Global Research

The news that the EU is considering setting up so-called “disembarkation centers” in nearby non-member states is a distraction meant to appease an angry public, though no plan has been released thus far pertaining to the enforcement measures that would need to be implemented in order to make them more than a “band-aid solution” to the Migrant Crisis.

Sound Concept, Shallow Strategy

Politico reported that draft conclusions for next week’s European Council Summit have been circulating around and claim to announce the creation of so-called “disembarkation centers” in non-EU states for facilitating migrant processing. The concept is that individuals intercepted at sea would be sent to these facilities prior to determining whether they’re eligible for asylum or are just migrating for economic reasons, with the first-mentioned category being allowed entry into the EU while the second one could presumably be denied this privilege and possibly sent back home to their country of origin. The idea itself is sound enough, but it crucially lacks any enforcement mechanism for guaranteeing the removal of economic migrants from the “disembarkation centers’” host states, as well as a related one for getting their home countries to pay for their return.

Nefarious Neighbors

The article suggests that NATO-member Albania and Major Non-NATO Ally Tunisia are being considered as the locations for these prospective centers, but also notes that nothing has been decided yet and that “opening [these facilities in Tunisia] could risk destabilizing the region’s sole post-Arab Spring democracy”. Importantly, no such security risks are mentioned when it comes to Albania, which is already hosting MEK terrorists and plans to also do the same for returning Daesh ones too, indicating that the Balkan country’s role as the pro-Western factory exporting regional destabilization remains unchanged. It’s uncertain whether Tunisia’s authorities are independent enough to resist being turned into the “North African Albania”, but the example of neighboring Libya might make even the most diehard Atlanticists think twice about the wisdom of this possible decision.

If there were any serious plans for ensuring security at these sites, then Tunisia’s concerns would mostly be moot and pretty much pertinent only in terms of its international reputation becoming synonymous with refugee/migrant camps, which is why there are reasons to reconsider the wisdom of this entire plan to begin with. The originators of the “disembarkation center” idea aren’t giving due attention to the security dimension of this concept, which is its Achilles’ heel because someone – either the host country, the UN, a “coalition of the willing”, mercenaries, or some other force – must guarantee that the intercepted migrants housed in these host countries don’t escape from their facilities prior to the completion of what’s led to believe will be their expedited processing.

The thought of possible terrorists infiltrating local communities is apparently real enough of a risk that Politico felt obligated to warn its readers that Tunisia’s “post-Arab Spring democracy” might be endangered if it goes along with this plan. Again, this apparently isn’t a problem for Albania, which the West has an interest in perpetuating as a center of regional destabilization against Serbia, the Republic of Macedonia, and even Greece. Furthermore, even in the unlikely event that a solution is struck for securing the “disembarkation centers”, then other deals have to be agreed to in advance for working out who will be responsible for forcibly removing recalcitrant migrants from these facilities if their asylum appeals are rejected and they’re ordered to return back to their homeland.

Homeward Bound…And Back?

Accordingly, even if – which is another major uncertainty – these individuals are removed, someone needs to pay for their journey back home, which naturally raises the question of who that will be and what happens if their country of origin doesn’t want them back for whatever the reason may be. Financial incentives might compel impoverished states to go along with this final step of the process, but once more, someone will have to fund their trip, and there’s no way to prevent them from trying to re-infiltrate the EU once they land back home. After all, the Executive Director of the UN World Food Program warned in late April that the Second Migrant Crisis might come from Africa when considering that half a billion people might be pushed out of the Greater Sahel Region and into Europe in the coming years.

Therein lays the fundamental problem behind any so-called “catch and release” policy, where it doesn’t matter whether the migrants are released in the transit country hosting the “disembarkation centers” or sent back to their country of origin because they could theoretically continue coming back until the whole mass of them overwhelms the EU’s border defenses through swarming tactics and succeeds in breaking into the “socialist welfare utopia” that they all dream of living in. Correspondingly, the EU might be drawn deeper into “mission creep” through the establishment of more bases in the Greater Sahel Region designed to “preemptively” catch illegal migrants destined for Europe, however “unethical” this may be but operating per an agreement with cash-hungry quisling governments (“neo-protectorates”) like the ones in Mali and Niger.

Concluding Thoughts

Seeing as how the most effective solution to this problem necessitates a sustained multilateral military-developmental campaign that “strikes at the root” of illegal migration but may not be politically palpable for the European public given its incalculable long-term costs and indefinite timeframe, the “band-aid solution” that’s being bandied about for appeasing the rising EuroRealist populace is the distraction of so-called “disembarkation centers” that might actually cause more harm than good if they result in thousands of migrants and their terrorist infiltrators being sent to Albania prior to being let loose again all throughout the Balkans. The coastal state is already hosting MEK terrorists and very soon Daesh ones too, and the last thing that the region needs is hordes of destitute individuals willing to do these groups’ bidding in order to earn a few extra bucks for paying their way to nearby Italy or Germany.

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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 Eurasia Future.

On May 30th, Secretary of Defense James Mattis announced a momentous shift in American global strategic policy. From now on, he decreed, the U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM), which oversees all U.S. military forces in Asia, will be called the Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM). The name change, Mattis explained, reflects “the increasing connectivity between the Indian and Pacific Oceans,” as well as Washington’s determination to remain the dominant power in both.   

What? You didn’t hear about this anywhere?  And even now, you’re not exactly blown away, right? Well, such a name change may not sound like much, but someday you may look back and realize that it couldn’t have been more consequential or ominous.  Think of it as a signal that the U.S. military is already setting the stage for an eventual confrontation with China.

If, until now, you hadn’t read about Mattis’s decision anywhere, I’m not surprised since the media gave it virtually no attention — less certainly than would have been accorded the least significant tweet Donald Trump ever dispatched.  What coverage it did receive treated the name change as no more than a passing “symbolic” gesture, a Pentagon ploy to encourage India to join Japan, Australia, and other U.S. allies in America’s Pacific alliance system. “In Symbolic Nod to India, U.S. Pacific Command Changes Name” was the headline of a Reuters story on the subject and, to the extent that any attention was paid, it was typical.

That the media’s military analysts failed to notice anything more than symbolism in the deep-sixing of PACOM shouldn’t be surprising, given all the attention being paid to other major international developments — the pyrotechnics of the Korean summit in Singapore, the insults traded at and after the G7 meeting in Canada, or the ominous gathering storm over Iran.  Add to this the poor grasp so many journalists have of the nature of the U.S. military’s strategic thinking.  Still, Mattis himself has not been shy about the geopolitical significance of linking the Indian and Pacific Oceans in such planning.  In fact, it represents a fundamental shift in U.S. military thinking with potentially far-reaching consequences.

Consider the backdrop to the name change: in recent months, the U.S. has stepped up its naval patrols in waters adjacent to Chinese-occupied islands in the South China Sea (as has China), raising the prospect of future clashes between the warships of the two countries. Such moves have been accompanied by ever more threatening language from the Department of Defense (DoD), indicating an intent to do nothing less than engage China militarily if that country’s build-up in the region continues.

“When it comes down to introducing what they have done in the South China Sea, there are consequences,” Mattis declared at the Shangri La Strategic Dialogue in Singapore on June 2nd.

As a preliminary indication of what he meant by this, Mattis promptly disinvited the Chinese from the world’s largest multinational naval exercise, the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC), conducted annually under American auspices.

“But that’s a relatively small consequence,” he added ominously, “and I believe there are much larger consequences in the future.”

With that in mind, he soon announced that the Pentagon is planning to conduct “a steady drumbeat” of naval operations in waters abutting those Chinese-occupied islands, which should raise the heat between the two countries and could create the conditions for a miscalculation, a mistake, or even an accident at sea that might lead to far worse.

In addition to its plans to heighten naval tensions in seas adjacent to China, the Pentagon has been laboring to strengthen its military ties with U.S.-friendly states on China’s perimeter, all clearly part of a long-term drive to — in Cold War fashion — “contain” Chinese power in Asia.  On June 8th, for example, the DoD launched Malabar 2018, a joint Pacific Ocean naval exercise involving forces from India, Japan, and the United States.  Incorporating once neutral India into America’s anti-Chinese “Pacific” alliance system in this and other ways has, in fact, become a major twenty-first-century goal of the Pentagon, posing a significant new threat to China.

For decades, the principal objective of U.S. strategy in Asia had been to bolster key Pacific allies Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines, while containing Chinese power in adjacent waters, including the East and South China Seas.  However, in recent times, China has sought to spread its influence into Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean region, in part by extolling its staggeringly ambitious “One Belt, One Road” trade and infrastructure initiative for the Eurasian continent and Africa.  That vast project is clearly meant both as a unique vehicle for cooperation and a way to tie much of Eurasia into a future China-centered economic and energy system.  Threatened by visions of such a future, American strategists have moved ever more decisively to constrain Chinese outreach in those very areas.  That, then, is the context for the sudden concerted drive by U.S. military strategists to link the Indian and Pacific Oceans and so encircle China with pro-American, anti-Chinese alliance systems. The name change on May 30th is a formal acknowledgement of an encirclement strategy that couldn’t, in the long run, be more dangerous.

Girding for War with China

To grasp the ramifications of such moves, some background on the former PACOM might be useful.  Originally known as the Far East Command, PACOM was established in 1947 and has been headquartered at U.S. bases near Honolulu, Hawaii, ever since.  As now constituted, its “area of responsibility” encompasses a mind-boggling expanse: all of East, South, and Southeast Asia, as well as Australia, New Zealand, and the waters of the Indian and Pacific Oceans — in other words, an area covering about 50% of the Earth’s surface and incorporating more than half of the global population.  Though the Pentagon divides the whole planet like a giant pie into a set of “unified commands,” none of them is larger than the newly expansive, newly named Indo-Pacific Command, with its 375,000 military and civilian personnel.

Before the Indian Ocean was explicitly incorporated into its fold, PACOM mainly focused on maintaining control of the western Pacific, especially in waters around a number of friendly island and peninsula states like Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines.  Its force structure has largely been composed of air and naval squadrons, along with a large Marine Corps presence on the Japanese island of Okinawa.  Its most powerful combat unit is the U.S. Pacific Fleet — like the area it now covers, the largest in the world.  It’s made up of the 3rd and 7th Fleets, which together have approximately 200 ships and submarines, nearly 1,200 aircraft, and more than 130,000 sailors, pilots, Marines, and civilians.

On a day-to-day basis, until recently, the biggest worry confronting the command was the possibility of a conflict with nuclear-armed North Korea.  During the late fall of 2017 and the winter of 2018, PACOM engaged in a continuing series of exercises designed to test its forces’ ability to overcome North Korean defenses and destroy its major military assets, including nuclear and missile facilities. These were undoubtedly intended, above all, as a warning to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un about what he could expect if he continued down the path of endless provocative missile and nuclear tests.  It seems that, at least for the time being, President Trump has suspended such drills as a result of his summit meeting with Kim.

Image below: Admiral Phil Davidson

North Korea aside, the principal preoccupation of PACOM commanders has long been the rising power of China and how to contain it.  This was evident at the May 30th ceremony in Hawaii at which Mattis announced that expansive name change and presided over a change-of-command ceremony, in which outgoing commander, Admiral Harry Harris Jr., was replaced by Admiral Phil Davidson.  (Given the naval-centric nature of its mission, the command is almost invariably headed by an admiral.)

While avoiding any direct mention of China in his opening remarks, Mattis left not a smidgeon of uncertainty that the command’s new name was a challenge and a call for the future mobilization of regional opposition across a vast stretch of the planet to China’s dreams and desires.  Other nations welcome U.S. support, he insisted, as they prefer an environment of “free, fair, and reciprocal trade not bound by any nation’s predatory economics or threat of coercion, for the Indo-Pacific has many belts and many roads.”  No one could mistake the meaning of that.

Departing Admiral Harris was blunter still.

Although “North Korea remains our most immediate threat,” he declared, “China remains our biggest long-term challenge.”

He then offered a warning: without the stepped-up efforts of the U.S. and its allies to constrain Beijing, “China will realize its dream of hegemony in Asia.”  Yes, he admitted, it was still possible to cooperate with the Chinese on limited issues, but we should “stand ready to confront them when we must.”  (On May 18th, Admiral Harris was nominated by President Trump as the future U.S. ambassador to South Korea, which will place a former military man at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul.)

Harris’s successor, Admiral Davidson, seems, if anything, even more determined to put confronting China atop the command’s agenda.  During his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 17th, he repeatedly highlighted the threat posed by Chinese military activities in the South China Sea and promised to resist them vigorously.

“Once [the South China Sea islands are] occupied, China will be able to extend its influence thousands of miles to the south and project power deep into Oceania,” he warned.  “The PLA [People’s Liberation Army] will be able to use these bases to challenge U.S. presence in the region, and any forces deployed to the islands would easily overwhelm the military forces of any other South China Sea claimants. In short, China is now capable of controlling the South China Sea in all scenarios short of war with the United States.”

Is that, then, what Admiral Davidson sees in our future?  War with China in those waters?  His testimony made it crystal clear that his primary objective as head of the Indo-Pacific Command will be nothing less than training and equipping the forces under him for just such a future war, while enlisting the militaries of as many allies as possible in the Pentagon’s campaign to encircle that country.

“To prevent a situation where China is more likely to win a conflict,” he affirmed in his version of Pentagonese, “we must resource high-end capabilities in a timely fashion, preserve our network of allies and partners, and continue to recruit and train the best soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and coastguardsmen in the world.”

Davidson’s first priority is to procure advanced weaponry and integrate it into the command’s force structure, ensuring that American combatants will always enjoy a technological advantage over their Chinese counterparts in any future confrontation.  Almost as important, he, like his predecessors, seeks to bolster America’s military ties with other members of the contain-China club.  This is where India comes in.  Like the United States, its leadership is deeply concerned with China’s expanding presence in the Indian Ocean region, including the opening of a future port/naval base in Gwadar, Pakistan, and another potential one on the island of Sri Lanka, both in the Indian Ocean.  Not surprisingly, given the periodic clashes between Chinese and Indian forces along their joint Himalayan borderlands and the permanent deployment of Chinese warships in the Indian Ocean, India’s prime minister Narendra Modi has shown himself to be increasingly disposed to join Washington in military arrangements aimed at limiting China’s geopolitical reach.

“An enduring strategic partnership with India comports with U.S. goals and objectives in the Indo-Pacific,” Admiral Davidson said in his recent congressional testimony.

Once installed as commander, he continued,

“I will maintain the positive momentum and trajectory of our burgeoning strategic partnership.”  His particular goal: to “increase maritime security cooperation.”

And so we arrive at the Indo-Pacific Command and a future shadowed by the potential for great power war.

The View from Beijing

The way the name change at PACOM was covered in the U.S., you would think it reflected, at most, a benign wish for greater economic connections between the Indian and Pacific Ocean regions, as well, perhaps, as a nod to America’s growing relationship with India.  Nowhere was there any hint that what might lie behind it was a hostile and potentially threatening new approach to China — or that it could conceivably be perceived that way in Beijing.  But there can be no doubt that the Chinese view such moves, including recent provocative naval operations in the disputed Paracel Islands of the South China Sea, as significant perils.

When, in late May, the Pentagon dispatched two warships — the USS Higgins, a destroyer, and the USS Antietam, a cruiser — into the waters near one of those newly fortified islands, the Chinese responded by sending in some of their own warships while issuing a statement condemning the provocative American naval patrols.  The U.S. action, said a Chinese military spokesperson,

“seriously violated China’s sovereignty [and] undermined strategic mutual trust.”

Described by the Pentagon as “freedom of navigation operations” (FRONOPs), such patrols are set to be increased at the behest of Mattis.

Of course, the Chinese are hardly blameless in the escalating tensions in the region. They have continued to militarize South China Sea islands whose ownership is in dispute, despite a promise that Chinese President Xi Jinping made to President Obama in 2015 not to do so.  Some of those islands in the Spratly and Paracel archipelagos are also claimed by Vietnam, the Philippines, and other countries in the area and have been the subject of intensifying, often bitter disagreements among them about where rightful ownership really lies.  Beijing has simply claimed sovereignty over all of them and refuses to compromise on the issue.  By fortifying them — which American military commanders see as a latent military threat to U.S. forces in the region — Beijing has provoked a particularly fierce U.S. reaction, though these are obviously waters relatively close to China, but many thousands of miles from the continental United States.

From Beijing, the strategic outlook articulated by Secretary Mattis, as well as Admirals Harris and Davidson, is clearly viewed — and not without reason — as threatening and as evidence of Washington’s master plan to surround China, confine it, and prevent it from ever achieving the regional dominance its leaders believe is its due as the rising great power on the planet.  To the Chinese leadership, changing PACOM’s name to the Indo-Pacific Command will just be another signal of Washington’s determination to extend its unprecedented military presence westward from the Pacific around Southeast Asia into the Indian Ocean and so further restrain the attainment of what it sees as China’s legitimate destiny.

However Chinese leaders end up responding to such strategic moves, one thing is certain: they will not view them with indifference.  On the contrary, as challenged great powers have always done, they will undoubtedly seek ways to counter America’s containment strategy by whatever means are at hand.  These may not initially be overtly military or even obvious, but in the long run they will certainly be vigorous and persistent.  They will include efforts to compete with Washington in pursuit of Asian allies — as seen in Beijing’s fervent courtship of President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines — and to secure new basing arrangements abroad, possibly under the pretext, as in Pakistan and Sri Lanka, of establishing commercial shipping terminals.  All of this will only add new tensions to an already anxiety-inducing relationship with the United States.  As ever more warships from both countries patrol the region, the likelihood that accidents will occur, mistakes will be made, and future military clashes will result can only increase.

With the possibility of war with North Korea fading in the wake of the recent Singapore summit, one thing is guaranteed: the new U.S. Indo-Pacific Command will only devote itself ever more fervently to what is already its one overriding priority: preparing for a conflict with China.  Its commanders insist that they do not seek such a war, and believe that their preparations — by demonstrating America’s strength and resolve — will deter the Chinese from ever challenging American supremacy.  That, however, is a fantasy.  In reality, a strategy that calls for a “steady drumbeat” of naval operations aimed at intimidating China in waters near that country will create ever more possibilities, however unintended, of sparking the very conflagration that it is, at least theoretically, designed to prevent.

Right now, a Sino-American war sounds like the plotline of some half-baked dystopian novel.  Unfortunately, given the direction in which both countries (and their militaries) are heading, it could, in the relatively near future, become a grim reality.

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Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of The Race for What’s Left. A documentary movie version of his book Blood and Oil is available from the Media Education Foundation. Follow him on Twitter at @mklare1.

A large-scale Syrian Arab Army offensive to liberate southwest parts of the country bordering Israel and Jordan from US/Israeli supported terrorists appears imminent in the coming days.

Many thousands of Syrian forces mobilized for the upcoming campaign, including large numbers of elite Tiger troops deployed to Daara governorate – the area where US aggression on Syria began in March 2011, using terrorists as imperial proxies.

Together with Syria’s 4th Division and Republican Guard, Tiger force commander General Suheil al-Hassan will likely head the offensive to free the nation’s southwest from US/Israeli supported terrorists controlling the territory.

A major battle looms. In late May, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert warned Syria against launching an offensive to regain control of its own territory bordering Israel and Jordan, threatening “firm and appropriate (US) measures.”

Pentagon and allied forces operate in the country illegally. Bashar al-Assad rightfully calls them “invaders.” In its 8th year, Obama’s war, now Trump’s, devastated the country – one of history’s great crimes.

Trump’s earlier promise to leave Syria was hollow, like virtually all positive pledges he makes. Washington didn’t wage war on the country to quit.

US troops occupy parts of its northeast and southwest. In early May, Fars News said

“the US military is dramatically expanding its operations in Syria, constructing new illegal bases in the war-torn country, and doing whatever it can to sell as many weapons as possible to vassals,” adding:

“The new mission creep base marks the latest example of America’s growing and controversial war for regime change in Damascus.”

“The new expansion is one part of what appears to be a massive US military infrastructure development project in other parts of the region as well, including Yemen, that will see new US outposts built this year on the pretext of fighting terror and protecting America’s illicit interests.”

US forces, along with UK and French ones, operate from numerous Pentagon bases in northern and southern parts of Syria.

Washington came to the country to stay, wanting puppet rule it controls replacing Assad, the nation made dystopian like post-war Libya and Iraq – partitioned, its resources looted, its people ruthlessly exploited, an Israeli rival eliminated, Iran isolated, ahead of a similar regime change scheme targeting the Islamic Republic.

Ahead of the Syrian Arab Army’s large-scale southwest offensive, its forces began striking US/Israeli supported terrorists’ “defenses inside the towns of Busra Al-Sham, Ghara Sharqiyah, and Ghara Gharbiyah,” according to AMN News.

What’s going on is a preliminary phase of what’s likely coming – a softening up of their positions ahead of attacking them and other southwestern areas full-force.

According to a Monday State Department press release, Lavrov and Pompeo “discussed issues and concerns related to Syria and the bilateral relationship.”

“Secretary Pompeo reemphasized the US commitment to the southwest ceasefire arrangement that was approved by President Trump and President Putin one year ago.”

Pompeo “noted that it was critical for Russia and (Syria) to adhere to these arrangements and ensure no unilateral activity in this area.”

On Monday, Lavrov and Pompeo discussed Syria by phone, focusing on observing Security Council Res. 2254 (December 2015).

It called for ceasefire and diplomatic conflict resolution – breached straightaway by Washington, NATO, Israel, their imperial allies, and terrorists they support.

Russia’s good faith efforts failed because Obama and now Trump want war and regime change, not peace and stability restored to Syria.

If Pentagon-led warplanes attack Syrian forces engaged in liberating southern parts of their own country from US/Israeli supported terrorists, war will escalate more than already, putting resolution more out of reach.

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

I had coffee with a foreign friend a week ago. The subject of Donald Trump inevitably came up and my friend said that he was torn between describing Trump as a genius or as an idiot, but was inclined to lean towards genius. He explained that Trump was willy-nilly establishing a new world order that will succeed the institutionally exhausted post-World War 2 financial and political arrangements that more-or-less established U.S. hegemony over the “free world.” The Bretton Woods agreement and the founding of the United Nations institutionalized the spread of liberal democracy and free trade, creating a new, post war international order under the firm control of the United States with the American dollar as the benchmark currency.

Trump is now rejecting what has become an increasingly dominant global world order in favor of returning to a nineteenth century style nationalism that has become popular as countries struggle to retain their cultural and political identifies. Trump’s vision would seem to include protection of core industries, existing demographics and cultural institutions combined with an end of “democratization,” which will result in an acceptance of foreign autocratic or non-conforming regimes as long as they do not pose military or economic threats.

Sounds good, I countered but there is a space between genius and idiocy and that would be called insanity, best illustrated by impulsive, irrational behavior coupled with acute hypersensitivity over perceived personal insults and a demonstrated inability to comprehend either generally accepted facts or basic norms of personal and group behavior.

Inevitably, I have other friends who follow foreign policy closely that have various interpretations of the Trump phenomenon. One sees the respectful meeting with Kim Jong-un of North Korea as a bit of brilliant statesmanship, potentially breaking a sixty-five year logjam and possibly opening the door to further discussions that might well avert a nuclear war. And the week also brought a Trump welcome suggestion that Russia should be asked to rejoin the G-7 group of major industrialized democracies, which also has to be seen as a positive step. There has also been talk of a Russia-U.S. summit similar to that with North Korea to iron out differences, an initiative that was first suggested by Trump and then agreed to by Russian President Vladimir Putin. There will inevitably be powerful resistance to such an arrangement coming primarily from the U.S. media and from Congress, but Donald Trump seems to fancy the prospect and it just might take place.

One good friend even puts a positive spin on Trump’s insulting behavior towards America’s traditional allies at the recent G-7 meeting in Canada. She observes that Trump’s basic objections were that Washington is subsidizing the defense of a wealthy Europe and thereby maintaining unnecessarily a relationship that perpetuates a state of no-war no-peace between Russia and the West. And the military costs exacerbate some genuine serious trade imbalances that damage the U.S. economy. If Trumpism prevails, G-7 will become a forum for discussions of trade and economic relations and will become less a club of nations aligned military against Russia and, eventually, China. As she put it, changing its constituency would be a triumph of “mercantilism” over “imperialism.” The now pointless NATO alliance might well find itself without much support if the members actually have to fully fund it proportionate to their GDPs and could easily fade away, which would be a blessing for everyone.

My objection to nearly all the arguments being made in favor or opposed to what occurred in Singapore last week is that the summit is being seen out of context, as is the outreach to Russia at G-7. Those who are in some cases violently opposed to the outcome of the talks with North Korea are, to be sure, sufferers from Trump Derangement Syndrome, where they hate anything he does and spin their responses to cast him in the most negative terms possible. Some others who choose to see daylight in spite of the essential emptiness of the “agreement” are perhaps being overly optimistic while likewise ignoring what else is going on.

And the neoconservatives and globalists are striking back hard to make sure that détente stays in a bottle hidden somewhere on a shelf in the White House cloak room. Always adept at the creation of new front groups, the neocons have now launched something called the Renew Democracy Initiative (RDI), with the goal of “uni[ting] the center-left and the center-right.” Its founders include the redoubtable Max Boot, The Washington Post’s Anne Appelbaum, the inevitable Bill Kristol, and Richard Hurwitz of Council on Foreign Relations. RDI’s website predictably calls for “fresh thinking” and envisions “the best minds from different countries com[ing] together for both broad and discrete projects in the service of liberty and democracy in the West and beyond.” It argues that

“Liberal democracy is in crisis around the world, besieged by authoritarianism, nationalism, and other illiberal forces. Far-right parties are gaining traction in Europe, Vladimir Putin tightens his grip on Russia and undermines democracy abroad, and America struggles with poisonous threats from the right and left.”

There are also the internal contradictions in what Trump appears to be doing, suggesting that a brighter future might not be on the horizon even if giving the Europeans a possibly deserved bloody nose over their refusal to spend money defending themselves provides some satisfaction. In the last week alone in Syria the White House has quietly renewed funding for the so-called White Helmets, a terrorist front group. It has also warned that it will take action against the Syrian government for any violation of a “de-escalation zone” in the country’s southwest that has been under the control of Washington. That means that the U.S., which is in Syria illegally, is warning that country’s legitimate government that it should not attempt to re-establish control over a region that was until recently ruled by terrorists.

And then there is also Donald Trump’s recent renunciation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), eliminating a successful program that was preventing nuclear proliferation on the part of Iran and replacing it with nothing whatsoever apart from war as a possible way of dealing with the potential problem. Indeed, Trump has been prepared to use military force on impulse, even when there is no clear casus belli. In Syria there have been two pointless cruise missile attacks and a trap set up to kill Russian mercenaries. Washington’s stated intention is to destabilize and replace President Bashar al-Assad while continuing the occupation of the Syrian oil fields. And in Afghanistan there are now more troops on the ground than there were on inauguration day together with no plan to bring them home. It is reported that the Pentagon has a twenty-year plan to finish the job but no one actually believes it will work.

The United States is constructing new drone bases in Africa and Asia. It also has a new military base in Israel which will serve as a tripwire for automatic American involvement if Israel goes to war and has given the green light to the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians. In Latin America, Washington has backed off from détente with Cuba and has been periodically threatening some kind of intervention in Venezuela. In Europe, it is engaged in aggressive war games on the Russian borders, most recently in Norway and Poland. The Administration has ordered increased involvement in Somalia and has special ops units operating – and dying – worldwide. Overall, it is hardly a return to the Garden of Eden.

And then there are the petty insults that do not behoove a great power. A friend recently attended the Russian National Day celebration at the embassy in Washington. He reported that the U.S. government completely boycotted the event, together with its allies in Western Europe and the anglosphere, resulting in sparse attendance. It is the kind of slight that causes attitudes to shift when the time comes for serious negotiating. It is unnecessary and it is precisely the sort of thing that Russian President Vladimir Putin is referring to when he asks that his country be treated with “respect.” The White House could have sent a delegation to attend the national day. Trump could have arranged it with a phone call, but he didn’t.

Winston Churchill once reportedly said that to

“Jaw, jaw, jaw is better than war, war, war.”

As one of the twentieth century’s leading warmongers, he may not have actually meant it, but in principle he was right. So let us hope for the best coming out of Singapore and also for the G-7 or what replaces it in the future. But don’t be confused or diverted by presidential grandstanding. Watch what else is going on outside the limelight and, at least for the present, it is not pretty.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

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

Global Research is a small team that believes in the power of information and analysis to bring about far-reaching societal change including a world without war.

Truth in media is a powerful instrument. As long as we keep probing, asking questions, challenging media disinformation to find real understanding, then we are in a better position to participate in creating a better world in which truth and accountability trump greed and corruption.

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Ex-Mossad Chief: Best Part of My Job Was Having ‘a License to Crime’

By Richard Silverstein, June 19, 2018

When asked about what issue took the lion’s share of his attention as Mossad chief, he answers that Iran took up 80% of the agency’s operational agenda.  For those of us who’ve long criticized Israel’s obsession with Iran and suspected it was a pressure valve exploited by Israeli leaders who sought to avoid issues like Palestine, Pardo’s admission makes one realize how much time the Mossad wasted on chimeras like this.

The Problem with Lamenting “Acceptance” of Kim Jong-un

By Hugh Gusterson, June 19, 2018

As one might expect of any event starring Donald Trump, reaction to the Trump-Kim summit in Singapore has been polarized. Republicans—the same people who condemned Barack Obama for visiting Cuba and John Kerry for meeting with Iranian leaders—defended Trump’s meeting with Kim Jong-un.

Are the Hard Brexiteers – Jumping Ship?

By True Publica, June 19, 2018

A couple of months ago, the driving force behind Ukip Nigel Faragewas forced into confirming that two of his children possess British and German passports, meaning they will maintain their free movement rights in the European Union after Brexit. Before that, the Independent reported that last year, Mr Farage was forced to deny he was applying for German citizenship himself after he was spotted queueing at the German embassy.

North Korea: What Price Peace?

By Askiah Adam, June 19, 2018

Indeed the Singapore Declaration was much anticipated and is well received. But there is, too, much pessimism. The recent unilateral abandonment of the Iran nuclear agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) by the United States is one. Iran, naturally, advised Kim to be wary.

Oil Giants Shell and Eni Face Trial in Milan Over Bribery Allegations in Biggest Corruption Case Facing Sector in Years

By Chloe Farand, June 19, 2018

They allege that Shell and Eni paid $1.1 billion into an account for the Nigeria government of which $800 million was later transferred to Malabu Oil and Gas, a company secretly owned by former Nigerian petroleum minister and convicted money launderer Dan Etete, to be distributed as payoffs.

China: The Largest Cheap Labor Factory in the World

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, June 19, 2018

The factory price of a commodity produced in China is of the order of 10% of the retail price in Western countries. Consequently, the largest share of the earnings of  China’s cheap labor economy accrue to distributors and retailers in Western countries.

In recent developments, Trump has duly instructed his administration to impose tariffs on about $50 billion worth of Chinese imports.

Marking yet another upsetting turn of events at the hands of the Trump administration, it was announced yesterday that the United States government canceled the proposed limits on the number of endangered whales, dolphins and sea turtles that can be injured or killed by gillnets on the West Coast.

The now defunct rule, which would have applied to less than 20 fishing vessels that use the monstrous fishing nets to catch swordfish in California and Oregon, would have halted gillnet fishing for up to two seasons if excess numbers of the nine groups of whales, sea turtles and or dolphins were trapped by the inconspicuous but dangerous net.

The measure which was originally introduced by the Pacific Fishery Management Council in 2015 would have applied to the endangered fin, humpback, and sperm whales, short-in pilot whales, and common bottlenose dolphins, as well as endangered leatherback turtles, loggerhead turtles, olive-ridley sea turtles and endangered green sea turtles.

Yet now, per Michael Milstein, a spokesperson for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the division has determined that the economic ramifications would have “a much more substantial impact on the fleet” than they had originally realized.

Further, he claimed, safety measures already enacted by the fishing industry, such as using pinging warning devices on the nets, have worked to “drastically” reduce the numbers of entangled whales and sea turtles.

“The Trump administration has declared war on whales, dolphins, and turtles off the coast of California,” noted Todd Steiner, director of the Turtle Island Restoration Network, which is based in Northern California.

Per the Los Angeles Times,

“This determination will only lead to more potential litigation and legislation involving this fishery. It’s not a good sign.”

Catherine Kilduff, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, warned in an ABC news report that

“any accidental harm to endangered communities of humpback whales and leatherback turtles would be particularly dangerous given their low numbers; as low as 411 for one group of humpbacks.

While NOAA figures reportedly estimate that the number of vessels plunged from a high of 129 in 1994 to 20 in 2016, many disagree.

“The numbers caught per set have not gone down,” argued Steiner. “The California gill-net fishery kills more marine mammals than all other West Coast fisheries combined.”

Sadly, the devastating news comes not even a full week after WAN reported on the positive new alliance between the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, the Government of Mexico, and the Carlos Slim Foundation, to support efforts to save the critically endangered vaquita porpoise.

*

Featured image is from takepart.com.

The Saudi-led coalition and its proxies are developing their military operation to capture the western Yemeni port city of al-Hudaydah from the Houthis.

This very advance started on June 13 after a series of failed attempts of the coalition-led forces to reach the city along the western Yemeni coast. Over 25,000 of coalition-backed fighters and at least 1,500 UAE troops, backed by a large number of military equipment, including battle tanks, and the Saudi Air Force and Special Operations Forces are involved in the operation.

According to French daily Le Figaro, troops of the French Special Operations Forces are operating alongside UAE troops.

The goal of the first stage of the operation is to isolate the city from the rest of the Houthi-held area. The coalition has also established a naval blockade of the city. However, it failed to carry out a landing operation in the area on June 13 because the Houthis responded with anti-ship missile strikes.

On the ground, by June 18, the coalition-led forces had entered into the al-Hudaydah airport establishing control of a major part of it. However, some positions in the airport are still in the hands of the Houthis.

The coalition-led forces also captured the Al-Matahen roundabout east of al-Hudayadh attempting to outflank the city. The advance was made thanks to massive air and artillery strikes on positions of the Houthis in the areas. Another factor is that the city is surrounded by non-mountainous terrain.

The Houthis respond to the coalition’s advance carrying out flanking attacks on the logistic lines of their enemies’ striking force. On June 18, a Houthi official, Ali al-Emad, told the pro-Hezbollah channel al-Mayadeen that about 160 fighters of the coalition-led forces had been captured by the Houthis since June 13.

Videos and photos also show that the coalition has already suffered significant losses in military equipment.

Al-Hudaydah is the key logistical hub and the last major supply line linking the Houthi-held part of Yemen and the rest of the world. It’s vital for providing humanitarian aid to the local population. It also allows the Houthis to receive limited military supplies from Iran.

If the coalition is able to capture the city, this may and will likely become a turning point in the Yemeni war leading to the defeat of the Houthis in open warfare and turning the conflict into a partisan war.

We are appalled that the Board of Deputies (BoD) which claims to be “the voice of British Jews,” has once again attempted to justify the massacre of unarmed Palestinian people by the Israeli military. You issued a throw-away tweet on 31 March and a full statement on 15 May, followed by a comment opposing the World Health Organisation fact-finding mission into the health needs of the occupied territories on 24 May.

As you know, on 30 March, when Israel began its latest attack, Palestinians were commemorating Land Day. [1] It was the launch of their Great March of Return demanding the right to go back to their homeland and an end to the blockade of Gaza. The March continued until 15 May, the seventieth anniversary of the Nakba, when three-quarters of a million Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their land: hundreds of towns and villages were depopulated and destroyed to make way for the state of Israel.

Since 30 March, 123 Palestinians have been killed, including children, women and medics, and journalists wearing vests marked PRESS, many shot in the back, and 13,600 have been maimed or injured by live ammunition, tear gas and firebombs. For six weeks the killings continued, day after day, and on 14 May, when the US moved its embassy to Jerusalem, despite “overwhelming global opposition”, another massacre: 60 people killed, and 2,771 maimed and wounded. The Israeli use of illegal “dumdum” bullets which expand after entering the body was clearly intended to cause not only greater pain but permanent disabilities.

Your statement justifying this massacre prompted over 500 Jewish Zionists to write to outgoing president Arkush and president-elect Marie van der Zyl [2] protesting that BoD had “deeply misrepresented” their views by relieving Israel of all responsibility for the deaths caused by their snipers.

BoD is doing its best to hide that Jews are divided over Israel’s ongoing repression and slaughter of the Palestinian people, which many of us, like most people everywhere in the world, including a number of Zionists, are outraged by. So much for BoD “speaking for all Jews”! You are so determined to defend Israel that you have even accused Jewish organisations and individuals of “antisemitism” because they support Palestinian rights, and campaigned for their expulsion from the Labour Party.

This is not the first time the BoD has condoned murder, claiming to speak on behalf of Jewish people in the UK. The BoD publicly supported pro-Israel rallies during the bombing of Gaza in 2008/9 and 2014 that killed thousands of Palestinian women, children and men. It has consistently supported a regime that is widely considered guilty of war crimes and the racist crime of apartheid. You are now saying that opposition to Israel’s actions is antisemitic, thus demanding that Israel should be the only government in the world exempt from criticism.

The BoD in recent years has been uncritical of Israel and pro-Tory, contrary to the great Jewish working-class tradition of struggling for social justice in every situation. Arkush declared his political allegiance when (on 9 June 2017) he mourned the Tory prime minister’s failure to win an outright majority at the general election as a “loss” for the Jewish community, and described the Tory alliance with the extreme right-wing, homophobic, anti-abortion Democratic Unionist Party in the North of Ireland as “positive news” and the DUP as “exceptionally warm and friendly”. The Tories that Arkush supports are aligned in Europe with right-wing political parties that honour Nazi collaborators and Islamophobes. Arkush also celebrated the election of Trump undeterred by his racist, Islamophobic, and antisemitic campaign.

Your identification with the Israeli government could prove even more frightening. Governments and people around the world fear that the wrecking of the agreement with Iran by Netanyahu and Trump (the heads of two nuclear powers) may start yet another war, repeating the horrors of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. You may find yourself not only supporting the destruction of Iran, but urging the risk of nuclear war.

As Jewish people we are distraught that the Nazi holocaust has been, and continues to be, used to justify the brutal occupation of another people who played no part in our historic persecution, and to indulge in warmongering.

We reclaim our tradition of struggling for social justice for all by echoing the call by Jamal Juma, coordinator of the Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign and the Land Defence Coalition:

“It is time for the world to stop standing in implicit or explicit complicity with Israeli apartheid and to join us in nonviolent action by taking up the Palestinian call for boycotts, divestment and sanctions until Israel respects international law and human rights.”

Notes

1. Land Day is the annual remembrance of the 1976 general strike protesting Israeli land theft from Palestinian citizens of Israel, when six unarmed Palestinians were killed, a hundred were wounded, and hundreds arrested.

2. We note that van der Zyl’s suitability to be president of BoD has been questioned by victims/survivors of child sexual abuse who accuse her of “abandoning” them in their efforts to eradicate this crime from Jewish institutions.

Signed by

Craig Berman
Sarah Glynn
Abe Hayeem
Rosamine Hayeem
Yael Kahn
Michael Kalmanovitz
Roisin Kalmanovitz
Agnes Kory
Selma James
Les Levidow
Moshe Machover
Helen Marks
Sam Weinstein
Karl Weiss

Things are getting serious. Tit-for-tat tariff announcements assure losers, not winners, if implemented and stick.

In response to China matching US imposed $50 billion in tariffs on its goods, Trump issued the following statement:

“This latest action by China clearly indicates its determination to keep the United States at a permanent and unfair disadvantage. This is unacceptable.

“Therefore, today, I directed the United States Trade Representative to identify $200 billion worth of Chinese goods for additional tariffs at a rate of 10 percent.”

If Beijing retaliates in kind as before, he’ll impose another $200 billion in duties on its products, he said, adding:

US tariffs will become effective “if China refuses to change its practices, and also if it insists on going forward with the new tariffs that it has recently announced.”

“China apparently has no intention of changing its unfair practices related to the acquisition of American intellectual property and technology.”

“Rather than altering those practices, it is now threatening United States companies, workers, and farmers who have done nothing wrong.”

“This latest action by China clearly indicates its determination to keep the United States at a permanent and unfair disadvantage, which is reflected in our massive US$376 billion trade imbalance in goods.”

In April, the Trump regime announced $50 billion in tariffs on around 1,300 Chinese products – last Friday reduced to 1,102 of equal value, 818 worth $34 billion effective July 6.

The remainder will be reviewed on July 24 before a final determination on imposition is made.

On Saturday, China’s Commerce Ministry said it “doesn’t want a trade war,” but will “fight back strongly” in response to Trump regime actions on trade, adding:

“If the US side finally loses its mind and issues a new list, the Chinese side will be forced to take comprehensive quantitative and qualitative measures and provide a tough response.”

Three rounds of Sino/US trade talks failed to resolve differences. During talks in Beijing last week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi remained far apart on trade and investment.

Separately, Pompeo accused Beijing of “unprecedented…larceny” on trade and through cyber activities, claiming:

“(T)hey’re not just taking (from the US) by forced technology transfer or stealing it by way of contract, but committing outright theft.”

A previous article explained that America’s trade deficit with China and other countries was made in the USA, not in Beijing or other foreign capitals.

Longstanding US policy encourages offshoring of jobs to low-wage countries – the problem exacerbated by last year’s great GOP tax cut heist, incentivizing corporate predators to shift operations abroad for tax advantages gained.

America blames other countries for its own wrongdoing and wrongheaded policies – sticks with other nations, not carrots, its favored tactic.

Dealings by China and Russia with other countries are polar opposite.

They seek cooperative relations abroad. Unlike Washington, they’re not waging political, economic, propaganda or hot war on any nations – a longterm winning strategy.

*

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

Os holofotes político-mediáticos, concentrados nos fluxos migratórios Sul-Norte, através do Mediterrâneo, deixam outras deslocações na sombra: as movimentações do Norte para o Sul, das forças militares e das armas, através do Mediterrâneo. Com efeito, através do “Mediterrâneo alargado”, uma área que, no âmbito da estratégia USA/NATO, se estende do Atlântico ao Mar Negro e, para sul, em direcção ao Golfo Pérsico e ao Oceano Índico.

No encontro com o Secretário Geral da NATO, Stoltenberg, em Roma, o Primeiro Ministro Conte, salientou a “importância do Mediterrâneo alargado para a segurança europeia”, ameaçada pelo “arco de instabilidade do Mediterrâneo até ao Médio Oriente”. Daí a importância da NATO, a aliança sob comando USA que Conte define como “pilar da segurança interna e internacional”.

Distorção completa da realidade. Fundamentalmente, foi a estratégia USA/NATO que provocou “o arco de instabilidade” devido:

• às duas guerras contra o Iraque,
• às outras duas guerras que demoliram os Estados jugoslavo e líbio,
• à guerra destinada a demolir o Estado sírio.

A Itália, que participou em todas estas guerras, segundo Conte, desempenha “um papel fundamental para a segurança e a estabilidade do flanco sul da Aliança”. De que maneira? Percebe-se pelo que  a comunicação mediática esconde.

O navio Trenton da Marinha dos EUA, que recolheu 42 refugiados (autorizados a desembarcar em Itália, ao contrário dos do Aquarius), não está estacionado na Sicília para realizar acções humanitárias no Mediterrâneo: é uma unidade rápida (até 80 km/h), capaz de desembarcar em poucas horas na costa norte-africana um corpo de 400 homens e veículos relacionados.

Forças especiais USA operam na Líbia para treinar e liderar formações armadas aliadas, enquanto os drones armados USA, decolando de Sigonella, atacam alvos na Líbia.

Em breve, anunciou Stoltenberg, também os drones da NATO começarão a funcionar a partir de Sigonella. Vão integrar-se no “Centro de Liderança Estratégica da NATO para o Sul”, um centro de serviços secretos para as operações militares no Médio Oriente, Norte da África, Sahel e África subsaariana. O Centro, que ficará operacional em Julho, está sediado em Lago Patria, no Comando Conjunto da Força da NATO (JFC Nápoles), sob o comando de um almirante americano – actualmente James Foggo – que também comanda as Forças Navais USA na Europa (com sede em Nápoles-Capodichino e a Sexta Frota estacionada em Gaeta) e as Forças Navais USA para a África.

Essas forças estão integradas pelo porta-aviões Harry S.Truman, que entrou no Mediterrâneo com o seu grupo de ataque há dois meses. No dia 10 de Junho, enquanto a atenção mediática estava concentrada no Aquarius, a frota USA  com mais de 8.000 homens, armados com 90 caças e mais de 1000 mísseis, foi posicionada Mediterrâneo Oriental, pronta para atacar a Síria e o Iraque.

Nesses mesmos dias, 12-13 de Junho, o Liberty Pride, um dos navios militares dos EUA, fazia escala em Livorno, embarcando nas suas 12 pontes outra carga de armas que, da base americana de Camp Darby, são enviadas mensalmente para a Jordânia e para a Arábia Saudita, destinadas às guerras na Síria e no Iémen. Assim, alimentam-se as guerras que, juntamente com os mecanismos de exploração neocolonial, provocam o empobrecimento e a erradicação das populações.

Consequentemente, os fluxos migratórios aumentam em condições dramáticas, que provocam vítimas e novas formas de escravidão. “Parece ser duro o que a imigração  agora paga”, comenta o Presidente Trump, referindo-se às medidas decididas não apenas por Salvini, mas por todo o Governo italiano, cujo Primeiro Ministro é designado como “fantástico”.

Reconhecimento legítimo da parte dos Estados Unidos, que no programa do actual Governo, os define como sendo o “aliado privilegiado” da Itália.

Manlio Dinucci

il manifesto, 19 de Junho de 2018

Artigo original em italiano :

Circuito di morte nel «Mediterraneo allargato»

ilmanifesto.it

 

Manlio Dinucci é geógrafoe jornalista

“Copyright Zambon Editore”

PORTUGUÊS

GUERRA NUCLEAR: O DIA ANTERIOR

De Hiroshima até hoje: Quem e como nos conduzem à catástrofe

ÍNDICE

 

Tradutora: Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos

 

 

 

Em 12 de Junho de 1901, o físico francês, Henri Becquerel, identificou e quantificou pela primeira vez, a radiação proveniente de uma amostra de urânio. O fenómeno será classificado, sucessivamente, por outra cientista francesa, Marie Curie, como radioactividade.

Esta descoberta,no principio da década de 1900, abre a estrada para um futuro inimaginável, ao progresso nos campos médico e energético, a descobertas que anunciavam riqueza e felicidade para toda a Humanidade. Mas abria, também, o caminho para o desenvolvimento da radioactividade no campo militar e, em seguida, ao uso da ameaça nuclear como supremacia política. A um século de distância, a maravilha científica é substituída pelo temor difuso de um perigo furtivo e permanente.

A Associação dos Cientistas Atómicos Americanos, responsável pelo desenvolvimento extraordinário do nuclear e, consciente da sua responsabilidade, mudou o ponteiro do Relógio do Apocalipse, o assinalador do tempo simbólico do risco nuclear, de 3 minutos para a meia noite em 2015, para 2,5 minutos para a meia noite em 2017.

Manlio Dinucci, com o seu livro ‘Guerra Nuclear – O Dia Anterior’, explica com precisão documentada, a História dos últimos setenta anos de convivência com o nuclear e denuncia quem são os que, desde o fim da Segunda Guerra Mundial,  a usam sem receio no que  respeita à segurança dos seres vivos e como eles querem nos levar à catástrofe, ao deserto nuclear.

Tudo começou em Agosto de 1945. O Presidente dos Estados Unidos, Henry Truman, tomou uma decisão terrível: a de lançar uma bomba atómica sobre o Japão, para pôr um fim à guerra, já terminada na Europa. Ordenou ao Comandante da Força Aérea Americana no Pacífico, Carl Spaaz, de lançar um engenho sobre uma cidade de tamanho médio. Foram escolhidas quatro cidades mediante a importância e a localização. No fim o destino recai sobre duas delas, Hiroshima e Nagasaki, em parte, por razões metereológicas. Uma imensa bola de fogo envolveu a cidade, transformando-se numa enorme núvem de fumo em forma de cogumelo. Esta forma característica tornar-se-á a imagem clássica da catástrofe nuclear tão temida. O bombardeamento causará a morte imediata de, pelo menos, de cem mil pessoas no perímetro de 1,5 km do epicentro da explosão. As radiações atingiram dezenas de milhares de pessoas que continuaram a morrer ao longo dos anos. Tinha sido libertado um monstro que não se podia conter, invísivel e altamente mortal.

Será que o Presidente Truman tinha escolhido, realmente, lançar o engenho, unicamente, para pôr fim à guerra no Pacífico? Talvez as coisas não sejam assim. É sabido agora, que o Japão tinha oferecido, através de diversos canais diplomáticos, a sua rendição, mas impunha a condição não renunciável da intocabilidade da figura do Imperador. A minoria da esquerda nos USA, era contrária a exonerar o maior responsável pelo militarismo japonês da sua responsabilidade e Truman, de repente, sensível ao pedido da esquerda, fortaleceu-se com esta recusa para, deste modo, rejeitar as diligências da diplomacia japonesa. Será  possível que o Presidente americano, ao atingir o Japão, quisesse na realidade, ameaçar e redimensionar o papel dos Soviéticos, os verdadeiros vencedores do nazismo na Europa? (Gian Luigi Nespoli e Giuseppe Zambon, Hiroshima-Nagasaki, Zambon Editore, Verona 1997).

As primeiras reportagens da cidade bombardeada deixaram as pessoas petrificadas perante esta enorme força desconhecida. A monstruosa quantidade de mortos e feridos de patologias desconhecidas e não curáveis causadas pelas radiações, impressionou o mundo inteiro, entregando aos Estados Unidos  o troféu de nação invencível.

Em seguida, o Pentágono continuará a financiar os estudos sobre o nuclear e, no final da presidência de Eisenhower, o Complexo militar/industrial começará a influenciar a política americana, exarcebando o perigo do comunismo e de uma possível invasão soviética da Europa. Este estado de guerra não declarada encorajava uma corrida ao armamento que fazia andar a toda a velocidade as fábricas, enquanto os aliados europeus, a Grã-Bretanha e a França, por sua vez, se esforçavam  para dotar-se da bomba atómica e poder, assim, aceder à mesa dos poderosos. A URSS, obviamente tentou recuperar o tempo do atraso tecnológico que a afastava dos USA. Assim, o nuclear entrava na cena política internacional como dissuasão entre as forças em oposição durante a Guerra Fria.

Durante muitos anos, temeu-se que um erro furtuito na sala dos botões pudesse terminar a existência da Humanidade. Só depois da dissolução da União Soviética e com os diversos tratados para o controlo do rearmamento nuclear,  nos anos seguintes, é que se acreditou que não se devia temer o nuclear. Mas como demonstra o livro de Dinucci, tratava-se de um falso sentido de segurança, porque, em silêncio, continuou a pesquisa e a produção de novas armas muito sofisticadas.

Hoje estamos novamente perante os Estados Unidos que desafiam a Rússia, com um olhar para a China, uma situação semelhante à da Guerra Fria, mas muito mais temível, porque ao contrário da década de 1970, quando os antagonistas tinham concordado com um último telefonema através  do famoso telefone vermelho antes de qualquer acção definitiva, actualmente todos os adversários sabem que só obtém a vitória, quem lançar o primeiro míssil.

Revela o Washington Post que se autorizam ataques preventivos contra os Estados que estejam quase a comprar armas de destruição em massa.Em plena sintonia com a teoria do PNAC (Project for a new American Century, Projecto para um novo século americano)formulado pelos neo-conservadores e cada vez mais aplicada à política americana: A História do Sec. XX deveria ter ensinado que é importante plasmar as circunstâncias antes que as crises surjam e enfrentar a ameaça nuclear e enfrentar as ameaças antes que se tornem trágicas. A História deste século deveria ter ensinado a abraçar a causa de uma liderança americana… estabelecer uma presença estatégica militar em todo o mundo através de uma revolução tecnológica no contexto militar, desencorajar o aparecimento de qualquer super potência competitiva, lançar ataques preventivos contra quaisquer poderes que ameacem os interesses americanos.

Da narrativa do nascimento da bomba e da aniquilição das duas cidades japoneasas até há corrida renovada aos armamentos, com um percurso de nove capítulos densos de informação e pormenores documentados, Manlio Dinucci introduz o leitor no mundo do nuclear e da política que o acompanhou sobre o fundo de um cenário internacional em mudança. O autor revela acidentes nucleares desconhecidos, o risco das centrais atómicas obsoletas e os atentados às mesmas, o uso do urânio empobrecido nos bombeardeamentos na Jugoslávia e no Iraque, as guerras escondiddas, as guerras comissionadas, as guerras no Médio Oriente, o nascimento do ISIS, a inquietante cumplicidade americana no armamento dos terroristas islâmicos, a NATO e a CIA a trabalhar na Ucrânia, a perigosa expansão da NATO nos países de Leste em direcção à Rússia.

A política estrangeira americana parece dividir a Europa em duas entidades: de um lado a nova Europa, constituída pelos antigos países satélites da União Soviética – Repúblicas dos Balcãs, Polónia, República Checa, Eslováquia, Hungria, Bulgária, Roménia e, do outro lado, a parte fundadora da União Europeia. A primeira é considerada a aliada mais firme, onde fazer fluir financiamentos, armas, soldados e bases de mísseis para instalar contra a Rússia; a segunda é mantida sob controlo,para que não ouse conspirar economica e financeiramente com a Rússia ou outras nações inscritas no livro negro dos EUA, penalidades pesadas, ameaças de sanções e crises bancárias. Quase toda a Europa é membro da NATO e alberga grande número de bases militares que armazenam armas e bombas nucleares em Itália, Bélgica, Holanda e Alemanha. É evidente que a Europa está numa posição de sujeição aos Estados Unidos e é considerada a parte fraca das forças em campo.

Um capítulo do livro descreve as novas armas e abre uma antevisão da guerra estelar: a mudança das armas cinéticas em armas de energia dirigida.Não usam mais balas, mas impulsos electromagnéticos, ondas de calor, armas cibernéticas e outras diabruras de ficção científica que só tinhamos visto em filmes e como tal, pensávamos ser pura fantasia. Hoje são uma realidade terrível, como os drones miniaturizados com as mais diversas utilizações, como matar por comando remoto ou transportar mini-nukes, que espalham epidemias ou mais simplesmente, mosquitos espias. Igualmente incrível é o desenvolvimento dos sistemas espaciais e dos aviões robotizados para destruir os satélites das comunicações dos adversários e para enviar armas para o Espaço.

No final desta extraordinária cavalgada ao longo da história dos nossos anos mais recentes, o livro explica a posição actual do poder americano, reivindicando a defesa do amargo fim dos seus privilégios antes do aparecimento de outros poderes. Para este fim a pressão militar americana aumenta em todos os continentes. O Pentágono controla directamente, 4.800 bases e outras instalações militares. O mundo está dividido em seis áreas, cada uma das quais está submetida ao controlo de outros tantos Comandos Combatentes Unificados dos Estados Unidos. A estes Comandos juntam-se três operacionais à escala global que presidem as forças nucleares terrestres, navais e as operações no espaço e ciber espaço, a guerra electrónica e missilística; as operações especiais e as operações psicológicas; o transporte, a mobilidade e o abastecimento dos exércitos.

Dinucci conta com precisão as funções de cada uma e o panorama descrito é impressionante, porque se desenvolve paralelamente ao nosso quotidiano, na quase total ignorância do público, que é tido deliberadamente na ignorância do facto de que as bases constituem o primeiro objectivo destinado a receber o contra ataque.

Jean Toschi Marazzani Visconti

A seguir: Nota sobre o Autor

Tradutora: Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos

Livro por Manlio Dinucci :

ÍNDICE

 

Featured image: Hashd al-Shaabi logo

Iraq’s Hashd al-Shaabi military force said Monday that 22 of its members had been killed in airstrikes carried out by U.S.-led coalition warplanes near Iraq’s border with Syria.

Incorporated into the Iraqi Armed Forces in late 2016, the Hashd al-Shaabi, who are also known as Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) and as the People’s Mobilization Committee and the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU).

In a statement, the group said that U.S. warplanes had struck one of its encampments near the Syrian border, leaving 22 of its fighters dead.

“At 22:00 on Sunday 17th of June 2018, an US plane struck a permanent base belonging to the 45th and 46th brigades responsible for protecting the borders between Syria and Iraq with two missiles that led to the martyrdom of 22 PMU fighters and injuring 12 others,” said the statement.

The PMF have been present at the border since the start of liberation operations in the area, and with the knowledge of Iraqi Joint Operations.

The PMF explained the reason for their presence near the Syrian/Iraqi border:

“Due to the geographical and desert type nature of the area, while at the same time the necessity for military presence, the Iraqi forces had to establish their bases north of the Syrian town of Albu Kamal, which is only 700 meters away from the border and has an infrastructure that is close to the defence line, which is exploited by terrorists who continuously seek infiltration and attempt entry into Iraqi territory. This presence and base is with the knowledge of Syrian government and Iraqi joint operations.

“The terror groups present in these areas tried to infiltrate into Iraqi territories and the PMF foiled this on many occasions,”  and said that the US strikes “came to enable the enemy control over the borders after security forces, including army, border police and PMF sacrificed to liberate, clear and protect the border.”

The statement went on to demand a “formal explanation” from the U.S. regarding the deadly incident.

First established in 2014 with the express purpose of fighting the Daesh terrorist group, the Hashd al-Shaabi is believed to include more than 150,000 Shia, Sunni, Christian and Yazidi fighters.

I find it exceptionally irritating when I hear liberals worry about whether Israel will be able to remain a “Jewish and Democratic State” if it retains control of occupied Palestinian lands. It’s irritating because Israel is not now a democratic state nor has it ever tried to be one.

A state that prioritizes rights for one group of citizens (in this case Jews, who comprise 80% of the population) over the rights of another group (Arabs, who are 20% of Israel’s citizenry) cannot be democratic. Israel discriminates against its Arab citizens in law, social services, funding for education, and in everyday life. So although the concerns of liberals in the West are about the future of Israeli democracy, what they ignore is the reality of Israel, in practice. 

As I document in my book, Palestinians: the Invisible Victims, from its inception in 1948, Israel has guaranteed rights and opportunities for Jews at the expense of the indigenous Palestinians who remained after the Nakba. Instead of experiencing democracy, these Arabs were subjected to harsh military law, as a result of which they were denied fundamental human and civil rights. Their lands and businesses were confiscated. And they were even denied the opportunity to join the labor movement, or form independent political parties.

During the past 70 years, these Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel have made significant advances as they organized and fought to expand their rights. But as two stories that have appeared recently in the Israeli media make clear, the contradiction inherent in being a democracy and a Jewish state continues to plague Israel.

In the first story, the leadership of the Knesset disqualified a proposed piece of legislation offered by a group of Arab legislators. The bill “Basic Law: Israel, a State of All Its Citizens” sought to guarantee equal rights for all Israelis—Jews and Arabs alike.

Apparently the Knesset leaders were so threatened by this bill that they were unwilling to even allow it to be introduced and debated. At the same time, however, Jewish members of the body are advancing another piece of legislation that defines Israel as the “national state of the Jewish People,” making it clear that Arabs are at best, second-class citizens.

In another story, Jewish residents of Afula, a town in Northern Israel, demonstrated against the proposed sale of a home in their community to an Arab family. The flyer, mobilizing Afula residents to come to the demonstration, criticized “the sale of homes to those who are undesirable in the neighborhood.” The former mayor of the community is quoted in the story saying “the residents of Afula don’t want a mixed city, but rather a Jewish city, and it’s their right.”

This is the impact of the apartheid system that Israel established to govern the lives of its Arab citizens. Since 1948, Israel not only confiscated lands surrounding Arab towns and villages to make way for Jewish agriculture and development, it denied Arabs the right to purchase land and homes in Jewish communities. Reflecting how this history has led to the demonstration in Afula, the leader of the Arab bloc in the Knesset said,

“It is not a surprise that in a country that has founded 700 towns for Jews and not even one for Arabs, the idea that Arabs should be pushed aside does not shock citizens…our hope of living together is crumbling due to hatred and racism fueled by the government.”

Meanwhile, in the West Bank, Israel appears to be preparing a similar fate for the Palestinians living under occupation. Continuing the practice the Israelis instituted in the Galilee region, they have been slowly and steadily concentrating captive West Bank Palestinians into enclaves, denying them access to their land and in some cases, evicting them from their communities. One recent case reported in the Israeli press involves a Supreme Court decision allowing the state to demolish the West Bank community of Khan al Ahmar and to forcibly relocate “its citizens to a site near a dumpster in Abu Dis”—a Palestinian community near occupied East Jerusalem. At risk are Khan al Ahmar’s 173 residents and the community’s school that serves 150 youngsters from there, and neighboring villages. This is one of four recent forced evictions to clear areas of Palestinians in order to consolidate Israeli control.

These three stories combined have two things in common. On the one hand, they establish that it is a contradiction in terms to consider that Israel can be both Jewish and democratic at the same time. Liberals therefore can stop fretting about the danger facing Israeli democracy in the future. It already is, in practice, an apartheid state.

Next to consider is the fact that none of these stories made it into the U.S. press and so I suppose I can almost understand the Western liberal’s lament. Since they just don’t know how Israel behaves, they have no idea that the future they fear, is already here.

*

James J. Zogby is the president of the Arab American Institute.

Featured image: Former Mossad Director Tamir Pardo (Photo: Yair Sagi)

Former Israeli Mossad chief (2011-2015), Tamir Pardo, spoke to Israel’s foremost TV news magazine (the video is only accessible via Israeli IP addresses), Uvda about his thirty years’ working for Israel’s foreign spy service.  He was continuing a tradition begun by his predecessor, the late-Meir Dagan, who also did an interview with the TV program after he left his job.  In fact, they both did the interviews for the same reason: they were deeply disaffected from their former boss, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Since so much of Israeli intelligence work is done covertly and under the pall of military censorship, preventing the public from having any inkling of what is done in its name, such interviews draw back the curtain slightly on an otherwise taboo subject in the Israeli media.  As a result, the audience for such events is huge and the public hangs on every word.

Pardo didn’t disappoint.  He mixed a combination of striking candor with feigned humility to present a picture of an experienced Israeli spy who’s been humiliated by his former boss, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and driven into a sort of forced exile.

Mossad: “Great Fun” Because It Offered “License to Crime”

The Uvda interviewer, Ilana Dayan, too mixed a series of softball questions with striking candor and managed to elicit some startling admissions from her subject.  When she asked him to characterize his career as a spy, she thought he would offer a high-minded reply so she asked if he thought of it as service to “king and country.”  Pardo ignored her suggestion, and instead replied that it was the greatest fun one could have because it was “a license to crime.”

It’s one thing for long-time critical observers of the Israeli intelligence apparatus to express such views of the excesses of the Israeli national security state, which I’ve long done; but it’s quite another for someone at its highest levels confirm some of your worst fears.  Being a Mossad agent offers a license to criminality on behalf of the Israeli State.  In an Israeli context this appears perfectly acceptable.  But to the rest of us (or most of the rest of us), this is horrifying.  And only an Israeli Mossad chief (or perhaps an FSB chief) can laugh at that sort of statement as Pardo clearly does and see it as charming or endearing.

At another point in the interview, Dayan offers Pardo a list of covert operations against Iran which the Mossad is thought to have orchestrated.  In looking at the list, his first reaction is: “very nice.”  Coming from any other intelligence agency chief this would be considered a ghoulish reply.  But coming from an Israeli career-assassin, the response seems totally in character.

The TV segment also offers the pro forma protestations of conscience one is accustomed to seeing in these affairs.  Dayan earnestly asks Pardo how it feels to have the power of life and death over his victims.  The ex-spy replies with due gravity that it’s a heavy burden which he weighed carefully every time he had to make such a decision.

The Iran File

When asked about what issue took the lion’s share of his attention as Mossad chief, he answers that Iran took up 80% of the agency’s operational agenda.  For those of us who’ve long criticized Israel’s obsession with Iran and suspected it was a pressure valve exploited by Israeli leaders who sought to avoid issues like Palestine, Pardo’s admission makes one realize how much time the Mossad wasted on chimeras like this.

Pardo recounts a meeting he had with his then- boss, Meir Dagan, when he assumed the role as his deputy director. Dagan tasked him with devising a program to deal with Iran.  Months later, the deputy presented three options:

1. “Conquering Iran”—this option was deemed “unrealistic”
2. Regime change—he uses the analogy of a chisel and crystal, saying the Mossad would seek the precise point of weakness within the glass that would cause it to disintegrate with the correctly placed blow.

Though he doesn’t mention the third option, presumably it was the one the Mossad ultimately pursued of assassination, sabotage of military bases, and cyber-attacks on nuclear facilities.

Israeli Assassination Campaign Failed to Deter Scientists from Participating in Nuclear Program

Dayan questions the ex-Mossad chief extensively about Israel’s assassination campaign against Iranian scientists, which led to the murders of five senior figures in the nuclear program.  The interviewer reveals, for the first time, that there were fifteen names on the target list, indicating that the project could have killed many more such figures had it not been called off once nuclear negotiations commenced in earnest.

Many journalists and analysts sympathetic to the Israeli interests argue that the killings served an important purpose in crippling Iran’s capacity to recruit top talent to the nuclear program.  For the first time, Pardo acknowledges that such a goal was a failure, when he responds to her pointed question asking whether it did so.  He half-heartedly replies: “not very clearly.”

Pardo also confesses explicitly that the overall program designed to destroy Iran’s nuclear program and deny it the capacity to build a nuclear weapon failed.  At that point, Dayan interrupts and asks him: if your plan failed, why did you oppose the prime minister’s plan to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities?  Why not try something more aggressive once your more modest goal failed?

The Mossadnik replies that it is impossible to prevent a nation from achieving nuclearization where it has a will to do so.  Iran, he suggests, is a huge country with many different military and scientific installations scattered throughout.  You cannot destroy its nuclear program with a single blow, no matter how large.  What becomes clear is that Pardo is a realist, while those holding the reins of power are either fantasists or fanatics who believe they can achieve absolute victory against Israel’s adversaries.

Israel’s Brush with War Against Iran

Dayan asks Pardo what the consequences of an Israeli attack on Iran would have been.  Looking directly into her eyes, he tells her it would’ve meant going to war.  That’s why, when Netanyahu ordered Israeli military forces into war readiness employing a code-named “P + 15” (fifteen days to commencement of hostilities), Pardo approached the government’s chief legal advisor and asked whether the prime minister could declare war in such a fashion without a full cabinet debate.  Later, there was such an internal debate and the IDF chief of staff joined with Pardo and the Shin Bet chief to oppose the war option.  Their views carried the day and Israel didn’t attack.

For the first time, Israel’s top spy tells Dayan that had he failed, rather than lead the Mossad into a war against Iran, he would have resigned.  Of course, it’s easy for such figures to assume a golden halo after the fact.  It’s harder to know what he would’ve done had the situation turned out for the worst.  But at least he asserts clearly that he would have refused his boss’ order to undertake what he perceived as an illegal war against Iran.

In looking back on that time, Israel’s top spy says that when he heard P+ invoked he understood there were two possible meanings: first, that Israel was truly on the path to war; and second, that declaring the intention of going to war was meant to signal Israel’s resolve to take the Iran issue to its ultimate bloody conclusion.  In other words, the exercise conveyed urgency to the Americans and forced them to consider Israel’s interests more fully while negotiating the nuclear deal.

It goes without saying that this is a highly dangerous enterprise.  Once one side in such a conflict adopts a military posture preparing for war, the other side is obligated to do the same.  At that point, the least spark can commence a conflict that neither side may actually want.  This is how World War I and a number of other bloody wars commenced.  But it does accord with Bibi Netanyahu’s reckless disregard for the conventional restraints most nation adopt to prevent such a catastrophe.  Luckily for Israel, there was no such spark and war was averted—that time.

However, given that the Israeli leader now has a like-minded reckless U.S president at the helm of U.S. foreign policy, all bets are off as to whether Israel may yet attack Iran either alone, or in tandem with the U.S. and its new Sunni allies, including Saudi Arabia.

The most important lesson to learn from the Pardo interview is that Israel’s strategy to deny Iran a nuclear weapon failed.  Despite the Mossad’s best efforts, its former director concedes publicly that its enemy’s capabilities were not significantly degraded.  That leaves only one other option, the one which has succeeded thus far (until Trump abandoned it), the JCPOA nuclear agreement.  The one which is currently most endangered by the reckless disregard of both Netanyahu and Trump.

NOTE: Iran has denied any intention to build nuclear weapons, is a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and is in compliance with the JCPOA according to the IAEA.  The above article largely conveys the views of Tamir Pardo and the Israeli intelligence community, which are often at odds with the international consensus regarding the Iranian efforts.

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I riflettori politico-mediatici, focalizzati sui flussi migratori Sud-Nord attraverso il Mediterraneo, lasciano in ombra altri flussi: quelli Nord-Sud di forze militari e armi attraverso il Mediterraneo. Anzi attraverso il «Mediterraneo allargato», area che, nel quadro della strategia Usa/Nato, si estende dall’Atlantico al Mar Nero e, a sud, fino al Golfo Persico e all’Oceano Indiano.

Nell’incontro col segretario della Nato Stoltenberg a Roma,  il premier Conte ha sottolineato la «centralitàdel Mediterraneo allargato per la sicurezza europea», minacciata dall’«arco di instabilità dal Mediterraneo al Medio Oriente». Da qui l’importanza della Nato, alleanza sotto comando Usa che Conte definisce «pilastro della sicurezza interna e internazionale». Completo stravolgimento della realtà.

È stata fondamentalmente la strategia Usa/Nato a provocare «l’arco di instabilità»con le due guerre contro l’Iraq, le altre due guerre che hanno demolito gli Stati jugoslavo e libico, e quella per demolire lo Stato siriano. L’Italia, che ha partecipato a tutte queste guerre, secondo Conte svolge «un ruolo chiave per la sicurezza e stabilità del fianco sud della Alleanza».

In che modo, lo si capisce da ciò che i media nascondono. La nave Trenton della U.S. Navy, che ha raccolto 42 profughi (autorizzati a sbarcare in Italia a differenza di quelli dell’Aquarius), non è di stanza in Sicilia per svolgere azioni umanitarie nel Mediterraneo: è una unità veloce (fino a 80 km/h), capace di sbarcare in poche ore sulle coste nord-africane un corpo di spedizione di 400 uomini e relativi mezzi. Forze speciali Usa operano in Libia per addestrare e guidare formazioni armate alleate, mentre droni armati Usa,decollando da Sigonella, colpiscono obiettivi in Libia. Tra poco, ha annunciato Stoltenberg, opereranno da Sigonella anche droni Nato. Essi integreranno l’«Hub di direzione strategica Nato per il Sud», centro di intelligence per operazioni militari in Medioriente, Nordafrica, Sahel e Africa subsahariana.

L’Hub, che diverrà operativo in luglio, ha sede a Lago Patria, presso il Comando della forza congiunta Nato (Jfc Naples), agli ordini di un ammiraglio statunitense – attualmente James Foggo –  che comanda anche le Forze navali Usa in Europa (con quartier generale a Napoli-Capodichino ela Sesta Flotta di stanza a Gaeta) e le Forze navali Usa per l’Africa. Tali forze sono state integrate dalla portaerei Harry S. Truman, entrata due mesi fa nel Mediterraneo con il suo gruppo d’attacco.

Il 10 giugno, mentre l’attenzione mediatica si concentrava sulla Aquarius, la flotta Usa con a bordo oltre 8000 uomini, armata di 90 caccia e oltre 1000 missili, veniva schierata nel Mediterraneo orientale, pronta a colpire in Siria e Iraq. Negli stessi giorni, il 12-13 giugno, faceva scalo a Livorno la Liberty Pride, una delle navi militarizzate Usa, imbarcando sui suoi 12 ponti un altro carico di armi che, dalla base Usa di Camp Darby, vengono inviate mensilmente in Giordania e Arabia Saudita per le guerre in Siria e nello Yemen.

Si alimentano così le guerre che, unite ai meccanismi neocoloniali di sfruttamento, provocano impoverimento e sradicamento di popolazioni. Aumentano di conseguenza i flussi migratori in condizioni drammatiche, che provocano vittime e nuove forme di schiavitù. «Sembra che essere duri sull’immigrazione ora paghi», commenta il presidente Trump riferendosi alle misure decise non solo da Salvini ma dall’intero governo italiano, il cui premier viene definito «fantastico».

Giusto riconoscimento da parte degli Stati uniti, che nel programma di governo sono definiti «alleato privilegiato»dell’Italia.

Manlio Dinucci

“The Trump experience has plunged corporate ideology and war rationales into disarray.”

Donald Trump, the arch racist usurper of the Republican Party, is tearing the ruling class consensus to shreds, inflicting bigger shocks to the imperial system by accident, impulse and ignorance than any conceivable “progressive” elected U.S. president could achieve on purpose. In the space of a few weeks, Trump has 1) threatened to disrupt corporate global supply chains through his in-out stance  on NAFTA; 2) forced Washington’s European junior imperial partners to reconsider their subservience to U.S. foreign policy and their vulnerability to U.S.-controlled financial institutions in the wake of Trump’s rejection of the Iran deal and his tirades at the G7 summit in Canada; and 3) discarded 70 years of Uncle Sam’s “Comply or Die” dictum towards North Korea, thus consigning the whole “axis of evil” designation to the dustbin.

Trump is not causing chaos in the imperial Big House because he wants to hasten the demise of U.S. imperialism. He is an intellectually and emotionally retarded spawn of super-privilege trying to stamp his orange imprint on history — “Trump did this, and it was the greatest thing ever!” — like the big “T” on the those buildings he doesn’t actually own. The man, literally, knows not what he does — and, therefore, cannot be counted on to repeat himself, or to follow through on any action with logic and consistency, for good or ill. However, the net effect of Trump’s crazed foreign policy has been to raise urgent questions, among foreign elites and general populations alike, of U.S. fitness for global hegemony. Trump’s behavior could deliver a coup de grace to an already severely frayed global capitalist consensus on U.S. world leadership, significantly weakening the potency of U.S. imperialism — even as Trump aligns more closely with the Israeli apartheid state and the Gulf monarchies and conspires to force regime change in Venezuela.

“The net effect of Trump’s crazed foreign policy has been to raise urgent questions of U.S. fitness for global hegemony.”

Domestically, the Trump experience has plunged corporate ideology and war rationales into disarray, even as his administration (with Democratic help) has delivered the biggest corporate tax windfalls and military budgets ever.

Contradictions abound — but, of course, the accumulation of contradictions is what ultimately erodes the whole edifice. Donald Trump, incapable of perceiving beyond surface appearances, thinks a “strong” foreign policy means blood-curdling threats. So he threatens North Korea with “fire and fury.” When Kim Jong-un comes to the table with his South Korean partner, as they collaborated to do, Trump believes his threat has worked, and that the U.S. acted from strength. And then he agrees to “leave the past behind” and to enter what will become years-long negotiations on “denuclearization,” with “security guarantees” for the North, while immediately halting U.S.-South Korean military exercises that Trump called “provocative.” Trump looks forward to an eventual withdrawal of troops from the South. “At some point I hope it will be, but it’s not right now.”

If the leader of North Korea — the original “pariah” state demonized and placed beyond the pale of U.S.-decreed legitimacy — is now just another negotiating partner, and U.S. troop withdrawal from the South is a principled goal, then the “axis of evil” era is over and the rationale for U.S. troops and bases virtually everywhere in the world collapses — as is well understood by U.S. imperial strategists, who are in deep distress.

“Trump’s behavior could deliver a coup de grace to an already severely frayed global capitalist consensus on U.S. world leadership.”

So are the Democrats. Since Trump won the GOP nomination, they have become overt partisans of the War Party. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, a former co-chair of the Progressive Caucus, sounded like some cracker mistress in the Big House, carping  that Trump had “elevated North Korea to the level of the United States while preserving the regime’s status quo.” Pelosi showed her racist, imperialist inner core, recoiling at the very idea of equality among nations and peoples, and condemning Trump for appearing to abandon the goal of regime change in the North. (See Ajamu Baraka, “The Democrats Out-Right the Right on North Korean Summit.”)

Pelosi and her House minions have long voted to fund Republican and Democratic wars, while pretending to be peaceniks. Trump’s capture of the GOP presidential nomination drew them out of the closet, in full armored gear, screaming “Russia, Russia, Russia” like banshees — a clear indication of crisis among the Democrats’ ruling class masters.

“If the leader of North Korea is now just another negotiating partner, and U.S. troop withdrawal from the South is a principled goal, then the ‘axis of evil’ era is over.”

Trump campaigned in 2016 for normal relations with Russia, an end to the U.S. regime change offensive, and opposition to so-called “free” trade, thus uniting most of the ruling class against him. It turned out that Trump’s wholly unexpected appeal for peaceful relations with Russia did not deter huge majorities of Republicans from voting for him in the primaries and the general election. The political conclusion was inescapable: If white Republicans were not wedded to the permanent war agenda — or cared more about maintaining white supremacy at home than funding endless hostilities abroad — then where was the mass constituency for the bipartisan War Party? If Trump’s “deplorables” weren’t wedded to the War Party, then who was?

Trump’s surprise election threw the bulk of the elite, the corporate media, the military-industrial complex, and the spooks of the intelligence agencies, into panic, as they confronted a crisis of legitimacy for the Warfare State. Now firmly aligned with Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, their response was to pre-empt Trump’s threatened rapprochement with Russia with a massive anti-Putin campaign. The elites realized they had to recreate — on the fly, with no factual basis — a war fervor that no longer existed among the masses of people, through Russiagate. In the chaotic process, they have further delegitimized virtually every U.S. institution, all the while putting the onus for the damage on the Vladimir Putin.

“If Trump’s “deplorables” weren’t wedded to the War Party, then who was?”

(They have even made the term “oligarchs” a household word — one that can just as easily be applied to the U.S. ruling class as to Putin’s rich friends in Russia. In the long term, this is not a good thing for rich capitalists, as a class.)

Trump has vacillated on “free trade,” speaking out of whichever side of his mouth works quicker. But his ambivalence and profound ignorance have put the NAFTA negotiations in total disarray. According the New York Times , Trump sent “a 24-year-old deputy to meet with a delegation that was expected to include representatives from more than 50 of the largest American companies and organizations, including Walmart, U.P.S., the Walt Disney Company, General Electric, General Motors, Caterpillar and Boeing” — the titans of industry to whom both corporate parties pay homage, but whom Trump is disrespecting, big time. Corporate supply chains affecting trillions of dollars and millions of (mostly Global South, super-exploitive) jobs hang in the balance. The National Association of Manufactures, whose pronouncements were gospel to Republicans and most Democrats in previous eras, can’t make a NAFTA wheel turn in Trump’s administration. Much more crucially, the advent of Trump has revealed the stark reality that there is no mass base for “free trade”— a euphemism for allowing the ruling class to do whatever they want with their money and everyone’s jobs. Support for “free trade” is an illusion conjured by the two corporate parties, who are writhing in a crisis of legitimacy.

“The National Association of Manufactures can’t make a NAFTA wheel turn in Trump’s administration.”

But such crises don’t bring down the system, on their own. Only a people’s movement can do that.

The real crisis for the War Party arrives when masses of people show up in the streets to demand an end to the Permanent Warfare State.

The real crisis for the Black Mass Incarceration State arrives when the targeted population no longer recognizes the legitimacy of the police, and moves to resist and replace the cops with their own security forces.

The real crisis for the Lords of Capital arrives when the people demand nationalization of the banks and the permanent dethroning of finance capital, the actual ruling class.

Trump, of course, wants none of that. But, under his presidency, the contradictions of late stage imperial capitalism are becoming both much more intense, and more obvious to folks on the ground. And that’s scaring the hell out of the ruling class — which will make them a lot meaner.

*

Glen Ford is executive editor of BAR. He can be contacted at [email protected].

One of the biggest corruption cases faced by the oil industry in recent years is due to resume in Milan on Wednesday as two of the world’s biggest oil companies Royal Dutch Shell and Italian firm Eni are facing trial.

Prosecutors are bringing criminal charges against Shell and Eni executives over allegations of corruption regarding a $1.3 billion oil deal in Nigeria.

This is the first time an oil company as large as Shell or senior executives of a major oil company have ever stood trial for bribery offences.

The case, which has been repeatedly delayed, involves the 2011 purchase by Shell and Eni of Nigeria’s OPL 245 offshore oilfield — one of Africa’s most valuable oil blocks.

Prosecutors in Milan have accused Shell and Eni of paying bribes to win the licence to explore the field which has never entered into production.

They allege that Shell and Eni paid $1.1 billion into an account for the Nigeria government of which $800 million was later transferred to Malabu Oil and Gas, a company secretly owned by former Nigerian petroleum minister and convicted money launderer Dan Etete, to be distributed as payoffs.

The $800 million payment was wired through London by bank JP Morgan Chase. A lawsuit accusing JP Morgan of negligence against the transfer has been filed against the bank in Nigeria.

According to court documents seen by Reuters, the bank admitted it knew Etete would benefit from the $800 million payment. It also argued the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency (now the National Crime Agency) approved the payment.

JP Morgan denied negligence and previously said it “considers the allegations made in the claim to be unsubstantiated and without merit”.

Prosecutors in Milan have also alleged that $520 million from the deal was converted into cash and intended to be paid to the then Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, members of the government and other Nigerian government officials.

They claimed $50 million in cash was also delivered to the home of Eni executive Roberto Casula.

Charges have been brought against Eni’s chief executive Claudio Descalzi and former chief of exploration and production for Shell Malcolm Brinded. No current Shell officials are facing charges in the case.

Both Shell and Eni have repeatedly denied wrongdoing.

In a statement, Shell said:

“We believe the trial judges will conclude that there is no case against Shell or its former employees. There is no place for bribery or corruption in our company.”

On its website, Eni said:

“Eni’s Board of Directors has reaffirmed its confidence that the company was not involved in alleged corrupt activities in relation to the transaction.The board of directors also confirmed its full confidence that chief executive Claudio Descalzi was not involved in the alleged illegal conduct and, more broadly, in his role as head of the company.”

The case is likely to shed some light on the murky dealings of international oil companies to access resources, including paying governments large sums of money in exchange of securing licensing rights.

Barnaby Pace, from NGO Global Witness, said the trial could be “a turning point” for the oil industry.

He said:

“Some of the most senior executives of two of the biggest companies in the world could face prison sentences for a deal struck under their watch. Shell has recently accused one of these former executives of taking kickbacks in a separate Nigerian deal. How long before Shell cracks over this case too?”

The case also highlights the role played by London in facilitating the transfer of money from oil companies to government officials.

Earlier this year, a special investigation by DeSmog UK revealed how small oil and gas companies are using London’s junior stock market, the Alternative Investment Market (AIM), to finance sometimes unsavoury business activities in frontier markets across Africa.

DeSmog UK’s Empire Oil investigation used the example of Sirius Petroleum, a small oil investment company listed on AIM and operating in the Niger Delta to shed some light on the exchange’s regulatory flaws and the City’s enabling role.

Talking about the Shell and Eni trial, Chairman of Nigerian NGO Human and Environmental Development Agenda, Lanre Suraju, said:

“It is a clear signal that it is no longer business as usual for oil companies in Nigeria. It’s time justice was served.”

“This case heralds the dawning of the age of accountability, a world where even the most powerful corporations can no longer hide their wrongdoing and avoid justice,” said Antonio Tricarico, from Italian anti-corruption NGO Re:Common.

DeSmog UK previously revealed how UK ministers agreed to lobby the Nigerian Government to protect Shell’s oil interests in the Niger Delta despite the company’s poor human rights and environmental record in the region.

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Featured image is from Lommer/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0.

As one might expect of any event starring Donald Trump, reaction to the Trump-Kim summit in Singapore has been polarized. Republicans—the same people who condemned Barack Obama for visiting Cuba and John Kerry for meeting with Iranian leaders—defended Trump’s meeting with Kim Jong-un.

“The way I look at it is when you’re talking, you’re not fighting,” said Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican of Texas. “And I think in the interest of everybody involved, that avoiding military conflict is really important if we can — because obviously a lot of innocent people would die in the process.”

Meanwhile many Democrats accused Trump of making the United States look weak.

These reversals in party rhetoric were not the most striking aspect of summit commentary, however. Post-meeting criticisms from pundits, politicians, and experts were of two kinds. The first was perfectly reasonable; the second should trouble anyone with a genuine interest in arms control.

The first kind of criticism was that, Trump’s inflated rhetoric notwithstanding, the summit was actually a great big nothing burger. As national security columnist Max Boot put it in the Washington Post,

“The Singapore summit was a mesmerizing spectacle utterly lacking in substance. In other words, it was a perfect microcosm of the Trump presidency…The meeting really should have been held in Oakland, not Singapore, because there is no there there.” (In case you missed the literary allusion, Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland, California, that “there’s no there there.”)

Nicholas Kristof, writing in the New York Times, levelled a similar criticism in more measured prose:

“The most remarkable aspect of the joint statement was what it didn’t contain. There was nothing about North Korea freezing plutonium and uranium programs, nothing about destroying intercontinental ballistic missiles, nothing about allowing inspectors to return to nuclear sites, nothing about North Korea making a full declaration of its nuclear program, nothing about a timetable, nothing about verification, not even any clear pledge to permanently halt testing of nuclear weapons or long-range missiles.”

Fair enough. The summit was more showbiz than arms control. It was not preceded, as would usually be the case, by months of painstaking, lawyerly negotiations between deputies to hammer out areas of agreement and disagreement, the latter to be resolved (if possible) by the two national leaders. Instead, it was largely a good-natured get-acquainted chat between two heads of state, accompanied by displays of mutual respect and followed by extravagant statements about denuclearization that are largely aspirational. Still, given that the two leaders in question were, just a few months ago, threatening to attack each other with weapons of mass destruction, this is clearly progress, even if it falls far short of an actual arms control agreement.

But it is the second kind of criticism that should really worry us. Here are some examples:

Sen. Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, said as the summit was beginning that

“North Korea has already extracted concessions” in the form of Kim’s “long-sought legitimacy and acceptance on the global stage.”

Alison Evans, a North Korea expert and risk consultant, said the

final communique “implicitly recognizes North Korea as a de facto nuclear weapons state,” and “this lends North Korea, and specifically Kim, legitimacy at home and abroad.”

Boot, meanwhile, also wrote that

“Kim won an invaluable propaganda windfall: Ruling one of the poorest and most despotic countries in the world (North Korea’s gross domestic product is smaller than Vermont’s), he was recognized as an equal by the leader of the world’s sole superpower.”

Anne Applebaum, another Washington Post pundit, wrote that

“For Kim Jong Un, this moment is vindication. The wisdom of his nuclear policy has been confirmed: His tiny, poor, often hungry country, where hundreds of thousands have perished in concentration camps that differ little from those built by Stalin, has been treated as the equal of the United States of America.”

And the New York Times editorial board opined that

“Mr. Kim’s wins were obvious. He got what his father and grandfather never did—a meeting with an American president, the legitimacy of being treated as an equal as a nuclear power on the world stage, country flags standing side by side.”

Such comments are, for a start, myopic. They make it sound as if the summit was a zero-sum prestige contest in which North Korea walked off with all the prize money. But the footage of the two smiling leaders represents a liability as well as a win for Kim. It may show that he is a player on the world stage, but for a regime that has built its legitimacy over decades around the notion that Americans are evil devils who cannot be trusted, such images also pose a danger. If Americans can be partners after all, what gives legitimacy to the hermit state and the iron-fisted discipline with which the Kim family has ruled? Remember: the Soviet regime was undone by glasnost, not decades of nuclear saber-rattling.

More to the point, criticisms of Trump for legitimizing Kim sound more like the complaints of old-money WASPS upset that nouveau riche people of color want to join their golf club than the statements of people seriously trying to solve the problems of nuclear proliferation or imminent war on the Korean Peninsula. They bring to mind comments made by American officials in response to nuclear tests by India and Pakistan in 1998. At that time, Secretary of State Madeline Albright said,

“it was clear that what the Indians and Pakistanis did was unacceptable, and that they are not now members of the nuclear club.” (If the tests showed anything, it was that, like it or not, India and Pakistan were indeed “members of the nuclear club.”)

Meanwhile former national security advisor Robert McFarlane wrote,

“we must make clear to the Indian government that it is today what it was two weeks ago: an arrogant, overreaching cabal that, by its devotion to the caste system, the political and cultural disenfranchisement of its people and its religious intolerance, is unworthy of membership in any club.”

Underlying such comments is a snotty assumption that nations are hierarchically ranked, that the United States is at the top of this hierarchy, and that it is beneath the dignity of the American president to be seen talking to certain kinds of people. From this perspective, maintaining status differentials is more important than avoiding nuclear war. For once, Trump got it right when he responded to a Time reporter who gave him a hard time for “a video that showed you and Kim Jong Un on equal footing.” He said,

“If I have to say I’m sitting on a stage with Chairman Kim and that gets us to save 30 million lives—it could be more than that—I’m willing to sit on a stage, I’m willing to travel to Singapore, very proudly.”

To state the obvious: with 10 to 20 nuclear weapons, North Korea is, whether we like it or not, now a member of the nuclear club. Any diplomatic strategy that treats North Korea the way it was 20 years ago, the way the United States wishes it still were, is an exercise in futility—unless the whole point is to put North Korea in what is no longer its place. American national security experts like to talk about being “realists.” It is not realistic to treat North Korea as if its nuclear weapons make no difference to its status.

National Security Advisor John Bolton wanted to treat North Korea like an unruly child, and the story the US media underplayed this week is that the Trump-Kim summit represented a stunning defeat for Bolton, who had done everything in his power to sabotage the summit and enshrine either regime change or unilateral surrender of nuclear weapons as the principal US goal in North Korea. Maybe there will be another reversal of fortune in the epic struggle between Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Bolton to dominate US policy toward Pyongyang, but for now, US and North Korean officials are talking for the first time in two decades. As Winston Churchill famously said, “to jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.”

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Hugh Gusterson is a professor of anthropology and international affairs at George Washington University. His expertise is in nuclear culture, international security, and the anthropology of science. He has written two books on the culture of nuclear weapons scientists and antinuclear activists: Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (University of California Press, 1996) and People of the Bomb: Portraits of America’s Nuclear Complex (University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

Featured image is from the author.

Featured image: Jacob Rees Mogg

There is something not quite right about the biggest cheerleaders for Britain leaving the European Union when they don’t actually believe in it themselves. You would think these individuals would want to reinforce their evangelical preaching with actions that speak louder than words.

A couple of months ago, the driving force behind Ukip Nigel Farage was forced into confirming that two of his children possess British and German passports, meaning they will maintain their free movement rights in the European Union after Brexit. Before that, the Independent reported that last year, Mr Farage was forced to deny he was applying for German citizenship himself after he was spotted queueing at the German embassy.

And, as TruePublica reported three weeks ago, another long-term cheerleader and central figure to the ‘Leave’ campaign was Nigel Lawson. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1983-89 who said in a speech that:

“Most of the world is not in the EU and … most of these countries are doing better economically than most of the European Union’. The alternative to membership of the EU is simple – it is ‘not being in the European Union.”

Firm in the belief that he was right all along until recently that is – Lawson has now applied for residency in …. France. And whilst I’m sure no-one thinks he shouldn’t do so under normal circumstances, we also shouldn’t forget that he was a vociferous campaigner to stop everyone else from having free movement to their favourite holiday spots in Europe. There is only one word for that – hypocrisy.

Another Brexiter planning to jump ship is Andy Wigmore, who helped run Leave.EU alongside Nigel Farage and Arron Banks. He’ll be taking advantage of his Belize citizenship and leaving the UK for the small tropical nation this summer.

Now we come to another, very high profile Brexiteer. Jacob Rees Mogg is the quintessential, traditional British elitist who has all the hallmarks of the 1850s deeply embedded into his DNA.

Born in Hammersmith, Mogg was educated at the Dragon and Eton, and later Trinity College, Oxford, where he became president of the Oxford University Conservative Association.

Having worked for a number of years in finance, he co-founded investment company Somerset Capital Management (SCM), which currently manages an investment fund of around $7.6bn (£5.5bn).

He is married to Helena de Chair, daughter of the late author Somerset de Chair and Lady Juliet Tadgell, who is set to inherit an estimated £45m from her mother. Their combined fortunes would then total something to the order of £100m–£150m.

Mogg entered politics in 1997. While canvassing for the seat in Fife, was driven around in a Mercedes by his nanny.

‘I was going to take my Bentley, but she wisely said that this would be seen as ostentatious and I should take Mummy’s Mercedes instead.’

He was elected MP for North East Somerset in 2010.

You don’t get more (British) elitist (1850s) than that.

However, the Mail on Sunday reported that

“Jacob Rees-Mogg’s investment firm has a stake in a string of Russian companies with links to the Kremlin and to some of Moscow’s wealthiest oligarchs. SCM has also bought shares in two Russian firms blacklisted by the US and others which are controlled by powerful oligarchs in President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.

“These Russian investments are not what you would expect to find in a Rees-Mogg fund,” said Justin Urquhart Stewart, of Seven Investment Management. “As a politician, he has taken a hardline stance on Brexit and on Russia. So to have a fund investing millions in Russian companies goes totally against what he says he stands for. This is hardly a pro-UK fund, as it has no stake in the future prosperity of Britain.”

Ress-Mogg clearly stated in the line of criticism that his SCM fund really only invests in emerging economies, which makes higher risk funds produce higher rewards.

That excuse would be fine if it was true. Hot on the heels of that news comes a report from CityWire’s Wealth Manager where we learn that Moggs SCM investment company is opening up its flagship dividend growth fund to a new audience in, wait for it  …. Europe. This is a Dublin-domiciled feeder fund which has £1.4 billion (€1.6 billion) in assets under management.

First it was the Panmunjom Declaration and now, after some two months, on 12 June the Singapore Joint Declaration was signed, the former between the leaders of the two Koreas, Chairman Kim Jong-un of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) or North Korea and President Moon Jae-in of the Republic of Korea (ROK) or South Korea. The latter, meanwhile, was inked by Donald Trump, the President of the United States, and Kim. The central theme for both is peace for the Korean Peninsula premised on its denuclearization.

Item 3 of the Singapore Declaration was unequivocal:

“Reaffirming the April 27, 2018 Panmunjom Declaration, the DPRK commits towards complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

The continuity between the two declarations then is unmistakeable.

Unfortunately, reasons exist to cast a shadow over this ray of hope. Indeed the Singapore Declaration was much anticipated and is well received. But there is, too, much pessimism. The recent unilateral abandonment of the Iran nuclear agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) by the United States is one. Iran, naturally, advised Kim to be wary. Simply put, Washington’s words are not worth the paper they’re printed on because there have been many previous instances where it reneged on its commitments. For example, one of Trump’s earliest moves was to withdraw from the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), a trade agreement signed and awaiting ratification by the 12 participating Pacific rim countries. NATO’s eastwards expansion towards the Russian border is another case of words betrayed. This was by the administration of Bush senior.

Not unnaturally, when the Singapore Declaration speaks of establishing US-DPRK friendly relations and for both parties to work at building peace for the Korean Peninsula hopes were kept realistic despite Trump’s announcement that US military exercises in South Korea will be suspended for the time being. This surprised even the ROK President. The US therefore, appeared to make good its intentions for peace. North Korea on its part had destroyed its missile test site even while the status of the summit was still uncertain.

However, the devil is in the details, which the Singapore Declaration left vague. Extensive negotiations then are inevitable. If the JCPOA took nine years to achieve could peace for Korea be arrived at faster? And, if the JCPOA is anything to go by could America’s cavalier attitude to peace be a a major spoiler?

The United States foreign policy is one of perpetual war. Where its soldiers are not on the ground, proxy armies are used to destabilise countries, as in Libya and Syria. To then be wholeheartedly optimistic about Korea is difficult, if not impossible especially when NATO military forces are building up along the Russia-Europe border, replete with military exercises which grow in intensity with every passing year.

America’s perpetual war policy is part of its imperial design to establish the so-called New World Order (NWO). Economic and military hostilities towards even superpowers Russia and China is indication of this malevolent inclination. And so, before a peace agreement can be signed and the Korean War well and truly ended the imperative is for a paradigm shift to occur in American foreign policy; one where there is acceptance that American hegemony is resented and a multipolar world is emerging. But no such thing is happening.

Does this mean that a Korean peace can be dismissed off hand as nothing but a pipe dream and the Singapore Declaration more an entrapment strategy than a liberating one? After all, Trump has said that sanctions on the DPRK stays.

But something odd occurred at the Summit. Trump played a 4-minute documentary on the options open to North Korea: a state of perpetual insecurity and war or prosperity through economic cooperation with America. Pyongyang is being placed squarely between a rock and a hard place.

Over the years North Korea has shown its resilience, circumventing American and international sanctions even as the noose tightens with every alleged breach. Rebuilding its cities from the ground up after having been razed to the ground by American bombing during the Korean War testifies to the people’s ingenuity. Reports of a backward, isolated country have proven false with recent visitors extolling its modern cityscapes. With the memories of a devastated country and a population decimated by at least 20 per cent still fresh in the Korean consciousness it is hard, therefore, to factor in an unforced capitulation by Pyongyang.

The Korean Peninsula is a flashpoint. For as long as tens of thousands of American soldiers are stationed in South Korea, North Korea cannot feel safe. But the Panmunjom Declaration demonstrated the two Koreas desire for peace. Yet Seoul does not decide its own security preferences. 

Furthermore, even if Trump had the will can he successfully undermine the deep state which has placed obstacles in his path throughout the 18 months he has been in office? Indeed, the dithering over the Summit could be an indication of him trying to override the neoconservatives in his administration, namely, John Bolton his National Security Advisor and Mike Pompeo, his Secretary of State. But this does not mean that neoconservatives want only war. 

North Korea is reputedly rich in untapped natural resources. Must Pyongyang then surrender its economic sovereignty to Washington before peace is possible for the peninsula? 

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Askiah Adam is Executive Director of International Movement for a JUST World (JUST).

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It appears that the Western public, both relatively ‘educated’ and thoroughly ignorant, could, after some persuasion, agree on certain very basic facts – for instance that Russia has historically been a victim of countless European aggressions, or that countries like Venezuela, Cuba, Iran or North Korea (DPRK) have never in modern history crossed the borders of foreign nations in order to attack, plunder or to overthrow governments.

OK, certainly, it would take some ‘persuasion’, but at least in specific circles of the otherwise hopelessly indoctrinated Western society, certain limited dialogue is still occasionally possible.

China is different. There is no ‘mercy’ for China, in the West. By many standards, the greatest and one of the oldest cultures on Earth, has been systematically smeared, insulted, ridiculed and arrogantly judged by the opinion-makers, propagandists, ‘academia’ and mainstream press with seats in London, New York, Paris and many other places which the West itself calls the centers of ‘erudition’ and ‘freedom of information’.

Anti-Chinese messages are sometimes overt, but mostly thinly veiled. They are almost always racist and based on ignorance. And the horrifying reality is: they work!

They work for many reasons. One of them is that while the North Asians in general, and the Chinese people in particular, have been learning with zeal all about the rest of the world, the West is thoroughly ignorant about almost everything Asian and Chinese.

I personally conducted a series of simple but revealing ‘experiments’ in China, Korea and Japan, as well as in several countries of the West: while almost every North Asian child can easily identify at least a few basic ‘icons’ of Western culture, including Shakespeare and Mozart, most of the European university professors with PhDs could not name one single Korean film director, Chinese classical music composer, or a Japanese poet.

Westerners know nothing about Asia! Not 50% of them, now even 90%, but most likely somewhere in the area of 99.9%.

And it goes without saying, that Korea is producing some of the best art films in the world, while China and Japan are renowned for their exquisite classical art, as well as modern masterpieces.

In the West, the same ignorance extends to Chinese philosophy, its political system and history. In both Europe and North America, there is absolute darkness, withering ignorance, regarding the Chinese vision of the world. In Paris or Berlin, China is being judged exclusively by Western logic, by Western ‘analysts’, with unsurpassable arrogance.

Racism is the only fundamental explanation, although there are many other, secondary reasons for this state of affairs.

Western racism, which used to humiliate, attack and ruin China for centuries, has gradually changed its tactics and strategies. From the openly and colorfully insulting and vulgar, it has steadily evolved into something much more ‘refined’ but consistently manipulative.

The spiteful nature of the Western lexicon of superiority has not disappeared.

In the past, the West used to depict Chinese people as dirty animals. Gradually, it began depicting the Chinese Revolution as animalistic, as well as the entire Chinese system, throwing into the battle against the PRC and the Communist Party of China, such concepts and slogans as “human rights”. 

We are not talking about human rights that could and should be applicable and respected in all parts of the world (like the right to life) protection for all the people of the Planet. That’s because it is clear that the most blatant violators of such rights have been, for many centuries, the Western countries. 

If all humans were to be respected as equal beings, all countries of the West would have to be tried and indicted, then occupied and harshly punished for countless genocides and holocausts committed in the past and present. The charges would be clear: barbarity, theft, torture as well as the slaughter of hundreds of millions of people in Africa, the Middle East, what is now called Latin America, and of course almost everywhere in Asia. Some of the most heinous crimes of the West were committed against China and its people.

The ‘human rights’ concept, which the West is constantly using against China is ‘targeted’. Most of the accusations and ‘facts’ have been taken out of the context of what has been occurring on the global scale (now and in the history). Exclusively, Eurocentric views and ‘analyses’ have been applied. Chinese philosophy and logic have been fully ignored; never taken seriously. No one in the West asks the Chinese people what they really want (only the so-called ‘dissidents’ are allowed to speak through the mass media to the Western public). Such an approach is not supposed to defend or to help anybody; instead it is degrading, designed to cause maximum damage to the most populous country on Earth, to its unique system, and increasingly, to its important global standing.

It is obvious that the Western academia and mass media are funded by hundreds of millions and billions of dollars to censor the mainstream Chinese voices, and to promote dark anticommunist and anti-PRC nihilism.

I know one Irish academic based in North Asia, who used to teach in China. He told me, with pride, that he used to provoke Chinese students:

“Do you know that Mao was a pedophile?”

And he ridiculed those who challenged him and found his discourses distasteful.

But such an approach is quite acceptable for the Western academia based in Asia. Reverse the tables and imagine a Chinese academic who comes to London to teach Chinese language and culture, beginning his classes by asking the students whether they know that Churchill used to have sex with animals? What would happen? Would he get fired right away or at the end of the day?

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The West has no shame, and it is time for the entire world to understand this simple fact.

In the past, I have often compared this situation to some medieval village, attacked and plundered by brigands (The West). Food stores were ransacked, houses burned, women raped and children forced into slavery, then subjected to thorough brainwashing.

Any resistance was crushed, brutally. People were told to spy on each other, to expose “terrorists” and “dangerous elements” in society, in order to protect the occupation regime.

Only two “economic systems” were allowed – feudalism and capitalism.

If the villagers elected a mayor who was ready to defend their interests, the brigands would murder him, unceremoniously. Murder or overthrow him, so there would always be a status quo.

But there had to be some notion of justice, right?

Once in a while, the council of the brigands would catch a thief who had stolen few cucumbers or tomatoes. And they would then brag that they protect the people and the village. While everything had already been burned to ashes by them

Given the history and present of China, given the horrid and genocidal nature of the Western past, ancient and modern, given the fact that China is by all definitions, the most peaceful large nation on Earth, how can anybody in the West even pronounce the words like ‘human rights’, let alone criticize China, Russia, Cuba or any other country that it put on its hit-list?

Of course, China, Russia or Cuba are not “perfect countries” (there are no perfect countries on Earth, and there never will be), but should a thief and mass murderer be allowed to judge anybody?

Obviously yes! It is happening, constantly. 

The West is unapologetic. It is because it is ignorant, thoroughly uninformed about its own past and present deeds, or conditioned to be uninformed. It is also because the West is truly a fundamentalist society, unable to analyze and to compare. It cannot see, anymore.

What is being offered by its politicians and replicated by the servile academia and mass media, is totally twisted.

Almost the entire world is in the same condition as the village that I just described.

But it is China (and also Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, Iran, and other nations) that is being portrayed as villains and tormentors of the people. Black becomes white. War is peace. Slavery is freedom. A mass rapist is a peacemaker and a cop.

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Once again: The West hates China. Let us be totally honest.

China has to understand it, and act accordingly. Sooner rather than later.

As we have already determined, the hatred towards China is irrational, illogical, purely racist; mainly based to the superiority complex of Western “thinkers”. 

But also, it is based on the subconscious fear of the Westerners that Chinese culture and its socialist system (with all its ‘imperfections’) are greatly superior to the culture of terror and thuggery spread throughout our Planet by both Europeans and then North Americans.

Several years ago, I was interviewed by various Chinese media outlets, including the legendary People’s Daily, China Radio International and CCTV (now CGTN).

They all wanted to know why, despite all those great efforts of China to befriend the world, there is so much Sino phobia in Western countries. I had to face the same question, again and again:

“What else could we do? We tried everything… What else?”

Because of its tremendous hereditary optimism, the Chinese nation could not grasp one simple but essential fact: the more China does for the world, the less aggressively it behaves, the more it will be hated and demonized in the West. It is precisely because China is, unlike the West, trying to improve the lives of the entire planet Earth, that it will never be left in peace, it will never be prized, admired or learned from in such places like London, Paris or New York.

I replied to those who were interviewing me:

“They hate you, therefore you are doing something right!”

My answer, perhaps, sounded too cynical to the Chinese people. However, I wasn’t trying to be cynical. I was just trying to answer, honestly, a question about the psyche of Western culture, which has already murdered hundreds of millions of human beings, worldwide. It was, after all, the greatest European psychologist of all time, Carl Gustav Jung, who diagnosed Western culture as “pathology”.

But Who Really Hates China and How Much?

But let’s get numbers: who hates China and how much? Mainly, the Westerners – Europeans and North Americans. And Japan, which actually murdered tens of millions of Chinese people, plus China’s main regional rival, Vietnam.

Only 13% of the Japanese see China favorably, according to a Pew Research Center Poll conducted in 2017. 83% of the Japanese, a country which is the main ally of the West in Asia, see China “unfavorably”. In Italy which is hysterically anti-Chinese and scandalously racist at that, the ratio is 31% favorably, 59% unfavorably. Shocking? Of course, it is. But Germany does not fare much better, with 34% – 53%. The United States – 44% – 47%. France 44% – 52%. Entire half of Spanish nation sees China unfavorably – 43% – 43%.

Now something really shocking: the “rest of the world”. The numbers are totally the opposite! South Africa: 45% see China favorably, 32% unfavorably. Argentina 41% – 26%. Even the Philippines which is being pushed constantly by the West into confrontation with China: 55% favorably – 40% unfavorably. Indonesia that perpetrated several anti-Chinese pogroms and even banned the Chinese language after the US-sponsored coup in 1965: 55% favorably – 36% unfavorably. Mexico 43% – 23%. Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela: 52% – 29%. Chile 51% – 28%.

Then it gets even more interesting: Lebanon: 63% – 33%. Kenya: 54% – 21%. Brazil 52% – 25%. Tunisia 63% – 22%. Russia: 70% – 24%. Tanzania 63% – 15%. Senegal 64% – 10%. And the most populous country in Sub Saharan Africa, Nigeria – 72% – 13%.

The 2017 BBC World Service poll, Views of China’s influence by country, gives even more shocking results:

At the two extremes, in Spain, only 15% see China’s influence as positive, while 68% see it as negative. In Nigeria, 83% as positive and only 9% as negative.

Now, think for a while what these numbers really say.

Who is really benefiting from China’s growing importance on the world scene? Of course – the wretched of the Earth; the majority of our Planet! Who are those who are trying to stop China from helping the colonized and oppressed people? The old and new colonialist powers!

China is predominantly hated by Western imperialist countries (and by their client states, like Japan and South Korea), while it is loved by the Africans), most Asians and Latin Americans, as well as Russians.

Tell an African what is being said to the Europeans – about the negative or even “neo-imperialist”, influence of China on the African continent – and he or she will die laughing.

Just before submitting this essay, I received a comment from Kenya, from my comrade Booker Ngesa Omole, National Organizing Secretary, SDP-Kenya (Socialist):

“The relationship of China and Kenya particularly and Africa generally has not only led to tremendous development both in infrastructure but also a genuine cultural exchange among the Chinese and African people, it has also made African people understand the Chinese people firsthand, away from the daily half-truths and lies generated against China and the Chinese people and transmitted en masse globally through the lie factories like CNN. It’s has also shown that there is a different way to relate to the so called development partners and the international capital, the Chinese have developed a policy of non-interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign country as opposed to USA and Western Countries through IMF and World Bank who have imposed destructive policies on the continent that has led to the suffering and death of many African people, like that infamous Structural Adjustment Plan, that was a killer plan, after its implementation Kenyans unemployment skyrocketed, our country also became bankrupt. 

Another comparison is the speed at which the projects are done, in the past we had a gruesome bureaucratic expensive process, which could take several years before any work could start on the ground. This has changed with the coming in of Chinese capital, we see the projects are being effected just in time, we see very high quality work contrary to what the western media want to portray that everything from China and Russia are fake before arrival.”

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The Chinese system (Communism or socialism with Chinese characteristics), is in its essence truly internationalist. 

As Chairman Mao Tse Tung wrote in his “Patriotism and Internationalism”:

“Can a Communist, who is an internationalist, at the same time be a patriot? We hold that he not only can be but also must be… The victory of China and defeat of the invading imperialists will help the people of other countries…”

Chairman Mao wrote this during the China’s liberation struggle against Japanese invaders. However, not much has really changed since then.

China is definitely willing and capable of putting much of the world devastated by Western imperialism, back onto its feet. It is big enough to do it, it is strong enough, it is determined and full of optimism.

The West produces, directly manufactures, crises and confrontations, like the one that took place in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, or the one that never really managed to ‘take off’ (mainly due to the disgust of the majority of the local people with the selfish and pro-Western protesters) in Hong Kong, in 2014.

However, those Western implants and proxies are all that most Europeans and North Americans know about China (PRC): ‘Human Rights’, Falun Gong, Tibet, Dalai Lama, ‘Northwest of the Country’ (here, they don’t remember, or cannot pronounce the names, but they were told in the mainstream Western media that China is doing ‘something sinister’ there, so that’s what they are repeating), Tiananmen Square, Ai Wei-Wei and few other disconnected barks, ‘events’, and names.

This is how this colossus with thousands of years of history, culture and philosophy, is perceived, judged, and how it is (mis-) understood.

The entire situation would be laughable, if it were not so tragic, so thoroughly appalling and dangerous.

It is becoming clear who really hates China: it is not the “world”, and it is not those countries on all the continents that have been brutalized and enslaved by the Western imperialists. There, China is loved. 

Those who hate China are the nations which are not ready to let go of their de facto colonies. The nations who are used to a good, too good and too easy life at the expense of others. To them, historically egalitarian and now for many decades socialist/Communist (with Chinese characteristics) China poses a truly great threat. Threat – not to their survival or peaceful existence, but threat to their looting and raping of the world.

China’s internationalist attitude towards the world, its egalitarianism and humanism, its emphasis on hard work and the tremendous optimism of its people, may soon, very soon, break the horrid inertia and the lethargy injected by Europe and the United States into the veins of all raped, plundered and humiliated nations. 

China Has Already Suffered Enough!

In his ground-breaking book “China Is Communist, Damn It!”, a prominent China expert, Jeff Brown (who is presently based in Shenzhen) writes about the dehumanizing treatment, which the Chinese people had been receiving from Westerners, for centuries:

“…untold numbers in the 19^th century… were pressganged and kidnapped, to be sent to the New World to work as coolie slaves.

The racism conducted on these Chinese coolies was instructive. On the ocean voyage from China to Vancouver, Canada, they were tightly packed and kept in dark, poorly ventilated holds for the three-week trip, so they would not have any contact with the Whites traveling aboveboard. No sunlight, no fresh air. The crew on the ships routinely talked about these Chinese allies in terms of “livestock” and they were handled and treated as such. Actually, they were treated worse than cattle, pigs, sheep and horses, as there are laws that require animals get so much open air and exercise per day, while in transit…

This kind of inhumane treatment of Chinese citizens is dispassionately captured in the diaries of a British officer, charged with overseeing them,

‘As children, we were taught that Cain and Coolies were murderers from the beginning; no Coolie was to be trusted; he was a yellow dog… The task of stowing away Coolies is a tiresome one. In orders, it is alluded to as “embarkation”. By those experienced in the job, it is known more as “packing”. The Coolies are not passengers capable of finding each his cabin. The Coolies are so much cargo, livestock, which has to be packed away. While experiences are ceaselessly pressing upon him, his attitude towards existence is the attitude of a domesticated animal.’

British 2^nd Lieutenant Daryl Klein, from his memoir, “With the Chinks”, spoken like a true Western imperial racist. Of course, chinks is the worst slur word to be used against the Chinese. It’s the equivalent of yellow nigger. The term Coolie is not any better. It’s like calling someone from Latin America a wetback. At least Lt. Klein was honest in his total dehumanization of the Dreaded Other.

There are countless examples of discrimination against, and humiliation of the Chinese people by the Western colonialists, on the territory of China. The Chinese were literally butchered and enslaved in their own territory, by the Westerners and the Japanese.

However, there were also despicable crimes committed against Chinese people on the territory of the United States, including lynching, and other types of killing.

Hard working, many Chinese men were brought as slave laborers to the United States and to Europe, where they were often treated worse than animals. For no other reason but for just being Chinese. No apologies or compensation were ever offered for such acts of barbarity; not even decades and centuries later. Until now, there is a silence surrounding the topic, although one has to wonder whether it is really simple ‘silence’ that grows from ignorance, or whether it is something much more sinister; perhaps defiance and conscious or subconscious refusal to condemn the fruits of Western culture, which are imperialism, racism and consequently – fascism. 

Gwen Sharp, PhD, wrote on June 20, 2014 for Sociological Images in his essay ‘Old “Yellow-Peril” Anti-Chinese Propaganda’:

“Chinese men were stereotyped as degenerate heroin addicts whose presence encouraged prostitution, gambling, and other immoral activities.  A number of cities on the West Coast experienced riots in which Whites attacked Asians and destroyed Chinese sections of town. Riots in Seattle in 1886 resulted in practically the entire Chinese population being rounded up and forcibly sent to San Francisco. Similar situations in other towns encouraged Chinese workers scattered throughout the West to relocate, leading to the growth of Chinatowns in a few larger cities on the West Coast.”

Throughout history, China and its people have suffered at the hands of Westerners, both Europeans and North Americans alike.

According to several academic and other sources, including a publication “History And Headlines” (History: October 9, 1740: Chinezenmoord, The Batavia Massacre):

“On October 9, 1740, Dutch colonial overlords on the Island of Java (now a main island in Indonesia) in the port city of Batavia (now Jakarta, capital of Indonesia) went on a mad killing spree of ethnic cleansing and murdered about 10,000 ethnic Chinese. The Dutch word, “Chinezenmoord,” literally means “Chinese Murder.”

Anti-Chinese massacres were also repeatedly committed by the Spanish occupiers of the Philippines, and there were countless other cases of anti-Chinese ethnic cleansing and massacres committed by the European colonialist administrations, in various parts of the world.

The ransacking of Beijing’s Summer Palace by French and British forces was one of the most atrocious crimes committed by Westerners on the territory of China. An outraged French novelist, Victor Hugo, then wrote:

“We call ourselves civilized and them barbarians. Here is what Civilization has done to Barbarity.”

*

The West cannot treat Chinese people this way, anymore, but if it could get away with it, it definitely still would.

The superiority complex in both Europe and North America is powerful and unapologetic. There is real great danger that if unchecked and unopposed, it may soon terminate all life on our Planet. The final holocaust would be accompanied by self-righteous speeches, unrestrained arrogance, gasping ignorance of the state of the world, and generally no regrets.

Chinese people cannot be beaten on the streets of Europe or North America, anymore; they cannot be, at least theoretically, insulted directly in the face just for being Chinese (although that is still happening).

But there are many different ways to hurt and deeply injure a human being or the country.

My close friend, a brilliant Chinese concert pianist, Yuan Sheng, once told me, right after he left a well-paid teaching position in New York, and moved permanently back to Beijing:

“In the United States, I used to cry late into the night, almost every night… I felt so helpless. Things they were saying about my country… And it was impossible to convince them that they were totally wrong!”

Several years later, at the “First World Cultural Forum” held in Beijing, an Egyptian-French fellow thinker Amin Said argued that we are all victims of capitalism. I strongly disagreed, and confronted him there, in Beijing, and later in Moscow where we spoke, again, side by side.

“Western bigotry, brutality and imperialism are much older than capitalism. I believe that the things are precisely the opposite: Western violent culture is the core of the savage capitalism.”

Recently, while addressing students and teachers at one of old alternative and officially progressive schools in Scandinavia, I finally understood the scope of the creeping anti-Chinese sentiments in Europe.

During my presentation about the global conflicts being fueled by the United States and Europe, the audience was silent and attentive. I spoke at a huge hall, addressing some 2 – 3 hundred people, most of them future educators.

There was some sort of standing ovation. Then questions. Then discussion over coffee. There, precisely then, things got very wrong.

A girl came and with an angelic smiled uttered:

“Sorry, I know nothing about China…. But what about the Northwest of the country?”

The northwest of China is a few times bigger than Scandinavia. Could she be more specific? No, she couldn’t:

“You know, the human rights… Minorities…”

An Italian girl approached me, saying she is studying philosophy. The same line of questions:

“I don’t know much about China, but…”

Then her questions got aggressive:

“What do you mean when you talk about ‘China’s humanism?’”

She was not asking, she was attacking. I snapped at her:

“You don’t want to listen, you simply want to hear yourself repeating what they brainwashed you with.”

One of the organizers of the conference hated my interaction with her spoiled, rude, self-centered and uneducated brats. I could not care less. I told her directly to her face.

“Then why did you accept the invitation to be a keynote speaker?” she asked.

I answered, honestly:

“To study the Europeans, anthropologically. To face your racism and ignorance.”

Next day, the same. I showed my shocking documentary film “Rwanda Gambit”, about how the West created the totally false Rwanda narrative, and how it triggered real genocide, that in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

But all that the audience wanted to discuss was China!

One said:

“I saw a Chinese government company building two sports stadiums in Zambia. Isn’t it strange?”

Really? Strange? The Chinese health system is mainly based on prevention and it is successful. Building stadiums is a crime?

Another one recalled that in West Africa,

“China was planting cashew nuts.”

That was supposed to match centuries of horrors of Western colonialism, the mass murder and slavery of hundreds of millions of Africans at the hands of the Brits, French, Germans, Belgians and others.

At the airport, leaving back for Asia, I wanted to throw up and simultaneously, to shout from joy. I was going home, leaving this brainwashed continent – this intellectual bordello behind.

The West was beyond salvation. It will not stop or repent. 

It can only be stopped, and it has to be stopped. 

*

Jeff Brown in his book “China Is Communist, Damn It!” pointed out one essential difference between the Chinese and Western mindset:

“China and the West could not be more different. Western civilization is founded on Greek philosophy, culture, politics and economy. Ancient Greece was composed of hundreds of relatively small, independent city-states, which on a daily basis, were comparatively isolated from each other. They were separated by water or mountain ranges, ensconced in bays and valleys. Each city-state’s population could usually be counted in the thousands, not millions. There were a number of different dialects, with varying degrees of mutual comprehension, from familiar to total misunderstanding. Contact with each other was based on commerce and trade, grounding Western economy in the precepts of capitalism. The notion of personal agency in the West is founded in this economic system, where farmers, landowners, merchants and craftsmen were able to work and make business decisions individually, between themselves. Each city-state had its own independent government and over the centuries, there were phases of monarchy, oligarchy, tyranny and democracy. Local wars were frequent, to settle disagreements. These battles happened steadily, as ancient Greece’s agricultural production was not abundant, due to poor soils and limited tillable land. When food became scarce with droughts, agricultural trade could be interrupted, due to shortages, thus stoking the need for war, to reclaim the lost purchases of food.

Ancient and modern China could not be more radically different. Life, the economy and development all revolved around a large central government, headed by the emperor. Instead of being based on trade and commerce, China’s economy has always been founded on agricultural production and the harvests were and still are largely sold to the state. Why? Because the government is expected to maintain the Heavenly Mandate, which means making sure that all of the citizens have enough to eat. Therefore, farmers always knew that the grain they grew could very easily end up in another part of China, because of distant droughts. This whole idea of central planning extended to flood control. Communities in one area of China would be tasked to build dams or canals, not to help reduce flood risk for themselves, but for other citizens far away, downstream, all for the collective good.

The idea of independent city-states is anathema in China, as it always signaled a breakdown in the central power’s cohesion and governance, from border to border, leading to warlordism, strife and hunger.” 

Chinese socialist (or call it Communist) system has clearly roots in China’s ancient history.

It is based on sharing and cooperation, on solidarity and harmony.

It is a much more suitable system for humanity, than what the West spread by force to all corners of the world.

When the West succeeds in something, it feels that it has “won”. It drives the banner pole into the earth, gets some fermented drink to celebrate, and feels superior, unique.

China thinks differently: “if our neighbors are doing well and are at peace, then China will prosper too, and will enjoy peace. We can trade, we can visit each other, exchange ideas.”

In the ancient days Chinese ships used to visit Africa, what is now Somalia and Kenya. The ships were huge. In those days, Europe had nothing so enormous at its disposal. Chinese ships were armed against the pirates, but they mainly travelled with scribes, scholars, doctors and researchers.

When they reached the African shore, they made contacts with the locals. They studied each other, exchanged gifts (some Chinese pottery and ceramics are still being found near the island of Lamu).

There was not much common ground between those two cultures, at that time. The Chinese scribes recorded: “This is not yet right time for permanent contact”. They left gifts on the shore, and sailed home. Nobody died. Nobody was “converted”. No one was raped. African land still belonged to Africans. African people were free to do what they chose.

A century or two later, the Westerners arrived…

*

I know China, but even better, I know the world in which China operates.

The more I see, the more I am impressed – I actually want China to be everywhere, and as soon as possible!

I have worked in all the tiny and large nations of Oceania (Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia), except in Niue and Nauru. There, the West divided this gorgeous and once proud part of the world, created bizarre borders, literally forced people to eat shit (dumping animal food in local stores), burdened them with foreign loans and introduced a culture of dependency and destruction (nuclear experiments, and military bases). Due to global warming, RMI, Kiribati and Tuwalu began “sinking” (in reality, the water is rising).

China came, with real internationalist determination. It began doing everything right – planting mangroves, building sport facilities for people in countries where over half of the population has to often live with diabetes. It constructed government buildings, hospitals, schools. The response of the West? They encouraged Taiwan to come, bribe the local governments and to make them recognize Taipei as the capital of an independent country, forcing China to break diplomatic relationships.

In Africa, I saw Chinese people building roads, railroads, even city trams, schools, hospitals, fighting malaria. This continent was only plundered by the West. Europeans and North Americans built nothing there. China did, and still does, miracles. Out of solidarity, out of internationalist principles so clearly defined decades ago by Chairman Mao.

And I don’t really care what the Western propagandists and ideologues think about the Chinese Communist Party, about Mao and about President Xi Jinping. I see results! I see China, huge, compassionate and confident, rising, and with its close allies like Russia, ready to defend the world.

China saved Cuba. The Western “left-wing” intellectuals said nothing about it. I did. I was attacked. Then, Fidel personally confirmed that I was correct.

China helped Venezuela and it helped Syria. Not for profit, but because it was its internationalist duty.

I saw China in action in East Timor, (Timor Leste), a tiny poor country that the West sacrificed, delivering it on a silver platter to the murderous Indonesian dictator Suharto and his military cronies. 30% of the people were brutally massacred. After independence, Australia began robbing the weak new government of the natural gas in a disputed area. China came in, built the energy sector and an excellent modern hospital (public), staffed with top Chinese surgeons (while Cuba sent field doctors).

Afghanistan? After 16 years of monstrous NATO occupation, this once proud and progressive (before the West manufactured terrorist movements there, to fight socialism) country is one of the poorest on Earth. The West built walls, barbed wire fences, military bases and total misery. China? China built a huge modern hospital wing, actually the only decent and functioning public medical facility in the country.

These are just some of many examples that I have been witnessing during my work, all over the world.

When I lived in Africa (I was based in Nairobi for several years), across the floor was a flat housing four Chinese engineers.

While the Westerners in Africa are almost always secretive, snobbish and arrogant, this group of Chinese builders was loud, enthusiastic and always in a great mood. They power-walked downstairs, in the garden, they ate, joked together. They looked like a good old “socialist realism” poster. They were clearly on a mission. They were building, trying to save the continent. And it was so clear how confident they were.

They were building, and I was making documentary films about what the West did to Africa, including my above-mentioned Rwanda Gambit.

It was clear where I stood. It was clear where the Chinese engineers stood. We stood with the people of Africa. Firmly. No matter what the Western propaganda, academia and mass media keep inventing, that is where we stood, and that is where we are standing right now, although geographically far apart. Once comrades, always comrades. And if we fall, that is how we fall – with no regrets, building a much better world.

And the people of Africa, of Oceania, Latin America and increasingly of Asia, are beginning to realize, to understand.

They are learning what The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is. They are learning about “Ecological Civilization”. They are slowly learning that not everyone is the same; that each country has a different culture and goals. They are learning that not everything in life is a lie or for profit. Yes of course, resources are not unlimited and expenses have to be sometimes covered, but there is much more to life than just cold calculations.

The West and its client states cannot understand this. Or they can, but do not want to. As a moral entity, they are finished. They can only fight for their own interests, as their workers in Paris are only fighting for their own benefits; definitely not for the world. 

The West tries to smear everything that is pure and it repeats that “everyone in this world is essentially the same” (a thief).

Their (mainly Western, but also South Korean, Taiwanese, Hong Kong and Japanese) academia is deeply involved. It has already infiltrated the entire world, particularly Asia, including China itself. It teaches young Chinese people that their country is actually not what they think it is! At some point, Chinese students were travelling to the West, in order to study… about China!

North American and European universities are spreading funding and trying to manipulate the best Chinese minds.

In other parts of Asia, again through funding and scholarships, the local academics “get matched” with the anti-Communist and pro-Western counterparts that operate at the universities inside the PRC.

This problem has been, fortunately, identified in the PRC, and the shameless attacks against the Chinese education system are being dealt with.

Mass media and bookstores are not far behind. Anti-Chinese propaganda is everywhere. Anti-Communist propaganda is everywhere.

*

Yet, China is rising. It is rising despite racism, the lies, and fake news.

Socialist, internationalist China is slowly but confidently marching forward, without confronting anyone, without making too much noise about the unfair, aggressive treatment it receives in the West and from countries like Japan.

It appears that its leadership has nerves of steel. Or perhaps those long thousands of years of great culture are simply allowed to speak for themselves.

When a great Dragon flies, you can bark, shout insults, even shoot at it. It is too big, too ancient, too wise and determined: it will not stop, turn back or fall from the sky. And when the people on Earth

 have enough time to observe it in its full glory and in full flight, they may, just finally may understand that the creature is not only mighty, but also tremendously beautiful and kind. 

*

This article was originally published on New Eastern Outlook.

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are his tribute to “The Great October Socialist Revolution” a revolutionary novel “Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter.

Disruption, disturbance, eruption, the words crowning the presidency of Donald J. Trump, who has effectively demonstrated an idea made famous by Nazi doodler of law and political theorist Carl Schmitt: politics is defined, not by identifying with friends in cosy harmony but with enemies in constant tension.

There are many ways that Trump might be seen as a creature of Schmittian reaction.  Alliances may well be lauded as good (the diplomat’s clichés of “eternal friendship”, “special bonds” and the treacly covering that comes with it), but then again, potential adversaries can also be considered in accommodating fashion.  In every enduring friendship between states is a potential enemy in wait, a dormant instinct that, given certain circumstances, might awake.  In every alliance, a potential shift might undermine, if not threaten the national interest.

In short, the current US president likes the bruising, the bullying and the cajoling in the abstract name of US self-interest. Forget the distinctions and the similarities.  There are no values in any shared sense.  There is only his road.

The press conference concluding the summit with Kim Jong-un on Sentosa Island provided the platform for Trump to round on his supposed allies even as he praised Little Rocket Man as his newly made friend, Chairman Kim, no less.  The spectacle was terrifying for groupies of the US empire, those who have praised the virtues of alliances and bonds with Washington as necessary for the Pax Americana.  Before them, the spectacle of US hegemony was being challenged with a brazen confidence. The Chairman seemed to be getting what he wanted, even if it all seemed a touch vague.

As the Kim-Trump show unfolded, the rubble at the G7 seemed to be growing, a sentiment captured by the satirical Borowitz Report in The New Yorker.  The meeting preceding the gathering in Singapore had put many a nose out of joint.  After leaving the Quebec summit, Trump got his fingers busy by tweeting that he had asked US representatives not to endorse the customary joint communiqué from the G7 leaders calling for “free, fair, and mutually beneficial trade” over the devil of protectionism.

The cooling towards Canada’s Justin Trudeau was a case in point, mixed with the usual air of berating condescension and sulkiness.  Much of it had arisen because of a disagreement on whether a sunset clause would find its way into any renegotiated trade agreement between Mexico, Canada and the United States.  Trump’s own version of reality was that negotiators were “pretty close on the sunset provision”.  Trudeau differed on such a reading, wanting nothing of the sort.  The bad blood was taking time to dry.

“Based on Justin’s false statements at his news conference, and the fact that Canada is charging massive Tariffs to our US farmers, workers and companies, I have instructed our US reps not to endorse the Communique as we look at tariffs on automobiles flooding the US market!”

In Singapore itself, Trump wished to add some flesh to the remarks, getting a few jocular asides in.

  “When I got onto the plane,” considered Trump, “I think that Justin probably didn’t know that Air Force One has about 20 televisions, and I see the television.  And he’s giving a news conference about how he will not be pushed around by the United States.  And I say, push him around?  We just shook hands.  It was very friendly.”

Then came that picture, poured over by aroused pundits and eager commentators, showing Trump sitting down like a bemused, bright coloured Buddha, seemingly defiant, with Germany’s Angela Merkel leaning across with grave school teacher disapproval.

“In fact,” he explained, “the picture with Angela Merkel, who I get along with very well, where I’m sitting there like this, that picture was we’re waiting for the document because I wanted to see the final document as changed by the changes that I requested.”

For Trump, the visuals are nigh everything, and this titillates the pundits he lures like starving waifs to a banquet.  Academics are also getting on board, being brought into Trumpland’s sordid undergrowth.

“Critics of President Trump say this is President Trump isolated,” suggested Dan Nexon of Georgetown University on the G7 snap, “so it feeds into the pre-existing narrative.”

But then came the other side, those supporters who considered the show “a sign of American strength, status and position in the dominance hierarchy.”

Others have also fallen for tissue-like substance and liberal readings, suggesting that Trump is seducing those who should know better.

“The symbolic meaning of a 13-second handshake in the visual form is the establishment of a physical and therefore a personal bond between the two leaders,” came the distinctly unscientific observation of political science professor Bruce Miroff.

The G7 meeting did the opposite of the Sentosa Island summit, suggesting a spectacle “of alienation, opposition and even international condemnation of Trump.”

Any amount of time might be spent on such performances, but Trump, for all the displays, remains heartily consistent in what superficially seems to be jolting anarchy.  On the issue of mistrusting, badgering, even punishing allies economically, he has remained true to his word, carrying through attitudes nursed since the 1980s.

“I’d throw a tax on every Mercedes-Benz rolling into this country,” he claimed in his 1990 Playboy interview should he ever become President, “and on all Japanese products, and we’d have wonderful allies again.”

And, prophetically, he promised a Schmitt-inspired attitude: don’t “trust our allies” and “perfect” that “huge military arsenal”.

*

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

The desperate sobbing of 10 Central American children, separated from their parents one day last week by immigration authorities at the border, makes for excruciating listening. Many of them sound like they’re crying so hard, they can barely breathe. They scream “Mami” and “Papá” over and over again, as if those are the only words they know.

The baritone voice of a Border Patrol agent booms above the crying.

“Well, we have an orchestra here,” he jokes. “What’s missing is a conductor.”

Then a distraught but determined 6-year-old Salvadoran girl pleads repeatedly for someone to call her aunt. Just one call, she begs anyone who will listen. She says she’s memorized the phone number, and at one point, rattles it off to a consular representative.

“My mommy says that I’ll go with my aunt,” she whimpers, “and that she’ll come to pick me up there as quickly as possible.”

An audio recording obtained by ProPublica adds real-life sounds of suffering to a contentious policy debate that has so far been short on input from those with the most at stake: immigrant children. More than 2,300 of them have been separated from their parents since April, when the Trump administration launched its “zero tolerance” immigration policy, which calls for prosecuting all people who attempt to illegally enter the country and taking away the children they brought with them. More than 100 of those children are under the age of 4. The children are initially held in warehouses, tents or big box stores that have been converted into Border Patrol detention facilities.

Condemnations of the policy have been swift and sharp, including from some of the administration’s most reliable supporters. It has united religious conservatives and immigrant rights activists, who have said that “zero tolerance” amounts to “zero humanity.” Democratic and Republican members of Congress spoke out against the administration’s enforcement efforts over the weekend. Former first lady Laura Bush called the administration’s practices “cruel” and “immoral,” and likened images of immigrant children being held in kennels to those that came out of Japanese internment camps during World War II. And the American Academy of Pediatrics has said the practice of separating children from their parents can cause the children “irreparable harm.”

Still, the administration had stood by it. President Donald Trump blames Democrats and says his administration is only enforcing laws already on the books, although that’s not true. There are no laws that require children to be separated from their parents, or that call for criminal prosecutions of all undocumented border crossers. Those practices were established by the Trump administration.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has cited passages from the Bible in an attempt to establish religious justification. On Monday, he defended it again saying it was a matter of rule of law,

“We cannot and will not encourage people to bring children by giving them blanket immunity from our laws.”

A Border Patrol spokesman echoed that thought in a written statement.

In recent days, authorities on the border have begun allowing tightly controlled tours of the facilities that are meant to put a humane face on the policy. But cameras are heavily restricted. And the children being held are not allowed to speak to journalists.

The audio obtained by ProPublica breaks that silence. It was recorded last week inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection detention facility. The person who made the recording asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. That person gave the audio to Jennifer Harbury, a well-known civil rights attorney who has lived and worked for four decades in the Rio Grande Valley along the Texas border with Mexico. Harbury provided it to ProPublica. She said the person who recorded it was a client who “heard the children’s weeping and crying, and was devastated by it.”

The person estimated that the children on the recording are between 4 and 10 years old. It appeared that they had been at the detention center for less than 24 hours, so their distress at having been separated from their parents was still raw. Consulate officials tried to comfort them with snacks and toys. But the children were inconsolable.

The child who stood out the most was the 6-year-old Salvadoran girl with a phone number stuck in her head. At the end of the audio, a consular official offers to call the girl’s aunt. ProPublica dialed the number she recited in the audio, and spoke with the aunt about the call.

“It was the hardest moment in my life,” she said. “Imagine getting a call from your 6-year-old niece. She’s crying and begging me to go get her. She says, ‘I promise I’ll behave, but please get me out of here. I’m all alone.’”

The aunt said what made the call even more painful was that there was nothing she could do. She and her 9-year-old daughter are seeking asylum in the United States after immigrating here two years ago for the exact same reasons and on the exact same route as her sister and her niece. They are from a small town called Armenia, about an hour’s drive northwest of the Salvadoran capital, but well within reach of its crippling crime waves. She said gangs were everywhere in El Salvador:

“They’re on the buses. They’re in the banks. They’re in schools. They’re in the police. There’s nowhere for normal people to feel safe.”

She said her niece and sister set out for the United States over a month ago. They paid a smuggler $7,000 to guide them through Guatemala, and Mexico and across the border into the United States. Now, she said, all the risk and investment seem lost.

The aunt said she worried that any attempt to intervene in her niece’s situation would put hers and her daughter’s asylum case at risk, particularly since the Trump administration overturned asylum protections for victims of gang and domestic violence. She said she’s managed to speak to her sister, who has been moved to an immigration detention facility near Port Isabel, Texas. And she keeps in touch with her niece, Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid, by telephone. Mother and daughter, however, have not been able to speak to one another.

The aunt said that Alison has been moved out of the Border Patrol facility to a shelter where she has a real bed. But she said that authorities at the shelter have warned the girl that her mother, 29-year-old Cindy Madrid, might be deported without her.

“I know she’s not an American citizen,” the aunt said of her niece. “But she’s a human being. She’s a child. How can they treat her this way?”

I have been an activist on Long Island since I organized my 8th grade class to write articles in the Westbury Times calling for a new High School. I sang for the Sane Nuclear Policy group in 1960, I organized against the wars in Vietnam, Central America, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yugoslavia; Iraq again…Then there was quiet. Organizing for peace by the 1990s was stymied by the powerful Democratic Party support of Clinton’s wars against Somalia, Chad and Yugoslavia, as well as the Desert Storm/Desert Shield operations both the Bush (pere) and Clinton’s regimes perpetrated against Iraq. Liberals have clung to the Democratic Party and they don’t work for peace; they have long supported all US wars from at least World War I to the present conflicts in Syria, Yemen, and wherever US troops and materiel is deployed.

They promote the demonization of leaders and people, and accuse anyone with a different take on the world of being a conspiracy theorist, a term made up by the CIA, by the way. As former CIA official John Stockwell said:

__ “It is the function of the CIA to keep the world unstable, and to propagandize and teach the American people to hate, so we will let the Establishment spend any amount of money on arms.”

People didn’t want George Bush’s war on Iraq; millions here and around the world in 2003 said no, thronging the streets of New York and Washington opposed to war on Afghanistan and Iraq. Heedless, the Whitehouse and the Pentagon proceeded to murder over one million Iraqis, and to destroy the infrastructure of the most advanced country of the Middle East. For peace activists, things became even more difficult after 9/11. The bourgeois media went into overdrive with the ubiquitous War on Terror,” supporting the “Endless wars” and the coups the Bush, Obama, and Trump regimes perpetrated. The US government targeted Libya, Honduras, Ukraine; wherever they wished… Bombing, occupation and regime change campaigns promoted the geostrategic needs of the ruling class with US government leaders, Democrats and Republicans alike carrying out their instructions.

There were revelations: US General Wesley Clark said he had heard, in 2001, directly from someone in the “the Secretary of Defense’s office”[ detailing] “a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”

The United States military then proceeded to invade or bomb every single one of those countries. Since 9/11 our tax dollars have paid for $5.6 trillion worth of munitions, bombs, guns, planes, ships, tanks, Humvees, missiles…to manufacturers of this deadly equipment, and the bankers who finance these wars. (Source)

It is all war, all the time. Both Democrats and Republicans have threatened wars on North Korea- DPRK: Democratic Republic of Korea, Iran, Russia and China. The Democrats oppose Trump’s peace [and hotel] overtures to the DPRK;last week, Wall Street stocks just sank with the threat of peace. The Apocalyptical Christian Fundamentalists look forward to World War III when they will all fly naked to heaven, leaving the rest of humankind to burn in a Hell on Earth.

For those of us who don’t find that prospect wonderful, there needs to be a reckoning, a reorganization, what Martin Luther King Jr. called, in a speech exactly one year before his death,

“A time comes when silence is betrayal.”

It is important to remember what Dr. King said as it is a perfect analysis and advice for us fifty years after his assassination.

Dr. King said people,

“do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought.”

He spoke of the war in Vietnam and said, when

“came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched [the War on Poverty] program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”

Dr. King said then,

“I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.”

What did Martin Luther King Jr. say that was not true? And though we have been inundated with fear of terrorists in our country and around the world, in fact the United States is now even MORE the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” The greatest terrorist.

Now, I am an historian. I have taught history of the US for 53 years. And one of the most important things I have tried to do is to expose the truth about the US history. Because children here are raised on that US “exceptionalism,” which makes Columbus a hero, though he killed most of the five million Taino/Arawak people of the Caribbean islands. US Social Studies texts and teachers revere the colonists who made war on the indigenous people, and the slaveholders who were our first presidents: The “Founding Fathers.” Teachers extoll Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase as doubling the size of the US, though all that land was stolen from the Native People who Jefferson called “uncivilized.” Children learn to take pride in US aggressiveness and plunder. When indigenous nations fought the settlers and the army called them “savages,” – that pattern of demonization became the official template for any people who resisted US war or aggression.

So, revolts of enslaved people were brutally oppressed, and anyone fighting against slavery with guns was crazy, vicious, and wrong, be they Maroon colonies of Blacks and Seminoles, Creeks or Choctaws, or even the white man, John Brown, who said slavery would not end but with blood!

When the US created an incident to attack Mexico, in the interest of the slaveholders, all opposition was suppressed, as was all efforts to end slavery. The US ended up with 1/3 of Mexico by 1848.

They do not teach Native American history here, but the US from the 1858 to 1890 decimated and ethnically cleansed the indigenous people in a series of wars called, “The Indian Wars.” Then the Dawes-Severalty Act placed survivors of those wars on reservations , and took their children away to the “Indian Schools,” robbing them of their culture and killing them with abuse. This happened to every Indigenous tribe west of the Mississippi River. (Read Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz’s Indigenous History of the United States).

Adolph Hitler studied the 1887 Dawes Act and this is where he got the idea of Concentration Camps. He also was an avid supporter of the US ideology of Eugenics and Social Darwinism. These “philosophies” emerged in the age of the Robber Barons, the late 19th Century, when the ruling class of the US took over not only the economy, but education, manipulating peoples’ ideology through the media and the politicos who ran the country from municipalities to the federal government. Laws and misinformation officially designated as inferiors all people of color -Blacks, Mexicans, Chinese, but also poor whites, and immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe.

My object here isn’t to bore you with old historical developments, but to put into perspective how the people of the United States have been socially engineered into abandoning natural compassion and concern for their fellow human beings. Because in fact, this has been the program of the United States since its founding. A settler regime requires support from those who would even marginally benefit from its aggressive policies. So, during the “Indian Wars,” when the US Army fought the Nez Perces, the Sioux, the Apaches, the Pomo, the Arapaho, the Cheyenne, and dozens more, they were acting in the interests of the mining moguls, the bonanza ranch companies, the sheep farmers, the railroad magnates. From Washington to Lincoln, and into the 1890s, the expansionism of the United States benefited white settlers. And when US Army killed Indigenous people, it made way for huge profits for the new Robber Barons.

Gradually, US family farmers, who benefited from the robbery of Indigenous land, succumbed one by one to the depressions of 1873, 1893, 1913, and finally the Great Depression. The big companies got all the farm land. That’s agribusiness. [In the 1980s Iowa Senator Tom Harkin said to me that there were more foreclosures in Iowa under Reagan than there had been in the Great Depression]. And the mining companies beat back every strike across the West with goon squads and National Guardsmen.

Everywhere, racism had taken root. In the South, Jim Crow laws and ideological manipulation gave poor whites the illusion of superiority to Black people. In the West, whites hated Native People and Mexicans: killed them, segregated them, and stole their land. Racism was taught in schools, it was legitimized in textbooks, it was preached from pulpits; it was in the media. Upper class white ideologues needed the poor people, 90% of the population, divided, especially after industrialization. It was an agenda: keep poor Black and white people apart, immigrants and native-born white workers apart, all to destroy class unity among workers in factories, mines, and to separate Black and white tenant farmers and sharecroppers…. vilify Mexicans and Chinese and Japanese…

A word about racism. Racism is a method of control. It is not a reaction to oppression, it is a tool of oppression, and therefore, it is reserved for the white people who are supposed to identify with the oppressor and to feel “superior” to the oppressed, people of color in the case of the US, or vilified and selected immigrants. Race is a construct; there is only one actual race; it is the human race, but the ideological leaders of the US have designated color or ethnicity as having to do with “race.” The better to divide us.

The US had, until the end of the 19th century, a frontier beyond which people down on their luck could go. By 1890, all the US land was Private Property, and there was no new land upon which people could settle. The rich mostly had it all. The economy was in shambles, and workers and farmers alike were rising up. The upper class feared revolution, there were resistance movements everywhere! Farmers! Workers! Strikes! Socialism! Even Blacks and whites were uniting in the South.

This threat of the poor uniting and rising up was the cause of US expansionism out-of-country. The Battleship Maine business was a sham, what we now call a “False Flag,” because with the Spanish-American War, the US embarked upon a path of imperialism, with governmental and economic leaders and the Yellow Journalist Press leading the attack. The bourgeoisie needed to expand. Capitalism must always expand! Raw materials stolen from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawai’i the Philippines, fruits of the Spanish American War, would lead to the US acquiring world’s riches! The US looked to China and also to Latin America. Their Patriarchal, racist, “Virile” aggressiveness was deified in a speech called “March of the Flag. Senator Albert Beveridge said:

“Fellow citizens, it is a noble land that God has given us; … a history of statesmen who flung the boundaries of the Republic out into unexplored lands and savage wildernesses …Shall the American people continue their resistless march toward the commercial supremacy of the world?… The Opposition tells us that we ought not to govern a people without their consent. I answer; the rule of liberty that all just government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, applies only to those who are capable of self-government. We govern the Indians without their consent, we govern our territories without their consent, we govern our children without their consent…

To-day, we are making more than we can use. To-day, our industrial society is congested; there are more workers than there is work! … As our commerce spreads, the flag of liberty will circle the globe, and the highways of the ocean carrying trade of all mankind, [will] be guarded by the guns of the republic. And, as their thunders salute the flag, benighted peoples will know that the voice of Liberty is speaking, at last, for them; that civilization is dawning, at last, for them!”

There it is: the prediction that the US would “continue a relentless march toward commercial supremacy of the world.” Justified by the glorious, “March of the Flag!” In the Spanish-American War, the US defeated the Spanish in Cuba in short order, but the US army was faced with the resistance of the people of the Philippines. After the defeat of the Spanish, the US killed over one million Filipinos. Since the ruling philosophy claimed that the Filipinos, like the Indigenous, were “savages;” the US perpetrated a genocide. US Generals directed soldiers to kill “everyone over ten” on those islands. In the Indian wars, the US Army said,

“The only good Indian was a dead Indian.”

The US military compared the Filipinos to “savage Indians.” There was opposition, and the US shifted into less obvious imperial practices, “Dollar Diplomacy” in Latin America and the Caribbean, “Moral Diplomacy- against Mexico, and all those natural resources: sugar, oil, timber, guano, lead, silver, other minerals – came home providing industrial jobs for the US working class.

So, the war on the indigenous, the continuation of racism after the end of slavery, and the first overseas imperial war the US fought were all predicated and justified upon racism and white supremacy. The cause of this all this expansionism was economic. Old Sir Walter Raleigh, an early imperialist pirate, said,

“Who controls the trade of the world controls the wealth of the world and consequently the World itself.”

That has been the path of the US ever since its founding.

World War one was done in company of the British Imperialists. It was a war for the bankers and industrialists: and resources. Nine million men died. Any opposition to the war was hushed by the Sedition and Espionage Acts. After WW I, the US laid claim to and laid waste to Central America and the Caribbean. United Fruit… “Gunboat Diplomacy” was imperialism and enforced by a bunch of Marines in China and the Western Hemisphere. March of the Flag.

The US came out on top and claimed victory in WW II, though they never mention that the Soviets won the war in Europe by the sacrifice of 27 million Soviet People. Post-War, the US wanted continued access to Asia, where most of US WW II military effort had gone.

But the Communists! The damned Communists wanted to get rid of imperial oppression and poverty and organize socialist economies – so people could live! So, US wars after WW II were against Communists in Asia; they armed and supported Chaing Kai-Chek against Mao and the Red Army. They used the UN to invade Korea against the Communist Revolution there. The US paid 80% of the French Indochina War, until they took over and began a mass murder and invasion of Vietnam against the protocols of the UN Geneva Accords. Fighting Communism meant ignoring international law, opposing peoples’ right to self-determination.

And then the Civil Rights Movement emerged out of the Black Churches in the US. J. Edgar Hoover was freaked out; the FBI went on full alert. People were on the move again in the US.

In the midst of all this the Cuban Revolution succeeded, and people here who were not anti-communists saw this as a victory for workers and peasants. The the peace movement bloomed: with the anti-Nuclear Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and then the movement against the war in Vietnam.

As our anti-war movements developed, our plan was “teach” the truth, and unteach the support that would make people want to kill other people who wanted communism. Crushing communism and killing communists was the central important message of the Cold War at home, so even unions were called communist. In the popular media and the schools, Communists were demonized; communists were bad and should be killed along with anyone who followed them.

Korean War in the 1950s

You have to demonize the people of another country to make people believe in killing them. Communist Koreans deserved to die; the US killed four million Koreans of them, leveled every city. Then the US killed 3 million Vietnamese.

Until 1975.

But the media showed the truth. And at home, the martyrs and the multitudes in the Civil Rights and Black Panther movements, Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, the Black Power Movement, the American Indian Movement, the Young Lords and then the students against the war…. Our humanity reasserted itself.

You see where this is going and where it comes from. In the 1980s, when communists were involved in revolutionary movements in Latin America, a movement sprang up uniting with people from Latin America and people from the US supporting Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, Guatemalans, and opposing US arming of Contras and fascist governments.

After the USSR died in 1991, the US had access to the resources of the former socialist republics. Expansion of capitalism followed: neoliberalism, privatizing publicly owned resources or closing them down.

Then: new enemies: Saddam Hussein: so, bomb Iraq; was there was a small anti-Iraq war movement but liberals were saying, “Let sanctions work.” The Iraqi people were then murdered in their millions by those sanctions, about which Madelaine Albright said -the death of 500,000 children was “worth it.” Then there was the Depleted Uranium and the devastation of cultural Iraq.

For over 30 years, the US government and media have been supporting the murder of millions of people. It is not about freedom; it is about oil, resources, trade routes, and capitalism. The March of the Flag.

There was a big anti-war movement before the second Iraq war but the government bombed anyhow and devised a way of having reporters there ‘EMBEDDED WITH US TROUPS!” Could there ever be a more honest way our government could have told us that the only information we would ever get would be from the military?

Then the US proceeded with devastating wars on Libya, Syria, with their Saudi buddies bombing the beautiful country of Yemen, deliberately starving millions. US troops are there now. Syria was a different story: she fought back, brought in the Russians, the Lebanese Hezbollah, the Iranians. The US vilifies all those resisters too. Of course, the justification for bombing was Bashar al Assad, the so-called dictator [beloved of his people]. When it was discovered that the terrorists in ISIS -Al Nusra and Al Qaeda were armed and trained and funded by the US, the US mainstream press covered it up.

This war on Syria has killed half a million Syrians, decimated ancient cities, and the US is illegally occupying the norther quadrant of the country along with the their terrorists, the French, and the British. War is still raging, and there is talk of NATO war on Russia and China too.

22 years ago yesterday, my husband Sean Gervasi died in Yugoslavia trying to tell the truth about the menace of NATO expansion and the US/NATO lies that eventually tore that sovereign country to pieces. He wrote the Prague Declaration for the Conference on the Enlargement of NATO in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean” in 1996, concluding,

“The Western system is experiencing a profound economic, social and political crisis. And Western leaders apparently see the exploitation of the East as the only large-scale project available which might stimulate growth, especially in Western Europe.

They are therefore prepared to risk a great deal for it. The question is: will the world accept the risks of East-West conflict and nuclear war in order to lock into one region economic arrangements which are already collapsing elsewhere?”

Are we? Because that is on the table. I am not for the wars OR those iniquitous economic arrangements. And that’s why I am here today.

With the Women’s March on the Pentagon, we have the beginnings of a National Peace Movement again. And I am here asking you to join it. Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq in 2004, did not take the loss of her son Casey Sheehan in Iraq as some great victory for America. She was and is angry. Her son, who never wanted to kill anyone, was killed for a ruthless imperialist system. She wrote 3 years ago,

[I] “ wonder if there is any hope to end the evil of US empire, or are we doomed to “wash, rinse, and repeat” these stories of infamy and tragedy over and over again until the USA collapses from the weight of all the carnage?”

Well, with the heart of a phoenix, and all her anger intact, Cindy launched the Women’s March on the Pentagon this year, and hundreds of women and not a few men, joined her- because the anti-war movement can’t collapse under the weight of carnage. We need to rise again from our ashes. We are.

I hope you will want to join us on our buses or invite the Long island Women involved in this into your living rooms or libraries to discuss this and create a powerful opposition to these bi-partisan wars. We really need you. Not on line or in Facebook, but in person to spread the word: US wars must end! We need our tax money for schools, housing, health care, childcare, the infrastructure, to save the environment, to stop non-renewable energy expansion, stop the pipelines! End the school-to-prison pipeline! Treat immigrants with compassion! Most people want this, but we feel immobilized. We need to mobilize. Only a viable peace and justice movement can accomplish this. Please join us!

The history behind Palestine and Israel is a history of Jewish European settler-colonialism — i.e., Zionism. And since racism is a symptom and a tool of settler-colonialism, Zionism is also viewed as anti-Semitism, and as ethno-supremacy or Jewish supremacy, Arabophobia and Islamophobia.

The triangulation of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and Arabophobia in the history of Palestine and Israel is part of the settler-colonial movement of Zionism and is not a “new history” in the sense of the term as introduced by Israeli historian Benny Morris in 1980 to humanize, in Israeli academic discourse, the victims of Zionism. It simply reflects modern terminology and encompasses historic events to which the Zionist mind is still largely closed.

These historic events are simple in their broad outline. Zionist Jews (self-proclaimed atheists) decided to build a Jewish state in Palestine and ended up taking much of the land by force and expelling most of the Palestinian non-Jewish Arab population, preventing them from returning.

Now Israel is occupying the rest of the territory the World Zionist Organization didn’t manage to take and continues to “settle” it.

In The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle, Joseph Massad writes:

Zionism as a colonial movement is constituted in ideology and practice by a religio-racial epistemology through which it apprehends itself and the world around it… It is no longer contested, even among many Israelis, that the impact of Zionism on the Palestinian people in the last one hundred years includes: the expulsion of a majority of Palestinians from their lands and homes, the prevention of their return, and the subsequent confiscation of their property for the exclusive use of Jews; imposing a military apartheid system on those Palestinians who remained in Israel from 1948 until 1966, which since then has been relaxed to a civilian Jewish supremacist system of discrimination; and the military occupation and apartheid system imposed on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and their population for the last thirty-five [now fifty-one] years as well as continued colonization of these occupied territories.

In that sense, the history of Jewish European settler-colonialism — i.e., Zionism — behind Palestine and Israel (as opposed to history as Zionist “narrative” or myth) has the voice of reason behind it, because it reveals an atrocity that must be redressed.

Acknowledging and taking accountability for Israel’s historic and ongoing crimes against Palestinian Arabs is the first step in resolving the Nakba. The historic details regarding why and how these tragic events happened have filled many books, but they are beside the point.

The broad outline by itself has the voice of reason if you also consider justice as reasonable and injustice as unreasonable.

What is reasonable or plausible, for example, about Ivanka Kushner now being able to buy a house in Jerusalem and “return” to Israel by dint of her conversion to Judaism and her American husband’s Jewishness, but Ghada Karmi, a Muslim Palestinian Arab being denied return to her homeland and not even allowed to buy back her own father’s stolen house?

In Humanizing the Text: Israeli “New History” and the Trajectory of the 1948 Historiography, Ilan Pappe, who is famously known for his The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, writes:

One thing is clear when analyzing the fortunes of Israeli new history from the time of its inception in the late 1980s until its brief/temporary disappearance in 2000: historical reconstruction is closely linked to general political developments and upheavals. In societies torn by internal and external rifts and conflicts, the work of historians is constantly pervaded by the political drama around them. In such geopolitical locations the pretense of objectivity is particularly misplaced, if not totally unfounded.

Radical Jewish dissident historians like Ilan Pappe in Israel are vital to a history that has the voice of reason on its side. They are a bridge to a wider public in Israel.

Palestinians often wonder what it takes to break through to the consciousness of Western publics with regard to the 70-year-long tragic history of Palestine.

I believe that the best way of shifting Western publics’ opinion from supporting Israel to supporting the Palestinian cause is to continue emphasizing what has already taken place through the demise of the so-called “peace process” and “two-state solution” — the realization, so long obscured, that the problem of Israel lies in its nature as a Zionist settler-colonial project in Palestine, rather than as a military “occupier”.

In Why the term ‘Israeli occupation’ must be rejected, Ramzy Baroud writes,

…It is often argued that Israel is an occupier that has violated the rules of occupation as stated in international law. This would have been the case a year, two years or five years after the original occupation had taken place, but not 51 years later. Since then, the occupation has turned into long-term colonization.

Many people believe that the Great March of Return has had so much positive journalistic reactions in Western media because the protest is essentially non-violent — i.e., it cannot be said to threaten Israel’s security and so the deadly force Israel uses is “disproportionate” and criminal.

That’s as far as Palestinian non-violent action goes. It doesn’t do anything to change Western publics’ perceptions of Israel as a legitimate Western-like state protecting its “borders” (albeit with disproportionate force) against a sea of Arabs or their perceptions of Palestinians as “rioters” and “barbarians” whose sole evil wish is to kill Jews.

Non-violent resistance has its uses, certainly, but it must never be pushed on an oppressed and brutalized people, in my view, as a higher moral ground of resistance.

Additionally, the emphasis on the tactic of non-violent resistance implicitly delegitimizes other forms of resistance, making saints out of some Palestinian martyrs and hunger-striking prisoners held under administrative detention (i.e., those imprisoned without charge) and accepting Israel’s justification for the execution and imprisonment of thousands of other Palestinians.

What’s different about the Great March of Return is that its demand of return connects the “occupation” and siege with the Nakba, dramatizing for a Western audience, through protest and resistance, the colonization of all of Palestine.

That demand, heard for the first time in the recent history of Palestinian resistance, is shifting the perceptions of Western publics.

Activists for justice in Palestine on social media have long used different tactics (primarily documenting and publicizing Israel’s violations of international law and human decency) to reach Western publics (to break through mainstream media in the West). The most effective are The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS – PACBI) campaigns that persuade academic big names and cultural and sports celebrities to take up the Palestinian cause.

Western publics are also becoming more aware of the Zionist backlash against BDS campaigns, especially as they impinge on freedom of speech.

Generally, addressing Western audiences, especially those on the Left, works by reference to progressive values applicable to injustices against all marginalized groups in Western society, as it brings home the incongruity of singling the Palestinian cause as an exception.

Western audiences are assumed to be part of the Judeo-Christian tradition, a term coined by George Orwell in the late 1930s in order to fight anti-Semitism. Unfortunately, this humanist tradition is tainted, because anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are now linked inexorably within it, and so combating one means combating the other.

Western civilization has long been defined by colonial conquest (with Islamophobia and Arabophobia in the Middle East) and imperial power; it is what gave birth to Zionism. Furthermore,

… once established in its position of military superiority, the colonial culture produces, through a whole range of media, an unending ‘series of propositions that slowly and subtly — with the help of books, newspapers, schools and their texts, advertisements, films, radio — work their way into one’s mind and shape one’s view of the world of the group to which one belongs’… Successful colonisation leads the oppressed to identify with the world view of the oppressor.

The Palestinian Authority now identifies with its oppressor so thoroughly that it did not shy away, as dictated by Israel, from cracking down viciously on Palestinians in the West Bank rallying against Mahmoud Abbas’s punitive economic measures in Gaza.

What will ultimately change Western Public’s perceptions are Palestinians themselves, however they choose to resist. They must insist on liberation — on decolonization and not simply on “ending the occupation”.

*

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

On June 17, Syrian government forces have cleared Kabt Mount, Shadid Hill and the areas of Abar Warak and Bir Atshan, near the T2 pumping station, from ISIS cells.

According to the pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 18 ISIS members and 8 government fighters were killed in the clashes. Pro-government sources added that a few vehicles of ISIS were also destroyed.

According to the ISIS-linked news agency Amaq, ISIS fighters ambushed a convoy of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) destroying a battle tank and a vehicle.

This advance was a part of the wider effort of the SAA and its allies to clear the Homs-Deir Ezzor desert and eastern Syria in general from ISIS cells.

The SAA also re-launched its operation to clear eastern al-Suwayda from ISIS after deploying additional reinforcements in the area. Aur, Hibbariyah and nearby settlements remain the main targets of the operation. On June 16, ISIS destroyed an SAA vehicle near al-Haramiyah.

Additional units of the Tiger Forces, led by General Suheil al-Hassan, arrived in the province of Daraa in order to participate in the upcoming military developments there. Pro-militant sources say that the sides involved in the conflict were not able to reach a deal to de-escalate the situation and to implement a reconciliation agreement there.

On June 17, the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) captured the village of Dashisha from ISIS. Additionally, the SDF established control of al-Nasirah and Tell al-Jabir. A major part of ISIS members had withdrawn from these villages towards the remaining positions of the terrorist group along the border with Iraq.

According to pro-Kurdish sources, the SDF is set to clear the entire border from ISIS elements. However, it is not clear when the US-backed force is going to pay attention to a notable ISIS enclave in the Euphrates Valley.

*

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For months Canadians have been inundated with claims from the government, various and sundry industries, and the national punditry, that NAFTA is good for our country, even necessary, and that “renegotiated” it will be even better. In the aftermath of US president Trump’s recent visit to Canada, virtually the entire Canadian political class has completely abandoned the vision of an independent, sovereign Canada. From the prime minister on down they rush to Brian Mulroney, the architect of the integration of Canada into the US, for direction and advice on how to “save NAFTA.” The door is now wide open for our country to take a different route, to reject NAFTA and build a nation which controls its own economy and destiny. Here are ten reasons why Canada should free itself from NAFTA, not enter more deeply into it.

One: Under NAFTA US corporations have the right to sue Canada for any law or regulation which they do not like and which they feel contravenes the spirit of NAFTA. US corporations have sued Canada 42 times under NAFTA, overturned Canadian laws and received over $200 million in NAFTA fines, plus approx. $100 million in legal fees, from Canada — and have filed claims for some five billion more. Why would any nation give foreign corporations the right to sue it and dictate its laws? (Canadian corporations can also sue the US. They have tried several times and failed each time.)

Two: Under the FTA, which is part of NAFTA, Canada agreed to never charge the Americans more for any good that we export to them than it charges Canadians. Why would Canada ever agree to such a provision and what in the world does it have to do with free trade?

Three: Canada agreed that it would never cut back on the amount of any good, including all forms of energy, that it sells to the US unless it cut back on Canadians proportionally at the same time. Why would Canada agree to deny its own citizens preferential access to their own resources?

Four: Except for a few exceptions, Canada agreed to allow US citizens and corporations to buy up Canadian companies and industries without restriction. They have taken over thousands of Canadian companies, from both our national railways to our retail industry to our grain companies. In 1867 the US purchased Alaska for $7 million. It is now purchasing Canada just as surely.

Five: Under NAFTA Canada’s standard of living has not risen, it has fallen. The real wages of Canadians are dropping steadily, and the divide between haves and have nots has soared.

Six: NAFTA is not free trade. It is the integration of North America into a continental economy. Integration means assimilation and that for Canada means the end of our country.

Seven: Locked into NAFTA Canada loses its ability to be an independent country. We see our country following the US on the world stage, even attacking and bombing small nations that have done no harm to Canada because, some of our leaders suggest, we must follow the US because our economies are so intertwined. (Then we watch some of the same leaders wringing their hands over the agony of the fleeing refugees our bombs have helped to create!)

Eight: Farsighted Canadian leaders have repeatedly warned their fellow citizens against free trade with the United States. John A. Macdonald called the very idea “veiled treason” because it meant giving control of our nation to a foreign power. George-Etienne Cartier said the end result would be union with United States, “that is to say, our annihilation as a country.” Robert Borden called free trade “the most momentous question” ever submitted to Canadians “not a mere question of markets but the future destiny of Canada.” John Diefenbaker called on Canadians “to take a clear stand in opposition to economic continentalism” and the “baneful effects of foreign ownership.” Pierre Elliott Trudeau called the FTA “a monstrous swindle, under which the Canadian government has ceded to the United States of America a large slice of the country’s sovereignty over its economy and natural resources.” John Turner called it “the Sale of Canada Act.”

Nine: In its early days Canada had no income tax. It used the revenue from tariffs on imported goods to finance the operation of the country and it had little or no debt throughout much of its history. Today after three decades of “free trade” with the US, Canada is carrying a record $1.2 trillion in federal and provincial debt and the tax burden on ordinary Canadians increases year after year. The rate of homelessness and use of food banks has escalated, public institutions and programmes on which citizens rely have been cut, while record amounts of raw resources are being poured across the border at fire sale prices.

Ten: Canada’s economy is roughly one tenth the size of that of the US. If we do not protect our industries, our sovereignty, and our economy, our country will be absorbed into the United States. This means the end of the dream of an independent Canada standing among the world’s nations with pride and dignity. It not be so. Both the FTA and NAFTA have cancellation clauses. With a simple 6 month’s notice Canada can withdraw without penalty. All three NAFTA countries are members of the World Trade Organization and our trade with them would simply revert back to WTO rules, under which we did much better than we have under NAFTA, and without any US corporate right to sue us or buy up our country.

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David Orchard was twice a contender for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. He is the author of The Fight For Canada: Four Centuries of Resistance to American Expansionism. He can be reached at [email protected]

The pattern is familiar. Ongoing violence in Nicaragua has the earmarks of another US-staged color revolution attempt.

Dirty US imperial hands operate everywhere, sovereign independent states their prime targets, wanting governments not subservient to US interests forcefully toppled, pro-Western puppet regimes replacing them.

What’s happening in Nicaragua is similar to the earlier US-sponsored Contra war.

This time it’s in new form, a so-called student-led anti-government movement, its rank-and-file elements unwittingly serving US imperial interests, led by likely CIA-recruited and manipulated hardliners.

Washington wants fascist tyranny replacing all sovereign independent governments. US dirty hands installed new millennium hemispheric pro-Western puppet rule in Haiti, Honduras, Paraguay, and Brazil.

Ongoing regime change efforts in Venezuela so far failed. Nicaragua is now targeted. Are Bolivia and Cuba next?

Ecuador’s Lenin Moreno appears amenable to transforming his nation into a US client state, purging former President Rafael Correa loyalists from his government, heading toward letting Pentagon forces back in country after Correa ordered them out.

Since mid-April, internal dark forces in Nicaragua were responsible for scores of deaths – at least 179, according to the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights.

A Saturday agreement calling for an end to violence and establishment of an international truth and security commission collapsed straightaway.

Hours after President Daniel Ortega and civic leaders agreed to attempt to restore calm, remove roadblocks, and establish the above cited commission, violence resumed, truce shattered, at least eight people reported dead.

National police blamed anti-government protesters for the killings. Talks nonetheless continue. Ortega expressed willingness to “listen to all proposals and initiatives within the constitutional framework.”

On Saturday, a building in Managua set ablaze killed eight people, including two children, according to police.

Firefighters blamed the fire on masked opposition elements. Ortega accused anti-government instigators of trying to undermine democracy in the country.

What’s going on is similar to the Obama regime’s late 2013/early 2014 Maidan coup in Ukraine, replacing democratic governance with Nazi-infested putschists.

Writing about what went on, I called events at the time an Orange Revolution 2.0, the first US-staged one occurring from November 2004 – January 2005.

Each time US color revolutions succeed, tyranny subservient to Washington replaces legitimate governance. Ordinary people lose out. Promises made are broken. Exploitation and repression follow.

Once deceived in Ukraine should have been enough. Memories of most people are short-lived. Awakenings when come are too late to matter.

US-staged Contra war in Nicaragua followed the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) overthrow of the US-supported tyrannical Anastasio Somoza fascist regime – a despot Franklin Roosevelt once called “a son-of-a bitch, but he’s our son-of-a-bitch.”

During the 1980s, Ortega led the FSLN campaign against the Somoza dictatorship – first as a freedom fighter, then as Nicaraguan president from 1985 – 1990.

In 2007, he was reelected president, currently Nicaragua’s leader. Washington wants him replaced with hard-right governance under leadership it controls – the same scheme it pursues against all sovereign independent states.

Orchestrated mid-April violent protests were staged against social security changes, increasing worker and employer payments, cutting future pensions – later rescinded by Ortega to restore order.

Violence continues anyway. Numbers killed and injured keep rising. Ortega’s governance is threatened – targeted by US imperial viciousness for regime change.

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

Featured image: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

It’s absurd to consider the founding father of the modern-day Turkish state as anything other than a Turk, but if the Greek Parliament passes the recently concluded “name deal” with Macedonia, then Athens will legally be obliged to regard everything in Greek Macedonia – including Atatürk, who was born in the regional capital of Thessaloniki – as having the “attribute” of being part of “Hellenic civilization, history, culture and heritage…from antiquity to the present day”.

Historical revisionism is back in season in the Balkans following the signing of the so-called “name deal” between the Republic of Macedonia and Greece, which the author extensively analyzed in his recent piece about how “Macedonia’s About To Become The World’s First ‘Politically Correct’ Police State”. The details of this topic as they relate to those two countries are contained within the text, but upon further contemplation of one of the many controversial clauses contained within the document, it became obvious that there’s also a Turkish tangent to all of this as well that deserves to be highlighted and discussed. Article 7 (2) of the agreement provocatively states the following:

“When reference is made to the First Party, these terms (author’s note: ‘Macedonia’ and ‘Macedonian’ as per Article 7 (1)) denote not only the area and people of the northern region of the First Party, but also their attributes, as well as the Hellenic civilization, history, culture, and heritage of that region from antiquity to present day.” (emphases are the author’s own)

Basically, Greece is making maximalist identity claims to the entirety of Greek Macedonia, which it asserts is characterized by the attribute of representing “Hellenic civilization, history, culture, and heritage…from antiquity to the present day”, or in other words, refusing to acknowledge the existence of any non-Hellenic people on this territory during any time in the past several thousand years. This is blatant revisionism of the most arrogant kind that insults the intelligence of any person with even a passing knowledge of history who is aware of the wars and migrations that have marked the human story since its very beginning, to say nothing of relatively recent events over the past century.

The founding father of the modern-day Turkish state, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was born in Thessaloniki, the main city of Greek Macedonia and current capital of the Greek administrative region of Central Macedonia, in 1881, thereby placing him within the purview of Greece’s maximalist claims that everything that it refers to by the word “Macedonia” (the region in which Atatürk was born) is characterized by the “attribute” of being part of “Hellenic civilization, history, culture, and heritage…from antiquity to the present day”. For as ridiculous of a claim as this is, it would be seemingly innocuous if it wasn’t about to become the official law of the state and its officials obligated to promote this on the world stage.

The so-called “name deal” that Greece just reached with the Republic of Macedonia will became the law of the land if it passes parliament, thus obligating the state’s representatives to implement all of its clauses, one of which is the revisionist assertion that everything within the borders of what is regarded as Greek Macedonia (including Thessaloniki, Atatürk’s birthplace) has been part of “Hellenic civilization, history, culture, and heritage…from antiquity to the present day”. That’s factually incorrect for many reasons, the most obvious and universally recognized objective one being the very existence of Atatürk – the founder of the modern-day Turkish state – himself, who was born there.

Should the agreement be approved by parliament, then Greece will have to claim Atatürk as their own per their newly promulgated national legislation, which will undoubtedly be seen as an unprecedented provocation by Turkey. It should be noted that the former mastermind of EuroMaidan and present US Ambassador to Greece Geoffrey Pyatt ominously predicted (or one could cynically say, planned in advance) that Turkey’s relations with his and his host country would go through “turbulence” ahead of its coming general election, which most certainly happened after Athens granted “political asylum” to two Turkish coup participants and the US threatened to sanction its nominal NATO “ally” if it purchases Russia’s S-400 anti-air missile system.

Now, however, Greece is about to take everything much further by passing the Macedonian “name deal” and entering its maximalist identity claims to everything and everyone who ever lived in the region of Greek Macedonia into law, thus making this absurd claim one of the pillars of its national-historic policy and compelling its state representatives to advance this narrative at all international fora. Failure to do so would literally be in contravention of the prospective legislation that’s about to be passed, thereby putting offenders on the wrong side of the law and opening them up to prosecution, or at the very least accusations of dereliction of their state duty. It sounds surreal, but these are the real-life implications if this “name deal” passes.

All of this is terribly ironic because the Greeks accuse the Macedonians of engaging in historical revisionism and appropriating a legacy that isn’t theirs, though with the stroke of a pen and pending passage in parliament, it’ll be Greece itself that will undoubtedly be guilty of this through the promulgation into law of its maximalist identity claims to Greek Macedonia that would inextricably involve laying legal claim to Atatürk’s legacy on the  basis that he and his family members were part of “Hellenic civilization, history, culture, and heritage…from antiquity to the present day.” This “politically correct” revisionism will lead to more pronounced interstate tensions if the Greek state gives itself the “right” to officially regard Atatürk as one of its “fellow Hellenes” because there’s no way that President Erdogan would ever remain silent in the face of such a provocation.

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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.

There has been considerable chatter inside the Washington Beltway about the meaning of President Donald Trump’s recent forays into international trade at the G-7 meeting in Canada and his nuclear disarmament tete-a-tete with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore. Depending on where one sits on the ideological spectrum G-7 is being viewed either as a calculated and largely ignorant insult to America’s closest allies or as a long overdue accounting for trade and defense imbalances that have severely damaged the U.S. economy. The most vitriolic analysis came from Republicans like Senator John McCain who accused Trump of betraying America’s allies while also aiding its enemies. McCain was referring in part to the president’s eminently reasonable suggestions that Moscow be allowed to rejoin the G-7 and that it would be beneficial to get together personally with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The meeting with Jong-un likewise is being described as a giveaway to North Korea with nothing in exchange but White House spin or as a brilliant maneuver to break a diplomatic logjam that has prevailed for more than twenty years. Those who are particularly concerned over the issue of a possible nuclear exchange taking place are pleased that the two sides are talking, even if, as The Hill observes, it will now be up to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to “put meat on the bones” by initiating a series of confidence building steps that will lead to a program for finally ending the Korean War and denuclearizing the region.

In his analysis of what to expect from Singapore, former Foreign Service Officer Peter Van Buren quotes another FSO Asia hand William Johnson, who describes how diplomacy is a process which

“…is often a series of failures, and in the best case, the failures become incrementally less bad, until the least spectacular failure is declared to be success. Diplomacy is a game where the goalposts are supposed to move, and often, to move erratically. Trump needs a plan, with specific goals, each laid out neatly in a set of talking points, not because he will attain those goals, but because he needs to figure out how short of them he can afford to fall or how far beyond them he can push his interlocutor.”

One would hope that in both the case of G-7 and Singapore wiser heads in the Administration will prevail and convince the White House to remain on target about protecting genuine American interests using diplomacy and whatever other tools are at hand.

Above all, a careful assessment of what the actual threats against the United States might be ten or twenty years down the road should be considered to frame appropriate responses. Was the presidential onslaught at G-7 justified in terms of protecting the national interest relating to unfair trade practices? Is a transnational defense strategy beneficial to the United States if it is required to bear most of the burden financially? And finally, what are the real military and political threats that confront the Washington?

The trade issue is perhaps the most complicated to deal with as most countries run surpluses with some trading partners and deficits with others, something called competitive advantage. The Donald Trump claim that that Canada runs a $100 billion surplus with the U.S. is incorrect. In reality, the U.S. has a small surplus in trading with Canada, last year amounting to $2.8 billion. So, is Canada a major source of trade imbalance? The answer would have to be “no,” even though it is demonstrably protectionist regarding food products. But there are other regions that have a large trade advantage vis-à-vis the U.S. The European Union runs a $100 billion surplus and China $375.

Europe aside, does China’s trade advantage have security implications? Yes, it does as China is the world’s most populous nation with the world’s largest economy. Economic power eventually translates into military power and if Beijing is closing its market to American products arbitrarily while selling its own goods in a relative open U.S. marketplace it becomes a vital national interest to correct that. And there are clear indications that Beijing deliberately distorts the marketplace by maintaining an undervalued Yuan and creating hurdles that foreign companies must negotiate to do business in China. China also owns 19% of Washington’s Treasury note issued debt, totaling $1.18 trillion, which it could unload at any time causing an economic crash in the U.S. The Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats has described the U.S. national debt as the most-grave long-term security challenge facing the country.

Defense policy and military threats from competitors constitute together a single issue as one drives the other. It is ironic that the United States, which is relatively unthreatened by enemies, continues to believe that it must intervene overseas to be safe. The current conflicts with Iran as well as in Syria and in Afghanistan are not vital interests for the United States, instead being driven largely by feckless allies, defense contractors and a sensationalist media. Even North Korea, which is a serious issue, is hardly a major threat to Americans.

The alleged threat from Russia, demonized by both the political left and right, is largely a fiction created to sell newspapers and give aspiring politicians something to talk about. Even if Russia wanted to re-occupy Eastern Europe it does not have the resources to do so. Its army is relatively small and designed for defense, its economy is the same size as Spain’s. It is nuclear armed to be sure, but, unless one is suicidal, nuclear weapons are ultimately defensive rather than offensive, to serve as a deterrent guaranteeing national survival when attacked but hardly usable otherwise.

So realistically Trump should be looking at the over the horizon economic and political problems deriving from Chinese power if he wants to address a real vital national interest. And he should do what he can to keep talking to G-7 about trade imbalances while also doing whatever is possible to hasten the demise of NATO, which has outlived its usefulness both from a fiscal and security point of view. And by all means, he should keep talking to Kim Jong-un and arrange sooner rather than later to meet with Vladimir Putin.

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This article was originally published on American Herald Tribune.

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

Featured image is from  #G7Charlevoix/ flickr.

He was my dad, and he most likely never had a chance for a better life. He was born in 1915 to a Sicilian father and Neapolitan mother, both immigrants. When Alphonse was ten, he lost all his teeth from gum disease. Then, at seventeen, at the onset of the Great Depression, he was able to get into Brooklyn College, a school that required top grades for enrollment. A year into his college career, the torment of the depression forced his parents to close their candy store. In order to make ends meet, Mom and Dad, and yes Alphonse, had to go out and find jobs. He dropped out of college and found a menial job, much to the chagrin of the dean, who saw a great future for young Alphonse. A shitty job, but that extra money coming in would mean lunch for the family would not just be banana or Broccoli Rabe sandwiches.

His dad Peter, a proud and highly intelligent man, who actually graduated college in Tunisia, found work as a machinist, and Alphonse’s mom found work in a factory. Peter got involved with the union, and by the late 1930s was going out on strike. The times were becoming rougher and the NYC cops were always there to protect the owners, not the workers. Violence was in the air. One day Alphonse got a phone call that his dad was in jail, arrested during a labor scuffle. The bail was too high for them to get Peter out. So, Alphonse and his mother went around to everyone and anyone they knew, literally begging for help. Finally, they had enough and got Peter out. The caveat to all this was that Peter was told he would never get a job in that trade again.. ever! Alphonse and his mom kept working, and Peter kept looking for work… any kind of work. He tried to get on Relief, the precursor to today’s welfare, but the waiting list was too long. It seemed that things were not working well for the family. One day, December 1st 1940, Alphonse’s mom came home from her factory job to find the ‘love of her life’ lying in their bathtub… dead from a gunshot to his head. He was thoughtful even in suicide to make sure that he did it in the tub, not wishing to bloody up the floor.

Alphonse got drafted a year and a half later, and was sent to the Tank Corps in Texas. Before he was to be shipped out the Army released him as the ‘Sole supporting son’ . He returned home and found a job at the Brooklyn Navy Yard for the remainder of the war. He made friends with a fellow named Amos, and after the war they decided to go into the used car business. Alphonse was good at choosing cars, and Amos was a natural as the fast talking salesman. Things were good. Alphonse had married his childhood sweetheart by then, and had two sons… this writer being the newest arrival. The ‘wheel of fate’ rotated once again in the early 1950s when Amos took out a bank loan and forged Alphonse’s name as  cosigner. When he could not repay the loan, they came after Alphonse… and before long he had to declare personal bankruptcy. He lost the car lot and wound up getting a job on the docks as a longshoreman.

Yes, other men had it much worse. But other men were not my father. He never once stopped loving me his entire life. He was always there for myself and my older brother… always! May his spirit enjoy the joy and happiness on the other side of this dream called life… the joy and happiness that only came in spurts for dear Alphonse.

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

Eurasian integration and developing relations with Asian countries are important items on Russia’s present-day political agenda.  One of the platforms for moving forward on these issues is the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU or EEU), which includes Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. With the aid of this organization, the Russian Federation is improving its cooperation with numerous Asian countries, which could become Russia’s invaluable economic partners in the future.

The EEU (and therefore Russia) has successfully collaborated with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The creation of a free trade zone (FTZ) between the EEU and the most influential and successful ASEAN member, Vietnam, is one of the most impressive achievements stemming from this cooperation, with the relevant agreement in effect since 2016

Thailand as well as Indonesia have also expressed their interest in creating a FTZ with the EEU.  However, negotiations with these countries will take time, while in the near future the EEU could sign an agreement of this nature with the renowned Asian Tiger, the Republic of Singapore.

The discussion to this effect has spanned a number of years. In May 2016, the Singapore Government and the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC, the EEU’s regulatory body) signed a Memorandum of Understanding which sets forth the partners’ intention to collaborate on the issues of economic integration and elimination of trade barriers. In October 2016, the EEU and Singapore signed a declaration on creating a work group, whose aim is to research the feasibility of the FTZ agreement. Official  negotiations on establishing the free trade zone began in summer 2017. By the end of May 2018, three rounds of negotiations have already taken place but many issues are yet to be discussed, and it is senseless to rush such work. Both the EEU and Singapore expect to conclude the agreement on mutually advantageous terms. It is estimated that the outcome of these negotiations will become known closer to autumn 2018.

Still, the mere existence of these negotiations and the research group has already aided the development of the economic relations between the EEU and Singapore.  Hence, in 2017 the trade turnover between Singapore and the EEU countries exceeded $4.6 million, which is almost 90% higher than that in 2016.

The joint work group’s second session, dedicated to cooperation between the EEU and the Singapore Government, was held in May 2018. The main topics for discussion were trade development, economic cooperation, the digital economy and the possibility of creating the FTZ. The EEU representatives asserted their wish to achieve greater cooperation with Singapore as well as the other members of ASEAN.  In turn, Singapore signaled their readiness to aid the dialogue between the EEU and ASEAN.

At the end of May 2018, Sergey Lavrov, the Foreign Minister of Russia, shared his views on the possibility of creating an EEU-Singapore FTZ with the media. In his opinion, this FTZ could become an important stimulus for mutual trade, reciprocal capital investment and a technology exchange between the participating member states, which would, in turn, lead to a creation of a brand new environment conducive to investment and trade.

According to the EEC representatives, the next round of negotiations on establishing the FTZ between the EEU and Singapore will take place in June 2018.

Aside from the ASEAN block, the EEU is actively collaborating with other Asian countries. In May 2018, the EEU member states signed an interim agreement on establishing a FTZ with the Islamic Republic of Iran in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan.  The parties eliminated or lowered various custom duties on a range of goods, agreed on a dispute resolution process, and decided to establish a joint committee comprised of high-ranking representatives from participating countries.  The duration of this agreement is 3 years,  and it has been reported that it is the first step in creating a permanent FTZ. Nevertheless, a permanent arrangement requires long-term and rigorous negotiations, which will take place while the interim FZT is in place.

Iran’s decision to sign this interim agreement could have been a direct consequence of the predicament it has found itself in because of the US intention to withdraw from the Iran nuclear agreement and impose new sanctions. A speedy creation of the FTZ with the EEU, even if temporary in nature, could substantially aid Iran’s economy threatened by US actions. At this time the trade turnover between Iran and the EEU countries is already approximately $2.7 billion, and this figure is bound to increase substantially in the next few months as a result of the interim FTZ.

China is yet another important EEU partner in Asia.  PRC also has serious intentions as far as the Eurasian economic integration is concerned. 2018 marked a 5-year anniversary of the Chinese Silk Road Economic Belt (the Belt) initiative, intended to unite key Eurasian transport routes and establish a common economic zone. The Chinese initiative nicely complements the EEU projects.  In May 2015, the Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Russian President Vladimir Putin signed an association agreement involving the Belt with the EEU.

In the summer of 2016, long-term negotiations on trade and economic cooperation began between China and the EEU. In October 2017, PRC’s Commerce Minister Zhong Shan and Veronika Nikishina, the EEC Minister in charge of trade, signed a bilateral agreement on concluding these negotiations. It has been reported that the agreement in question is of paramount importance both for China and the EEU member countries, and it will aid in eliminating trade barriers, increasing state support for trade initiatives and creating favorable conditions for industrial growth.

At the moment, the EEU leaders are preparing for the negotiations on creating a FTZ with a number of countries, including important players on the global market such as Israel and India. It is worth noting that EEU’s achievements over its 3-year life span are significant. All the aforementioned events may substantially strengthen trade and economic development on the entire Eurasian continent and lead to the creation of a firm foundation for Eurasian economic integration. The stabilizing role of all these processes is certainly noteworthy. For instance, the inclusion of long-term rivals such as China and India in the common economic zone could have a positive effect on the calm in the entire Asia-Pacific region.

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Dmitry Bokarev is a political observer, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

Civilians are fleeing Hodeidah after hundreds were killed in the Saudi-led coalition’s bomb campaign to take the strategic Yemeni port from Houthi rebels. The death toll and the disruption of vital supply lines has alarmed the UN.

Corporate power has been turning Britain into a corrupt state and it’s colonisation of the institutions that are supposed to uphold society is now acting like a terminal disease on the dying carcass of democracy. The corporate elite is putting business and their version of free-market ideology at the heart of political policymaking. The big corporations are literally making government in their own image and this is once again confirmed by Theresa May’s appointment of a senior executive at scandal-ridden Serco, the government prison and immigration detention centre contractor as justice minister.

Presidents Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un are perhaps the two most unpredictable leaders in the world with everyone wondering from day to day what new provocative statement will be ushered from official channels. However, the two most unpredictable leaders appear to have found common ground, perhaps even kindred spirits, during the course of the Singapore Summit when both men came away with an apparent mutually beneficial deal that will see the de-escalation of tensions on the Korean peninsula.

While there have been no real concrete agreements as a result of the talks, the North Korean side has pledged its commitment to the denuclearization of the peninsula while the American side has strongly suggested that it will put its military exercises on hold with South Korea.

The first step seems to be an agreement for both sides to work toward recovering the remains of Korean war dead and their immediate repatriation.

Beyond that, the statement agreed to by both parties reads as follows:

President Donald J. Trump of the United States of America and Chairman Kim Jong Un of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) held a first, historic summit in Singapore on June 12, 2018.

President Trump and Chairman Kim Jong Un conducted a comprehensive, in-depth and sincere exchange of opinions on the issues related to the establishment of new US-DPRK relations and the building of a lasting and robust peace regime on the Korean Peninsula. President Trump committed to providing security guarantees to the DPRK, and Chairman Kim Jong Un reaffirmed his firm and unwavering commitment to complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

Convinced that the establishment of new US-DPRK relations will contribute to the peace and prosperity of the Korean Peninsula and of the world, and recognizing that mutual confidence building can promote the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, President Trump, and Chairman Kim Jong Un, state the following:

The United States and the DPRK commit to establish new US-DPRK relations in accordance with the desire of the peoples of the two countries for peace and prosperity.
The United States and DPRK will join their efforts to build a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula.

Reaffirming April 27, 2018, Panmunjom Declaration, the DPRK commits to work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

The United States and the DPRK commit to recovering POW/MIA remains, including the immediate repatriation of those already identified.

Having acknowledged that the US-DPRK summit — the first in history — was an epochal event of great significance in overcoming decades of tensions and hostilities between the two countries and for the opening up of a new future, President Trump and Chairman Kim Jong Un, commit to implementing the stipulations in the joint statement fully and expeditiously. The United States and the DPRK commit to holding follow-on negotiations, led by the US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, and a relevant high-level DPRK official, at the earliest possible date, to implement the outcomes of the US-DPRK summit.

President Donald J. Trump of the United States of America and Chairman Kim Jong Un of the State Affairs Commission of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea have committed to cooperate for the development of new US-DPRK relations and for the promotion of peace, prosperity, and the security of the Korean Peninsula and of the world.

DONALD J. TRUMP
President of the United States of America

KIM JONG UN
Chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea

June 12, 2018
Sentosa Island
Singapore

The talks have now concluded with the remainder of the negotiating to take place between Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his counterpart with some suggesting that the next stage is the freeing of American spies incarcerated in North Korea.

The Reaction From American Political Circles 

While Republicans, having never met a war they didn’t like, attempted to keep their rage at the idea of peace under control, many like chicken hawk Lindsey Graham appeared on national media to tone down praise of Trump and warn against showing weakness and removing troops from one of America’s many war zones. Essentially, they are arguing that America should dictate the terms, Kim should agree, and there should be no American concessions of any value.

Democrats, however, have predictably been frothing at the mouth at even the idea of peace, particularly a peace negotiated by “literally Hitler” himself, Donald Trump. These warmongers and psychotics have railed against even talking to Kim Jong Un, claiming that there should be no peace whatsoever with a nation that has such horrible human rights violations as if the United States has not racked up enough of those same violations of its own. These critics complain that Trump is engaging in “appeasement” of some kind which seems impossible to explain to anyone using logic or who is restrained by reality.

But what is actually happening with this summit? Is it a true and genuine desire for peace or is it just cover for the next war to take shape over the next several years?

The Potential Positive 

It is difficult for any genuine anti-war activist to oppose the recent talks between the United States and North Korea. After decades of technical war, threats to “obliterate” North Korea, constant nuclear tests, repeatedly provocative war games, innumerable threats against one another, not to mention the tension between South and North Korea, two countries that have long wanted to talk to one another, the fact that tensions seem to be easing can scarcely be considered a bad thing.

While it is unfair that the United States and its “allies” can maintain nuclear weapons stockpiles as they march across the globe slaughtering innocent people while other countries cannot, an end to nuclear proliferation (across the board) is also desirable. If both countries can come to an agreement to, at the very least, stop provoking one another, America will have taken a greater step toward peace in Singapore than it has in decades.

For all their public appearances, both Trump and Kim have appeared legitimately happy at the results of the meeting and both have expressed high hopes for the future. Trump even went so far as to tweet that the “nuclear threat” from North Korea no longer existed. But is there more to the deal than just a desire for peace?

On Tuesday, May 8, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the United States will be pulling out of the “Iran Nuclear Deal” which was struck under the Obama administration, a deal that he repeatedly called a “bad deal” and even “the single worst deal I’ve ever seen drawn by anybody.”

“The so-called Iran deal was supposed to protect the United States and our allies from the lunacy of an Iranian nuclear bomb, a weapon that will only endanger the survival of the Iranian regime,” the President said. “In fact, the deal allowed Iran to continue enriching uranium and over time reach the brink of a nuclear breakout.”

He added that

“Today, we have definitive proof that this Iranian promise was a lie.”

Yet there was absolutely no evidence to back Trump up on his claims. Even Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats have stated that Iran is living up to its commitments. Still, Trump has argued in the past that, while Iran may be sticking to its commitments, it is violating the “spirit” of the agreement by “fostering discord” in the region.

This is highly ironic considering that the United States is the single biggest fosterer of discord in the Middle East alongside Israel. It’s also false that Iran is “fostering discord” and that it is not living up to its end of the deal. It should also be pointed out that Iran was doing nothing wrong in terms of its nuclear program before the deal and should never have been bullied into signing it to begin with.

Now, a sovereign country who has a right to pursue a nuclear energy program is being told by aggressive nuclear states that it cannot be allowed to be armed in the same manner, develop an adequate energy program, or defend itself against the aggression of the very states marching across the region and repeatedly stating their desire to overthrow, destabilize, or invade Iran.

But while this  move may have come as a shock to some, it shouldn’t have. After all, the Iran deal itself was nothing more than the first step in the coming war on Iran. This can be seen clearly in the pages of the corporate-financier think tanks who develop and present US foreign and domestic policy. For instance, the Brookings Institution, as Tony Cartalucci writes,

“whose corporate-financier sponsors include arms manufacturers Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, energy giants Exxon Mobil, BP, Aramco, and Chevron, and financiers including Bank of America, Citi, and numerous advisers and trustees provided by Goldman Sachs,” wrote in 2009 of the plan to use just such a “deal” to then justify military action against Iran.

On Friday, the Trump regime announced a 25% duty on $50 billion of Chinese goods, targeting imports “contain(ing) industrially significant technologies.”

A White House statement said tariffs will be imposed on “goods related to China’s Made in China 2025 strategic plan to dominate the emerging high-technology industries that will drive future economic growth for China, but hurt economic growth for the United States and many other countries.”

In May 2015, China’s State Council unveiled a 10-year plan to transform the country into a global industrial and high-tech manufacturing power.

Follow-up plans aim to further enhance China technologically and industrially by 2049, the People’s Republic of China’s 100th anniversary.

Nine priorities include:

1. improving manufacturing innovation;

2. integrating technology and industry;

3. strengthening the industrial base;

4. promoting Chinese brands;

5. enforcing green manufacturing;

6. pursuing breakthroughs in 10 key sectors;

7. restructuring the manufacturing sector;

8. promoting service-oriented manufacturing as well as manufacturing-related service industries; and

9. internationalizing manufacturing.

Ten key sectors focused on include:

1. new information technology;

2. numerical control tools and robotics;

3. aerospace equipment;

4. ocean engineering equipment and high-tech ships;

5. railway equipment;

6. energy saving and new energy vehicles;

7. power equipment;

8. new materials;

9. medicine as well as medical devices; and

10. agricultural machinery.

Beijing retaliated straightaway against US duties, announcing 25% tariffs on 659 US products worth about $50 billion.

Around two-thirds of this amount will be implemented on July 6, the remainder on a date to be announced – the first round imposed on soybeans, corn, wheat, rice, sorghum, beef, pork, poultry, fish, dairy products, nuts and vegetables, autos and aquatic products, according to Beijing’s Ministries of Finance and Commerce, the latter ministry saying:

“All the previous agreements reached through talks will become invalid. China doesn’t want to engage in a trade war, but in face of the shortsighted acts from the US side, (Beijing) is forced to take strong and forceful measures to hit back.”

On Friday, US-China Business Council president John Frisbie issued a statement, saying:

“We urge both governments to sit down and negotiate a solution to these important issues. American companies want solutions, not sanctions.”

“Tariffs will not solve these problems, but will harm American economic interests and jobs. Rather than inflicting damage on ourselves, we should be seeking ways to address the problems with China.”

Both countries held three rounds of talks, unable to resolve differences so far, further negotiations coming in Washington and Beijing.

Things are far from a full-blown trade war. The risk of one remains if agreement isn’t reached on major issues in the months ahead.

On Friday, the White House threatened Beijing with additional duties if it retaliated – perhaps to be announced in the coming days given China’s announced $50 billion in tariffs, matching in amount what Trump ordered imposed.

On Thursday, Global Trade Watch director Lori Wallach questioned whether Trump has a coherent strategy to deal with America’s huge structural trade deficit with China – responsible for eliminating 3.4 million US jobs since 2001, she explained.

“(R)eality (is) that to date, he has miserably failed to deliver on his China trade promises,” Wallach stressed, adding:

“Our trade deficit with China has grown considerably since Trump was elected, and American job outsourcing continues and will intensify given that his tax scam was packed with incentives to relocate US production offshore.”

Paul Craig Roberts explained

“that America’s ‘trade problem’ is entirely of its own making and is not due to Mexico, Canada, China, and Europe.”

It’s all about “globalism, neoliberal economics, and” the power of Wall Street over US policy – especially its ownership of and control over the misnamed Federal Reserve.

America’s trade deficit with China and other countries “has its origin in the offshoring of American jobs,” Roberts stressed – longstanding US policy, exacerbated under Trump, as Wallach explained.

Put another way, America’s huge structural trade deficit was made in the USA, not abroad in China or anywhere else.

*

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

Iconic. This particular image is borrowed from this site.

Journalist Milton Mayer traveled to Germany in the wake of World War II to find out how ordinary, normally decent, educated German people got caught up, co-opted or neutralized in the horrible devolution of the country that ended in the atrocities with which we are all so familiar — and a World War that cost countless lives.

The book he wrote should be better known: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 was published in 1955 by the University of Chicago Press.

There is an excerpt at the link, a chapter called “But Then It was too Late.” Under provisions of the U. of C Press copyright notice, included below, part of the excerpt is reproduced below.

***

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it…

“The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting.

It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing….

Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’

that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head….

“You see,” my colleague went on, “one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse.

You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion,  thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow.

You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

“And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it.

These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

“But your friends are fewer now…

“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes.

That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens.

In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next.

Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves;

“You have gone almost all the way yourself.

Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it…

Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

“What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or ‘adjust’ your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not I, however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with your shame.

This last is the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame. Many Germans became this poor kind of hero, many more, I think, than the world knows or cares to know.”

*

Dr Kohls is a retired physician from Duluth, MN, USA. He writes a weekly column for the Duluth Reader, the area’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns deal with the dangers of American fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, malnutrition, Big Pharma’s psychiatric drugging and over-vaccination regimens, and other movements that threaten the environment, prosperity, democracy, civility and the health and longevity of the planet and the populace. Many of his columns are archived at

http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/gary-g-kohls;

http://duluthreader.com/search?search_term=Duty+to+Warn&p=2; or at

https://www.transcend.org/tms/search/?q=gary+kohls+articles

U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents are systematically violating U.S. and international law by blocking immigrants at international ports of entry on the southern border from entering the country so they can claim asylum. Immigration civil rights advocates have been documenting this illegal behavior since late 2016, from Texas to California. It was sporadic then, and appears to have been based at least in part on CBP’s difficulties with handling large numbers of people.

Even so, the practice of turning immigrants away has suddenly become routine, creating chilling scenes of immigrants and children camped out near the bridges, exposed to sun, wind, and rain, amid make-do bedding, scattered clothing, and trash. A few times a day, the immigrants walk to the middle of the bridges and ask to be admitted to the port of entry building on the U.S. side so that they can request asylum. They are almost always turned back.

The Intercept witnessed such a scene on June 4 in El Paso, Texas. At 6 a.m., the sun rose on a 15-year-old Guatemalan boy and his father who were trying to walk across the border to apply for asylum. They did not swim the Rio Grande or otherwise attempt to enter the country illegally — they’d made their attempt on an arcing, international bridge that joins El Paso with its Mexican sister city, Ciudad Juárez.

They were stopped at the top of the bridge by two CBP agents who refused to let them cross, pointed them back to Mexico, and said to try crossing later. This was the sixth time in three days that the man, his son, and about a dozen other Guatemalans had been thus rejected.

I knew they were Guatemalans because I’d spoken with the man two days earlier. I spotted him and the group squatting disconsolately on the Mexican side of the bridge by the public bathrooms. This man and others in the group told me then that they were asylum-seekers afraid to go back to their home country because of violence there. They were extremely frustrated about being turned away. They recounted that the agents always told them there was “no room” to process them at the port of entry, and they should come back later when there might be room. There never was room. “False words,” the man with the son said, in Spanish that was heavily accented by Q’eqchi’, his indigenous tongue. Another man started crying.

#asylum @CBP #ElPaso #Guatemalan #migrants turned back at int'l bridge into El Paso last night, today. Small children too. I filmed and interviewed. This is against US & international law. pic.twitter.com/KBui4C3PT1

— Debbie Nathan (@DebbieNathan2) June 3, 2018

Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, immigrants within the U.S. who tell immigration officials they’re afraid to return to their countries have the right to request asylum and to be immediately processed. They are not supposed to be turned back at bridges. They are not supposed to be banished to life on Mexican sidewalks, by public toilets, begging passersby for tacos to feed their children.

Yet this has been happening, not just at El Paso but also at ports of entry all along the southern border. Immigration rights advocates first noticed that asylum-seekers were being turned away at some bridges shortly after the election of Donald Trump, and the practice continued into 2017. A Southern California immigrant advocacy group, Al Otro Lado, responded by suing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for violations of U.S. immigration law and the Constitution. The suit is ongoing.

The blocking works this way: In the precise middle of the international bridges, CBP agents stand, sentry-like, near the imaginary line dividing the two countries — a line often marked with a ceremonial metal plaque. The agents peer at everyone crossing, looking for people they think might be candidates for asylum. If the people say anything suggesting they might be requesting asylum — if they’re not Mexicans, and especially if they’re from Central America — the agents block their way and say to come back another time.

Local people who frequently cross the border started noticing the agents in early May, but did not know why they were on the bridge. Some people started calling Ruben Garcia, director of Annunciation House, a migrant shelter which encompasses a network of satellite shelters. The shelters have for years maintained a close relationship with ICE. They regularly take in immigrants who’ve been picked up by the Border Patrol, processed, and released by ICE pending the results of their immigration cases. Garcia says he is very familiar with how many people the government picks up from week to week, and with how much of their own space CBP and ICE have to process people.

In late May, Garcia and some volunteers at his shelters began visiting the bridges and taking statements from Central Americans who’d been denied entry.

Based on that experience and on other information he has gathered, Garcia believes that the sudden day-in, day-out presence of CBP agents on the bridges, and their routine turn-backs of Central Americans and other migrants, is something new and disturbing.

In El Paso, Garcia believes that the government’s claims of “no room” in 2016 and 2017 might have had some merit.

“Back then, there really were a lot of Central Americans coming, and I know the government was overwhelmed in El Paso because we were overwhelmed at our shelters,” Garcia said.

But now, he said, the situation has changed:

“The numbers are down at our shelters. And if they’re down at our shelters, they’ve got to be down at the government’s facilities.”

Garcia said those facilities include interview rooms at ports of entry. He can’t imagine they are overtaxed. Yet, he said, Central Americans stranded at the bridge constantly tell him that CBP agents say there’s “no room” to process the migrants.

Garcia said he asked a low-level CBP agent, who was working at an international bridge, why Central Americans were being blocked. “This is a borderwide policy,” Garcia said the agent answered. Garcia believes the policy is connected to Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s “zero tolerance” policy initiated in early May.

That is when the Trump administration began routinely splitting up immigrant adults and children who were caught crossing into the U.S. Most were families from Central America.

By blocking asylum-seekers from crossing legally, CBP is pressuring them to cross illegally. Garcia believes that this new practice gives the government an excuse to split up even more families.

“By putting officers on the bridge,” said a CBP spokesperson, the agency “is taking a proactive approach to ensure that arriving travelers have valid entry documents in order to expedite the processing of lawful travel.”

Depending upon port circumstances at the time of arrival, individuals presenting without documents may need to wait in Mexico as CBP officers work to process those already within our facilities. The number of inadmissible individuals we are able to process in a day varies based on the complexity of the cases, resources available, medical needs, translation requirements, holding/detention space, overall port volume and enforcement actions.  As in the past when we’ve had to limit the number of people we can bring in for processing at a given time, we expect that this will be a temporary situation.

Amber Ramirez, a former immigration paralegal, came to the same conclusion earlier this month after she saw social media posts on Facebook about CBP agents blocking asylum-seekers on the international bridge.

Ramirez, 25, crosses frequently between El Paso and Juárez. On her way to El Paso one day after looking at Facebook, Ramirez saw a group of people who looked distressed. Speaking with them, she learned that all were from Guatemala: a 16-year-old girl and a woman with a frightened preschool-aged daughter. The teenager told Ramirez they had been prevented from crossing for days. They said they were considering coming into the U.S. by wading and walking under the bridge.

Ramirez knew that the wading and walking would result in the mother being criminally prosecuted and separated from her child, so she decided to act, even though she felt shaky.

“My whole life, I’ve been scared and intimated” by border agents, she said.

She gathered the teenager, the woman, and the child. She walked them to the top of the bridge.

Once there, she noticed that one CBP agent was standing north of the border, well within the United States. Ramirez then looked at the Central Americans and realized that they inadvertently had stepped forward. They were in the United States, too.

The agents tried to get Ramirez and the group to take a few steps backward, into Mexico. Instead, the group stayed politely but stubbornly in place. A quiet standoff ensued.

A supervisor arrived and seemed angry. Ramirez tried hard to remember the text of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the part about “aliens” in U.S. territory having the right to claim asylum. She wanted to quote it to the supervisor, but apparently he already knew the law. She remembers him scowling but waving the Central Americans past the blockade and toward the port of entry.

Two days later, on June 4, I saw the Guatemalan man with his 15-year-old son walking south on the bridge to Mexico. The man said they had just been prevented from crossing by CBP blockade for the sixth time in three days. I asked if he and his son would walk back again, with me behind them, filming. He agreed.

At the top, something similar to Ramirez’s experience occurred. When the agents saw us, they noticed that I was taking a video with my phone and seemed flustered. While telling the man and his son that there was “no room,” they stepped backward into the U.S. The Guatemalans stepped forward.

I noted to the agents that the Guatemalans were now in the U.S. and now had the legal right to request asylum.

“It’s not that we’re not going to help them — it’s a capacity issue,” one agent said.

The two shifted from foot to foot, and one called a supervisor. The Guatemalans stolidly held their ground in their first few inches of America.

The supervisor arrived, assessed the situation, and waved the father and son northward. I followed. The supervisor’s walkie-talkie squawked to officials farther down the line that asylum-seekers were coming to the port of entry along with a reporter.

Suddenly, another Guatemalan father-and-son pair came up behind us. I’d earlier met and filmed them, too. They said they had decided to follow me when they saw I was walking behind the others. This second family had also been denied entry many times. Now, they had also just been let through.

Inside the port, a gray-haired CBP agent peered at the four Guatemalans’ wrinkled identity papers, which the fathers had fished from old plastic bags. In a pleasant voice, the agent asked,

“Are you afraid to return to your country?”

“Yes,” said the Guatemalans.

“Step this way.”

I said goodbye and good luck to the Guatemalans.

But without advocates or press at their sides, other immigrants are still not getting past the bridge blockade. On June 9, two journalists — Bob Moore, a freelancer, and Claudia Tristán, of El Paso’s KFOX-TV — stood on the southbound side of the bridge, where they were not immediately visible to the CBP officials. Each pointed their phones toward the northbound side and filmed a woman — whom they later determined was a Honduran asylum-seeker — and her small son walking several feet into the United States. Their videos show the two being turned back to Mexico.

Karolina Walters is a staff attorney at the Washington, D.C.-based American Immigration Council, one of three groups representing plaintiffs in the Al Otro Lado lawsuit. She says these turn-backs of people already on U.S. soil constitute civil rights violations and “get to the heart of the lawsuit.”

The day after the journalists made their turn-back videos, Garcia called a community meeting to recruit volunteers to go to the bridge in shifts. Almost 50 people came to the meeting — a very impressive number for El Paso, Garcia said. Similar gatherings have been underway during the past several days in other Texas border cities.

Garcia is training some of his recruits to go to the bridges in shifts and take notes when they see refugees being turned back from requesting asylum. He has another group that is learning to accompany the immigrants to the invisible line. He hopes those volunteers will be able to help asylum-seekers exercise their rights in the face of blockading border agents.

*

Featured image is from the author.

“For the past decade, Stephen Harper has led a government that is increasingly partisan, suspicious, and hostile when dealing with our closest neighbours: the United States and Mexico. We will end this antagonism and work with our partners to advance our shared interests.” – Liberal Party of Canada campaign platform (2015)

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Following his election victory in the fall of 2015, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau distinguished his approach from that of his predecessor Stephen Harper and boasted of the changes his government would bring to Ottawa.

He spoke of ‘sunny ways’ as a governing style built on positive engagement with Canadians. A Trudeau government would succeed where its predecessor failed to get a major oil pipeline to the West Coast built by securing ‘social license’ from affected communities.

The Liberal platform pledged to reduce obstacles to trade with the U.S. [2]

Now, more than halfway through its mandate, the Liberal ship has coasted into some precarious waters. Trudeau’s hope to secure the twinning of Kinder Morgan’s Trans-Mountain pipeline, which would take diluted bitumen from land-locked Alberta to the West Coast of Canada, has encountered serious resistance. Meanwhile, the quarter century old North American Free Trade Agreement faces an uncertain future, as the Prime Minister confronts a protectionist Trump Administration determined to .

And speaking of the president, several officials within the White House have dumped on Trudeau in ways that no other US president in recent memory have publicly,

This week’s Global Research News Hour attempts to examine where the charismatic Canadian leader has gone wrong, and how he can fix it. The show also explores the meaning behind the Trump administration’s character assassinstion of the Prime Minister, as happened the weekend of the G7.

Our first guest is David Hughes. A former Earth scientist and fellow of the PostCarbon Institute, and the author of a new study on Canada’s Energy outlook. He believes that the priority of getting Tar sands oil to tide water doesn’t make economic sense.

In our second half hour, organic farmer, author and political activist David Orchard weighs in on the new round of tariff actions being taken by Trump against Canadian interests. He is convinced that NAFTA should be scrapped not just renegotiated as appears to be the case. Finally, We hear from John Helmer, who sees the attacks by the U.S. against Trudeau as a coordinated attack and not just the rants of a temperamental Commander – in- Chief.

David Hughes is a former Earth scientist, a fellow with the Post Carbon Institute, and the President of Global Sustainability Research. He is author of the May 2018 study, Canada’s Energy Outlook, for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

David Orchard is a Borden, Saskatchewan-based organic farmer, political activist and two-time contender for leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. He is also author of the 1993 best-seller The Fight for Canada: Four Centuries of Resistance to American Expansionism (Stoddart, 1993; 2nd ed. Robert Davies, 1999). His website is davidorchard.com

John Helmer is the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent based in Moscow, and directs his own independent bureau there. He has been a professor of political science, sociology and journalism, and has advised government heads in Greece, the United States and Asia. He served as a staffer in President Jimmy Carter’s White House from 1977 to 1981. Helmer’s blog ‘Dances with Bears’ can be found at johnhelmer.net.

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The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM in Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca . Excerpts of the show have begun airing on Rabble Radio and appear as podcasts at rabble.ca.

Community Radio Stations carrying the Global Research News Hour:

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

Boston College Radio WZBC 90.3FM NEWTONS  during the Truth and Justice Radio Programming slot -Sundays at 7am ET.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Radio Fanshawe: Fanshawe’s 106.9 The X (CIXX-FM) out of London, Ontario airs the Global Research News Hour Sundays at 6am with an encore at 4pm.

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

Notes:

1. https://www.liberal.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/New-plan-for-a-strong-middle-class.pdf ; p.66
2. ibid

Seventeen years of war in the Middle East and what do we have to show for it? Iraq after our 2003 invasion and occupation is no longer a unified country. Its once modern infrastructure is largely destroyed, and the nation has fractured into warring enclaves.

We have lost the war in Afghanistan. The Taliban is resurgent and has a presence in over 70 percent of the country.

Libya is a failed state.

Yemen after three years of relentless airstrikes and a blockade is enduring one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters. The 500 “moderate” rebels we funded and armed in Syria at a cost of $500 million are in retreat after instigating a lawless reign of terror.

The military adventurism has cost a staggering $5.6 trillion as our infrastructure crumbles, austerity guts basic services and half the population of the United States lives at or near poverty levels. The endless wars in the Middle East are the biggest strategic blunder in American history and herald the death of the empire.

Someone has to be blamed for debacles that have resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead, including at least 200,000 civilians, and millions driven from their homes. Someone has to be blamed for the proliferation of radical jihadist groups throughout the Middle East, the continued worldwide terrorist attacks, the wholesale destruction of cities and towns under relentless airstrikes and the abject failure of U.S. and U.S.-backed forces to stanch the insurgencies. You can be sure it won’t be the generals, the politicians such as George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the rabid neocons such as Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton who sold us the wars, the Central Intelligence Agency, the arms contractors who profit from perpetual war or the celebrity pundits on the airwaves and in newspapers who serve as cheerleaders for the mayhem.

“The failed policies, or lack of policies, of the United States, which violate international law, have left the Middle East in total chaos,” the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations, Gholamali Khoshroo, told me when we met in New York City. “The United States, to cover up these aggressive, reckless and costly policies, blames Iran. Iran is blamed for their failures in Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Lebanon.”

The Trump administration “is very naive about the Middle East and Iran,” the ambassador said.

“It can only speak in the language of threats—pressure, sanctions, intervention. These policies have failed in the region. They are very risky and costly. Let the Americans deal with the problems of the countries they have already invaded and attacked. America lacks constructive power in the Middle East. It is unable to govern even a village in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen or Syria. All it can do is use force and destructive power. This U.S. administration wants the Middle East and the whole world to bow to it. This is not a policy conducive to sound relationships with sovereign states, especially those countries that have resisted American influence.”

“The plan to arm ‘moderate’ rebels in Syria was a cover to topple [Syrian President] Bashar al-Assad,” the ambassador went on. “The Americans knew there were no ‘moderate’ rebels. They knew these weapons would get into the hands of terrorist groups like Daesh [Islamic State], Al-Nusra and their affiliates. Once again, the American policy failed. The Americans succeeded in destroying a country. They succeeded in creating bloodbaths. They succeeded in displacing millions of people. But they gained nothing. The sovereignty of Syria is expanding by the day. It is hard to imagine what President Trump is offering as a strategy in Syria. One day, he says, ‘I will move out of Syria very soon, very quickly.’ The next day he says, ‘If Iran is there, we should stay.’ I wonder if the American taxpayers know how much of their money has been wasted in Iraq, Syria and Yemen?”

Image on the right: Iran’s Ambassador to the United Nations Gholam Ali Khoshroo

Trump’s unilateral decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, although Iran was in compliance with the agreement, was the first salvo in this effort to divert attention from these failures to Iran. Bolton, the new national security adviser, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, along with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, advocate the overthrow of the Iranian government, with Giuliani saying last month that Trump is “as committed to regime change as we [an inner circle of presidential advisers] are.”

“The Iran nuclear deal was possible following several letters by President Barack Obama assuring the Iranian leadership that America had no intention of violating Iranian sovereignty,” Ambassador Khoshroo said. “America said it wanted to engage in a serious dialogue on equal footing and mutual interests and concerns. These assurances led to the negotiations that concluded with the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action]. From the beginning, however, America was not forthcoming in its dealings with us on the JCPOA. President Obama wanted the agreement to be implemented, but he did not want it implemented in its full capacity. Congress, on the day JCPOA was implemented, passed a law warning Europeans that were doing business with Iran. The staffs of companies had to apply for a visa to the United States if they had traveled to Iran for business purposes. This began on the first day. The Americans were not always very forthcoming. OFAC [Office of Foreign Funds Control] gave ambiguous answers to many of the questions that companies had about sanctions, but at least in words the Obama administration supported the JCPOA and saw the agreement as the basis for our interactions.”

“President Trump, however, even as a candidate, called the agreement ‘the worst deal America ever made,’ ” the ambassador said. “He called this deal a source of embarrassment for America. Indeed, it was not the deal but America’s unilateral decision to walk away from an agreement that was supported by the United Nations Security Council, and in fact co-sponsored and drafted by the United States, that is the source of embarrassment for America. To walk away from an international agreement and then threaten a sovereign country is the real source of embarrassment since Iran was in full compliance while the U.S. never was.”

“In 2008, the Israelis told the world that Iran was only some days away from acquiring an atomic bomb,” he said. “The Israelis said there had to be a military strike to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. What has happened since? During the last two years, there have been 11 reports by the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] clearly confirming and demonstrating Iran’s full compliance with the JCPOA. All of the accusations [about] Iran using nuclear facilities for military purposes were refuted by the IAEA as well as by Europe, Russia, China, along with many other countries in Asia, Latin America, Africa. America is concerned about Iranian influence in the region and seeks to contain Iran because the U.S. administration realizes that America’s policies in the Middle East have failed. Their own statements about Iran repeatedly contradict each other. One day they say, ‘Iran is so weak it will collapse,’ and the next day they say, ‘Iran is governing several Arab capitals in the Middle East.’ ”

Iran announced recently that it has tentative plans to produce the feedstock for centrifuges, the machines that enrich uranium, if the nuclear deal is not salvaged by European members of the JCPOA. European countries, dismayed by Trump’s decision to withdraw from the agreement, are attempting to renegotiate the deal, which imposes restrictions on Iran’s nuclear development in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions.

Why go to war with a country that abides by an agreement it has signed with the United States? Why attack a government that is the mortal enemy of the Taliban, along with other jihadist groups, including al-Qaida and Islamic State, that now threaten us after we created and armed them? Why shatter the de facto alliance we have with Iran in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why further destabilize a region already dangerously volatile?

The architects of these wars are in trouble. They have watched helplessly as the instability and political vacuum they caused, especially in Iraq, left Iran as the dominant power in the region. Washington, in essence, elevated its nemesis. It has no idea how to reverse its mistake, beyond attacking Iran. Those both in the U.S. and abroad who began or promoted these wars see a conflict with Iran as a solution to their foreign and increasingly domestic dilemmas.

For example, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, mired in corruption scandals, hopes that by fostering a conflict with Iran he can divert attention away from investigations into his abuse of power and the massacres Israel carries out against Palestinians, along with Israel’s accelerated seizure of Palestinian land.

“The most brutal regime is now in power in Israel,” the Iranian ambassador said. “It has no regard for international law or humanitarian law. It violates Security Council resolutions regarding settlements, its capital and occupation. Look at what Israel has done in Gaza in the last 30 days. On the same day America was unlawfully transferring its embassy to Jerusalem, 60 unarmed Palestinian protesters were killed by Israeli snipers. [Israelis] were dancing in Jerusalem while the blood of unarmed Palestinians was running in Gaza. The Trump administration gives total support and impunity to Israel. This angers many people in the Middle East, including many in Saudi Arabia. It is a Zionist project to portray Iran as the main threat to peace in the Middle East. Israel introducing Iran as a threat is an attempt to divert attention from the crimes this regime is committing, but these too are failed policies that will backfire. They are policies designed to cover weakness.”

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, facing internal unrest, launched the war in Yemen as a vanity project to bolster his credentials as a military leader. Now he desperately needs to deflect attention from the quagmire and humanitarian disaster he created.

“Saudi Arabia, as part of [the civil war in Yemen], has a tactical and strategic cooperation with Israel against Iran,” the ambassador said. “But the Saudi regime is defying the sentiments of its own people. How long will this be possible? For three years now, Saudi Arabia, assisted by the United States, has bombed the Yemeni people and imposed a total blockade that includes food and medicine. Nothing has been resolved. Once again, Iran is blamed for this failure by Saudi Arabia and the United States in Yemen. Even if Iran wanted to help the Yemenis, it is not possible due to the total blockade. The Yemeni people asked for peace negotiations from the first day of the war. But Saudi military adventurism and its desire to test its military resolve made any peaceful solution impossible. The U.S. and the U.K. provide military and logistical support, including cluster bombs to be used by the Saudis in Yemen. The Emiratis are bombing Yemen. All such actions are doomed to failure since there is no military solution in Yemen. There is only a political solution. Look at the targets of Saudi airstrikes in Yemen: funerals. Wedding ceremonies. Agricultural fields. Houses. Civilians. How do the Saudis expect the Yemeni people to greet those who bomb them? With hugs? The war has cost a lot of money, and Trump responds by saying [to Saudi Arabia], ‘Oh you have money. [Paraphrasing here.] Please buy our ‘beautiful weapons.’ They are killing beautiful children with these ‘beautiful’ weapons. It is a disaster. It is tragic.”

And then there is President Donald Trump, desperate for a global crusade he can use to mask his ineptitude, the rampant corruption of his administration and his status as an international pariah when he runs for re-election in 2020.

“Of course, blaming and threatening Iran is not new,” the ambassador said. “This has been going on for 40 years. The Iranian people and the Iranian government are accustomed to this nonsense. United States intervention in the internal affairs of Iran goes back a long time, including the [Iranian] war with Iraq, when the United States supported Saddam Hussein. Then America invaded Iraq in 2003 in their so-called ‘intervention for democracy and elimination of WMDs.’ Iran has always resisted and will always resist U.S. threats.”

“America was in Iran 40 years ago,” the ambassador said. “About 100,000 U.S. advisers were in Iran during the rule of the shah, who was among the closest allies of America. America was unable to keep this regime in power because the Iranian people revolted against such dependency and suppression. Since the fall of the shah in 1979, for 40 years, America continued to violate international law, especially the Algeria agreements it signed with Iran in 1981.”

The Algeria Declaration was a set of agreements between the United States and Iran that resolved the Iranian hostage crisis. It was brokered by the Algerian government. The U.S. committed itself in the Algeria Declaration to refrain from interference in Iranian internal affairs and to lift trade sanctions on Iran and a freeze on Iranian assets.

The warmongers have no more of a plan for “regime change” in Iran than they had in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or Syria. European allies, whom Trump alienated when he walked away from the Iranian nuclear agreement, are in no mood to cooperate with Washington. The Pentagon, even if it wanted to, does not have the hundreds of thousands of troops it would need to attack and occupy Iran. And the idea—pushed by lunatic fringe figures like Bolton and Giuliani—that the marginal and discredited Iranian resistance group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), which fought alongside Saddam Hussein in the war against Iran and is viewed by most Iranians as composed of traitors, is a viable counterforce to the Iranian government is ludicrous. In all these equations the 80 million people in Iran are ignored just as the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria were ignored. Perhaps they would not welcome a war with the United States. Perhaps if attacked they would resist. Perhaps they don’t want to be occupied. Perhaps a war with Iran would be interpreted throughout the region as a war against Shiism. But these are calculations that the ideologues, who know little about the instrument of war and even less about the cultures or peoples they seek to dominate, are unable to fathom.

“The Middle East has many problems: insecurity, instability, problems with natural resources such as water, etc.,” Khoshroo said. “All of these problems have been made worse by foreign intervention as well as Israel’s lawlessness. The issue of Palestine is at the heart of turmoil in the Middle East for Muslims. Any delay in finding solutions to these wounds in the Middle East exposes this region to more dangerous threats. Americans say they want the Middle East to be free from violent extremism, but this will only happen when the Middle East is free from occupation and foreign intervention. The Americans are selling their weapons throughout the Middle East. They calculate how much money they can earn from destruction. They don’t care about human beings. They don’t care about security or democratic process or political process. This is worrisome.”

“What are the results of American policies in the Middle East?” he asked. “All of the American allies in the region are in turmoil. Only Iran is secure and stable. Why is this the case? Why, during the last 40 years, has Iran been stable? Is it because Iran has no relationship with America? Why is there hostility between Iran and America? Can’t the Americans see that Iran’s stability is important for the region? We are surrounded by Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen. What good would come from destabilizing Iran? What would America get out of that?”

*

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, New York Times best selling author, former professor at Princeton University, activist and ordained Presbyterian minister. He has written 11 books, including the New York Times best-seller “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” (2012), which he co-authored with the cartoonist Joe Sacco.

Featured image is from Mr. Fish/Truthdig.

The State Department reportedly asked US Middle East embassies to assure aid isn’t given to foreign militaries involved in human rights abuses.

The above sounds more like fiction than reality. No militaries anywhere violate human rights more egregiously than America’s and Israel’s.

It’s gone on throughout the entire history of both countries, countless millions harmed by their high crimes of war and against humanity, their use of chemical, biological, radiological, and other banned weapons, their contempt for rule of law principles, their disdain for the rights of invented enemies.

Zionist ideologue Trump regime ambassador to Israel David Friedman opposes scrutiny of IDF practices – enforcing occupation harshness, waging undeclared war on defenseless Palestinian civilians, responsible for over 14,000 casualties in Gaza since March 30 alone, Israel holding an entire Palestinian population hostage to what the late Edward Said called its “refined viciousness.”

Responding to alleged State Department human rights guidelines, Friedman turned truth on its head claiming

“Israel is a democracy whose army does not engage in gross violations of human rights,” adding:

The IDF “has a robust system of investigation and prosecution in the rare circumstance where misconduct occurs…(I)t would be against (US) national interests” to limit military aid to Israel “especially in a time of war.”

Israel’s self-styled world’s most moral army is one of the most ruthless. Its war crimes and other human rights abuses are rife.

Its so-called “robust system of investigation and prosecution” consistently whitewashes flagrant abusiveness time and again.

America and Israel partner in each other’s Nuremberg-level high crimes, accountability never forthcoming.

Both countries flagrantly violate the laws of war and other fundamental human rights.

US law is clear, unequivocal and ignored. The 1961 Foreign Assistance Act (FAA) prohibits aiding governments engaged:

“in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights, including torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, prolonged detention without charges, causing the disappearance of persons by the abduction and clandestine detention of those persons, or other flagrant denial of the right to life, liberty, and the security of person, unless such assistance will directly benefit the needy people in such country.”

The Leahy Law provision of the 2001 Foreign Operations Appropriations Act (FOAA) (Sec. 8092 of PL 106-259) states:

“None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to support any training program involving a unit of the security forces of a foreign country if the Secretary of Defense has received credible information from the Department of State that a member of such unit has committed a gross violation of human rights, unless all necessary corrective steps have been taken.”

FOAA prohibits funding foreign security forces involved in gross human rights violations. It’s proscribed unless “effective measures (are taken) to bring the responsible members of the security forces unit to justice.”

When it comes to Israel, the Saudis, and other US allied flagrant human rights abusers, the above laws don’t apply – no matter how lawless their practices.

Israel has a well-documented appalling human rights record. Yet it gets billions of dollars in US military aid annually, including state-of-the-art weapons, munitions and technology, more on request – along with special benefits afforded no other countries.

Every US administration along with virtually the entire Congress, bureaucracy, and major media support Israel, ignoring its high crimes, blaming victims for its brutality inflicted on them.

Alleged State Department concern for human rights is a ruse, especially with neocon extremist Mike Pompeo in charge as secretary of state – an unindicted war criminal, an assassin and torturer as CIA director.

Israel and other US allied rogue states are immune from accountability no matter how flagrant their high crimes and human rights abuses.

The above cited US laws and alleged State Department concern for human rights don’t apply to them.

*

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

Maybe it is the best agreement ever signed…Maybe by applying it, Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, will enter an era of great friendship and enormous prosperity…

Maybe…The only small detail is the majority of the deputies of the Greek Parliament do not know the agreement is so good. Their parties declared they are opposing the agreement and they won’t ratify it. Even the An.Ell. party, which is the junior partner of SYRIZA in the government, does not know how profitable is this agreement. They said they would vote No to the agreement when introduced in the Parliament. The population does not know it also. 70% of those asked in the polls, including 50% of the SYRIZA voters, answered they are against the agreement.

The opposition asked the Government to have a vote in the Parliament on the agreement Tsipras and Kotzias wanted to sign before it is signed. The government refused the request and refused also the calls for a referendum from various corners and personalities, including from Mikis Theodorakis, the legendary symbol of the International Leftist movement. No, Tsipras and Kotzias know better what is good for the people than the people itself.

Given the official opposition of the parties commanding the majority of deputies of the Parliament, the clear opposition of the people and other circumstances we will try to elucidate, the signing today of the agreement between Tsipras and the FYROM PM Zaev was nothing less than a political, if not a legal stricto senso, coup d’ etat against Greek constitutional order and the principles of Popular and National Sovereignty, with the sole aim of opening the way of FYROM to NATO and the EU, and that irrespective of the opinion one may hold of the agreement itself.

As we said everybody can have an opinion about this agreement (*) But there is a much larger and probably far more important question than how to solve the dispute between Greece and FYROM. And this question is: Who rules Greece and FYROM? Their citizens and elected Parliaments, or US, Germany, NATO and the EU?

Kotzias and Tsipras (image on the right) had technically the right to sign this agreement, but they did not have any legitimacy to do it, as Greek political parties commanding a majority of deputies in the Greek Parliament have expressed their disagreement with it in the most official way.

By the way, a closer look at the agreement will persuade you than in fact, instead of solving, it is recognizing and eternalizing the existing differences between Greeks and Macedonian Slavs. The main aim of the agreement is to open the way of NATO to FYROM and then, the differences of the two nations will be used to provide Americans with a permanent tool to use the one nation against the other. The agreement was conceived to facilitate US-NATO advanced strategic planning for controlling Balkans, encircling, containing and threatening Russia.

The agreement has also the potential of destabilizing and provoking much greater instability, chaos and conflicts in the region, including in Greece itself. (By the way there are also doubts if Mr. Zaev, the PM of FYROM, who came into power in 2016, as a result of a color revolution, greatly helped by US Secret Services, has also sufficient legitimization to sign this agreement.)

Only by a series of legal coup d’ etats and flagrant violations of the most elementary democratic and parliamentarian rules, we will expose in detail, Tsipras and Kotzias were able to sign today this agreement. Of course, all massive violations of democratic rule and legitimacy in a member of the EU are not representing any obstacle for Federica Mogherini, the EU Representative on Foreign and Security Policy, the EU Commissioner on Enlargement Johannes Hahn, Rosemary DiCarlo, Deputy General Secretary of the UN and Mathew Nimetz, UN special Envoy who were present and celebrated the signing of the agreement in lake Prespes, an agreement representing the will of the Empire, not the will of the two nations.

The agreement is also strongly supported by US President Trump, the German government, NATO and the EU. All of them are wishing to include FYROM to NATO as soon as possible in order for this organization to control the whole of the Balkans. FYROM is located on the very center of the peninsula, between Albania and Bulgaria and between Greece and Serbia. To control it means to control the whole peninsula. In FYROM the US have established since many years enormous military installations and the country has become the center of CIA activities covering all Balkans. (**)

The only reason Tsipras and Kotzias proceeded to the signing of this agreement, circumventing the essence of the Greek Constitutional Order, with the help of the EU Commission, always willing to attack democratic principles in any member state of the EU, is exactly their wish to satisfy everything NATO and the US are asking from them, something they do also (***) in all spheres of Foreign and Defense Policy.

The signature of this agreement, in opposition to the will of the Parliament and the people, is the second so grave violation of the very foundations of the democratic regime in Greece and of the principles of Popular and National Sovereignty, since the disregarding of the clear verdict of the 2015 Referendum. In fact it is the continuation of the previous, 2015 coup, but without even the shadow of a justification. Tsipras claimed, back in 2015, that he could not do anything else. Now there is no other reason to sign this agreement than to satisfy the American desiderata. By signing such an agreement and paying a huge corresponding, this government proves that is controlled directly by foreign powers in a way no Greek government was controlled after the military junta. The fact that the centers of Western Imperialism were able to control the leadership of the Greek Left, one of the most radical and strong in any European country after WWII is a tremendous triumph for the Empire,  for many reasons (****).

The main difference between now and 2015 is that the main role is played now by US and NATO. The European Union is relegated to a back stage supporting role, the opposite of what happened in 2015. Of course, we should remember that already in 2015 American diplomacy did also play an important back stage role in the signing of the Greek capitulation and the Greek vice-Prime Minister Dragasakis has even gone on record to thank the US Administration for its vital contribution to the … surrender of his own government! The supposed “radical left” (SYRIZA) and supposed “radical right” (An.Ell.) were unable to capitulate by themselves, they needed outside help even for that!

We said that this new coup is the continuation of the previous one, because both are included in a project of destroying the Greek nation and democracy, by turning the Greek state into a Western protectorate in all fields, including foreign and defense policies and status. The Tsipras – Zaev agreement is not representing but the transition from the economic to the geopolitical methods of colonization of Greece.

Why this is a coup d’ Etat

As we already said, one problem is how Greece and FYROM want to regulate their relations. Another one is who holds and how he exercises power in both nations.

In the Greek case, it is clear that the Troika, Germany and the EU are making the law as far as economy and society is concerned, US, NATO and their allies as far as Geopolitics are concerned.

But up to now, this was happening through a formal respect of parliamentary forms. Now, we have a clear violation even of those forms and rules.

This is why we said the signing of this agreement is a coup d’ etat, probably not in a strict legal sense, but at least in a political sense.

A government has of course the right to sign international agreements, which subsequently have to be ratified by the National Parliament.

But there are some limits to this possibility. The agreements should not be in clear violation of people’s will or of the expressed will of the majority of the Parliament!

For example, Mr. Tsipras, before going to Brussels to negotiate his surrender after the 2015 referendum, he felt the need to go to the Greek Parliament asking for an authorization to negotiate and sign an agreement.

Now, not only he has not any authorization of the Parliament to sign the agreement he is signing, the majority of the Greek political parties commanding a majority of deputies in the Greek Parliament are publicly opposing the agreement he is signing. This fact is putting into obvious and serious doubt his right to sign the agreement, as it would happen in any other law-ruled country of the world.

There is worse. SYRIZA has refused to put the agreement to the preliminary approval of the Parliament and to satisfy a demand of the opposition for a vote on it.

Maybe you will ask how a government commanding a majority in the Parliament, has not a majority on that  particular issue. This is happening because SYRIZA has a parliamentary majority only by adding An.Ell. deputies and An.Ell. is included in the parties opposing the agreement.

There is even more. It is maybe the first time in the international history of parliamentarianism and of international relations that a Foreign Minister is signing an international agreement against not only the will of the majority of his own Parliament, but one which his own government is not fully supporting! One of the two governing parties in Greece, the smaller partner of SYRIZA, An.Ell., disagrees also with the agreement. This is why Mr. Tsipras and Mr. Kotzias did not ask even for an authorization from their own Council of Ministers before signing!

Except SYRIZA, who was voted by less than 20% of the Greek electorate back in September 2015, there is only another small party, Potami, with four deputies supporting the agreement. All other political parties, from the Communist Party of the Far Left to Golden Dawn of the Far Right are opposing the agreement Tsipras+ and Kotzias are signing.

Speaking about the institutional order, the only Greek state institution which has debated and decided ever about the FYROM issue has been the Council of Heads of Political Parties, which has met under the President of the Greek Republic, back in 1992. Then all the heads of the Greek Political Parties represented in the Parliament, the President of SYN (the predecessor of SYRIZA) included, with the exception of the Communist Party, decided that Greece does not accept for FYROM any name in which the term Macedonia or its derivatives would be included.

It is true that this is not any more the opinion of most Greek political parties, but nobody bothered to change that decision. If SYRIZA respected in an elementary way the institutions of the Greek State and Democracy, the minimum it had to do was to ask for convening again this Council, or, alternatively, convening the Parliament to ask for changing this decision and for authorization to negotiate on a different basis.

The Referendum question

The agreement is not only signed against the will of the Parliament, it is also signed against the will of the people.

Hundreds of thousands of people, probably more than a million, have demonstrated in Athens and Salonica against SYRIZA’s policy on this question. Those demonstrations were by far the biggest in the country since many years.

The polls show since last February that a constant absolute majority of Greek citizens are against the policy of the government on that issue, including half of the SYRIZA voters themselves. According to the latest poll, taken after the agreement was known, 70% of Greeks reject the agreement. The influence of SYRIZA in all Northern Greece is collapsing.

All that puts in even bigger doubt the political legitimacy of a government signing an agreement like the one signed today, but it is also putting a huge question on the reasons it is doing it. It seems as one more clear indication, which is also verified by a lot of different indications, that the two governing parties of Greece are following strictly the agenda of the United States, of NATO and of their allies.

Given the importance citizens in all countries pay to national questions, affecting their idea of their own Nation, the divisions in Greek society are very deep, especially in the context of a country under attack. The internal atmosphere in the country is aggravated by the extremely authoritarian way SYRIZA and Tsipras himself are behaving towards everybody in disagreement with them.

Mr. Tsipras himself, who spend all his life in street demonstrations or organizing the occupation of public buildings went live to treat half to one million peaceful demonstrators in Athens as Mob. But the polls made among demostrators proved that a clear majority of them have voted No in the 2015 referendum.

Those who demonstrate against the “Macedonia” policy of SYRIZA represent the same, deep social revolt of Greeks to save themselves and their nation, which brought this party to power, not because, but in spite of its ideas and leading cadres, because the country was in an emergency situation, facing existential threats and because Tsipras was intelligent enough to adopt revolutionary slogans and ideas from outside his party, which he betrayed consequently.

By the way, it is rather ridiculous if not immoral to treat like that the demonstrators who went to the Constitution Square to hear Mikis Theodorakis, the legendary symbol of the Greek and international Left, or Professor Kasimatis, the leading authority in Constitutional Law in Greece, ex-advisor of PM Andreas Papandrou and an ardent critique of the neocolonial Loan agreements imposed to Greece. SYRIZA, in a classic Stalinist methodology, is portraying all people disagreeing with its policies as primitive, far right nationalists, “forgetting” that among themselves there is a number of real Leftist intellectuals and politicians, like the legendary veteran of the Greek Left Manolis Glezos, nine times condemned to death because of his political ideas and saved from execution because of the mobilization of European personalities, including Charles De Gaulle, who called his the “first Resistant in Europe”.

By attacking all those people as “nationalists”, “extremists”, “far right people”, “populists” etc. SYRIZA is not only committing political suicide, it creates gradually the conditions for a kind of low intensity civil-war in the country and of a real rise of the Far Right, if it will stay the only major force able to use the Greek national feeling. SYRIZA leaders, except those among them who are serving directly foreign interests, maybe they hope that they will develop far-right to cut the percentages of the conventional right, but in fact they play with fire, completely detached from reality and any kind of principles.

In fact, SYRIZA itself has come to power expressing and then betraying a deep feeling of social and national revolt. But even right wing Greek nationalism, even when it is adopting primitive forms, is essentially a defensive nationalism, no Greek claiming any territory outside the frontiers of Greece. The reaction on the Macedonian question is out of the huge fears of Greeks that after the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, the dismemberment of Greece will follow. And in a way it did happen. The Greek state and society were not bombed by NATO as Yugoslavia, but they were destroyed and kidnapped by economic warfare by the same forces which destroyed Yugolsavia.

The potential of this question to provoke serious internal strife in Greece was is one more reason, various Greek personalities have called for a Referendum to be held about the agreement with FYROM, including Mikis Theodorakis, a proposal which can protect democratic decision making and also civil peace in the country.

Of course the proposal was rejected by SYRIZA, for decades an advocate of referendums.

SYRIZA not only does not want a referendum in Greece, he does not want it also in FYROM. The FM Kotzias has even suggested publicly to the FYROM authorities not to do it, in alliance with the pro-American and pro-NATO leaders of the Albanian community in this country.

A strong supporter of everything Soviets and East Germans were doing, including interventions in Eastern Europe, a stalinist ideologue who never permitted any doubt to himself about the regimes he was serving and a virulent critique of Western Imperialism once, Mr. Nikos Kotzias left the Greek CP in 1990. Some years afterwards he seemed to enjoy full confidence of this same “Western imperialism”, if we judge from the fact he has worked as an advisor and a kind of theoretician of Greek FM G. Papandreou, himself one of the most pro-American ever Foreign Ministers of Greece. He had also served as President of the PASOK think tank during its “modernization”, right wing turn. After not being appointed as Foreign Minister when Georges Papandreou became Prime Minister, Kotzias gradually begun to criticize his policies. He is one of the people who commanded huge influence to the shaping of Tsipras’ideas, especially as Tsipras had a very low level of education, in particular as far as it concerned foreign and international policy. We assume he has contributed a lot to the pro-western behind the scenes orientation Mr. Tsipras and SYRIZA have taken. Something which was facilitated by the fact SYRIZA has never functioned as a collective, not even to speak of a democratic political entity. All decisions were taken by Tsipras himself and a group of close friends of him, something which made eventually mush easier the manipulation of this party by various foreign centers.

The Imperial Strategy is probably to use SYRIZA in a first stage to get from Greece all concesiions they want in Cyprus, the Balkans, in the Aegean and concerning relations with Turkey and use of the Greek territory as a gigantic US military base. This is the Plan A which will have as a result the birth of the plan B. The destruction not only of the SYRIZA leadership, because of the policy it is implementing, but also a huge blow to the underlying, now more and more orphan, strong social current of a Greek national, popular and antiimperialist Left, which has shaped Greek politics since the time of the huge Resistance to Nazi Occupation.

Undermining Democracy and States: τhe Legal Tricks of the Agreement concerning NATO and its Ratification

The Agreement as signed is constructed in such a way as

1. To produce as quickly as possible and before the text is ratified by the Greek Parliament a maximum of results as far as FYROM’s integration into NATO is concerned.
2. To create enormous political difficulties to the Greek Parliament in order to make near to impossible to it to refuse to ratify it.

All that is done by reversing the usual chronology for the implementation of an international agreement.

In the first phase the agreement will be submitted to the FYROM parliament for ratification, but not to the Greek one! If the FYROM parliament will ratify it, Athens will revoke its veto to the inclusion of FYROM into NATO and EU and the Alliance will issue an invitation to FYROM  to join it. All that before the agreement is submitted to the Greek parliamentarians.

That means the political and military integration of FYROM into NATO will begin, with Americans taking care to make as much as possible a sheer formality the final act of inclusion of FYROM, which has to be ratified by all parliaments of the Members of NATO.

If things are going as planned and FYROM takes all the necessary steps it has to take changing its constitution and adopting all that in a referendum, then and only then the Greek parliament will examine the agreement and decide if it wants it and if it wants FYROM inside NATO.

In theory, Greek deputies have the possibility to cancel all that. But how logical is for FYROM to have begun accession negotiations with NATO and EU, to have satisfied all conditions put by the Greek government and then suddenly for the Greek deputies to say “Just a moment, all that was a mistake”. If they do it enormous pressures will be exercised on Greece and it will be accused of fraude.

We repeat, one can agree or disagree with the content of this agreement and with this or that solution of the dispute between Greece and FYROM. But nobody has the right to impose his views organizing coup d’ etats and circumventing the Constitutional Order and Democracy itself. The fact that this is accepted and even supported by the European Commission in one of the members of the European Union (which also happens to be the birth place of Democracy!) constitutes one more serious proof how far the EU has gone into its transformation to a totalitarian structure, acting on behalf of International Finance and NATO.

* 

Notes

*As it happens with all agreements, there are those who like them and those who do not like them. In Greece there are those who believe that Athens should not recognize any state whose name includes the term Macedonia or its derivatives. There are also people who say that FYROM can have the name it wishes to have. In the middle there are people who say Greece cannot deny to Slav Macedonians altogether the use of the term Macedonia, but in such a form which will make clear they represent a part, but not the whole of Macedonia, as Slav Macedonian nationalism claims.  Equally conflicting views exist in FYROM. This dispute did not create any problem in the relations between two countries and nobody was remembering it until recently, when Washington asked the Tsipras and Zaev governments to solve it quickly, in order for FYROM to be invited to NATO next July and to be given pre-acession status to the EU.

**We remind our readers that this region of SE Europe, of critical importance in any war with Russia, has been transformed into a chain of small, socially and economically ruined and plundered and closely controlled western protectorates. Germany and other European countries are looting them systematically, but it is NATO and the US which make the Law, as far as geopolitics is concerned. There are only some “details” for the control of the whole region to be completed, like incorporating all Western Balkan states into NATO and its corollary, the EU and organizing regime change in Serbia.

***Look http://www.defenddemocracy.press/mikis-theodorakis-blasts-greek-governments-foreign-policy/

****First, they are able to use the SYRIZA-An.Ell.government in Athens to get concessions from Greece in foreign and military policy no other government would be able to deliver to them.

Second, they use this policy to destroy the social basis of the Greek left, to put the SYRIZA leaders into open clash with both their social base and the national feeling of Greeks. They want to finish with one of the deepest social, national and antiimperialist currents, shaping Greek policies and social ideology since the Nazi occupation, the strongest and the deepest in any European country.

Third, they want to create if possible a current of primitive nationalist Far Rigth, as a result of a series of betrayals by SYRIZA.

Such a current may be useful in the next stage of the Greek, European and Middle Eastern Crisis. A low intensity civil war or an open dictatorship, a war with Turkey or in the Balkans cannot be excluded.

Featured image is from Yanis Varoufakis.

The ugliness of US immigration policy is once again evident. There is national outrage that separating children, often infants, from their parents is wrong. There is also national consensus (nine out of ten people in the US) that people brought here by their parents, the Dreamers, should not be forced out of the country as adults.

The highly restrictive, dysfunctional immigration system in the United States serves the interests of  big business and US Empire. Investors can cross borders to find workers who will accept slave-labor wages and dangerous environments, but workers cannot cross borders to find better wages and safety.

US-pushed corporate trade agreements serve the interests of transnational corporations, allowing them to legally take advantage of cheap labor and to steal natural resources, but workers cannot cross borders  when their economy is destroyed or their communities are poisoned.

US militarism and regime change cross borders to replace governments that are working to improve the lives and autonomy of their people and install authoritarian governments, but people who are facing the terrorism of US-supported security states cannot cross the border to find refuge.

The violence of the drug trade that serves US consumers creates mafia and gang violence in other countries, but people who live with the violence of drug gangsterism cannot cross borders to escape.

Separating Children From Their Parents

President Donald Trump claims he hates to have to separate children from their families at the border and that he is merely enforcing a law passed by the Democrats.

Separating families at the Border is the fault of bad legislation passed by the Democrats. Border Security laws should be changed but the Dems can’t get their act together! Started the Wall.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 5, 2018

This is a false description of why children are separated from their parents.

The reason for the separation is that the Trump administration has decided on zero tolerance criminal enforcement of immigration laws.  A 1997 court settlement in Flores barred children from being imprisoned with their parents. In 2014, President Obama put hundreds of families in immigration detention but federal courts stopped them from holding families for months without trial, resulting in the release of families to return for trial. Trump has taken the approach of arresting the parents and holding the children.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which is responsible for taking care of “unaccompanied alien children,” the label put on these youth, already has 11,000 immigrants under the age of 18 in its custody who haven’t yet been placed with relatives or other sponsors. Under the new Trump policy, 2,000 children have been separated from their parents in just six weeks.  These youth are held in tent cities and warehouse jails, which could fairly be called prison camps.

This is resulting in heartbreaking stories. A man from Honduras, where the US supported a coup, Marco Antonio Muñoz, killed himself in a detention cell after his 3-year-old son was taken. CNN reports agents ripped a Honduran  woman’s infant daughter from her arms while she was breastfeeding. The New York Times reported on one child, referred to only as José, also from Honduras, who refused to take a shower or change his clothes after being separated from his parents as he didn’t want anything else taken away from him.

The American Academy of Pediatrics says separation will cause “irreparable harm” to children. While Jeff Sessions and Sarah Huckabee Sanders have used the bible to justify the policy, there is a revolt among Trump’s religious base.  The Chicago Tribune reports

“The Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, who delivered a prayer at Trump’s inauguration, signed a letter calling the practice ‘horrible.’ Pastor Franklin Graham … a vocal supporter of the president’s who has brushed aside past Trump controversies, called it ‘terrible’ and ‘disgraceful.’”

Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, described “a groundswell of opposition from virtually every corner of the Christian community.” The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Southern Baptist Convention issued statements critical of the practice. Even Evangelical Trump supporters are speaking out against it.

Separating children from their parents is justified as a deterrent to convince people not to attempt to cross the border, but it has not worked. The children are also a bargaining chip. Trump will not change the policy unless Congress agrees to his immigration demands, including the border wall, tightening the rules for border enforcement and curbing legal entry. In turn, the Democrats are using child separation as a tool for the 2018 election. Both parties are holding immigrant children hostage for their agendas.

A group of students lead the larger crowd that turned out and showed up in support of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) at Acacia Park and ended their rally at the office of Cory Gardner on Tuesday September 5, 2017 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. (Photo by Dougal Brownlie, The Gazette).

Immigrant Youth Brought to the US by their Parents

Immigrant youth are also being used by Trump to force negotiation for tougher immigration policies and by Democrats for the 2018 election.

Trump’s repeal of policies protecting youth brought to the US by their parents has resulted in outrage and national consensus that these youth should not be punished. A CBS News poll found 87 percent believe the Dreamers should be allowed to remain in the US.

Dysfunction in Congress and an obstinate White House have left these youth in limbo-risk. Obama allowed certain immigrant youth brought to the U.S. without documents as children to live and work here without fear of deportation. Trump reversed that, announcing he would rescind the program, and gave Congress six months to find a legislative fix. His rescission has been blocked by a federal court.

President Trump sent mixed signals last week. First he said he would veto a bill that would protect Dreamers from deportation, then the White House reversed that statement saying Trump had misunderstood the question and would sign the legislation passed by Congress. People in both Chambers are trying to find a way forward, but sensible immigration laws have lots of barriers to overcome.

Rallies Call For Immigrant Rights Persist

Across the country there have been rallies for immigrant rights. Groups like Mijente and the Cosecha Movement are doing strong organizing for permanent protection for all immigrants. Last week, actions were focused on the issue of separating parents from their children.

hate has no home here // #FamilesBelongTogether @ the roosevelt bridge, stuart, fl pic.twitter.com/TA4IsrBSue

— lauren (@laurenpineiro) June 14, 2018

#FamilesBelongTogether Brooklyn unites to fight family separation pic.twitter.com/IgfSRfgyeW

— Pablo Gutierrez (@PablogtzT47) June 14, 2018

Word. #FamilesBelongTogether pic.twitter.com/iT9BrRK5uE

— ?️‍?Abby Spice, ? Mama?️‍? (@clapifyoulikeme) June 14, 2018

More great photos from our actions yesterday #FamilesBelongTogether pic.twitter.com/88bOQFyWWQ

— Families Belong Together (@familiesbelong) June 15, 2018

Every media network needs to be focused on children being taken from their parents at the border & the children who are being detained as prisoners for crossing the border alone

This is a humanitarian CRISIS of historic proportions#FamilesBelongTogether #ThursdayMotivation pic.twitter.com/zXJ4Hevv2v

— Mara McEwin (@maramcewin) June 14, 2018

These types of immigration policies have existed for multiple administrations. Trump has not come close to Obama’s record level of deportations. From 2009 to 2016, Obama oversaw the forcible removal of more than 3 million undocumented immigrants. ICE under Obama averaged 309,887 arrests per year from 2009-2012, while ICE under Trump averaged 139,553 in 2017. Obama set records between 2008 and 2014 for the number of people arrested and placed in deportation proceedings.

Remember that there were multiple mass protests against Obama on immigration throughout the country. Protesters blocked traffic around the White House highlighting how “Obama deports parents.” Obama did not use the harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric of Trump, but he had strong enforcement policies against immigrants.

Immigration, as we noted at the outset, is tied into issues of corporate trade agreements, regime change, US Empire, the drug war and capitalism. These issues are forcing a race to the bottom for worker rights and wages and destruction of the environment. They are driving a growing security state, militarization of law enforcement and mass incarceration. Border patrols lock people into countries where they face poverty, pollution and violence with little chance of escape.

Immigrants are the scapegoats, but it is the systems that are driving migration. Most people would prefer to remain in their home countries where they have roots, family and communities. Extreme conditions drive people to abandon everything and endure harsh and dangerous travel in hope of finding safety and the means of survival.

This is typical divide and conquer – encouraging us to blame each other and fight while the wealth of the elites expands. We are all hurt by the systems and crises that drive mass migration. This includes climate change as well.

While we take immediate action to protect immigrant children and families, let’s also speak out about the connections between migration and the many crises we face. We need to educate those who are being misled into blaming immigrants for the conditions that force them to leave their homes.

We must work in solidarity to create democratized economic systems, demand trade agreements that strengthen worker rights and protection of the environment and transition to a clean energy economy and a foreign policy that respects the autonomy of peoples while we also end racist systems, militarism, imperialism and mass incarceration.

*

Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers co-direct Popular Resistance where this article was originally published.

All images in this article are from the authors unless otherwise stated. Featured image is by Susan Melkisethian from flickr.

In a strange case of reversed roles Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chrystia Freeland, tried to convince US president Donald Trump to return to his lost path of globalization and international trade agreements in an impassionate speech she gave at the Foreign Policy Forum last June 13 in Washington D.C. 

Ms. Freeland seems to have a good reputation in some circles in Washington. At least enough to get her centre stage and a nomination as “diplomat of the year.”  Though she should know that the recognition she received was not meant to acknowledge necessarily her achievements but rather to use her as an “international voice” on behalf of some US sectors that dissent with Donald Trump’s foreign policy – more specifically, those aspects of US foreign policy that are perceived to hurt business such as international trade and tariffs. Ms. Freeland obliged and that was precisely the focus of her speech.

We don’t know the impact that Ms. Freeland’s speech has had on Donald Trump. But her message would have been fitting had she been on the same stage with the likes of Ronald Reagan whom she did praise once.

What we do know is that her speech – probably meant to be inspirational – was full of liberal, capitalist and imperial rhetoric, and showed little understanding of the geopolitical realities of today. Her tenacious defense of the virtues of capitalism lacked vision and placed her right back at the time of the old Cold War with the only exception of authoritarianism being the nemesis instead of communism. She pointed her accusatory finger at Venezuela, Russia and China as examples of current unruly countries that do not follow her image of international order. 

So, no one should fear that Chrystia Freeland’s “mano-a-mano” retort to Donald Trump’s mischief towards Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the G7 meeting means a deep fissure in Canada-US relations. On the contrary, hers was an exaltation of the common goal the two countries share, albeit with tactical differences:

“the fight for liberal democracy and the international rules-based order that supports it.”

By “international” she obviously meant North American.

Ms. Freeland made a strong defense of “liberal democracy” that others cannot question in her fading world. But she never noticed the contradiction that a forced liberal democracy is in fact authoritarianism of the worst kind. If democracy needs a Canadian or US stamp of approval, then it stops being a democracy. Democracy by definition is based on people’s free decisions, not on imposed decisions, much less on foreign imposed decisions.

In a very revealing – but not surprising – colonial language, she showed a concern that

“within the club of wealthy Western nations, we are seeing homegrown anti-democratic forces on the rise.”

And again, she failed to link that concern to her own grim admission that “Middle-class working families are not wrong to feel left behind. Wages have been stagnating. Jobs are becoming more precarious, pensions uncertain, housing, childcare, and education harder to afford.” She simply justified it by saying that

“these are the wrenching human consequences, the growing pains” of righteous liberal democracies.

She went on to say,

“Liberal democracy is also under assault from abroad. Authoritarian regimes are actively seeking to undermine us with sophisticated, well-financed propaganda and espionage programs.”

An obvious reference to Russia. In fact she did refer specifically to Venezuela’s “authoritarianism” and to Russia’s move “backwards” from “democratic capitalism.” 

Her reductionist view that reproducing a patched up worn out capitalist system will make new friends despite the evidence to the contrary is quite shocking. 

Ms. Freeland was in total denial failing to recognize that it is not authoritarianism that is “on the march,” but it is a new multipolar world on the march to replace the North American-centered unipolar world of the 20^th century. 

China and Russia are leading the way successfully towards reducing the domination of a Western liberal consensus in world affairs. China is doing that with its Silk Road Economic Belt as a development strategy that focuses on connectivity and cooperation between Eurasian countries and possibly beyond. Russia is using a no less effective strategic approach by using its soft power building new alliances and balancing the conflicting forces, especially in the Middle East, with an eye to a positive relationship with the European Union. This spells danger to the diminishing might of the US and its ally from the North, Canada.

In concluding, in the new upcoming world order countries can come with their different systems willing to form alliances and work together, be it China’s communism, Venezuela’s 21st century socialism, or Russia’s balancing soft power to deescalate major conflicts and bring competitors together.

It is shortsighted to admit that a one-fits-all liberal democracy is not perfect and to ignore that other nations assert the right to try their own social system, willing to fail and try again without foreign interference. Freeland doesn’t grasp the importance that other nations attribute to trying on their own, being sovereign in solving their own problems and being respected. 

Ms. Freeland, assertion of the right to freely and peacefully choose our own destiny is not authoritarianism. Your desire to shape the world to your image is. Your definition of authoritarianism is someone else’s sovereignty.

We have to acknowledge that there was one statement Ms. Freeland made that we have to agree on, “You [the US] may feel today that your size allows you to go mano-a-mano with your traditional adversaries and be guaranteed to win. But if history tells us one thing, it is that no one nation’s pre-eminence is eternal.” 

In other words, empires fall. 

But then we are left wondering why is Canada pursuing a close ties with a falling empire instead of embracing an emerging multipolar world?

*

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.

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The response to President Donald Trump’s arrogant withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and wild threats of tariffs on U.S. allies has exposed declining U.S. influence on a global scale.

This became all too obvious at the gathering in Quebec, Canada, of the G7 summit of the seven major imperialist powers — United States, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan. With the exception of Japan, the other six countries are also leading members of the U.S.-commanded NATO military alliance.

Trump’s insults and contradictory statements before and after the G7 meeting, and his threats of new tariffs unleashing an unpredictable trade war, reinforced the disarray in the global capitalist order that U.S. imperialism has commanded for 70 years.

Washington is increasingly unable to control the global agenda. U.S. corporate power finds it can no longer order the nations of the world to isolate the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea or Iran.

The U.S. has less to offer except threats of military destruction, unpayable debt and broken agreements. This untenable situation is the cause of Trump’s rants, tweets and temper tantrums.

The June 12 meeting in Singapore of President Kim Jong Un and Trump, and the joint communiqué signed afterwards, was met with great enthusiasm in North and South Korea — and worldwide. But this is hardly based on Trump’s skill as a negotiator. Events in Asia are moving far beyond U.S. control.

The images of the two warm meetings of President Moon Jae-in of South Korea and President Kim of the DPRK; President Kim’s two meetings with President Xi of China; and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit, which opposed all sanctions, ending the day before Trump arrived in Asia; confirmed that decades of U.S. efforts to isolate DPRK had failed.

G7 – a thieves summit

In past years G7 summits were usually weekend photo ops, with a vague unity statement to paper over deep economic rivalries behind the scenes.

The only agreement among these top officials, who represent the largest bankers and corporations, is about imperialist wars. They agree on the NATO bombing of Libya, the concerted regime change effort in Syria, the expansion of NATO to the borders of Russia, and the effort to pull Ukraine into the NATO military alliance. They agreed to impose harsh sanctions on Russia and expel Russia from what was then the G8 when Russia moved in 2014 to save its only naval port in Crimea from being captured by NATO.

In past decades, the U.S. had great influence in establishing, and steering for its benefit, this gathering of the world’s largest imperialist powers. In essence it is a gathering of thieves and robbers in an alliance to loot the developing world through international banking agreements, utilizing the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and imposing starvation sanctions on countries that have stepped out of line. But at the same time, these pirates are also ruthlessly competing with each other.

A different alliance

As one meeting of world leaders of the major imperialist countries ended in Canada, another very different meeting was opening in China.

More than 2,500 domestic and foreign reporters and 2,000 guests came to Qingdao, a coastal city in Shandong province, to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit on June 9 and 10. A dozen agreements on economic cooperation and security were signed.

The SCO summit involves eight Asian countries in the developing world. Four of them — China, Russia, India and Pakistan — are large countries. The Central Asian countries Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are also members. Several other Asian countries have observer and dialogue partner status. The member countries account for 3 billion people, almost half the world’s population.

SCO’s newest member, as of this summit, is Iran.

This meeting of global significance has received scant attention in the U.S. media. One headline of CNNMoney, however, summarized the new reality: “Forget the G7. A summit happening in China is what really matters.” (June 8)

The SCO is not a revolutionary alliance. Nor is it an international coalition that challenges capitalist property relations or the global order in any fundamental way.

It is an international gathering outside of all imperialist-dominated forums. Many of the member countries are targeted by imperialism and seek mutual assistance and cooperation in order to develop.

Initially established as a regional security grouping, the SCO nations have increasingly focused on expanding trade and strengthening wider cooperation among developing countries.

Plans already underway for vast modernization, the introduction of new industries and advanced communication will lead to a large expansion of the working class throughout the entire region.

China’s agenda in hosting the SCO summit is to expand its regional influence and bypass U.S. military encirclement through numerous trade and infrastructure agreements. It now has the nationalized resources and the expertise to help fund large-scale development projects and to upgrade the infrastructure of major roads, railways, ports, pipelines and telecommunications to meet the needs of neighboring countries.

U.S. breaks Iran deal

Trump’s May 8 announcement on Iran unraveled an international agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, signed by seven countries — U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, Iran and the European Union — after years of dire U.S. threats. Although Iran had met every provision of the restrictive treaty, stringent sanctions and harsh new penalties to any country doing business with Iran will be imposed.

France, Germany and Britain, along with the EU, denounced the unilateral action because it blocked their unfolding business deals. In a joint statement, they officially reminded Trump that a U.N. Security Council endorsement had made this a binding international agreement. Despite their opposition to Washington’s decision, they began closing down their projects in Iran.

Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran agreement is hardly a surprise. From the hundreds of treaties made with Indigenous nations to the Vietnam Peace Treaty, agreements with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia, Washington has never respected or abided by any pact made with oppressed, developing or targeted nations.

But Washington’s decision to withdraw from the signed agreement, reimpose sanctions and demand every other country follow suit or face penalties no longer has the impact it did even five years ago.

China’s invitation to Iran

China — Iran’s number-one energy partner — used Washington’s effort to isolate Iran and undercut Wall Street’s European rivals by turning the tables.

President Xi Jinping invited Iranian President Hassan Rouhani for a bilateral meeting on trade and cooperation. Jinping also publicly invited Iran to participate in the SCO meeting.

Iran is a key transport hub between Asia and Europe and provides maritime access to landlocked countries. China’s proposal for a high-speed railway across Central Asia is advantageous to Iran and to the development of the whole region.

Iran recently signed a free-trade zone agreement with the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union.

Russia, Iran and China can trade in the Chinese yuan, now an international currency. This means they can avoid U.S. sanctions on both Iran and Russia, which complicate all U.S. dollar transactions.

Attendance at the SCO

It is significant that both Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and President Mamnoon Hussain of Pakistan attended the SCO summit and shook hands. These two nuclear states have fought three wars against each other. British and U.S. policy for decades was to do everything possible to keep India and Pakistan in hostile contention.

Presidents of four central Asian countries that are former Soviet republics — Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan — attended as members. Each country secured very favorable new economic and trade agreements. For example, in return for greater access to regional energy, China offers lesser developed countries like Kazakhstan, the largest world exporter of uranium, access to world markets for its exports as well as increased regional trade among member states.

Russian President Vladimir Putin attended the summit. Russia’s economy is much smaller than China’s and is growing slowly. But Russia is one of the world’s biggest energy producers. It also faces U.S. and EU sanctions.

Qingdao was a symbolic choice to host the SCO summit. It is at the eastern end of a vast railway network across Eurasia and a logistical center linking the Silk Road Economic Belt with the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road.

According to Chinese news reports, this 18th summit is expected to “ratify a five-year outline for the implementation of the Treaty on Long-term Good Neighborliness, Friendship and Cooperation,” as well as “approve more than 10 cooperation deals covering areas including security, economy, and people-to-people exchanges.”

Changing balance

U.S. imperialism’s economic domination has declined dramatically. So has the economic weight of the EU countries.

In contrast, the Asia Pacific region’s share of the global economy is expected to rise to 39 percent by 2023, while that of North America is estimated to fall to 25 percent, according to the IMF.

French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted that the other G7 members wouldn’t “mind signing a six-country agreement if need be.” The six other G7 countries now form a larger market than the U.S. market.

But, as Putin pointed out, the combined purchasing power of the SCO now outstrips that of the G7.

News reports and commentaries at the SCO focused on this new alliance challenging the existing world order led by the U.S.

All of this will have an impact on Trump’s talks with the DPRK. Trump faces a common determination to not allow U.S. threats or sanctions to isolate any country or destabilize whole regions.

Pentagon threatens all progress

The Pentagon’s response to the historic SCO gathering was to send U.S. B-52 bombers on maneuvers in the South China Sea on June 5. Earlier, on May 27, two warships sailed near the South China Sea islands claimed by China. China denounced U.S. militarization of the region and its willful trespassing as highly provocative.

While fighting among themselves at the G7 meeting, both Britain and France agreed to have their warships join the aggressive U.S. naval operation, labeled the “Freedom of Navigation Flotilla,” in the world’s most important shipping corridor.

It is hardly a coincidence that the announcement among these imperialist pirates was made in Singapore days ahead of Trump’s meeting with President Kim Jong un of the DPRK.

This old-fashioned gunboat diplomacy can’t stop the people of the world from pursuing development and communication.

*

This article was originally published on Workers World.

Sara Flounders is co-coordinator of the International Action Center.

The Atlantic Council describes itself as:

…an essential forum for navigating the dramatic economic and political changes defining the twenty-first century by informing and galvanizing its uniquely influential network of global leaders. Through the papers we write, the ideas we generate, and the communities we build, the Council shapes policy choices and strategies to create a more secure and prosperous world.

The Atlantic Council seeks to create this “secure and prosperous world” for its corporate-financier sponsors which include weapons manufacturers like Airbus, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Boeing – big-oil interests like Chevron, BP, and ExxonMobil – big-banks like JP Morgan, Bank of America, and HSBC – and also governments and organizations like the US State Department itself, the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and NATO.

Yet despite the scale and scope of both the Atlantic Council’s mission and resources, its ability to influence public perception appears to be diminishing.

It has been in Syria in particular where the Atlantic Council’s influence has reached all time lows in both credibility and effectiveness. This is owed mainly to the fact that Atlantic Council “experts” are confined to armchairs in offices scattered across the West while alternative media sources are on the ground in Syria.

A recent piece co-authored by one of these Atlantic Council “experts” – Aaron Stein – along with US Army reserve officer Luke J. O’Brien – serves as an example of how ineffective the Atlantic Council and its sponsors have become in communicating narratives to the public.

Alleged Rationale for Syrian CW Use is Illogical at Face Value 

The article titled, “The Military Logic Behind Assad’s Use of Chemical Weapons” published in “War on the Rocks,” claims as its premise (emphasis added):

When Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime uses chemical weapons, as it has done on at least four different occasions in the past five years (August 2013, March 2017, April 2017, and April 2018), conspiracy theorists and Russian propaganda outlets immediately kick into gear to begin denying it. They posit that the Syrian regime would never use chemical weapons because, after all, it is already winning the civil war. Instead, these outlets suggest, the anti-Assad opposition (working with external powers) stages “false flag” events to provide excuses for an American military strike aimed at toppling the regime. 

These denials are absurd for a number of reasons, one of which is that there is an obvious – but often overlooked – rationale for the regime’s use of chemical weapons. The Syrian conflict has demonstrated the value of these weapons for Assad’s enemy-centric approach to counter-insurgent warfare, which is premised on the idea of using overwhelming force to punish local populations where insurgents are active. Rather than working to deliver services and stability to contested spaces to compel popular support, the intent is to re-establish central government control through naked aggression.

The article would claim that chemical weapons (CWs) are more psychologically damaging to targeted populations than conventional weapons. The article also makes the claim that to dislodge militants from even a moderately-sized structure, it would require upward to 147 unguided 155mm artillery shells. Thus CWs – Stein and O’Brien argue – are more efficient than conventional weapons.

The article claims that CWs can (emphasis added):

…seep into these buildings with relative ease, as long as the shells land even reasonably close to the target. In Syria as well as in other conflicts, the anti-Assad opposition has dug fairly sophisticated tunnel systems that are, in theory, impervious to the regime’s heavy artillery and unguided bombs. To effectively target these buried facilities, Assad has turned to chemical weapons, which often descend and concentrate in low-lying areas. The advantage is clear: The regime can ensure heavy casualties with a small amount of effort, either by incapacitating or killing combatants, or by terrorizing these groups and the civilians who live alongside them.

Yet in order for this narrative to be viable – readers would need to believe that the Syrian government had only encountered determined, well-entrenched enemies on “at least four different occasions in the past five years,” as admitted in the article’s opening paragraph – an utterly absurd notion at face value.

Even casual observers of the Syrian conflict are now familiar with the dense urban environments combat has taken place in, with literally hours of combat footage available even to the Atlantic Council’s office-bound “experts” to observe online, depicting Syrian combat operations using conventional weapons to dislodge militants from “moderately-sized structures,” immense structures, and even entire cities.

While Stein and O’Brien attempt to describe Syria deploying chemical weapons as a cheap and effective weapon of war to dislodge entrenched enemies, the fact that they themselves only cite four attacks in the past five years and the fact that the number of dead from those attacks – 1,620 by the West’s most politically-charged accusations – represents only 1.2% of the total number of militants killed or 0.45% of the total war dead since 2011 – reveal their premise as an inverted reality.

All Areas Syria “Used Chemical Weapons,” Still Held by Militants Afterwards 

Stein and O’Brien never explain how such limited use of chemical weapons – even if the Syrian government was the culprit in each case – afforded Damascus any significant advantage over the overwhelming use of conventional weapons Damascus is actually winning the war with.

In fact, all of the CW attacks they cited in their opening paragraph appear to indicate precisely the opposite.

The first attack cited by Stein and O’Brien was the 2013 Ghouta incident itself – Eastern Ghouta having only just been liberated by Syrian government forces in 2018 – 5 years after the alleged attack.

The second cited attack was in Ltamenah, Hama in 2017. Ltamenah – at the time of this writing – is still under militant control.

The third cited attack was the Khan Sheikhoun incident. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) would admit in its own report that its investigators were unable to access the actual site of the attack because it was still firmly held by anti-government militants. At the time of this writing – Khan Sheikhoun is also still held by militants.

The fourth and final incident cited by Stein and O’Brien was the recent Douma incident – in which allegations of CW attacks were made when the city was all but already taken by Syrian forces.

In other words – in 3 out of 4 cases cited by Stein and O’Brien themselves – CW attacks attributed to the Syrian government failed to produce any tactical or strategic advantage. In 2 out of 4 cases, militants still hold the areas the alleged attacks took place in. The fourth and final case was a chemical attack carried out when Syrian forces had already obtained victory through the use of conventional weapons.

Of course, there is another serious problem with claiming Damascus opted to use CWs in the absence of precision-guided munitions – Damascus does indeed have access to precision-guided munitions in the form of the Russian air force.

Syria Does Not Lack Precision Strike Capabilities 

The article attempts to make the argument that the Syrian government lacks “precision-guided munitions,” and thus has used CWs as a “cheap” substitute, claiming:

Unlike expensive precision-guided munitions (and the advanced command, control, communications, and intelligence systems needed to use them), even smaller and less advanced states can field chemical weapons programs relatively cheaply.

And:

If you’re an army forced to fight a war on the cheap, chemical weapons make a great deal of sense.

Yet this is entirely untrue. Syria does indeed have access to precision-guided munitions in the form of the Russian air force.

While Stein and O’Brien cite only four CW attacks they assign blame to the Syrian government for – to be charitable – consider the highly questionable UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria and its claims of over two dozen CW attacks attributed to Syrian government forces.

Compare that number to the number of daily Russian air sorties at various points since its 2015 military intervention in Syria on behalf of Damascus.

The Daily Beast – a decidedly anti-Moscow publication – would describe the tempo of Russian air operations in Syria in its 2016 article titled, “Russia Is Launching Twice as Many Airstrikes as the U.S. in Syria,” claiming (emphasis added):

Five months after the first Russian warplanes slipped into Syria to reinforce the embattled regime of President Bashar al-Assad, the Kremlin’s air wing near Latakia—on Syria’s Mediterranean coast in the heart of regime territory—has found its rhythm, launching roughly one air strike every 20 minutes targeting Islamic State militants, U.S.-backed rebels and civilians in rebel-controlled areas. 

“From Feb. 10 to 16, aircraft of the Russian aviation group in the Syrian Arab Republic have performed 444 combat sorties engaging 1,593 terrorist objects in the provinces of Deir Ez Zor, Daraa, Homs, Hama, Latakia and Aleppo,” the Russian defense ministry claimed in a statement.

From February 10 to February 16, 2016, Syria had at its disposal on average, 74 airstrikes per day – versus the 4 CW incidents in 5 years cited by Stein and O’Brien or the roughly 24 incidents the UN Commission of Inquiry dubiously accused Damascus of.

It is clear that Damascus had at its disposal a more effective and less politically controversial method of delivering effective firepower onto well-fortified targets than “CWs.” The Daily Beast itself admits in its article that Russian airpower was “tilting the balance of the war in Bashar al-Assad’s favor.”

Claims that Chemical Attacks Do Not Serve US Interests are also Absurd 

Stein and O’Brien also claim that the US has no means of intervening and toppling the Syrian government because of Russia’s military presence in Syria. The article claims:

Assad can count on the presence of Russian forces in Syria to act as a deterrent against strikes that could threaten regime stability. He can reasonably assume that American military action has to be refined to try and prevent unintended escalation, and will therefore be relatively small in scale.

However – it was the staged CWs attack in 2013 and subsequent attempts to cite such attacks as a basis for US-led regime change that – in part – prompted Russia’s direct military intervention in the first place.

The US is also currently occupying the vast majority of Syrian territory east of the Euphrates – an occupation originally predicated on fighting the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS). Yet with ISIS all but defeated, the US has justified its continued presence in Syria in part based on allegations of remaining CWs – meaning that again – Stein and O’Brien’s premise is refuted – this time by the very establishment their war propaganda is meant to serve.

The Guardian’s article, “US military to maintain open-ended presence in Syria, Tillerson says,” would report (emphasis added):

In his Stanford speech, [then US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson] laid out five US goals in Syria: the defeat of Isis and al-Qaida, a UN-brokered resolution for Syria that involved Bashar al-Assad’s departure, a curb on Iran, conditions for the safe return of refugees, and the complete elimination of remaining chemical weapons.

The Bottom Line

Claiming that Syria is using CWs as a “cheap” substitute for precision-guided munitions to dislodge militants from fortified positions contradicts reality both in terms of basic facts on the ground and logic. The fact that Stein and O’Brien failed to cite even one single instance where the use of CWs provided Damascus any measurable advantage tactically or strategically exposes their “analysis” as – at best – lazy war propaganda.

In fact, the four instances they do cite illustrate precisely the opposite – with militants remaining in control of contested territory after the use of these supposedly “cheap” and “effective” weapons.

Claiming that Damascus needs CWs for a lack of precision-guided munitions requires readers to ignore the fact that Russia has provided such capabilities to the Syrian government in the form of airstrikes since 2015, amounting on average to 74 a day at varying points in the conflict.

Claiming that the United States does not benefit from staging chemical attacks when the very pretext for its continued occupation of Syrian territory – according to the US Secretary of State – includes accusations of CW use by the Syrian government – at face value is a contradiction.

For the Atlantic Council and “War on the Rocks” which published Stein and O’Brien’s article, had their goal been serious analysis – finding actual experts is imperative. Had their goal been to produce convincing war propaganda – it is recommended that they find more skillful liars than Stein and O’Brien.

*

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

All images in this article are from the author.

Israelis are governed by civil law. Palestinians suffer under the oppressive yoke of unlawful militarized rule – their fundamental rights denied.

Military order 1797 is the latest example of extremist Israeli policy – apartheid ruthlessness by any standard, unrestrained because of full US support.

The world community, including the UN, has done nothing over many decades to challenge what no just societies tolerate.

International law is a nonstarter in Israel, repeatedly breached with impunity, accountability never forthcoming. Slow-motion genocide of an entire population continues unimpeded – notably in Gaza.

There’s no ambiguity about fundamental international law – binding on all nations, overriding their domestic laws, in America automatically US law under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause (Article 6, Clause 2) – for treaties and conventions it signed.

Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court bans “(d)eportation or forcible transfer of (a) population.”

Fourth Geneva’s Article 49 prohibits the forcible transfer or displacement of protected persons – nor may occupying powers legally shift any portion of their own population to territory they occupy.

The Nuremberg International Military Tribunal said forcible deportation of a population constitutes a war crime.

Article 43 of the 1907 Hague Regulations requires an occupying power to respect and observe laws of the territory it occupies.

Israeli Military Order (MO) 1797 is all about unlawful ethnic cleansing. Established under Oslo II (1995), West Bank Area C comprises over 60% of the territory – controlled by Israel, the most valued occupied land along with East Jerusalem.

The MO more greatly empowers Israel’s Civil Administration to order demolitions of Palestinian homes and other structures – without the right of a hearing or appeal, excluding judicial authority to overrule what’s ordered.

Any Palestinian structure completed in the last six months, under construction, or inhabited for less than 30 days can be demolished within four days by order of a Civil Administration inspector – without near-impossible to get permit authorization to build.

The MO applies solely to Palestinians, not settlers. It’s all about slow-motion (extrajudicial) ethnic cleansing.

Israel wants all valued West Bank land annexed, the so-called “Green Line” erased, intolerant of a two-state solution it rejects – despite phony public posturing otherwise.

On Tuesday, the PA foreign ministry said Israel’s ethnic cleansing plan “imperils any opportunity for achieving peace based on the two-state solution; which is done through the continuous settlements expansion in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and in the borders alongside the Green Line, Jerusalem, and the Jordan Valley, in addition to the series of decisions and measures that facilitate the imposition of Israeli law in Area C in order to annex it.”

Extremist Israeli minister Naftali Bennett explained it, saying

“(t)he West Bank and all the settlements around it will soon become part of Israel.”

Commenting on his statement, the PA foreign ministry said:

“These statements are translated on the ground through their extraordinary measures, the latest of which is the Military Order 1797 which expands the powers granted to the so-called Civil Administration in demolishing Palestinians facilities, and evacuating area C from its Palestinians citizens,” adding:

“(T)he long series of colonial measures are continuously escalating for the purpose of Palestinian lands theft.”

“The latest notices were distributed by the Israeli occupation authorities yesterday to raze more than 29 dunums in the Jordan Valley, and the Israeli occupation forces handed over the order to seize more than 24 dunums in the villages of Yetma, Qabla and Qablan under military pretexts.”

“(S)eizing large areas of Beit Surik in order to expand the settlement of Mevaseret Zion will create a situation of urban colonial expansions at the expense of the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the rights of its citizens.”

“The Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu bears full and direct responsibility for these ongoing crimes and their consequences and prospects for peace and its sequences on the future of security and stability in the region.”

“The US administration also (is) directly responsibl(e) for the outcomes of its blind bias towards the occupation and its expansionist colonial policies.”

“The Ministry expresses its deep astonishment regarding the international community’s silence that claim their interest in the two state solution.”

“Israel is not held accountable and punished for its crimes which encourages the occupation to continue implementing its colonialist expansionist plans.”

MO 1797 is the latest Israeli ethnic cleansing action, part of its longterm plan for maximum Jews and minimum Arabs, systematically stealing historic Palestine – an unlawful agenda in flagrant violation of fundamental international law.

*

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

Featured image: President Donald J. Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, walk together to their one-on-one bilateral meeting, Tuesday, June 12, 2018, at the Capella Hotel in Singapore. (Official White House Photo by Stephanie Chasez)

Tuesday’s Singapore summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korean Chairman Kim Jong-un has set the stage for the sharpening of disputes in the Asia-Pacific, particularly with China, despite the apparent relaxation of tensions.

During his press conference in Singapore, Trump mixed promises with veiled threats. He said crippling economic sanctions on North Korea would remain in place and there would be no reduction of the 32,000 US troops in South Korea—3,500 more than usually reported—notwithstanding his vague references to bringing the troops home.

Trump said

the US “will be stopping the war games (with South Korea), which will save us a tremendous amount of money, unless and until we see the future negotiation is not going along like it should.”

Like his other statements, this nebulous promise can be easily abrogated, should Pyongyang fail to toe Washington’s line.

The declaration apparently caught US allies by surprise. South Korea’s presidential spokesman Kim Eui-gyeom said:

“For now, there still is a need to find out the exact meaning and intention of President Trump’s remarks.”

South Korean President Moon Jae-in is scheduled to meet US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Seoul on Thursday to discuss the summit. Pompeo will then head to Beijing.

Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera opposed Trump’s proposal, saying:

“The US-South Korean exercises and US forces in South Korea play significant roles for the security of East Asia.”

The massive war games send a regular threatening message to China, which is the true target of US and Japanese aggression.

US Forces Korea seemed to be taken by surprise, saying:

“In coordination with our ROK [South Korean] partners, we will continue with our current military posture until we receive updated guidance from the Department of Defense and/or Indo-Pacific Command.”

China’s response gave a clearer indication of the developing conflict. A Tuesday op-ed in China’s state-owned Global Times insisted that if North Korea was no longer a “threat,” then “there will be no grounds for the US and South Korea to continue large-scale military drills and for Washington to maintain its military presence in South Korea.”

Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang stated:

“China has consistently held that sanctions are not the goal in themselves. The [United Nations] Security Council’s actions should support and conform to the efforts of current diplomatic talks towards denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula, and promote a political solution for the peninsula.”

China hopes to incorporate North Korea into its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), an infrastructure plan to connect Asia with Europe and Africa. A Global Timesarticle on Wednesday called for China to “gradually shift to economic assistance” to Pyongyang in order to bring it into the BRI.

Washington is whipping up further tensions with Beijing. On May 27, the US sailed two naval vessels within the 12-nautical-mile zone around the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea, risking a clash with the Chinese navy. Trump’s emerging trade war with Beijing could likewise lead to military conflict.

Trump used the summit with Kim to deliver North Korea an ultimatum: join the United States in the growing war drive against China or become a casualty on the road to such a conflagration.

Amid the growing confrontation with China, the US Democratic Party and its allies have uttered their usual empty phrases about “human rights.” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi criticized Trump for “[elevating] North Korea to the level of the United States while preserving the regime’s status quo.”

The US media has largely denounced Trump for supposedly allowing China to emerge as the summit’s “winner.” Both the New York Times and Washington Post expressed anger at the apparent decision to cancel joint military exercises with South Korea.

The Times’ Nicholas Kristof, who regularly brays for imperialist war in the name of human rights, wrote an opinion piece, “Trump Was Outfoxed in Singapore.” He said:

“Trump has eased the tensions that he himself created when he threatened last fall to ‘totally destroy’ North Korea. I’m just not sure a leader should get credit for defusing a crisis that he himself created.”

For these layers, the US policies should continue to assert its hegemony in the Indo-Pacific region as aggressively as possible. They backed the Obama administration’s repudiation of the 2007 six-party agreement with Pyongyang, and its “pivot to Asia” to further militarize the region. They supported the decision to install a THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) battery in South Korea, escalating tensions with North Korea and China, and the deployment of massive strategic weaponry to the Korean Peninsula, which threatened Pyongyang with total destruction.

The Washington Post denounced Trump for supposedly yielding US ground in the Asia-Pacific:

“With backing from China and Russia, which seek to diminish US strategic standing in Asia, North Korea has long sought an end to the exercises—and until Tuesday, this and previous US administrations had flatly rejected the idea.”

This campaign against Trump is not based on his domestic brutalization of immigrants, the destruction of entire societies in the Middle East, or the numerous other violations of democratic rights Washington has carried out. For this affluent layer, their primary concern is that Trump is not fully using the military against China and Russia, lamenting any let-up in US aggression.

Whatever their disagreements, Trump and the Republicans, as well as the Democrats and their allies, will continue the preparations for great power conflicts as laid out by the Pentagon in January’s National Defense Strategy, which branded China and Russia as threats to America’s post-World War II hegemony.

Featured image: South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un embrace each other after releasing a joint statement at the truce village of Panmunjeom, Friday. / Korea Summit Press Pool

The Trump-Kim geopolitical reality-TV show – surreal for some – offered unparalleled entries to the annals of international diplomacy. It will be tough to upstage the US President pulling an iPad and showing Kim Jong-un the cheesy trailer of a straight-to-video 1980s B-grade action movie – complete with a Sylvester Stallone cameo – casting the two leaders as heroes destined to save the world’s 7 billion people.

Away from the TV, the former “Rocket Man”, now respectfully recast in Trump terminology as “Chairman Kim”, did strike a formidable coup by completely erasing the dreaded acronym CVID – or “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization” – from the final text of the Singapore joint statement.

Throughout the pre-summit negotiations, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) had always stressed an “action-for-action” strategy leading to denuclearization, as in Pyongyang being compensated every step of the way instead of waiting until after complete denuclearization – a process that could last over a decade – to be eligible for economic benefits.

The Singapore joint statement enshrines exactly what the Russia-China strategic partnership – formalized in the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit – was suggesting from the beginning: a double freeze.

The DPRK holds off on any new nuclear and missile tests while the US and South Korea stop the “war games” (Trump’s terminology).

This logical sequence of the Sino-Russian roadmap is based on what South Korean President Moon Jae-in agreed with Kim Jong-un at the inter-Korean summit last April. And that ties in with what North Korea, South Korea and Russia had already discussed at the Far East summit in Vladivostok last September, as Asia Times reported; economic integration between Russia and the two Koreas, including the crucial connectivity of a future Trans-Korean railway with the Trans-Siberian.

Once again, this is all about Eurasia integration; increased trade between North Korea and Northeast China, concerning mostly Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces; and total, physical connectivity of both Koreas to the Eurasian heartland.

That’s yet another instance of the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) meeting the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU). And not by accident South Korea wants to connect deeper with both BRI and the EAEU. 

When in doubt, re-read Panmunjom

The Singapore joint statement is not a deal; it’s a statement. The absolutely key item is number 3: “Reaffirming the April 27, 2018, Panmunjom Declaration, the DPRK commits to work toward the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

This means that the US and North Korea will work towards denuclearization not only in what concerns the DPRK but the whole Korean Peninsula.

Much more than “…the DPRK commits to work toward the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula”, the keywords are in fact    “reaffirming the April 27, 2018, Panmunjom Declaration…”  

Even before Singapore, everyone knew the DPRK would not “de-nuke” (Trump terminology) for nothing, especially when promised just some vague US “guarantees”.

Predictably, both US neocon and humanitarian imperialist factions are unanimous in their fury, blasting the absence of “meat” in the joint statement. In fact there’s plenty of meat. Singapore reaffirms the Panmunjom Declaration, which is a deal between North Korea and South Korea.

By signing the Singapore joint statement, Washington has been put on notice of the Panmunjom Declaration. In law, when you take notice of a fact, you can’t ignore it later. The DPRK’s commitment to denuclearize in the Singapore statement is a reaffirmation of its commitment to denuclearize in the Panmunjom Declaration, with all of the conditions attached to it. And Trump acknowledged that by signing the Singapore statement.

The Panmunjom Declaration stresses that:

“South and North Korea confirmed the common goal of realizing, through complete denuclearization, a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula. South and North Korea shared the view that the measures being initiated by North Korea are very meaningful and crucial for the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and agreed to carry out their respective roles and responsibilities in this regard. South and North Korea agreed to actively seek the support and cooperation of the international community for the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

That’s the commitment. “International community”, as everyone knows, is code for the US as The Great Decider. If Washington does not bring back its military from South Korea, there will be no denuclearization. Essentially, that’s the deal discussed between Kim and President Xi Jinping in their two crucial, pre-Singapore meetings. Get the US out of the peninsula, and we have your back. 

So all focus should be on “reaffirming”, the key word in the Singapore joint statement. 

In recent days, speculation has swirled regarding whether another chemical-weapons attack will soon take place in Syria, as sources in both Syrian intelligence and the Russian military have warned that U.S.-backed forces in the U.S.-occupied region of Deir ez-Zor are planning to stage a chemical weapons attack to be blamed on the Syrian government.

Concern that such an event could soon take place has only grown since the U.S. government announcement this past Thursday that the U.S. would provide $6.6 million over the next year to fund the White Helmets, the controversial “humanitarian” group that has been accused of staging “false flag” chemical weapons attacks in the past. Notably, the White Helmets were largely responsible for staging the recent alleged chlorine gas attack in Eastern Ghouta, which led the United States, the United Kingdom and France to attack Syrian government targets. That same attack in Eastern Ghouta had been predicted weeks prior by the Russian military and Syrian government, who are warning once again that a similar event is likely to occur in coming weeks.

An additional and largely overlooked indication that another staged attack could soon take place has been the recent movements of U.S. military assets to the Syrian coast, particularly the deployment of the Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group (HSTCSG).

As MintPress previously reported, the deployment of the HSTCSG – which consists of some 6,500 sailors — was first announced in April prior to the U.S., France and U.K. bombing of Syria. However, the group did not arrive until after that bombing had taken place.

While the April bombing was called a “one-time shot” by U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis, the fact that the Truman strike group’s deployment to the region was not canceled after the bombings occurred led some to suggest that the U.S. may have been anticipating more strikes against Syria’s government in the coming months. Indeed, soon after the U.S.-led bombing of Syria, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, declared the U.S. was “locked and loaded” should the Syrian government again be accused of using chemical weapons.

Now, amid claims from both the Syrian and Russian governments of another chemical weapons provocation, as well as the U.S.’ renewed funding of the White Helmets, the strike group’s deployment directly off the Syrian coast has only given greater credence to those previously voiced concerns.

According to a recent announcement from the U.S. Navy:

Bringing the Harry S. Truman strike group back into the fight against ISIS sends a powerful message to our partners that we are committed to peace and security in the region, and anywhere threatened by international terrorism. Once again, we demonstrate the incredible flexibility and capabilities of a carrier strike group: we are combat-proven and ready to answer the call anytime and anywhere to carry out any mission we are directed [sic].”

The statement also noted that fighter squadrons would be working with the strike group to “conduct precision strikes on ISIS targets” as part of the U.S. coalition’s Operation Inherent Resolve, which claims to be aimed at eliminating the presence of ISIS in Syria and Iraq. In addition to the strike group, a report from SouthFront last month provided evidence that the U.S. had recently established a military garrison near the Jafra oil field, the exact location cited by both Syrian and Russian sources as the likely location for the future staging of a chemical weapons attack.

Fog of war: U.S. aiding the very terrorists it vowed to exterminate

While the U.S. has publicly claimed to be moving military assets as part of its campaign against ISIS, the fact that the U.S. has recently been accused of aiding ISIS in Syria — both as a pretext for its indefinite occupation of Syria’s Northeast and as a means of distracting and weakening the Syrian government that it has long sought to topple — casts doubt on the official narrative.

Indeed, since the U.S. and its proxy force, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), took control of northeastern Syria – nearly a third of the entire country – last November, neither group has done anything to target the ISIS pockets in the area until the recent June 4 announcement by Mattis that the U.S. and the SDF had “re-commenced” their offensive after a lengthy hiatus. The U.S. has yet to offer an explanation for the hiatus and reports have not yet surfaced regarding the specific actions of the new offensive to target ISIS.

However, during the “hiatus”, and despite its occupation of the territory, the U.S. has re-trained ISIS fighters and regrouped them into small militias which have been placed under the SDF banner. In addition, SDF defectors have asserted that the U.S. and SDF regularly collaborate with the terror group.

Unidentified U.S.-backed Syrian rebels surround a piece of artillery during training by American special forces member in Southeastern Syria near Tanf. (Source: Hammurabi’s Justice News)

More recently, the U.S. again threatened the Syrian government over the latter’s planned offensive aimed at removing militant groups from the Dara’a governorate in the south of Syria. On Friday, the U.S. State Department announced that the U.S. would issue a “decisive response” if the offensive goes forward as planned. Given that the militants in the Dara’a governorate are either ISIS, Al Qaeda or their affiliates, the U.S. threat against a Syrian military offensive targeting these groups has been largely interpreted as a U.S. move actually aimed at protecting ISIS and Al Qaeda.

Given that the U.S. has been documented to be retraining ISIS fighters and protecting ISIS in the portion of Syria it occupies and elsewhere in the country, the movement of U.S. military assets such as the Truman strike group suggests that the official claim that those assets will be used in “the fight against ISIS” may not be what it appears.

Indeed, accusations by Russia and Syria of an imminent “false flag” chemical weapons attack, as well as the U.S.’ renewed funding of the White Helmets to the tune of over $6 million, instead suggest that the Truman strike group’s new deployment to Syria is in preparation for the U.S.’ predetermined response to anticipated accusations regarding the Syrian government’s alleged use of chemical weapons.

*

Whitney Webb is a staff writer for MintPress News and a contributor to Ben Swann’s Truth in Media. Her work has appeared on Global Research, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has also made radio and TV appearances on RT and Sputnik. She currently lives with her family in southern Chile.

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Pro-GMO Activism and Smears Masquerade as Journalism: From Seralini to Jairam Ramesh, Aruna Rodrigues Puts the Record Straight

By Colin Todhunter and Aruna Rodrigues, June 17, 2018

Rodrigues accuses Sandhya Ramesh of dubbing anything that is a proper critique of GMOs based on ‘independent’ science (the distinction is important) as the work of ‘anti-GMO’ activists. She argues that a properly researched piece would have entailed weeks of serious research into the various studies carried out by Seralini and his team over the last decade as well as the reappraisal of Bt brinjal (October 2009 to February 2010) ordered by Jairam Ramesh.

Trump Wants to Free America from “Fool Trade” and Flip the Tables on the EU

By Andrew Korybko, June 17, 2018

Tweeting from Singapore after the failed G7 Summit in Canada, the President wrote that “Fair Trade is now to be called Fool Trade if it is not Reciprocal”, before explaining how Canada and Germany “rip off” the US through their own protectionist tariffs and insufficient contributions to NATO, respectively.

Aftermath of the Trump-Kim Summit: Unilateral Denuclearization, Continued US Military Threats, Economic Sanctions

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, June 17, 2018

ROK president Moon had demanded the suspension of the US-ROK war games directed against the DPRK to no avail.

Under the US-ROK combined forces command, all South Korean Forces fall under US command. The South Korean president is not the Commander in Chief and cannot under any circumstances veto the conduct of joint war games.

Trump Approves $50 Billion in Tariffs on Chinese Goods

By Stephen Lendman, June 16, 2018

Reportedly Trump met with his trade officials on Thursday, a decision reached to impose around $50 billion in tariffs on a range of Chinese goods – an announcement of the move expected on Friday or early next week.

Drivers Behind the War on Syria and the Impoverishment of Us All

By Mark Taliano, June 16, 2018

To be blunt, Western policymakers seek to destroy secular democracy in Syria, along with its socially uplifting political economy, with a view to installing a compliant fascist Wahhabi government.

The end result is chaos, the enrichment of the transnational “oligarchs” and the impoverishment of Syria.

What’s in Trump’s ‘Deal of the Century’? The Answers Are in Plain Sight

By Jonathan Cook, June 16, 2018

According to Palestinian officials, they are likely to be offered provisional borders over fragments of land comprising about half the occupied territories – or just 11 percent of what was recognised as Palestine under the British mandate.

The Palestinian areas would be demilitarised, and Israel would have control over the borders and airspace.

In the six weeks that President Donald Trump‘s “heartless and cruel” family separation policy has been in effect, nearly 2,000 immigrant children have been separated from their families, according Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data obtained by the Associated Press and published on Friday.

The staggering figure—which averages out to 47 children ripped from their parents’ arms each day—comes as Trump and the Republican Party continue to lie about the White House’s responsibility for the so-called “zero tolerance” policy that made family separation a consistent practice.

According to the DHS figures, “1,995 minors were separated from 1,940 adults from April 19 through May 31,” the AP reports.

Appalling. Inhumane. It needs to stop. #FamiliesBelongTogether! https://t.co/v8uFKETyt3

— Human Rights Watch (@hrw) June 15, 2018

2000 children in *six weeks*. Think about the scale of the crime being perpetrated here. https://t.co/z10uzkklds

— Zack Beauchamp (@zackbeauchamp) June 15, 2018

When Trump was asked about his administration’s family separation policy during a press gaggle on the White House lawn on Friday before the DHS numbers were made public, the president claimed to “hate” that children are been taken from their families and stated falsely:

“Democrats have to change their law. That’s their law.”

The crowd of reporters tried repeatedly to explain to Trump that his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions, is responsible for the family separation policy and that he could change it at any time—but Trump pressed on, unphased by the facts.

Watch:

"I hate it," Pres. Trump says of administration's policy of separating children from parents at the U.S. border, claiming he has no ability to alter the policy without votes from Democrats. https://t.co/FaycODDn27 pic.twitter.com/zEJT1XgxKk

— ABC News (@ABC) June 15, 2018

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Featured image is from Massoud Nayeri.

Bolivian President Evo Morales said Saturday that Latin America “is no longer the United States’ backyard” while denouncing the United States’ attempt to convince its South American allies to help it orchestrate a military intervention or coup in Venezuela.

In an interview with news agency EFE, Morales explained that several Latin American leaders have confided in him that U.S. Vice president Mike Pence is “trying to convince some United States-friendly countries” help them seize control of the South American country and replace the current government led by Nicolas Maduro.

The real target, Morales explained, is not the Venezuelan president but “Venezuelan oil, and Venezuelans know that.”

Drawing parallels to 2011 military intervention in Libya, Morales said the U.S. isn’t interested in helping with alleged humanitarian crisis since, despite the current political and social turmoil in Libya, the U.S. will not intervene there since “the country’s oil is now owned by the U.S. and some European oil companies,” Morales asserted.

“One military intervention (in the region) would only create another armed conflict,” he added pointing to Colombia’s membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as a general sign of an escalation of “military aggression to all Latin America and the Caribbean” region.

Morales explained, however, that U.S. interventionism is not only militaristic.

“When there are no military coups, they seek judicial or congressional coups” as in the case of former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff‘s impeachment and the Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s imprisonment, which is barring him from running in the upcoming 2018 elections.

“I am certain we will free Lula. If he returns, some countries in Latin America will again strengthen the ideological, programmatic and liberation struggle against the North American empire,” Morales said.

Two meetings of considerable geopolitical significance took place last weekend. They could not have been more different in tone and outcome. Each in their way were representative of the fundamental realignment that is taking place in the world order, and each points to a very different future.

The first of these meetings was the G7 (or G6+1 as some of the participants described it) in Québec City Canada. Attending were political leaders of the six largest (as measured by GDP) of western industrial nations and Japan.

The American President Donald Trump did not bother to conceal his fundamental scorn for his alleged friends and allies. He arrived late, made little or nothing by way of a significant contribution, and left early. On his plane en route to a meeting in Singapore with North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un he resiled from the joint memorandum supposedly agreed to in Québec, and added some personal and bitter insults about the meeting’s host, Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau.

Prior to arriving at the meeting, Trump had thrown a verbal bomb, suggesting that it was time that Russia was invited back into the group from which it had been suspended in 2014.

The European members of the G7, with the possible exception of Italy, were less than enthusiastic about Trump’s unheralded suggestion. Implicit in Trump’s suggestion was that if the other members agreed Russia would in fact rejoin the G7. It is indicative of just how out of touch with geopolitical realities the G7politicians actually are.

The Russian response was directly to the point: “we are,” they said, “focusing on other formats.”

Those ‘other formats’ are a range of multilateral arrangements in which Russia is one of the key players. They include for example the Brazil, India, China, South Africa (BRICS) Association who between them account for more than 40% of the world’s population. In 2018 three of them (China, India and Brazil) were, according to the IMF, in the top 10 of the world’s biggest economies. Perhaps needless to add, none of them are members of the G7.

The second key group central to Russia’s ‘other formats is the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) whose most important member economically and politically is Russia. Even more importantly, the EAEU has signed major cooperation agreements with the China instigated Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It has also signed a free trade agreement with Iran, to come into effect in 2020. Iran is a pivotal nation in all of the Eurasian and beyond multilateral agreements that are not only already in place, but are having a steadily mounting economic, financial and geopolitical impact.

The third grouping and a one having its annual meeting in Qingdao, China, is the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). It was not by coincidence that the SCO meeting took place in Shandong Province, which is the birthplace of Confucius.

It was not a coincidence because in his opening remarks to the conference, China’s President Xi Jinping specifically quoted from Confucius’s teachings on a just cause being pursued for the common good. The Confucian philosophy’s emphasis on unity and harmony was reflected in Xi’s 2013 speech in Astana when he set out his vision for the BRI. That philosophy is incorporated in what is now known is the Shanghai Spirit; i.e. mutual trust, mutual benefit, and an emphasis on equality, consultation and respect for the diversity of civilisations.

Again without laboring the point, the contrast with the dominant ethos of the G7 group could not be greater.

The SCO meeting was the first to be held since Pakistan and India were admitted as full members in 2017. These two nations have a difficult history, but contrary to the expectations of many western commentators, they have nonetheless agreed to seek a resolution of their differences within the SCO framework.

Significantly, India and Pakistan have also agreed to work together to solve the seemingly intractable Afghanistan war, itself brought about by the illegal intervention and occupation of the United States and its allies. Unsurprisingly, the United States is not participating in this attempted peace process, which also includes Russia, China and Iran.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser to former United States President Jimmy Carter, and the principal architect of Operation Cyclone that gave birth to Al Qaeda, wrote in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, that the strategic imperative for the United States was to prevent the rise of any national grouping of nations that could challenge US political, economic and military hegemony. He specifically nominated an alliance of Russia, China and “perhaps Iran” as the most dangerous scenario.

United States foreign policy since Brzezinski’s book has certainly striven to achieve this outcome, but ironically those policies have had the opposite effect. One unintended consequence has been a ‘look East’ policy by an increasing number of European nations. American sanctions, not only on its perceived enemies such as Russia and Iran, but also to its European “allies” who have the temerity to adhere to the spirit and the letter of the JCPOA, is causing a reappraisal by the Europeans as to where their national interest truly lies.

Of even greater consequence, China and Russia, through a combination of factors including complementary economies and resources, and the certain knowledge that they are more secure together than apart, have forged an increasingly close relationship. So much so in fact, that in Qingdao President Xi presented President Putin with a unique Medal of Friendship. Xi not only described Russia as China’s “best ally”, he also used the phrase “strategic partnership” for the first time in a public forum.

Twenty years after Brzezinski’s book, and 11 years after Putin’s seminal speech to the Munich security conference, the shape of a new political order is forming at an accelerating pace.

BRICS, SCO and the EAEU are similarly spearheading the drive away from the United States dollar as the medium of international trade. A slew of other countries, in Africa, the Middle East and South America are following suit. The gold backed Yuan convertible Note; a similar arrangement being negotiated with the London Metals Exchange; trading in national currencies and the development of CHIPS to replace the American dominated SWIFT system of international exchange are all part of the fundamental realignment taking place. The foundations of US hegemony are being rapidly eroded and short of a catastrophic war there is nothing they can do about it.

That does not mean they won’t try. They will undoubtedly cause enormous problems in doing so, not to mention the chaos inherent in a dysfunctional American leadership and their lack of a coherent strategic plan. Attempting to dictate outcomes and expecting blind adherence by its “allies” no longer suffices.

By contrast, the SCO conference has shown with abundant clarity however, that policies based on mutual respect, mutual benefit and respect for the sovereignty of others will trump (no pun intended) the fading imperialism of the self- interested and squabbling group that gathered in Québec.

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James O’Neill is an Australian-based Barrister at Law, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”. 

Featured image is from the author.

In the wake of the Syrian crisis, I started experiencing physical pain and chronic fatigue. One day I saw a neurologist who asked for blood tests and MRI scan. After examining my results, he told me I was fine and that there was nothing to worry about. For me, it did not make sense. “What about the headaches, exhaustion and fatigue I am getting?” I asked. He briefly explained that sometimes emotional stress manifests itself as physical illness. I left baffled, but deep inside I knew what was wrong with me. What my country was going through was eating me up. This incident made me wonder about the war’s psychological effects on children. The war’s impact must be far greater on the younger generation of Syria. Almost each one of the kids I was teaching had a heartrending story to tell and some of them witnessed unspeakable tortures. Therefore, I started raising questions and seeking answers, regarding mental health awareness among children, which I wanted to share with you.

Unfortunately, during times of war and trauma, mental health is sometimes relegated or considered unimportant. Realizing the significance of mental health might be halfway through helping children. Wendy Smith, an American therapist, discussed in a TED Talk the importance of raising mental health awareness among children:

“Millions of our kids are suffering alone because they and we lack information we need.”

Therefore, a mental-health literate child can recognize his own symptoms and is, therefore, able to seek help. When I asked Dr. Tayseer Hassoun, Syrian psychiatrist, about the ways in which we could raise awareness inside schools, he suggested that:

“mental health should be smoothly integrated into the curricula. Besides, school medical officers should be trained to detect any mental health disorders among children and adolescents”.

Whereas, Ms. Shirin Khalil, Syrian therapist and trainer, highlighted the importance of training all school staff. Hassoun and Khalil were in charge of training over forty psychosocial supporters. However, Khalil thinks that step to be a drop in the bucket:

“All school staff should be trained including teachers and school principals”.

The problem does not only stem from the lack of mental health services. The social stigma related to mental health often prevents people from seeking help. According to the UK Mental Health Foundation, stigma might even “worsen someone’s mental health problems”. Some people in our society still use terms such as “crazy, schizophrenic, psycho…etc” as insulting words. Dr. Hassoun believes that working on erasing mental health stigma won’t be effective unless it is embedded in the programmes targeted towards children. It would be very useful, for instance, to discuss with pupils the importance of some stigmatized professions such as psychiatry. It seems, however, that mental health stigma in Syria has dramatically decreased.

“More medical health services are being provided and the demand for those services is increasing. Many parents are contacting me to inquire about their children’s mental health state. This is an unprecedented improvement. In the past, parents never considered seeing a psychotherapist” Khalil added.

What Tayseer and Khalil implied is that looking for solutions and offering help should not only be the responsibility of Psychiatrists and therapists. Each one of us has a part to take in helping Syrian children. In fact, I have encountered many cases throughout my teaching experience in which I felt utterly impotent. After the Syrian crisis, teachers found themselves needing to play different roles in classrooms. The role of an educator does not suffice anymore. Dr. Hassoun stressed the significance of the teacher’s role in improving children’s mental health “since they are role models for their pupils”. He added that

“pupils learn much from their teachers’ behavior and they are affected by the way those teachers interact with them. Therefore, corporal punishment and verbal abuse must not be used by teachers”.

Since teachers are the second most important care providers for children, they may either improve or worsen children’s mental health”.

Nonetheless, many Syrian teachers are suffering on different levels as well. The question is whether it is fair or logical to demand them to take part in the healing process of children. Khalil argues that many humanitarian workers are helping others despite the horrors they have been exposed to since the beginning of the crisis. Thus,

“teachers can do so effectively if they are trained and provided with variant tools. Moreover, supporting children can be healing to the teachers themselves”.

In addition to the roles of parents and teachers, children can, in fact, help themselves by implementing stress management techniques. Dr. Hassoun said that

“breathing techniques, drawing, playing music, and participating in other creative activities such as acting, narrating stories and reciting poetry” can greatly reduce anxiety among young students.

In conclusion, there are so many things we need to learn as teachers. But, not getting the right training is not a justification for not acting and reaching out to children who are suffering in silence. Let’s start rethinking our approach and questioning our old inherited habits. When I asked Ms. Khalil for the piece of advice she would give to teachers, she responded:

“Love. With love we can help others lead better lives”.

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Source

Stigma and discrimination: https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/a-to-z/s/stigma-and-discrimination

Featured image is from the author.

The siege of Yemen’s Red Sea port of Hodeidah launched by Saudi and United Arab Emirates-led forces at dawn on Wednesday could cost the lives of some quarter of a million people in the crowded city itself, according to a UN estimate, while threatening to kill millions more across the country through hunger and disease.

Inflicting mass suffering upon civilians is the main purpose of the attack on Hodeidah, which is the principal lifeline for food, fuel and medicine for at least 70 percent of the population in a country that depends on imports for up to 90 percent of its food. The aim is to starve the impoverished Yemeni people into submission.

The battle for the city, the most crowded urban area in Yemen, with a population of between 400,000 and 600,000 people, promises to be the bloodiest since Saudi Arabia launched its war against the Yemeni population in March 2015 with the aim of toppling the rule of Houthi rebels and reinstalling the puppet regime of Riyadh and Washington headed by Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi.

In the little more than three years since the war began, at least 13,000 have been killed, the overwhelming majority of them civilian victims of Saudi air strikes. The toll exacted by the cut-off of food and medicine and the destruction of basic infrastructure inflicted by the Saudi-led blockade and air war, however, has been massively higher.

Last year alone, some 50,000 Yemeni children starved to death—roughly 1,000 every week—according to the aid group, Save the Children. One million Yemenis are infected with cholera, an epidemic that has claimed the lives of nearly 2,500 people. As part of its preparations for the Hodeidah offensive, Saudi warplanes bombed a cholera clinic run by Doctors without Borders.

This total war against an entire population, of the likes carried out by Hitler’s Third Reich three-quarters of a century ago, would be impossible without the uninterrupted support—military and political—of US imperialism since its outset.

The US, together with its main NATO allies the UK and France, has supplied the planes, warships, bombs, missiles and shells used to devastate Yemen and slaughter its people. In his eight years in office, President Barack Obama presided over some $115 billion in arms sales to the monarchical dictatorship in Riyadh. The Trump administration, which has sought to forge an anti-Iran axis with Saudi Arabia, the other reactionary Gulf oil sheikhdoms and Israel, has touted arms deals with Riyadh that potentially would amount to $110 billion.

The Pentagon has given direct and indispensable aid to the Saudi-led onslaught, providing midair refueling for the planes that bomb Yemeni civilians, staffing a joint command center in Riyadh with US intelligence and logistics officers and reinforcing the Saudi-UAE blockade of the country with American warships. Recently, US Green Berets have been deployed with Saudi ground forces to assist in their anti-Yemen operations. Under the banner of the “war on terror”, the Pentagon is waging its own air war in Yemen, conducting at least 130 air and drone strikes in 2017, quadruple the number in 2016.

The Trump administration gave the go-ahead for the current siege of Hodeidah in the form of a statement from US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announcing that he had spoken with the rulers of the UAE and “made clear our desire to address their security concerns.” Pentagon officials have reported that US officers are helping to select targets in the port city.

Given the scale of the unfolding catastrophe in Yemen and the criminal role played by the US government, it is noteworthy that the American corporate media has largely ignored the siege of Hodeidah, much as it did with the US sieges that reduced the cities of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria to rubble, killing tens of thousands, or, for that matter, the estimates of the number of civilians killed in the US war to topple Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, which ranged between 500,000 and a million.

Yemen is emblematic of the world situation three decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union unleashed a period of continuous war and unrestrained imperialist violence.

War crimes on the scale of those committed in the 1930s and 1940s have become almost commonplace. Civilian populations can be massacred; refugees from the US southern border to the Mediterranean can be treated with the methods of the Gestapo; the Israeli military can gun down unarmed Palestinian demonstrators with impunity, defended by Washington–all barely raising an eyebrow in the corporate press.

An exception to the media silence was a pair of shamefaced editorials that appeared Thursday in the New York Times and the Washington Post. Reeking of hypocrisy, both of them expressed a certain amount of unease within the US ruling establishment over the events in Yemen.

The Times editorial notes that the war has resulted in “countless civilian deaths, many attributed to indiscriminate coalition bombing attacks.” It adds,

“Under international law, these attacks may qualify as war crimes in which the United States and Britain, another arms supplier, are complicit.”

The Washington Post warns:

“…the United States, which already has been supplying its two allies with intelligence, refueling and munitions, will be complicit if the result is what aid officials say it could be: starvation, epidemics and other human suffering surpassing anything the world has seen in decades.”

That both newspapers of record of the US ruling establishment use the word “complicit” in describing Washington’s role in Yemen has an undeniable significance. In legal terms, complicity means that someone is held criminally accountable for aiding and abetting the commission of a crime.

In the case of Yemen, the complicity is with war crimes on a world historic scale that could never have been committed without the aiding and abetting of US imperialism.

Based on the legal principles and criteria employed in the Nuremberg trials that sent the surviving leaders of Hitler’s Third Reich to the gallows or prison, there are many in Washington who should today be facing prosecution and the fate of life in prison or worse for the crimes committed in Yemen.

This includes not just Trump and those in his administration directly involved in the Yemen atrocities—Pompeo, Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis, Nikki Haley and other top officials in the military and intelligence apparatus—but also their predecessors, Barack Obama, John Kerry, Ashton Carter, Susan Rice and others responsible for initiating the US support for the Saudi-led war.

Based on the Nuremberg precedent, the CEOs of companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon that have made billions out of supplying the arms used to murder Yemeni men, women and children would likewise be on trial, as would political leaders of both major parties that have supported US policy and representatives of a mass media that has functioned shamelessly as an instrument of war propaganda.

Alongside them in this crowded defendants’ dock, room would have to be made for their British counterparts from the governments of Prime Minister Theresa May and David Cameron along with their respective foreign policy, military and intelligence officials, as well as British arms dealers who have reaped massive profits off of the bloodbath in Yemen.

The reality, however, is that none of the war criminals in Washington and London will be called to account for their crimes in Yemen—or for that matter those in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and beyond—without the mobilization of the American and British working class, united in struggle with the working people of Yemen, the rest of the Middle East and the entire planet. Under conditions in which the mass killing in Yemen and the broader Middle East threatens to coalesce into region-wide and even world war, the fight to build a mass antiwar movement based on the working class and the youth and directed against the capitalist system is the most urgent political task of the day.

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Featured image is from Yemen Press.

Trump promised to replace what he termed as “fool trade” with fair trade when it comes to America’s economic partnerships, especially those with NAFTA and the EU.

Tweeting from Singapore after the failed G7 Summit in Canada, the President wrote that “Fair Trade is now to be called Fool Trade if it is not Reciprocal”, before explaining how Canada and Germany “rip off” the US through their own protectionist tariffs and insufficient contributions to NATO, respectively. Trump’s sour that their leaders attacked him for his “Make America Great Again” steel and aluminum tariffs while hypocritically ignoring their own lopsided economic relations with the US, and he believes that now is the time to make right for what he truly believes are the historic wrongs that his predecessors committed in voluntarily handicapping American power. Proverbially speaking, the President conceptualizes America as Gulliver the “giant” tied down by a bunch of Lilliputian dwarves, albeit having previously put itself in this submissive position out of some sort of ideological masochistic-sadism that Trump wants to free it from.

The Cold War-era quid pro quo of the US providing costly security assistance to its NATO allies in order to enable them to concentrate more fully on building their utopian welfare states is no longer relevant because of the changing nature of geopolitics and the rise of asymmetrical threats, though Clinton, Bush, and Obama perpetuated this state of affairs because it advanced the Liberal-Globalist model that all three of them were pursuing at the expense of average Americans. Having entered into office because of the desperation that millions of regular folks in Middle America are experiencing as a result of the domestically catastrophic consequences of globalization on the American Heartland and especially the Midwest, Trump feels obligated to do something about this massive self-inflicted economic wound that’s bleeding hundreds of billions of dollars from the country each year for voluntary reasons that are impossible for this businessman to fathom.

Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (R) meets with U.S. President Donald Trump during the G7 Summit in the Charlevoix town of La Malbaie, Quebec, Canada, June 8, 2018 (Source: Oriental Review)

Transforming “fool trade” back into fair trade will harmonize this imbalance, at least from the US’ perspective, though it’ll be detrimental to its semi-socialist partners who have grown accustomed to having the “big brother” that they love to complain about so much subsidizing their militaries and de-facto doing the same for their economies through this decades-long legacy of uneven trading arrangements that Trump now wants to change. The far-reaching consequences of the Europeans losing out on this multibillion-dollar bonanza are that their domestic growth and social stability will undoubtedly suffer while the elite scramble to appease the masses as they frantically try to negotiate more favorable trading terms with the US. America can deal with an indefinite disruption of transatlantic trade much better than the Europeans can, and Trump’s betting that he can exploit the resultant geopolitical tumult in order to strengthen the US’ unipolar control over the EU.

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This article was originally published on Oriental Review.

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.

Michel Chossudovsky reporting from Seoul, South Korea, June 16, 2018

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The Trump-Kim Summit Joint Statement includes an unwavering commitment on the part of the DPRK to carry out a complete denuclearization namely the abandonment of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

In exchange for what?

Nothing on the part of the US.

President Trump committed to provide security guarantees to the DPRK, and Chairman Kim Jong Un reaffirmed his firm and unwavering commitment to complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

The economic sanctions regime prevails.

Empty promises of guaranteed security? Under the terms of  the 1953 armistice agreement, the U.S. is still at war with the DPRK.

The history of the US led war against Korea and its aftermath are not mentioned. In the course of the Korean war (1950-53), thirty percent of the North Korean population was wiped out, 38 towns and cities were transformed into rubble.

And the media casually portrays the DPRK as a threat to global security.

The Joint Statement was extremely precise with regard to the DPRK’s commitment to “denuclearization”.

If negotiations regarding “denuclearization” break down, Trump had threatened to implement a new set of sanctions:

“The sanctions will come off when we are sure the nukes are no longer a factor…” said Trump

ROK president Moon had demanded the suspension of the US-ROK war games directed against the DPRK to no avail.

Under the US-ROK combined forces command, all South Korean Forces fall under US command. The South Korean president is not the Commander in Chief and cannot under any circumstances veto the conduct of joint war games.

The suspension of the May US-ROK “war games” were used as a means to enforce a unilateral process of denuclearization: 

“president Trump agreed to suspend military exercises with South Korea in return for a commitment to denuclearisation from North Korea.

“Trump said the war games were expensive and “very provocative”, and yet stopping them has been called a “major concession”, something the US has previously rejected as non-negotiable on the grounds that the exercises are a key element of its military alliance with Seoul”

What is striking in the formulation of this Joint Statement is the absence of a legal framework.

The 1953 armistice agreement prevails. The three countries (DPRK, China, U.S.) are still at war. The armistice agreement is simply not mentioned. Will it be rescinded? In turn, the Korean peninsula is militarized. More than 28 thousand troops are stationed in the ROK.

The US has a joint defense agreement with the ROK. Will that agreement be rescinded. The terms of the Kim-Moon Panmunjom Declaration, would require the scrapping of the combined forces command which puts South Korean forces under the command of a four star general appointed by the Pentagon. While the Singapore Joint Statement acknowledges that the DPRK would carry out “denuclearization” under the terms of the April 27, 2018 Panmunjom Declaration, the U.S. does not in any way signify its endorsement of the inter-Korean dialogue.

Unilateral Denuclearization

The Joint Statement requires the DPRK to abandon its nuclear weapons program, while ensuring the continued development of the US nuclear weapons program under a 1.2 trillion dollar project.

The deployment of America’s nuclear arsenal Worldwide will also be pointed at Korea: unilateral denuclearization on the part of the DPRK does not ensure the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. Quite the opposite: it favors a move towards hegemonic control over nuclear weapons by the US and its NATO allies.

GRTV Video: Michel Chossudovsky reporting from Seoul, South Korea

What comes Next? The Insidious Role of Mike Pompeo

The Joint Statement confirms that Secretary of State Michael Pompeo will be in charge of the negotiations which up to now have been conducted by means of threats of military action, intimidation and continued economic sanctions.

In the lead up to the Singapore Summit, the CIA under Mike Pompeo played a key role in the negotiations. He was in Pyongyang for talks with Kim Jong-un on the Easter weekend which preceded the Singapore summit.

Followup negotiations are to be carried out by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and White House National Security Advisor John Bolton.

Neither of these Trump appointees are committed to peace. It is worth noting that back in May 2017, the DPRK had accused the CIA and its counterparts of South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) also know as the KCIA of plotting to assassinate Chairman Kim. (This accusation was also directed against the KCIA team under impeached president Park).

Barely six months later, in October 2017, Mike Pompeo intimated in a public statement that Kim Jong-un was on the hit list of the CIA’s political assassination program (which confirmed that the DPRK’s earlier statement regarding an alleged assassination attempt was not out of the blue).

Then in February 2018 at the height of the Olympics and the inter-Korean dialogue, the Pentagon threatened to wage a “bloody nose” attack, involving the possible use of a so-called mini-nuke or tactical nuclear weapon.

It is worth noting that the Trump-Kim Joint Statement, does not explicitly mention Washington’s support of the Kim-Moon Panmunjom Declaration. In fact from the very outset, Washington has been involved in the sabotage of the inter-Korean dialogue.

From a geopolitical standpoint, North-South reunification would weaken U.S. strategic interests in Northeast Asia.