gangsters.

Before the summit with Putin on July 16 in Helsinki, Trump will be meeting with British PM Theresa May and the Queen on July 12 outside London to avoid protests. Local councillors from the opposition Labour Party in west Oxfordshire near Woodstock also wrote in an open letter to Trump that they object to his visit to Blenheim Palace, principal residence of the Dukes of Marlborough. They wrote that “Winston Churchill’s finest hour was to fight all the things you stand for: hate, bigotry, racism and fear.”

Trump is also scheduled to meet leaders of NATO countries in Brussels to chastise them because they’re not contributing enough for the US to protect them from Russia with the key punch in the face expected to Angela Merkel of Germany. Only after the UK and NATO visits, Trump will meet Putin (who in sharp contrast is a master of diplomacy) of Russia on July 16 to either tell him he has reserved a place in hell for him or one in heaven. Of course that depends on Putin’s behaviour. One news op put out that it is truly an enigma why Trump would meet Putin after UK and NATO visits.

Everyone has all the correct answers barring Trump’s alternate right American camp. The best comes from an exceptionally interesting opinion on CNN by Jeffrey Sachs, professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. In his words

“Donald Trump is really a Manchurian Candidate (reference to the 1959 political thriller book by Richard Condon) a stooge of some foreign potentate”.

A high likelihood of the foreign power is Israel based on the fact that it has been Netanyahu who suffers nightmares of Iran’s successful political influence in the region and who also convinced Trump to tear up the JCPOA. It was also Netanyahu who goaded Trump to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Maybe Putin is privy to incriminating information about Trump but that is part of US Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump’s collusion with Putin to influence the presidential elections and what else may come out of it should be no surprise.

President Donald Trump jokes with French President Emmanuel Macron about their prior hand shake (Source: Oriental Review)

Jeffery Sachs then goes on in his opinion that

“The US has probably never before had a delusional President, one who speaks gibberish, insults those around him including his closest associates, and baffles the world. By instinct, we strive to make sense of Trump’s nonsense, implicitly assuming some hidden strategy.”

Sachs is correct there is no hidden strategy as he is not a strategist.

Another gaffe is one in which Trump tweeted that his close ally Saudi Arabia has agreed to ramp up crude oil pumping to bring the price of crude down but then he comes across as the bully that EU and other countries should stop buying Iran oil or he will slap punishing sanctions  on them. Many of the countries under the threat of sanctions are complying with the exception of Turkey and China. The net effect is that that crude oil prices keep heading north.

Probably the biggest blunder (different from a gaffe) about to be implemented is the highest likelihood of a war on Iran following its economic strangulation. The five diehard Iran hawks besides Trump himself are his handpicked National Security Advisor John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Israeli PM Netanyahu, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley and not forgetting the team of duo Arab leaders lumped in as one hawk with two wings- the Mohammed bins Salman and Zayed (MbS and MbZ). The military situation with Iran requires some explanation from the regional geopolitical aspect and that it is neither a weak Arab country nor tribally splintered nor easily exploited.

Based on Iran’s website president.ir, Reuters reported on July 3 that President Rouhani appeared to threaten disrupting oil shipments from neighbouring countries if Washington presses ahead with its goal of forcing all countries to stop buying Iranian oil or as retaliation for any hostile U.S. action against Iran. Rouhani stated

“The Americans have claimed they want to completely stop Iran’s oil exports. They don’t understand the meaning of this statement, because it has no meaning for Iranian oil not to be exported, while the region’s oil is exported.”

Iran has a geographical advantage of being able to block the narrow Strait of Hormuz, a critical choke point for nearly 18-22 MMBOPD. Moreover Bab al Mandab (“gate of tears”, a strategic link between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean through Suez Canal) is another maritime choke point between western Yemen and eastern Djibouti through which another 4-5 MMBOPD passes. Iran has influence with the Yemeni Houthis while MbS and MbZ are trapped in Yemen trying to win a war that just cannot be won. Iran, Russia and Hezbollah made that clear to US in Syria. So Iran has full control of Hormuz and a good collateral grip on Mandab. Djibouti is another hot point and home to overseas military and naval bases by the US, China and Japan.

Given all these facts specifically Trump’s hawkish and alt-right attitudes, Netanyahu’s fear of Iran, the oil factor, Iran’s growing influence in Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon and Syria, the threats of trade and military sanctions against China and Russia, the world is sitting on the precipice of a major conflict with one man’s finger on the trigger to make America First.

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Gulam Asgar Mitha is a retired Technical Safety Engineer. He has worked in Libya, Qatar, Pakistan, France, Yemen and UAE with several N. American and International oil and gas companies.. Currently Gulam lives in Calgary, Canada and enjoys reading and keeping in tune with current global political issues.

Featured image is from State of Globe.

1. Emergency of “The Great Peace Charter” for the 21^st-century 

We, the undersigned 72 peacemakers from 27 countries representing more than 15 international peacemaking and humanitarian organizations, appeal to the leaders of the world’s most powerful nuclear powers with 96% of the stockpiles of all nuclear weapons: to the United States President – Mr. Donald Trump and the Russia President – Mr. Vladimir Putin with the proposal to take as the resolution of your Summit the fundamental for the world community of the 21st century, “The Great Peace Charter.” This Charter will begin an unprecedented historical process for the liberation of humankind from wars and for the approval of its existential right to live without wars. Therefore, its spiritual and moral significance in the history of humanity will be no less than the significance of “The Great Charter of the Liberties”, 2015 for the affirmation of the universal value of freedom. 

The world civil society, almost 8 billion people from more than 200 countries, demands and expects from you not the next peacekeeping cosmetics of the infinitely growing militarism, putting humanity on the verge of “shameful self-destruction of humankind” (Helena Roerich), but a fundamental peacebuilding solution, The Great Peace Charter, which excludes the repetition of the last century – the most deadly and devastating in the human history, full of countless conflicts, casualties, suffering and monstrous war crimes (Kofi Annan). From the “point of no return” for the humanity self-destruction, which is now 100% prepared, only the light push of the nuclear trigger separates, the responsibility for which lies entirely with the governments of the United States and Russia.  

The constantly growing threat of self-destruction of humanity tramples the first and fundamental human and humanity right to life, making it ever more chimerical and questionable. The growth in volumes and, above all, the effectiveness of weapons, especially nuclear and similar, proportionally reduces the existential level and probability of the survival for humankind on the planet as its noosphere. The perspective of an endless intensification within continuous arms race in this planetary sphere turns it from “reasonable” into “insane sphere”. It is alone on the planet irresistibly aspiring to self-destruction for more than a century, practicing in the world wars and steadily raising their “rating” both in social production, in the public consciousness and in power. 

Therefore, the complete and shameful, 100% stand-to the nuclear suicide of humankind, primarily by the hands/nuclear bombs of the US and Russia, absolutely determines the emergency of The Great Peace Charter on the verge of this irretrievable existential abyss. The responsibility for ignoring humanity survival and the extreme necessity of a similar rescuing solution lies entirely on the nuclear superpowers leaders. 

2. The Summit and its decision center

What is the key meaning and the center of the Summit decision? It was brilliantly formulated by John Kennedy at the UN Session 55 years ago as a self-evident absolute truth of the present: “Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind.” 

However, unfortunately, there are still unanswered questions arising from this truth: “Who, How, at What Level and When will end the war and feeding its militarism?“ 

The historic mission of the leaders of the nuclear superpowers is to rise to the level of John Kennedy’s peacemaking thinking, to continue and enrich it as a synthesis of the 8 greatest peacemaking covenants and initiatives of the past, developing the Kennedy truth, and yours own unique contribution to the organizational global governance of its implementation in the 21st century. Only in this case you will make yourself and your nations “again great”, the memory of which humanity will preserve forever as world leaders who changed the course of history from war to peace, “from the arms race to a peace race” (Martin Luther King). 

3. Integration of peacemaking covenants and initiatives

The eight great peace covenants and initiatives of the 20th and 21st centuries, which constructively develop Kennedy’s truth, are: 

1. Program of general and complete disarmament in the UN, 1959: USSR/Russia, 

2. “Peace can not be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding” [science]: Albert Einstein, 

3. “We shall require substantially new manner thinking if mankind is to survive”: Albert Einstein, 

4. We must “shift the arms race into a peace race”: Martin Luther King. (Are the US and Russia leaders able to rise to the level of King and to realize this historic “shift” at least in the format of an agreement of intentions for the near future?), 

5. Peace Departments in governments: an ancient American idea, not yet embodied, 

6. Multipolar harmonious world order: the foreign policy idea and the course of Russia, 

7. Reforming the UN, international law and global governance: a common understanding of this need, 

8. Sociocybernetic “Global Peace Science” of international origin in the early 21st century, revealing the genetics of global peace in the structural harmony/balance of the spheres of world social production. This science systematically and holistically integrates these great peacemaking covenants and initiatives of the 20th and 21st centuries. It ensures the realization of “peace through understanding,” the exclusion of violence, militarism and weapons as the main threat to security and the achievement of assured security for all nations. This all “will end the war” and eradicate it as an obsolete institution. 

The Great Peace Charter undoubtedly requires a similar, generally acceptable scientific platform and its joint scientific development, which the US and Russia could begin to initiate their cooperation instead of their confrontation. 

4. Large-scale and long-term “Roadmap” for global peacemaking

The main contribution of world leaders to the understanding of global peacemaking for the 21st century could be its principled, large-scale and long-term “Roadmap”, based on the synthesis of peace covenants and responding, at least in the first approximation, to the questions: “Who, How, at What Level and When will end the war and feeding its militarism?“ 

The key roadmap lighthouses: 

1. The ultimate goal, “end the institution of war”: universal complete disarmament and guaranteed nonviolent security as a conscious global peace on the socio-genetic level of the structural harmony of the spheres within world social production during 50 years of the 21st century,

2. The primary goal for the next 5-10 years is nuclear disarmament, “nuclear zero”, requiring for all nuclear weapons immediate taken off hair trigger alert and its reduction by 20-10% annually under the control of the IAEA. This is the first practical goal for nuclear leaders, which the USA and Russia ones could and should initiate. This is their priority responsibility before their peoples and humanity in a whole. 

3. Orientation to conscious harmonious economic relations, excluding world “trade and sanctions wars” and contributing to the reduction of political tension instead of its aggravation. 

4. Determination of the time and extended format of the next “Global Peace Summit” with the participation of all 9 nuclear powers, the EU, the UN and the world civil society represented by the most deserved peacemaking non-governmental organizations working for at least 10 years, uniting peacemakers from at least 30 countries and possessing fundamental peacebuilding ideas / concepts, fixed in publications. This format is dictated by the peacemaking grandiose mission in the 21st century defined by The Great Peace Charter and ensures democracy in its adoption and fulfillment.

Recognition in the Roadmap of the USA and Russia leaders of at least these grandiose peacemaking landmarks of the 21st century will provide to you and your peoples with the place of historical peace builders of the third millennium of world human history, determining its powerful peacemaking breakthrough and the turning-point from traditional militaristic trend. Recognition of these ultimate goals will make it possible to formulate the strategy and tactics of achieving the entire cluster of the numerous intermediate goals and tasks of the 21st century within peacebuilding process as a new global movement of pacification. 

This will be a movement along the road to peace “through understanding” in the global peace science; it will be a “shift from the arms race to a peace race” and to a new non-militaristic thinking; it will be time for institutions in the governments of the “Department of Peace” responsible for organizing, managing, implementing, monitoring and control of these goals achievement; it will be the UN and global governance reform, subject to these anti-militaristic goals; this will require an answer to the key question: WHO, which social force and which actors of social production and geopolitics can guarantee the achievement of these goals. To answer this question, it takes a long time of scientific peacemaking restructuring of public consciousness through the appropriate education of new generations and the enlightenment of adult generations.  

Of course, in the peacebuilding roadmap, the partial but acute problems of Syria, Iran, Donbas, North Korea and the like must find a place. However, their decision in the context and on the common platform of “The Great Peace Charter” will be much more effective and faster than without it. Otherwise, partial questions will suppress the horizon and dream of global peace for humanity.

So we can see the broad contours of the peacebuilding roadmap in the 21st century.

5. Resolution of the US-Russia Summit and its alternatives forecast 

The squeeze of the proposed ideas of 1-2 pages, not more, the text of the US-Russia Summit Resolution will be The Great Peace Charter as the long awaited and keenly necessary on the brink of nuclear suicide solution.  This will be the most dignified and highly responsible and ethical Resolution in relation to humanity as a whole and in relation to the USA and Russia national interests, but will not be confined to them. This resolution will accentuate the deep commonality of the USA and Russia basic values, which was repeatedly emphasized by their leaders, for all their differences. 

Another, almost equal, final alternative maybe the Resolution of cosmetic propaganda significance, filled with the pathetic beautiful words about “global security, peace and responsibility,” but emphasizing the value differences and instrumental approaches of the two countries preserving for this the inviolable institutions of war, militarism and the factual arms race. Which of the alternative Resolutions will win will be visible at the summit end.

6. Instead of an epilogue. The foundations of hope

We, the peacemaking leaders of the world civil society, hope that both presidents will find enough courage and political will to accept the first value-based Resolution. Despite all the differences in personalities, cultures and countries they represent, they have two important electoral potentials.

First, they both talked about “harmonious or coherent foreign policy” and second, both formulated paradigms of global peace in their election platforms, in which they proclaimed “common ground” and “shared interests” of the parties within the common goal: “our goal is peace and prosperity, but not war and destruction” (Trump): see this.

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The project organizational part.

The proposed international civil initiative of peacemaking and humanitarian organizations is:

The GHA 65th and the WGHA 4th Project jointly with other international organizations. It was launched on June 29, 2018, when it became known about the US-Russia Summit. Approved on July 8, 2018. It is open for support and signing indefinitely, not only for this, but for all subsequent summits, if left unattended. We will compare the adopted Summit Resolution with our proposal.

“The Great Peace Charter” project coauthors: 72 peacemaking leaders (list below) from 27 countries and more than 20 international peacemaking organizations:

Nobel Peace Laureates: 

Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate 1976, stopped the terror in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Community for Peace People, see this

Prof. John Scales Avery, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate (shared 1995 award), Chairman of the Danish Peace Academy, Copenhagen, Denmark, see this

International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Nobel Peace Prize 1985, Ernesto Kahan, Israel: see this

International peace organizations: 

1. Global Harmony Association, Leo Semashko, Julia Budnikova, Nina Novikova, Russia
2. Women’s Global Harmony Association, Ayo Ayoola-Amale, Ghana
3. Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Ayo Ayoola-Amale, Ghana 
4. International Center for Sociocybernetics Studies, Bernard Scott, Britain   
5. Global Peace Foundation, Subhash Chandra, India, 
6. International Association of Educators for World Peace, Lana Yang, USA 
7. Russia and America Goodwill Association, Vladislav Krasnov, USA 
8. Center for Humanistic Future Studies at Michigan University, Rudolf Siebert, USA
9. World Constitution and Parliament Association, Roger Kotila, USA 
10. A People’s Campaign for Peace in the United States, Robert Weir, USA 
11. Community for Peace People, Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace Laureate, North Ireland 
12. World Wide Peace Organization, Maria Cristina Azcona, Argentina  
13. Society “ONE WORLD – ONE HARMONY DREAM”, Rosa Dalmiglio, Italy 
14. Danish Peace Academy, John Avery, Denmark 
15. International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Nobel Peace Prize 1985, Ernesto Kahan, Israel 
16. Gandhi Development Trust, Ela Gandhi, South Africa 
17. ESTIA NEW SMYRNA FOUNDATION, Takis Ioannidis, Greece 
18. Global Peace Centre, Michael Ellis, Australia 
19. International Peace Research Association, Ursula Oswald, Mexico 
20. Noospheric Research and Development Institute, Boris Rezhabek, Russia 
21. IESL Association, Brig Kartar Singh, India 
22. Magadh University, Pravat Kumar Dhal, India

And others

The GHA peace proposals and initiatives for past summits, which detail the separate aspects of the proposed “The Great Peace Charter”: 

1. Global Harmony as Guarantor for World Security and Nuclear Zero, May 2009: see this,
2. Global Harmony International Treaty for Nuclear Disarmament, May 2009: see this,
3. General and Complete Disarmament in 50 years on the Basis of Global Harmony through the ABC of Harmony. GHA Constant Petition to the UN. GHA 37th project. Started: August 31, 2012: see this
4. BEFORE THIRD WORLD WAR. Peace and Disarmament from Harmony. New World Peace Movement for the 21 century. GHA 38th Project. Started: September 24, 2012: see this 
5. Monitoring: Dynamics of Peace and War Priorities in the World Public Consciousness. Approved by GHA on January 17, 2014: see this
6. Global Peace Science. 2016: see this
7. Russia – USA: Global Peace Cooperation. The 52^nd GHA project. Approved by the GHA on September 5, 2016: see this
8. PUTIN – TRUMP: Two paradigms of global peace. GHA Open Letter, February 1, 2017: see this

9. Global Peace Science Agenda for the UN, UNESCO, G20 and EU. June 5, 2017: see this

10. The UN of Harmony and Global Peace Replacing the UN of Disharmony. Sociocybernetic Model of Spherons’ Global Harmonious Governance (SMSGHG) at the UN level. Approved on November 16, 2017: see this
11. Global Peace Science for G20-2013 and Humanity: see this

12. Global Peace Science for G20-2017 and Humanity: see this

13. Spherons’ Global Peace Genetics. GHA and WGHA MESSAGE on the Global Harmony Day, June 21, 2018: see this

14. USA-RUSSIA Summit. The Great Peace Charter for the 21st century. 08-07-18: see this

And others 

The leaders-coauthors list 

72 peacemakers from 27 countries: Australia, Algeria, Argentina, Belarus, Brazil, Britain, Colombia, Denmark, Ghana, Greece, France, Israel, India, Iran, Malta, Mexico, Northern Ireland, Pakistan, Poland, Puerto Rico, Russia, Rwanda, South Africa, South Sudan, Spain, USA, Japan

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Relevant in relation to the US-led ongoing wars, this article was originally published on June 29, 2015.

The most expensive social science program in history–the US Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS)–has quietly come to an end (2015). During its eight years of existence, the controversial program cost tax payers more than $725 million. The Pentagon distributed much of the funding to two large defense firms that became the HTS’s principal contractors: BAE Systems and CGI Federal.

HTS supporters frequently claimed that the program would increase cultural understanding between US forces and Iraqis and Afghans–and therefore reduce American and civilian casualties. The program’s leaders insisted that embedded social scientists were delivering sociocultural knowledge to commanders, but the reality was more complex. HTS personnel conducted a range of activities including data collection, intelligence gathering, and psychological operations. In at least one case, an HTS employee supported interrogations in Afghanistan (Weinberger 2011).

The program also served a more insidious function: It became a propaganda tool for convincing the American public–especially those with liberal tendencies–that the US-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan were benevolent missions in which smart, fresh-faced young college graduates were playing a role. It appeared to demonstrate how US forces were engaged in a kinder, gentler form of occupation. Department of Defense photos portrayed HTS personnel sitting on rugs while drinking tea with Afghan elders, or distributing sweets to euphoric Iraqi children. Here was a war that Americans could feel good about fighting.

When HTS was first announced in late 2006, I followed its development with concern. Along with many other anthropologists, I opposed the program because of the potential harm it might bring to Iraqi and Afghan civilians–and to future generations of social scientists who might be accused of being spies when conducting research abroad.

Apart from anthropologists, HTS had other critics. A small but vocal group of military officers publicly criticized the program, noting that it was “undermining sustainable military cultural competence” (Connable 2009) and that in practice, “the effectiveness of the HTTs [human terrain teams] was dubious at best” (Gentile 2013). Yet despite these criticisms, the program grew exponentially. At its peak in 2010, HTS employed more than 500 people ranging from career academics with PhDs to retired Special Forces personnel. Over the next few years, more than 30 “human terrain teams” (HTTs) were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the program’s annual budget exploded to more than $150 million.

Then in 2014, an odd thing happened. News reports and official statements about HTS virtually disappeared. Its slick website was no longer updated. HTS’s boosters fell silent. And when I tried phoning its headquarters at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas earlier this year, no one answered the phone.

I became curious about the fate of HTS. I heard conflicting accounts from military social scientists, former employees, and journalists who had written about it in the past. A few claimed that the program had ended–as did Wikipedia’s entry on the Human Terrain System. However, none of these sources included concrete evidence confirming its termination.

Image on the right: U.S. Army Training And Doctrine Command Shoulder Sleeve Insignia Blazon Description (Source: US Army Institute of Heraldry)

In an effort to verify the program’s official status, I contacted the US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), which was HTS’s home since its inception. I had resisted contacting TRADOC because in the past, my inquiries had gone unanswered. But earlier this month, I decided to try once more.

To my surprise, I received a response from Major Harold Huff of TRADOC’s Public Affairs Office. In a two-line email message sent to me last week, Huff confirmed that HTS had indeed ended on September 30, 2014. In order to get a better understanding of HTS’s hasty demise, let us review its history.

Embedded Social Science

HTS was launched in June 2006 as a program designed to embed five-person teams with Army combat brigades. According to the original HTS blueprint, each team would combine military personnel with academically trained cultural specialists–preferably social scientists with graduate degrees. Early in 2007, the first HTT was deployed to Khost, Afghanistan where it was attached to the 82nd Airborne Division’s 4th Brigade. By the end of the year, four more teams were deployed across the country.

The program’s principal architect was cultural anthropologist Montgomery McFate. For the first four years of the program, she and retired Army Colonel Steve Fondacaro (who was hired as HTS’s manager) tirelessly promoted the program. Their PR blitz included front-page stories in the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle Magazine and dozens of articles in magazines and newspapers. The corporate media generally described HTS in glowing terms, and occasionally journalists portrayed McFate as a bohemian bad girl. One infatuated reporter described her as a “punk rock wild child. . .with a penchant for big hats and American Spirit cigarettes and a nose that still bears the tiny dent of a piercing 25 years closed” (Stannard 2007). McFate was the perfect shill.

HTS’s meteoric ascent paralleled and was accelerated by the rise to power of General David Petraeus, who was a staunch supporter. As a commander in Iraq, Petraeus became known for an unusual strategy that relied upon “securing” the population by interacting with civilians and paying off local tribal leaders in exchange for political support. This “population-centric” approach became known as the Petraeus Doctrine and was welcomed by some Army officers. Many Pentagon officials (particularly Defense Secretary Robert Gates) were impressed with the strategy, which was soon codified when Petraeus oversaw the publication of a new Army field manual, FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency warfare had an air of theoretical legitimacy–indeed, Petraeus surrounded himself with a team of advisors with doctoral degrees in political science and history. These men referred to counterinsurgency as “the graduate level of war.”

Many brigade commanders fell into line once the Petraeus Doctrine was established as the Army’s preferred method for fighting insurgents. Criticizing counterinsurgency–or HTS for that matter–was a bad move for officers seeking to advance their careers. Congressmen and women generally liked the new approach because it appeared to be succeeding (at least in Iraq) and because many viewed it as less lethal. And HTS fit perfectly with the narrative that Petraeus had crafted with the help of compliant reporters: counterinsurgency is the thinking man’s warfare.

However, HTS encountered a series of obstacles. As mentioned above, the program met organized resistance from academic anthropologists. Less than a year after the first HTT was deployed to Afghanistan, the American Anthropological Association issued a sharply worded statement in which it expressed disapproval of the program. An ad hoc group, the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, succeeded in gathering the signatures of more than 1,000 anthropologists who pledged to avoid counterinsurgency work.

HTS was also beset by tragedy. Between May 2008 and January 2009, three employees of the program–Michael Bhatia, Nicole Suveges, and Paula Loyd–were killed in action. Some suggested that in its rush to supply the Army with social scientists, BAE Systems (which had been granted large contracts to manage HTS) was not providing personnel with sufficient training.

It soon became clear that BAE Systems was on a hiring binge and was inadequately screening HTS applicants. Most of the academics who were hired had no substantive knowledge of Iraqi or Afghan culture. Very few could speak or understand Arabic, Pashto, Dari, or Farsi. But the pressure was on–the Army needed “human terrain analysts” ASAP and was willing to pay top dollar to get them. Vanessa Gezari nicely summarizes the results of these bizarre hiring patterns:

Some were bright, driven, talented people who contributed useful insights–but an equal number of unqualified people threatened to turn the whole effort into a joke. The Human Terrain System–which had been described in the pages of military journals and briefed to commanders in glowing, best-case-scenario terms–was ultimately a complex mix of brains and ambition, idealism and greed, idiocy, optimism, and bad judgment. (Gezari 2013: 197)

As early as 2009, reports of racism, sexual harassment, and payroll padding began to emerge, and an Army investigation found that HTS was plagued by severe problems (Vander Brook 2013). To make matters worse, the investigators found that many brigade commanders considered HTTs to be ineffective. In the wake of these revelations, Fondacaro and McFate resigned from the program. Army Colonel Sharon Hamilton replaced Fondacaro as program manager, while anthropologist Christopher King took over as chief social scientist.

But by this point, HTS was making a transition from “proof-of-concept” to a permanent “program of record”–a major milestone towards full institutionalization. As a Pentagon correspondent told me, once such programs become permanent, “these things never really die.” This makes HTS’s recent expiration all the more perplexing.

Downward Spiral

Given its spectacular growth and the Army’s once insatiable demand for embedded social scientists, one might ask: Why did HTS fall into a downward spiral?

One reason had to do with the scheduled pullout of US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. As early as 2012, HTS’s management team was desperately searching for a way to market the program after a US troop withdrawal:

With Iraq behind it and the end of its role in Afghanistan scheduled for 2014, the operative term used by US Army Human Terrain System managers these days is “Phase Zero.” The term refers to sending small teams of Army human terrain experts to gather information about local populations–their customs and sensitivities–perhaps in peacetime and certainly before areas boil over into a conflict that might require a larger number of US forces. Human Terrain System advocates see Phase Zero as a way for the program to survive in a more austere military (Hodges 2012).

Apparently, none of the military’s branches or combatant commands were interested in funding the program beyond fiscal year 2014. Perhaps HTS’s reputation preceded it. In an email message, an Army reserve officer told me that “like the armored vehicles being given to police departments, they [HTS personnel] are sort of surplus. . .mostly looking for customers.”

Others employed by the military have recounted similar stories. For example, an anthropologist who works in a military organization (who asked not to be named and was not speaking in an official capacity) noted, “many military personnel did express objections to the program for a variety of reasons. They just expressed their critiques internally.”

Another factor that undoubtedly damaged HTS’s long-term survival was Petraeus’s spectacular fall from grace during his tenure as CIA director. “From Hero to Zero,” reported the Washington Post after his extramarital exploits and reckless handling of classified information were publicized (Moyer 2015). In the aftermath of the Petraeus-Broadwell affair, some journalists began to acknowledge that their enthusiasm for counterinsurgency warfare was due in large part to “hero-worship and runaway military idolatry” centered around Petraeus’s personality cult (Vlahos 2012). In a remarkably candid confession, Wired magazine’s Spencer Ackerman (2012) admitted:

the more I interacted with his staff, the more persuasive their points seemed. . .in retrospect, I was insufficiently critical [of counterinsurgency doctrine]. . .Another irony that Petraeus’s downfall reveals is that some of us who egotistically thought our coverage of Petraeus and counterinsurgency was so sophisticated were perpetuating myths without fully realizing it.

The Petraeus-Broadwell scandal ripped away the shroud of mystique that had enveloped counterinsurgency’s promoters. Perhaps HTS unfairly suffered from the collateral damage–but then again, the program’s architects had conveniently cast their lot with the Petraeus boys. (Mark Twain might have said of the situation: You pays your money and you takes your choice.)

By 2013, a fresh wave of criticism began to surround HTS. Anthropologists continued their opposition, but HTS’s newest critics were not academics–they were investigative journalists and an irate Congressman. USA Today correspondent Tom Vanden Brook published a series of excoriating articles based upon documents that the newspaper had obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Independent reporter John Stanton cultivated a network of HTS insiders and published dozens of reports about the program’s seedier aspects. Journalist Vanessa Gezari was another critical observer. After several years of careful research, she published a riveting exposé in 2013, entitled The Tender Soldier. In it, she tells readers:

“I wanted to believe in the Human Terrain System’s capacity to make the US military smarter, but the more time I spent with the team, the more confused I became” (Gezari 2013: 169).

And later in the same chapter:

“The Human Terrain System lied to the public and to its own employees and contract staff about the nature of its work in Afghanistan. . .[it] would prove less controversial for what it did than for its sheer incompetence” (Ibid.: 192).

As if these critiques were not enough, US Representative Duncan Hunter, a Republican member of the House Armed Services Committee, launched a one-man crusade against the program. His frustration was palpable:

“It’s shocking that this program, with its controversy and highly questionable need, could be extended. It should be ended,” he said in early 2014. The pressure was mounting.

Another problem facing HTS was the broad shift in Pentagon priorities, away from cultural intelligence and towards geospatial intelligence. As noted by geographer Oliver Belcher (2013: 189), the latter “marks a real move towards conducting human terrain intelligence at a distance within strategic centers of calculation in Washington, DC and Virginia.” Counterinsurgency was a passing fad.

“The US military has a strong cultural aversion to irregular warfare and to devoting resources to sociocultural knowledge,” according to researchers at National Defense University (Lamb et al. 2013: 28).

This, combined with HTS’s record of incompetence, undoubtedly emboldened those opposing the idea of incorporating social science perspectives in the military.

By 2014, the rapidly growing fields of computational social science and predictive modeling had become fashionable–they aligned neatly with the Obama administration’s sweeping embrace of “big data.” Many Pentagon planners would prefer to collect data from mobile phone records, remote sensors, biometric databases, and drones equipped with high-resolution cameras than from human social scientists with dubious credentials. (For fuller coverage of predictive modeling programs, see my article “Seeing into Hearts and Minds” in the current edition of Anthropology Today). In the words of Oliver Belcher (2013: 63), “It’s algorithms, not anthropology, that are the real social science scandal in late-modern war.”

Postscript: Life After Death for HTS?

The final days of HTS’s existence were ugly. By one account, its last moments were tumultuous and emotional. It seems that HTS still had true believers among its ranks–employees who were in denial even as the plug was being pulled. Someone familiar with the situation described those on the payroll at the time of closure as “angry, shocked, bitter, retaliatory. . .The last 3-4 months involved some of the most toxic culture of embittered people I have ever witnessed.”

Although HTS has officially ended, questions still remain about its future. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2015 allows the Army to carry out a “Pilot Program for the Human Terrain System. . .to support phase 0 shaping operations and the theater security cooperation plans of the Commander of the United States Pacific Command. . .this section shall terminate on September 30, 2016” (US Congress 2014: Section 1075).

Furthermore, a March 16, 2015 letter from Army General Ray Odierno to US Representative Nita Lowey includes HTS on a list of unfunded requirements for fiscal year 2016. Odierno’s letter describes HTS as an unfunded program to be used by the Pacific Command as suggested in the NDAA. Yet no job advertisements have been posted to recruit employees for the program. Only time will tell if HTS will rise Phoenix-like from the ashes, or if it has truly disintegrated.

Some argue that HTS was a good idea that was badly mismanaged. It would be more accurate to say that HTS was a bad idea that was badly mismanaged. Cultural knowledge is not a service that can be easily provided by contractors and consultants, or taught to soldiers using a training manual. HTS was built upon a flawed premise, and its abysmal record was the inevitable result. The fact that the program continued as long as it did reveals the Army’s superficial attitude towards culture.

Viewed with a wide-angle lens, it becomes clear that HTS had broader social significance. The program encapsulated deep cultural contradictions underlying America’s place in the world after 9/11–contradictions that continue haunting our country today. In Vanessa Gezari’s words:

[HTS] was a giant cultural metaphor, a cosmic expression of the national zeitgeist: American exceptionalism tempered by the political correctness of a postcolonial, globalized age and driven by the ravenous hunger of defense contractors for profit. If you could have found a way to project on a big screen the nation’s mixed feelings about its role as the sole superpower in a post-Cold War world, this was what it would have looked like. (Gezari 2013: 198)

A great deal can be learned by examining the wreckage left behind in the wake of HTS. From one perspective, the program can be interpreted as an example of the ineptitude, incompetence, and hubris that characterized many aspects of the US-led invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. As historian Niall Ferguson has observed, the US is an empire in denial. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that wars of imperial conquest would be couched in terms of “cultural awareness” and securing “human terrain.” From another perspective, HTS represents the perverse excesses of a military-industrial complex run amok, a system that caters to the needs of the defense industry and celebrity generals rather than the needs of Iraqis or Afghans.

We would be far better off if more government-funded social science was used to build bridges of respect and mutual understanding with other societies, rather than as a weapon to be used against them.

*

Roberto J. González is professor of anthropology at San José State University. He has authored several books including Zapotec Science, American Counterinsurgency and Militarizing Culture. He can be contacted at [email protected].

Sources

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Connable, Ben. 2009. All Our Eggs in a Broken Basket: How the Human Terrain System Is Undermining Sustainable Military Cultural Competence. Military Review (March-April 2009), 57-64.

Gentile, Gian. 2013. Counterinsurgency: The Graduate Level of War or Pure Hokum? e-International Relations, August 3.

Gezari, Vanessa. 2013. The Tender Soldier. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Hodges, Jim. 2012. US Army’s Human Terrain Experts May Help Defuse Future Conflicts. Defense News, March 22.

Lamb, Christopher et al. 2013. The Way Ahead for Human Terrain Teams. Joint Forces Quarterly 70(3), 21-29.

Moyer, Justin Wm. 2015. General David Petraeus: From Hero to Zero. Washington Post, April 24.

Stannard, Matthew. 2007. Montgomery McFate’s Mission. San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, April 29.

US Congress. 2014. National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2015.

Vander Brook, Tom. 2013. Army Plows Ahead with Troubled War-Zone Program. USA Today, February 28.

Vlahos, Kelley. 2012. Petraeus’s COIN Gets Flipped. The American Conservative, November 19.

Weinberger, Sharon. 2011. Pentagon Cultural Analyst Helped with Interrogations. Nature, October 18.