Global Research

A team of elite US Green Beret commandos deployed to the Saudi border of Yemen last year to help find and destroy Houthi rebel missile caches, the New York Times reported on Thursday.

Featured image: Democract Now! host and producer, Amy Goodman. (Source: Flickr/Aditya Ganapathiraju)

The dust had barely settled after last weekend’s U.S.-led bombing of Syria before a split in the political class developed. While some Beltway figures, media personalities and former officials hailed the bombings, others decried the “limited” nature of the airstrikes. At the grassroots level, a somewhat different debate gripped the left and the right — those who opposed the bombings were accused of buying into the propaganda of the Syria-Russia-Iran alliance, while would-be defenders of human rights called for increased military measures to degrade the killing capacity of the “Assad regime.”

Democracy Now!, the daily hour-long news show hosted by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, has long been the flagship institution for U.S. progressives. With its jaunty 90s opening theme, timely coverage of world events, liberal (maybe radical-liberal) take on global affairs, and impressive range of top-tier guests including authors, government officials, policy experts and activists, the syndicated program is seen as an exemplary display of independent journalism.

No doubt, the New York-based show is in a class of its own when compared to the vapidity and sensationalism of shock-jock right-wing radio or smug, Beltway liberalism of Randi Rhodes, Thom Hartmann or Cenk Uygur. Like a gust of oxygen in the choking smog of AC360-Maddow infotainment, Amy Goodman resembles an enlightened aunt at a Fourth of July party — a female version of Ira Glass who brings a kale, cauliflower, almond cheese and cumin-spiced casserole to the potluck while discussing difficult topics in an unshakeably calm, Zen-like manner.

Despite its reputation as a standard-bearer for left-of-center “alternative media,” Democracy Now isn’t immune to the pressures of U.S. politics: sometimes the Battle of Seattle veterans canvas their suburbs for Barack Obama; sometimes Michael Moore or Noam Chomsky get out the vote for Hillary.

In a similar manner, Democracy Now frequently accommodates narratives that would seem at home on CNN or the state-run Voice of America. With alarming regularity, the “war and peace report” has showcased passionate voices advocating Pentagon or State Department solutions to dire human-rights crises across the globe, including “regime change.”

Case-in-point: Syria. Since the country plunged into the depths of withering all-sided conflict and proxy war pitting the government of Bashar al-Assad against a range of opposition groups – from Gulf Arab-funded jihadists to Western-funded secular armies, with few independent players in between – the program regularly features interviews with activists who feel that Washington can play a progressive role for the people of the region through the deployment of the U.S. Armed Forces, covert aid to factions on the ground, and the routine violation of international legal norms such as the United Nations Charter.

Democracy Now generally isn’t a Pentagon mouthpiece; a large portion of its coverage does consist of decent progressive journalism. Yet interspersed throughout programming covering genuine popular movements, we find narratives covering the left flank of U.S. imperialism, normalizing the use of U.S. military force for ostensibly “humanitarian” purposes.

Interventionist voices for peace

In the course of the last week — since Syria came under cruise missile attack by the trilateral U.S.-U.K.-France alliance — Democracy Now has featured two interviews with activists who unabashedly call for the Pentagon to use military measures against the Syrian government for the sake of easing the Syrian people’s pain. Their arguments resemble the line of Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), who questioned whether the bombings were the result of a White House “choreographed Kabuki show” with their Russian counterparts rather than the Cuban Missile Crisis-style showdown which seemed apparent prior to the strikes.

On Tuesday, Goodman interviewed Ramah Kudaimi of the Syrian Solidarity Collective. Described as a “grassroots activist” and member of the anti-war movement, Kudaimi argued – as she has for several years now – that the bombings didn’t manage to go far enough in displacing “the regime.” Noting that the U.S., since Obama, has offered verbal support to the “Syrian people’s revolution” while acting in a manner that “strengthened the regime,” Kudaimi accused the Trump administration of continuing to not go far enough in ensuring regime change. Meanwhile, she accused the antiwar left of offering uncritical support to the Bush-style “War on Terror” being waged by what she depicts as the virtually united forces of Syria, Iran, Russia, and the U.S.-led coalition of Western powers and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.

Watch | Syrian-American Activist: Limited U.S. Airstrikes Send Signal to Assad He Can Continue Mass Killing

Mocking the very real possibility of the tripartite alliance clashing with the Russian military mission backing Syria’s government, Kudaimi said:

… it was kind of infuriating to see this being presented as breaking news, this being presented as an apocalypse, that we’re about to embark on World War III, especially as has been made clear again and again by the U.S. actions is — and words — is that this was something very limited, just to kind of send a message to Bashar al-Assad that you can go on and kill people with barrel bombs, with anything, but don’t — limit your use of chemical weapons.”

This was followed by an interview on Thursday with Moazzam Begg, a British Pakistani survivor of illegal detention and torture at the U.S. prisons in Bagram airbase in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, who now heads the human-rights group CAGE. In his interview, Begg stressed the need for a No-Fly Zone over the last remaining rebel stronghold of Idlib to prevent an “unprecedented massacre.”

Maintaining that he is “completely against Western intervention” on account of his own first-hand experience, Begg complained that the U.S.-led intervention in the country continues to target the Syrian opposition rather than the government, dourly noting that the U.S. hasn’t limited itself to fighting ISIS alone but also those groups that fought alongside it or alongside other groups like Jabhat al-Nusra, the rebranded al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria. Instead, he implied, the U.S. should attack the root of the conflict: the Syrian air force. Begg said:

At least we know that in the Kurdish regions, for example, during the Iraq War, there were no-fly zones. Indeed, in Bosnia …  it was bad enough, but a no-fly zone at least stopped those who had air forces to carry out even further killing with mass casualties.

Neither guest mentioned the significant proportion of “regime supporters” who reside in Syria, or the need for a resumption of negotiations between beleaguered opposition forces, the government and the various powers who are militarily involved in the conflict.

These are far from the first occasions that Democracy Now’s guests, like the New York City-based Democratic socialists of Jacobin magazine, have propagated a line favoring humanitarian intervention in Syria. Past interviewees and headline readouts enthusiastically supported the NATO-backed uprising in Libya against the government of Muammar Gaddafi as well, regularly citing the inflated figures of government-caused deaths published by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

Black Agenda Report head editor Bruce Dixon noted at the time:

Something is really wrong with this picture. We have to wonder … at least as far as the war in Libya goes, whether Democracy Now is simply feeding us the line of corporate media, the Pentagon and the State Department rather than fulfilling the role of unembedded, independent journalists.”

Humanitarian crises and the pro-imperialist illusions “of idiots”

A denunciation of war crimes and indiscriminate bombings by the Syrian Arab Army or Russian Aerospace Forces — be it through hypersonic missile, artillery shell, barrel bomb, chemical warfare, etc. — is hardly our point of dispute. Nor is earnest solidarity with any people suffering at the hands of a state that disregards or does damage to their life-or-death interests.

Yet the position that any resistance to a reassertion of U.S. or European hegemony in Syria is a product of “fake news” indoctrination or a “pro-fascist anti-imperialism of idiots” — as Leila Al Shami argued in a widely-shared blog post — woefully misses the mark and cynically equates principled opponents of imperialist war with reactionary misanthropes on the far right.

To assert that Washington, London or Paris can act as guarantors of human rights or allies of the Syrian people is not only criminally naive, it provides ammunition to ideological fusillades aiming far higher than the low-hanging fruit of the Ba’athist regime alone.

For Washington and its European allies, as well as its junior partners in the region, Damascus is simply a pit-stop on the road to Tehran (and possibly Moscow) — a means by which so-called “Iranian imperialism” and the aims of rival powers can be thwarted, allowing hegemonic powers led by the U.S. to continue a policy of global conquest stretching from the Caribbean through the Mediterranean to the Sea of China.

The assertion that the war-stricken Assad regime is uniquely fascistic — unlike the region’s dynastic/sectarian, Zionist, militarist, or neo-Ottoman regimes — illustrates a selective indignation which dangerously feeds illusions that unlawful wars waged by top-tier Western powers to effect regime change will improve the lives of the most oppressed groups in the region and meet their need for a just peace. In what country, on what planet, do such precedents exist?

Let’s provide a reminder of these actors’ regional deeds in the past century: two world wars, Sykes-Picot, the partition plan, the War on Terror, police-state fascism, Wahhabist despotism, the shredding of the Middle East’s social fabric, and so forth. Doesn’t this offer at least a bit of proof that imperialism, neocolonialism, the military-industrial complex and the finance oligarchy at its helm aren’t in the least bit concerned about advancing human rights, democracy, peace and social justice in the region?

Endless warfare — endless disorientation?

Throughout the late 20th century but especially since the end of the Cold War, the United States arrogated to itself the right of aggressive military intervention across the globe on various pretenses. From Yugoslavia to Afghanistan, across Africa and the Middle East — Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria, Yemen — the U.S. cited a combination of national security concerns like terrorism and human-rights crimes to justify a total disregard for international law and consensus, not to mention the subsequent war crimes its military carried out in the course of “humanitarian” warfare.

While the U.K.’s successive governments have eagerly played the “poodle” role in support of Washington’s military adventures, the British people still maintain a vibrant anti-war movement. Anti-war and even anti-imperialist voices are frequently heard in the media, while Jeremy Corbyn’s left-wing faction of the Labour Party has waged a stiff opposition to Tory Prime Minister Theresa May’s eagerness to participate in attacks on Syria. As a result, only 28 percent of the British public supported May’s “commitment to combat” Syria while 36 percent opposed it, according to a poll by The Independent.

In the United States, Pew Research Center data from last year showed that over twice that ratio of Americans – 58 percent – supported such missile strikes.

The U.S. anti-war movement stagnated prior to the dusk of the George W. Bush administration and the onset of 2008’s election season, due in no small part to inroads by the Democratic Party and sectarian infighting by dominant leftist groups. In anticipation of the election of Barack Obama, the movement and its peace parades simply ground to a halt.

Following the jubilation of Obama’s electoral success and his post-inauguration resumption of Bush-era policies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine-Israel, and Guantanamo, the grassroots opposition never reactivated. Mocking the movement’s co-option by the Democratic Party, activist Cindy Sheehan noted at the time that she began referring to the “anti-war left” as the “’anti-Republican War’ movement.”

In a study of the movement’s failure titled “Partisan Dynamics of Contention,” University of Michigan researcher Michael Heaney wrote:

As president, Obama maintained the occupation of Iraq and escalated the war in Afghanistan. The anti-war movement should have been furious at Obama’s “betrayal” and reinvigorated its protest activity. Instead, attendance at anti-war rallies declined precipitously and financial resources available to the movement dissipated … the election of Obama appeared to be a demobilizing force on the anti-war movement, even in the face of his pro-war decisions.”

This grim state of affairs — ideological confusion, misplaced hopes, demoralization, disintegration — gives us ample cause to criticize the humanitarian window-of a center-left that’s now been housebroken, domesticated and rendered oblivious to the main enemy at home: U.S. imperialism.

Who pays the piper calls the tune

The rise and fall of popular left-wing currents — anti-war movements, militant workers’ struggles, and Black, Native American, Puerto Rican and Latin American immigrant liberation struggles — has followed predictable trends: there is the violent counter-insurgency conducted by a reinvigorated repressive state apparatus, white nationalist vigilantes, and other far-right groupings; and then there’s the low-intensity counterinsurgency conducted through the ideological state apparatus of media and academia; the formation of new electoral alliances and installation of minority “faces in the right places” of power; as well as the key factor, which is the co-option of movement figures by non-profit foundations backed by major capitalist philanthropic figures.

While open repression – the iron fist – tends to radicalize movements and galvanize popular support for them, the persuasive approach of the “velvet glove” forms a much more effective, less explosive and more demilitarized way of neutralizing mass opposition — transforming the revolutionary into the reformist, the radical into the tame, and the left to the centrist.

Much has been made of the role of figures like Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros and his Open Society Foundations, whose proclaimed mission is to protect dissent and “build vibrant and tolerant democracies” through philanthropic grants that ostensibly serve oppressed or marginalized communities. Much of the critique can veer toward the conspiratorial, or exaggerates his role as some all-powerful impresario of the global left. Yet Soros is a major activist financier both abroad and at home, one of many players invested in what’s been called the “Non-Profit Industrial Complex” or NPIC,which comprises a complex web of relations between local and federal governments, the capitalist class, philanthropic foundations, NGO/non-profit social-service and social-justice organizations.

A look at who sponsors Democracy Now! shows just how dependent it is on NPIC. It’s worth quoting last year’s analysis of DN’s funding structure by Danny Haiphong at length:

Democracy Now runs interference for imperialism because it is beholden to funding sources, as are all non-profits and non-governmental organizations … An analysis conducted in Critical Sociology found that the Pacifica Foundation received upwards of 148,000 USD between the years of 1996-1998 from the Ford, Carnegie, and other foundations to launch Democracy Now.

The Lannan Foundation gave Democracy Now an additional 375,000 USD packaged in a number of grants, according to the foundation’s IRS 990 forms since 2008. Patrick Lannan, the capitalist mogul who founded the organization, sat on the board of ITT corporation in the late 70s and early 80s. The ITT corporation was instrumental in the CIA-backed fascist coup that overthrew the democratically elected socialist Salvador Allende in 1973.

… Foundations wield a form of “soft power” on behalf of U.S. imperialism. Their main purpose is to provide a “civil society” infrastructure in targeted nations capable of fomenting conditions of regime change.

“Fake news” and critical consumption

The compromised nature of Democracy Now doesn’t render it entirely useless for genuine anti-imperialists and listeners opposed to war, be they “humanitarian” or not. Strong critical voices are often heard on Democracy Now – as may be the case on CBS, NBC, BBC, Al Jazeera, RT, MintPress News, PressTV, even maybe once in a blue moon on Fox News or CNBC.

When looking at any of these organizations we need to remain critical of the banalities they may spew such as a liberal-versus-conservative paradigm that upholds systems of power like global monopoly capitalism (imperialism), despite distracting debates over the finer points of how the system is upheld – is it for a more “humanitarian” world order, a more “secure” one?

All of us have a duty – as media producers and media consumers – to look beyond the rhetoric of social justice deployed by center-left establishment figures, and instead see the structures and principles they both depend on and uphold. “Fake News” in terms of bias, propaganda and lie by omission is unavoidable, but the key question remains “cui bono?” – who benefits from the propagation of this narrative?

In the case of Democracy Now!, we have incorporated non-profit 501(c)3s and big Wall Street money underwriting the ostensibly “independent” and alternative media. As usual, we should remain on guard.

The “war and peace report,” as progressive as it may often sound, has long ceased to be a purely listener-supported project, and this lack of economic independence has spilled into its politics. The clearest sign of that is an implicit support, especially in the Arab Spring era, of imperialist wars on “authoritarian” regimes who find themselves in the crosshairs of the U.S. government.

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

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

On March 18, physician, University of Illinois Chicago Professor Emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Health, Cancer Prevention Coalition chairman Samuel Epstein passed away at age-91 of cardiac arrest in Chicago.

Epstein was an internationally recognized cancer expert and its avoidable causes, especially exposure to industrial carcinogens in air, water, food, consumer products, pesticides, prescription drugs, and workplace environments.

Born and educated in England, he came to America in 1960. In Boston, he founded the Laboratories of Carcinogenesis and Toxicology, and The Children’s Cancer Research Foundation.

He was appointed Senior Research Associate in Pathology at Harvard Medical School, later coming to Chicago to teach at the University of Illinois.

He wrote numerous scientific articles, many others in national newspapers, along with seven books – notably The Politics of Cancer and The Politics of Cancer Revisited, discussed below.

Based on 2012 – 2014 data, over 38% of Americans are diagnosed with cancer in their lifetimes, one of the nation’s leading health problems.

Decades after Richard Nixon signed the 1971 National Cancer Act, vowing to find a cure in his State of the Union address, cancer rates proliferated to epidemic levels.

In 2018, an estimated 1,735,350 new cases of cancer will be diagnosed in America, 609,640 people perishing from the disease, according to the National Cancer Institute – the toll exceeding US combat deaths in all its wars from WW II to the present.

Cancer occurs when body cells divide and spread uncontrollably. If untreated, it metastasizes and kills. Why is the war on it being lost?

According to Epstein,

it’s because “(t)he cancer establishment is fixated on damage control – diagnosis, treatment and basic genetic research – and is indifferent, if not sometimes hostile, to cancer prevention – getting carcinogens out of the environment.”

“The second factor is conflicts of interests, which are significant when it comes to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), but profound and overwhelming (for) the National Cancer Society (NCS).”

These organizations are incestuously tied to the “drug industry, the mammography industry, the pesticide industry, and other such industries” that profit from cancer proliferation. It’s big business. The more victims, the greater the bottom line benefits.

Epstein believed the war on cancer is winnable by avoiding carcinogenic exposure. He supported enacting laws, criminalizing corporations and their officials for knowingly introducing carcinogens into the environment.

Epstein’s “Politics of Cancer Revisited” updated his earlier classic, explaining the limitations of cancer research.

He discussed case histories and political infighting on issues relating to asbestos, vinyl chloride, bischloromethylether, benzene, tobacco, red dyes #2 and #40, saccharin, acrylonitrile, female sex hormones, pesticides, aldrin/dieldrin, chlordane heptachlor, and nitrosamines.

He also focused on challenging and debunking “cancer establishment” policies and its US/UK apologists, aiding and abetting continued harm to public health.

He stressed the war on cancer is being lost because profits take precedence over human health, in his preface explaining:

“Cancer is caused mainly by exposure to chemical or physical agents in the environment. The more of a carcinogen present in the human environment, hence the greater the exposure to it, the greater the chance of developing cancer from it.”

“There is no known method for measuring or predicting a ‘safe’ level of exposure to any carcinogen below which cancer will result in any individual or population group.”

He documented occupational, environmental, prescription drug, and consumer product carcinogens. Examples include:

• diethanolamine (DEA) absorbed in the skin, used in cosmetics, soaps and toiletries;
• permanent and semi-permanent dark hair dye, producing 20% of female non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in America;
• food colorings, pesticides, fungicides, nitrites, and hormones in foods;

Most US cattle and sheep receive carcinogenic growth-promoting hormone implants (usually testosterone or estrogens).

Packaging is harmful, containing dangerous chemicals able to migrate into food and other edibles.

Epstein said hazardous prescription drugs “may pose the single most important class of unrecognized and avoidable cancer risks for the US population.”

In 1992, he and three colleagues proposed “war on cancer” reforms, endorsed by 64 national cancer prevention, public health and preventive medicine experts in a statement, saying:

“(T)he generously funded cancer establishment, the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the American Cancer Society (ACS), and some 20 comprehensive cancer centers, have misled and confused the public and Congress by repeated claims that we are winning the war against cancer.”

“In fact, the cancer establishment has continually minimized the evidence for increasing cancer rates, which it has largely attributed to smoking and dietary fat, while discounting or ignoring the causal role of avoidable exposures to industrial carcinogens in the air, food, water, and the workplace.”

Everyone can vote with their pocketbooks. They can make responsible choices, avoiding harmful products, buying safer ones, encouraging others to do the same thing.

That’s how important battles are won, by ordinary people at the grassroots – getting informed, doing the right thing, telling others, and proving where real power lies when used constructively.

Epstein explained it’s easier to pollute than protect public health. Powerful monied interests influence government policymaking at the federal, state and local levels, serving their own interests at the expense of public health and welfare.

Cancer is a growth industry because of governmental failure to combat it – emphasizing treatment, not prevention.

The “cancer establishment” spread misleading information for decades, predicting lower future incidences and mortality rates, eventually eliminating suffering and deaths from the disease in all forms.

Instead, it’s more prevalent than ever because of government inaction and inattention to root causes, nothing done to prohibit known carcinogens from the environment, workplaces, food, air, consumer products, and prescription drugs.

Industry is free to produce harmful products because nothing is done to stop it.

The only message corporate predators and organizations supporting them understand is hitting them in the pocketbook where it hurts most – the most effective way to get their attention.

*

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

Seven years before he was appointed as US National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski published Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era. In this 1970 futurist treatise on American political science, Brzezinski forecasts how “[t]he post-industrial society is becoming a ‘technetronic’ society: a society that is shaped culturally, psychologically, socially, and economically by the impact of technology and electronics—particularly in the area of computers and communications” (9).Almost fifty years later in 2018, President Donald Trump is ushering in Brzezinski’s technetronic new age by accelerating President Barack Obama’s 2009 Educate to Innovate initiative[1].

According to the Obama White House archives, the technetronic Educate to Innovate program financed “science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)” education programs that were bankrolled with “over $700 million in public-private partnerships” between the federal government and “leading companies, foundations, non-profits, and science and engineering societies.” During Obama’s presidency, which was counseled by Brzezinski[2], the corporate-fascist Educate to Innovate project orchestrated public-private political-economic planning with “leaders such as Ursula Burns (Xerox), Sally Ride, Craig Barrett (formerly of Intel), and Glenn Britt (Time Warner Cable) to leverage the business community interest in improving STEM education. Together, they recruited over a 100 other CEOs.”Additionally, Obama’s neoliberal regimepushed Brzezinski’s technetronic agenda even further by “help[ing] [to] launch Change the Equation, a new [2010] non-profit with full-time staff dedicated to mobilizing the business community to improve the quality of STEM education in the United States.”

On September 25^th of 2017, the technetronic policies underlying Obama’s Educate to Innovate were ramped up by Trump’s signature of a $200 million Presidential Memorandum on Creating Pathways to Jobs by Increasing Access to Jobs by Increasing Access to High-Quality Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education. According to a report from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, “[t]his Presidential Memorandum (PM) directs the U.S. Secretary of Education to make promoting high-quality STEM and computer science education one of the Department of Education’s top priorities, and beginning in fiscal year 2018, to take this priority into account when awarding competitive grant funds.” The Trump Administration also launched other STEM education initiatives such as Executive Order 13801 “Expanding Apprenticeships in America,” which allocates federal resources for public-private “career-pathways” partnerships between schools and corporations that train students in hi-tech skills needed “to prepare workers for the jobs of the future.”

To condition students for these computerized jobs of the technetronic future, Secretary Betsy DeVos (image on the right) is advocating “virtual education” through public-private partnerships between public schools and for-profit ed-tech corporations that implement “adaptive-learning” computer modules in online courses or “blended-learning” classes that hybridize computerized instruction mixed with traditional human teaching. Moreover, to fascistically plan the technocratic economy of the future, these technetronic edu-corporations will data-mine each student’s cognitive-behavioral learning algorithm(s) in order to predetermine his or her “career pathway” into a future-tech job under the “competency-based education” (CBE) stipulations of the new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).

In retrospect, Brzezinski, who was a prominent member of the Council on Foreign Relations, presciently forecasted this future in which the schooling system is managed by private corporations that utilize computerized technologies to psycho-behaviorally condition students for workforce placement in a technocratically planned economy[3]. Of course, hi-tech cognitive-behavioral conditioning of the student body through stimulus-response learning algorithms for the purposes of techno-fascist workforce planning is exploitative enough. Yet there is a more sinister ulterior motive behind technetronic workforce conditioning through adaptive-learning CBE software: the replacement of human instructors with automated teaching bots to perfect the scientific management of hi-tech psychosocial engineering through public-private techno-fascism.

“Individualized”/“Personalized” Education = Computerized Edu-Conditioning:

If you think that these dystopic predictions sound far-fetched, then consider the following statement given in 1984 by Dustin Heustin, a member of Utah’s World Institute for Computer-Assisted Teaching:

“[w]e’ve been absolutely staggered by realizing that the computer has the capability to act as if it were ten of the top psychologists working with one student . . . Won’t it be wonderful when the child in the smallest county in the most distant area or in the most confused urban setting can have the equivalent of the finest school in the world on that terminal and no one can get between that child and that curriculum?” (qtd. in Iserbyt 8).

Note how Heustin is medicalizing ed-tech by comparing teaching software with psychologists, not with educators or academicians; Heustin’s analogy clearly implicates that teaching computers are the hi-tech perfection of the stimulus-response method of psychological conditioning for the purposes of workforce schooling[4]. Furthermore, notice how Heustin is glorifying instructional technologies that can supersede a human teacher or tutor from “get[ting] between” the student and the preprogrammed curriculum, thereby exalting educational technology above human teachers as the highest authority over the student’s learning process. Lastly, observe how Heustin is implying that, by supplanting human instructors with computerized teaching technetronics, the traditional ratio of one teacher per several students is ostensibly inverted so that each student receives “individualized” attention from ten expert psychologists simultaneously.

This quote from Heustin is perhaps dated. Nonetheless, up-to-date adaptive-learning CBE technetronics currently deliver the same types of computerized learning that facilitate Heustin’s dream of preventing human teachers from “get[ing] between” the student and the career-pathways conditioning software.

• Affective-Behavioral Data-Mining for CBE Workforce Behaviorism: Indeed, these adaptive-learning CBE technetronics are currently used to not only substitute human educators under the pretense of “individualized” instruction; they are also used to replace human psychologists as the digital stimulus-response algorithms are programmed to rewire a student’s cognitive-behavioral conditioning. In fact, it is admitted that CBE adaptive-learning algorithms are derived from the stimulus-response psychological method of behaviorist conditioning.

A 2011 issue of the peer-reviewed journal, Computers in Human Behavior, explains how CBE-style adaptive-learning algorithms data-mine not only a student’s academic content knowledge, but also his or her behavioral and affective responses to the computerized curriculum stimuli. This article, entitled “The Contribution of Learner Characteristics in the Development of Computer-Based Adaptive Learning Environments,” reports that “[t]he development of learner models takes an active part in upcoming [computer-based] adaptive learning environments. The purpose of learner models is to drive personalization based on learner and learning characteristics . . . such as cognitive, affective and behavioral variables” (Vandewaetere, Desmet, and Clarebout 118). In other words, a student’s adaptive-learning career-pathways algorithms are “model[ed]” from the “personaliz[ed]” data-mining of his or her behavioral reflex responses as well as his or her emotional and attitudinal responses to computerized lesson-plan stimuli.

This behavioral-affective adaptive-learning method of computerized workforce conditioning is guided by competency-based pedagogy, which is likewise rooted in the stimulus-response method of behaviorist psychology [5]. In 2005,the British Journal of Educational Technology published an article that historicizes how computerized CBE can be traced back to the manipulation of behaviorist psychological sciences for workforce edu-conditioning: “[c]ompetency-based training (CBT) has its origins in the behaviourist movement which sought to focus attention on intended outcomes of learning and observable student behaviours (Bowden & Masters, 1993; Velde, 1999). This focus represented a shift from establishing an individual’s ‘knowledge’ to an emphasis on ability to competently perform specific workplace tasks and roles and, as argued by Velde (1999) and Mulcahy (2000), the adoption of CBT has been driven by economic and social forces, rather than educational ones” (Phelps, Stewart, and Allan 69).Entitled “Competency, Capability, Complexity and Computers: Exploring a New Model for Conceptualising End-User Computer Education,” this academic article examines how CBE pedagogy is integral to computerized adaptive-conditioning curriculums for STEM education: “[n]otions of competency have dominated the computer education literature, and have underpinned Competency-Based Training (CBT) in information technology at all levels of education and training” (Phelps, Stewart, and Allan 67).

In sum, these scholarly publications reveal how students’ career pathways curriculums are programmed by CBE adaptive-learning software that data-mine the students’ cognitive, behavioral, and affective stimulus-response algorithms to “individualize” hi-tech workforce conditioning in a technocratic planned economy.

• How Stimulus-Response UII “Personalizes” Workforce Conditioning: Under competency-based education statutes, a student can learn at his or her own pace as he or she works through computerized teaching modules that “individualize” psycho-behavioral conditioning based on his or her performance. As the student generates responses to the computerized teaching stimuli, the software in turn generates “user interaction information” (UII), which the software then processes into “personalized” algorithms that determine the academic or career “pathway” a student must follow. If a student responds more or less proficiently to a computer stimulus, then the digitalized curriculum will be set for more or less challenging “academic” pathways (potentially at an accelerated pace); if a student responds more or less incompetently to a computer stimulus, then the digitalized curriculum will be set for more or less remediated “career” pathways (potentially at a slower pace). Thus, rather than all students receiving the same general curriculum delivered by a single human teacher, each student receives an “individualized” curriculum that is “personalized” according to his or her stimulus-response-based algorithms calculated by his or her UII generated on his or her separate computer-conditioning modules.  The student’s career or academic pathway may be further “personalized” according to the student’s behavioral-affective responses associated with his or her cognitive-behavioral responses.

A 2015 issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Learning Analytics breaks down this “personalized” stimulus-response process of data-mining psycho-behavioral UII for CBE workforce conditioning. The scholarly article, entitled “A Competence-based Service for Supporting Self-Regulated Learning in Virtual Environments,” analyzes the “psychological mathematical framework” for data-mining UII with CBE adaptive-conditioning algorithms: “Competence‐based Knowledge Space Theory (CbKST) incorporates psychological assumptions on underlying skills and competences required for solving specific problems (Korossy, 1997; Heller Steiner, Hockemeyer, & Albert, 2006). In this approach, competences are assigned to both learning objects (taught competences) and assessment items (tested competences).  . . . CbKST provides adaptive assessment algorithms for efficiently determining the learnerʼs current knowledge and competence state, which builds the basis for personalization purposes. Based on this learner information, personalized learning paths can be created.Goal setting can be done by defining skills to be achieved (competence goal) or problems to be capable of solving. The competence gap to be closed during learning is represented by the skills that are part of the goal, but not part of the competence state of a learner” (Nussbaumer, Hillemann, Gütl, and Albert 106).

To simplify this passage, a student’s CBE career-path “goal[s]” are “personalized” by “psychological mathematical” adaptive-learning “algorithms” that are data-mined from the student’s UII responses on computerized “assessment items (tested competencies)” as his or her UII responses are recursively conditioned with digital lesson stimuli programmed with “learning objects (taught competencies).”

Such CBE adaptive-conditioning software are commercialized for “personalized” edu-consumption through corporate-trademarked “courseware” programs, including Alta (engineered by the Knewton Corporation), Intelligent Adaptive Learning™ (designed by the Dreambox Learning Corporation), Brightspace LeaP™ (purchased from Knowillage Systems by the D2L Corporation), and the Adaptive eLearning Platforms owned by the Smart Sparrow Corporation[6]. These and other for-profit courseware products are integrated into blended-learning classrooms at numerous KIPP charter schools; and they are also mainlined into online virtual schools such as Khan Academy and Capella University.

In 2015, the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) Center on Higher Education Reform published an article titled “The Student Experience: How Competency-Based Education Providers Serve Students,” which reviews the“computer adaptive education” software programmed into the “FlexPath model at Capella” (Baker 10). According to the AEI, Capella’s FlexPath courseware “individualize[s]” workforce edu-conditioning through “course-based instruction [that] is maintained by bundling competencies within courses. Students register for particular courses and can work at their own pace and in any order to demonstrate mastery of each competency. Capella states that the assessments ‘simulate work you’ll be expected to do on the job.’ 39 Students at Capella have personalized competency maps (figure 3) for each course that summarize how many competencies they have mastered and how many assessments they have completed” (Baker 10). In a nutshell, Capella’s online FlexPath platform conditions workforce competences through non-linear learning modules that allow the student to opt between various stimulus-response lesson paths that are sequenced throughout “personalized competency maps” for job-specific career-pathway curriculums.

Nevertheless, this “individualization” is not student centered. Instead, it is computer centered because a student’s conditioning through a career-pathway curriculum is predetermined by the preprogrammed parameters of the adaptive-learning courseware algorithm(s). The CBE software algorithm cannot be fundamentally altered by student UII responses; for it is impossible to create a new career-pathway curriculum regardless of how ingeniously a student generates UII responses to the adaptive-learning stimulus data. It is only possible to vary the competence-lesson paths within a prescribed career-pathway curriculum.

The AEI concurs:

“the components of traditional higher education programs that are typically the most flexible and able to be personalized (like choice of major, choice of classes within majors, and learning objectives within individual courses) are often fixed in CBE programs” (ii).

Obviously, if the “major, . . . classes . . . , and learning objectives” are all “fixed” in CBE computer-learning modules, then the only thing that could possibly be personalized are the competence paths which the student chooses to take through the fixed major, courses, and lessons that are required for certification in his or her prescribed career-pathway curriculum.

Ultimately, UII only enables the software algorithms to sort students “individually” into pre-planned career pathways because cognitive-behavioral stimulus-response algorithms cannot be scripted for jobs that have not yet been planned. As P. Wildman points out, “competencies tend to be prescriptive and are designed for a more stable environment with familiar problems” (qtd. in Phelps, Hase, and Ellis 69). In other words, competence-conditioning modules can only be preprogrammed with stimulus-response algorithms if those job competences have already been standardized in a “stable” career-pathway “environment” in which the particulars of workforce competences have been “familiar[ized]” and regimented in a planned economy.

Therefore, since workforce-competence algorithms are programmed in accordance with the market prospects and labor demands of a corporate-fascist planned economy, such workforce-competence algorithms must be fixed within the parameters of industry-specific career-pathway quotas that have been pre-planned by a public-private corporate-fascist elite [7]. As a result,

“[t]he problem with competency training,” notes C. Price,“is that it is always in danger of equipping the young for the performance of yesterday’s jobs” because corporate-government planning cannot account for the jobs of tomorrow which have not yet been planned (qtd. in Phelps, Hase, and Ellis 69).

*

(This article is excerpted from Klyczek’s soon-to-be-released book, School World Order: The Technocratic Corporatization of Education, which can be pre-ordered from Trine Day Press).

John Klyczek has an MA in English and has taught college rhetoric and research argumentation for over seven years. His literary scholarship concentrates on the history of global eugenics and Aldous Huxley’s dystopic novel, Brave New World. He is a contributor to the Intrepid Report, the Dissident Voice, OpEdNews, News With Views, and Natural News. He is also the Director of Writing and Editing at Black Freighter Productions (BFP) Books.

Sources

Baker, Rachel B.  “The Student Experience: How Competency-Based Education Providers Serve Students.”  American Enterprise Institute Series on Competency-Based Higher Education. The Center on Higher Education Reform of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 2015.  Print.

Brzezinski, Zbigniew.  Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era. New York: The Viking Press, 1970.  Print.

Hsu, Chien-Chang and Chih-Chiang Ho.  “The Design and Implementation of a Competency-Based Intelligent Mobile Learning System.”  Expert Systems with Applications 39.9 (2012): 8030-8043.  Print.

Iserbyt, Charlotte Thomson.  The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America: A Chronological Paper Trail. Revised and Abridged Ed.  Parkman, OH: Conscience Press, 2011.  Print.

Nussbaumer, Alexander, Eva‐Catherine Hillemann, Christian Gütl, and Dietrich Albert.  “A Competence-based Service for Supporting Self-Regulated Learning in Virtual Environments.”  Journal of Learning Analytics 2.1 (2015): 101-133.  Print.

Phelps, Renata, Stewart Hase, and Allan Ellis.  “Competency,Capability,Complexity and Computers:Exploring a New Model for Conceptualising End-User Computer Education.”  British Journal of Educational Technology 36.1 (2005): 67-84.  Print.

Vandewaetere, Mieke, Piet Desmet, and Geraldine Clarebout.  “The Contribution of Learner Characteristics in the Development of Computer-Based Adaptive-Learning Environments.”  Computers in Human Behavior 27.1 (2011): 118-130.  Print.

Notes

[1]  The continuity of federal educational governance from the Democratic Obama Administration to the Republican Trump Administration at the White House parallels the continuity of state-level educational governance from Democrat Arne Duncan to Republican Bruce Rauner in Illinois. In my article titled “The Corporatization of Education,” I expose how both Governor Rauner and former Secretary of Ed Duncan, who was previously CEO of Chicago Public Schools, manipulated the Hegelian dialectic of America’s false leftwing-rightwing political paradigm to perpetuate corporate-fascist charter schooling across liberal and conservative party lines in Illinois. Like the Duncan-Rauner dialectic, the Obama-Trump dialectic exemplifies how the US educational system is stage-managed by the Hegelian “full-spectrum dominance” of bipartisan corporatism colluding to fascistically privatize public schooling for the purposes of “cradle-to-career” workforce planning.

[2]  On March 24^th, 2010, a professional photographer who was employed by Obama’s Executive Office of the President of the United States, Pete Souza, snapped an “Official White House Photo” (P032410PS-0305) of Brzezinski seated directly beside President Obama during a national security meeting. Prior to this advisory meeting, Brzezinski’s endorsement of candidate Obama was instrumental to Barack’s election to Commander in Chief, and on September 12, 2007, candidate Obama gave a campaign speech in which here ferred to Brzezinski as “one of our most outstanding thinkers.”Obama’s love affair with Brzezinski is highlighted by historian Webster Griffin Tarpley, who wrote the following: “Any lingering doubts about Obama’s status as an abject puppet of Zbigniew Brzezinski and the Rockefeller Trilateral Commission ended this morning when the withered mummy of imperialism himself appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to campaign for Obama, urged on by his own moronic daughter, Mika Brzezinski, an Obama groupie and sycophant. Zbigniew, a low-level Polish aristocrat whose life has been devoted to hatred for Russia, lauded Obama for his 2002 speech opposing the Iraq war, saying that he himself was the source of Obama’s arguments back then – thus confirming Obama’s long-term status as his puppet, which probably began in 1981-1983, when Obama was a student at Columbia University, and Zbig was directing the anti-Russian institute.” After Zbig’s death last year, former President Obama made the following statement: “Zbigniew Brzezinski was an accomplished public servant, a powerful intellect, and a passionate advocate for American leadership. His influence spanned several decades, and I was one of several Presidents who benefited from his wisdom and counsel.”

[3]  Brzezinski, who co-founded the Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller Sr., foresaw the following predictions for technetronic education in the twenty-first century:

• Virtual Schooling through Computerized Teaching Technetronics: “The formal educational system has been relatively slow in exploiting the new opportunities for supplementary home-based education through television consoles and other electronic devices” (268). However, “[a] good case can be made for ending initial education (more of which could be obtained in the home through electronic devices) somewhere around the age of eighteen” (267).

• For-Profit Ed-Tech and Corporate-Fascist Charter School Privatization: “[B]usiness[es] are becoming more involved in education, for psychological as well as for professional reasons. Greater multiplicity in educational training will make for a more pluralistic national community, and the increasing involvement of business companies in education may lead to a more rapid adaptation of the latest techniques and scientific knowledge to the educational process. American business and, to a lesser extent, government have already undertaken extensive programs of managerial ‘retooling’ and retraining, thereby moving toward the intermittent educational pattern” (268-269).

• Workforce Training for “Career Pathways”: “[I]t [education] could be more generally pursued within a work-study framework, and it should be supplemented by periodic additional training throughout most of one’s active life. . . . Th[e] formal initial period could be followed by two years of service in a socially desirable cause; then by direct involvement in some professional activity and by advanced, systematic training within that area; and finally by regular periods of one and eventually even two years of broadening ‘integrative’ study at the beginning of every decade of one’s life, somewhere up to the age of sixty.  . . . Regular and formally required retraining—as well as broadening—could ensue at regular intervals throughout most of one’s professional career” (266-267).

• Lifelong P-20/Cradle-to-Career Learning: “The unprecedented spread of mass education in America raises the more general question whether mechanically extending the duration of education will suffice to meet both the psychological and technical needs of the emerging society. . . . By extending education on an intermittent basis throughout the lifetime of the citizen, society would go a long way” (266).

Nearly fifty years after the publication of Between Two Ages, the accuracy of Brzezinski’s foresights above can be seen in the contemporary research that I have documented in the following articles: “The Corporatization of Education,”“Corporate-Fascist Workforce Training for the Hegelian State,”“National Charter School Fascism,”“Betsy DeVos, Big Data, and the Public-Private Planned Economy,” and “Secretary DeVos, Neurocore, and Competency-Based Workforce Training.”

[4]  In“Secretary DeVos, Neurocore, and Competency-Based Workforce Training,” I expound the long and continuing history of psychological conditioning methods used in the classroom for workforce education. In “National Charter School Fascism,” I document how the burgeoning public-private P-20 merger of public schooling and corporate medicine is clinically pathologizing the learning process to expand the institutionalization of such psychological-medical approaches to conditioning cognitive-behavioral learning in the classroom.

[5] In my article titled “Secretary DeVos, Neurocore, and Competency-Based Workforce Training,” I historicize how competency-based education is actually a rendition of outcomes-based education, which emphasizes the use of psycho-behavioral conditioning methods to train students to perform prescriptive workforce-learning outcomes. In “Schooling and the Myth of Objectivity: Stalking the Politics of the Hidden Curriculum,” Dr. Henry Giroux provides a similar historical analysis of OBE-CBE techno-conditioning. Giroux, who is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, reveals how “the technological and behaviorist models that have long exercised a powerful influence on the curriculum field were, in part, adapted from the scientific management movement of the 1920’s, just as the roots of the competency-based education movement were developed in earlier research work adapted ‘from the systems engineering procedures of the defense industry’ (Franklin, March 1976, pp.304-305)” (283).

[6]  Other Knewton courseware products are contracted with some of the biggest ed-tech corporations in the educational-industrial complex: Pearson Education, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Cengage Learning. Dreambox is the beneficiary of millions of dollars in investments from Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, who is also a corporate philanthropist who lobbies heavily for the overthrow of publicly elected school boards to be replaced with private charter councils that autocratically manage public-private charter-school corporations.  D2L’s Brightspace LeaP™ has even expanded its reaches internationally into Latin America through twenty-seven AliatUniversidades campuses across Mexico.  Smart Sparrow is funded by ACT Inc., the corporation that designs, owns, and distributes the “American College Testing®” standardized test used for college admissions applications.

[7]  According to former Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement for the US Department of Education,Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, this de-individuated computerization of workforce conditioning is not only the corporate-fascist method of edu-conditioning; it is likewise the Soviet-communist method of collectivist-Statist edu-conditioning. In her article titled, “Heritage Foundation, NAFTA, School Choice and the Destruction of Traditional Education,” Iserbyt quotes “Professor Eugene Boyce, University of Georgia . . . : ‘They [communists] do not educate for jobs that don’t exist.’” Iserbyt elaborates:“[n]o matter what your child wants to be/do in the future (welder or ballet dancer) his freedom to pursue his dreams will be limited by whether he is included in the school/business partnership’s ‘quota’ for training. Example: If he wants to be a welder at the shipbuilding company in your town, he will only be able to get training if he is fortunate enough to be included in the training quota. If the company only needs ten welders, and your son/daughter is No. 11 on the list, he/she will NOT receive training.” These parallels between communist and fascist workforce schooling through computer conditioning further demonstrate the Hegelian-dialectical full-spectrum dominance of both “leftwing” and “rightwing” educational politics that are dished out in semantically different flavors of the same pabulum of corporate-government collusion.

The official end of the Cold War era in 1989 brought during the first coming years a kind of international optimism that the idea of the “end of history“ really could be realized as it was a belief in no reason for the geopolitical struggles between the most powerful states. The New World Order, spoken out firstly by M. Gorbachev in his address to the UN on December 7th, 1988 was originally seen as the order of equal partnership in the world politics reflecting “radically different international circumstances after the Cold War“.[1]

Unfortunately, the Cold War era finished without the “end of history“ as the US continues the same policy from the time of the Cold War against Moscow – now not against the USSR but against its successor Russia. Therefore, for the Pentagon, the Cold War era in fact has never ended as the fundamental political task to eliminate Russia from the world politics still is not accomplished. Regardless the fact that in 1989 Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe, followed by the end of the USSR in 1991, that brought a real possibility for creation of a new international system and global security[2], the eastward enlargement of the NATO from March 1999 (the Fourth enlargement) onward is a clear proof of the continuation of the US Cold War time policy toward Moscow which actually creates uncertainty about the future of the global security.

After the end of the USSR and the Cold War, there were many Western public workers and academicians who questioned firstly why the NATO has to exist at all and secondly why this officially defensive military alliance is enlarging its membership when the more comprehensive Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (the CSCE, today the OSCE) could provide the necessary framework for security cooperation in Europe including and Russia.[3]However, the NATO was not dissolved, but quite contrary adopted the same policy of the further (eastward) enlargement likewise the EU. The Kosovo crisis in 1998−1999 became a formal excuse for the enlargement of both these US client organizations for the “better security of Europe“. The EU Commission President, Romano Prodi, in his speech before the EU Parliament on October 13th, 1999 was quite clear on this matter.[4] However, if we know that the Kosovo crisis followed by the NATO military intervention (aggression) against Serbia and Montenegro was fully fuelled exactly by the US administration, it is not far from the truth that the Kosovo crisis was provoked and maintained by Washington, among other purposes, for the sake to give a formal excuse for the further eastward enlargement of both the EU and the NATO.

NATO expansion

However, can we speak at all about the end of the Cold War in 1989/1990 taking into account probably the focal counterargument: the NATO existence and even its further enlargement? As a matter of fact, the NATO is the largest and longest-surviving military alliance in contemporary history (est. 1949, i.e., six years before the Warsaw Pact came into existence). No doubts today that the NATO was established and still is operating as a fundamental instrument of the US policy of global imperialistic unilateralism that is, however, primarily directed against Russia. The deployment of the US missiles in Western Europe in the 1980s, regardless on achieved détente in the 1970s in the US-USSR relations, became a clear indicator of a real nature of Pentagon’s geopolitical game with the East in which the NATO is misused for the realization of the US foreign policy objectives under the pretext that the NATO is allegedly the dominant international organization in the field of the Western European security. Although the NATO was formally founded specifically to “protect and defend“ Western Europe from the USSR there are many doubts after 1990 why this Cold War organization still exists as the alleged danger for the Western civilization disappeared with the decomposition of both the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. Basically, the proper answer to this question can be found in the origins of the Cold War.

According to the revisionist approach from the mid-1960s, the main responsibility for both the Iron Curtain and the Cold War is on the American side as the USA:

“…refused to accommodate the legitimate security requirements of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe and also because it overturned the wartime allies’ agreement to treat postwar, occupied Germany as a single economic entity. Furthermore, the Truman administration (1945−53) used the myth of Soviet expansionism to mask the true nature of American foreign policy, which included the creation of a global system to advance the interests of American capitalism.“[5]

Undoubtedly, a dismissal of the USSR by M. Gorbachev in 1989−1991 produced a huge power vacuum in Central and Eastern Europe that was in the coming years filled by the NATO and the EU. The eastward enlargement programme of both the NATO and the EU emerged in due time as a prime instrument by Washington to gradually acquire control over the ex-Communist territories around Russia. A standard Western academic cliché when writing on the eastward enlargement of the EU is that those ex-Communist East European states:

“… wanted to join a club of secure, prosperous, democratic, and relatively well-governed countries. They saw themselves as naturally belonging to Europe, but deprived of the opportunity to enjoy democracy and the free market by Soviet hegemony and Western European acquiescence to that state of affairs. With the fall of Communism this historical injustice had to be remedied, and accession to the EU was to make their return to Europe complete“.[6]

However, it is not clear why seven Western European states currently out of the EU are not able to see all mentioned advantages of the EU membership. Even one of the member states (the UK) decided in 2016 to leave the club (Brexit) and one of the chief reasons for this decision was exactly the eastward enlargement as the critical idea of all Eastern European states to join the EU is to live on the Western EU member states’ financial support. Nevertheless, from the geopolitical perspective, the new EU member states coming from Eastern Europe (from 2004 enlargement onward) are the US Trojan Horse in the club, who are openly supporting the American foreign policy of the imperial design, but with their prime duty as the members of both the EU and the NATO to take an active participation in the coming Western military crusade against Russia in the form of the WWIII. However, these Eastern European nations are going to be the first to experience direct consequences of the war as being a critical part of the Western front-line combat zone against Russia.

Surely, one of the most fundamental anti-Russian actions in Europe at the post-Soviet era was the US decision to expend the NATO eastward by offering full membership to three ex-Warsaw Pact members: Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. Therefore, Reagan-Gorbachev agreement from Reykjavik in 1988 was unilaterally and brazenly violated by Washington under the formal excuse of a combination of events−V. Zhirinovsky’s showing in the 1993 elections in Russia, domestic pressure upon B. Clinton from his Republican opponents at the Congress, and what the US administration saw as the abject failure of the EU to provide an answer to the European problem of the Yugoslav civil war (1991−1999). Washington quickly accused the Europeans to be unable to deal with the Yugoslav crisis that was a major test which the EU failed to pass, but honestly speaking, all the EU peace-making efforts dealing with the Yugoslav crisis really failed for the very reason as they were directly sabotaged by the US diplomacy. Nevertheless, the first new action by the enlarged NATO, only two weeks after its Fourth enlargement, was a savaged bombing of Serbia for the sake to put her Kosovo province under the NATO occupation.

Remains of the Yugoslav Army headquarters bombed by NATO during the aerial campaign in 1999

It has to be recognized that the Cold War bipolarity after 1989 was, at least up to 2008, superseded by the US-led unipolarity – a hegemonic configuration of the US accumulated hyperpower in global politics that presented quite new challenges to the international relations. However, after the event of 9/11, the US administration started to act on the accelerating achievement after the Cold War of supreme political and military power in the globe for the sake to complete a mission of a global hegemon. The US administration, however, purposely presented the 9/11 attack as the work of (only) a network of Al Qaeda, a Islamic terrorist organization led by Osama bin Laden who was a Saudi millionaire’s son but as well as “who learned his terrorist trade, with U.S. assistance, fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s“.[7] The US administration of President G. W. Bush responded very quickly and by the end of 2001 a Taliban regime in Afghanistan, that was a radical Islamic regime which was providing a base of operations for Al Qaeda, became demolished and the biggest part of the country occupied or controlled in a coalition with the US satellite states. That was the beginning of the announced „War on Terrorism“ that actually had to serve as a good excuse to further strengthen the US position as the global policeman followed by the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Therefore, a policy of a global unipolarity – a condition of a global politics in which a system of international relations is dictated by a single dominant power-hegemon that is quite capable of dominating all other states, became an order of the day for both the Pentagon and the White House.

With the US military invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 the US stood alone (with the military support by the UK as the fundamental American client state after 1989) at the summit of the hierarchy of the international relations and global politics up to 2008 when Russia finally decided to protect its own geopolitical and historical interests in some part of the world – in this particular case at the Caucasus. The US, in the other words, became in the years 1989−2008 the sole state in the world with the military and political capability to be a decisive factor in the global politics at any corner of the world. In these years, the US military expenditures exceeded all other states combined – a clear sign of a hegemonic global policy of Washington. It seemed to be that the US had an extraordinary historical ability to dictate the future of the world according to its wishes and design as America became a single world hyperpower as the universal empire stronger than Roman or British empires.

By definition, the empire is a universal state having a preponderant power and being in a real ability to act independently without any restraint.[8] Therefore, the empire is working alone rather than in concert with other states, or at least with those whom we can call as the Great Powers[9] – a fundamental mistake and sin which finally provokes an apocalyptic animosity and clash with the rest of the world. This animosity, from a historical perspective, after certain time, provokes a blowback by the others that exactly, in the case of the US empire, came from Russia in 2008. Central Caucasus, Eastern Ukraine, and the West Middle East today became the regions of a direct clash of geopolitical interests on the global chessboard between declining US empire and the rising economic, political, financial and military power of Russia. The US even from 1990 (the First Gulf War) crossed the moral boundaries in abusing its hyperpower through defiant and brutal unilateralism, becoming, as all other universal states (empires), hated and feared rogue civilization (“rogue gangster state“ according to Stephen Lendman). The universal state is acting as an international outlaw by its own rules, values, norms, and requirements like the US and its NATO satellites in the case of the barbaric bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia for 78 days in 1999.

According to Noam Chomsky, in fall 2002 the most powerful state ever existed in history declared the basic principle of its imperial grand strategy as self-intention to keep its global hegemony by the threat to use or by use of its own super powerfully equipped military arsenal that is the most critical US dimension of power in which Washington reigns supreme in the world.[10] It was clearly confirmed by the White House on September 17th, 2002 as a part of the US national security strategy that was going to be no longer bound by the UN Charter’s rules governing the use of force:

“Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States“.[11]

The hawks of the US hegemonic world order after 1989 have been openly emphasized the necessity of America’s self-serving pre-eminent role in the world politics, as Hillary Clinton, for instance, put it at her confirmation hearing as the US Secretary of State in 2009:

“So let me say it clearly: the United States can, must, and will lead in this new century… The world looks to us because America has the reach and resolve to mobilize the shared effort needed to solve problems on a global scale – in defense of our own interests, but also as a force for progress. In this we have no rival“.[12]

However, those H. Clinton’s words were ungrounded as the US empire already was in the process of declination. The gradual decline and probably ultimate demise of the US empire, as any other empire in history, can not be understood without previous knowledge of nature and driving forces of the imperial system. After 1991 the USA remained to function as a „military society“ as there were, for instance, the Roman Empire or the Ottoman Sultanate. That is to say more precisely, the driving force behind the US empire left to be an “external objective“ – the perceived needs to reconstruct the world according to its own values and norms. However, such very ambitious project requires a very systematic policy of overall mobilization of the whole society, economy, and politics. As such mobilization, all the time implies sacrificing a particular sector of the domestic economy for the sake to realize the expansionist aims, the system’s functioning is basically reinforced by the need to replenish resources used up at the previous stage[13] – the need which the US simply could not accomplish successfully.

The US, as a matter of fact, already found itself very costly to maintain its own military dominance in the world. The American soldiers are deployed in almost 80 countries from the Balkans to the Caucasus and from the Gulf of Arden to the Korean Peninsula and Haiti. The US administration is today constantly trapped by the Imperial Overstretch Effect – the gap between the resources and ambitions especially in the foreign (imperialistic) policy which is formally wrapped into the phrase of “domestic security“ needs or international „humanitarian mission“. Undoubtedly, the US costly imperial pursuits and particularly military spending weakened the American economy in relation to its main rivals – China and Russia.

There is a number of scholars (N. Chomsky, M. Chossudovsky, etc.) and public workers (like P. K. Roberts) who predict that after the Pax Americana a multipolar system of international relations will emerge. The fact is that multipolarity, as a global system with more than two dominant power centers, is clearly advocated by V. Putin’s administration in Kremlin instead of both a bipolarity or unipolarity. This concept of multipolarity in international relations has to include alongside the US and the BRICS countries, Japan and the EU. As a multipolar system includes several comparatively equal Great Powers, it is by the nature complex system and hopefully more prosperous for maintaining the global security. The world is in fact from 2008 at the process of power transition that is surely the dangerous period as a hyperpower of the USA is directly challenged by the rise of its rivals – Russia and China. Subsequently, the current Ukrainian and Syrian crisis are the consequences (a global „collateral damage“) of such period of power transition which already marked the beginning of a new Cold War that can be soon transformed into the Hot Peace era. Nevertheless, the US administration is not anymore in position to run with the Bush Doctrine[14] that is the unilateral grand strategy of the George W. Bush’s administration in order to preserve a unipolar world under the US hegemony by keeping America’s military capacity beyond any challenge by any other state in the world as, certainly, the US hegemony is already challenged by both Russia and China. Those two countries are currently in the process of making their own alliance bloc advocating multilateralism as a cooperative approach to managing shared global problems and keeping a collective security by collective and coordinated actions (a group thinking) by the Great Powers.

BRICS leaders

The fundamental task of the US foreign policy after 1989 is to protect its own concept and practice of the unipolar geopolitical order in the world, while Russia with the other BRICS countries is trying to create a multilateral global geopolitical order. The BRICS group of countries (Brasil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are clearly expressing the global phenomena of the “Rise of the Rest“ against the US unipolar hegemony. The rise of the BRICS marks a decisive shift in the global counter-balance of power toward the final end of America’s hegemony. A significance of these four fast-growing economies and their global geopolitical power is already visible and recognized with the predictions that up to 2021 the BRICS countries can exceed the combined strength of the G-7 countries.[15]Therefore, here we are dealing with two diametrically opposite geopolitical concepts of the world order in the 21st century.[16] The current Ukrainian and Syrian crises are a just practical expression of it. From the very general point of view, the US administration is not opposing the Russian geopolitical projects because of the fear of the reconstruction of the USSR, but rather for the sake of realization of its own global geopolitical projects according to which Russia has to be a political and economic colony of the West like all the former Yugoslav republics are today but just formally existing as the „independent“ states. The most immediate US task in dealing with Russia after 2000 is to prevent Moscow to create a Eurasian geopolitical and economic block by misusing the EU and NATO policy of the eastward enlargement in East Europe and the Balkans. Ukraine in this matter plays one of the fundamental roles as according to notorious US Russophobe of the Polish origin Z. Brzezinski, Ukraine is a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard as a geopolitical pivot for the reason that its very existence as an independent country helps to halt Russia to become a Eurasian empire what means a center of world power. Therefore, the US policy in Eastern Europe has to be concentrated on turning all regional countries against Russia, but primarily Ukraine which has to play the crucial role of stabbing the knife to Russia’s backbone.[17]

The Huntington’s thesis about the unavoidable clash of the antagonistic cultures at the post-Soviet time basically served as academic verification of the continuation of America’s hegemonic global policy after 1989. The author himself „was part leading academic and part policy adviser to several US administrations−and had occupied this influential space since the late 1950s“[18] what means that Huntington directly was participating in directing the US foreign policy during the Cold War. However, as the USSR together with its Communist satellites finally lost the war, but the US policy of the Pax Americana had to be continued and after the Cold War, Huntington actually by his article and later the book on the clash of antagonistic civilizations, as their value systems are profoundly different, paved the academic ground to the Pentagon to invent, a new and useful enemies that would give the US a new role and provide a new justification for America’s continued hegemony in a post-Soviet world. One of these enemies became a post-Yeltsin’s Russia as a country which decided to resist a global hegemony by anyone.

A new Russia’s foreign policy in the 21st century is especially oriented and directed toward refutation of predicting that the new century of the new millennium is going to be more “American“ than the previous one. It means that the US-Russian relations after 2000 are going from the US-led “New World Order“ to the multipolar “Resetting Relations“.[19] The last military success of the Pax Americana’s geopolitical project was the Second Gulf War (the Iraq War) in 2003 launched by the US Neocon President George W. Bush not only to kick out the “Vietnam Syndrome“, but more important to answer to all those experts who previously had been predicting an erosion of the US influence in the global politics. The architects of a post-Yeltsin’s Russia’s geopolitics, followed by all critics of the Pax Americana, are emphasizing a dangerous effect of the American soft power in the shape of popular culture, fashion, fast food, music, etc., as the products of a primitive sub-culture and a quasi-civilization. Therefore, the global duty of the civilizations at the time of the clash of civilizations is to fight against the quasi-civilization which degenerates the human face around the world. That is one of the critical tasks of Russia in world policy after 2000 as one of the escalating Great Powers. A rising power of the post-Yeltsin’s Russia as one of the leading countries which are challenging the US unipolar hegemony can be seen from the facts that only up to 2008 Russia succeeded to double its GDP, to triple wages in real terms and to reduce the unemployment and poverty.[20]

*

Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović is Founder & Editor of POLICRATICUS-Electronic Magazine on Global Politics (www.global-politics.eu). Contact: [email protected]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research

Notes

[1] Jeffrey Haynes, Peter Hough, Shahin Malik, Lloyd Pettiford, World Politics, New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013, 97.

[2] John Baylis, Steve Smith (eds.), The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations, Second edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, 111.

[3] Karin M. Fierke, Antje Wiener, “Constructing Institutional Interests: EU and NATO Enlargement” in Frank Schimmelfennig, Ulrich Sedelmeier (eds.), The Politics of European Union Enlargement: Theoretical Approaches, London−New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2005, 99.

[4] European Commission, “Speech by Mr Romano Prodi, President of the European Commission, on Enlargement”, European Parliament Brussels, October 13^th, 1999, SPEECH/99/130.

[5] David Gowland et al., The European Mosaic, Third edition, Harlow, England: Pearson Education, 2006, 277.

[6] Jan Zielonka, Europe as Empire: The Nature of the Enlarged European Union, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006, 49.

[7] Steven L. Spiegel, Jennifer Morrison Taw, Fred L. Wehling, Kristen P. Williams, World Politics In A New Era, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2004, 329.

[8] On this issue, see more in [Robert Kaplan, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos, New York: Random House, 2002]. On the political ideology of a universal state, see [Elen Arveler, Politička ideologija Vizantijskog carstva, Beograd: Filip Višnjić, 1988].

[9] A Great Power is a such state which is ranked among the most powerful states in the world according to hierarchical state-system. There are four fundamental criteria to identify a Great Power state: 1. It is in the first rank of military competence, having full capacity to protect its own national security and to influence other countries; 2. It is an economically powerful state; 3. It has global spheres of interest; and 4. It uses a “forward” foreign policy having actual, but not only potential, impact on international relations and world politics [Andrew Heywood, Global Politics, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001, 7].

[10] Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, London: Penguin Books, 2004, 11.

[11] White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, Washington, September 17^th, 2012.

[12] Amitav Acharya, The End of American World Order, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2014, 51.

[13] Andrew C. Janos, East Central Europe in the Modern World: The Politics of the Borderlands from pre- to postCommunism, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000, 330−331.

[14] The Bush Doctrine dealing with the “War on Terrorism” is formulated in two messages delivered to joint sessions of the US Congress on September 20^th, 2001 and January 29^th, 2002 [Paul R. Viotti (ed.), American Foreign Policy and National Security: A Documentary Record, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005, 244−248]. The Bush Doctrine is directly supported by the USA Patriot Act of October 24^th, 2001. The idea of Bush Doctrine is in fact very similar to the idea of the Reagan Doctrine of 1985 formulated to fight the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.

[15] Andrew Heywood, Global Politics, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001, 447.

[16] Срђан Перишић, Нова геополитика Русије, Београд: Медија центар „Одбрана“, 2015, 221.

[17] On this issue, see more in [Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, New York: Basic Books, 1997].

[18] John Baylis, Steve Smith (eds.), The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations, Second edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, 115.

[19] Roger E. Kanet, “From the ‘New World Order’ to ‘Resetting Relations’: Two Decades of US−Russian Relations” in Roger E. Kanet (ed.), Russian Foreign Policy in the 21^st Century, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 204−227.

[20] Richard W. Mansbach, Kirsten L. Taylor, Introduction to Global Politics, Second edition, London−New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012, 165.

All images, except the featured, in this article are from the author.

The recent presentation made by Binyamin Netanyahu purportedly detailing a secret Iranian programme aimed at acquiring a nuclear weapons capability is the latest in a long-term effort on his part to obtain United States assistance in destroying Iran. But the actions of the Israeli prime minister are not only ironic and hypocritical: they bring into focus the connection between the purposeful destructions of Iraq and Libya on the one hand and the attempt to destroy Syria, foment conflict in Lebanon and neutralise Iranian military power on the other. Few Americans are aware of this two decade-long grand strategy followed by successive United States administrations because the compartmentalization of events, short-term memory of the public and government propaganda have all served to murky the fundamental picture, that is, one in which the United States continues to follow a policy of taking down countries which pose a threat to the state of Israel. It is a policy which was adopted without recourse to public debate despite the serious ramifications it has had in terms of the cost to American prestige and an ever increasing national debt.

Most of the world’s major national intelligence services have long concluded that Iran has no nuclear weapons development programme. This includes the intelligence community of the United States and up until recently -if Binyamin Netanyahu is to be believed- Israel’s Mossad. A debate within Iran’s political, military and intelligence circles apparently ended with the nation’s supreme leader ruling against the development of nuclear weapons.

The irony is not lost in the scenario of the leader of Israel decrying the acquisition of nuclear technology by another nation, one that is a signatory state to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and subject to the stringent conditions of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action reached between Iran and the ‘Five Plus One’ countries, when Israel is in possession of an undeclared arsenal of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Israel’s own nuclear weapons programme, which began with the express disapproval of President John F. Kennedy who felt that it would create a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, involved the practice of a grand deception by David Ben Gurion who insisted that the Dimona reactor was for research purposes only and not for the production of plutonium.

A pungent whiff of hypocrisy pervades Netanyahu’s presentation. Israel’s nuclear arms programme has not only been shrouded in secrecy but has involved acts of criminality which according to FBI documents declassified in June 2012 allegedly involved Netanyahu himself. Netanyahu later issued a gagging order directing the unindicted ringleader of a nuclear smuggling ring to refrain from discussing an operation known as ‘Project Pinto’. Israel spied on nuclear installations inside the United States and in the 1960s and it stole bomb-grade uranium from a US nuclear fuel-processing plant.

Netanyahu’s speech is the latest in a campaign by Israel to ignite a war against Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iran, a plan which is intimately linked to the effort to destroy Syria over the past seven years.

The war in Syria represents the combined efforts of the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia to destroy the so-called ‘Shia Crescent’ of Iran, Syria and Lebanon (Hezbollah). The centrality of Israel in this effort was made clear by Roland Dumas, a former foreign minister of France in 2013. But Israel, along with the United States and Saudi Arabia, has been enraged by the fact that Bashar al-Assad’s secular government with the help of Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, has practically defeated the Islamic fanatics who were introduced into Syria for the purpose of overthrowing Assad in order to balkanise the country and stop Iranian arms shipments to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The reason why Israel wants Iranian aid to Hezbollah cut off and the organisation destroyed is not hard to fathom. Hezbollah is the only armed force within the Arab world willing and capable of taking on the Israeli military. Israel has for long coveted southern Lebanon up to the River Litani. But Hezbollah has twice inflicted humiliating defeats on Israel: first in 2000 when Israel was forced to withdraw after an 18-year occupation of the southern part of Lebanon which had commenced with a bloody invasion, and secondly in 2006 when Israel was forced to withdraw after sustaining heavy losses during a 34-day conflict.

Apart from the aforementioned goal of breaking the conduit between Iran and Hezbollah, the balkanisation of Syria would mean that any of the successor states would find it difficult to make a claim for the Golan Heights which Israel conquered in 1967 and which it illegally annexed in 1981. Israel is also supportive of the idea of a Kurdish state being created out of Syria as a means through which the transfer of oil and gas could be facilitated.

Much evidence exists of a pre-existing Israeli plan to destroy Syria. The Yinon Plan of 1982 and a series of position papers produced by Israel-friendly neoconservative ideologues in the United States (the Project for the New American Century’s ‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses – Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century’ in 2000) as well as for the Israeli government (‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm’ in 1996) bear this out. Each document clearly calls for the neutralising or the “rolling back” of several states including Syria.

The Yinon Plan, the name given to a paper entitled ‘A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s’ which was published in February 1982 in Kivunim (Directions), a journal written in Hebrew, set out Israel’s enduring aim of balkanising the surrounding Arab and Muslim world into ethnic and sectarian mini-states. Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq were prime candidates.

It was not a unique or suddenly arrived at policy, but simply set out in detail an overarching policy pursued by Israel’s leaders since the founding of the state. For  instance, the diaries of Moshe Sharett, an early prime minister of Israel, laid bare David Ben Gurion and Moshe Dayan’s aim of weakening Lebanon by exacerbating tensions between its Muslim and Christian population in the course of which Dayan hoped that a Christian military officer would declare a Christian state out of which the region south of the River Litani would be ceded to Israel.

A crucial point to mention is that the policy of the United States towards Syria and others is congruent with that of Israel. In fact, America has been pursuing a two-decade long strategy aimed at destabilisation and balkanisation regardless of the political stripe of the president in office. After the attack of 9/11, the United States set in motion a plan, in the words of retired U.S. General Wesley Clark, “to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran”.

The secular nations of Iraq, Syria and Libya had no links to the Sunni Islamist al-Qaeda cell which purportedly carried out the attacks on 9/11. Neither did Shia Iran. Yet, America foreign policy has been geared towards destroying nations who happen to oppose Israel and who are supportive of the Palestinian cause.

To quote General Clark again, American foreign policy was “hijacked” without a public debate.

While the adoption of this policy remains officially unacknowledged, the modus operandi by which the United States has sought to destroy these countries is clear. A succession of position papers as well as the intended effect of United States and NATO interventions point to the exploiting of ethnic and sectarian conflicts as well as the use of Islamist proxy armies as the standard tactic utilised to bring down governments.

For instance, a Pentagon-funded report by the RAND Corporation in 2008 entitled ‘Unfolding the Future of the Long War: Motivations, Prospects and Implications for the U.S. Army’ explicitly refers to the need to foment conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims as a means to the end of controlling the resources of the Middle East.

Another tactic alluded to by a 2012 document created by the Defense Intelligence Agency is that of declaring ‘Safe Havens’ -a term synonymous with the often used ‘No-Fly Zones’- ostensibly as a humanitarian policy, but which is a technique used to shield and preserve areas controlled by Islamist insurgents. It was utilised by NATO forces as a means of protecting the al-Qaeda-affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting Group during its campaign to overthrow the government of Muammar Gaddafi, and an attempt was made to implement this prior to the fall of the al-Nusra-controlled city of Aleppo.

America’s Founding Fathers warned against getting involved in foreign entanglements, yet it devotedly follows a Middle East policy that clearly benefits the interests of another nation state. It is a policy which risks setting off a major regional war based on sectarian lines as well as embroiling it in a conflict with nuclear armed Russia.

For Israel, the goal remains the establishment of its undisputed hegemony in the Middle East. However, while an economic rationale predicated on relieving Europe of its dependency on Russian gas via a pipeline from the gulf is occasionally referenced, there has never been a comprehensive articulation of what America’s fundamental interests are in destroying Syria and Iran.

Pursuing such a policy without having had a full and thorough public debate tends to confirm key areas of dysfunction in the American system of governance. First it highlights the power and influence of those lobbies associated with Israeli interests and the Military Industry, and secondly, the unchanging nature of this policy which has been followed by the respective administrations of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump provide evidence that what Michael J. Glennon terms the ‘Madisonian’ institutions of state are no longer accountable in the manner which people still think they are. Instead power in regard to crucial issues on American national security rests with an unelected group of people outside of the separated organs of government: what Glennon, a professor of law at Tufts University, refers to as ‘Trumanite’ institutions.

The implications for the health of American democracy are all too apparent.

The pursuit of a strategy which has served to diminish American esteem among the global community as well as adding to the increasing national debt represents a catastrophic failure not only on the part of the political class, but also on the part of the mainstream media, which has consistently presented a narrative devoid of its true context. The intellectual community comprised of university academics and scholars working for think tanks must accept a large share of the blame.

Binyamin Netanyahu’s speech, a shameless attempt at goading the United States into breaking its obligations under an international agreement as a prelude to fighting a war which would serve Israel’s interests, ought to ignite a full and transparent debate on American national security policy in the Middle East.

A failure to do this risks future costly disasters which would dwarf the debacles of Iraq, Libya and Syria.

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VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

If past is prologue, things aren’t encouraging. Throughout the entire post-WW II period, Washington has been militantly hostile toward North Korea – for its sovereign independence, not for any threat it posed.

Intermittent US talks with Pyongyang failed each time initiated. Will this time be different when hawkish US neocon extremists will be dealing with North Korea, a nation they despise?

Prospects aren’t favorable – including what happens if an agreement is reached. US history is clear – a record of breached treaties, conventions and other deals, America agreeing to one thing, then going another way.

Examples are endless. GHW Bush’s secretary of state James Baker’s “iron-clad” pledge to Mikhail Gorbachev not to expand NATO “one inch eastward” toward Russia’s borders was flagrantly breach by succeeding US administrations.

Today, US-led NATO forces surround Russia, posing a major threat to its security. Can North Korea fare better than Russia in dealing with America? It takes a foolhardy leap of faith to believe it.

Twice earlier, Washington engaged in diplomacy with the DPRK, initiatives offering aid in return for abandoning its nuclear weapons program.

Both efforts failed. In 1994, an Agreed Framework was agreed on between both countries.

Pyongyang agreed to freeze and replace its nuclear power plant program with a light water nuclear reactor, along with steps toward normalizing relations with Washington.

The Clinton administration agreed to build two light-water reactors by 2003. In the interim, it would supply Pyongyang with 500,000 tons of heavy fuel annually.

US sanctions would be lifted. The DPRK would be removed from the State Department’s state sponsors of terrorism list. Both countries agreed to provide “formal assurances” against threatened or actual use of nuclear weapons.

Pyongyang agreed to allow Washington to monitor its nuclear sites. The deal collapsed after GW Bush called North Korea part of an axis of evil in his first State of the Union address.

The DPRK upheld its part of the deal. Washington systematically breached it, reneging on its word. North Korea responded by resuming its plutonium enrichment program.

Its nuclear weapons deterrent was developed because Washington can’t be trusted – not earlier, not today, not ever unless or until evidence proves otherwise. None so far exists.

In August 2003, so-called six-party talks were initiated, involving America, China, Japan, North Korea, Russia and South Korea.

In 2005, Pyongyang pledged to abandon “all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs.” In 2009, talks broke down following disagreements over verification, along with international condemnation of a DPRK ballistic missile test – what many other countries do without criticism of their programs.

North Korea responded to the breakdown in talks, saying it would never reengage in diplomacy accomplishing nothing. Nor was it bound by earlier agreements.

US hostility, toughness and betrayal defined bilateral relations for years. Pyongyang earlier said

“if the US has a will to drop its hostile policy toward the DPRK, it will have dialogue…the ball is in the court of the US side.”

The key stumbling block always isn’t what Washington pledges. It’s what happens next, repeatedly and consistently breaching agreements reached.

US/North Korea diplomatic initiatives throughout the years were pockmarked with failure, the DPRK falsely blamed for Washington’s betrayal.

Will history repeat under Trump? Will a so far unscheduled summit with DPRK leader Kim Jong-un occur?

If both leaders meet for summit talks in the weeks ahead, is anything positive possible? Can Washington be expected to keep its word on whatever might be pledged?

Will it turn a new leaf for peace on the Korean peninsula, agreeing to steps toward normalizing relations with Pyongyang – including respecting its sovereign independence, formally ending the 1950s Korean War, and removing hostile sanctions?

John Bolton earlier urged ending North Korea, saying:

“The only longterm way to deal with (its) nuclear weapons program is to end (the) regime,” adding:

“It’s not enough…to impose sanctions…(T)his regime poses a threat to stability in the region that undermines security” – promoting war, not diplomatic outreach and peace.

Pompeo earlier lied claiming a North Korean threat, a few months away from being able to strike US cities with nuclear weapons, ignoring its peace agenda, never having attacked another country throughout its history.

Ahead of possible Trump/Kim Jong-un summit talks, he mocked inter-Korean diplomacy, calling it “a faint…not likely to lead to any true change…”

In his first address as secretary of state, he said

“(o)ur objective (on the Korean peninsula) remains unchanged. We’re committed to permanent, verifiable, irreversible dismantling of North Koreans’ weapons of mass destruction programs without delay. Until then, the global maximum pressure campaign will continue.”

Are Pompeo and Bolton actively working to undermine positive results of a Trump/Kim Jong-un summit?

Do they oppose dealmaking with the DPRK? Bolton may have leaked US intelligence information to a right-wing Washington think tank, claiming without evidence that Pyongyang intends to produce nuclear-grade graphite nuclear reactors need to operate, suggesting it violates the spirit of summit talks – to generate public opposition to any agreement with Kim.

Earlier on Fox News Sunday, Bolton said

“(w)e have very much in mind the Libya model from 2003, 2004” in discussions with North Korea.

Gaddafi abandoned Libya’s WMD development. In February 2011, US-dominated NATO launched naked aggression against the country, raping and destroying it, transforming Africa’s most developed country into a dystopian charnel house, sodomizing Gaddafi to death – things remaining violent and chaotic today.

Longstanding hostile US relations toward North Korea suggest it’s unlikely for anything positive to come from Kim/Trump summit talks if they occur – over the longterm, what matters most.

*

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

In a matter of mere hours, a new election will take place. Unlike seemingly all other national elections worldwide, this election will bring real “hope” to a needlessly impoverished country. This election will see real “change” come to a country far too long restricted and controlled by external foreign powers. For this is an election that is steeped in real democracy; not the US-inspired definition – the one based solely on the archaic shards of what little is left of a desperate empire struggling to hold onto its waning influence. This election will showcase, finally and thankfully, a return to the true definition.

This Sunday, May 6, 2018, is the most important election in the world!

Proving the point, why is this election is being swept under the rug of worldwide US media control? Here, unlike the remaining hapless world, there is a very bright future awaiting for all… an example for an anguished world begging to finally be set free. It will be this democracy, correctly re-defined and judiciously administered, that will, on this coming day, succeed for all.

World, Welcome to Lebanon!

Once Upon a Time: Democracy.

When accurately considering supposed worldwide “democratic” elections, they are routinely a facade and mean little. Once US foreign policy is done, these nation’s elections provide nothing for the people who have no other choice for effecting change other than their single useless vote. For the voter who favours a return to true popular nationalism, in every post-election cycle-unless the result is acceptable to Washington- US hegemony, falsely branded as “democracy,” is designed to quickly negate the result of the multi-months long showcase of a promised electoral process. In reality, elections have not brought true populist hope and change to any country; except for the aristocracy and the power hungry. Instead, further degradation of their internal political processes, elimination off constitutional civil liberties, imposed economic austerity, and civil wars of division are the usual US inspired democratic result. US policy calls for only the election of political leaders who care not for their countries or countrymen and who will sell their souls- and their allegiance- in favour of a goody bag full of promised US rewards.

This Sunday, May 6  at the voting booths across the streets of Lebanon this malignant form of hegemonic democracy will be smashed to bits before the world’s eyes.  An example to all of what could, and what should, be.

Here in Beirut, Lebanon, this election will go on as planned. It results, regardless of the outcome, guaranteed. There will be no interference from the Western troika: the US/UK/ EU. This election will provide a new future, new politicians, national unity and- more importantly- the certification that this fledgling nation will, come the following Monday morning, march forward together with very much to look forward to. In doing so, Lebanon, virtually insignificant in 2000, will soon become a guiding light to a world so desperate for a true return to, “the will of the people.”

Bringing true democracy to the people of Lebanon has already been a decades-long and bloody battle. Surprisingly to most, it has been Hizbullah that has led Lebanon on this path from the beginning. As discussed in a previous article, Hizbullah’s very strong Shia influence, personified by spiritual and political supreme leader, Hassan Nasrallah, provides a very direct, sincere and all-inclusionary path for political development: One that also has a very strong moral and ethical requirement.

This influence in no small measure has lead Lebanon to this Sunday’s election.

Hizbullah was born of a need for a defense against invasion by foreign armies, political or otherwise, its roots steeped in the social uprising of the Lebanese Shi’a community in the late 1960’s and early 70’s.  Divisive Lebanese politics and a  15-year (1975-1990) civil war war spawned by the Israelis, who pitted the Christian militias and the Syrians against the Muslim Lebanese, created, as intended, a fractured country fighting each other in the streets for more than a decade.

Hizbullah formalized a new Lebanese parliamentary structure after bringing the civil war to a close and since democracy has slowly and very methodically flourished.  The current Lebanese parliamentary structure is a result of the negotiations that ended the Civil War. A unique feature of the Lebanese parliament is the principle of “confessional distribution.” Prior, during elections held between 1932 and 1972,  seats were apportioned between Christians and Muslims in a 6:5 ratio. By the 1960s, Muslims had become openly resistant to this system. Postwar, The Taif Agreement of 1989, which effectively ended the civil war, reapportioned the Parliament to provide for equal representation of Christians and Muslims, with each electing 64 of the 128 deputies. With this, each religious community- Shia, Sunni, Alawite, Christain, Druze and Hizbullah-  campaigns for the parliamentary seats.

Lebanon is unusual in that its cabinet of three ministers is by law the country’s executive authority, effectively more powerful than the president, prime minister or parliament, which is the body that elects the cabinet to begin with. This means that a coalition of party seats can bring in a Cabinet of their choosing. It is here that the political power of Hizbullah has been clearly shown.

Hizbullah’s political growth has as much to do with its successes in Lebanese society as with it’s military victories of defence. Beyond an improved military, the fundamental change has been in the area of access to public social services, once substantially missing under the pre-2006 Lebanese government. During and after the 1975-90 civil war, the Lebanese central government of that time neglected service provisions for the public. Municipal elections were not held for 35 years, and thus the municipalities’ human, financial and technical capacities deteriorated, rendering them mere skeleton institutions.

Today, Hizbullah runs a range of philanthropic and commercial activities including hospitals, medical centers, schools, orphanages, rehabilitation centers for the handicapped, supermarkets, gas stations, construction companies, a radio station (Nur) and public service television station (Al Manar).  Health care is now universal and heavily subsidized, if not free. In endearing itself to the Lebanese public as a whole, Hezbollah has developed a highly organized system of health and social-service organizations. The service system is made up of the Social Unit; the Education Unit; and the Islamic Health Unit, which together make up its network of national service providers.

In a Lebanese parliament that had too often in the past echoed the false western model of democracy in that it ignored the true interests of those that did cast votes in their favor, here in today’s Lebanon it is Hizbullah that has been unwavering in directly representing all Lebanese regardless of religion or former nationality. This upcoming example of worldwide leadership is, of course, anathema to the expanding empire and its increasingly draconian, if not barbaric, proffering of their horrifying bastardization once known as “democracy.”

Defining Modern US Democracy.

This year alone has seen far too many new examples of democracy lost. Keep in mind the many previous US successes at regime change and control using the US form of proffered democratic change: the Brazils, the Venezuelas, the Ukraines, Syrias, Yemens, Egypts, Turkeys, of  our world, whose people’s democracies and therefore their futures have already been cast upon the jagged rocks of history. In just a few short months of 2018, one should have noticed the continued, yet similar, the pattern of obvious endemic hegemony.

Start with Honduras, where the populist candidate, Juan Orlando Hernández, was overthrown after his initial presidential electoral victory by a US manipulated run-off election in favor of their candidate, Salvador Nasralla (no relation).  So, true democracy be damned,  victory for Juan Orlando Hernández and the impoverished people of Honduras was so easily turned into defeat. The final election results: Chaos for the Honduran people; control for the US military.

Of course, the established first world democracies have seen their own attempts at populism ultimately thwarted as well. Take the Catalonian Independence vote: one that was more of a “nice try “ than a binding election.  Or Brexit, that is, two years hence, no further along than before the referendum vote was taken and now, as predicted, seems doomed to be blown onto those same jagged rocks  by the minions of the empire- the UK Parliament and House of Lords- which are howling and raging against it daily in the UK press despite the outcome of that vote.

In turn, consider the one UK politician who may- although untested- bring true socialist labour back to Britain, but is assailed by the same press just as regularly as being tantamount to the next Joseph Stalin. Like Lebanon, however, Jeremy Corbyn‘s true threat is not merely his championing a return to populist socialist reform via British democracy: No, it is because his leadership would likely provide hope and change-and a future- for all of Briton. This is, of course, is not acceptable to the established powers that exist to willfully maintain the status quo of continued austerity, trickle-up economics, US/EU subservience, and national social degradation. Hence, Corbyn’s remaining days on earth may be terminally shortened.

A True Democratic Definition for the World.

With the Israelis keeping the 2006 horrors firmly on the minds of all Lebanese while demanding regime change, it seems safe to say that Hizbullah is not a long shot in gaining a legitimate coalition majority in the May 6 election.  If this happens, it will be because of, not a Shi’a majority, but a Lebanese people’s majority made up of all Muslim religious affiliations, as well as Christian, who will likely cross any political party affiliations when they vote. Because of the constitutional voting right of universal suffrage, and Israel’s continued demands for more war, many who vote will indeed have one primary political motivation: self-preservation.

In February 2006,  Michel Aoun and Hassan Nasrallah signed a memorandum of understanding that called for a broad range of reforms, such as guaranteeing equal media access for candidates and allowing expatriate voting. However, Hizbullah appears to be playing it cool in the ramp up to the election. Their TV station, Al Manar, is staying focused on foreign, Syrian and Mid-east news with little election coverage. Interestingly, western media to date also has very little coverage of this very important election, a glaring, if not suspicious, omission.

The Lebanese parliamentary politicians who are elected this weekend will have a lot on their hands, but also a lot of chips to play with. Being pro- Lebanon is a must to be considered for election, but also the love and demand for peace in a nation too often victimized by wars of incursion. With Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah embracing the Lebanese army, the candidates are free to also embrace both and their defense of Lebanon. With the drums of war beating ever louder from Tel Aviv to Washington, a future for Lebanon starts firmly at its own borders. The Candidates know this well.

Foreign military power will not be overturning this election.

Indeed the military wing is now far more organized and prepared for defense than before the 2006 war, however, Hizbullah’s persona under the direction of their spiritual and political leader, Sheikh Sa’id Hassan Nasrallah has also dramatically changed. There is a moral, disciplined side to the militia that comes from the overlying Shi’a religious doctrine espoused by Nasrallah, one that now accepts all religions, but with a firm grasp on professional, ethical performance of its military duties… when necessary.

Although Hizbullah does not reveal troop strength in numbers it is  universally considered to be the largest non-state military in the world  and considerably stronger than the Lebanese army. Estimates indicate at least 20,000 professionally trained soldiers and 25,000 civilian militia fighters are maintained, however, this is a very low-ball estimate considering that US military estimates for the Syrian based Hizbullah units are currently 60,000 and that, with western Syria back under Assad’s control, most of these battle-hardened troops will be returning home soon. Whatever Hizbullah’s military may have been before the Syrian war, it is unquestionable that it is currently far better manned, armed, supplied, and trained than ever before.

Beyond the fact that Lebanon’s defense is now the composite of two well trained and armed armies; and that just one needed to stop Israel three times, Lebanon’s position relative to the other Mid-East nations will soon be of interest to this upcoming parliament.

The biggest defensive disadvantage to the two Lebanese armies is that neither, reportedly, has surface-to-air missiles. This is due to the Lebanese government’s weakness in the 2006 peace deal, however, Hizbullah is reportedly beginning manufacture them in secret. Strategically, Lebanon has so far been nothing more than an Israeli “no-fly” zone used for their attacks on Syria. Israeli warplanes are seen routinely in the skies since the Lebanese armies can do nothing about it. Using this past Saturday’s Israeli attacks on Iranian positions in Hama and Aleppo, Syria as an example, IDF strike forces crossed neutral Lebanon airspace and entering from the  Mediterranean, and thus arriving unscathed at the Lebanon/Syrian border at high speed; their time to target approximately thirty seconds.

Considering the reported Iranian loss of life applied to Russia’s announcement of selling the vaunted S-300 anti-missile/aircraft system to Syria and Putin’s stern warning to Netanyahu before the Israeli attacks of this weekend, it is more than likely that the soon-to-be No-Fly zone in Syria will be expanded into Lebanese territory. This would add to Lebanese defense and more importantly secure the western flank of Syria by a sovereign independent and neutral nation. Never before has Lebanon had a vital place in world geo-strategic politics. With a new ramp-up to US war in Syria brewing, Lebanon will likely be at center stage of preventing an escalation to war very soon.

Democracy and Money.

“Oil wealth is for all the Lebanese.” – Hassan Nasrallah

Lebanon has been impoverished compared to many of its Mid-East counterparts primarily because it did not have its own natural resources to harvest. This means that Lebanese suffer daily electrical blackouts and little in the way of infrastructure such as healthcare and education, a gap filled by Hizbullah via Iranian funding.  Lacking its own gas or oil Lebanon must import expensive diesel fuel at an annual loss to the economy of some $2.5 billion. Lebanon is one of the world’s most indebted countries with debt to GDP of some 145%. The Syrian war and internal Lebanese political stalemate have frozen its offshore energy exploration until now.

In 2010 the oil and gas geopolitics of the Mediterranean changed profoundly. That was when a Texas oil company, Noble Energy, discovered a huge deposit of natural gas offshore Israel in the Eastern Mediterranean, the so-called Leviathan Field, one of the world’s largest gas field discoveries in over a decade. The same Texas company later confirmed significant gas resources offshore in Cyprus waters near the Israeli Leviathan, called Aphrodite. Israel conducted war games in 2017 off the Cyprus coast in preparation to steal these fields as well.

A UK company, Spectrum, conducted geophysical surveys in the offshore Lebanese section of the Levant Basin in recent years, including 3D seismic, and estimated that the Lebanese waters could hold up to 25 trillion cubic feet of economically recoverable gas. Development of those gas reserves would alter the entire economy of Lebanon. And increase its autonomy from foreign influence, while providing a new massive revenue stream that can be used for improving Lebanese society while decreasing foreign debt and its control.

Contracts for initial exploration and test wells have already been signed with XXXX. In a post-election era, Lebanon’s parliament will have the chance to greatly expand on what Hizbullah’s move to parliamentary nationalism has already accomplished. It is no secret that through Hizbullah’s already significant improvements in education and social services have been funded primarily by Iran, but in a Lebanon that barely two decades ago had almost none of these the benefits will show soon. Political corrupt has seen an iron fist from the example of Hizbullah and its Shia allegiance to Islam that promotes educations and is intolerant of political corruption. This means that when it comes to voting on Lebanon’s future these parliamentarians will keep their voter’s true interests true to their hearts…and no one else’s.

Lebanese Democracy: An Example to the World!

This Sunday, a return to a proper definition of democracy will return for the world to behold, cherish and wonder at its results. Meanwhile, in the land of the exceptional US-style democracy in the form of the 2018 mid-term elections has the voter once again uselessly heading to the polls. By the admission of the two political parties; the US voter this time has a new and simple choice to make: Vote for the democrat…as an anti-trump statement; vote RNC and be pro-Trump, or as Trump himself defensively opined last week, “ Vote Republican or the Democrats will have me impeached.” These are apparently the best selling points that US democracy has to offer voters this time.

These two options, of course, are devoid of any domestic policy specifics whatsoever and also fail to draw attention to the failures of the DNC, the RNC and the two/one party US monocracy that furthers the personal disenfranchisement of the voter from their own political system and their own  future. But fly the flag they will as these flag wrapped voters again fail to realize that their political system is equal to the worldwide definition of democracy they pretend to be the exception of.

It is now time for Americans and world citizens across the globe to understand clearly the true definition of US democracy. This is a fraudulent democratic model that is far more akin the the false tenets of ISIS or modern Zionism.

Just as ISIS sold a failure of conscience by offering its own self-serving bastardization of the Koran in order to justify its expansion and sanctioned horrors; just as Zionism manipulates and distorts the Torah and the Talmud while falsely claiming to speak for all Jews worldwide in order to incorrectly legitimise its expansions and horrors, thus we now must compare the US religion of “democracy.”  We have seen all too clearly that US democracy, exposed for what it truly is in our world,  similarly misuses what once was a pure ideology; one of a definitive democracy from long ago, now nothing more than a tool -an excuse- to destroy or conquer.

On Monday morning May 7, 2018, this illusion will be forever smashed to pieces, not just on the jagged rocks of history, but far more importantly…a changing of the minds of all the peoples of our world; those yearning to be free.

For true democracy has only one definition; one that may not be re-defined. It grapples for return within our bones, within our souls and our collective human conscience that has for far too long bared witness to the horrors and the “Sorrows of Empire.” In Lebanon, a land that has suffered much at the hands of empire, here there is only one remaining definition, one that is offered, this coming Sunday to the remaining civilized world…Freedom.

And nothing else!

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Author’s Note: This article is a continuation is a series direct from Lebanon. The author will be reporting live from the Lebanese election on Sat. May 5 and Sun. May 6, 2018. For more details on this important election and its results please refer back to this publication or visit the author’s archive at www.watchingromeburn.com

Brett Redmayne-Titley has published over 150 in-depth articles over the past seven years for news agencies worldwide. Many have been translated. On-scene reporting from important current events has been an emphasis that has led to multi-part exposes on such topics as the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, NATO summit, KXL Pipeline, Porter Ranch Methane blow-out and many more. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Prior articles can be viewed at his archive: www.watchingromeburn.uk 

It seems like rich nonsense, but should peace be attained on the Korean peninsula, with arrangements entrenched to ensure durability as opposed to unconvincing window dressing, President Donald Trump might well join the list of frauds and charlatans who have obtained the Nobel Peace Prize.

The nomination for the 2019 prize came in a letter from 18 of Trump’s Republican supporters in the House of Representatives to the Nobel Committee chair Berit Reiss-Andersen, which starkly resembled the narrative of fakery the President delights in. Trump, went the signers, should receive the prize “in recognition of his work to end the Korean War, denuclearize the Korean peninsula, and bring peace to the region.”

The Republicans seem to have things the wrong way around.  Rather than incite instability, Trump supposedly calmed the waters.  Rather than creating teeth-chattering fear amongst allies, he brought accord where there was disagreement.  “Since taking office, President Trump has worked tirelessly to apply maximum pressure on North Korea to end its illicit weapons programs and bring peace to the region.” He was the great unifier, bringing on powers such as China “to impose one of the most successful international sanctions regimes in history.” (Never let history get in the way of a good tale.)

All this, despite sketchy details of a as yet unplanned summit between Trump and Kim Jong Un to take place at the end of this month or early June.  Agendas are also in their infancy: where to with the actual issue of denuclearisation, and what lasting security guarantees might be put in place.

There have been some howlers in the hall of Nobel Peace Prize recipients, and Trump’s addition to the role would be perversely fitting.  Henry Kissinger retains the mantle of the manifest absurd, despite being the blood spatted Iago of US foreign policy. Under his sagaciously poisonous direction, democracies were withered in favour of murderous regimes.  Countries – Laos and Cambodia – were subjected to illegal bombings.  Murdering high officials was condoned.

Importantly, he was given the Nobel for supposedly concluding the war in Vietnam despite frustrating the Johnson administration’s efforts to do so in 1968.  (Fun if cruel fact: the Vietnam War would only conclude in 1975, two years after Kissinger’s award.)  Along with that dark lord of mendacity and cunning Richard Nixon, Kissinger sabotaged peace talks between North and South Vietnam in an effort to gain an advantage over Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey in the elections that year.  (Nixon’s order to his close aide H. R. Haldeman on October 22, 1968 was to “monkey wrench” the efforts of the Democrats.) 

Closer in precedent, though not quite stratospherically venal as that of Kissinger was the award given to President Barack Obama in 2009.  Still presidentially virginal, more than a few eyebrows were raised.  “What has he done?” came the obvious question from Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times.  Obama had to agree, though accepted the award.  The Committee had obviously decided to convert the prize into something of a big push to achievement, an act of pure counter-intuition.

In 2015, former secretary of the Nobel committee Geir Lundestad admitted regret.

“Even many of Obama’s supporters believed that the prize was a mistake.  In that sense the committee didn’t achieve what it had hoped for.”

What stands out in Trump’s meaningless nomination is a suggestion that the players on the ground – the Moon Jae-in administration of South Korea, and the Kim Jong Un regime of the DPRK – are mere marionettes directed by Trump and social media mist.  Tweets matter.  Targeted indignation count.  Never mind that the Koreas have taken the first steps and initiated discussions that have been viewed with suspicion by members of Congress.

Nominations, however, remain that. They do not necessarily yield the fruit of an award. President George W. Bush had been floated as a contender at some point, and Thomas E. Ricks would write with acid reflection in 2015 that he probably deserved one.

“The actions of the United States have successfully bolstered the influence of Iran over the region.  Now Iraq and Iran, who in the 1980s fought a long and bitter war, are reconciled!” 

A delightful spoof of the inner world of the peace prize committee, veering dangerously close to its naff rationales can be found in the Pan-Arabian Enquirer.  The satirical publication suggested that the Nobel Committee would award the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize to Bush and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.

“These two statesmen have been absolutely instrumental in stopping the Syrian war from escalating into a terrifying global conflict and, for this, they must be congratulated.”

Such is the rationale.  Those who start wars and wage campaigns of terror one day will, at some point, be seen in a different light.  Peace achieved, even over graveyards, can be acknowledged by way of awards.  But in Trump’s case, the resume of extensive violence waged against other states and peoples is still in its infancy. For all that, the Nobel Prize Committee may still have a risible surprise in store, something appropriate for a proclaimed age of Fake News. 

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

Featured image is from Citizens for Trump.

There has been considerable speculation in recent days as to whether the recent and ongoing protests across former Soviet Armenia constitute another Washington Color Revolution destabilization or whether it represents simply the angry revolt of citizens fed up with the deep corruption and lack of economic development under the regime of Prime Minister Serzh Sargysan. Following days of large protests, the former President was forced to resign on April 23, declaring, 

“Nikol Pashinyan was right. I was wrong.”

Armenia is an integral member of Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union and were it to come under control of a pro-NATO opposition could bring a strategic problem for Moscow to put it mildly. The issue is significant.

Ironically, what nominally sparked the protests was the action of Sargysan to in effect do what Turkey’s Erdogan has done, only in reverse. He and his parliamentary majority party managed to strip the office of President of almost all but ceremonial roles, while giving actual decision powers to the office of Prime Minister. That he managed just before he himself became Prime Minister. Reaction from Moscow to the ongoing protests until now has evidently been muted following a statement that it won’t get involved in Armenian internal affairs.

At this point, despite the fact that Sargysan resigned as Prime Minister and did not submit himself as candidate to oppose Pashinyan in the May 1 parliament vote, Pashinyan fell short of the majority needed to be named Prime Minister. As of this writing he has called for a total blockage of traffic and government buildings by “peaceful acts of civil disobedience.” He told a crowd outside Parliament after the failed vote was announced,

“Tomorrow total strike is declared. We block all the streets, communications, subway and the airports starting from 08:15. Our struggle cannot end in a failure.”

Color Revolution?

What evidence points to a directed Washington intervention into a country strategic for Moscow? First we have the established presence of an office in Yerevan of the Open Society Foundations-Armenia. As the anti-government protests built in size on April 17, several NGOs signed an open letter to the government warning that they had identified probable government-backed protest disruptors and warned against their deployment against the peaceful protestors.

The call was signed among others by Helsinki Committee of Armenia, part of Helsinki Committees which in part is funded by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. The call was also signed by Open Society Foundations – Armenia.

This past February the  OSF-Armenia announced a joint project with the European Union designed to, “focus on engaging youth, young activists and journalists. It will serve as a bridge between the established human rights advocates in Armenia and younger generations of activists interested in gaining more expertise in defending rights of the RA citizens.”

Another signer to the warning statement to the Armenian government was an Armenian NGO calling itself the Protection of Rights Without Borders NGO. It turns out that that NGO is also funded not only by  OSF-Armenia, but also by the EU and by the US State Department USAID, an organization as I describe in my newest book, Manifest Destiny: Democracy as Cognitive Dissonance, that is frequently tied to US Government regime change destabilizations and Color Revolutions.

The fact that Open Society Foundations-Armenia and others signed such a statement directly tied to unfolding events on the streets of Yerevan suggest at the least more than an academic interest in the growing protests.

What about the role of other US-based NGOs in Armenia? The leading US regime-change NGO, National Endowment for Democracy, created in the 1980’s in the words of Allan Weinstein, one of its founders, to do what the CIA used to do but privately, has become far less forthcoming about its grants. Nonetheless some research reveals that the NED has also funded numerous programs in Armenia ranging from promoting rule of law and government accountability in Armenia, as well as funding a 2017 program for Armenian journalists to show “how Georgia benefits from its associations with the EU and how Armenia does not reap similar advantages from the Eurasian Economic Union.” In another generous grant the NED gave more than $40,000 in 2017, a hefty sum in the depressed Armenian economy, to finance Armenian Times Newspaper as they put it, “to improve the quality and increase the availability of independent news…”

Now if we add to the established presence of Washington-financed NGOs the fact that the US State Department actively is in contact with opposition leader Nikol Pashinyan during the recent protests it becomes even more likely we are witnessing a variation of Washington’s Color Revolution. On April 30, the day before the fateful parliament vote, US State Department Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, A. Wess Mitchell, noted he had initiated a phone discussion with opposition Civil Contract MP, Nikol Pashinyan. In his official statement Mitchell merely stated that the

“US government looks forward to working closely with the new government in Armenia, aiming to further deepen the decades-long US-Armenian relationship.”

Wess Mitchell sits in the post held under Obama by the infamous neoconservative Ukraine Color Revolution instigator, Victoria Nuland. It seems he is the continuity of Nuland as well. Mitchell came to the State Department post in 2017 from something called the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) where he was CEO and which he actually founded. Now things get interesting.

The CEPA, a Washington think tank founded in 2004 at the time the US was deep involved in the Ukraine Orange Revolution, describes its mission being “to promote an economically vibrant, strategically secure and politically free Central and Eastern Europe with close and enduring ties to the United States.” A major program of CEPA is “dedicated to monitoring and exposing Russian disinformation in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.”

Indeed Assistant Secretary of State Mitchell comes from a Washington anti-Russian think tank whose funders include NATO, US Defense Department, National Endowment for Democracy, the major military industry giants including Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, BAE Systems, Bell Helicopter. Notably after an article in the Russian state RT on the funding of CEPA that portion of their website seems to have vanished into cyber nirvana.

In addition to Russophobe Mitchell in admitted contact with opposition leader Nikol Pashinyan, US Ambassador to Armenia, Richard Mills, a former Senior “Democracy Advisor” (sic) at the US Embassy in Iraq owes his job to Victoria Nuland who reportedly brought Mills to Yerevan to help bring Armenia, like Ukraine, into the US sphere and away from Russia. Mills reportedly played a key role in brokering the sale of an Armenian Vorotan Hydro complex to American company that triggered a failed 2015 attempt at a Color Revolution protest over the ensuing 16% hike in electricity prices. US-funded NGOs argued the main reason for the rising electricity was Russia whose Gazprom dominates the Armenian energy market. Protests were spread then using the social media hash tag #ElectricYerevan.

This time all indications point to a far more refined remake of a US Color Revolution, this time with a credible leader, 42-year old journalist and prison veteran from earlier anti-government actions Pashinyan. Pashinyan has been careful to declare if made Prime Minister he would not take Armenia out of Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union. On May 1 he declared,

“We consider Russia as a strategic ally, our movement does not create threats for this…If I am elected [as the prime minister], Armenia will remain a member of the Eurasian Economic Union and the Collective Security Treaty Organization.”

At this juncture it is clear, despite Nikol Pashinyan’s soothing words, that the Armenian events are not at all good news for Moscow whose direct options are for the moment limited.

Why Armenia?

Armenia is a strategic ally of Moscow ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. It is bordered by two hostile countries—Azerbaijan and Turkey. Her other neighbors are Iran and Georgia. With the situation in Georgia precarious since the US staged a Color Revolution in 2003 bringing the pro-NATO Mikhail Saakashvili into power, were Armenia to come under influence of a leader determined to pull the country away from Russian dependence, its major trading partner and investor, it would result in some kind of civil war.

Already there are voices in Azerbaijan gleefully anticipating such an outcome. On May 1 as the Armenian parliament refused to vote Pashinyan in as Prime Minister, Azeri parliament member Gudrat Hasanguliyev warned that the situation in Armenia might turn into a civil war. He insisted that Azerbaijan should be prepared to use such a civil war as a chance to retake the secessionist Nagorno-Karabakh whose population is majority Armenian.

Since the Russian-brokered end to a war between a US-backed Azeri army and Armenia in 1994 the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave has been in an uneasy ceasefire. It was broken briefly in 2016 when Azeri forces tried a military occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh before being forced to backdown.

All evidence at this point suggests there is a dirty hand of the US NGOs and State Department pushing to take advantage of the internal discontent inside Armenia to further weaken Russia and its Eurasian Economic Union by at the minimum creating unrest and chaos in Armenia. If this is so will be clear soon enough.

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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author.

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Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl

ISBN Number: 978-0-937147-2-2

Year: 2007

Pages: 341 pages with complete index

List Price: $25.95

Special Price: $18.00

 

This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”

This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.

The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.

I use a computer and smart phone for more than 10 hours a day.

So I wasn’t happy to learn that recent scientific studies show the blue light emitted by our computers, tablets and smart phones can cause cancer, ruin your eyes, and cause insomnia.

Device makers use screens that pump out a lot of blue light.  Not for any evil purpose … but just because it’s cheap to make bright LEDs lights which pump out crazy amounts of blue light frequencies (light with a wavelength of between 450 and 495 nanometers).

Cancer

A new study by Spanish, British and Canadian scientists published Monday in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives found that blue light is linked to prostate and breast cancer.

The study found that other bright light – such as red or green LEDs – are not linked with cancer.

Blindness

Numerous studies show that the blue light from our devices can lead to serious eye problems.

For example, blue light is linked with macular degeneration … the main cause of blindness among older Americans.

Insomnia

It’s well-known that exposure to blue light at night can lead to insomnia.

What You Can Do to Protect Yourself

There are numerous blue light filters which you can put on your computer, tablet or phone.  For example, Amazon carries hundreds of them.

For example, I have a clear plastic filter that covers my work computer monitor.

And I just bought a replacement glass cover for my daughter’s iPhone that is a blue light filter.

On my laptop, I applied a clear stick-on film which is a blue light filter.

Finally, I’ve set all of the hand-held devices in my house to “night mode”, so that they shift away from blue light (and towards a more reddish hue) at night. Here’s how to do it for your Windows-based device, iPhone or Android.

In part 2, we will discuss the thousands of scientific studies on the benefits (believe it or not) of certain red light therapies.  This is the flip side of the blue light problem:  a way to improve your health …

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This article was originally published on Washington’s Blog.

Workers from around the world took to the streets on May 1—International Workers’ Day, also known as May Day—to proclaim on their day they were not going to surrender to the logic of capitalist dehumanization and plunder that the ruling class imposes on the peoples of the world.

Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) joined in by declaring our solidarity with those workers because we are those workers. In our statement, we reminded everyone that it is the working class and poor who end up being the cannon fodder for imperialist wars. We repeated once again what is now becoming our slogan: “Not one drop of blood from the working class and poor in defense of the gangsterism of the capitalist ruling class.”

Read our May Day statement here.

Imperialist wars abroad are linked to capitalist-induced class repression on the stolen, occupied land called the United States. On May Day in 2008, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) proved labor strikes can stop these attacks on humanity.

The people of the U.S. colony of Puerto Rico have suffered since September due to a lack of electricity that is a direct consequence of colonial destruction and austerity measures. On May Day, they faced further violence at the hands of goons who work for the colonial overseer when Puerto Ricans rightfully expressed their indignation in the streets.

In France, the neoliberal policies of President Emmanuel Macron sparked massive demonstrations on May 1. Thousands of workers poured into the streets in opposition to his support for an even more militarized agenda than what his predecessors had proposed. This includes a plan to re-introduce a military draft.

Meanwhile, people in the Cuban socialist state 90 miles from the U.S. imperial core say they don’t need to demand their rights as workers because they already have them in place.

Black Activists Still Imprisoned

Afro-Colombians fear for the lives of two leaders of the Black Communities Process, or PCN, the main organization defending the collective land rights of descendants of African slaves. Sara Quiñonez and her mother, Tulia Maris Valencia, were detained on false charges of collaborating with the ELN guerilla group—an allegation that could mark them for assassination. But the PCN is an organization that “promotes peace and peaceful struggle,” said PCN organizer and BAP member Charo Mina-Rojas, who called on leftists everywhere to demand the two women’s release during an interview with BAP member Glen Ford on Black Agenda Report Radio.

You can find information on how you can support these two freedom fighters here.

Upcoming Event

War, revolution and organizing the Black left is on the agenda for the National Assembly for Black Liberation. We encourage Black left forces to participate. Information on the conference can be found here.

No compromise.

No retreat.

Nearly half of Americans have a tough time paying their bills, and over one-third have faced hardships such as running out of food, not being able to afford a place to live, or not having enough money to pay for medical treatment.

Those are some of the grim findings from the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s first-ever survey of financial well-being, released Tuesday.

The numbers parallel MarketWatch’s own State of the American Wallet dashboard, which tracks how Americans are faring financially with data that updates in real time.

The State of the American Wallet shows how Americans are saddled with mounting car loan and credit card debt and not saving enough money — even enough to cover emergency expenses. Meanwhile, people in the top 1% control a growing share of the nation’s wealth.

Similarly, the CFPB survey found a wide range in how respondents felt about their financial well-being. Respondents were assigned scores on a scale of 1 to 100 after answering 10 questions. A score of 50 or lower meant the respondent was likely to be struggling to make ends meet. The average score was 54, but there was a 35-point spread between the top 10% and bottom 10% of participants.

The CFPB, which has faced an uncertain future under the Trump administration, surveyed more than 6,300 people in 2016 for its survey.

The survey included questions on whether respondents could “enjoy life” because of the way they managed their money, and how often respondents had money left over at the end of the month. The public can take the survey and find out their financial well-being score here.

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Leslie Albrecht is a personal finance reporter based in New York. She worked previously as a local news reporter at the New York City neighborhood news website DNAinfo, and as a reporter at the Modesto Bee and Merced Sun-Star, two McClatchy newspapers in California’s Central Valley. She is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Follow her on Twitter at @ReporterLeslie.

Dear diary, many of my colleagues are unhappy about the recent events in Syria. They are unhappy that Assad is still in power. However, I see the metaphorical glass as being half full. In a recent poll, 58% of Americans support the bombing of Syria and 19% have “no opinion.” This is wonderful news, since it shows how the vast majority of people are easily manipulated and are simply apathetic. In a democracy, the most important but least understood tool is propaganda. Let me share with you the fundamentals of a successful propaganda campaign.

Here are the five rules of public relations a.k.a propaganda:

• Keep the message simple
• Make it emotional
• Don’t allow nuances or debates
• Demonize the opposition
• Keep repeating the message

Rule #1: The principle message has to be simple so that even a 5-year-old can understand. In this case, it was, “Assad used chemical weapons to kill innocent Syrians.” The secondary message was we should do something about it. Everyone who watched TV or read the mainstream/social media got this message loud and clear.

Rule #2: Make it emotional. Propaganda is just marketing. (In fact, the phrase Public Relations was coined to replace Propaganda when the latter became a dirty word after World War I). Every good commercial has an emotional aspect to it. Emotions stop you from thinking and analyzing. Thus, while selling Pepsi, marketers use sexy women, selling a war requires evoking fear and/or anger.

About 120 years ago, when the U.S. wanted to steal Cuba from Spain, it relied upon the exact playbook.

“You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war,” said the newspaper oligarch William Randolph Hearst to his cartoonist.

The pictures portrayed dying children and brutal Spanish authorities. (Although Spain is white, the picture on the right used a monstrous person with African American features, since a warmonger could also be racist in those days).

Today, the U.S. government tells the White Helmets, “You furnish the videos, we’ll furnish the war.” It’s the same technique used over and over. Remember during Iraq War 1, when a girl testified before the Congress that Iraqi soldiers were killing newborn babies in incubators? Of course, it turned out to be fake news; and the girl turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador.

The Syrian war is also a great study in use of emotional language: “worst chemical attack in Syria in years” (a lie from NY Times that forgot its own article about 52+ chemical attacks by ISIS); “international outrage,” “shocked the world,” “horrific/deadly/ghastly/heinous chemical attack” etc. Also, the Syrian government is always referred to as “regime” and Assad is always a “dictator” or a “butcher” who “kills his own people.” Every word and phrase is designed to have an emotional impact.

Rule #3: No debate allowed. The media and the pundits left absolutely no doubt who the culprit was. Within minutes after the release of pictures/videos, everyone was blaming Assad. So it didn’t matter if you listened to ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox, or read the NY Times, WaPo or HuffPo … everyone was singing the same tune. Tucker Carlson was the only mainstream person who went off the script, but we are taking care of him.

This kind of consistency is really important in a successful propaganda campaign. No one should be allowed to consider other alternatives – could the attack be staged, could it be a false flag, could it be fake, how do we know when/where the videos were taken, why is it that Assad’s chemical weapons kill only children and civilians and never the jihadists, why do the attacks happen only when Assad is winning etc.?

There was also no discussion of evidence or proofs. We see pictures and videos, and that’s enough. We have a doctor on site who says it’s Sarin or chlorine gas … end of story. Nobody discusses options such as should we send an international team of doctors and experts to the site, should we wait for an autopsy, should we get Assad to answer these charges (gasp!) and so on.

The U.S. Establishment is the jury, judge and the prosecutor. The witness is Al Qaeda who supplies the pictures and the videos, but the average person doesn’t know that either.

The secondary message was also never debated. Even if you assume that the Syrian government used chemical weapons, why should the U.S. do something about it? Is it a moral obligation that only falls on the U.S.? Is it a legal obligation? Does the U.S. intervene every time and anytime some country uses chemical weapons? How about non-chemical weapons? No such discussions are permitted.

Even the bombing was so ridiculous, but the average person doesn’t notice anything suspicious. For example, we bombed the Barzeh research facility that has been inspected and cleared by the OPCW many times, including once in Nov 2017. The fact is that it’s a civilian research and educational center:

Furthermore, the OPCW team had just arrived in Syria on April 13 when the trio of U.S./U.K./France bombed the sites. Wouldn’t it make sense to send the OPCW team to inspect the buildings before bombing them? Also, if the buildings really had chemical weapons, wouldn’t bombing them disperse the chemicals and kill thousands of civilians near by? The real proof for the civilian nature of these buildings is that within a couple of hours after the bombing, there were Syrian journalists and soldiers walking through the rubbles of these lethal “chemical weapons factories.”

Thinking only complicates matters and ruins everything. That’s why propaganda has to keep everything simple.

Rule #4: You have to viciously attack anyone who questions the official narrative. We did a great job of attacking independent journalists and bloggers. Vanessa Beeley, Eva Bartlett and Twitter influencers such as @PartisanGirl and @Ian56789 were all maligned as “Russian bots.” Ian even got banned from Twitter for a few days. Sites such as 21^st Century Wire and Russia Insider were brought down by our hackers during the strikes on Syria.

Rule #5: Repetition is key in any successful campaign – selling a product, a politician or a war. Thus the media saturated the airwaves and the Internet with shocking language and pictures and videos. The West really has only one media outlet, but it comes in 100’s and 1000’s of different names in order to give the illusion of choice and diversity. Thus when the same message is repeated so many times by so many people, it comes becomes the truth.

So, you see, it doesn’t matter if Assad is still in power. The most important thing is that people are gullible and malleable, since that allows us to keep the war going and eventually achieve our goals. I assure you, we will get Syria and then we will get Iran. Yes, it will be a humanitarian disaster of epic proportion, but rest assured that the people of the West will feel good about it. That’s the power of propaganda!

*

Chris Kanthan is the author of a new book, “Deconstructing the Syrian War.” Chris lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, has traveled to 35 countries, and writes about world affairs, politics, economy and health. His other book is “Deconstructing Monsanto.”

All images, except the featured, in this article are from the author.

GR Editor’s Note

First published in April 2015, this article constitutes a “Russian perspective” on the deployment of US-NATO troops in Eastern Europe. The US-NATO militarization of Eastern Europe directed against Russia has been ongoing for several years. The threat is real.

It should also be noted that US troops have been stationed in several Western European countries including Germany and Italy since the end of World War II.

(Michel Chossudovsky. GR Ed, May 4, 2018)

*     *     *

The Americans are planning the largest increase of their military presence in Eastern Europe since the Cold War. The Pentagon announced plans to deploy a tank brigade in Europe in February 2017. Why not immediately, especially against the backdrop of the “Russian aggression?” As a matter of fact, there is no aggression. Instead, the United States occupies Europe.

Not that long ago, Pentagon officials announced plans to deploy 4,000 troops, 250 tanks and Bradley armored vehicles, self-propelled howitzers and 1,700 pieces of other wheeled vehicles and trucks in Eastern Europe.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, US Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Wark said that many countries of Eastern Europe questioned the readiness of the United States to protect them, especially against the background of  “Russian aggression.” The above-mentioned measures were taken to prove otherwise.

Poland and Bulgaria 

A report from the European Command of the US Armed Forces said that the total number of US troops in Europe would thus be equal to three brigades. This contingent will be shared between  Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania and Bulgaria. American people and equipment will be present in each of these countries, Gen. Ben Hodges said. 

According to The National Interest, NATO’s growing presence in the Baltic States – the most likely flashpoint for a confrontation with Russia – will demonstrate NATO’s determination to protect its members. However, it turns out that the tank brigade will not be deployed in Eastern Europe under the aegis of NATO. The move will be made as part of the US program titled European Reassurance Initiative. The $3.4-billion program requires approval from Congress to become reality.

Secondly, who is the aggressor? Is Russia building its bases near the USA to protect Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela and other countries?

Does Russia need to give way to “peace loving” initiatives of the North Atlantic Alliance?

Does Russia’s military doctrine mention anything about a preemptive nuclear strike? No other country has started so many bloody conflicts all over the world. There is also a very nice American tradition to betray allies, should something go contrary to plans.

The Americans prefer to bomb someone and see what happens. They will not die for Europe. The main concern is the Russian-German alliance that targets Asia. Yet, it is possible to end this initiative by bribing politicians and spreading adequate propaganda.

Thirdly, if the threat of the Russian aggression is as serious as it is painted, why not increase the military presence immediately? Why does the USA want the unlucky Balts, Poles, Romanians and Bulgarians tremble with fear for nearly a whole year? Is the Russian aggression an imaginary threat? Why send tanks to Europe if a nuclear conflict could destroy them in minutes?

USA occupies Europe on Roman Empire principles

As for Europe, it is not just dependent on the United States – it is occupied by the United States. The occupation is based on principles of the Roman Empire: the Romans used military garrisons to contain local population should they rebel against Rome’s exploitative and predatory policy.

What if a country of Eastern Europe decides to re-engage with Russia despite the Transatlantic Pact and sanctions? That would be a reason to use American military garrisons. Nobody will dare to utter a word, because US troops in Europe will soon outnumber all European troops combined. With the help of US troops, Poland, Bulgaria and others of the ilk will have the honor to die first in the much-talked about nuclear war.

Russia has no territorial or other claims to Europe. However, moving troops to its borders without a good reason for it is a very dangerous game. Russia will not repeat the experience of 1941. Russia will take necessary security measures in response to NATO’s growing military presence in Europe, especially in the eastern part of the continent, Alexander Grushko, Russia’s Ambassador to NATO said. Moscow’s reaction to such a move will be adequately efficient, he added.

The USA never sends its troops to places where it smells war – it evacuates them from such places instead. For example, We have recently seen the evacuation of NATO’s troops from Turkey, a NATO member.

“The Americans do not want to get involved in a real war. They do not want to mess with North Korea, – Eduard Limonov, writer and political activist told Pravda.Ru. –

Donald Trump says that it is about time the Americans should stop protecting all for free. The Americans have a plethora of their own problems: a huge public debt, high unemployment, and the situation is getting worse. Instead, they spend enormous money on other countries. This will stop soon. The Americans will return to their North America, and their interference in global affairs will decrease.”

Hon. Paul Hellyer

The Globalization of War is an extraordinarily important book. It tags the origin of a long series of wars and conflicts, from the end of World War II to the present, as being direct products of U.S.  Foreign Policy. Nothing happens by accident. U.S. provocateurs, usually agents of the CIA, incite one conflict after another in what Michel Chossudovsky labels America’s “Long War” against Humanity.

It comprises a war on two fronts. Those countries that can either be “bought,” or destabilized by a corrupt international financial system, are easy targets for effective conquest. In other cases insurrection, riots and wars are used to solicit American military intervention to fill the pockets of the military-industrial complex that General Eisenhower warned us about. The “End Game” is a New World Order embracing a dual economic and military dictatorship prepared to use atomic weapons and risk the future of the entire human species to achieve its ends.

Michel Chossudovsky is one of the few individuals I know who has analyzed the anatomy of the New World Order and recognized the threat to the entire human species that it is.

The Globalization of War is a must read for anyone who prefers peace and hope to perpetual war, death, dislocation and despair.

Hon. Paul Hellyer, former Canadian Minister of National Defence

Michel Chossudovsky’s Book The Globalization of War, America’s Long War against Humanity can be ordered directly from Global Research Publishers or Amazon.  Click image above to order

Ein Aufruf zur Nächstenliebe.
Oder: Hass hält Opfer in der Opferrolle fest.

Ich möchte leben.

In der letzten Zeit läuft es mir angesichts der sozialen und klassischen Medien kalt den Rücken herunter. Genau genommen macht mir ihre Macht Angst, wenn sie ungenügend kontrolliert ist. Kontrollieren bedeutet nicht Zensieren. Redakteure, Moderatoren, Journalisten, Leser und Zuhörer – wir alle tragen eine Verantwortung, wenn die Medien über die Stränge schlagen. Die Kehrseite der sozialen Medien ist es, jedem und jeder zu ermöglichen, seinem/ihrem Zorn freien Lauf zu gewähren. Man wird mich hassen – und das nehme ich voll und ganz hin.

Mein Angreifer ist kein Schwein und ich leide auch nicht unter dem Stockholm-Syndrom.

Die Kampagne „Verpfeif‘ dein Schwein“ („Balance Ton Porc“) löste in mir schlagartig heftige Reaktionen aus. Ich mochte weder den Ausdruck, der ihm gegeben wurde, noch das Ziel, das dahintersteckte. Eine Hexenjagd, die es ermöglicht, jemanden zu beschuldigen und fertig zu machen; offene Rechnungen zu begleichen. Ich bestreite nicht das Leid der Opfer, aber ich denke, dass die Lösung nicht in der öffentlichen Hinrichtung der Peiniger liegt. Angreifen, Belästigen, Vergewaltigen – all dies sind verwerfliche Taten und die Opfer müssen unterstützt und ermutigt werden in ihrem Bemühen Gerechtigkeit zu erlangen. Das menschliche Wesen ist zu Schrecklichem und Wunderbarem fähig. Dabei bilden die Opfer keine Ausnahme.

Ihr Leben lang müssen sie mit der Tat leben, die sie über sich ergehen lassen mussten. Jahre können vergehen, doch die lebendige Erinnerung an den Tag, an dem ihr Leben aus den Fugen geriet, wird bleiben. Diese Tragödie wurde wunderbar in dem Film Festen von Thomas Vinterberg thematisiert. Ein Familientreffen zum 60. Geburtstag des Vaters nimmt eine unerwartete Wendung. Das schreckliche Familiengeheimnis wird von Christian aufgedeckt, der, ebenso wie seine Zwillingsschwester, von seinem Vater missbraucht wurde, als er noch ein Kind war. Letzte hatte sich umgebracht, es war für sie der einzige Ausweg.

Schreiben bedeutet, sich auszudrücken. Sowohl als Kind als auch als Jugendliche wurde ich selbst Opfer sexueller Gewalt. Eine dunkle Kindheit, erschreckende Erinnerungen, dieses Leben scheint kein Ende zu nehmen. Die Angst ist allgegenwärtig. Scham, Schweigen, dann die Flucht ans andere Ende der Welt. Doch die Welt wird niemals groß genug sein, um dieser Vergangenheit zu entkommen. Die Lösung liegt in uns; nur in uns selbst – missbrauchten Frauen und Männern.

Albträume, Wut, Zorn und Hilflosigkeit sind unsere Gefährten. Ein Trauma, das unsere Existenz unbarmherzig zerfrisst. Das Wichtigste ist, zunächst einmal, darüber sprechen zu können, denn das größte Hindernis der Heilung ist das Schweigen – und sein Durchbrechen ist der erste Schritt Richtung Freiheit. Dies entwickelt sich oft in einem Krisenzustand.

Ein Flashback, während man das Geschirr abwäscht. Die Erinnerung dieses Körpers, der schmerzt. Die Schwierigkeit, gar Unmöglichkeit, seine Träume zu erfüllen, zu lieben und sich lieben zu lassen.

Reden ist ein Akt der Tapferkeit. Leider und viel zu oft ziehen es die Menschen aus dem Umfeld und der Familie vor zu leugnen. Als ich anfing, darüber zu sprechen, nach 30 Jahren, sagte man mir: „Wir haben die Wahl dir zu glauben oder nicht”. Man hat sich dazu entschieden, mir nicht zu glauben. Therapiesitzungen folgten, über Jahre hinweg. Meine Leser und die Selbsthilfegruppen haben mir die Augen geöffnet: Nicht durch den Hass auf den Täter würde es mir besser gehen. Ganz im Gegenteil, genau das trug dazu bei, eine bereits eitrige Wunde weiter zu infizieren. Die Heilung lag im Reden, darin, meine Erfahrung mit anderen zu teilen.

Sprechen ist unerlässlich, doch das sollte man nicht einfach irgendwie tun. Und schon gar nicht im Rahmen einer Denunzierungskampagne auf Websites, die zur Lynchjustiz wird.

Bevor man öffentlich darüber spricht, muss man im Privaten darüber sprechen. Es fängt bei einem selbst an, da man sich erst des Ausmaßes dessen, was geschehen ist, bewusst werden muss. Dieser Prozess vollzieht sich einzig im privaten Raum. Ein Kind vertraut sich vielleicht seinem Hund an, ein Erwachsener spricht zuerst mit sich selbst, bevor er sich damit überhaupt an jemand anderen wenden kann. Erst nachdem ein Opfer das Wort ergriffen hat, kann es zur Tat übergehen. Den Täter anprangern, Hilfe suchen, ihn vielleicht sogar damit konfrontieren. Akzeptieren, was passiert ist, die gesamte Energie auf sich selbst richten und auf sich achten, um sich selbst wieder aufzubauen und zu einem glücklichen Leben zu finden. Jede Geschichte sexueller Gewalt ist einzigartig, jedes Opfer ein kostbares Wesen. Ein Schatz, der einfach leben will.

Jahrzehnte nach dem Unwiderruflichen habe ich den Täter damit konfrontiert – ich bot ihm an, ihm zu verzeihen. Er wusste nicht, wie er es akzeptieren konnte. Sei’s drum – ich habe mich davon befreit, und das ist die Hauptsache. Er ist kein Schwein, er ist ein Mann, ein menschliches Wesen.

Während dieses Prozesses, der einem Hindernislauf glich, habe ich getobt vor Wut, gebrüllt, „ihm“ die Pest an den Hals gewünscht. Glücklicherweise habe ich Männer und Frauen getroffen, die mir zugehört, mich getröstet und mir den Weg gezeigt haben. Eines Tages habe ich an einem ganz besonderen Konfliktlösungstraining teilgenommen. Statt den Angreifer zu isolieren und auszugrenzen, lernten wir ihn zu integrieren und ihn einzuladen, Teil der Lösung zu werden. Ein menschlicher Ansatz – sowohl für das Opfer, als auch den Täter. Ich gebe zu, anfangs meine Zweifel gehabt zu haben. Dieser Ansatz erfordert es, gegen sich selbst zu gehen, um mit dem anderen, dem Vergewaltiger, zu kommunizieren. Es ist jedoch eine befreiende Geste, selbst wenn dieser die ausgestreckte Hand ablehnt. Wenn man den anderen als menschliches Wesen sieht, wird man auch selbst als Opfer wieder humaner. Man überträgt die Last dem anderen; so kann das Opfer seine Energie wieder finden, um sich selbst und das Leben zu lieben.

Man wird mich hassen – doch es waren weder feministische Gruppen, noch Denunzierungskampagnen, die mir geholfen haben. Es waren Selbsthilfegruppen, betreut durch Menschen wie mich. Aufgrund der geteilten Erfahrungen gelingt es, über einen Ansatz einfacher Glaubenssätze hinauszugehen.

Gleich wie gut die Absicht, es ist gefährlich in diesem Bereich intellektuell oder durch politischen Aktivismus motiviert Position zu beziehen. Die Sichtweise ist zwangsläufig beschränkt, ja voreingenommen. Es fehlt an Nächstenliebe. An Offenheit angesichts eines Themas, das über das „Schwein und das Opfer“ hinausgeht. Um helfen zu können, muss man lieben. Ich glaube nicht, dass dies bei den Denunzierungskampagnen der Fall ist, deren Ziel es lediglich ist, die mutmaßlichen Angreifer zur Schlachtbank zu führen. Der Hass hat niemals irgendetwas geheilt. Er hält das Opfer nur in seiner Opferrolle fest und verweigert ihm jegliches Recht auf Heilung. Es ist, als ob jeden Tag jemand kommt und die heilende Wunde wieder aufreißt. Es ist nie einfach: Ich kannte eine Frau, die als kleines Kind sowohl von ihrem Vater als auch ihrer Mutter missbraucht wurde.

Ich liebe die Menschen.

Ich hasse die Menschen, die mir das angetan haben, aber ich liebe die Menschen.

Claude Jacqueline Herdhuin

 

https://www.rubikon.news/artikel/was-tun-gegen-sexuelle-gewalt

Violence sexuelle : et maintenant?Je veux vivre.

Claude Jacqueline Herdhuin lebt in Kanada und hat eine Vorliebe für Worte, weshalb sie bereits in vielen verschiedenen literarischen Bereichen tätig war. Sie ist Übersetzerin und Romanautorin sowie freie Drehbuchautorin und Regisseurin für Spielfilme und Dokumentationen, schreibt Gedichte und kritische Artikel, letztere für Publikationsorgane wie Mondialisation. Darüber hinaus arbeitete sie obendrein für das staatliche-kanadische Radio CIBL. Heute widmet sie sich vorwiegend der Lehre und unterrichtet Französisch als Zweitsprache für Immigranten, internationale Studenten und englischsprachige Kanadier.

Half of Unasur’s members suspended their participation in the South American bloc.

The American-friendly governments of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, and Peru coordinated their move just days after Bolivia assumed the rotating presidency of the organization, justifying their decision on the alleged basis that the landlocked country hasn’t provided any real sense of leadership in the few days that it’s been in charge of this regional integrational group. This explanation is clearly a poorly crafted excuse to disguise the fact that these right-wing governments, some of whom came to power after US-supported “deep state” and “constitutional” coups, are doing Washington’s bidding in trying their best to reverse the regional progress that was made during the leftist “Pink Tide” that swept the region over a decade ago. This move also correlates with the US’ efforts to divide the Mercosur trading bloc that was created around that time too, half of whose members were just involved in what happened with Unasur.

Of the remaining six countries that are still active in the continental organization, half of them are part of the Venezuelan-led ALBA group that also counts Bolivia and Ecuador as members. Their integrational efforts have been faltering over the past few years as Venezuela sank into the depths of US-provoked Hybrid War and was unable to subsidize the organization to the degree that it used to. The other three countries still left in Unasur – Guyana, Suriname, and Uruguay – are small, weak, and relatively impoverished, and Venezuela’s ongoing territorial dispute with neighboring Guyana represents yet another fault line in this already fractured organization. For all intents and purposes, the mass self-suspension of half of Unasur’s members will render the bloc functionally useless as planned but end up ultimately being counterproductive to the continent’s integrational interests, potentially making South America as a whole less competitive in the long-run.

Another point to focus on is the how those six countries blamed Bolivia as their public pretext for pulling out of the group, which might be a prelude to the multilateral Hybrid War pressure that they plan to put on it across the coming months as President Morales prepares for next year’s polls. Following the Venezuelan template that they each have extensive experience with, Bolivia might be excluded from other regional gatherings just like the Bolivarian Republic was from the recent Summit of the Americas. Unlike its ALBA ally, however, Bolivia is landlocked and completely surrounded by four of the six countries who just suspended their membership in Unasur, so there’s a distinct chance that they might one day blockade it under whatever invented pretext in order to put maximum economic pressure on the state in provoking further political tensions within it.

Altogether, the most important significance of what just happened is that it proves the success of the US’ “Operation Condor 2.0” hemisphere-wide unipolar comeback over the past few years in regaining control of most of the continent following its “Pink Tide” multipolar “rebellion” a decade ago.

*

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.

To underscore the dire situation in Libya and the extent to which extremists will go, on Wednesday at around noon two huge explosions occurred at the HNEC, the Higher National Election Commission’s HQ, in Tripoli, killing over 15 people and wounding many more. The attack suggests that fanatics may be concerned over the rising popularity of Field Marshall Khalifa Haftar and fear that the controversial Haftar could win in the upcoming elections. They may be seeking to derail the vote. If so, their gambit may have the opposite effect: it could actually galvanize Libyan support for elections as a way out of the current political chaos and conundrum.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, a notorious warmonger, serial liar and supremacist racialist who used to lead the closest thing Israel has to a fascist party until parties even more extreme got elected to parliament, is attempting to bamboozle the clueless Trump into getting on a war footing with Iran.

Netanyahu’s breathless announcement that there was a potential weapons aspect to Iran’s nuclear enrichment program has been known for a decade and a half.

Netanyahu even seems to have provoked the White House to issue a communique falsely stating that Iran has a weapons program presently, which it promptly had to retract. The incident is so scary because it shows how easy it is to manipulate the erratic Trump and his not-ready-for-prime-time staff. That sort of thing, David Frum said on Twitter, can cause a war. And he should know.

But the retraction is incorrect, as well. Iran in the distant past had done some things that would be helpful if it had launched a full blown weapons program. It never did launch such a program.

Netanyahu instanced no evidence at all that Iran is out of compliance with the 2015 deal, and UN inspectors continually have affirmed that Tehran *is* in compliance. His allegation that Iran’s recent missiles are designed to be fitted with warheads is simply false.

So why try to put Iran on the front burner of American war-making? It is a desperate attempt on Netanyahu’s part to divert world attention from the ongoing Israeli Apartheid discrimination against the stateless Palestinians, which it militarily occupies (directly with jackboots and colonial settlers on the West Bank, indirectly with military encirclement and the sniping of innocent protesters in Gaza).

In recent weeks, Israeli snipers have used live ammunition to kill some 40 and wound hundreds of Palestinians who were unarmed and peacefully protesting their imprisonment in the Gaza Strip (70% of their families were kicked out of their homes in Israel and now live in squalid refugee camps while European Israelis took over their houses and farmland and are living it up). The sniping victims have including children, journalists, demonstrators distant from the Israeli confinement fence, and worshipers at prayer with the mention of God on their lips. Shooting unarmed people who pose no threat is a war crime, and doing it systematically amounts to a crime against humanity. So too is the crime of Apartheid described in the Statute of Rome as a “crime against humanity,” and Israel manifestly and robustly practices Apartheid against the Palestinians under its military heel.

The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment program (to make fuel for reactors generating electricity) was designed to prevent Iran from weaponizing the program.

All nuclear enrichment via centrifuges is potentially dual use. Uranium can be enriched to 5% for reactor fuel, but if scientists keep feeding it through the centrifuges they can enrich it to 95% for a bomb. The Iran deal was designed to keep Iran from making high enriched uranium (HEU).

Iran accepted spot inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. No country under active inspections has ever developed a nuclear weapon.

Iran vastly reduced the number of centrifuges it has, which means it would take at least a year or even years to make HEU, even if it could do so without the inspectors detecting the signature at the site, which it cannot.

Iran discontinued and bricked in its planned heavy water reactor at Arak. Fissile material builds up on the rods in a heavy water reactor much faster than on a light water reactor, and so the heavy water ones can theoretically aid in making a bomb. Iran no longer even has a plan for a heavy water reactor.

Iran destroyed its stockpile of uranium enriched to 19.5% for its medical reactor. It has no enriched uranium higher than 5%, useful for its three reactors at Bushehr. Iran benefits from nuclear energy because it burns oil for electricity generation, cutting into the money it could make from instead selling it on the open market.

South Korea, Japan and France all use nuclear reactors for electricity generation just as Iran is starting to. France enriches uranium both for that purpose and to make nuclear weapons. If you don’t think Japan could construct a bomb in three weeks if it wanted to, you don’t know Japanese technology (they have a big stockpile of plutonium).

So Netanyahu and the American Right should have sighed in relief, right? Remember, Netanyahu has several hundred actual real nuclear bombs that it could drop on Iran, and Iran has bupkes. Likewise the US is bristling with nuclear warheads. Iran has some old F4 jets Nixon gave them.

In 2007, the National Intelligence Estimate of the CIA assessed that Iran did some experiments with military significance in 2003 but then halted them ever after. The 2011 NIE repeated the conclusion that Iran did not have a weapons program at that time and had not decided to pursue one.

Our sloppy and sometimes propagandistic press keeps talking about Iran’s “nuclear weapons program,” but it is a unicorn. No such thing has ever existed per se, though the experiments and programs Iran pursued as part of its civilian energy program always had potential weapons implications, and Iranian scientists did perform some occasional experiments that might have had weapons purposes.

Because nuclear enrichment is dual use, Iran until 2015 always had the option of going for broke and pursuing a bomb, using know-how gained from the civilian program. That is all the CIA was saying. It was also saying that no such decision had been taken, a conclusion echoed by Israeli politicians like Ehud Barak and by Israeli intelligence.

But the JCPOA forestalled any such decision. Iran could only make a bomb now by kicking out the inspectors and manufacturing thousands of centrifuges, in other words by putting up a huge neon sign saying “I am making a nuclear bomb here.”

Iran’s nuclear enrichment program has also always probably been intended to have deterrent effects against anyone thinking of doing to the country what Bush did to Iraq. I.e. if it was clear someone was planning to invade, Iran could in fact go for broke and try to defend itself.

Since the US right wing and the government of Israel would very much like to see Iran invaded and its government overthrown, and its legs broken, this nuclear latency or the Japan option is an annoyance they would like to remove. It is easier to execute someone if you disarm him first.

But Iran of course is already substantially disarmed, voluntarily. What is going on now is an attempt to pull the wool over people’s eyes about that and to con them into spending $6 trillion on another ruinous Middle East conflict.

That will keep everybody busy while Netanyahu finally succeeds in ethnically cleansing what is left of the Palestinians, his ulterior ultimate goal.

*

Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment and Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan.

A note from Nat Parry: 

In the spring of 1971, with war raging in Vietnam, the U.S. peace movement hoped to shut down the federal government in an audacious mass civil disobedience action. Under the slogan “If the government won’t stop the war, then the people will stop the government,” tens of thousands of protesters set out to block major intersections and bridges to bring Washington, DC, to a halt.

A young Robert Parry, then a student at Colby College, drove down from Maine to participate in the demonstrations and ended up arrested along with thousands of other protesters who were swept up in the largest mass arrest in U.S. history. He later wrote about the protests and their significance in the Colby Echo, where he was Editor-in-Chief.

Marking the anniversary of these events, we republish Parry’s article for the first time in 47 years, with an introduction from his classmate Stephen Orlov, who attended the demonstration with him.

***

By Stephen Orlov

It was with a heavy heart that I read Nat Parry’s moving tribute to his father, Robert, on his sudden passing.

Bob was my closest friend at Maine’s Colby College during the turbulent Vietnam War years, when Bob was Editor-in-Chief of our student newspaper, the Colby Echo. He rarely talked with family and friends about his time at Colby, given the enormity of the important issues of the day he addressed tirelessly during his distinguished career. So Nat asked me to share a few anecdotes about Bob during his student days, when he began honing his muckraking journalistic skills and demonstrating to our campus community his inspiring strength of character in speaking truth to power.

I worked with Bob at the Echo, writing anti-war articles as an Associate Editor and Student Government President. We helped lead with a handful of activists the Colby strike against the Vietnam War in May of 1970, following Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia and the National Guard’s killing of protesting students at Kent State. Bob played a key role in our successful lobbying campaign that convinced the Colby Faculty to pass a resolution supporting our student strike.

We replaced classes with a counter-cultural-curriculum of daily workshops led by students and professors on the mass movements that were engulfing America in a tidal wave of social protest—anti-war and nuclear disarmament, civil rights and black power, feminism and gay rights, the American Indian Movement and United Farm Workers Boycott, anti-poverty and pro-environment.

Bob and I drafted a telegram on behalf of student government heads of 16 college and university campuses in Maine to Senators Edmund Muskie and Margaret Chase Smith, which forced them to fly to Colby within days for an all-state anti-war rally that would “give the students of Maine the opportunity to confront you.”

We devoured the non-violent civil disobedience writings of King, Thoreau and Gandhi, discussing for hours how to best apply their theory and practice to our plans for being arrested together at anti-war demonstrations in Washington DC that spring. And a year later at the May Day demonstrations in 1971, the friendly elderly stranger arrested next to us turned out to be Dr. Benjamin Spock, who had penned the classic baby-care “bible,” we both would later rely on as parents.

Image below is Robert Parry in 1971

At a speech to Alumni donors during the strike, Colby President Robert Strider attacked Bob’s editorial stewardship of the Echo, decrying “the uncontrollable barbarism, with its obscenities, libel and innuendo, of the college press.” The following semester, Strider moved to end the College’s near century-old sponsorship of the Echo because of Bob’s editorial choices.

Strider wrote to Bob officially demanding the removal of the Colby name from the Echo and he convinced the Chairperson of the Board of Trustees to propose at a Board meeting we attended a resolution to disassociate the College from its student newspaper. Strider had highlighted swear words and an Echo photo of students frolicking “au natural” as just cause, but we countered that the heart of the matter was Bob’s anti-war editorial position. Bob refused to remove the Colby name from the Echo and he delivered an unflinching defense of freedom of the press, convincing the Trustees to reject the censorship resolution of their Board Chair and College President.

On a personal note, Bob lamented a painful rift with his father, William, who was the publisher of the Framingham News, nearby Boston. He told me how his dad had always preached to him the need to consider multiple points of view for every story, a principle Bob embraced throughout his career, and yet William dogmatically dismissed off-hand Bob’s anti-war position as being anti-American, and he ardently supported the war effort in his paper. Perhaps that personal experience later helped Bob emotionally confront the surreptitious maneuvers by government and media power brokers to blacklist him within the Washington press corps for his courageous reporting.

Bob and I remained in close touch during our first few years after graduation. We traveled together to Miami in 1972 for anti-war demonstrations at the Republican National Convention, sleeping in a pop-up tent in the protester’s camp at Flamingo Park, where we bathed in the Park swimming pool. We drove there from Mass. to Florida in a car Bob had recently bought. He was rather proud of the fact that he had tuned it up himself after studying an auto-maintenance manual.

After I moved to Montreal and he to Virginia, regrettably we rarely saw each other, occasionally catching up on work and family life from a distance. I can still remember decades ago, Bob describing passionately his visionary plans to begin publishing an online investigative journal in the tradition of his hero, I.F. Stone. I was thrilled to learn that Bob was honored in 2015 with Harvard’s Nieman Foundation I.F. Stone Prize for Journalism, and later with the Martha Gellhorn Award. Ironically, when the Colby Trustees refused forty-five years earlier to back the Board resolution disassociating the College from the Echo, they appointed Trustee Dwight Sargent, the curator of Harvard’s Nieman Foundation of Journalism at the time, to head a study committee, which never censored Bob or the Echo.

Throughout his life’s journey, Robert Parry cast the shadow of a giant, and on his path he left a signature footprint marked by strength and integrity. Bob’s passing is a personal loss of a friend I’ve admired my entire adult life, a loss of far greater magnitude for his loving family. His legacy shall endure, inspiring investigative journalists the world over.

---

“May Day”

By Robert Parry

(Originally published in the Colby Echo student newspaper in May 1971)

There was the air of a mighty athletic contest about it. A super bowl played out in the streets of the nation’s capital. And the news media always alert for any incident that will appeal to America’s sports-minded viewing public played the athletics of the situation to the hilt. To the media, it was the kids coming off several big seasons of demonstrations against the seasoned veterans of the Washington police force. The demonstrators with their potent offense trying to throw the city into chaos; the cops, led by their elite Civil Disturbance Unit and backed up by thousands of Marines, Army, and National Guard, putting up a great defense to maintain social order.

It was to be the biggest story of the week, perhaps of 1971, and the participants’ temerarious victory predictions and scoffs at the strength of the opposition reminded some viewers of Joe Namath psyching the Baltimore Colts out of the ’69 Super Bowl. The demonstrators had stated, “If the government won’t stop the war, then the people will stop the government.” And President Nixon had countered with assurances that he would not be intimidated. Chief of the D.C. police, Jerry Wilson, who would guide his team on the field, went on saying that the demonstration would be only a minor “nuisance.”

So the lines were drawn and the kids readied themselves for game time Monday morning. But the police started things early with a foray into the demonstrators’ home base at dawn Sunday. At that time, 41,000 people were camping at West Potomac Park. The police dispersed them hoping that many would go home, but most remained in Washington and others, like the nine members of the Colby contingent, had been staying elsewhere.

But with the thrust into the park, the police had taken the play away from the offense-minded demonstrators. The kids charged foul, but their cries went unheeded. Rules for the week’s struggle were fuzzy at best, and with their early move, the police gave warning that many of the fair-play guidelines were out the window for as long as threats of disruption continued. The lack of rules reflected an even greater confusion which would plague observers and commenters throughout the week – how could anyone tell who won.

Nine of us from Colby – Steve Orlov, Dick Kaynor, Bob Knight, Lyndon Summers, Ken Eisen, Joel Simon, Andy Koss, Peter Vose and me – had come to Washington to commit civil disobedience. Most of us expected to be arrested; some were prepared to be clubbed. We had come because we opposed the war and wanted to demonstrate through the power of non-violent civil disobedience that our commitment to the war’s end went beyond placards and petitions to congressmen.

We had come expecting to engage in Gandhian civil disobedience (passive non-violence); we learned, however, on meeting up with our regional group Sunday afternoon that the tactic now being favored was “mobile non-violence.” Apparently because of fears that the numbers of demonstrators had been significantly reduced by the park clearing and because of a greater concern for the ends (who would win the “Stop the City” Bowl Game) rather than the means, regional leaders favoring “mobile” tactics had prevailed over others wanting more passive disobedience. Gandhi was to be mixed with Abbie Hoffman and the result would be a kind of touch football in the streets.

The kids were up early Monday but, as the slogan goes, the police department never sleeps. The cops and the troops were out in force and they had already had the four bridges from Virginia to D.C. neatly in their pockets. Ken and I drove our cars into the city before six. Our job was to use the cars for blocking and slowing down traffic. Steve and Peter stayed with us in case of trouble and the others disembarked on the D.C. side of the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge. From the beginning it was clear that things were not going our way.

Steve and I drove around participating in and occasionally starting traffic jams. Scenes from Godard films met us at nearly every corner. Police charging and swinging into clumps of demonstrators, police cars chasing kids across parks, the grey smoke of tear gas rising everywhere, troops in their full, khaki battle gear lining the city’s bridges. The government had responded to the threats of a shut-down with force and throughout the morning they had the kids running from their attacks and reeling from the tear gas. Traffic was snarled (some places for hours) but as the government pointed out, the workers got through.

When the Colby contingent returned to Ken’s house in Arlington, we evaluated what had happened and discovered that Jody and Lyndon had been arrested. Everyone at the Eisen’s was disappointed with how the demonstration had developed. We had come to be arrested and instead spent the whole day avoiding arrest. All of us agreed, no more of the same.

That evening, however, Bob, Steve and I talked with Hosea Williams, a leader of the SCLC, and he told us that his organization would lead a march to the Justice Department Tuesday afternoon which would end in a mass sit-down and, almost certainly, arrests. Six of us decided to go; four of us (Ken, Steve, Dick and I) got arrested. (Bob and Peter had taken a lunch break during the speeches and when they returned from their “Justice Department” sandwiches, they found four rows of police blocking off access to the several thousand demonstrators.)

The demonstrations at Justice were what we had been hoping for. When the police arrived, the two or three thousand protesters sat down and pulled out handkerchiefs to use in case of tear gas. The police moved toward us in rows, a tear gas canister was set off accidentally. The people didn’t panic, they didn’t run, they stayed together. The police began the arrests. At first, there were some incidents of violence, police clubbing and macing demonstrators, but when the cops realized that there would be no resistance, the arrests came orderly and peaceful.

The arrested demonstrators were taken in buses to areas of detention. The four of us from Colby and about 800 other people were placed in the U.S. District Court cell block. We were held in a cell (50’x20’) with 100 other protesters and later in a cell (15’x15’) containing 66 people.

The over-crowding, the oppressive heat, and the bologna sandwiches served with rancid mayonnaise made life in the cells difficult. But it also served as a crucible test for the principles of communal living. When food was provided for us, we asked to be allowed to pass the food back to the back of the cell in an orderly way. The people sitting against the back wall ate first. We overcame the difficulties of too many people by communicating with each other and arranging shifts for sleeping (while some slept, others stood or sat uncomfortably). In short, we survived by learning to live with and care for each other.

At 10:30 Wednesday morning, I was taken in a bus to court. Ken, Steve, and Dick had to remain in an even smaller cell (8’x12’) with 33 people until five that evening. Dick, Ken, and I were fortunate to be arraigned before Judge Halleck, the judge most sympathetic to our cause in the city. Halleck was accepting pleas of nolo contendere (no contest) and giving sentences of two days or $20 (the two days considered already served). Steve and Jody were released on bond and the charges against Lyndon were dropped.

People have asked us since we’ve returned to Colby what was accomplished in Washington. The media, knowing that nobody likes a tie game, had ruled that the police had won. And indeed there are strong arguments to support that conclusion: the city was kept open, the government did function, and the war still continues. The police statistics were also impressive: virtually all government employees made it to work and almost 14,000 demonstrators had been arrested. And the people who watched on their sets at home saw the police always on the offensive and the demonstrators on the run.

But one thing that the media seemed to forget was that the shutting down of Washington was only one of May Day’s aims. The demonstrators were designed to project an image of Washington, D.C., to the world as the scene of social chaos brought on by the country’s involvement in Indochina and the problems of racism and poverty at home. By forcing the government to line its streets with thousands of soldiers the demonstrations created an image not easily washed away.

But more importantly, May Day was the first large-scale application of non-violent civil disobedience by white Americans. The arrest tallies which are pointed to with such pride by Chief Wilson stand perhaps as a greater monument to the determination and will to sacrifice of the protesters. As we were being taken away from the Justice Department in a bus, the cry of the people with us was not of defeat but of victory. As we passed people on the streets kids leaned out the windows shouting “We won, we won.”

But the greater measure of victory of defeat had to lie in the effect the actions had on those not participating. The initial reaction from television commentators and politicians indicated that the demonstrations were not well received, but other adults who were more immediately involved with the May Day occurrences felt differently. For instance, a reporter for theWashington Star who was arrested at Justice and served time in our cell block wrote on Thursday, “I … was radicalized, but not just in the political sense. When I was separated from the group in the cell block, I told them I didn’t know whether to flash a V sign for peace or a fist for power. ‘Give them both,’ said a friend. I did.”

The spirit, he wrote, comparable to that of the “Britons in their bomb shelter during World War II or civil rights workers in the south” – was the feeling of men and women with a vision of a new society that is coming. Everyone I’ve talked to who experienced that feeling left Washington knowing that they had found 14,000 brothers and sisters by being in jail. The whole question of victory or defeat became submerged under all of us win or all of us lose.

*

Stephen Orlov is an award-winning playwright, who recently co-edited with Melbourne-based Palestinian playwright and poet, Samah Sabawi, Double Exposure: Plays of the Jewish and Palestinian Diasporas, the first English-language anthology worldwide in any genre of drama, prose, or poetry by Jewish and Palestinian writers.

Featured image: Haftar last Thursday early evening at Benghazi’s Benina Airport (Source: LNA website & social media)

Field Marshall Khalifa Haftar returned from a Paris hospital, via Cairo, to Libya on a proverbial ‘white horse’.

Recovered after two weeks of alleged illness, much exaggerated by the media and by those interested, like the UN, to see the back of him.

The last thing the awful regimes we have in both the UK & USA presently, want is to have a man like Haftar to fight their surrogates extremist terrorists.

Haftar ‘ain’t perfect’, in particular, his sons. But if we, and I mean ‘the West’, want to eradicate terrorists, in for a start, Libya, Haftar, as imperfect and old school that he maybe, is the man to do it.

In part, many believe it was a ruse by Haftar to ‘disappear’ these past 14 days or so to ‘flush’ out the traitors and double crossers, something peoples of this region are regrettably particularly culturally prone to be.

If he was on death’s door, he would not have smiled for the bevy of photographers and TV cameras, even laughing and joking as he was met by dignitaries at the airport in Benghazi following his flight arrival from Cairo.

Haftar gave a brief televised statement at Benina Airport, starting with:

“I want to reassure you that I am in good health,” further stating “I should be addressing you standing up but I am obliged to do so sitting down,” Haftar jokingly added.

Haftar continued

“I won’t respond to those promoting rumors about my health, and you are not responsible for them. But there are those who will answer for them in the appropriate way,” Haftar almost menacingly concluded.

Libya for the first time in 7 years, given Haftar’s enhanced popularity evident to all who watched TV, on his return, or who spoke to Libyans who watched it, that his return has a consequence of increasing his popularity that could tip the balance of power in his favour given the motley crew that are his opposition.

The next week or two will be telling. It’s believed there is a chance for an eventual end of this civil war through Haftar’s consolidation of power in Libya coupled with a potential offensive on one of the last bastions of power in the hands of extremist jihadists, Derna.

An important indirect factor, which does have an effect on the public, will be the approach of the month long ‘Ramadan’ starting around mid May.

A further interesting development on Monday, in the light of Haftar’s return to Libya, was the announcement from Aguila Saleh, the Speaker of Libya’s Tobruk based parliament, the House of Representatives (HoR), who has called for presidential elections to be held between September – December. This was publicly supported internationally by both France and Egypt. Others are expected to follow.

Such an election would use the former constitution as a basis, not repeat not the UN-backed Libyan Political Agreement (LPA).

The US and UK want regime change in Syria, all over the Middle East in fact, because of a perceived Zionist agenda. How about the US and UK have a regime change, many Arabs jokingly cry!

A final thought is a statement the other day by long time neocon John Bolton who said publicly he sees Libya as a ‘disarmament model’ – was Bolton’s intention to encourage and inspire the North Korean leader Kim somehow?

You couldn’t make this stuff up!

American and Western Foreign Policy is descending into a farce.

WARNING: This post includes documentation of most gruesome scenes at the crime scene. First published in May 2014, updated in February 2015 

New update 20 February 2015

First-hand information on how the Odessa operation was organized and executed (+18 GRAPHIC)

Update 1 June 2014

A reply to BBC’s Tim Whewell article “Ukraine crisis: Dark new narratives in Odessa“. He meant that a variety of  “myths” cannot give a factual explanation on the causes of the fire and who their perpetrators were. And also a rebuttal to the declarations by Sweden’s ex – Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, who blamed “Russian criminal gangs” for the Odessa incidents.

***

I

This is a horrifying photo showing, among other, the Odessa massacre perpetrated by fascists forces on the 2nd of May 2014:

Martyr of the fascist Odessa massacre of 2nd May 2014. Composition by Arte deNoli based on a video

II

Below: Young women wrapped with the Ukraine flag prepare cocktails Molotov that will be thrown against the  people under siege, and forced locked in the building from outside – to burn them alive

See it on video in Part VIII down below, position 4:28

III

This video appeared on YouTube late night on the 14th May 2014 – uploaded by an account of name Brogorovic Ivan. I happened to be the first one viewing the video, so I shared the link in Twitter. Soon afterwards YouTube removed the  video.

IV

I posted this on Twitter, May 4th 2014, using all available evidence that had emerged up to that date. The text refers to the video above.

V

Beating wounded survivors

VI

The still video above (see the whole video by clicking the image) shows, among other a) “Ukrainian activists” finishing up survivors that manage to escape the building on fire, killing them with baseball bats (man in circle on the image); b) a woman who survived is interviewed and confirms that the Ukrainian activists entered the building after set it on fire throwing some semi-asphyxiated people from the windows. Also explains that among the death found inside the building, some of them had bullet wounds.

VII

Ukrainian nationalists bring a burning tire to the building

This  still image corresponds to a video posted in YouTube (seems removed), and which has not got much viewers (only 160 viewers up to this date) despite it was uploaded on the very 2nd of May. The video is call in Russian “В Одессе правосеки штурмуют Дом профсоюзов 02 05 2014 Украина”, which means (free transl.) “Provocateurs storm the Trade Unions Building in Odessa, Ukraine, 2 May 2014.” The link provided to @Professorsblogg by Anna Shlyapnikova ‏(@shlyapnikova).

VIII

Click on image above for a seriously documented video-material posted later in YouTube (May 12, 2014). Link to the site (Recommended)

IX

“Bloodbath in Odessa guided by interim rulers of Ukraine”

Two relevant articles on the background of the Odessa bloodbath in Voltaire.org: see this and this.

For much of Iran’s political elite, and its overwhelmingly young population, the nuclear deal is becoming a story of failure. This situation risks impacting on Tehran’s willingness to engage politically and to reach diplomatic compromises with Western powers. Last week European leaders were in Washington for a last push to keep the United States on board ahead of the 12 May deadline for Donald Trump to issue waivers required under the nuclear deal. During his visit, Emmanuel Macron suggested that the US and Europe could work on a “new deal” with Iran – one which preserves but expands on the 2015 accord. But with Iran kept out of the European-US talks, Hassan Rouhani has questioned the legitimacy of proposals now put forward by Macron and Angela Merkel for Iran to negotiate further deals on its nuclear programme and regional issues. In the process of wooing Washington on this bigger and better deal, Europe must ensure it does not end up losing Tehran, whose buy-in will be essential to succeeding in this effort.

Iran’s rethink on Europe

Despite increasing pressures coming from Trump, Iran has continued to fulfill its part of the deal, as verified by the International Atomic Energy Agency 11 times since the deal was implemented in January 2016. Iran has waited to see what actions Trump would take and carefully assessed the ability and willingness of Europe to safeguard the nuclear deal. In October, Tehran sent out clear signals that it would consider sticking to the deal so long as Europe, China, and Russia could deliver a package that served Iran’s national security interests. But as talks between the US and the EU3 (Germany, France, and the United Kingdom) have stepped up over the last few months, Iranian thinking on European positioning has begun to sour.

Officials and experts from Iran, interviewed on condition of anonymity over the past month, outlined a growing perception inside Tehran that Europe is unable and/or unwilling to deliver on the nuclear agreement without the US. Even those who defend the nuclear deal inside the country are finding it difficult to continue to do so, not just because of Trump but also because of European tactics, which one Iranian official described as “appeasement by Europe to reward the violator of the deal and Iran’s expense”.

This perception has contributed to considerably hardened Iranian rhetoric in recent weeks around a possible US withdrawal. The secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), which includes the most important decision-makers inside the country, warned that Iran may not only walk away from the nuclear deal, but also withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Such public statements from senior figures signal that a rethink may be taking place over Iran’s foreign policy orientation and openness to engaging with the West. Decision-makers in Europe should be alert to the gravity of such political shifts.

Keeping Iran on board

Iranian officials have repeatedly outlined that Iran will abide by the nuclear deal so long as the US does not violate the agreement. If Europe wants to keep Iran on board with the agreement in the scenario where Trump does not issue the sanctions waivers required, or to even sell a new European-US framework to Iran, it will need to shore up its fast-diminishing political capital with Tehran. While Macron’s hour-long call with Rouhani on Sunday was a good start, greater activity is urgently needed.

First, Europeans should seek to alleviate growing Iranian fears that the price of saving the deal will be a wider “pressure package”, one which returns their relations to the pre-2013 policy of isolation and sanctions. While the focus is understandably now on securing ongoing US support for the deal, the EU3 should not neglect the fact that any new framework agreed will require at least some Iranian buy-in to make it workable. In the current political climate in Iran, this is not a given.

As such, the EU3 should, as a unified coalition, work at the highest level with Iran’s foreign ministry to shore up confidence regarding the nuclear deal. In advance of the 12 May deadline, if it looks increasingly likely that Trump will not waive sanctions, the newly appointed German foreign minister should follow up on Macron’s call to Rouhani with a visit to Tehran to meet with their Iranian counterpart and consider contingencies (some measures for which are outlined below).

Second, EU member states should delay the prospect of new sanctions targeting Iranian regional behaviour, at least until firmer guarantees are in place regarding Trump’s decision on the nuclear deal. The timing of such sanctions has reportedly been the topic of heated debate among the 28 member states. At a minimum, the countries supporting such measures should step up their public messaging to communicate the reasons and the targeted nature of new sanctions, including a commitment that these are not the start of more far-reaching sanctions that will hurt the wider Iranian economy. This is particularly the case with Iran’s private sector, which constantly meets new hurdles placed in its way when seeking to do business with Europe.

Third, European governments should double down on efforts to maintain Iranian compliance to the nuclear deal if Trump fails to renew waivers due on 12 May. Such action by the White House would result in the snap-back of US secondary sanctions and are likely to be viewed in Tehran as significant non-performance of the nuclear deal. Europe will need to coordinate with Russia and China to persuade Iran to continue adhering to its nuclear obligations, at least for a period of time. The exhaustion of the dispute resolution mechanism under the nuclear deal can buy time (estimated to be between 2-3 months) for contingency planning while allowing Iran to save face.

In this scenario, European governments will need to convince the US that it will be in their mutual interest to agree on an amicable separation on the nuclear deal. Europeans will need to argue that such a settlement would allow Trump to claim victory with his base for withdrawing US participation in the JCPOA, while avoiding deeper damage to transatlantic relations and possibly maintaining Europe’s quiet compliance on regional issues. This path should also allow the US to reverse its course (Europeans should continue to encourage such a reversal, whatever the 12 May decision).

As part of this contingency plan, to keep Iran on board Europeans will need to offer some degree of economic relief. It will be critical to reach a pan-European deal with the Trump administration to limit the extent to which the US secondary sanctions that may snap back are actually enforced by US regulators. This should include a series of exemptions and carve-outs for European companies already involved in strategic areas of trade and investment with Iran, with the priority being to limit the immediate shock to Iranian oil exports.

European governments should further make a strong case to the Iranian government and public as to why the nuclear deal can continue to serve Iran’s security and economic interest even without the US. They should emphasise the immediate economic benefits of continued oil exports to Europe and possible longer-term commitments for investments in the country. Sustained political rapprochement between Europe and Iran could also influence Asian countries that closely watch European actions (such as Japan, South Korea, and India) to retain economic ties with Iran.

Finally, regardless of the fate of the nuclear deal, Europe should keep the pathway open for regional talks with Iran. Germany, France, the UK, and Italy should establish and formalise a regular high-level regional dialogue with Iran that builds on those held in February in Munich. It is a positive sign that a second round of such talks is reportedly due to be held this month in Rome. Such engagement will become even more important if the US withdraws from the nuclear deal, increasing the risk of regional military escalation that is already surfacing between Israel and Iran in Syria. Europeans should focus these talks on damage limitation and de-escalation in both Yemen and Syria, to help create an Israeli-Iranian and Saudi-Iranian modus vivendi in both conflict theatres (something which the US seems uninterested in).

Ultimately, Iran’s willingness to implement any follow-up measures on regional issues will be heavily influenced by the fate of the nuclear deal and how the fallout over Trump’s actions is managed. Europe may well not be capable of salvaging the deal if the US withdraws from or violates it. But Europe must at least attempt to do so and demonstrate its political willingness through actions that serve as a precedent for the international community. To do otherwise is likely to have an immediate and consequential impact on Iranian foreign policy and significantly reduce Europe’s relevance for the Iranian political establishment. For Iran’s youth, as the largest population bloc in the country, this will be an important experience in how far Europe is willing to go in delivering on its promises to defend the nuclear deal, whose collapse would affect the Iranian psyche and domestic political discourse for years to come.

*

Ellie Geranmayeh is senior policy fellow for the Middle East and North Africa Programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations. She focuses on European foreign policy in relation to Iran, particularly on the nuclear and regional dossiers.

Trump drew the mockery of many when he said that the US doesn’t want to be the “world’s policeman”, but what people don’t realize is that cops handle small-time activities such as what in this context would be “peacekeeping”, while what the President actually has in mind is a much grander mission of Great Power competition on such a larger scale that the best comparison is to that of America’s federal marshals.

The internet collectively let off a loud laugh when Trump said with a straight face that the US doesn’t want to be the “world’s policeman”, with many social media users instantly mocking him for striking Syria last month on the false flag basis that it supposedly violated international legal and humanitarian standards through the use of chemical weapons. What these people don’t realize, however, is that Trump has something altogether differently in mind than what they think, and that the “Kraken” doesn’t even conceive of his country’s attack on Syria as a small-time “police” action but as something much grander and akin to using the country’s federal marshals to complicate the large-scale activities of America’s adversaries.

Background Concepts

For the non-American readers who may be unfamiliar with what the marshals are, they’re the US’ oldest law enforcement agency and are many levels higher than regular cops. Due to their federal nature, they operate across state lines and only in instances dealing with serious criminal offenders, unlike policemen who just have a limited geographic jurisdiction and sometimes have to seek the support of more competent judicial and quasi-military authorities (such as the FBI and SWAT teams). Trump is known for thinking big, and true to form, his statement about America not wanting to be the “world’s policeman” is a case in point.

Being as savvy as he is of social media sentiment, he knew right away how this would be perceived, and that’s partially why he phrased his statement the way that he did. Speaking next to the President of Nigeria, Trump hoped to imply that the presumed responsibilities of the “world’s policeman” are those of so-called “peacekeeping” missions such as the disastrous one that took place in the early 1990s in Somalia. The American audience largely understands that to have been a “police operation” with no clear national security interests other than the ambiguous concept of “preserving a rules-based system” which means nothing to the average person.

Police vs. Marshals

That same objective, however, is what drives America’s self-designation as the “world’s marshal”, but a unambiguous distinction needs to be made at this point between that role and the former one of the “world’s policeman”. The latter is thought by US decision makers and strategists to deal mostly in the “peacekeeping” realm of small-scale direct military engagement during or after civil wars (even those that are American-provoked) in “Global South” countries, while the former concerns acts of Great Power competition where the national interest is much more clearly defined and relatively (key word) understandable to many. Both, it should be said, also deal with the “preserving a rules-based system”, but in different ways.

The “world’s policeman”, per the second-mentioned word, operates at a more local level in enforcing US-defined rules and standards within any given country and all the way down to its literally local level such as when responding to ethnic violence within society. The “world’s marshal”, though, operates at a much grander scale in enforcing US-defined rules and standards that uphold the fading American-led international system of unipolarity, thus making it more applicable in responding to multipolar Great Power challengers than non-state ethno-religious militias that fall within the competencies of the “world’s policeman”.

As proof that the US conceives of its mission according to the aforementioned “marshal” role, one need look no further than its National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy, both of which outline in the plainest of terms how the US aspires to “contain” Russia, China, and Iran. These policy-guiding documents also signal a strong shift away from the previous “policeman” role and towards this newfound but unstated “marshal” one in focusing more on Great Powers than non-state actors. Like it was earlier said, this also entails “preserving a rules-based system”, but on a much larger scale that will now be explained.

Rules, Rules, Rules

The “Washington Consensus” that took control of the world after the end of the Cold War was designed to indefinitely sustain unipolarity, meaning that every single “rule and standard” was supposed to uphold the US’ global dominance in one way or another. Accordingly, the US has a self-interest in preemptively stopping any prospective challengers to its hegemony (the so-called “Wolfowitz Doctrine”), which is why it’s now simultaneously at odds with Russia, China, and Iran for different reasons related to this fear and thus feels compelled to respond to them in its “marshal” capacity. On their own, none of them are profoundly shaking the US-led system, but their whole gestalt poses a much more serious systemic threat.

For example, Crimea’s historic reunification with Russia changed internationally recognized post-Soviet borders in Europe via a democratic referendum and secured Moscow’s naval base in the Black Sea, thus thwarting the US’ efforts to have “EuroMaidan” pave the way to future American control of what Westerners have derided as being a “Russian lake”. Similarly, China’s “9-dash line” in the South China Sea stakes out Beijing’s claim to this energy-rich waterway through which a large bulk of the global economy traverses, therefore preventing the US from taking full control of it and blackmailing the People’s Republic. As for Iran, the US has wanted to curb the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program in order to allow its “Israeli” ally to maintain its military dominance in the Mideast.

Each of these three abovementioned challenges to the US-dictated “rules and standards” of the post-Cold War world collectively combine to present a formidable multipolar push for reforming the global system and diversifying its stakeholders to the extent that America would no longer be the sole unipolar hegemon. In addition, these three Great Powers are coming together through the Chinese-led One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity to fundamentally transform international economic networks and consequently facilitate the emergence of new political, military, and ultimately strategic models that altogether lead to global paradigmatic changes. US-initiated Hybrid Wars are being waged to forestall these developments, but they’re thus far insufficient to fully stop this process.

Concluding Thoughts

That’s why the US is expanding its role from the “world’s policeman” to the “world’s marshal” in assembling various “Lead From Behind” coalitions to assist with its “containment” measures on the state-to-state level, ergo why last month’s Syrian strikes should be seen less as a “police” operation in responding to a false flag chemical weapons attack and more like the “marshal” one that it truly is in complicating the stabilizing efforts of two of the US’ three Great Power challengers in this globally significant battlespace. Police operations aren’t usually a big deal but it’s always a major event whenever the marshals get involved, which is yet another observation in favor of reframing the Syrian strikes because of how they confirmed the existence of the New Cold War.

All told, the world should expect Trump to continue carrying out grand military and political actions as he embraces his country’s newfound strategic role as its “marshal” in counteracting the multipolar advances of its Great Power adversaries. The US is thinking big, but its critics are still stuck in the same old paradigm of “smallness” in belittling it as “merely” being the “world’s policeman” when in reality America itself has reconceptualized its strategic responsibilities on a much larger scale that regrettably appears to be beyond the comprehension of most observers. The sooner that people start taking Trump and his declarations seriously and maturely analyzing his words for what they really mean, then the sooner that the rest of the world will realize what America’s new strategy is and begin thinking about the most effective ways to counter it.

*

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.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

If launched, war on Iran could threaten world peace more than any other post-9/11 conflict.

The Islamic Republic is far stronger militarily than Iraq, Libya or Syria. Iranian missiles with destructive warheads can hit Israeli targets, as well as US regional ones.

In early 2017, senior Iranian official Mojtaba Zonour, a National Security and Foreign Policy Commission member, warned Tehran would retaliate swiftly if its territory is struck – able to hit regional targets with destructive force in minutes.

“(O)nly seven minutes is needed for (an) Iranian missile to hit Tel Aviv,” he said.

Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of its airspace division, said

“(i)f the enemy makes a mistake, our roaring missiles will come down on them.”

On Wednesday, Islamic Republic Defense Minister General Amir Hatari “warn(ed) the regime occupying (Jerusalem) al-Quds and its allies that they must stop their conspiracies and dangerous behavior, because Iran’s response will be surprising and make them regretful.”

Bush/Cheney neocons prepared war plans to attack Iran, updated over time, not implemented so far.

US/Israeli anti-Iran covert operations have been ongoing for years. In early 2008, Bush signed a secret finding, complicit with Israel, authorizing an unprecedented in scope covert offensive against the Islamic Republic.

It included targeted assassinations, funding opposition groups, destabilizing the Islamic Republic, Syria and Lebanon, as well as preparing for war on Iran not launched so far.

What’s going on now is cause for great concern, including Israeli and US strikes on Syrian sites, escalating war in the country, provoking Iran to respond militarily, Netanyahu’s anti-Iran Monday bluster, Trump likely heading toward pulling out of the JCPOA next week, followed by reimposition of US nuclear-related sanctions on the Islamic Republic, prompting its resumption of pre-JCPOA nuclear activities – perhaps used by Washington and Israel as a pretext for launching hostile actions against the country.

On Tuesday, NBC News cited three unnamed US officials, saying Israeli warplanes struck Syrian military sites near Hama and Aleppo last weekend.

“On the list of the potentials for most likely live hostility around the world, the battle between Israel and Iran in Syria is at the top of the list right now,” one senior US official was quoted saying.

NBC News:

“US officials believe (Iran supplying Syria with weapons and munitions is) meant both to shore up Iranian ground forces and to strike at Israel” is utter nonsense.

Iran threatens no other countries. Claims otherwise are bald-faced lies, heightening regional tensions, risking greater conflict than already.

On Monday, US war secretary Mattis spoke to Avigdor Lieberman in Washington, his Israeli counterpart – Syria and Iran the focus of discussions.

“The Iranian forces…or the proxy forces have tried to get down closer to the Israeli border, I mean very close to it, and you’ve seen Israel take action over that,” Mattis belligerently claimed.

Iranian military advisors are helping Syrian forces combat US/Israeli-supported terrorists, not preparing to attack Israel cross-border – a US and Israeli specialty, not anything Iran or Syria intend.

Washington and Israel are at war on Syria without formally declaring it.

NBC News:

“During the past week, senior Israeli military leaders have been meeting with senior US counterparts, both in the region and in the US, looking for US support for stronger action against Iran in Syria.”

Days earlier, CENTCOM chief General Joseph Votel met with IDF chief of staff General Gadi Eizenkot and Israeli intelligence officials days discussing Syria and Iran.

Netanyahu’s Monday theatrical presentation on Iran was an exercise in deception, bald-faced lies, bravado without substance.

His “Iran files” weren’t secretly stolen from a Tehran warehouse, as he falsely claimed. Material was largely old news well-known to the IAEA, repackaged to appear damning – no experts fooled.

Netanyahu is a serial liar, clear to anyone following his earlier antics. Nothing he says is credible.

Sovereign independent Iran is Israel’s main regional rival, why Washington and the Jewish state are hellbent to replace its government with pro-Western puppet rule.

Strategy involves regime change in Syria, isolating Iran, followed by a similar strategy to topple its government.

Things seem headed for something much more serious than already. Escalated regional conflicts could spark confrontation between the world’s dominant nuclear powers.

All bets are off if it happens.

*

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

Soon after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a televised address in which he unveiled a cache of 55,000 pages of documents and 183 CDs that he claimed comprised Iran’s alleged “atomic archive” of documents on its nuclear program, supposedly proving the existence of an illegal and ongoing secret program to “test and build nuclear weapons” called Project Amad, the UN’s atomic agency weighed in to directly negate the claims. 

But right on cue, Reuters now reports that

“Trump has all but decided to withdraw from the 2015 Iran nuclear accord by May 12but exactly how he will do so remains unclear, two White House officials and a source familiar with the administration’s internal debate said on Wednesday.”

On Tuesday, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) issued an assessment in response to Netanyahu’s speech firmly asserting that there are “no credible indications” supporting Netanyahu’s claims of a continued Iranian nuclear weapons program after 2009.

According to the AP summary of the IAEA assessment:

The U.N. nuclear agency says it believes that Iran had a “coordinated” nuclear weapons program in place before 2003, but found “no credible indications” of such work after 2009…

The documents focused on Iranian activities before 2003 and did not provide any explicit evidence that Iran has violated its 2015 nuclear deal with the international community.

The IAEA statements followed on the heels of a number of international Iran analysts weighing in to say there appeared “nothing new” in terms of “evidence” which Netanyahu confidently presented as if it were an open-and-shut bombshell revelation of Iranian malfeasance.

Nothing really new in @netanyahu Iran speech. Confirms that Iran closed down nuclear weapons program in 2003. Continued technology efforts. In principle all of this well known. No allegation that Iran cheats on 2015 nuclear deal. https://t.co/IJElnZ3JmM

— Carl Bildt (@carlbildt) April 30, 2018

One such specialist in an op-ed for the New York Times called the supposed Israeli Mossad intelligence haul a big “nuclear nothingburger” full of things already well-known to the world, with the further implication that the intelligence operation that netted the files itself appears hokey and untrustworthy.

Middle East analyst Steven Simon noted in the Times piece that:

The archive had been stored in what Mr. Netanyahu described as a derelict warehouse in Tehran. The photos he displayed indicated that there did not even appear to be a lock on the door. One wonders how important the Iranians thought these documents were, given the slapdash approach they took to storing them. In any case, the Mossad operation that netted this haul apparently took place in January and President Trump was briefed on it shortly afterward.

Meanwhile, former Israeli National Security Advisor Uzi Arad in response to Netanyahu’s claim that Iran lied about its nuclear program, said that “at no point was there any indication that Iran violated the agreement.”

"At no point was there any indication that Iran violated the agreement", says former Israeli National Security Advisor Uzi Arad in response to @netanyahu's claim that #Iran lied about its nuclear program. pic.twitter.com/e1ZqNAAuJ2

— i24NEWS English (@i24NEWS_EN) May 1, 2018

Indeed, after Netanyahu’s bizarre performance which in typical fashion made heavy use of stage props and simplistically styled visuals (who can forget the absurd bugs bunny cartoon bomb image he held up at the U.N. in 2012?), there’s been little reporting focused on just how a team of Mossad agents waltzed into Iran to steal from “a dilapidated warehouse” over 100,000 of the country’s most sensitive and damning documents.

To underscore this far-fetched scenario is literally the claim being made — that a large Mossad team walked into an Iranian warehouse to physically carry and secretly transport bulk print files and CDs out of the country — a senior Israeli intelligence official was widely quoted as saying of the covert operation,

“We didn’t take everything because it was too heavy.”

To this we might reply it was so nice of the Iranians and their feared and paranoia-driven Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to leave their most secretive and “hidden” files so unguarded and out in the open, and in an old unsecured building in which there “did not even appear to be a lock on the door” according to the NY Times.

Below is the official account currently circulating of the details of the Mossad operation inside Iran, sourced to high level Israeli officials and posted to Axios by Israeli national security reporter Barak Ravid:

• Israeli officials say the Mossad received intelligence that showed the Iranians were trying to hide all documents concerning the military dimensions of their nuclear program.
• The official said that in a highly secret operation known to a handful of Iranian officials, the Iranians transferred tens of thousands of documents and CD’s from several different sites around the country to a civilian warehouse in Tehran. The Israeli official said the Iranians did all that because they were afraid IAEA inspectors would find the documents.
• The Mossad put the warehouse under surveillance and started preparing for a possible operation to seize the documents. According to Israeli officials, more than 100 Mossad spies worked on this operation and, in January 2018, it was implemented.
• A senior Israeli intelligence official said the Mossad managed to put its hands on most of the documents in the warehouse. “We didn’t take everything because it was too heavy”, he said.

The trove of Persian language documents are still being reportedly translated and analyzed by separate teams of Mossad and CIA specialists.

Assuming any of the details of the claimed Mossad “secret files” heist are accurate, the likely correct version of events is that being offered by the IAEA,  while the Iranians themselves remained unmoved by the strange presentation, slamming  the Israeli PM’s accusations, calling him “an infamous liar” who “can’t stop crying wolf.” As evidence for this assertion, the Iranians can simply point to Netanyahu’s testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in 2002 on Iraq’s mythical WMD program.

Netanyahu argued in the lead up to the disastrous Iraq war:

 “There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking and is working and is advancing toward the development of nuclear weapons, no question whatsoever.”

And asserted that the United States must pursue regime change because, “make no mistake about it, if and once Saddam has nuclear weapons, the terror network will have  nuclear weapons.” He said there was “no question (Saddam) hadn’t given up on his nuclear program” and that the Iraqi leader was “hell-bent on achieving an atomic bomb, atomic capabilities.”

Of course, all of this was dead wrong.

And then there’s this stellar track record:

This is paranoid #Netanyahu before the Iraq invasion. Listen to him lying through his teeth about Saddam seeking the development of #NuclearWeapons & 15 yrs later look at the chaos in Iraq.

Does he REALLY think the world will believe him again about #Iran ? pic.twitter.com/w90ZDDWqIW

— Marwa Osman (@Osman_Marwa1) May 1, 2018

Though it’s possible that Trump might not actually go through with unilaterally collapsing the deal altogether, the possibility of that Obama-era 2015 deal surviving through 2018 is hanging by a thread.

While Reuters further reports Trump’s top aides are attempting to talk him down from nixing it all together, citing a White House source who said “it was possible Trump will end up with a decision that ‘is not a full pullout’ but was unable to describe what that might look like” — current momentum since Netanyahu’s speech seems going in the direction of a pull-out.

If so, this will not bode well for the prospects of a greater Israeli-Iran-Syria-Hezbollah war that is sure to set the whole region on fire.

Trump’s trade team heads off to Beijing this week of May 2018 to attempt to negotiate terms of a new US-China trade deal.  The US decision whether to continue the exemptions on Steel and Aluminum tariffs with the European Union occurs comes due this week as well.  And this past week Trump also declared “we’re doing very nicely with NAFTA”. 

So what’s all the talk about a Trump ‘trade war’? Is it media hype? Typical Trump hyperbole?  Is there really a trade war in the making? Indeed, was there ever? And how much of it is really about reducing the US global trade deficit—and how much about the resurrection of Trump’s ‘economic nationalism’ theme for the consumption of his domestic political base in an election year?

One thing for certain, what’s underway is not a ‘trade war’.

Trump announced his 25% steel and 10% aluminum tariffs in early March, getting the attention of the US press with his typical Trump bombast, off-the-wall tweets and extremist statements. The steel-aluminum tariffs were originally to apply worldwide. But the exemptions began almost immediately.  In fact, all US major trading partners were quickly suspended from the tariffs—except for China.

By mid-March, Canada and Mexico were let off the tariff hook, even though they were among the top four largest steel importers to the US, with Canada largest and Mexico fourth largest.  Thereafter, Brazil (second largest steel importer), Germany, and others steel importers were exempted as well.[1]  And Canada, by far the largest aluminum importer to the US, accounting for 43% of US aluminum imports, was exempted for imports of that product.

South Korea ‘Softball’ Trade Template

The Trump administration’s signal to its allies was the US-South Korea deal that soon followed. The South Koreans were pitched a ‘softball’ trade deal. South Korea, the third largest US steel importer last year, was exempted from steel tariffs, now permanently as part of the final deal. So much for steel tariffs. Moreover, no other significant tariffs were imposed on South Korea as part of the bilateral treaty revisions.  No wonder the South Koreans were described as ‘ecstatic’ about the deal.

What the US got in the quickly renegotiated US-South Korea free trade deal was more access for US auto makers into Korea’s auto markets. And quotas on Korean truck imports into the US. Korean auto companies, Kia and Hyundai, had already made significant inroads to the US auto market. US auto makers have become dependent on US truck sales to stay afloat; they didn’t want Korean to challenge them in the truck market as well. Except for these auto agreements, there were no major tariffs or other obstructions to South Korea imports to the US. Not surprising, the South Koreans were ecstatic they got off so easily in the negotiations.[2]  Clearly, the US-South Korea deal had nothing to do with Steel or Aluminum. If anything, it was a token adjustment of US-Korea auto trade and little more.

So the Korean deal was a ‘big nothing’ trade renegotiation. And so far as US trade deficits are concerned, steel-aluminum imports are insignificant.  Steel-aluminum tariffs do nothing for the US global trade deficit.  US steel and aluminum imports combined make up only $47 billion—a fraction of total US imports of $2.36 trillion in 2017.

The steel-aluminum tariffs were more of a Trump publicity tactic, to get the attention of the media and US trade allies.   And if the tariffs were the signal, then the South Korea deal is now the template. It’s not about steel or aluminum tariffs.  But you wouldn’t know that if you listened to Trump’s speech in Pennsylvania.  Canada and Mexico import more steel to the US than South Korea. But in a final NAFTA revision they too will be virtually exempted from steel-aluminum tariffs when those negotiations are completed.

NAFTA as South Korea Redux

According to reports of the NAFTA negotiations, most details have already been negotiated with Mexico and Canada and the parties are close to a final deal. Typical of the ‘softball’ US approach with NAFTA—like South Korea—is the US recent dropping of its key demand that half the value of US autos and parts imported to the US be made in the US. That’s now gone. So a deal on NAFTA is imminent. Certainly before the Mexican elections this summer. But it will have little besides token adjustments to steel or autos.  Trump threats to withdraw from NAFTA were never real. They were always merely to tell his base what they wanted to hear.

For what Trump wants from NAFTA is not a significant reduction of steel, auto, or any other imports to the US. What the US wants is more access for US corporations’ investment into Mexico and Canada; more protection for patents of US pharmaceutical companies to gouge consumers in those countries like they do in the US; and a shift in power to the trade dispute tribunals favoring the US. He’ll sell the exaggerated token adjustments to his political base, which will applaud his latest, inflated ‘fake news’—while the big corporations and financial elites in the US will silently nod their heads in agreement for the incremental gains he’s obtained for them.

In the most recent development concerning NAFTA negotiations, Trump has extended the deadline for a final revision for another thirty days—a development which means the parties are very close to a final resolution.  The revisions will most likely look like the South Korean deal in many details—with quotas (not tariffs) on auto parts trade and more US access for US business investment and token limits on imports to the US.

Launching US-Europe Trade Negotiations: Macron’s Visit/Merkel’s Snub

After NAFTA comes Europe, later this year and in 2019. Like the NAFTA negotiations, Europe deadlines on steel and aluminum tariffs were just extended another thirty days.  That’s just the beginning of likely further extensions. Europe will be less amenable to steel, aluminum or any other tariffs than the US NAFTA or South Korean partners.  French president Macron’s visit last week to the US should be viewed as the opening of negotiations on trade between the US and Europe. But the European economy is again weakening and France, Germany, the UK and others are desperate to maintain export levels, which is the main means by which they keep their economies going.

Europe also wants to keep the Iran Deal in place, which means important exports and trade for it, while Trump wants to end the deal as he’s promised his domestic political base.  A tentative agreement may have been reached between Trump and Macron during the latter’s recent visit to the US: Trump will formally pull the US out of the Iran Deal by May 12 but then will do nothing real apart from the announcement—much like the US withdrawal from the Climate Treaty. Europe will continue its trade deals with Iran. The US and Europe will then jointly try to negotiate an addendum with Iran. In short, France and Europe get to keep their business deals and Trump gets to pander to his political base before the elections in November. Like the Europe steel-aluminum tariff exemptions due this week, that announcement will soon follow as well within a week.

While Macron was treated like royalty by Trump during his visit to the US, German Chancellor Merkel, who followed within days, was treated more like a minor partner and snubbed.  The snubbing wasn’t about trade, however.  It was more about Germany’s refusal to participate in the Syrian bombings, as well as US dislike for the growing resistance in Germany to go along with extreme economic sanctions on Russia.  Long run, what the US has always wanted from Germany is to substitute US natural gas imports (which the US now has a surplus due to fracking technology) for Russian gas and for Germany to stop building gas pipelines with Russia. Trump will likely focus on political concessions from Europe while seeking only token changes to imports from Europe to the US. In other words, the content of a US-Europe trade deal may differ from NAFTA of South Korea but the ‘form’ will remain dominated by token adjustments, with little net import reduction to the US.

The UK economy is slowing rapidly, German industrial production has slowed in the last three of four months. And signs are accumulating that globally trade, upon which Europe is especially dependent, is slowing once again. The UK in particular is an economic basket case. Brexit negotiations are in shambles. And the Conservative Party’s days are numbered.  Trump therefore will not demand extreme concessions from the UK.  Nor will he from the rest of Europe, also now slowing economically—though not as severe as the UK—and important to Trump-US interests in concluding any trade deal with China, providing cover for US policy in the middle East, and with regard to Russian sanctions and US support for a collapsed Ukraine. Politics will dictate token trade adjustments with Europe.

Trump’s Political Objectives

Except for the case of China, therefore, the Trump trade war is mostly tough talking trade for show.  Trump wants some token concessions from its US allies trading partners. Token concessions he can then ‘sell’ to his political base in an election year. He’s playing to his ‘America First’ economic nationalist political base, agitating it for electoral purposes next November.  He is in election mode, giving campaign speeches throughout the US as if this were September 2016 again. He may also be mobilizing that base in anticipation of the eventual firing of Mueller he plans and the political firestorm that may provoke from the traditional elites in the US.  He’s given them massive tax cuts and now some gains from trade negotiations without upsetting the global capitalist trade structure he once promised to do.

Trump is betting that delivering on taxes and trade to the elite will keep enough of them at bay. While delivering on immigration, the wall, and hyped (but phony) trade deals with US allies will convince his ‘America First’ political base he’s delivering for them as well. The so-called trade war is phony because it is designed to produce token adjustments to US trade relations with allies, which Trump will then inflate, exaggerate and lie about to his domestic political base, as they fall for his economic nationalism theme once again.

Is China the Trade Target?

But where does that leave US-China trade?  Certainly many believe that is headed for a ‘trade war’.  Tit-for-tat $50 billion tariffs have been levied by both the US and China on each other. Trump has threatened another $100 billion and China has said it will similarly follow suit.  Even the products to be tariffed have been identified—the US targeted a wide range of imports from China and China in turn targeting US agricultural products and other industrial goods from the US Midwest, and thus Trump’s political base.

Trump’s trade team is by now in Beijing.  It represents the major interest groups of Trump’s administration: Treasury Secretary Mnuchin—the bankers and big US multinational corporations. Trade representative hardliners, Robert Lighthizer and Peter Navarro—the Pentagon and US war production industries. And Larry Kudlow the Trump administration’s economic nationalists.  Will the Trump phony trade war apply to China as well? Or will it be an actual economic war? Is it really about reducing the US $375 billion annual trade deficit with China?  Or about US bankers wanting more access and ownership of operations in China?  Or is it about China’s attempt to technologically leapfrog the US in the next generation war-making and cyber security software capability?

*

The second part of this three part series will address the China-US element of Trump trade policy and strategy.

Jack Rasmus is author of the recently published book, ‘Central Bankers at the End of Their Ropes: Monetary Policy and the Coming Depression’, Clarity Press, August 2017. He blogs at jackrasmus.com and his twitter handle is @drjackrasmus. His website is http://kyklosproductions.com.

Dr. Rasmus is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

The late Zbigniew Brzezinski was an architect in the use of fanatical terrorists to invade and destroy countries.  Washington used the tactic in Afghanistan, and Washington is still using so-called “jihadi” terrorists to destroy non-compliant countries.  Washington has been destroying Syria with these anti-democratic,  extremely misogynist, cult-intoxicated “Wahhabi” terrorists for over seven years now.

Washington has also been waging a largely successful war on Western minds. Toxic MSM indoctrination has robbed Western populations of critical thinking skills to such an extent that Western populations continue to embrace tv messaging that fabricates support for Wahhabi terrorism and engineers rejection for democracy, equal rights, religious diversity and civilizing values – all of which are best represented by the legitimate Syrian government and the vast majority of Syrians.

Canadians need to listen to voices from Syria.  One such voice is that of Reverend Andrew Ashdown, who has been a regular visitor to Syria throughout the war.  In a recent Facebook message he wrote this:

“Poignant to visit one of the iconic sites of Deir Ezzor this afternoon – the main suspension across the Euphrates bridge. In 2009 I brought a tour group here, had a meal in the restaurant by the river, which is now a ruin, and watched the boys as they dived into the river from the bridge. The bridges across the Euphrates were bombed by the US airforce, preventing the Syrian Army from fighting IS, and protecting their territory. The destruction of this bridge cost the lives of 150 Syrian soldiers. The attack encouraged a further attack by IS on Deir Ezzor, and echoed an ‘accidental’ attack by the coalition air a force on the Syrian Army as they were fighting ISIS, killing hundreds of Syrian soldiers, and resulting in an IS advance on the city. And the western coalition are fighting for ‘democracy’?”

In a single paragraph Ashdown confirms what has been proven many times over. ISIS and all of the terrorists are proxies for the West (sometimes expendable, but proxies nonetheless).  Syria and its allies are the enemy — not the terrorists, and the notion that the war on Syria is somehow “humanitarian” or a “democratic endeavor” is absolutely ridiculous.

Another voice from Syria, that of permanent Syrian resident Lilly Martin, lays bare yet another war propaganda lie, the one about “Moderate opposition”.

Interview by Tom Duggan

The so-called “moderate opposition” are sectarian terrorists, and they always have been.

Peace and Justice demand that we denounce the lies and move forward on a framework of Truth.

*

Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017.

---

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The ‘Sultan’ of an illusionary Ottoman Empire—Turkey’s President Erdogan—is pressuring submissive politicians throughout the Balkan countries to do his bidding to restore the glory of the Ottoman period. For Erdogan, this is not simply an unfulfilled quest; he has been targeting the Balkans for the past several years (which he views as easy prey) to co-opt into his sphere of influence by spreading his Islamic agenda under the guise of cultural cooperation. He is investing heavily in infrastructure and religious institutions, using businesses as leverage (while reaping economic benefit) as part of his sinister scheme to consolidate Turkey’s grip on the Balkan states to serve his neo-Ottoman design.

Former Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu emphatically echoed his boss’s grandiose vision, stating that by 2023 (the 100th anniversary of the Turkish Republic), Turkey will become as powerful and influential as the Ottoman Empire was during its heyday. The Balkan states must realize that their prospect for economic growth, prosperity, freedom, and sustainable democracy rests on close association with the EU, and not with a ruthless dictator who pretends to be the savior for the Balkans.

According to Turkey’s Ministry of Economy, by the end of 2016, the cumulative worth of Turkey’s foreign direct investment in the Balkan countries reached about $10 billion. A year ago, Erdogan proudly stated in an interview for the Albanian TV station ‘Top Channel’ that Turkey has invested three billion euros in Albania.

“I don’t know how many investments have arrived from the EU, but ours will not stop.”

The Western Balkan countries have been seeking long-lasting relations with the EU in their efforts to join the Union. With the new enlargement package the European Commission recommended, Albania will be the first to start accession talks. Turkey, meanwhile, is flexing its economic muscles to lure Albania and other Balkan states into its own geostrategic orbit.

Turkey’s investments in Albania are selective and strategically calculated to have the greatest economic and political impact on the financial market as well as major national projects. This includes owning the second-largest bank, hydropower plants, an iron smelting plant, former state-owned telecom operator “Albtelecom”, and mobile operator “Eagle Mobile”.

Prime Minister Edi Rama, who wholeheartedly supports these projects, is known for his close relations with Erdogan (the only leader from Europe to attend Erdogan’s daughter’s wedding) and is now negotiating the construction of a tourist airport in Vlora, 140km south of the capital Tirana.

Albanian citizens must realize that Erdogan’s investments in their economy are but a façade to cover his larger goal of making the Balkans increasingly dependent on Turkey, while making Ankara the dominant center of power à la the Ottoman era in its days of glory.

Despite the various changes in its political systems, Albania has been a secular state since its founding in 1912. After independence, the democratic, monarchic, and later totalitarian communist regimes followed a systematic secularization of the national culture. But then, in contrast to the national socio-political liberal trend, in 2015 Erdogan inaugurated the Grand Mosque ‘Namazgja’, which is the largest mosque in Albania, costing around 30 million euros and financed by Turkey’s Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet).

During his speech at Columbia University in late April, Albanian Minister of Foreign Affairs Ditmir Bushati dismissed all the facts about Erdogan’s unambiguous Islamic agenda in Albania. When we challenged him on that score, he queasily responded by saying that

“It is not true that Turkey has built the largest mosque in Albania, and that the mosque was built for the Muslim needs.”

This false statement is consistent with his refusal to admit that tens of new mosques have already been inaugurated in Albania that were financed by Erdogan.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the Inauguration Ceremony of Preze Castle Mosque in Albanian (13 May 2015)

Albania’s Prime Minister Rama is not the only one flirting with Erdogan. President Ilir Meta, after his meeting with Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, underlined the prospect that the two countries are on the path to increasing cooperation, while ignoring the concern shared by a majority of Albanians who feel that the closer Albania gets to Turkey, the farther it distances itself from the EU.

In a conversation with Mero Baze, a journalist and publisher of Tema, he stated that Turkish investments originate from a close circle of businessmen associated with President Erdogan, and are not investments acquired from competitive bidding in the open marketplace. They are privately negotiated, and

“As such, they can turn into a problem, in case of political instability in Turkey” said Baze, “as they become politically exposed to Erdogan—an autocrat who may face major political problems in the future, which can drag Albania into the political and economic morass in Turkey” that may well ensue.

In January of this year, opposition MP Dashamir Shehi alerted the parliament of Erdogan’s ‘invasion in Albania.’

“I am against the expansion of the Turkish presence in Albania. I don’t want Turkish investments and turbulence of Turkish politics in our country. Chromium, metallurgy, schools, airports are taken by the Turks. We aim toward Europe not East”.

The Prime Minister responded to him sarcastically, saying

“Drink brandy and do not scream.”

In a conversation with us, Xhemal Ahmeti, historian and philosopher who wrote a treatise for the Albanian government entitled “Saving the Albanian culture from the Turkish tendencies”, said that, after the Albanian government, Erdogan is the one who has the maximum power over Albania. He also condemned the lack of open criticism of Turkey in the Albanian media, saying that

“With this policy, Albania closes every gateway to the West.”

He suggested that Albania must take concrete steps against Salafism and “Erdoganism”, because their instructors, emissaries, and ideologues infiltrate political parties, academic associations, and mosques in Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, and other Balkan states.

Erdogan is intoxicating Albania by providing now small doses of economic development until it finally succumbs to his manipulation and deceit.  If Albania is looking towards the European Union as it officially states, it should not allow Erdogan to dominate the country by any means or persuasion.  Albanian leaders must remember that the EU would not admit any new member into the Union who is deeply wedded to Erdogan, especially now that his naked desire to dominate the Balkans has been exposed for all to see.

Europe is aware that Erdogan’s express purpose is to rebuild a regional neo-Ottoman power, which directly challenges Western values.  Only a couple of weeks ago this sentiment was clearly expressed by MP Alparslan Kavaklıoğlu, a member of the ruling AKP and head of the parliament’s Security and Intelligence Commission:

“Europe will be Muslim. We will be effective there, Allah willing. I am sure of that.”

Turkey’s diplomatic and military trajectory under Erdogan will remain the same for as long as he survives politically. The Balkan states, and especially Albania, who is the immediate candidate to join the EU, must carefully calibrate its relations with Turkey.

The EU must make it clear that since full adherence to its charter, especially regarding human rights, freedom, and a democratic form of government, are prerequisites to EU membership, Albania must not cozy up to Erdogan, who has flagrantly abandoned the EU’s founding principles.

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Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU. He teaches courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies.

[email protected]; Web: www.alonben-meir.com

Featured image: Anti-drone demonstrators march in 2013.  (Photo: Debra Sweet/flickr/cc)

The Trump administration on Tuesday flouted two major deadlines for disclosing the number of civilians killed by U.S. military forces: one public report that was mandated by an Obama-era executive order and focused on drone strike deaths; and one report to Congress that is supposed to detail all civilian deaths tied to U.S. military operations.

“The Trump administration’s decision not to comply with even the meager transparency requirements of the executive order is a dangerous low,” declared Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project.

“It’s unacceptable,” she added, “for the government to simply refuse to release the numbers of people killed, let alone their identities, the rules governing its deadly decisions, or investigations into credibly alleged wrongful killing.”

A White House spokesman told the Washington Post,

“The executive order that requires the civilian casualty report is under review,” and may be “modified” or “rescinded,” while a spokesman for the Pentagon said the congressional report is slated to be provided to lawmakers by June 1.

A team of counterterrorism and human rights experts at Just Security put the missed deadlines into context, outlining the broader shifts the administration has made with regard to deadly drone and military operations:

In the time since President Donald Trump has been in office, his administration has secretly changed U.S. policy rules on the use of lethal force abroad, refused even to admit the new policy exists, increased the number of lethal operations in places like Yemen and Somalia, and—according to independent monitoring groups like Airwars—was responsible for a significant uptick in civilian deaths in Iraq and Syria in 2017. In this context of increased secrecy, expanded military operations, and credible allegations of civilian casualties, congressional scrutiny of the executive branch is crucial.

“This increased secrecy about the costs and consequences of Trump’s killing policies prevents public oversight and accountability for wrongful deaths,” said Shamsi. “The victims of our government’s lethal actions deserve better, as does the American public in whose name the Trump administration is secretly killing people.”

Mariya Parodi, a press officer for Amnesty International USA, tweeted Tuesday evening:

The same human progress that gives us the technology to strike half a world away also demands the discipline to constrain that power or risk abusing ithttps://t.co/KsHAueHChF

— Mariya Parodi (@MariyaParodi) May 1, 2018

While independents groups repeatedly criticized the Obama administration for providing vague and lowball estimates for the number of civilians killed, they did at least produce the mandated reports. As the Post details:

The first report on casualties caused by counterterrorism strikes was released in July 2016 and disclosed up to 116 civilian casualties during seven years of strikes. The report was criticized by independent groups, such as the New America Foundation and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which estimated between 200 and 325 civilian deaths over a similar period. Just before Obama left office in early 2017, the administration released a second report that disclosed the deaths of 441 fighters and one civilian in 2016.

Even though the White House refused to release numbers, a spokesman wrote in an email that there was no increase in civilian casualties in 2017.

But counterterrorism experts cast doubt on that assertion, noting that there was a big surge in drone strikes in 2017, especially in Yemen, where the United States launched 127 strikes, up from 32 in 2016.

“It’s almost impossible to claim that there has been no increase in civilian casualties,” said Luke Hartig, a fellow at New America specializing in counterterrorism. “It’s hard to look at what we know from public reporting—both the increase in total strikes and reports of civilian casualties—and say that nothing has changed.”

Airwars reported earlier this year that the Coalition waging an air campaign against ISIS—which includes the U.S., the U.K., France, Belgium, and Australia, plus possibly Jordan and Saudi Arabia—”cumulatively dropped 39,577 bombs and missiles in airstrikes against ISIS in 2017,” which likely killed “between 3,923 and 6,102 non-combatants… a 215 percent increase on the 1,243 to 1,904 civilians estimated as likely killed by Coalition strikes in 2016.”

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Featured image: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, centre, speaks before a meeting about the deadlock over Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline expansion with B.C. Premier John Horgan and Alberta Premier Rachel Notley, in Trudeau’s on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on April 15. (Source: Justin Tang / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

Peace – in the Koreas, is what the world expects; and Peace in the world is what humanity expects, the vast majority – 99.9% of the world population wants peace, but it’s the 0.1% that commands war and destruction, since war and destruction is what runs the western economy. Literally. If peace would break out – what we in the west still call economy, though it’s a fraud, every day more visible – would collapse. In the US the war industry with all the associated production and service industries, including the Silicon Valley and banking – contributes more than 50% to GDP. Nobody notices and nobody says so. Naturally. Everything that might be revealing and thought-provoking, is lied about or hidden from the public.

This enormous Korean Peace Initiative is a flare of hope. The two Presidents, Moon Jae-in from the South and Kim Jong-un from the North have met last Friday, 27 April 2018, at the Peace House at Panmunjeom, near the 38^th Parallel North, or the so-called Military Demarcation Line. It is the first time in more than 60 years that leaders of both Koreas have crossed the line – Mr. Moon to the North, and Mr. Kim to the South. They have declared their willingness to establish Peace, to sign a real Peace Agreement before the end of this year. At present, technically the two nations are still at war – a war sustained by the United States. The DPRK survives from day to day on a shaky armistice agreement from 1953. The American ferocious military forces and those of their NATO allies have totally destroyed, bombed to rubble and ashes North Korea at will, killing one third of her population, between 1950 and 1953. US-NATO did this despite North Korea’s offer to surrender long before the country was but a heap of ruins. Killing for spite, indulging in and enjoying the causing of horrendous suffering and death, is the sadistic and satanic way of the west.

This must be said and never forgotten. Although we look forward now – we, the world at large wants Peace, a live peace experience of Korea which could be replicated. The two leaders promise a number of joint actions and undertakings, including ridding the Peninsula of nuclear weapons – a very ambitious plan. Not because the two are not genuine in their endeavor but will Washington with more than 30,000 troops stationed in the South and a fleet of navy vessels and aircraft carriers as well as fighter jets and bombers – and a nuclear arsenal – withdraw their murderous toys? South Korea is a sovereign nation, she could request the departure of foreign occupiers, what the US is – but will the occupiers leave? – Or will the Pentagon, CIA or the White House invent a false flag event to nullify this peace effort? – Nothing is beyond Washington’s evil intention to hegemonize the world.

And for DPRK’s President Kim Jong-un to recall – John Bolton, Trump’s National Security Advisor, said just a couple of days ago, referring to North Koreas denuclearization – “Libya should serve as a model”. You may remember in 2003 / 2004 Gaddafi was accused of hiding weapons of mass destruction (WMD), i.e. a nuclear arms development program. The west blackmailed him to get rid of it, against some ‘economic aid and favors’, of course. Gaddafi accepted. The western sicko leaders all became friends with him, the French then President Nicolas Sarkozy on top, who is now accused in French Courts of receiving up to € 50 million ‘illegal money’ (what is legal money by western standards?) from Muammar Gaddafi for Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign. Well, we also remember how in 2011 he was miserably tortured and slaughtered anyway, despite his concessions to the west on his alleged WMDs, by NATO forces led by France and viciously supported by Hillary Clinton, then Obama’s Secretary of State. Had Gaddafi kept his weapons, he may be still be alive and Libya and Libya’s people may still be prospering as they did before the US-NATO onslaught in 2011.

For now, the US of A seems to go passively along with the Peace Initiative. It’s more, the Donald is actually claiming credit for it. It is unbelievable but true. There is even a group of Trump supporters who will propose Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. Imagine! – But why not, after all, Obama got the prize before he really started his Presidency – and then he bombed more countries and killed more people than any other US President in recent history. Yes, all is possible. We are living in a world where war is peace, where you are made believe that bombing a country to rubble will bring peace. Seriously. And the western people, brainwashed to the core, believe it.

However, despite Trump the “peacemaker”, be on your guard. Iran’s Foreign Minister, Bahram Qassemi, so pointedly said – never trust any agreement or promise made by Washington. He referred, of course, to the 5+1 (Permanent Security Council Members, plus Germany, and, of course, Iran) Nuclear Deal that Trump wants to abolish, or at best renegotiate – for which he engaged his new little boyfriend, Macron, to call Mr. Rouhani to please agree to re-discuss the Nuclear Deal and the issue of Iran’s long-range missiles. Of course, Mr. Rouhani turned him off.

And, as I’m writing these lines, Netanyahu comes to the fore with the most flagrant of lies – but he knows with enough propaganda – the west will buy them, accusing with a bland PowerPoint presentation Iran of not adhering to the nuclear agreement and of running a secret nuclear program; he has allegedly ‘tons’ of documents to prove it. And he comes out with this absolute blatant falsehood 12 days before the deadline Trump set to decide whether or not to scrap the Iran Nuclear Deal. As the west, especially Europe and of course Master Trump, are all submissively on their knees in front of Israel’s guru, his message, repeated at nauseam since the 2015 deal was signed, may catch on — and this, despite Europe’s (commercially inspired) adamant wish to adhere to the 5+1 Accord.

Iran is on her guard, and North Korea should be too.

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Peace in the Koreas – and in the future a unified Korea, unified families after more than 65 years; certainly, a dream for almost all Koreans. Yet, have the US motives to keep the DPRK under constant threat of war, under permanent fear, to keep the small country as an eastern entry point to Asia – to China and Russia – the same motive that started the war in 1950 – has that motive gone?

What does that mean for Syria, Iraq, Iran and Venezuela? – Trump at one point within the last weeks has said that the US is going to withdraw her troops from Syria. Really? – Or is this a well-orchestrated, but little veiled game – to give people hope for peace and then let them drop back into the ruins? – Remember this little ‘schmoozer’ guy, Macron, went to Washington with one of his priority requests – Donald, please do not leave Syria, we need you there.

Can you imagine – this little Rothschild implanted ‘call-me-president’ rascal has the nerve to say – we need you there? – Who in heaven does he think he is? – Let him militarize ‘his own’ (sic) country. France is already militarized and police patrolled like no other European nation – with the State of Emergency – effectively Martial Law – engraved in the French Constitution. Let the French people deal with Washington’s new baby poodle.

France and the UK, of course along with Washington, are also following Israel’s cue – destroy and partition Syria and Iran – to create a Greater Israel, from the Euphrates to the Red Sea. And of course, the EU, miserable vassals of Washington, will keep their stranglehold with sanctions on Venezuela – Venezuela that has arguably together with Cuba, the best democratic system in the world, has never done any harm to anyone, let alone to those sanctioning countries. Even Switzerland had the audacity to join the EU’s sanction regime against Venezuela, a country that has been among the most pleasant partners of Switzerland in the past. One can only wonder, how low do these countries pull down their pants to please their ruthless Atlantists neofascist masters.

Will this noble Korean peace spirit stretch through the world and bring about a higher consciousness, one that strives for peace instead of war?

France is engaged in strikes, after strikes, after strikes against the Macron-imposed new labor reform laws that would literally strip French workers of most of the social and labor rights and benefits they have achieved since WWII – for what? – To make the rich richer, and the poor poorer. That’s what austerity is all about, has always been – the west calls it structural adjustment – what a euphemism! – And the people haven’t caught-on yet. Or is it the corrupt politicians that go along with it against the will of the people?

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Peace in Korea – uniting again a historically peaceful and absolutely non-violent people – may be way more than a political act. It is a social compact of people; a vision to enshrine the non-violent nature of their culture upon Mother Earth, on a tiny fleck of earth in eastern Asia, on the Continent where the future lays – the East that brings human values back to the world, the OBI – One Belt Initiative of China, the broad economic and cultural cooperation enhanced by the SCO – Shanghai Cooperation Organization, led by China and Russia, and is already encompassing about half the world’s population, producing about a third of the globe’s economic output. – Could Korea be just that spark that ignites the engine to turning the massive ocean liner around, slowly but steadily – and, foremost – peacefully?

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Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank around the globe as an economist in the fields of water and environment. He is the author of Implosion, an economic thriller, based on his professional Bank experience. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

As a Palestinian, I barely raise an eyebrow when I hear Mohammed bin Salman say things like, Palestinians “must accept what US offers or stop complaining.”

That’s because I don’t make the mistaken assumption (as many people do) that the ideology of “Arab Nationalism” plays a factor today in politics related to Israel and the Jewish settler-colonial occupation of “mandate” Palestine.

Whereas Zionism is alive and kicking, Arab Nationalism, which arose after WWI when Palestine, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon came under British and French rule, has long been dead.

After WWI, Syria and Iraq led the movement in a failed attempt to exploit the rivalries of the Great Powers in the Middle East and create a state that would embrace all the “Arab Nation”.

Look where Syria and Iraq are now.

The very first time that Saudi Arabia acted (along with Iraq, Transjordan [which became Jordan in 1922] and Yemen) on an issue involving Palestine was in 1936, when these countries jointly intervened to end the Palestine strike, the general strike in Palestine against British policies on Jewish immigration and foreign land purchases in Palestine.

Look where Saudi Arabia and Yemen are today.

Secret peace missions between Arab countries and/or Israel and its allies for the political and territorial gains of these countries at the expense of the civil population of Palestinian Arabs (who had hardly any militia themselves and could not fight) began as early as 1948, when Golda Meir met secretly with King Abdullah of Jordan just before the mandate ended. She promised territorial gains if he stayed out of the fight.

At the time Abdullah disagreed with Egypt over what was to be achieved by this war, wanting to make Palestine part of a “Greater Syria”. Egypt disagreed with Abdullah, wanting to liberate Palestine and turn it over to the Palestinians, but it waited until the last minute to intervene in Palestine.

Look where Jordan and Egypt are now vis-vis-Israel and its ally, the U.S..

In 1948, Saudi Arabia contributed only a token unit to the under-equipped, under-trained Arab Liberation Army”.

When it came to a truce between these Arab leaders and Israel, from the beginning, they were all under strong external pressure – as they are today.

In my view, the Zionist Jewish state and Saudi Arabia have a lot in common.

They have the same culture of tribe and religion, both placing “otherness” and exclusivity at the heart of their world view. With its oil wealth, Saudi Arabia wreaks the same kind of political havoc in the Middle East that Israel does with its technology and military assets.

The way I see it, the U.S. is politically a client state of Israel, and Saudi Arabia is a client state of the U.S.

So what are the concerns of the crown prince?

“The Saudi crown prince is not a moderate leader, he cannot afford to be, as he has to move quickly to save Saudi Arabia from its impending economic and strategic disaster, says Gregory Copley, of the International Strategic Studies Association.

Saudi Arabia hosted an Islamic Counter-Terrorism Summit on November 26 in Riyadh which is already being described as a meeting of an ‘Arab NATO.’”

His major concern is the social and political stability of Saudi Arabia.

So why should this be surprising to anybody?  I believe the reason, partly, is because Israel uses the term “Arab” profusely to refer to Palestinians and has defined its Palestinian citizens within the Green Line as “Arab” in “nationality”, when there is no such thing.

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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.

The Gallup World Poll, released on May 1st, surveyed over 1,000 people in each of 128 countries, and found that the three nations with the highest percentage of employees satisfied with their jobs, were UAE, Russia, and U.S. 

In UAE, the lowest percentage, 31%, were seeking full-time employment but not in full-time employment. 58% of citizens who were full-time employed rated their jobs as “Good.” 12% rated them as “Great.”

Russia had 51% seeking but not having full-time work; 35% who had full-time work rated their jobs as “Good”; and 13% had “Great” jobs.

U.S. had 56% seeking but not having full-time work, 32% with “Good” jobs, and 13% with “Great” jobs.

The other nations with the highest jobs-satisfaction were Kazakhstan, Singapore, and Panama, with 11% in each having “Great” jobs; Estonia, Mongolia, and Uruguay, with 10%; and Colombia, Canada, Philippines, and Mauritius, with 9%. However, Panama had a very high 73% who were seeking but not having full-time employment; Mongolia had a very high 71% who were, and Philippines had an even higher 78% in that category; so, those three actually had fairly poor overall scores, because of their high percentage of citizens who couldn’t obtain full-time employment. 

The nations with the lowest “Great” jobs scores, each nation having only 1% of full-time workers who rated their jobs “Great,” were: Togo, Tanzania, Congo Kinshasa, Somalia, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, Italy, Chad, Iran, Burkina Faso, and South Sudan. 

Generally speaking, the performance of European and former Soviet nations was mediocre, and of African and Latin American nations was poor.

Here were the scores in nations where the U.S. had recently invaded, or else overthrown the government by means of a coup: Iraqhad 2% “Great” jobs, and 85% seeking but not having full-time work; Libya had 4% and 79%; Honduras had 5% and 86%; Ukraine had 4% and 66%; and Georgia had 4% and 84%. Only incomplete data were shown for Afghanistan and for Yemen, but each of those two was in the bottom 10% of all nations regarding the percentage who rated their jobs as being even “Good.” No data at all were shown for Syria. But, generally, nations that the U.S. had invaded or else otherwise overthrown, performed less well than was normal for their particular region of the world. Nothing in these data is consistent with the idea that the U.S. Government does anything but harm to the people in foreign countries. Any idea that the U.S. today is anything like the U.S. during the Marshall Plan era, in the wake of World War II, is the reverse of the truth. This is a very different country, out for conquest, nothing else. However, America’s own workers have been doing very well, relative to the workers in other countries. Only the residents of other countries are being harmed by the U.S. Government.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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. (Source: Korea Summit Press Pool)

One of the memorable events of the Summit of Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong-un was the unexpected impact of the historical handshake between the two leaders. Many would agree with me that the Kim-Moon handshake shook the world. But I am asking this: “Did the handshake make the summit a success?” This paper tackles this question.

The Kim-Moon Handshake

Early morning of April 27, 2018, the world saw Kim Jong-un coming with dignity and self confidence toward Moon Jae-in who was waiting on the south side of the narrow demarcation line separating the Korean peninsula into two parts.. As soon as Kim approached Moon, the two leaders greeted each other with sincere and friendly smile and they shook hands with enthusiasm.

It was, in a way, the handshake of two giant families: the family of fifty million members of South Korea with the family of twenty-five million members of North Korea; it meant the meeting of Juche of the North with liberal democracy of the South.

It represented the victory of Koreans’ dream for reunification over the greed of the vested interest group who exploit the North-South tension for political financial gains.

The world watched the handshake with expectation and fear; the world cheered; the world shed tears

Many cried with relief because they realized that the handshake could mean the liberation from the fear of the global nuclear war which Trump and his hawkish oligarchy could have provoked.

The Kim-Moon handshake shook the world in another way. We saw that Kim Jong-un was not a monster, the image which Western media, intellectuals and politicians have been trying so hard to project.

We saw that he had frank and gentle smile; we noticed that he was a human being like us showing joy and worries; we witnessed that he was listening rather than imposing his own ideas.

The handshake shook the world by making us be aware of how we have had a very negative image of North Korea along with its leaders because of misleading and biased corporate media in the world.

So, the Kim-Moon handshake shook the world. It is fine! It is great!! But we have to ask an important question: “Did the handshake make the summit a success?” There seems to be a general consensus to the effect that the summit was a success. But how successful was it?

A summit would be a success if its objectives are right and it the objectives are attained. There are good reasons to believe that the summit objectives were right and these objectives were well attained.

The ultimate objective of the summit was, to be sure, to find ways and means to establish permanent peace and prosperity on the Korean peninsula which we all wanted. For ten years from 1998 to 2008, two outstanding leaders of South Korean presidents, Kim Dae- jung and Rho Moo-hyun and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il have prepared a roadmap precisely for the peace and the prosperity through two summit declarations of historical significance, namely, the Summit Declaration of June 15, 2000 (Declaration-6.15) and that of October 4, 2007 (Declaration-10.04). Let us see then what this roadmap contained.

The Declaration-6.15

The Joint Declaration-6.15 was produced at the summit of Kim Dae-jung, president of South Korea with Kim Jong-il, supreme leader of North Korea. This Declaration had four key agreements:

(1) reunification of the Korean peninsula by the Koreans without foreign interventions,

(2) adoption of a sort of con-federal regime of governance,

(3) reunion of separated families,

(4) North-South cooperation in various fields including economic development, cultural and sport activities and promotion of North-South dialogues.

The Declaration-10.04

Now, the Declaration-10.04 signed by Rho Moo-hyun, president of South Korea and Kim Jong-il, supreme leader of North Korea had eight key agreements:

(1) faithful implementation of the Declaration-6.15,

(2) mutual respect for sovereignty and joint efforts for the reunification of Koreas,

(3) mutual non-aggression and mutual dialogue to reduce tension and conflict in addition to the transformation of the North Limit Line (NLL) into peaceful joint fishing zone,

(4) replacement of the Armistice prevailing since 1953 with a peace treaty through 3-party talk, or 4-party talk or 6-party talk,

(5) North-South cooperation for investments, resource development and promotion of foreign investment in Special Economic Zones, development of transportation infrastructure including the Gaesung-Sinuiju railroad, the Gaesung-Pyongyang Expressway,

(6) mutual cooperation for the development of various fields including culture, arts, sports, technologies and several other fields,

(7) humanitarian cooperation, especially the reunion of separated families,

(8) mutual cooperation in international affairs.

The Panmunjom Declaration (Declaration-4.27)

The Panmunjom Declaration signed by Moon Jae-in, president of South Korea and Kim Jong-un, chairman of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) on April 27, 2018 (the Declaration-4.27) was a further elaboration of the two preceding declarations adding a few new agreements. This Declaration has three chapters with several sections in each chapter

In the preface of first chapter, the Declaration emphasizes, in the strongest terms, the importance of the “blood relation” of the two peoples. This aspect of biological link is perhaps the most important part of the whole declaration. Put it differently, this relation means that the two peoples are “one”. This oneness of Koreans who have been cruelly separated by foreign powers has been the theme cultivated throughout the PyongChang Olympics and the Moon-Kim summit. We will see this in greater detail below.

The messages presented in the six sections of the first chapter may be summarized in this manner.

First, the two peoples have a common destiny and they should fully implement the projects defined in the two preceding Declarations.

Second, both sides should hold sustained North South dialogues at all levels.

Third, in order to facilitate the implementation of mutual cooperation, liaison offices should be established in North and South in various fields of activities.

Fourth, North-South human networks organized through visits, exchanges and contacts are encouraged so that cooperation can be facilitated. The creation of unified sport teams is also encouraged to participate at international sport events.

Fifth, the inter-Korea Red Cross meetings are encouraged to organize as soon as possible (August, this year) the reunion of families who were separated because of the Korean War.

Finally, in the sixth section of the first chapter, the implementation of the agreements of the Declaration-10.04 is emphasized, in particular, the construction of highways and railways in North Korea and other projects for economic development

The second chapter of the Declaration-4.27 addresses the issue of military tension. It has three sections.

First, the DMZ will be transformed into a peace zone. For this, the noisy propaganda broadcasting through giant loudspeakers will be stopped. In fact, on April 30th, the removal of whole loud speakers started.

Second, the NLL zone will become, finally, a neutral fishing zone where fishing boats from North and South will catch fish in peace.

Third, liaison offices will be established in North and South in order to facilitate cooperation.

Finally, the third chapter of the Declaration has four sections.

First, both sides reaffirm the non-aggression previously agreed upon.

Second, both agreed to carry out disarmament which will be phased out over a given period of time.

Third, this year (2018) which is the 65th anniversary year of the 1953 Armistice Agreement should be made a year ending the Korean War and producing a peace treaty through multilateral meetings so that, at last, permanent peace can prevail on the Korean peninsula.

In the Declaration-4.27, the fourth section of the third chapter deals with the issue which is perhaps the most difficult part, for it deals with issue of denuclearization. The text reads as follows:

“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 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.”

Here, we see two key messages.

First, the initiative of denuclearization was made by Kim Jong-un showing that Pyongyang is sincere regarding denuclearization. The Declaration-4.27 did not elaborate further the denuclearization issue, for it is an issue which should be handled at the coming Washington-Pyongyang summit

Second, we should pay attention to the expression “complete denuclearization” in the above quotation. Many people wonder if this meant the CVID (complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization) solution.

The Pyongyang’s post-summit statements seem to imply precisely the CVID solution. Pyongyang has promised to destroy completely the 7 nuclear test sites of Pyungge-ri. It appears that Mike Pompeo, new Secretary of State of the U.S. and Kim Jong-un would have agreed the full inspection of all nuclear facilities and missile launch sites in North Korea.

Coming back to the question regarding the success of the Kim-Moon summit, it can be said that it was a great success, for it integrated fully the projects specified in the two previous summits. The Kim-Moon summit did more; it implemented already some of the projects including the removal of loud speakers along the DMZ. Furthermore, there were, in Declaration- 4.27, several important new issues added. In particular, the idea of peace treaty and complete denuclearization are meaningful additions.

Oneness

If there is a very special thing in the Declaration-4.27, it is its theme. The theme underlying the whole declaration was the idea of “oneness” of the Koreans whether they are North Koreans or South Koreans. This notion of oneness has two important implications.

On the one hand, Koreans-whether they are in North or in South- are related through blood, language, culture; oneness transcends ideologies or political systems; it means that the two Korean peoples have the common destiny, that is, they live together or die together. This notion of the common destiny goes long way in implications. For instance, they are to be united in dealing with international affairs. Thus, it will be interesting to see how “oneness” will affect Koreas’ relations with China, Japan and the United States and Russia.

To understand the dynamics of Koreans’ oneness, we have to go back to the time of PyongChang Olympics. We were quite moved by how the North-South united woman hockey team entered, during the opening ceremony, by waving the symbol of the unity (oneness) represented by the blue colour map of the Korean peninsula. What the map represented was the idea that the North Koreans and the South Koreans were ” ONE”.

The cheer leader group composed of orchestra, singers and dancers shouted with the South Korean crowd:

“Oori-neun-ha-na-da” (We are One!)

The famous musical group Sam-ji-yeon of North Korea which presented a remarkable concert in Gang-neung city and Seoul included many South Korean songs in order to show that the Koreans are one through music and culture.

On April 1 and 2 the South Korean musical group went to Pyongyang and sang songs suitable for the concert theme: “We are One.” The beautiful harmony of incredible voices of singers from the North and the South made the Korean audience feel the “oneness.”

The theme of being one is repeated and even emphasized by the two summit stars, Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in.

They planted a pine tree, in the site of the summit, covering the tree with soil from Mt. Baekdu-san in the North and soil from Mt. Halla-san in the South.

They watered it with water from Han River of South Korea and Dae-dong River of North Korea.

The ideology of oneness means that North Koreans and South Koreans have the common destiny sharing pains and joy and fighting side by side common enemies.

However, in order that the oneness works, both Koreas should exercise fully their sovereignty in all areas of national life, especially in national defence.

Unfortunately, as pointed out in several occasions by Professor Michel Chossudovsky (see North Korea and the Danger of Nuclear War. The Demilitarization of the Korean Peninsula, Toward a Peace Agenda, Global Research, April 27, 2018) South Korea is the only advanced country of respectable size without full sovereignty in affairs of national defence.

South Korean armed forces are integrated into what is called “Combines Forces Command (CFC)” composed of South Korean and U.S. armed forces under the command of a U.S. general. Moreover, under the regime of Operation Control (OPCON) in times of war, it is the Americans who direct the war. It is clear that as long as this regime lasts, it is nearly impossible for Koreas to act as sovereign nation.

To sum up, the Kim-Moon summit was a great success for the following reasons.

First, it not only faithfully integrated all the North-South agreements contained in the two previous Declarations: Declaration-6.15 and the Declaration-10.04 but also it went further by adding new agreement identifying concrete measures needed for mutual non aggression and peace.

Second, the summit has produced surprising results related to denuclearization; the summit agreed to do “complete denuclearization” the roadmap of which will be determined at the long waited Trump-Kim summit.

Finally, we may add, as another contributing factor of the success, the personalities of the three stars. It appears that the courage, self-assurance and boldness of Kim Jong-un, the extraordinary diplomatic ability of Moon Jae-in and the aggressive bargaining talent of Donald Trump have all contributed to the success.

But, the most convincing contributing factor was, as far as I am concerned, the feeling and the conviction of “oneness” of South Koreans and North Koreans.

In the future, this conviction will make it possible for the two Koreas to go over differences in ideologies and political systems and to be united in the pursuit of peace and prosperity on the Korean peninsula.

*

Professor Joseph H. Chung is co-director of the Observatory of East Asia (OAE) of the Study Center for Integration and Globalization (CEIM) of Quebec University in Montreal (UQAM). He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Workers across the globe took to the streets for Labor Day celebrations, in numbers ranging from hundreds to tens of thousands.

Venezuela

Honduras

Colombia

USA

Brazil

“In our time,” wrote George Orwell in 1946, “political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.” British colonialism, the Soviet gulag and America’s dropping of an atomic bomb, he argued, “can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face.” So how do people defend the indefensible? Through “euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” By obscuring the truth.

So it is, more than 70 years later, with Israeli policy toward the Gaza Strip. The truth is too brutal to honestly defend. Why are thousands of Palestinians risking their lives by running toward the Israeli snipers who guard the fence that encloses Gaza? Because Gaza is becoming uninhabitable. That’s not hyperbole. The United Nations says that Gaza will be “unlivable” by 2020, maybe sooner.

Hamas bears some of the blame for that: Its refusal to recognize Israel, its decades of terrorist attacks and its authoritarianism have all worsened Gaza’s plight. Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority bears some of the blame too. So does Egypt.

But the actor with the greatest power over Gaza is Israel. Israeli policies are instrumental in denying Gaza’s people the water, electricity, education and food they need to live decent lives.

How do kind, respectable, well-meaning American Jews defend this? How do they endorse the strangulation of 2 million human beings? Orwell provided the answer. They do so because Jewish leaders, in both Israel and the United States, encase Israel’s actions in a fog of euphemism and lies.

The fog consists, above all, of three words — “withdrew,” “security” and “Hamas” — which appear to absolve Israel of responsibility for the horror it oversees.

Start with “withdrew.” Earlier this month, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, defended Israel’s shooting of mostly unarmed protesters by declaring that,

“We withdrew entirely from the Gaza Strip in August 2005, removing every Israeli resident, home, factory and synagogue. We are not responsible for the well-being of the people of Gaza.”

American Jewish leaders echo the claim. “Israel withdrew totally” from Gaza, wrote Kenneth Bandler, the American Jewish Committee’s director of media relations, last year. Thus, Palestinians rushing toward Gaza’s fence with Israel are the equivalent of Mexicans crossing the Rio Grande.

“No nation,” insists the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, “would tolerate such a threat” to its “sovereignty.”

These are anesthetizing fictions. Yes, Israel withdrew its settlers and soldiers in 2005. But Israel still controls Gaza. It controls it in the way a prison guard might control a prison courtyard in which he never actually sets foot.

First, Israel declares parts of Gaza off-limits to the people who live there. Israel has established buffer zones — it calls them Access Restricted Areas — to keep Palestinians away from the fence that separates Gaza from Israel. According to the United Nations, this restricted area has ranged over the past decade from 100 to 500 meters, comprising as much as one-third of Gaza’s arable land. People who enter these zones can — and over the years have been — shot.

In addition to barring Palestinians from much of Gaza’s best land, Israel bars them from much of Gaza’s water. In 1993, the Oslo Accords promised Gazan fisherman the right to fish 20 nautical miles off the coast. But since then, Israel has generally restricted fishing to between three and six nautical miles. (Occasionally, it has extended the boundary to nine nautical miles). Since sardines, which the United Nations calls Gaza’s “most important catch,” “flourish at the 6 NM boundary,” these limitations have been disastrous for Gazan fisherman.

The second way in which Israel still controls Gaza is by controlling its borders. Israel controls the airspace above Gaza, and has not permitted the reopening of Gaza’s airport, which it bombed in 2001. Neither does it allow travel to and from Gaza by sea.

Israel also controls most land access to Gaza. It’s true that — in addition to Gaza’s two active border-crossing points with Israel — it has a third, Rafah, with Egypt. But even here, Israel wields substantial influence. Asked this week about Hamas’s desire to repatriate the body of a dead operative via Rafah, Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett boasted,

“Could we prevent it? The answer is yes.”

This doesn’t excuse Egyptian leader General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who to his discredit, has largely kept the Rafah crossing closed since he took power in 2013. But even when Rafah is open, it isn’t a significant conduit for Gazan exports. As Sari Bashi of Human Rights Watch explained to me, there is little market in Egypt for goods from Gaza, both because those goods are expensive for Egyptian consumers and because transportation across the Sinai is difficult. So when it comes to goods leaving Gaza, the Strip is largely under Israeli control.

Finally, and perhaps most profoundly, Israel controls Gaza’s population registry. When a child is born in Gaza, her parents register the birth, via the Palestinian Authority, with the Israeli military. If Israel doesn’t enter her in its computer system, Israel won’t recognize her Palestinian ID card. From Israel’s perspective, she will not legally exist.

This control is not merely theoretical. If Israel doesn’t recognize your Palestinian ID card, it’s unlikely to allow you into, or out of, Gaza. And because Israel sees Palestinians as a demographic threat, it uses this power to keep the population in Gaza — and especially the West Bank — as low as possible. Israel rarely adds adults to the Palestinian population registry. That means that if you’re, say, a Jordanian who marries someone from Gaza and wants to move there to live with her, you’re probably out of luck. Israel won’t let you in.

Israel is even more zealous about limiting the number of Palestinians in the West Bank, where it still has settlers. So when Palestinians move from Gaza to the West Bank, Israel generally refuses to let them update their addresses, which means they can’t legally stay. Israel can even prevent children in Gaza from changing their address to the West Bank to live with a parent. Let’s say a child lives with her mother in Gaza but has a father in the West Bank. If the mother dies, and Israel deems there to be a suitable caretaker in Gaza, it can use that as grounds to deny the child the right to legally reunite with her father in the West Bank.

You won’t hear about this at the AIPAC Policy Conference. But in these and myriad other ways, Israel constrains the lives of virtually every person in Gaza. As the indispensable Israeli human rights group Gisha has observed:

“Gaza residents may not bring a crate of milk into the Gaza Strip without Israeli permission; A Gaza university cannot receive visits from a foreign lecturer unless Israel issues a visitor’s permit; A Gaza mother cannot register her child in the Palestinian population registry without Israeli approval; A Gaza fisherman cannot fish off the coast of Gaza without permission from Israel; A Gaza nonprofit organization cannot receive a tax-exempt donation of goods without Israeli approval; A Gaza teacher cannot receive her salary unless Israel agrees to transfer tax revenues to the Palestinian Ministry of Education; A Gaza farmer cannot get his carnations and cherry tomatoes to market unless Israel permits the goods to exit Gaza.”

Claiming that Israel divested itself of responsibility for Gaza when it “withdrew totally” in 2005 may ease American Jewish consciences. But it’s a lie.

It’s a lie that keeps American Jews from reckoning with the effect Israeli control has had on ordinary people. In three wars — in 2008-2009, 2012 and 2014 — Israeli bombing damaged roughly 240,000 Gazan homes. According to The New York Times, Operation Cast Lead alone, in 2008-2009, cost Gaza’s economy $4 billion, almost three times the Strip’s annual GDP. Operation Protective Edge in 2014 damaged or destroyed more than 500 schools and preschools, affecting 350,000 students.

This destruction, along with Gaza’s rapid population growth, has created a massive need for infrastructure and services. But Israel’s buffer zones and partial blockade make it impossible for the Strip to effectively rebuild. Over the past three years, Israel has, to its credit, loosened restrictions on goods coming in and out of Gaza. Still, the United Nations reports that, in large measure because of “continued export restrictions” and “restrictions on import of material and equipment necessary for local production[B3],” Gaza exported less than one-fifth as much in 2016 as it had in the first half of 2007.

The consequences of this economic collapse have been profound. According to the United Nations, roughly half the people in Gaza are “moderately-to-severely food insecure,” up 30% from a decade ago. Hospitals lack essential drugs. A shortage of teachers and buildings has forced many schools to run double and even triple shifts, which means many children attend school for only four hours a day. (By withholding donations to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which runs many of Gaza’s schools, the Trump administration will likely make this worse). Most people in Gaza receive only a few hours of electricity per day. Abbas — who in an effort to weaken Hamas last year slashed the amount he pays Israel for Gaza’s electricity — bears some of the blame for that. But so does Israel, whose export restrictions deny utility officials in Gaza the money to purchase sufficient fuel or to fully rebuild the Gaza power station Israel bombed in 2006.

Most alarming of all is Gaza’s dwindling supply of water. In 2000, 98% of Gaza’s residents had access to safe drinking water through its public water network. By 2014, the figure was down to 10%. Because overpumping has damaged the Strip’s coastal aquifer, the United Nations warned last year that “Gaza’s only water source will be depleted, and irreversibly-so by 2020, unless immediate remedial action is taken.” The best long-term solution is to build a new desalination plant. But Gaza has neither the electricity nor the money to do so. Israel is not a bystander in this catastrophe. It is a primary cause.

Security

If pressed on these realities, American Jewish leaders will concede that the suffering in Gaza is deeply unfortunate. But they will deploy a second term to justify the situation: “security.” Read statements on Gaza by AIPAC and The Anti-Defamation League and you’ll encounter the term “security blockade.” The implication is clear: Israel only harms people in Gaza when it is absolutely necessary to keep Israelis safe.

But this, too, is false. Certain elements of the blockade do have a plausible security rationale. Israel, for instance, restricts Gaza’s import of many “dual-use” products, from cement and steel to cranes, x-ray machines and smoke detectors to wood planks thicker than 5 centimeters to even the batteries and spare parts needed to power children’s hearings aids. The economic and humanitarian consequences of these restrictions are often grave. And Israel’s definition of “dual-use” is far broader than international standards. Still, most of the products Israel restricts could be used for attacks on Israel, so there’s a security rationale for restricting them.

One can also argue that Israel’s buffer zones and restrictions on fishing serve Israeli security. If Palestinians are kept away from the fence, the rockets they launch into Israel can’t travel as far. If Palestinian boats are kept nearer the coast, they are easier for the Israeli navy to track. Given the harm that these limits cause farmers and fishermen, Israel should pay them compensation. It should also compensate those Palestinians who suffer from Israel’s import restrictions. But whether one thinks these restrictions justify the human cost, it’s at least possible to divine the security rationale that underlies them.

When you examine Israel’s travel restrictions, however, and its restrictions on Gazan exports, AIPAC and the ADL’s security rationalizations largely collapse. With rare exceptions, students from Gaza cannot travel to the West Bank to study. Academics and researchers in Gaza cannot normally leave to attend international conferences, nor can foreign academics visit the Strip. Families in Gaza cannot travel to the West Bank or Israel proper to see their families unless a “first degree relative” (parent, child, sibling) gets married, dies or is about to die. Letting someone leave Gaza to visit his dying grandparent is an unacceptable security risk, evidently, while letting them leave to visit a dying parent is not.

Israel’s blockade on exports is similarly vast and arbitrary. Israel allows farmers in Gaza to sell tomatoes and eggplants to Israel but not potatoes, spinach and beans. It allows them to export 450 tons of eggplant and tomatoes per month but not more. Spinach, evidently, is more dangerous than eggplant. And 500 tons of eggplant and tomatoes are more dangerous than 450.

From a certain ultra-myopic perspective, even this has a security rationale. If you see every person leaving Gaza only as a potential terrorist and every container only as the potential hiding place for a bomb, then the fewer people and goods that leave Gaza for Israel or the West Bank (which unlike Gaza, still contains Israelis), the safer Israel is. What this ignores is that terrorism doesn’t only require opportunity; it also requires intent. And when you bankrupt a Gazan farmer by blocking his exports or crush a Gazan student’s dreams by denying her the chance to study abroad, you may breed the desperation and hatred that produces terrorism, and thus undermine the very Israeli security you’re trying to safeguard.

The dirty little secret of Israel’s blockade is that elements of it are motivated less by any convincing security rationale than by economic self-interest. In 2009, Haaretz exposed the way Israeli agricultural interests lobby to loosen restrictions on imports into Gaza when Israeli farmers want to sell surplus goods. In 2011, Israel found itself with a shortage of lulavs, the palm fronds that observant Jews shake on the holiday of Sukkot. So Israel lifted its ban on Gaza’s export of palm fronds. Had the security risk suddenly changed? Of course not. What had changed were the needs of Israeli consumers.

When you think about it, this isn’t surprising. The Israeli government is accountable to Israeli citizens. It’s not accountable to the people of Gaza, despite wielding enormous power over their lives. When governments wield unaccountable power, they become abusive and corrupt. Why does Israel maintain a blockade that is not only cruel but, in some ways, absurd? Because it can.

Hamas

Closely associated with the “security” justification is a third word that features prominently in American Jewish defenses of Israeli policy in Gaza: “Hamas.” AIPAC declared in a recent fundraising email that

“Hamas has a deliberate strategy: challenge Israel’s sovereignty, attack Israeli citizens while hiding behind the people of Gaza, and find new ways to threaten Israel’s very right to exist.”

The recent border protests, argued Anti-Defamation League head Jonathan Greenblatt, “featured literal calls by Hamas leaders in the crowds to march ‘on to Jerusalem,’ a theme consistent with the ideology of Hamas, which is to destroy the Jewish state.” From one side of their mouths, American Jewish leaders insist that Israel no longer controls Gaza. But when confronted with the control Israel actually wields, their justifications generally boil down to: “security” and “Hamas.”

Hamas is indeed a brutal and destructive force, to both Israelis and Palestinians. It has a long and ugly record of terrorist attacks. It does not recognize Israel. Its Islamist ideology is deeply oppressive, especially to women, LGBTQ Palestinians and religious dissenters.

But Hamas did not force Israel to adopt the policies that have devastated Gaza. Those policies represent a choice — a choice that has not only failed to dislodge Hamas, but has also created the very conditions in which extremism thrives.

In January 2006, four months after Israel withdrew its settlers from Gaza, Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem went to the polls to elect representatives to the Palestinian Authority’s parliament. (Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas was elected separately a year earlier). Hamas won only 45 percent of the vote. But because Fatah — the comparatively secular party founded by Yasser Arafat — ran multiple candidates in many districts, thus splitting the vote, Hamas gained 58 percent of the seats.

This presented Israel with a problem. In the 1970s and 1980s, Israeli leaders had actually viewed Palestinian Islamists as more moderate than the Fatah-dominated PLO, and therefore allowed them greater freedom to organize. In his book Gaza: A History, French scholar Jean-Pierre Filiu notes that in 1988 — a year after Hamas’s creation — one of the party’s cofounders, Mahmoud Zahar, met with Israel’s then-Foreign Affairs Minister Shimon Peres “to propose a tacit recognition of Israel in exchange for its withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967.”

But when the PLO publicly recognized Israel in 1988 and reaffirmed that recognition at the start of the Oslo Peace Process in 1993, Hamas’s rejectionism became impossible for Israel to ignore. Hamas denounced the PLO for recognizing Israel. And during the Oslo Process and the Second Intifada that followed, Hamas launched numerous terrorist attacks. It’s not surprising, therefore, that Israel did not welcome a Hamas-led government.

There were, however, signs that Hamas might be softening its opposition to two states. Just its decision to compete in the 2006 campaign — after boycotting previous Palestinian Authority elections on the grounds that they legitimized the Oslo Process — suggested a shift. In its 2006 election manifesto, Hamas made no reference to Israel’s destruction. It spoke instead about “the establishment of an independent state whose capital is Jerusalem.” After its surprise victory, Hamas leaders did not offer to recognize Israel. But Zahar did declare that, in return for “our independent state on the area occupied [in] ’67,” Hamas would support a “long-term truce” and “after that, let time heal.” (As former CIA official Paul Pillar has noted, a long-term truce is what today exists between North and South Korea, since no peace treaty officially ended the Korean War.) Another Hamas leader, Khaled Meshal, argued that,

“If Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders, there could be peace and security in the region.”

Hamas was likely following popular opinion. Exit polling by the Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki found that while Hamas benefited from frustration with Fatah’s corruption and failure to uphold law and order, 75% of Palestinian voters — and a remarkable 60 percent of Hamas voters — favored the two-state solution. Perhaps that explains why, after its victory, Hamas proposed a unity government with Fatah “for the purpose of ending the occupation and settlements and achieving a complete withdrawal from the lands occupied in 1967, including Jerusalem, so that the region enjoys calm and stability during this phase.”

Israel could have embraced this. Even in a unity government, Abbas — who had been elected separately — would have remained president. It was widely assumed that if he reached a peace agreement with Israel, Palestinians, like Israelis, would vote on it in a referendum. The crucial question, therefore, was not whether Hamas as a party endorsed the two-state solution. (After all, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party had never endorsed the two-state solution.) The crucial question was whether — if the Palestinian people formally endorsed a two-state deal — Hamas would respect their will (something Hamas later pledged to do). Had Hamas, or any other Palestinian faction, committed acts of violence, Israel would have retained the right to respond.

That was the path not taken. Instead, the United States and Israel demanded that Hamas formally foreswear violence, embrace two states and accept past peace agreements — a standard that Netanyahu’s own government does not meet. Hamas, which spent the Oslo years calling the PLO dupes for recognizing Israel without getting a Palestinian state in return, refused. So Washington and Jerusalem pressured Abbas to reject a national unity government and govern without a democratically elected parliament. Then, in 2007, the Bush administration encouraged Abbas’s national security advisor, Mohammed Dahlan, to oust Hamas from Gaza by force, a gambit that backfired when Hamas won the battle on the ground. And with Hamas now ensconced in power, Israel dramatically tightened its blockade of Gaza, which it has maintained — with modifications — ever since.

The result: Gaza has been devastated, and Hamas remains in power.

Which brings us to the current protests. The Israeli government’s American defenders insist that Israel cannot let thousands of demonstrators — some of them violent — tear down the fence and begin streaming toward the kibbutzes and towns on the other side. That’s true, but it misses the larger point. No government finds it easy to quell mass protests. The deeper question is always: What has that government done to address the grievances that sparked the protests in the first place? For more than a decade, Israel’s answer to the problem of Gaza has been collective punishment and terrifying force. For stretches of time, this has kept Gaza quiet. And it may again. In the coming weeks, Israeli soldiers may kill and maim enough protesters to scare the rest back into their prison enclave. But sooner or later, Gaza will rise again. And the longer Israel suffocates its people, the more desperate and vengeful their uprisings will become. A 10-year-old in Gaza has already endured three wars. According to the United Nations, three hundred thousand children in Gaza suffer from post-traumatic stress from the 2014 conflict alone. Do Israeli and American Jewish leaders really believe that brutalizing them even more by denying them adequate food, education, electricity and water will make them more likely to live in peace with Israel? By maintaining its blockade, Israel is not pushing Gaza’s next generation toward coexistence. It’s pushing it toward ISIS.

The alternative is a strategy built not on collective punishment but on hope. It would begin with dismantling much of the blockade. Israel has the right to search cargo entering and exiting leaving Gaza. It has the right to investigate people traveling to and from there — and to restrict their movement if it finds evidence they’re a threat. But there’s a vast difference between restricting the movement of particular individuals that you have reason to suspect of terrorism and restricting entire classes of people based on no individual suspicion at all. There’s a vast difference between restricting certain imports that could be used to construct tunnels or bombs and prohibiting the export of potatoes and beans. Except when there’s a clear, specific danger, Israel should allow the people of Gaza to study, travel, trade and gain the resources to live decent lives. Doing so would not only be humane. It would also be wise. Israel will be safer when people in Gaza have something to lose.

A strategy of hope would involve allowing (and even encouraging) Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem to hold free elections for the first time in more than 12 years. And that would require allowing Palestinians to vote for whichever party they choose. Israel has the right to retaliate if Hamas, or any other Palestinian faction, attacks it. It does not have the right to bar Palestinians from voting for parties that reject the two-state solution when Israelis do so all the time.

A strategy of hope would mean embracing the Arab Peace Initiative and the Clinton Parameters: a viable Palestinian state near the 1967 lines. It would mean ending settlement growth, and perhaps even paying settlers to move back inside the green line so as to keep hopes for a two-state solution alive.

Finally, a strategy of hope would require Israeli and American Jewish leaders to talk honestly about why 70% of the people in Gaza are refugees or descendants of refugees. Israeli and American Jews find it frightening that the Gaza protesters have labeled their demonstrations “The Great March of Return.” But surely Jews — who prayed for 2,000 years to return to the land from which we were exiled — can understand why Palestinians in Gaza might yearn for lands from which they were exiled a mere 70 years ago. That yearning does not make Palestinians anti-Semites or terrorists. If Moshe Dayan could express sympathy in 1956 for the inhabitants of “the refugee camps of Gaza” who have “seen, with their own eyes, how we have made a homeland of the soil and the villages where they and their forebears once dwelt,” why can’t today’s Israeli leaders acknowledge, and offer recompense for, the Nakba? Why is it considered inconceivable that Israel would permit the return of a single Palestinian refugee when, in 1949, a far more fragile Israel offered to readmit 100,000.

Netanyahu and Trump. But who makes it absurd? To a significant extent, we American Jews do. The organized American Jewish community doesn’t only conceal the truth about Gaza from itself. It lobbies American politicians to do the same. The American Jewish establishment exports its “euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness” to Washington. It excoriates politicians who dare to suggest that Israel bears some of the responsibility for Gaza’s suffering. In doing so, it helps to sustain Israel’s current policies and to foreclose alternatives.

The struggle for human decency, Orwell argued, is also a struggle for honest language. Our community’s complicity in the human nightmare in Gaza should fill every American Jew with shame. The first step toward ending that complicity is to stop lying to ourselves.

*

Peter Beinart is a Senior Columnist at The Forward and Associate Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York. He is also a Contributor to The Atlantic and a CNN Political Commentator.

 

Before anyone shouts us out for being a Russian supporting apologist Putinbot, it is important to get some facts right. Our position is that there’s no doubting that Russia has been undermining Western democracies with “active measures” such as propaganda and disinformation for a very long time. But then who hasn’t been doing this all over the world. The West has been doing that forever. Anyway, who needs Putin when we have Cambridge Analytica, SCL Elections and Facebook to overthrow important national decisions all by ourselves.

However, demonizing another country for the purposes of stoking up global tensions and destabilising the world order with a hidden agenda that is likely driven more out of geopolitical ambitions and providing a convenient cover for domestic crisis is frankly just plain dangerous.

Here is a classic disinformation and propaganda campaign cooked up by the West. But just before that we’d like to draw your attention to our report dated August 2016 entitled “The Biased Report that Led to Banning Russian Athletes” where investigative journalist Rick Sterling said

“On the basis of a report by Canadian lawyer Richard Mclaren (the “Mclaren Report”), the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has recommended the banning of all Russian athletes from the Rio Games. Before his report was even issued, Mclaren influenced the International Association of Athletic Federations (IAAF) in their decision to ban all Russian athletes from track and field events, including those who never failed any doping tests, in Russia or elsewhere.“

Turns out, our man Rick – was on the mark.

That Doping Programme

There were dozens of stories about the Russian state-sponsored doping programme spread daily that led to a mass ban of their athletes. Was this really about cleaning up international athletics, a true scandal inside the Russia sports machine or was this really just another Russiaphobia attack. Here are just two typical headlines you will likely remember.

BBC July 2016: Rio 2016: More Russian athletes banned from Olympics

Following a report conducted by Canadian law professor Richard McLaren,which said Russia operated a state-sponsored doping programme from 2011 to 2015, the International Olympic Committee ruled any Russian athlete who has served a doping ban will not be eligible for Rio 2016. So far, more than 110 of the 387-strong Russian team have been banned from the Games.

Daily Mail July 2016: ENTIRE Russian team of 387 athletes will be banned from competing at the Rio Olympics as punishment for their country’s state-sponsored doping programme

According to well-placed sources, the International Olympic Committee will punish all 387 Russian sportsmen and women in the strongest possible way after revelations of their country’s state-sponsored doping programme shocked the world. The country’s corrupt track and field stars have already been banned from the Games, and last week lost a desperate legal challenge to overturn that decision.

On April 26th, just last week, Reuters published a story that has gone literally no-where in the international mainstream media.

The headline reads: Nearly 1,600 doping rules violations in 2016 – WADA

(Reuters) – There were nearly 1,600 anti-doping rules violations (ADRV) in 2016 involving athletes and support staff from 117 nationalities across 112 sports with athletics top of the list, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) said in a report released on Thursday.

WADA said a total of 229,514 samples were collected in 2016 and analysed by WADA-accredited laboratories resulting in 1,595 ADRVs.

The vast major of adverse analytical findings (79 percent) were produced by male athletes (1,046) and were the results of results collected during in-competition testing (78 percent).

Italy topped the list of countries with the most ADRVs on 147 followed by France (86), the United States (76) and Australia (75).

Not satisfied that Russia did not end up being number one on the list, Reuters still needed to somehow toe the line with its last comment in its article.

“Russia, whose participation at the 2016 Rio Olympics and 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Games was restricted following an investigation which uncovered evidence of widespread state-sponsored doping, was tied for sixth with India on 69 ADRVs.”

There was no adverse media attention to Italy, nor France or the USA – and none were banned.

In fact, of 11,491 competitors, there were 95 athletes representing 52 countries in thirteen sports who competed in the Rio Summer Olympics who had been caught with a prior doping offence, the vast majority were caught within the previous 24 months.  All were sanctioned from competing for a defined period with the exception of one where the decision was overturned.

Russia had two on that list. These two athletes, swimmer Yuliya Yefimova and cyclist Olga Zabelinskaya, was exceptionally allowed to compete by the IOC after their ban was deemed “unenforceable” by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

America had six on that list.

On 7 August 2016, the IOC cleared 278 Russian athletes who all competed, while 111 were removed because of the scandal.

America sported 554 athletes in 30 sports and came home in third place with 46 gold medals, 37 silver and 38 bronze. Russia came fourth with 19 golds, 17 silver and 19 bronze.

18 American athletes were caught using banned or illegal substances during the 2016 games and according to this report entitled “US wins Olympic gold in doping” they were top of the doping league throughout the games.

World Cup

There’s a suspicious similarity between the banning of Russian athletes at the Rio Olympics and recent national headlines that the UK has been seeking to punish Russia after accusing it of mounting the Salisbury so-called Novichok nerve agent attack against double agent Sergei Skripal.

The Royal Family will shun the World Cup as part of the British response, so will many dignitaries from many Western countries and some celebrities getting in ‘on message’ and earning some ‘Brownie’ points on both sides of the Atlantic.

In a wholly inappropriate outburst, UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has likened Russia’s upcoming World Cup to “Nazi Germany’s Olympic Games in 1936.” One British MP has even called for the World Cup to be postponed or moved.

In the meantime, more than 40 FIFA officials and television executives are awaiting trial or have pleaded guilty to mass corruption causing chaos for world cup finances and potential sponsors have been put off by the negative media coverage of it. There is also growing tension between Putin and other world leaders due to the escalating Syria conflict. This world cup looks set to be a huge security threat to the Russian authorities.

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Featured image is from TruePublica.

The US aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman, which set sail from the world’s largest naval base in Norfolk (Virginia), entered the Mediterranean with its strike group.

The strike group consists of the guided-missile cruiser USS Normandy and the guided-missile destroyers USS Farragut, USS Forrest Sherman, USS Bulkeley, and USS Arleigh Burke. Two others, USS Jason Dunham and USS The Sullivans, will rejoin the strike group at a later date. German destroyer FGS Hessen is added to the Truman strike group.

The fleet, with more than 8,000 men on board, has an enormous firepower. The Truman – a supercarrier 300 meters long, equipped with two nuclear reactors – can launch 90 fighters and helicopters in consecutive waves. Its strike group, supplemented by 4 destroyers already in the Mediterranean and some submarines, can launch over 1,000 cruise missiles.

The US Naval Forces Europe-Africa – whose headquarters are located in Naples-Capodichino while the base of the Sixth Fleet is located in Gaeta – are thus strengthened. They are under the orders of the same admiral (currently James Foggo) who commands the Allied Joint Force Command Naples at Lago Patria.

The deployment of the US fleet in the Mediterranean is part of the overall strengthening of US forces in Europe, under the orders of the same general (currently Curtis Scaparrotti) who holds the position of Supreme Allied Commander in Europe.

In a congressional hearing, Scaparrotti explains the reason for the strengthening of US forces in Europe. What he presents is a real war scenario: he accuses Russia of carrying out “a campaign of destabilization to change the international order, fracture NATO and undermine US leadership around the world”.

After “the illegal annexation of Crimea by Russia and its destabilization of Eastern Ukraine”, the United States, which deploys over 60,000 troops in European Nato countries, has increased its posture in Europe by deploying an armored brigade combat team and a combat aviation brigade, and by pre-positioning equipment for additional armored brigade combat teams. At the same time the US doubled its maritime deployments to the Black Sea.

To strengthen its forces in Europe, the United States spent more than 16 billion dollars in five years. At the same time the US pushed the European allies to increase their military spending by 46 billion dollars in three years to strengthen the NATO deployment against Russia.

This is part of the strategy launched by Washington in 2014 with the putsch of Maidan and the consequent attack on the Russians of Ukraine: making Europe the first line of a new cold war to strengthen the US influence on its allies and hinder Eurasian cooperation. The NATO foreign ministers reaffirmed their consent on April 27, preparing a further expansion of NATO to the East against Russia through the entry of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Georgia and Ukraine.

This strategy requires an adequate preparation of public opinion. To this end, Scaparrotti accuses Russia of “using political provocation, spreading disinformation and undermining democratic institutions” even in Italy. He then announces that “the US and NATO counter Russian misinformation with truthful and transparent information”. In their wake, the European Commission announces a series of measures against fake news, accusing Russia of using “disinformation in its war strategy”.

It is to be expected that NATO and the EU will censor what is published here, by decreeing that the US fleet in the Mediterranean is a fake news spread by Russia in its “war strategy”.

Source: PandoraTV

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This article was originally published in Italian in Il Manifesto.

Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

In late 2005 CNN’s Christiane Amanpour interviewed Syrian president Bashar al-Assad ahead of the publication of a UN report on an investigation into the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former prime minster of Lebanon, on Valentine’s Day that year. Syria’s leader was at the time effectively tried and condemned in a trial-by-media as having ordered Hariri’s assassination, though there is to this day no conclusive evidence proving either Syrian or Lebanese government links with the massive bomb attack in Beirut that killed Hariri and 22 other people. In fact, the evidence strongly points to an Israeli hand in the murder. 

Given that Hariri’s death triggered a popular uprising known as the ‘Cedar Revolution’, which overthrew the pro-Syrian government in Beirut and led to Syrian troops being forced out of Lebanon after decades of peacekeeping since the Lebanese civil war, it’s difficult to see what possible motivation the Syrian government may have had for assassinating Hariri – though one can certainly see how certain other countries in the region may have benefited.

Having grilled Assad on his alleged involvement in that macabre deed, Amanpour went on to tell her interviewee, to his face, that the US government was ‘actively seeking’ to depose him by force:

“Mr President, the rhetoric of regime change is headed towards you from the United States. They are actively looking for a new Syrian leader. They are granting visas and visits to Syrian opposition politicians. They are talking about isolating you diplomatically and perhaps a coup d’état or your regime crumbling.”

From this published Wikileaks cable, we also know that the following year, in 2006, the top US diplomat in Syria believed that the goal of US policy there should be to destabilize the Syrian government, by any means available:

• that the US should work to increase Sunni-Shia sectarianism in Syria
• the US should try to strain relations between the Syrian government and other Arab governments, and then blame Syria for the strain
• the US should seek to stoke Syrian government fears of coup plots in order to provoke the Syrian government to overreact
• the US should work to undermine Syrian economic reforms and discourage foreign investment
• the US should seek to foster the belief that the Syrian government was not legitimate, and that violent protests in Syria were praiseworthy

And still there are those who believe that the US and its collaborators are NOT to blame for EVERY SINGLE DEATH over the past 7 years of bloody mayhem in Syria.

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Niall Bradley has a background in political science and media consulting, and has been an editor and contributing writer at SOTT.net for 8 years. His articles are cross-posted on his personal blog, NiallBradley.net. Niall is co-host of the ‘Behind the Headlines’ radio show on the Sott Radio Networkand co-authored Manufactured Terror: The Boston Marathon Bombings, Sandy Hook, Aurora Shooting and Other False-Flag Terror Attacks with Joe Quinn.

Featured image is from the author.

On May 2, the Syrian Military Intelligence detected and seized a weapon shipment, which was on its way from southern Syria to the besieged militants in the northern Homs countryside, according to the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA).

The shipment included dozens of US-made M72 LAW anti-tank rockets, dozens of mortar and RPG rounds, a Soviet-made Konkurs Anti-Tank Guided Missile (ATGM) and a large amount of ammunition for 12,7, 14,5 and 23mm machine guns.

Konkurs ATGM

A second shipment containing Israel-made medicine and medical supplies was seized by the Syrian Military Intelligence in the Damascus desert. The SANA said that the second shipment had also been on its way to the besieged militants in the Eastern Homs countryside.

More than 2,000 militants have been besieged by the SAA in the northern Homs countryside and parts of the southern Hama countryside since late 2012. Currently, the Damascus government is in the final stage of negotiations with the militants to lift the siege in exchange for the withdrawal of the terrorist elements.

Observers believe that these weapons and medical supplies are an attempt to encourage the besieged militants in northern Homs to reject any peaceful agreement. Some sources believe that the Israeli intelligence may be behind this failed attempt.

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All images in this article are from Damascus Now.

Total world military expenditure rose to $1739 billion in 2017, a marginal increase of 1.1 per cent in real terms from 2016, according to new figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). China’s military expenditure rose again in 2017, continuing an upward trend in spending that has lasted for more than two decades. Russia’s military spending fell for the first time since 1998, while spending by the United States remained constant for the second successive year. The comprehensive annual update of the SIPRI Military Expenditure Database is accessible from today at www.sipri.org.

‘Continuing high world military expenditure is a cause for serious concern,’ said Ambassador Jan Eliasson, Chair of the SIPRI Governing Board. ‘It undermines the search for peaceful solutions to conflicts around the world.’

After 13 consecutive years of increases from 1999 to 2011 and relatively unchanged spending from 2012 to 2016, total global military expenditure rose again in 2017.¹ Military spending in 2017 represented 2.2 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP) or $230 per person.

‘The increases in world military expenditure in recent years have been largely due to the substantial growth in spending by countries in Asia and Oceania and the Middle East, such as China, India and Saudi Arabia,’ said Dr Nan Tian, Researcher with the SIPRI Arms and Military Expenditure (AMEX) programme. ‘At the global level, the weight of military spending is clearly shifting away from the Euro–Atlantic region.’

​​​​​​China leads continued spending increase in Asia and Oceania

Military expenditure in Asia and Oceania rose for the 29th successive year. China, the second largest spender globally, increased its military spending by 5.6 per cent to $228 billion in 2017. China’s spending as a share of world military expenditure has risen from 5.8 per cent in 2008 to 13 per cent in 2017. India spent $63.9 billion on its military in 2017, an increase of 5.5 per cent compared with 2016, while South Korea’s spending, at $39.2 billion, rose by 1.7 per cent between 2016 and 2017.

‘Tensions between China and many of its neighbours continue to drive the growth in military spending in Asia,’ said Siemon Wezeman, Senior Researcher with the SIPRI AMEX programme.

​​​​​​Spending falls sharply in Russia, but rises in Central and Western Europe

At $66.3 billion, Russia’s military spending in 2017 was 20 per cent lower than in 2016, the first annual decrease since 1998.

‘Military modernization remains a priority in Russia, but the military budget has been restricted by economic problems that the country has experienced since 2014,’ said Siemon Wezeman.

Driven, in part, by the perception of a growing threat from Russia, military spending in both Central and Western Europe increased in 2017, by 12 and 1.7 per cent, respectively. Many European states are members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and, within that framework, have agreed to increase their military spending. Total military spending by all 29 NATO members was $900 billion in 2017, accounting for 52 per cent of world spending.

Higher spending by Saudi Arabia drives increase in the Middle East

Military expenditure in the Middle East rose by 6.2 per cent in 2017.² Spending by Saudi Arabia increased by 9.2 per cent in 2017 following a fall in 2016. With spending of $69.4 billion, Saudi Arabia had the third highest military expenditure in the world in 2017. Iran (19 per cent) and Iraq (22 per cent) also recorded significant increases in military spending in 2017.

‘Despite low oil prices, armed conflict and rivalries throughout the Middle East are driving the rise in military spending in the region,’ said Pieter Wezeman, Senior Researcher with the SIPRI AMEX programme.

In 2017 military expenditure as a share of GDP (known as the ‘military burden’) was highest in the Middle East, at 5.2 per cent. No other region in the world allocated more than 1.8 per cent of GDP to military spending.

US spending no longer in decline

World military spending 1988–2017. Data and graphic: SIPRI

The United States continues to have the highest military expenditure in the world. In 2017 the USA spent more on its military than the next seven highest-spending countries combined. At $610 billion, US military spending was unchanged between 2016 and 2017.

‘The downward trend in US military spending that started in 2010 has come to an end,’ said Dr Aude Fleurant, Director of the SIPRI AMEX programme. ‘US military spending in 2018 is set to rise significantly to support increases in military personnel and the modernization of conventional and nuclear weapons.’

​​​​​​Other notable developments

• China made the largest absolute increase in spending ($12 billion) in 2017 (in constant 2016 prices), while Russia made the largest decrease (–$13.9 billion).
• Military expenditure in South America rose by 4.1 per cent in 2017, mainly as a result of notable increases by the two largest spenders in the subregion: Argentina (up by 15 per cent) and Brazil (up by 6.3 per cent).
• Military spending in Central America and the Caribbean fell by 6.6 per cent in 2017, largely due to lower spending by Mexico (down by 8.1 per cent from 2016).
• Military expenditure in Africa decreased by 0.5 per cent in 2017, the third consecutive annual decrease since the peak in spending in 2014. Algeria’s military spending fell for the first time in over a decade (down by 5.2 per cent from 2016).
• Seven of the 10 countries with the highest military burden are in the Middle East: Oman (12 per cent of GDP), Saudi Arabia (10 per cent of GDP), Kuwait (5.8 per cent of GDP), Jordan (4.8 per cent of GDP), Israel (4.7 per cent of GDP), Lebanon (4.5 per cent of GDP) and Bahrain (4.1 per cent of GDP).

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Notes

¹ Unless otherwise stated, all figures for spending in 2017 are given in 2017 current US dollars. All percentage changes are expressed in real terms (constant 2016 prices).

² For countries in the Middle East for which data is available.

The writing had been on the wall for some time, but the outcome of the Italian election of March 4 shocked almost everyone by the extent to which the status quo was upended. The governing center-left Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party) was humiliated: its share of the vote fell nearly 7% compared to the previous general election in 2013 to just under 19%; its secretary, Matteo Renzi, would soon resign his post. The other big loser was Silvio Berlusconi, the dominant figure on the center-right for a generation. His party, Forza Italia (FI, Go Italy!) plunged from 21.6% to 14% and was displaced within the coalition by the increasingly xenophobic, often racist Lega (The League, formerly the Lega Nord or Northern League), which more than quadrupled its share of the vote since 2013, from 4.1% to 17.4%. Over the same period the Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S, Five Star Movement) had drawn 25.6% of the vote in its maiden appearance in 2013. But back then, the electoral law in force gave the center-left an artificial majority, barely averting parliamentary paralysis. In 2018, despite a new law designed to marginalize it, the M5S and its telegenic new 31-year-old standard-bearer, Luigi Di Maio, raked in 32.7% of the vote, making it Italy’s largest party by far.

It is hard to overstate the importance of these developments. In the early 1990s external events (the end of the Soviet Union and the acceleration of European integration) and internal ones (corruption scandals and the self-dissolution of the Italian Communist Party, PCI) combined to bring down the party system that had dominated Italian politics since the end of World War II. Instead of one bloc, the Christian Democrats (Democrazia Cristiana, DC) and their much smaller allies, permanently in power, while a Communist-led left was permanently relegated to the opposition, it was now possible to imagine left and right governments alternating in power, which the logic of the cold war had blocked for nearly half a century.

The Second Republic: New Parties and Coalitions

The party system that emerged from the wreckage promised further change, and was popularly dubbed the Second Republic.¹ As corruption scandals undermined the dominant parties of the First Republic, Berlusconi burst on the political scene. His FI party sprang up around his extensive media empire, its leadership composed of his own cronies plus refugees and opportunists from the ruins of the First Republic. He gave cover to, and helped accelerate, the moderation of the former neo-fascist party Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI, Italian Social Movement), which became a partner in an unlikely coalition that also included the Northern League, at the time a secessionist, anti-southern movement. Despite rough patches, Berlusconi managed to hold together quite disparate interests successfully enough to form four governments, including the longest-lived one in the history of the republic. He was less successful in his effort to create a single party out of a mixed bag of interests and traditions, but since the turn of the century, self-interest kept these forces together in a sometimes unstable alliance.

On the center-left, the bulk of the former PCI leadership became the core of an alliance that ran from parts of the far left to former left-wing Christian Democrats as well as centrists repelled by Berlusconi’s coalition. Here, too, efforts to turn a heterogeneous alliance into something more permanent were not just unsuccessful, but marked by constant infighting, including a number of splits. These public squabbles did little to attract new adherents and certainly did nothing to help the historic left’s already eroding cultural and organizational legacy. By 2007, when the Democratic Party of the Left (the initial successor to the bulk of the PCI) dropped the ‘Left’ from its name little remained of what had once been the largest communist party in the western world. Those remnants now exist in uneasy alliance with what remains of the left wing of the Christian Democrats. And groups to the left of the Democrats have had extremely limited success, due partly to electoral systems that punish small parties, but also to their own fragmentation and rather tired image.

Thus, by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Italian party system consisted almost entirely of parties that would have been unrecognizable twenty years earlier. Yet the goal of producing a bipolar system where governments of the (center-) right and (center-) left could alternate in power without undue trauma had seemingly been achieved, and in this sense the so-called Second Republic appeared consolidated. But this was all called into question in 2013, and five years later it was definitively blown apart. If it took the First Republic nearly half a century to collapse, the Second has been dispensed with in half that time as a sometimes artificially-sustained bipolar equilibrium has given way to a tripolar system that is anything but stable. And for all the differences that ended each, the epitaph for both could read ‘Died of Popular Disgust with Politics as Usual’.

This brief summary raises obvious questions: How to explain the dynamics of the Italian situation? And to what extent is Italy’s experience similar to that of other capitalist countries?

The Center-Left: Phase I

Because the left was dominated by the Communists during the First Republic, Italy never had a major social democratic party. After the PCI’s fraught, drawn-out dissolution in 1991, none of its successors was even called ‘socialist’ or ‘social democratic’. This reflected distinctively Italian considerations,² but also an ambitious vision: to produce a reborn, post-cold war left that could finally transcend old labels and traditions. (Moreover, by the early 1990s social democracy, battered by a decade of neoliberalism, was hardly in robust health.) As things turned out, rejecting labels did nothing to help the party avoid the fate of the mainstream left elsewhere. It could claim a victory of sorts when Massimo D’Alema, a former PCI leader who had been instrumental in dissolving the party and trying to get it to follow a Third Way path, became Prime Minister in 1998, the first former Communist to head the government of a NATO country. But efforts to jettison a Communist past while having nothing solid to fall back on, combined with the peculiarities of the Italian political system, did nothing to spare what remained of the main body of the PCI from the broader crisis of the left.

To take a telling example: Desperate to legitimize itself, the Democratic Party of the Left (later the Left Democrats, now the Democratic Party) and its allies became Italy’s biggest cheerleaders for European integration. Until, that is, the crisis of 2008. By the time the Democrats started taking a more critical stance vis-à-vis the EU’s unrelenting austerity policies, they had been outflanked on both the left and the right by moderate to extreme Euro-skeptics making their own complaints look timid at best.

The post-communist identity crisis also played itself out in dramatic fashion regarding the type of party that was supposed to help generate a revitalized left. There was sharp internal debate within this once formidably organized party over whether the old ways of doing politics had been rendered obsolete, and needed to give way to a ‘lighter’ or more ‘liquid’ party structure. The debate was partly decided by the judgment of history: maintaining robust structures and flanking organizations requires considerable human and financial input, and both were in decreasing supply by the end of the century. But as the very name ‘Democratic Party’ shows, the contest was also settled by conscious design. Reference to the American case is transparent, and many parallels can be drawn with the leadership style of Tony Blair and New Labour, including increased emphasis on leaders’ personalities, greater attention to the media (and less attention to what remained of the mass membership), and a focus on style over substance.

Moreover, the new party was in a paradoxical situation with respect to its erstwhile allies on the center-left, especially those who came from non-communist, Catholic and laical traditions. If an ally was to obtain a safe seat in an election campaign (or be placed high on a proportional list, depending on the electoral system of the moment), its success would depend on the numerous former Communist militants in the ‘red zones’ of central Italy who could be counted on to turn out the vote. Yet the very existence of these resources reinforced suspicions that the PCI’s heirs harbored hegemonic designs over whatever new political formation might be in the offing.

Historical subjects can only construct something out of the raw material at hand, in the setting in which they find themselves. Even under favorable circumstances such as a rising progressive tide, it would have been a daunting task to reshape the Italian left into a solid, unified party or even a broad federation of some sort. And the 1990s represented a conjuncture that was anything but favorable for the left, in Italy or elsewhere. Whatever misreadings of the times and outright blunders, and they were many, can be attributed to the mainstream Italian left, we cannot ignore the reality in which it was forced to operate. Despite its distinctive history and efforts to strike out on a new path, its trajectory would be strikingly similar to that of other mainstream social democratic parties, whether of long-standing, like Labour under Blair or the German SPD, or of more recent vintage, like the French Socialists.

The Second Republic’s Unkept Promises

The above summary provides a minimal context for understanding the challenges that faced the mainstream left in the Second Republic. A more extended discussion of the entire period would take us far from our present task. Suffice it to say, for our purposes, that the dynamic described above persisted for nearly 25 years, marked, as already noted, by center-right and center-left governments alternating in office, something taken for granted in other capitalist democracies, but unprecedented in Italy until 1996. Equally novel was the composition of the major parties that sat in parliament: by the first decade of the twenty-first century, those that could be traced back to the First Republic had changed dramatically, and the rest were completely new.

What was not new were old patterns of unending squabbles and back-biting on both the left and right. Moreover, the erosion of old political labels produced an unprecedented number of politicians who switched affiliations once in parliament, a cynical, age-old practice known as trasformismo. Such rank opportunism obviously did nothing to increase the already-low esteem in which the political class was held. And some improvements are relative at best. Governments no longer fall every nine months, as they used to: they now last two years.

But the Second Republic was supposed to put an end to the vices of the First, in particular to in-fighting in Rome over issues opaque to ordinary citizens. That it fell far short of this goal is a key reason that the Second Republic lost whatever good will it once enjoyed. To be sure, there were times when a ‘normal’ alternation took place: incumbents lose an election, and the opposition takes over (1994, 1996, 2001, 2006, 2008). But most recently (2013 and 2018), no clear winning majority emerged. Even more often, the prime minister has resigned for reasons that evoked memories of the First Republic (1995, 1998, 2000, 2008, 2011, 2014, 2016). Moreover, on three additional occasions (1993, 1995, 2011) generally at the instigation of the President of the Republic, independent ‘technocratic’ governments have been installed, in a caretaker role until new elections to avoid risking destabilizing the country (or unduly frightening markets). These ‘abnormal’ cabinet shuffles became increasingly frequent in the past decade, which, not coincidentally, has witnessed an intensification of anti-establishment political trends.

The Center-Left’s Last Chance

This increasing instability and turnover mainly reflected the internal strife of the largest party on the left as it groped for a clear identity. As it morphed from the Party of the Democratic Left (PDS) to the Left Democrats (DS) to the plain and simple Democratic Party (PD), the main descendant of the PCI kept projecting a somewhat out-of-focus image, constantly evoking a ‘reformism’ that it never defined, even as it inexorably moved rightward. At times more social democratic in its leaders’ ambitions, and at other times a vaguer amalgam of ideas and traditions, the party stumbled along with the consequences for its organization and social influence that were noted above. But for all this, it nonetheless remained the unquestioned core of any plausible alternative to Berlusconi’s center-right coalition.

The 2013 elections seemed to signal a turning point when the center-left blew a lead that had appeared insurmountable when the campaign opened. The M5S actually gained several thousand more votes than the PD, making it the single largest party in the country. However, the electoral law provided a bonus that guaranteed majority to the party or coalition that obtained the most votes for the Chamber of Deputies. Because the center-left met this criterion with just under 30% of the total, it obtained a majority of the seats.³ No such bonus existed for the smaller but equally powerful Senate, so the only way to avoid an immediate return to the polls was a heterogeneous ‘Grand Coalition’ that went from the PD to Berlusconi. Only when part of Forza Italia broke away did the PD and its allies finally gain clear majorities in both chambers.

This is the context in which the meteoric rise of Matteo Renzi to the leadership of the PD and then the prime minister’s office took place. His native Florence, the capital of once deep-red Tuscany, was his political springboard. He came late to the PD when his group, descendants of the left wing of the Christian Democratic Party, merged with the Left Democrats to form the PD. He rose rapidly in electoral politics and in the organization of the Florentine party. His unbridled ambition and often ruthless tactics alienated many in the party establishment: he called for dumping the established leadership (using the term for junking an old car when acquiring a new model, rottamazione). He was also highly critical of the unions, which he blamed for clinging to outmoded ideas and defending protected workers while ignoring Italy’s extremely high levels of youth unemployment and underemployment.

Renzi’s initial effort to lead the PD was thwarted in a primary to become the party’s prime ministerial candidate for the 2013 elections. Undeterred, he launched a second, successful, challenge, this time for the role of PD secretary late in 2013. The party’s turmoil is eloquently reflected in the fact that this made him the PD’s fifth leader in six years.⁴ He then wasted no time undermining his own party’s prime minister, and within two months had basically driven him from office. At 39, Renzi became the youngest prime minister in Italian history.

Promising dramatic change, he hit the ground running, giving Italy its youngest-ever cabinet and most equitable gender balance. He also appointed women, for the first time, to head some of the country’s largest state-run conglomerates. Benefitting from the sense that there was indeed a fresh political wind blowing, a mere three months after taking office Renzi led the PD to an unprecedented 41% showing in the 2014 elections to the European Parliament. This was a full 15% more than its total a year earlier. Equally notable is that the M5S fell by 4%, while Forza Italia, suffering breakaways on both flanks, lost more than half its previous support. Given fresh options, Italian voters across the spectrum were clearly taking them.

Renzi also adopted a more critical stance toward the EU than his predecessors, reflecting the negative impact of EU austerity policies and the increasingly explosive immigration/refugee crisis. Italy’s geography makes it particularly vulnerable to migratory flows, above all when land routes through Turkey are closed off (and the EU had paid the Turks to block their borders with Greece). At that point, the flow from North Africa, and especially Libya, grew enormously.⁵ The EU did try to ease pressure on Italy by appealing to European solidarity and assigning quotas of asylum seekers to member countries. But this was openly opposed by some and studiously ignored by most of the rest. The EU also tried to discourage Italy from its rescue missions at sea, arguing that these encouraged migrants to continue crossing the Mediterranean, an argument the government initially rejected, although it eventually tightened its policies in the course of 2017, dramatically reducing crossings from Libya.

Given the center-left’s historic commitment to European integration, Renzi’s freedom to maneuver financially was severely constrained, not least because the European Central Bank (headed, as it happened, by an Italian, Mario Draghi) had actually cut Italy a good deal of slack, particularly compared to its treatment of Greece. In short, this was a liability about which he could do very little; it would cost the governing parties dearly. To a significant extent, the same is true with respect to the migration/refugee dilemma.

While these problems largely fell outside Renzi’s control, he would also come to be vexed by dilemmas entirely of his own making. The first is his personality and leadership style, both inside the PD and in the government. Self-confident (and self-promoting) to an abrasive fault, he won considerable support within the party as he set about reshaping it in his own image. But he surrounded himself with loyalists as he openly scorned traditions and people he considered ready for the scrap heap. In the place of these old impediments to modernization, Renzi articulated an extremely fuzzy vision of a ‘Party of the Nation’. A personalized leadership style inevitably produces personal animosities, which is precisely what occurred. Playing on the Italian acronym for the Democratic Party (Pd), his critics began referring to the Party of Renzi (PdR).

Renzi’s second self-inflicted problem goes by the revealing name ‘Jobs Act’, presented with an English title, and enacted late in 2014. This carried an earlier (2011) ‘flexicurity’ reform of the labour market much farther. Some measures in support of precarious workers were reasonable and long overdue. But pressure from the European Central Bank and the EU also pushed the Jobs Act in more neoliberal directions. This was most evident with respect to guarantees of job security, resented by management and fiercely defended by the unions.

When the Jobs Act took aim at these protections and also relaxed restraints on employers’ ability to monitor their workers, bringing Italian legislation more in line with the rest of the major countries in the EU, it met ferocious opposition from the unions as well as what remained of the left wing of the PD. While some of its elements were unique to Italy, this legislation also bore numerous similarities to labour market reforms that had been carried out, or that would soon be carried out, in Germany, France, and Spain: Renzi openly invoked the German Hartz IV reforms as an inspiration.⁶ He insisted that a more open labour market would increase employment, especially among young people; create more open-ended (versus temporary) contracts; and ensure that more full-time permanent positions would be created. Over the next several years, to no one’s surprise save perhaps Renzi’s, none of these assurances were realized. For instance, predictably, employers leaped at the tax write-offs given to encourage short-term hirings, but then found ways to back out of their commitment to turn these into more permanent positions.⁷ And there was no discernible surge in employment, among young people or generally, that could be traced to the legislation’s impact.

The third of Renzi’s self-inflicted problems cost him his position as prime minister. The immediate cause of his resignation was the rejection in December 2016, by popular referendum, of a number of modifications to the Italian constitution passed in April of that same year after a long, protracted parliamentary struggle.⁸Public opinion initially strongly supported the proposals, but a hotly contested campaign began to swing opinion; when Renzi then threatened to resign if the No vote prevailed, it became a referendum on him. This is clear from the fact that the proposed package of reforms was decisively defeated (59-41) even though polls showed that small majorities favored every one of the most controversial items in the package.

This was not simply a public judgement on Renzi, although that certainly was a factor. While many proposed changes made sense, the package, taken as a whole, appeared to shift considerable power into the hands of the central government. This produced principled, as well as opportunistic, opposition in many quarters. Numerous proposals were touted as guaranteeing increased ‘efficiency’, but made many legal experts leery of the strengthening of executive power. Another aggravating factor was that a brand-new electoral law had just been passed that would have provided yet another generous bonus in seats to guarantee the winning coalition a strong majority. A locked-in majority in a streamlined legislature with a strengthened executive was simply too much for many politicians and constitutional experts. (The left wing of the PD actively campaigned against the proposed reforms on these grounds, although by then extreme personal animosity toward Renzi played a major role as well.)

Finally, keep in mind the context in which these debates took place: the most recent elections had seen Renzi and the PD rack up 41% of the vote. Renzi was thus the likely chief beneficiary of these changes in the immediate sense. But many opposed these changes on grounds that went well beyond personalities. They worried in principle about a system that might turn much more centralized power over to an extremist, or an untested demagogue, a not entirely implausible scenario given increasingly volatile election results.

Why would Renzi take such a gamble? One reasonable explanation is that he mistook the 41% vote in the European elections as a personal vote of confidence that he could continue to draw upon, rather than understanding it as a powerful, but less personal, desire for change. In short, his overweening self-confidence, not to mention arrogance, finally caught up with him. A more generous interpretation, not entirely at odds with the above, is that Renzi believed so strongly in the proposed constitutional changes that he would put his job on the line, unaware of how unpopular he had become. Either way, the result showed that Renzi had dissipated his and his party’s political momentum.

His behavior in the immediate aftermath of the referendum hardly suggests chastened self-examination. Although he resigned as prime minister, he held onto the role of party secretary, and continued to try to reinforce his own position and that of his supporters inside the organization. The result was an ever-more-toxic atmosphere that was only partly resolved when he finally gave up his position as secretary in the aftermath of the 2018 election. And while the PD turned in on itself in the sort of settling of accounts that often follows a defeat, the broader political environment, with its rising populist tide, continued to evolve.

To the Left of the PD

As for other political forces on the left, the 2018 elections provided scant comfort to those who hoped that the PD’s neoliberal reform of the labour market, along with its effort to produce a more executive-friendly constitution, would provide space for a more radical option to affirm itself. After all, even when Renzi’s PD scored an historic high 41% in the 2014 European elections, a coalition of several left groups running under the label ‘The Other Europe With Tsipras’ had gotten just over 4% of the vote, along with a handful of seats. The reasoning was that there surely was now more space to the left of the PD in 2018, given its record in office.

As things turned out, if such space existed, explicitly left-wing formations – and there were many of them – failed to take advantage of it. In fact, whether one uses the 2013 general election or the 2014 European vote as a benchmark, there was no meaningful change in the proportion of the vote won by these groups. The strongest of them is Liberi e Uguali (LeU, Free and Equal), which made it over the 3% threshold (by 0.4%), winning 14 seats in the lower chamber. LeU is extremely heterogeneous. It consists of several groupings of former leaders who peeled away from the PD at different times, usually depending on when their tolerance for the Democrats’ rightward drift, or Renzi’s leadership, drove them out. It also contains remnants of other groups, some of them quite prominent at one time or another: Rifondazione Comunista, formed when the PCI’s left wing refused to go along with its dissolution; left-wing Greens; and important trade union leaders. Finally, LeU also served as an umbrella of sorts for a number of smaller left-wing or secular groups that did not want to throw their support away, given the 3% minimum required for a list to enter parliament. With all these components, it is difficult to stick a neat label on LeU, but ‘social democratic/Green with populist elements’ makes up in accuracy what it lacks in elegance.⁹

Finally, on the far left of the Italian political spectrum, there is Potere al Popolo (Power to the People), distinctive for the sheer number of different groups that make it up, ranging from those who still identify as communist (including what remains of the left wing of Rifondazione Comunista) down to myriad local left-wing organizations with no formal associational affiliation.¹⁰ Despite putting forward veteran leftist figures and several prominent cultural figures as candidates, and strongly identifying with Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn and Jean-Luc Mélenchon (leader of La France Insoumise), Potere al Popolo presents itself as speaking for Italy’s young people, particularly those who are poor, dispossessed and most vulnerable to Italy’s (and Europe’s) exploitative, repressive and discriminatory structures. It received 370,000 votes in 2018, or 1.1% – well below the minimum threshold to enter parliament.

How can we explain such a weak showing by these left-wing groups? One fairly obvious explanation is that, however ‘objectively’ favourable conditions might have seemed for a militant left-wing appeal, it mattered a great deal who was voicing that appeal. Aside from presenting an extremely fragmented image, LeU and even Potere al Popolo, put forward many of the same old faces that had seemingly been populating the left forever. The hoped-for social and political dynamics that had produced Podemos in Spain, the Left Bloc in Portugal or Syriza in its more heady days in Greece, failed to materialize. And that brings us to another explanation for the terribly weak showing by all groups to the left of the PD: the frustration and outright rage against the status quo was channeled into a much more powerful populist protest, in the form of the Five Star Movement.

Populism of the Left, Right, and Center

Italy’s historical lack of a social democratic party made it distinctive in one way; more recently, it has gained another distinction, not for what it lacks, but for what it has in greater abundance than anywhere else in the west: significant populist movements and parties.

‘Populism’ is both a slippery and elastic term about which there is broad disagreement over important issues: Is it – necessarily – anti-pluralistic? Anti-democratic? Essentially authoritarian? A form of exclusionary identity politics? The list could go on. Here I will limit myself to a few generalizations agreed upon by most students of the phenomenon, with the understanding that I am not proposing some grand synthesis, but rather am simply drawing on the ideas and concepts I find most useful.¹¹ Key among these are strong anti-establishment and anti-elitist appeals, and strong, often charismatic leaders. As the root of the term reveals, their dominant ‘frame’, to use current sociological terminology, is to speak in the name of ‘the people’. But ‘the people’ can be framed quite broadly, against elites, or distant institutions, or in exclusionary terms, against ‘The Other’, however defined. It is also the case that, whatever the claims, these movements (movement-organizations is more precise) tend to be characterized by one-way communication, as the leader speaks in the name of everyone.

The above is not a check-list of what makes for an ideal-type populist movement. These are, rather, traits that, in various combinations and to various degrees, are found in such movements. Those familiar with the literature will notice some omissions on my part. For instance, I don’t view populist movements as necessarily anti-democratic, nor as always articulating exclusive truth claims, unless ‘truth’ is defined so broadly as to be meaningless. And while right-wing populism has drawn most recent attention, there are numerous historical as well as contemporary left-wing variants as well.

With these points in mind, a quick survey of the Italian scene is in order. No one who has read this far should be wondering why Italy, of all countries, should stand out for the number and extent of populist political forces. The implosion of the First Republic’s party system, followed by the wheel-spinning of the Second’s, created the sort of political soil in which all sorts of new political formations could thrive, and this is exactly what happened.

Lega: The Northern League (Lega Nord, LN) brought together several regionalist movements in northern Italy that had arisen in the 1980s. Certain themes remained constant throughout its evolution, especially resentment of what was seen as a corrupt central government all too eager to squander the taxes paid by hard-working northerners, small-business people and workers alike. Some local leagues were ethnocentric from the start as well as being classically anti-‘Big Government’, a trait they all initially shared. As it evolved as a political party, the LN revealed impressive shape-shifting skills, trying out and adopting different identities in response to changing conditions. Because its strength was so geographically concentrated, the LN’s impact was always much greater than its national vote percentages might suggest. For example, it has governed cities as large as Milan and Genoa, and headed the regional governments of Lombardy and the Veneto, where its strength remains greatest even as it has expanded into the rest of the North-Center.¹²

The Northern League initially claimed to embody European culture and values, in contrast to what it denounced as the lazy, welfare-dependent south, seen as more Mediterranean or, taking up a classically Italian form of bigotry, as ‘North African’. From a cluster of highly localistic organizations, it evolved into a separatist movement calling for the independence of an imaginary ‘Padania’, named for the Po River’s environs. From separatist, it became federalist as it evolved from opposition to participation in center-right governments. This evolution also witnessed a change from a free-market anti-tax stance to one of ‘welfare chauvinism’: welfare benefits (within reason) are fine, as long as they go to ‘people like us’, not outsiders. The League also grew increasingly hostile to the EU, ultimately calling for Italy to leave not only the Eurozone, but the Union. For the 2018 elections, the LN dropped ‘Northern’ from the name on its party list, presenting itself as a nationalistic bulwark against European encroachment, openly making common cause with the likes of the extreme-right French National Front and Dutch Party for Freedom. Over time, its’ always present law-and-order, ethnocentric, anti-Muslim, and overtly racist positions became increasingly pronounced. It now calls for the immediate expulsion of all undocumented immigrants, not distinguishing migrants from refugees.

Its growth has hardly been smooth. Until 2018, its electoral support ranged from 4 to 10%, but leadership struggles in 2011, and a financial scandal in 2012, seemed to threaten its very survival.¹³ Even after changing leaders and adopting harder-line positions under its current leader, Matteo Salvini, its fortunes only improved modestly. It did, however, begin to improve its support in areas that bordered its northeastern strongholds, particularly as Berlusconi’s undisputed leadership of the center-right began to wane (see below). And its visibility and popularity was given a huge boost when, in 2017, it promoted (non-binding) referendums that demanded greater autonomy for Lombardy and the Veneto. Nonetheless, almost no one foresaw anything like the dramatic increase in the Lega’s vote to more than 17% in 2018.

These numbers show that the League’s rightward, increasingly racist evolution clearly paid off, as it profited from growing anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-European sentiment. The center-right alliance had already shifted rightward before 2018, and the center of gravity within the alliance has now moved even farther right as the League displaced Berlusconi’s Forza Italia as the largest component of the three-party group. (The third and smallest member of the coalition, the Fratelli d’Italia or Brothers of Italy (FdI), the harder-line remnants of the former neo-fascist party, captured a bit over 4% of the vote, more than doubling their previous showing – see below.)

Forza Italia: ‘Populist’ is not the first, or even the second, thing that comes to mind when hearing the name of the billionaire media mogul and four-time prime minister who owes his control over Italy’s private TV networks to his First Republic political connections. Moreover, his political base grew out of anything but a grass-roots movement. It was grounded in his advertising empire, enabling him to penetrate every corner of the country when he launched the political organization he named after the cheer for the national soccer team.¹⁴ In 2018, Berlusconi presented himself as a bulwark on the center-right against irresponsible populists like the Five Star Movement and the League (his coalition partner), but suffered huge losses.

But no understanding of the Italian political system in the last 25 years is possible without understanding how Berlusconi turned himself into this period’s dominant political figure by riding waves of popular discontent and turning them to his own benefit.¹⁵ As the center of the political spectrum disintegrated, he emerged as the one person who could counter the threat of a victory for the left. His understanding of mass media, not to mention his personal media empire, enabled him to use television to great effect, projecting directly into people’s homes the reassuring image of a confident, successful businessman who understood common folks’ concerns. Once in office, he gained control over the major public networks as well, guaranteeing constant and overwhelmingly positive coverage.

His control over, and use of, mass media meant Berlusconi didn’t have to rely on mass rallies and other forms of overt mobilization. Instead, he could project a ‘soft’ populism. Not that this spared Italy heavy doses of demagoguery, including (literal) self-description as the country’s savior. He immodestly shared with the country that he felt ‘anointed by the Lord’. And while he would eventually have numerous refugees from the discredited parties of the First Republic surrounding him in office, his initial political forays stressed his own and his associates’ professionalism and extraneousness to established politics. These were hard-working businesspeople, far from the self-serving politicians who had brought the country to the brink of chaos, another classic populist theme.

Berlusconi thus put forward a respectable, mainstream populism, a moderate alternative to the crudeness (and localism) of the League, while at the same time offering the reassurance of a break with the past. That less than six months after Berlusconi and his cronies cobbled it together Forza Italia garnered over 20% of the vote, making it the largest party in the first election of the Second Republic, testifies to the remarkable success of the project.

These events, and those that followed, also underscore how Italian populism has displayed what astute observers have called ‘mutating populism’, a dynamic in which these movements interact with, and feed off, each other.¹⁶ The very fact that Berlusconi became the unquestioned power broker of the center-right in the Second Republic also meant that, willy-nilly, he was now part of an establishment that others could attack. For example, as his League coalition partners, not to mention the former neo-fascists, took ever-more-strident positions against immigrants, he responded by taking a more right-wing tack himself. The same occurred with respect to his partners’ growing nationalism and anti-European attitudes. But since he also wanted to represent the most mainstream voice on the center-right, his options were limited: in any event, he could hardly outflank the League and ex-neofascists on the right. Finally, although he had made so many comebacks that no one completely dismissed his chances in 2018, the results suggest that many voters had finally had enough of an 81-year-old who had been around for a quarter-century.

Movimento Cinque Stelle: The dimensions of its success, just over 25% of the vote in its first appearance in the 2013 general election, shocked everyone. But no one who had been paying attention to the M5S could be completely surprised. Beppe Grillo, a comedian who remains its driving spirit, had been a well-known political gadfly since the 1980s. From the mid-2000s his blog and use of social media, in collaboration with an internet consulting firm, had drawn tens of thousands of followers. So did his (in)famous ‘V-Day’ rallies in 2007 and 2008. These are notorious for the crudest of the V’s used to name the gatherings: vaffanculo, or ‘fuck off’, which Grillo would shout and his delighted audience would echo.¹⁷ Ventilation of anti-establishment feelings aside, the rallies were meant to generate grass roots initiatives for legislation on term limits, bans on politicians with criminal convictions, and favoring an electoral system that allowed voting for specific candidates as opposed to closed lists. His blog had been a success for some time, but the rallies persuaded Grillo that he could create a mass movement that combined old-fashioned practices alongside modern social media.¹⁸

The organization was formally launched in 2009 as a ‘non-association’ with a ‘non-Statute’. Despite these quasi-anarchic airs, and a stated commitment to equality and participatory democracy, the M5S has always been tightly controlled by Grillo and, at most, a few hand-picked associates. His ‘excommunication’ of officeholders or activists who dare to cross him has been frequent, and public. And any commitment to democracy ends abruptly at, literally, the ownership of the ‘movement’: it is a corporation formally registered in Grillo’s name and he has exclusive rights to the use of its logo.¹⁹

Democratic or not, at the outset the M5S did resemble the new social movements far more than any political party. And in its early years, it could unambiguously be labeled a left-populist formation. It had a clear left-green profile, espousing an environmental, anti-globalist, progressive populism that also emphasized civil liberties.²⁰ But a once-chummy relationship with the mainstream left soon cooled under constant attacks from Grillo, who had no time for any of the established parties. Still, progressive positions remained prominent and in some cases even expanded: the 2018 electoral program advocated an assault on poverty by providing a basic guaranteed income for job-seekers with certain ‘flexicurity’ provisions, as well as a minimum guaranteed pension to those below a poverty threshold. At the same time, the M5S also began to espouse right-wing positions, particularly regarding immigration and law-and-order. It is common for modern populist movements (often deceptively) to insist they are neither left nor right. In the case of the latter-day evolution of the M5S, there is something to the claim.

To be sure, its more right-wing positions are softer than those of the League. While critical of Brussels, it calls for a re-thinking and restructuring of the Union, demanding that other countries meet their responsibilities, for example regarding the settlement of refugees. And while advocating the expulsion of undocumented migrants, it claims it would never send people back to places where their lives or rights would be endangered. It is also on record as supporting ius soli (granting citizenship to those born to legal immigrants on Italian soil), a position that the right militantly opposes. Yet, at the same time that his party was setting out these positions, Grillo also made a point of forging closer ties to the anti-EU and xenophobic British UKIP and French National Front.

Five Star attitudes toward mainstream politics present fewer ambiguities. Political dilettantism is celebrated: the movement refuses the (significant) public funds granted to all parties, and elected officials must hand back that part of their salaries determined to be ‘excessive’. Parliamentarians elected under its banner ostentatiously refuse the ‘Honorable’ title that goes with their office. More concretely, their militant refusal to enter alliances or agree to parliamentary compromises produced the initial post-election standoff in 2013, which was only resolved when MPs from other parties switched sides, enabling the formation of the center-left government. In addition, the M5S’s inexperience has sometimes been painfully on display where it governs on a local level, most notably in Rome.

Even a ‘normal’ party that expanded so quickly would experience dramatic growing pains, but the M5S is hardly a normal party. It is a rapidly institutionalizing movement-party that vaulted to prominence thanks to its uncompromising denunciation of a stalled status quo, in short, from a position of radical opposition. But in 2013, and then in local elections as well as those for the European Parliament, and especially as the 2018 election approached, the political landscape changed. The two parties that had been the linchpins of the Second Republic were in decline: Berlusconi’s Forza Italia in almost linear fashion and the Democrats after what first appeared to be a renaissance under Renzi. As frustration with politics-as-usual grew, so did the idea of the M5S as a plausible contender to lead a government.

In fact, in the years leading to the 2018 election, aware of his own controversial and often vulgar public image, Grillo took several steps back from the limelight, assuming the role of ‘guarantor’.²¹ A YouTube channel was created to facilitate communication between members and elected officials. A five-member steering committee dubbed ‘The Directorate’ was set up, and the young vice-president of the Chamber of Deputies, Luigi Di Maio, increasingly became the fresh public face of the M5S. Throughout the 2018 campaign, Di Maio expressed the movement’s readiness to govern Italy, and as of this writing the thirty-one-year-old remains its candidate for prime minister.

Aside from these developments in what had been something of a one-man show, the M5S also spelled out an ambitious program, two key features of which (the minimum pension and the ‘flexicurity’ income supplement) were mentioned above. Tax cuts and generous family benefits were also pledged; 50 billion euros would be found by cutting wasteful spending, while an equal amount would be invested in key strategic industries, and so on.²² As if these exorbitant promises, whose numbers appear to have been plucked out of thin air were not enough, the M5S has also promised to dramatically reduce Italy’s public debt from over 130% of GDP to under 100 in ten years.

That this is less a program than sheer pie in the sky is obvious, but there is reason to believe that some of the more generous promises were instrumental in the huge increase in support the M5S enjoyed in the poverty-ridden south, culminating in the near-total sweep in the 2018 elections. This, in turn, makes one wonder how long that support will last without an effort to keep at least some of its generous promises, given the notoriously volatile southern electorate. But should these budget-busting expenditures actually take place, we can expect condemnation, and worse, on the part of the EU, with unforeseen, but quite likely devastating, consequences all around.

All this assumes that the M5S actually enters a government. If it doesn’t, the only plausible scenario other than a quick return to new elections, with no guarantee of a different outcome, is a jury-rigged majority unlikely to undertake any serious problem without falling apart.

Moreover, such explosive growth produces dilemmas of its own. As several observers have pointed out, the movement was well on the way to becoming a ‘catch-all’ party even before 2018, but the most recent election fully confirmed the trend. True to its original progressive profile, the M5S’s breakout in 2013 was strongest in the North and Center of the country, particularly the four regions that comprise Italy’s historic ‘red zones’. By 2018 it actually outpolled the Democrats there. Its voters broadly mirror the general electorate, with disproportionate support coming from younger and more highly educated voters.²³ While the M5S initially underperformed in the south, its support there was already increasing before the near-clean sweep in 2018, when it polled well over 40% overall, almost hitting 50% in Sicily and Campania (where Naples is located). Keeping this impressive overall strength in mind, its support in the South was greatest where unemployment was highest.

While the ‘catch-all’ designation usually refers to a party’s appeal across classes, the M5S’s increased support in the south between 2013 and 2018 suggests that the term could be applied to its attractiveness across political boundaries. Since Berlusconi’s center-right coalition got the most votes in the south in 2013, it obviously had more to lose in 2018. In the north-center, however, a different dynamic was at work. In fact, while the M5S continued to take votes away from the PD, it actually lost votes to the Lega, which also attracted former PD voters over the issues of law-and-order and immigration.²⁴ The resurgent League’s success against the PD is hardly surprising since the Democrats were in government during the migrant crisis, which saw often demagogic alarms raised over the threat to law and order that the influx of foreigners represented. The League’s ability to siphon votes from the M5S suggests just how inflammatory these issues have become. Recall that Grillo (and Berlusconi) had espoused more right-leaning positions on these topics, whether out of conviction or simply in an effort not to cede the terrain entirely to the League. Whatever the motive, the results show that trying to compete with a far right organization on its own terrain is a losing proposition.

Fratelli d’Italia: To someone unfamiliar with Italy, hearing that there was a political party called “Brothers of Italy” might suggest aggressive anti-feminism. But while there is nothing enlightened about Fratelli d’Italia (FdI), its current leader is in fact a woman, while its name evokes the Italian national anthem. It is a direct descendant, through several twists and turns, of the First Republic’s true pariah, the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI, Italian Social Movement), whose symbol remains in its logo. But by 2018, only the most extreme elements in FdI could still be called neo-fascist, on occasion appearing too indulgent with respect to some of Italy’s truly fascistic organizations, such as Forza Nuova, or Casa Pound, which have been implicated in scores of violent activities in recent years. (Casa Pound put its own list forward in 2018 and received over 300,000 votes, or a hair under 1%.) Italy has in fact witnessed an uptick in violent acts, above all against immigrants, in the era of Brexit, Trump, and the rightward shift of the League and the center-right more generally.²⁵

FdI was certainly helped by this trend, more than doubling its vote between 2013 and 2018, from 2% to 4.4%. But it remains very much the junior partner in the center-right alliance, dwarfed by the Lega’s 17.4% and Forza Italia’s 14%. As the League has moved farther to the right, it has become difficult to draw many distinctions between it and FdI: both are often stridently anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim, sounding alarms about the breakdown of law and order caused by foreigners. Both are euroskeptical. True to its roots, FdI remain more statist and unapologetically welfarist. It is unlikely to participate in even a markedly right-wing government, but could well play the role of far-right external critic of any such government.

The Left: Nothing Assured

In one sense, there is much that is unique in Italy’s experience when compared with that of other western capitalist countries, from the reasons the so-called Second Republic arose in the first place to its inglorious demise in less than a quarter-century. But when one compares broader trends, as opposed to specific institutional configurations (which often vary considerably from country to country), we see developments that are taking place elsewhere, in more extreme form.

Nowhere is this clearer than with respect to the mainstream left. The Democrats, consisting of the much-recycled remnants of the Italian Communist Party and the left wing of Christian Democracy, are truly one of a kind. Yet how much daylight exists between their behaviour and that of the venerable German Social Democrats or, for that matter, the French Socialists, who underwent their own renaissance 50 years ago? Ideological conviction and sociological trends have led all of them to adopt – some more enthusiastically than others, to be sure – neoliberal policies, aggravated by the EU’s obsession with austerity. And they have all been victims of what Gerassimos Moschonas has described as importing the fracture sociale: attempting to balance their blue-collar and white-collar/professional constituencies, at the ultimate expense of the former.²⁶

The only thing that appears certain is that the Democratic Party will not be undertaking any sort of profound self-examination in the foreseeable future. Moreover, even if it did so, one has to wonder what difference that would make. Born at the wrong time, increasingly composed of a patchwork of different histories and political cultures, devoid from the start of a clear vision, having lost or undercut its own social roots, and ultimately unified by nothing other than the sum of its component parts, how likely would it be, at this point, to find a path to salvation – assuming one existed?

Nor is the outlook for the radical left much better. It would provide an ideal research site for a political archaeologist, if such a profession existed, for here one finds remnants of every militant organization that has ever existed on the Italian left, or so it seems. Parallel to these myriad forms, and sometimes interlaced with them, are the many grassroots and civic activities of which Italy has always had in abundance. Efforts such as those of Potere al Popolo show that there is a felt need to bring these forces together, but they also revealed the enormous challenge of doing anything with such a fragmented reality other than cobbling together an electoral list.

“Efforts such as those of Potere al Popolo show that there is a felt need to bring these forces together, but they also revealed the enormous challenge of doing anything with such a fragmented reality other than cobbling together an electoral list.”

Currently and for the foreseeable future, mainstream and radical left alike face a truly daunting challenge as attitudes on immigration, refugees, and citizenship have become increasingly politicized in recent years. And there is no denying the fact that the strong anti-immigrant appeal of right-wing parties has attracted support from significant sectors of the working class. In the not-so-distant past, robust grassroots structures enabled both parties and unions to resist and counter such appeals, but even where such structures still exist, they are shadows of their former selves. This puts the left in an extremely difficult position: stick to your principles and watch the demagogues cut the ground out from under you, or try a more genteel anti-immigrant appeal while selling out your values, and being outbid by the extremists for your trouble.²⁷

Negotiations to form a government are continuing as this is written, with an outcome that is far from certain as all the major parties jockey for position. The existence of three distinct poles – the center-left, the Five-Star Movement, and the center-right – promises that any coalition will be tension-ridden. And as if that were not enough, the cohesion of the center-right, never very solid, has weakened in the wake of the election. Berlusconi is desperate to counter his own and his party’s weakened status. Salvini is doing everything possible to assert the League’s primacy within the alliance, and its entitlement to a dominant role in any governing coalition, despite the fact that the M5S is nearly twice as large as the League. Di Maio, for his part, appears hell-bent on taking office, completing the transition from inflexible opposition to governing party in record time – and worrying later about how to hold onto the party’s base, or deliver on its promises.

As for the Democrats, they initially appeared committed to standing back, regrouping, and taking advantage of being in the opposition when a government led by the M5S would, in their calculation, inevitably prove unable to deliver on the unrealistic promises that helped it get elected. Others within the party pressed from the start for a more ‘realistic’ and ‘responsible’ approach, especially as the post-election stalemate continued. Exactly what this means is unclear, since anything more than external support of a short-lived caretaker government would likely prove suicidal for the PD in its present post-electoral disorientation.

Yet given Italy’s time-honoured tradition of trasformismo, at the moment it is impossible to rule out any scenario, including a broad-based caretaker government to mark time until another election could be held. Yet given recent electoral trends, there is no guarantee – even with a tricked-out electoral system – that the result would be very different than the present tri-polar stalemate.

Under the Second Republic, faced with a standoff, the major political actors were pragmatic enough – and power-hungry enough – to cobble together arrangements that stumbled along without accomplishing a great deal, but that did manage to avoid catastrophes. If, as appears likely, the Second Republic is truly dead and buried, Italy will no longer have even such modest assurances to fall back upon.

*

Steve Hellman is Professor Emeritus at York University and author of Italian Communism in Transition, among others.

Notes

1. There has never been a formal constitutional change like that of the Fourth to the Fifth French Republic in 1958. Nevertheless, the terminology was immediately and widely adopted, and I use it here as well: the (informal) First Republic is most commonly seen as ending with the 1994 elections.

2. There already existed a Socialist Party, which, from the 1980s on, had been in fierce competition with the PCI; there was a much smaller Social Democratic Party as well. Nor did the former Communists want to deter progressive Catholics, from within the (disintegrating) Christian Democrats by evoking a political tradition alien to them.

3. The electoral system had been designed under the assumption that Italy was going to continue to have a bipolar party system. The Five Star Movement’s success, and a Constitutional Court ruling, produced a changed electoral law for 2018. That law – which is also slated to be rewritten – still awards a bonus, but only if the winning party or coalition gets at least 40% of valid votes cast. (The center-right came close with 37%.)

4. Fabio Bordignon, “Matteo Renzi: A ‘Leftist Berlusconi’ for the Italian Democratic Party?” South European Society and Politics Vol. 19 No. 1 (2014), p. 1.

5. The Italians and EU once had an agreement with Muammar Gaddafi, also paying to stop unauthorized migration, but this ended with his ouster and Libya’s de facto disintegration.

6. For an overview, see Georg Picot, “Italy’s Jobs Act in comparative perspective,” EuVisions,28 April 2017.

7. Valentina Conte, “Jobs Act, scomparsi metà dei contratti scontati,” La Repubblica, 17 March 2018 p. 9.

8. Here I draw on Martin Bull, “Renzi Removed: The 2016 Italian Constitutional Referendum and its Outcome,” in Alessandro Chiaromonte and Alex Wilson, eds., Italian Politics: The Great Reform That Never Was (London: Berghan, 2017), pp. 131-153.

9. See liberieuguali.it for the party’s home page. There is actually more information on its positions on specific issues on its Facebook page.

10. The party’s web site lists 87 different organizations that signed onto its electoral manifesto, although this includes ten different local branches of Rifondazione Comunista. See: PDF.

11. In addition to specific arguments I will cite in what follows, some of the writing on the topic that I have found most useful includes Cas Mudde, “The Populist Zeitgeist,” Government and Opposition, 39 (Autumn, 2004): 541-63; Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell, eds., Twenty-First Century Populism: The Spectre of European Democracy (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008); Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, “Exclusionary vs. Inclusionary Populism: Comparing Contemporary Europe and Latin America,” Government and Opposition 48 (Spring 2013): 147-174; Jan-Werner Muller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

12. In the absence of a more complete analysis, a synthesis of the shifting votes in 2018 can be found in Istituto Cattaneo, “Elezioni Politiche 2018: le prime analisi sui flussi di voto.” For a vivid visual representation of the League’s expansion between elections, see La Republica, 12 March 2018, p. 10.

13. Anna Cento Bull, “Quando la magia svanisce: Bossi perde la leadership, la Lega perde attrattiva,” Aldo Di Virgilio and Claudio M. Radaelli, eds., Politica in Italia: I fatti dell’anno e le interpretazioni(Bologna: Il Mulino, 2013), pp. 101-117.

14. For a very good history and detailed analysis of the first decade of Forza Italia, see Emanuela Poli, Forza Italia. Struttura, leadership e radicamento territoriale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001).

15. Useful in showing the populist themes in Berlusconi’s rise is Marco Tarchi, L’Italia populista. (Bologna: Il Mulino 2003), especially Chapter VII. On the media-based populism he employed, see Roberto Biorcio, “The Lega Nord and the Italian Media System,” in Gianpietro Mazzoleni et al., eds., The Media and Neo-Populism: A Contemporary Comparative Analysis (Westport CT and London: Praeger, 2003), pp. 71-94.

16. Bertjan Verbeek and Andrej Zaslove, “Italy: a case of mutating populism?” Democratization, 23: 2 (2016): 304–323.

17. There were two more prosaic references as well: V for Victory à la Winston Churchill, and a rather obscure reference to the graphic novel V for Vendetta.

18. Elisabetta Gualmini, “Introduzione. Da movimento a partito,” in Piergiorgio Corbetta and Gualmini, eds., Il partito di Grillo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2013), pp. 7-2. In the same volume, for more on the formation of the movement see Rinaldo Vignati, “Beppe Grillo: dalla Tv ai Palasport, dal blog al Movimento,” pp. 29-63.

19. The five stars in the title refer to the five foundational values: accessible water for all, support of the environment, sustainable transport, and sustainable development, and the right to internet connectivity.

20. For a definition of the M5S as “left-libertarian populist” see Verbeek and Zaslove, p. 307.

21. For more on the events recounted here, see Luigi Ceccarini and Fabio Bordignon, “The five stars continue to shine: the consolidation of Grillo’s ‘movement party’ in Italy,” Contemporary Italian Politics Vol. 8 No. 2 (2016): pp. 131-159.

22. The 20 key points of the Cinque Stelle electoral program can be found at: www.movimento5stelle.it.

23. Ceccarini and Bordignon, pp. 141-142.

24. Analyses of the parties’ votes, as well as the movement of votes among them, can be found at www.cattaneo.org; and two. See p. 4 of the latter for the discussion of the Lega’s inroads into the PD vote.

25. Chiara Baldi articles in R.it drawing on press articles and other sources, from 2014 to the beginning of 2018; and Elisabetta Povoledo, “Rise of Mussolini’s Heirs Across Italy Fuels a Countermovement,” New York Times, Feb. 25, 2018, p. A8.

26. Gerassimos Moschonas, In the Name of Social Democracy: The Great Transformation 1945 to the Present (London: Verso, 2002), passim, but esp. Chapters 7 and 8.

27. For both a general discussion and specific cases, among many, see Tim Bale, et al. “If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them? Explaining Social Democratic Responses to the Challenge from the Populist Radical Right in Western Europe,” Political Studies, 58 (October 2010): 410-426; also Sofía A. Pérez, “Immigration and the European Left,” in James Cronin et al., eds., What’s Left of the Left (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 265-289.

Featured image: Royal Saudi Air Force Eurofighter Typhoon (by RA.AZ, CC BY-ND-SA 2.0)

Some birthdays are not for celebrating. Last month Yemen’s civil war slipped into its fourth year. It’s a war without obvious good or bad guys: Security Council investigators have documented violations of international humanitarian law by all sides. UN human rights officials nonetheless claim that the “leading cause” of civilian casualties are airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition, which backs Yemen’s President Hadi against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels and allied supporters of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh. The coalition’s air operations may not be any more indiscriminate or lacking in precaution than Houthi artillery and missile attacks, but are certainly more powerful and widespread.

What is Britain’s involvement in a war the UK government itself calls the world’s largest humanitarian crisis? Limited, if ministers are to be believed.

Throughout the Yemen conflict, Saudi Arabia has remained by far Britain’s leading arms export customer. Half of all UK exports of weapons and military equipment from 2013 to 2017 went to the Kingdom (up from 28% in 2007–11). Most were for the Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF), 151 of whose 324 combat aircraft are British-supplied, along with weapons, ground systems, parts and spares.

Faced with inevitable legal and political criticism, the UK government insists that it isn’t responsible for — and cannot even necessarily know — how UK-supplied weapons are used after they have been shipped. Last July the High Court agreed (though activists are now applying to appeal that decision).

The reality of the UK’s relationship with the Saudi military challenges this ‘flog and forget’ theory of arms control. Under a sequence of formal agreements between the UK and Saudi governments since 1973, the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) and its contractors supply not only military ‘hardware’, but also human ‘software’. Around 7000 individuals — private employees, British civil servants and seconded Royal Air Force personnel — are present in Saudi Arabia to advise, train, service and manage British-supplied combat aircraft and other military equipment.

Ministers have nonetheless assured Parliament that these support staff are strictly hands-off:

“there is no British involvement in the coalition in targeting or weaponizing aircraft to undertake missions [in Yemen]”. 

Likewise they insist that neither UK military personnel nor contractor personnel “are involved in the loading of weapons for operational sorties, nor are they involved in the planning of operational sorties”.

Documents and testimonies we’ve gathered paint a more complicated picture. Over the past eighteen months, with the support of the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, Katherine Templar and I have sought to map these British and British-employed personnel in Saudi Arabia, trying to understand their work and their experiences. Though their existence is hardly a secret, their precise numbers and functions have long remained obscure. The UK-Saudi agreements that govern their work are classified ‘UK Confidential/RSAF Secret’ and are closed from public release until 2027. Even UK ministers say

 they “do not have full visibility of the prime contractor’s manpower footprint in Saudi Arabia, the detail of which forms part of the commercial arrangements underpinning the delivery of much of the contracted support and is therefore sensitive.”

We’ve interviewed technicians, managers and officials from every level of this UK-Saudi ‘footprint’, backed up by individuals’ written CVs and formal job descriptions. If they are no longer physically loading bombs, as ministers insist, they’re still required to do almost everything else. A mix of UK company employees and seconded RAF personnel have continued to be responsible for maintaining the weapons systems of all Saudi Tornado IDS fighter-bombers, a backbone of the Yemen air war. They also work as aircraft armourers and weapons supervisors for the UK-supplied Typhoon fighters deployed at the main operating bases for Saudi Yemen operations, and provide deeper-level maintenance for Yemen-deployed combat aircraft.

These roles are underpinned by UK military commitments to Saudi Arabia that have never been disclosed to public or parliament. Our report discloses one of them, from a UK-Saudi agreement named ‘Al Yamamah’, which details how the UK will supply and support Saudi Arabia’s Tornado fighter-bombers. MOD officials have confirmed that this secret 1986 agreement continues in force “as long as the programme lasts”, despite more recent accords. (When in 2006 the UK’s Guardian newspaper obtained an earlier, less detailed agreement which had been released “by mistake” to the National Archives at Kew, the MOD removed the files overnight, and claimed their release “severely dented [Saudi] confidence in the [UK’s] ability to protect sensitive information”).

Prime Minister’s Office file PREM 19/3076 released to the National Archives during 2017 (Crown Copyright, reproduced under Open Government Licence v.3.0)

A similar inadvertent indiscretion seems to have been repeated: though the files containing the ‘Al Yamamah’ agreement remain withheld from public view, a bundle of unrelated Downing Street files, recently placed unnoticed in the National Archives, contains key extracts of the agreement.

As these papers show, the agreement requires that “United Kingdom civilian and military personnel will remain available in Saudi Arabia for preparation, including arming and support, of the [Tornado fighter-bomber] aircraft during an armed conflict” in which Saudi Arabia is involved, though these personnel may not “participate” in the conflict directly. The clause makes no reference to the authorisation or lawfulness of such a conflict.

British diplomats were concerned about the implications of this commitment from the start, lobbying within Whitehall during negotiations for the clause to be removed. “At worst”, the Foreign Office’s Middle East Department wrote to the MOD’s defence sales division, “this [clause] could expose HMG to accusations that they were involved in an undercover role in any number of types of unlawful military adventures; at best, it might threaten to compromise British neutrality in armed conflicts between third States.” Papers elsewhere in the National Archives show that the commitment was removed from a draft version of the agreement circulated within Whitehall six weeks before signature. It nonetheless seems to have been re-inserted into the final agreement at the last minute.

Extract of the 1986 UK-Saudi ‘Al Yamamah’ Memorandum of Understanding, included amongst papers in file PREM 19/3076 in the UK National Archives (Crown Copyright reproduced under Open Government Licence v3.0)

It’s difficult for the UK government to argue that it cannot know much about how its arms supplies are used, when it is helping the Saudi armed forces to use them. Our research doesn’t judge the rights or wrongs of the war in Yemen. But Britain’s day-to-day involvement with these weapons systems gives it a duty of precaution to help prevent civilian harm from those weapons. The government also has a duty of care for the thousands of British citizens at work in Saudi Arabia in quasi-military roles, fulfilling UK MOD contracts but as employees of private companies, without some of the legal and physical protections of military personnel or public servants. Most of the individuals we spoke to described their time in Saudi Arabia as amongst the most professionally and financially rewarding experiences of their lives. But we also spoke with whistle-blowers left unprotected under Saudi Labour Law, and even deprived of their British passports while working (a practice which seems now to have ended). We met contractors who described occasional physical jeopardy, from Scud missiles to unexploded ordnance. And we interviewed technicians anxious about the legal ramifications of their work within a foreign military machine at war.

The legal protection of these British citizens may be bound together with the physical protection of Yemen’s citizens. How the UK government navigates its obligations to protect both groups depends partly on whether other UK-Saudi agreements contain similar commitments to support Saudi combat operations, including the 2005 ‘Al Salam’ agreement covering UK support for the Saudi Air Force’s Typhoon fighters, and a new ‘Military and Security Cooperation Agreement’ signed in September 2017. (Both remain secret).

Nonetheless the government has clearly declined so far to exercise one option: to activate the ‘suspend’ clause in the Al Yamamah MOU. This all-or-nothing clause, also reproduced in the papers sitting unnoticed at the National Archives, allows the UK government “in the case of the outbreak of war… after consultation with the Saudi Arabian government…[to] suspend the arrangements provided for in the MOU”, removing UK re-supply and support for these weapons systems until the end of the conflict.

The diplomatic and economic fallout from such a suspension shouldn’t be taken lightly. But as bombardments continue on both sides of the Yemen-Saudi border, this is a question that should at least be debated in public, not behind closed doors in Whitehall and Riyadh.

Read the full research here.

*

Mike Lewis is a researcher on armed conflict, weapons, tax and illicit finance, a former UN Security Council sanctions investigator and an independent research consultant. He is writing in a personal capacity.

A US federal judge in New York ordered Iran to pay billions of dollars in damages to families affected by 9/11, ABC news reported on Tuesday.

Judge George B Daniels found the country liable to more than 1,000 “parents, spouses, siblings and children” involved in the lawsuit. Daniels said the payment amounts to $12.5m per spouse, $8.5m per parent, $8.5m per child and $4.25m for each sibling, according to the ABC report.

The lawsuit claims that Iran provided technical assistance, training and planning to the al-Qaeda operatives that conducted the attacks.

However, the official investigation on the attacks, known as the 9/11 Commission Report, said that Iran did not play a direct role.

In addition, there is no binding mechanism to force Iran to pay, making the judgment symbolic.

The lawsuit is linked to a case filed against Saudi Arabia, which families of 9/11 victims say provided direct support for the attackers.

Back in March, judge Daniels rejected Saudi Arabia’s request to dismiss lawsuits accusing it of being involved in the attacks.

The cases are based on the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (Jasta), a 2016 law that provides an exemption to the legal principle of sovereign immunity, allowing families of the victims to take foreign governments to court.

The families point to the fact that the majority of the hijackers were Saudi citizens, and claim that Saudi officials and institutions “aided and abetted” the attackers in the years leading up to the 9/11 attacks, according to court documents.

The Saudi government has long denied involvement in the attacks in which hijacked planes crashed into New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon outside Washington, DC, and a Pennsylvania field. Almost 3,000 people died.

Riyadh and its Gulf allies had strongly opposed Jasta, which was initially vetoed by then-President Barack Obama. The US Senate overturned the veto by overwhelmingly adopting the legislation.

Critics of the law say it is politically motivated and an infringement on the sovereignty of foreign nations.

Friday April 27th, 2018 a ‘historic’ meeting between South Korean leader Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un took place in the demilitarized zone between the two countries.

Both leaders signed onto a joint declaration to cease hostile acts, pursue denuclearization of both countries and engage other world powers, including the United States, in this process.

In a special breaking report for GRTV, Professor Michel Chossudovsky comments on the significance of this meeting, coming as it does weeks before another expected meeting between the North Korean leader and US President Trump.

Dear Readers,

More than ever, Global Research needs your support. Our task as an independent media is to “Battle the Lie”.

“Lying” in mainstream journalism has become the “new normal”: mainstream journalists are pressured to comply. Some journalists refuse.

Lies, distortions and omissions are part of a multibillion dollar propaganda operation which sustains the “war narrative”.

While “Truth” is a powerful instrument, “the Lie” is generously funded by the lobby groups and corporate charities. And that is why we need the support of our readers.

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Netanyahu: The Dangerous Prankster

By Massoud Nayeri, May 02, 2018

Mr. Netanyahu’s political life depends on a chaotic Middle East and foremost a military confrontation with Iran. Today, Mr. Netanyahu is the most dangerous man in the world which enjoys Mr. Trump’s complete support.

Wikipedia: Our New Technological McCarthyism

By Richard Gale and Dr. Gary Null, May 02, 2018

Today, the internet, often thought of as our world’s “final frontier” for free thinkers and the flow and exchange of ideas and information, is seriously ill. It has been systemically infected by ideological viruses, memes of information intent on poisoning freedom of expression that we take for granted every time we use Google or visit Facebook, Youtube and now the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Commemorating The May 2nd 2014 Odessa Massacre: Why the U.S. Coup-Regime Still Runs Ukraine

By Eric Zuesse, May 02, 2018

That massacre was designed to, and it did, terrorize the residents in all areas of Ukraine which had voted overwhelmingly for the man whom Obama had just ousted, Viktor Yanukovych.

US Claims of “Russian Meddling” Exposes Its Own Global Meddling

By Tony Cartalucci, May 02, 2018

The “Russian meddling” described in the FBI indictment consists of Facebook ads and the creation of accounts posing as American social media personalities commentating on US political issues. The FBI’s indictment failed to list any instances of Russian government money, or money from an alleged intermediary being funneled into any actual US political parties, opposition or activist groups, or any US-based media organizations.

RussiaPhobia and the Skripal Affair: Where They Tell You Not to Look

By Craig Murray, May 02, 2018

At the very beginning of the Skripal incident, the security services blocked by D(SMA) notice any media mention of Pablo Miller and told the media not to look at Orbis and the Steele dossier on Trump, acting immediately to get out their message via trusties in the BBC and Guardian.

James Comey’s Forgotten Rescue of Bush-Era Torture

By James Bovard, May 02, 2018

Comey twice gave explicit approval for waterboarding, which sought to break detainees with near-drowning. This practice had been recognized as a war crime by the U.S. government since the Spanish American War.

For many residents of Sinoe County, Liberia, the experiences of Golden Veroleum (GVL) – a palm oil company that arrived in 2010 – have been disappointing and detrimental to their way of life. 

Communities say their land was taken without their consent in many instances. These communities remain on the frontline of a development model that puts people’s wellbeing in the hands of private companies and foreign investors.

This remains so, even after years of complaints to international organisations including the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), the industry’s leading certification body.

I am a senior forests and lands campaigner at Friends of the Earth in the United States. I advocate for financial institutions to stop financing deforestation and human rights violations and for the recognition of indigenous peoples and local communities’ land and natural resource rights. This photo essay captures what I witnessed when I travelled to Sinoe County.

GVL has has faced significant controversy since its arrival in Liberia. Along the rugged roads you hear stories of armed police threatening villagers to sign agreements with the company, drinking water sources spoiled by industrial machinery, and livelihoods lost behind plantation fences. Mile after mile reveals vanishing forests.

Weathered stumps jut from the earth amidst felled trees, serve as the final reminders of what was recently thick forest. The barren landscape here signals what is to come: communities’ lifelines to their land and culture traded for an uncertain future driven by industrial agriculture.

Amidst the ever-growing plantations, there is one sight to be seen: neatly arranged rows of palm in every direction. These plantations are part of GVL’s concession agreement with the Government of Liberia. The agreement covers 350,000 hectares – more than two percent of the country’s land mass – for 65 years.

“The day the Memorandum of Understanding was signed with GVL we saw three pickup trucks full of armed police putting guns on our people. GVL forced our people to sign that MOU. When our people see armed police, they are confused. Here’s a man who can’t even read or write, and he is forced to put his fingerprints to sign the MOU.” – Ricky Kanswea, Nimupoh, Sinoe County

Since GVL and its primary investor Golden Agri-Resources arrived in Liberia, the companies have faced consistent charges of human rights violations and environmental destruction. A February 2018 RSPO Complaints Panel decision affirmed communities’ longstanding grievances. The decision found that GVL violated RSPO Principles and Criteria by coercing and intimidating community members into signing agreements, continuing to develop on disputed lands, and destroying community sacred sites.

“They built their mill on our sacred hill. We said this place is our sacred hill. They said it wasn’t. But what do they know? We are in our town. This is our sacred hill.” – Kaffa Samneh, Jacksonville, Sinoe County

Many still hold out hope that GVL will keep its promises of building handpumps, schools and clinics. But after the better part of a decade, others are skeptical about what the company will provide for the people who depend on the land and forests for their sustenance. Some are beginning to question a development model that relies on private companies to provide basic services.

“When they came to operate on my land, they never asked me. They just jumped on my land and started working. When I asked them, who gave you this land, they said it was government land. So we were forced to leave the place.” – Romeo M. Chea, Jacksonville, Sinoe County

Following the 2017 election of President George Weah, Liberians are filled with both hope and concern for the future. The new president has promised a pro-poor agenda, while declaring the country “open for business.”

But the Liberian Legislature has yet to pass the Land Rights Act – a draft law that would recognize communities’ ownership rights over their traditional lands, providing them equal footing with companies and investors. As national organizations mobilize for the passage of a strong Land Rights Act, vested interests are seeking to push forward a watered down version that would maintain business-as-usual. Land insecurity is widely seen as one of the main causes of the country’s 14-year civil war.

“The place where my parents borne me – that is my land. That is the place they left for me. This land is for every one of us. Aren’t I the one working here? Let the company come talk to us. I will say come and take that piece of land, but leave this piece for me, this is where I will make my farm. But that’s not what they want to do.” – Beatrice Flahn, Jacksonville, Sinoe County

In rural Sinoe County growing disillusionment with Golden Veroleum’s palm oil plantations signify a demand for a new path towards progress. Will Liberia’s forests continue to be handed over to foreign companies and investors? Or will Liberians begin to reap the full benefits from the land they have called home for generations?

*

 

“We are sorry.”

This is what the head of public policy for Facebook in Canada has said in regards to the revelation that over 600,000 Canadians have had their privacy compromised and their data used by Cambridge Analytica.

When whistleblower Christopher Wylie revealed that Cambridge Analytica had inappropriately collected information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users, he also showed the world the incredible scale of how social media companies and data brokers are harvesting and exploiting the private social media activity of millions of people around the world.

And it’s shown us something else: how Canada’s privacy laws have failed to protect us, and how they have no power to help us prevent something like this from happening again.

The law that governs our private data is called PIPEDA (the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act). It governs how private companies collect and use our personal information.

But when violations are found, the act is toothless: it gives no power for our Privacy Commissioner to issue penalties or force compliance. This means that companies have no incentive to comply, and if caught, suffer no real consequences. Political parties have a remarkable incentive to keep things as they are: they’re exempt from the law, free to acquire, store and utilize your personal information however they wish.

And what’s more, despite years of recommendations, our government had been stalling on implementing key fixes that could give our laws the teeth they need to take action on this. This includes things like implementing a data breach notification regime, putting an end to political parties being exempt from privacy laws, and providing actual powers to enforce compliance orders.

However, as pressure has increased from every direction following news of the data scandal, we’re seeing the first signs of positive movement from our government.

The government has just pushed forward mandatory data breach disclosure rules that have been been delayed for nearly three years. We’ve also heard from the Acting Democratic Institutions Minister that he would be open to making changes to Canada’s privacy laws, while the Privacy Commissioner has launched an investigation to find out if the data of any Canadians was compromised.

It’s clear that there’s an appetite for change — but we must continue to push for a commitment to reform all the out-of-date parts of our privacy laws that are failing to protect us. With federal elections due in 2019, we need to safeguard our democracy and protect against undue influence stemming from online privacy violations.

What this scandal has really highlighted is how aggressive business models built on data harvesting, combined with deceptive marketing, which misleads users about their privacy options, lead to disturbing privacy violations like this.

Facebook’s half-hearted apology to Canadians only makes it clearer that companies like this will never improve their practices unless the law compels them. With news of major data breaches coming almost every day now, it’s time for the government to step up and give us all the protection we deserve.

*

Victoria Henry is a Campaigner at OpenMedia, a community-based organization that works to keep the Internet open, affordable, and surveillance-free.

Featured image is from Blogtrepreneur/Flickr

The still-unscheduled Donald Trump-Kim Jong Un summit offers the opportunity for a denuclearization deal that would avoid a possible nuclear war, but that potential deal remains vulnerable to a hostile corporate media sector and political elites in the United States. At the center of this hostility is national security adviser John Bolton, who’s not just uninterested in selling a denuclearization deal to the public. He’s working actively to undermine it.

Strong circumstantial evidence indicates that he leaked intelligence to a Washington think tank sympathetic to his views in order to generate media questioning about the president’s announced plan to reach an agreement with North Korea’s leader.

Bolton made no secret of his visceral opposition to such a deal before Trump announced that Bolton would become national security adviser, arguing that Kim Jong Un would never let go of his nuclear weapons, especially since he is so close to having a real nuclear deterrent capability vis-a-vis the United States.

Even after meeting Trump on March 6 to discuss joining the administration, Bolton was not expecting the announcement of a Trump-Kim summit. Trump tweeted about progress in talks with North Korea that day, but when asked about such talks in an interview with Fox News later that same day, Bolton dismissed the whole idea. He portrayed Kim’s willingness to have discussions as aimed at diverting Washington’s attention from Pyongyang nearing its goal of having a “deliverable nuclear weapon.”

After the Trump-Kim summit was announced on March 9, Bolton made a tactical adjustment in his public stance toward talks with Kim to avoid an open conflict with Trump. He started suggesting in interviews that Trump had cleverly “foiled” Kim’s plan for long, drawn-out talks by accepting the proposal for a summit meeting. But he also urged Trump to assume a stance that would guarantee the meeting would fail.

In an interview with Fox News on the day of the summit announcement, Bolton suggested a peremptory demand by Trump to Kim:

“Tell us what ports should American ships sail in, what airports American planes can land to load your nuclear weapons.”

And in a second interview with Fox that day, Bolton suggested that Trump demand that Kim identify the ports and airfields to be used to “dismantle your nuclear program and put it at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where Libya’s nuclear program lives.” Bolton’s invocation of the Libyan example of giving up a nuclear weapons program was an ostentatious way of conveying his intention to keep open the option of using force to overthrow Kim’s regime.

Bolton was staking his opposition to negotiations with Kim primarily on the argument that North Korea would simply exploit such negotiations to complete its testing of a nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). But former CIA Director Mike Pompeo got a concrete commitment from Kim to end all tests during their meetings in Pyongyang on April 7-8, which Kim then announced officially on April 20.

Pompeo’s report on Kim’s commitment, coming just before Bolton’s first day in the White House on April 9, immediately vitiated Bolton’s chief argument against a denuclearization agreement. But Bolton had another argument to fall back on. When a Fox News interviewer asked him on March 6 about a possible nuclear testing freeze, Bolton replied,

“A freeze won’t work. The only inspections system that you could have with any prospect of finding out what they’re up to would have to be so intrusive it would threaten the stability of the regime.”

As an argument that a testing halt wouldn’t work, that comment was nonsensical: The United States has no intrusive inspections to detect a test of a long-range North Korean missile or of a nuclear weapon. But Bolton could use the need for an intrusive inspection system that North Korea would resist as an argument against a denuclearization agreement. He was well aware that in 2008, Vice President Dick Cheney forced Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to change the agreement she had reached with North Korea in October 2007 to require an intrusive verification system at a different stage of implementation—before the United States had taken North Korea off the terrorism list and ended the application of the Trading with the Enemy Act rather than after that, as had been originally agreed. North Korea refused to accept the new verification demand and then denounced the agreement in late 2008.

Within a few days of Bolton taking over as national security adviser, someone leaked intelligence to a Washington think tank on a North Korean facility allegedly intended to produce nuclear-grade graphite, a key component of nuclear reactors. The leak resulted in a post by David Albright, the executive director of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), on April 20 with satellite images of what he identified as a North Korean nuclear-grade graphite plant. Albright wrote that a “knowledgeable government official” had identified the site of the factory on the Yalu River, which divides North Korea from China.

Albright suggested that the factory “violates the spirit of the upcoming summit processes with the United States and South Korea.” And he concluded that any agreement with North Korea “must contain its verifiable commitments not to proliferate nuclear goods and abide by internationally recognized strategic export control regimes.”

But Albright presented no evidence that the building under U.S. intelligence surveillance had any bearing on negotiations on denuclearization. His report made it clear that analysts had only suspicions rather than hard evidence that it was for nuclear-grade graphite, referring to “the suspect site” and to “the suspect facility.” Albright also admitted that nuclear-grade graphite is a “dual use” material, and that an existing North Korean facility produces it for components of domestic and foreign ballistic missiles, not for nuclear plants.

Albright nevertheless implied that nuclear-grade graphite is produced and traded covertly. In fact, it is sold online by trading companies such as Alibaba like any other industrial item.

On April 21, despite the absence of any real link between the “suspect facility” and a prospective denuclearization agreement, The Washington Post published an article by intelligence reporter Joby Warrick, based on Albright’s post, that suggested such a link. Warrick referred to a “suspected graphite production facility” that could allow North Korea’s “weapons program” to “quietly advance while creating an additional source of badly needed export revenue.”

Adopting Bolton’s key argument against a denuclearization agreement, Warrick wrote,

“It is unclear how the United States and its allies would reliably verify a suspension of key facets of North Korea’s nuclear program or confirm that it has stopped selling weapons components to partners overseas.” North Korea has “a long history of concealing illicit weapons activity from foreign eyes,” Warrick argued, adding that, unlike Iran, it “does not allow inspectors to visit its nuclear facilities.”

But Warrick failed to inform readers that North Korea had allowed 24-hour, 7-day-a-week inspections of their nuclear facilities from the time the agreed framework was adopted in 1994 until December 2002, after Bolton had successfully engineered the George W. Bush administration’s open renunciation of that Clinton administration agreement. And in the negotiations in 2007-08, Pyongyang only had objected to the U.S. demand for intrusive inspection—including military sites—before the United States had ended its suite of hostile policies toward North Korea.

The graphite factory episode would not be the first time Bolton had used alleged intelligence to try to block a negotiated agreement. In early 2004, Bolton, as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, was determined to prevent the British, French and German governments from reaching an accord with Iran that would frustrate Cheney’s plan for an eventual U.S. military option against Iran. Bolton gave satellite images of Iran’s Parchin military complex to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) claiming that they were appropriate for certain kinds of nuclear weapons testing, as Seymour Hersh later reported. Bolton demanded that the IAEA inspect the sites, evidently hoping that Iran would refuse such an intrusive inspection and allow the Bush administration to accuse Iran of hiding covert weapons activities.

But the IAEA failed to refer to the satellite images of Parchin in two 2004 reports on Iran. Then the State Department provided them to ABC News, which reported that a State Department official “confirmed the United States suspects nuclear activity at some of [Parchin’s] facilities.” But the ABC report also quoted a former senior Department of Defense official who specialized in nuclear weapons as saying the images did not constitute evidence of any nuclear weapons-related activities. Iran let the IAEA inspect 10 Parchin sites in two separate visits in 2005. Taking environment samples in each case, the inspectors found no evidence of nuclear-related activity.

Bolton’s hopes of keeping the option of U.S. war on Iran flopped in 2004, but he still believes in a first strike against North Korea, as he urged in an op-ed in late February. And he can be expected to continue to use his position in the White House to try to keep that option open as he did with Iran in 2004, in part by covert leaks of information to allies outside the government.

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Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist, historian and author who has covered U.S. wars and interventions in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen and Syria since 2004 and was the 2012 winner of the Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. His most recent book is “Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare” (Just World Books, 2014).

On Monday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered an alarming presentation, allegedly based upon hundreds of thousands of pages of documents and files, detailing an undeclared Iranian nuclear weapons program that Netanyahu claimed to have been recently acquired by Israeli intelligence. If true, the Israeli intelligence coup appears to have exposed a significant element of Iranian non-compliance with the so-called Iran nuclear agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Program of Action, or JCPOA, at a time when the very future of that agreement hangs in the balance.

On May 12 President Donald Trump is widely expected to announce a decision on whether the United States will remain as a state party of the Iran nuclear agreement. The president ran for office in 2016 on a campaign that derided the JCPOA as a “horrible deal”, and vowed to “rip it up” once he took office. Fulfilling this promise proved to be harder than expected.   Trump ran into resistance from Congress, his own cabinet (former National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and Secretary of Defense James Mattis consistently cautioned against pulling out of the agreement) and the other signatories to the JCPOA, all of whom pointed out that Iran was complying with the terms of the agreement and, as such, the agreement was working in so far as it blocked Iran’s pathway to a nuclear weapon. As a result, Trump was compelled to hold off on withdrawal while his administration struggled to find consensus.

Consensus, as it was, was reached not by constructing a policy path that would allow the United States to remain in the JCPOA despite the president’s strong reservations, but rather by removing those in the president’s cabinet who did not support his policy on the Iran deal: McMaster was replaced by the noted Iran hawk, John Bolton, and Tillerson was ejected from the State Department and replaced by former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who shares Trump’s position regarding the fate of the JCPOA.

Under the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015, the president must certify every 90 days that, among other things, Iran is “transparently, verifiably, and fully implementing the agreement, including all related technical or additional agreements.” Trump has been searching for a way to pin the blame of any U.S. decertification on Iran; Netanyahu’s presentation, both in timing and content, appears geared toward helping push President Trump toward a decision to withdraw.

But this was not a replay of the Israeli pressure tactics applied to the Obama administration in the weeks and months leading up to the signing of the JCPOA in July 2015, when Netanyahu traveled to the United States and spoke directly to the American Congress in an effort to derail the agreement. This time, Netanyahu was operating hand in hand with the president and secretary of state. The details of the Israeli intelligence operation, which unfolded “several weeks ago,” according to Netanyahu, were shared with American intelligence, and provided the background for Netanyahu’s phone conversation with Trump on April 28, and his meeting with Mike Pompeo on April 29.

The Israeli information challenges Iran’s compliance with its obligations as set forth in Annex 1 of the JCPOA, regarding “Past and Present Issues of Concern” —in short, the contentious question of whether Iran had ever sought to acquire a nuclear weapon. If Iran was shown to have lied, this line of argument goes, then the president, in good faith, could report to Congress that Iran was not in compliance with Annex 1 and, as such, could refuse to continue to issue a waiver regarding the lifting of economic sanctions.

Legally speaking, however, the Israeli argument, along with any attempt on the part of the Trump administration to rely upon the Israeli information used by Netanyahu in his presentation, does not hold water. The IAEA, in implementing the “Roadmap for Clarification of Past and Present Outstanding Issues”, had already thoroughly investigated the Amad Project and its alleged leader, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, based upon information made available from member states (presumably including Israel).  The conclusions reached by the IAEA—that the Amad Project was terminated in 2003, and that Fakhrizadeh went on the head up a new organization that made use of the same personnel as the Amad Project—were the same as made by Netanyahu. As Netanyahu noted, Iran denied the existence of the Amad Project to the IAEA.

What Netanyahu failed to say was that Iran backed up its denial by discussing the organization structures alleged to be part of the Amad Project in detail with the IAEA. Moreover, the IAEA conclusion “that, before the end of 2003, an organizational structure was in place in Iran suitable for the coordination of a range of activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device” indicates that it was well aware of the possibility, if not probability, that Iran was not being fully forthcoming regarding its nuclear past, and yet opted to certify Iran as being compliant with the “Roadmap for Clarification of Past and Present Outstanding Issues.” Netanyahu’s presentation does not alter this outcome whatsoever.

Critical to any discussion as to the relevance of Netanyahu’s presentation is the issue of the credibility of the information he drew upon, as well as the source of that information—the Israeli intelligence services. From 1994 through 1998, while serving as an inspector with the United Nations Special Commission, I actively worked with Israeli intelligence, at the highest levels, on issues pertaining to Iraqi compliance with its obligation to disarm in accordance with relevant Security Council resolutions. My takeaway from that experience is that Israeli intelligence capabilities were, and are, some of the most advanced in the world when it comes to regional issues that have a direct bearing on its national security—both Iraq and Iran would fit into that category. I also found that the Israeli intelligence service, like all others, is fallible and prone to analytical error driven by domestic political imperative, failure in internal management oversight, and poor analysis on the part of those responsible for assessing the massive quantity of data that came into Israel’s possession.

Sometimes the Israelis hit homeruns—the successful intercept of ballistic missile guidance and control equipment in Jordan in November 1995 on the basis of an intelligence tip off from the Israelis is one such example; other times they struck out, such as the paper prepared for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1997 on the reconstitution of Iraq’s nuclear weapons research and development infrastructure that proved to be 100 percent wrong.

In 1998, Israel agreed with the finding of UNSCOM inspectors that Iraq’s proscribed ballistic missile program had been eliminated as an operational threat, and yet four years later, in 2002, the Israelis had changed their mind, void of any new information, and re-assessed Iraq to have dozens of operational long-range missiles in an effort to bolster American justifications for invading Iraq. This only underscores the reality that the Israeli government was just as capable of skewing intelligence to meet a political objective as any other nation.

This personal experience colors my assessment of Netanyahu’s presentation on Iran. When discussing Iran and any allegations regarding past programs dedicated to developing nuclear weapons, one cannot dismiss the fact that Israeli fingerprints were on a previous trove of documents—the so-called “laptop of death”—that initiated the entire controversy about “alleged studies.”

The timing of Netanyahu’s presentation—a mere two weeks before Trump is scheduled to make his determination about the fate of the JCPOA—is suspect, as is the methodology used to introduce the intelligence material to the world. If this trove of documents is, in fact, what Netanyahu claims, then there are mechanisms in place via the JCPOA framework to address the legitimate concerns raised by their collective content. The Israeli government could have shared this information with any of the signatory parties to the JCPOA, who then could have requested a meeting of the Joint Commission of the JCPOA where the issue of Iranian compliance would then be discussed. While the process involved is a cumbersome one, in the end any failure of the part of Iran to constructively engage would result in the matter being taken to the Security Council, where sanctions could be re-imposed.

Likewise, the Israelis could have taken their information straight to the IAEA, which is empowered by the JCPOA to investigate “activities inconsistent with the JCPOA” at “locations that have not been declared under the safeguards agreement or Additional Protocol.” Netanyahu’s ramshackle building in the Shorabad District of southern Tehran would seem to fit that description perfectly, despite the seeming illogic of Iran hiding its most sensitive documents in such an insecure location. Again, any substantive Iranian noncompliance with the IAEA’s demands to investigate would eventually lead to the resumption of economic sanctions against Iran.

The legal and practical fallacies inherent in Netanyahu’s presentation may ultimately not matter. In the end, Netanyahu was addressing an audience of one—Donald Trump. This “intelligence driven briefing,” regardless of the veracity of the information used to underpin it, will be used by Trump to bolster a decision he has already made to withdraw from the JCPOA, setting America and the world on a path for which there can only be one destination—war with Iran. Once Trump withdraws from the JCPOA, there will be no turning back; Israel’s hyped up claims will never be subjected to the kind of scrutiny decisions of this magnitude would seem to demand. This was, and is, Netanyahu’s ultimate objective, which is itself a sad commentary on a president whose campaign was anchored in opposition to the flawed intelligence used to justify the Iraq War. Sadly, one can only observe, “Mission Accomplished.”

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Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. He is the author of Deal of the Century: How Iran Blocked the West’s Road to War.

At the very beginning of the Skripal incident, the security services blocked by D(SMA) notice any media mention of Pablo Miller and told the media not to look at Orbis and the Steele dossier on Trump, acting immediately to get out their message via trusties in the BBC and Guardian. Gordon Corera, “BBC Security Correspondent”, did not name the source who told him to say this, but helpfully illustrated his tweet with a nice picture of MI6 Headquarters.

MI6’s most important media conduit (after Frank Gardner) is Luke Harding of the Guardian.

A number of people replied to Harding’s tweet to point out that this was demonstrably untrue, and Pablo Miller had listed his employment by Orbis Business Intelligence on his Linkedin profile. That profile had just been deleted, but a google search for “Pablo Miller” plus “Orbis Business Intelligence”, without Linkedin as a search term, brought up Miller’s Linkedin profile as the first result (although there are twelve other Pablo Millers on Linkedin and the search brought up none of them). Plus a 2017 forum discussed Pablo Miller’s Orbis connection and it both cited and linked to his Linkedin entry.

You might think that any journalist worth his salt would want to consider this interesting counter-evidence. But Harding merely tweeted again the blank denials of the security services, without question.

This is an important trait of Harding. Last year we both appeared, separately, at the Jaipur Literature Festival. Harding was promoting a book and putting the boot into Wikileaks and Snowden. After his talk, I approached him in an entirely friendly manner, and told him there were a couple of factual errors in his presentation on matters to which I was an eye-witness, and I should be very happy to brief him, off the record, but we could discuss which bits he might use. He said he would talk later, and dashed off. Later I saw him in the author’s lounge, and as I walked towards him he hurriedly got up and left, looking at me.

Of course, nobody is obliged to talk to me. But at that period I had journalists from every major news agency contacting me daily wishing to interview me about Wikileaks, all of whom I was turning down, and there was no doubt of my inside knowledge and direct involvement with a number of the matters of which Harding was writing and speaking. A journalist who positively avoids knowledge of his subject is an interesting phenomenon.

But then Harding is that. From a wealthy family background, privately educated at Atlantic College and then Oxford, Harding became the editor of Oxford University’s Cherwell magazine without showing any leftwing or rebel characteristics. It was not a surprise to those who knew him as a student when he was employed at the very right wing “Daily Mail”. From there he moved to the Guardian. In 2003 Harding was embedded with US forces in Iraq and filing breathless reports of US special forces operations.

Moving to Moscow in 2007 as the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, others in the Moscow press corps and in the British expatriate community found him to be a man of strongly hawkish neo-con views, extremely pro-British establishment, and much closer to the British Embassy and to MI6 than anybody else in the press corps. It was for this reason Harding was the only resident British journalist, to my knowledge, whose visa the Russians under Putin have refused to renew. They suspected he is actually an MI6 officer, although he is not.

With this background, people who knew Harding were dumbfounded when Harding appeared to be the supporter and insider of first Assange and then Snowden. The reason for this dichotomy is that Harding was not – he wrote books on Wikileaks and on Snowden that claimed to be insider accounts, but in fact just carried on Harding’s long history of plagiarism, as Julian Assange makes clear. Harding’s books were just careful hatchet jobs pretending to be inside accounts. The Guardian’s historical reputation for radicalism was already a sham under the editorship of Rusbridger, and has completely vanished under Viner, in favour of hardcore Clinton identity politics failing to disguise unbending neo-conservatism. The Guardian smashed the hard drives containing the Snowden files under GCHQ supervision, having already undertaken “not to even look at” the information on Iraq and Afghanistan. The fact the hard drives were not the only copies in the world does not excuse their cravenness.

We know, of course, what MI6 have fed to Harding, because it is reflected every day in his output. What we do not know, but may surmise, is what Harding fed back to the security services that he gleaned from the Guardian’s association with Wikileaks and Snowden.

Harding has since made his living from peddling a stream of anti-Assange, anti-Snowden and above all, anti-Russian books, with great commercial success, puffed by the entire mainstream media. But when challenged by the non-mainstream media about the numerous fact free assertions on behalf of the security services to be found in his books, Harding is not altogether convincing. You can watch this video, in which Harding outlines how emoticons convinced him someone was a Russian agent, together with this fascinating analysis which really is a must-read study of anti-Russian paranoia. There is a similar analysis here.

Perhaps still more revealing is this 2014 interview with his old student newspaper Cherwell, where he obvously felt comfortable enough to let the full extent of his monstrous boggle-eyed Russophobia become plain:

His analogies span the bulk of the 20th century and his predictions for the future are equally far-reaching. “This is the biggest crisis in Europe since the Cold War. It’s not the break-up of Yugoslavia, but the strategic consensus since 1945 has been ripped up. We now have an authoritarian state, with armies on the march.” What next?

“It’s clear to me that Putin intends to dismember Ukraine and join it up with Transnistria, then perhaps he’ll go as far as Moldova in one way or another,” Harding says. This is part of what he deems Putin’s over-arching project: an expansionist attempt to gather Russo-phones together under one yoke, which he terms ‘scary and Eurasian-ist’, and which he notes is darkly reminiscent of “another dictator of short stature” who concocted “a similarly irredentist project in the 1930s”.

But actually I think you can garner everything you want to know about Harding from looking at his twitter feed over the last two months. He has obsessively retweeted scores of stories churning out the government’s increasingly strained propaganda line on what occurred in Salisbury. Not one time had Harding ever questioned, even in the mildest way, a single one of the multiple inconsistencies in the government account or referred to anybody who does. He has acted, purely and simply, as a conduit for government propaganda, while abandoning all notion of a journalistic duty to investigate.

We still have no idea of who attacked Sergei Skripal and why. But the fact that, right from the start, the government blocked the media from mentioning Pablo Miller, and put out denials that this has anything to do with Christopher Steele and Orbis, including lying that Miller had never been connected to Orbis, convinces me that this is the most promising direction in which to look.

It never seemed likely to me that the Russians had decided to assassinate an inactive spy who they let out of prison many years ago, over something that happened in Moscow over a decade ago. It seemed even less likely when Boris Johnson claimed intelligence showed this was the result of a decade long novichok programme involving training in secret assassination techniques. Why would they blow all that effort on old Skripal?

That the motive is the connection to the hottest issue in US politics today, and not something in Moscow a decade ago, always seemed to me much more probable. Having now reviewed matters and seen that the government actively tried to shut down this line of inquiry, makes it still more probable this is right.

This does not tell us who did it. Possibly the Russians did, annoyed that Skripal was feeding information to the Steele dossier, against the terms of his release.

Given that the Steele dossier is demonstrably in large degree nonsense, it seems to me more probable the idea was to silence Skripal to close the danger that he would reveal his part in the concoction of this fraud. Remember he had sold out Russian agents to the British for cash and was a man of elastic loyalties. It is also worth noting that Luke Harding has a bestselling book currently on sale, in large part predicated on the truth of the Steele Dossier.

Steele, MI6 and the elements of the CIA which are out to get Trump, all would have a powerful motive to have the Skripal loose end tied.

Rule number one of real investigative journalism: look where they tell you not to look.

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Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and Rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010.

Thousands of people protested in the capital of Yerevan, some of them rather violently, to oppose former President Serzh Sargsyan’s appointment as Prime Minister following the implementation of the 2015 constitutional reforms that make the premier the most powerful person in the country. Some people considered this to be a bid by the long-time politician to remain in office under a different auspice and without having to go through the democratic process, seeing as how parliament appoints the Prime Minister whereas the President is still directly elected, and it’s because of this heavy pressure why he resigned.

Nikol Pashinyan, the veteran politician leading what he’s self-described as a “velvet revolution” and who was instrumental in 2015’s so-called “Electric Yerevan” Color Revolution attempt, was the public face behind this campaign, even though the former premier made a strong point that the man whose party only won 7% of the vote in the last election has no right to speak on behalf of the entire nation. To Pashinyan’s “credit” though, he was very open about his regime change intentions and his movement was very successful in luring hordes of naïve youth into the ever-growing crowd.

Those youngsters were understandably upset at the landlocked South Caucasian state’s stagnant economy, though their participation in the unrest was exploited in order to have them function as de-facto “human shields” protecting the older protest organizers, just like what happened in 2015. Moreover, it should be said that Armenia – just like Ukraine before it nearly half a decade ago – is split between East and West, and that this division is evidenced by the former Sargsyan government’s imperfect “balancing act” in trying to manage its membership in the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union with its newfound EU relations through the “Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement” (CEPA).

This geostrategic “schizophrenia”, for lack of a better description, inadvertently destabilized the domestic political situation in Armenia by sending mixed signals to its citizens and provoking discord from all sectors of society, as it’s usually the case that no one is satisfied whenever indecisive leaders try to please everyone. This state of affairs has proven to be fertile ground for hyper-nationalists such as Pashinyan, who demagogically allege that the former government didn’t do enough to protect Armenia’s interests and should have responded in one way or another to Russia’s “military diplomacy” in maintaining the strategic “balance” between their country and its neighboring Azerbaijani foe.

The international implications of Pashinyan or other hyper-nationalist pro-Western firebrands seizing power in Armenia in the aftermath of Sargsyan’s resignation can’t be downplayed because there’s a high likelihood that they could provoke a “Continuation War” in Nagorno-Karabakh in an attempt to drag Russia into a “Reverse Brzezinski” conflagration whereby it might get sucked into a regional quagmire in the Caucasus. Moscow’s mutual defense commitments to Yerevan do not extend beyond Armenia’s frontier to the disputed region within the internationally recognized borders of Azerbaijan, but nevertheless, the chaotic dynamics of any conflict are such that the Russian base in Gyumri might somehow end up playing a role.

That said, the events in Armenia are fast-moving and becoming ever more unpredictable by the day, and the destabilization of this state isn’t at all to Russia’s advantage nor that of the emerging Multipolar World Order in general, but corresponds chiefly to the interests that the US and its allies have in provoking problems right in the center of the Russian-Turkish-Iranian Multipolar Tripartite at this sensitive geopolitical time.

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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.

Those titular words were sent to me by Fr. Daniel Berrigan shortly before he died.

It is a glorious spring day as I write.  The day my father died was also glorious, and I cried like a baby. It was 25 years ago today, May 1, 1993. To the young it must seem like a long time ago.  To me it is yesterday. I am his namesake for which I feel blessed.  Every day that passes I realize how profound his influence has been on me.  Perhaps not obvious to others, it runs like an underground stream that carries me forward and soothes my soul through the passage of days. The early morning he died was so beautiful, almost as beautiful as he was.  The call from the hospital came at 5 A.M.  When I was leaving his apartment shortly thereafter, the birds were in full throat, singing madly.  The flowering bushes leading into his apartment building were in full bloom and the smell intoxicating. The morning was arriving and my father departing and my heart was aching. The bittersweet juxtaposition of his day of departure has never left me, nor has the feel and smell of him as we would hug in those final years as he was weakening and preparing for his restless farewell.  My father never waivered from his faith that

“though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal.”

Those words ring their reminders in my ears continually.

Now it is spring again.  Yesterday as I drove to work through the gentle New England spring rain, I noticed how fast the grass was turning green and how in a few days the weather will turn quite warm and the flowers and foliage will explode with joy. “Explode,” yes.  That word dragged my thoughts across the world. And I thought of all the bombs and missiles exploding throughout the Middle East and the guns of the killers exploding everywhere, extinguishing the possibility for joy for so many. And the nuclear ones hiding in their silos and those treacherously sliding silently under the world’s oceans in Trident submarines, primed to kill us all. And the indifference of so many people to this carnage, initiated and sustained by our own government.  Or was it indifference or something else?  It seemed to me as I wondered in the rolling silence of the car that it was that and yet wasn’t just that.  There was a missing link that I couldn’t fully understand, and still don’t.  Was it fear?

Then I recalled that yesterday was the anniversary of the death of Dan Berrigan two years ago, another father and mentor whose influence runs through my veins.  Dan and my father never met, and in ways they were opposites, but yet a marriage of opposites.  Both trained by Jesuits, and Dan a Jesuit priest, who became a renegade radical priest, a criminal felon in opposition to the American Empire and its terrifying violence; my father, eight years older, a gentle more conservative soul inspired by the same faith expressed in quieter and more personal ways and possessed of a gift with words equal to the eloquence of Dan’s writing but more humorous and sometimes acerbic.  Dan, the serious poet; my father, a master of the epistolarian’s art and quite the serious comedian.

The tragedian and comic, faithful to the paradox of our condition.  In one of his last letters to me my father wrote,

“I am hooked up to a heart monitor and have been examined by a neurosurgeon named Block.  I think he is H.R. Block of tax forms.  I have also just signed a consent form for a cat scan.  I think that’s to see if I like cats.”

And of course Dan, in his role as dissident, wrote so famously, fifty years ago this May 17, as he stood burning draft records in Catonsville, Maryland with his brother Phil and seven other brave resisters to the war against Vietnam:

Excuse us good friends for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house.  We could not, so help us God, do otherwise.  For we are sick at heart.  Our hearts give us no rest for thinking of the Land of Burning Children….We say killing is disorder.  Life and gentleness and community and unselfishness is the only order we recognize….In a time of death, some men… the resisters…those who preach and embrace the truth, such men overcome death, their lives are bathed in the light of resurrection, the truth has set them free…

Who am I?  Who are we?

The mystical and political poet Kenneth Rexforth wrote in “Growing”:

I and thou, from the one to

The dual, from the dual

To the other, the wonderful,

Unending, unfathomable

Process of becoming each

Ourselves for the other.

How do we become who we are? asked Nietzsche, while paradoxically telling us. But in speaking paradoxically, he, the alleged murderer of God but himself a paradoxical lover of Jesus, spoke the truth about us all, or at least about me.  I am a paradox, a combination of influences of those who came before me and now whisper to me from the shadows and those living friends and enemies who inspire me. Their spirits flow into me while I flow on.  It is a vast conspiracy of the communion of the living and the dead.

I can hear my father whisper to me what he wrote years ago:

“The other day Mama saw a death notice of an Edward J. Curtin but happily he came from Brooklyn, so it wasn’t either of us.  I told you things would get better.”

I am laughing through my tears as I recall how he would often end his epistles with the word pax, and then further on the question – quién sabe? (who knows?).

I don’t know, but knowledge is overrated.

The world is beautiful, and we must save it by listening to the voices of our blessed dead, who instill us with life and love and the spirit of resistance.  We must carry it on.

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Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely; is a frequent contributor to Global Research. He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/.

A novice prankster stood at the corner of a street and shouted; “The new restaurant on the next block is giving FREE LUNCH today!” A few curious people start running toward the imaginary restaurant. Soon a crowd of people were pushing and shoving each other to get to the restaurant first and enjoy a free lunch! The novice prankster, amazed by this quick reaction fell in his own prank and start running with the crowd. He was telling himself maybe it is true, may be they are giving a free lunch! The President of the United States reminds us of that novice prankster! Almost a year ago, Mr. Trump in an interview in regard to North Korea said,

“We are sending an armada. Very powerful. We have submarines. Very powerful” suggesting that North Korea could be obliterated at any moment.

Of course the U.S. Navy Admirals with the rest of the world saw this statement as what it was, just as a prank! Independent on April 19, 2017, informed its readers that “‘Armada’ Trump claimed was deployed to North Korea actually heading to Australia”! But the Prankster-in-Chief still believes that his prank was a major factor for the current peace initiative and Inter-Korea Summit. On Sunday night (April 29) during his staged rally in Michigan, in regard to North Korea, he told his loyal supporters that one of the “fake news groups” is asking “What do you think President Trump had to do with it? I’ll tell you what. Like, how about everything?” Of course, this boasting about Korea was confirmed when the enthusiastic audience suddenly burst and shouted, “Nobel, Nobel”. “That’s very nice, thank you” said President.

However, yesterday (April 30th) the news about Korea was overshadowed by another prankster, Prime Minister Netanyahu. Through a bizarre presentation, “Bibi” nervously showcased a few images and slides on a big screen and unveiled file and CD cabinets to prove that “Iran Lied”! He spoke in English at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv, so the corporate media in the U.S. could broadcast his message directly to the American public. But Mr. Netanyahu’s argument about the “secret” Iranian nuclear program was so poor that even the Israeli friendly U.S. media respectfully saw it as a “nothing burger”! Instead, most “pundits” were fascinated by the Israeli intelligence capability and Mossad’s spies who successfully could smuggle 10,000 secret files out of well guarded Iranian underground vaults! But this shenanigan was only a distraction.

Mr. Netanyahu’s political life depends on a chaotic Middle East and foremost a military confrontation with Iran. Today, Mr. Netanyahu is the most dangerous man in the world which enjoys Mr. Trump’s complete support. In this regard Mr. Pompeo -right after his confirmation as the Secretary of State – wasted no time in his first tour, to line up the Arab “allies” for a bloody war with Iran. The U.S./Israel have already demonstrated that they have no respect for the international laws and are dismissing all resolutions and statements that have been issued over Iran nuclear deal by the UN, EU, IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) and JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – an international agreement on the nuclear program of Iran). In other words, those who are more lethal (by the law of jungle) shall rule the Middle East! The last Bombardments by Israeli Air Force targeting the Iranian bases in Syria, which was “registered as a literal earthquake” is very alarming. If this is true, then the question is, are they already using the “mini nuclear bombs”?

There is an arbitrary deadline that is set for May 12 for President Trump to “Nix or Fix the Iran deal”. Peace activists should raise their voices more than ever and demand for a period of reconciliation to ease down the unnecessary anxiety about imaginary threats from Iran.

No more war in the Middle East! Stop Netanyahu Now!

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Massoud Nayeri is a graphic designer and an independent peace activist based in the United States. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author.

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

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

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

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

Reviews

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

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

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