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According to London’s Guardian, “US intelligence officials are under pressure from the White House to produce a justification to declare Iran in violation of a 2015 nuclear agreement” – despite no evidence suggesting it.
Israel believes that bringing Washington into the conflict is doable given that the U.S. media has heavily propagandized against Tehran and that inside-the-beltway groupthink largely perceives Iran as an enemy.
The Lieberman statement was the second Israeli warning in two days. On August 23 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Russian President Vladimir Putin that Israel is ready to defend its interests and to counteract the Iranian influence in Syria.
It is worthwhile to take a look at possibly the same tactic is being used for Iran, where counterfeiting the rial might have been used in an attempt to crash the national currency. Hanke gets enthusiastic about having identified a period of hyperinflation in Iran in 2012.
When the two leaders met in Sochi on Wednesday, Netanyahu told Putin that any peace deal in Syria must entail the full withdrawal of any Iranian forces from the area.
The Trump Administration has notified international inspectors in Vienna that “the possibility of demanding access to military sites in Iran where there is reasonable suspicion of nuclear research or development” the report continued “If the Iranians balk, as seems likely, their refusal could enable Washington to declare Tehran in violation of the 2-year-old deal.” What would that mean? For starters, the U.S. would impose harsh sanctions against Iran which would see retaliatory actions by the Iranians including the complete elimination of the U.S. dollar in its oil trades.
Whatever the West may think, and no matter what the Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri may say publicly, the Lebanese army, in clear coordination with Hezbollah (which is outlawed in many Western countries) as well as with the Syrian army, is now pounding the positions of deadly ISIS/Daesh, right at the border region.
The army began the operation on August 19, 2017, at 5 in the morning, by firing at the terrorists’ positions in Jaroud, Raas Ba’albak and al-Qaa’ using rockets and heavy artillery. It all has an emotional twist: the army commanders declared that the operation was launched in honor of the country’s kidnapped military men and martyrs.
Apparently, Lebanon has finally decided: that, enough is enough! First Al-Nusra Front and now ISIS have to go.
Ignore the fact the Lebanese government went out of its way to say that the Lebanese army is actually not coordinating with Syrian forces, or with Hezbollah. After all, Mr. Hariri just recently returned from Washington, where he met the US President who is treating Syrian President Assad as his personal enemy, and Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. Personally, Mr. Hariri likes the West, and he is very close to its loyal ally, Saudi Arabia, where he was born.
But Mr. Haririwas never elected. Lebanon is using a complex and obscure “confession system”, ‘distributing political and institutional power proportionally among confessional communities’. President has to be a Maronite Christian; Speaker of the Parliament is Shi’a Muslim and Prime Minister has to be a Sunni Muslim.
Therefore, one thing is what Mr. Hariri says, and other what most of the people of Lebanon think or do.
Meanwhile, the Lebanese resistance, politicaland social movement Hezbollah has also declared a joint anti-Daesh (ISIS) offensive with the Syrian army, at the other side of the border. The gloves are suddenly off.
Unlike one month earlier, when Al-Nusra Front was almost totally wiped out by the same coalition but in the end its fighters were spared and offered a transfer to a ‘safe zone’ inside Syria (Idlib), this time there is not going to be any preliminary negotiation with the most venomous of all terrorist groups in the region. The message is clear: either the unconditional or at least irreversible surrender of all ISIS terrorists, or their total destruction.
By the evening of August 20, the Lebanese army was already holding around 80 square kilometers (roughly 30%) of the area that was previously controlled by Daesh (ISIS).
*
Before I departed from the Lebanese capital for Cairo, Egypt, I drank a few cups of coffee with my good friend, an intellectual from Syria. We were sitting in the middle of Beirut’s Christian neighborhood, Achrafieh.
“Let’s take a ‘selfie’ together,” he said. I was surprised; before he was known to despise social media.
“We are winning,” he said, “and that’s great… But you never know what happens next… There will be, surely, some terrible retaliation. Who knows whether we’ll see each other again, you know… Something may happen to me, or to you, on the way to the airport.”
I knew what he was talking about, and I have written about the situation many times before. Lebanon, in some of the non-Muslim neighborhoods of Beirut, has been literally saturated with so-called “dormant cells”, of various terrorist organizations, particularly ISIS. At any moment they can get ‘activated’, destroying hundreds of lives in this beautiful but long-suffering city.
Beirut is nervous, edgy. Great victories in the mountains liberated tormented local people, and Lebanon is finally regaining its territories. But the terrorists will not disappear from the country overnight. They may be losing big territorial battles, but they are still capable of inflicting terrible casualties on the civilians and even the military.
But so far, everything is moving rapidly, in Lebanon and across the border. The once astonishing number of almost 2 million refugees on its territory has gradually been reduced to 1.5 million, and then adjusted further down to 1.2 million. Soon it may drop well under one million.
Syrians are going back, confident that peace is returning to their scarred land.
The Syrian forces, as well as Russians, Iranians and Hezbollah, are clearly determined to stop the insurgency of several terrorist groups on the Syrian territory, while China is now also playing an increasingly important and positive role.
Most of the terrorist armies are directly or indirectly supported by the West or by its close allies in the Gulf. Turkey is also playing dangerous and deadly games in the region.
*
Almost no one is talking about the final collapse of the Middle East, anymore. Entire nations have been damaged; some went up in flames. Implanted militant Islam served well both the West and much of the Gulf. But Syria survived; it fought bravely and determinedly, supported by its allies and at an enormous cost, it has managed to stop the imperialists and their brutal extremist local offshoots.
While no one is celebrating, yet, the mood in Syria, Lebanon and in several other part of the region is suddenly upbeat.
The West is now fully discredited, while Russia has gained great respect.
As Lebanese and Syrian armies are, with Hezbollah support, conducting offensive against the ISIS, Russian jets, it is reported, killed some 200 terrorists heading for a region of Deirez-Zur in Syria. In the same period of time, US-led strikes killed at least 17 civilians in Raqqah.
Mr. Assad has no illusions about the motives of the Western involvement in the region. As reported on August 20 by SANA Syrian Arab Agency, he recently gave a powerful speech:
“…This conflict is a valuable opportunity for the West to ‘settle the account’ with so many countries and subjugating countries which have refused to bow to the West’s hegemony during the past years or decades, including Syria, Iran, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Belarus among others, even Russia.”
President Assad continued:
“Today the West is facing an existential conflict….living in a state of hysteria whenever there is a state that wants to take part with it in the international decision-making in any field and in any place in the world”.
*
By August 27 2017, it was clear that Daesh (ISIS) fighters were cornered, if not completely defeated. The Lebanese Army agreed to a cease-fire in its offensive, after terrorists decided to lay down arms. Negotiations began. It appears that the ISIS may soon pull out of Lebanese territory to Syria, to a designated zone.
Victory came at a heavy price: the Lebanese Army helicopters were flying helicopters with body bags containing remains of the soldiers, over the capital – Beirut.
Across the border (as was reported by Press TV on August 27), helicopters were used for totally different goals:
“For the second time this week, a helicopter operating under the US-led coalition has transferred members of the Daesh terrorist group in Syria’s eastern Dayr al-Zawr Province, a UK-based monitoring group says… Syrian sources said that the operation was accompanied by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces’ artillery fire… The sources speculated that the airlift was possibly meant to transfer US mercenaries fighting alongside Daesh or the terror outfit’s ringleaders who sought to defect…”
*
Tiny Lebanon is tied to Syria with an umbilical cord. It is a rocky, often extremely complex relationship, but during the historic moments like this it is clear that both countries can and choose to act in unison. The Prime Minister of Lebanon may like to flirt with Donald Trump in Washington and with Saudi Arabia, but the armies of both countries are clearly together, fighting the same enemy. And so is Hezbollah.
To both the Syrian and Lebanese people, it is clear who the real enemies of the region are. And they are definitely not Hezbollah or President Assad.
*
Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are revolutionary novel “Aurora” and two bestselling works of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”. View his other books here. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Al-Mayadeen. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo. After having lived in Latin America, Africa and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter.
This article was originally published by New Eastern Outlook.
A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company’s owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” and that Prince’s companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.”
In their testimony, both men also allege that Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq. One of the men alleges that Prince turned a profit by transporting “illegal” or “unlawful” weapons into the country on Prince’s private planes. They also charge that Prince and other Blackwater executives destroyed incriminating videos, emails and other documents and have intentionally deceived the US State Department and other federal agencies. The identities of the two individuals were sealed out of concerns for their safety.
These allegations, and a series of other charges, are contained in sworn affidavits, given under penalty of perjury, filed late at night on August 3 in the Eastern District of Virginia as part of a seventy-page motion by lawyers for Iraqi civilians suing Blackwater for alleged war crimes and other misconduct. Susan Burke, a private attorney working in conjunction with the Center for Constitutional Rights, is suing Blackwater in five separate civil cases filed in the Washington, DC, area. They were recently consolidated before Judge T.S. Ellis III of the Eastern District of Virginia for pretrial motions. Burke filed the August 3 motion in response to Blackwater’s motion to dismiss the case. Blackwater asserts that Prince and the company are innocent of any wrongdoing and that they were professionally performing their duties on behalf of their employer, the US State Department.
The former employee, identified in the court documents as “John Doe #2,” is a former member of Blackwater’s management team, according to a source close to the case. Doe #2 alleges in a sworn declaration that, based on information provided to him by former colleagues,
“it appears that Mr. Prince and his employees murdered, or had murdered, one or more persons who have provided information, or who were planning to provide information, to the federal authorities about the ongoing criminal conduct.”
John Doe #2 says he worked at Blackwater for four years; his identity is concealed in the sworn declaration because he “fear[s] violence against me in retaliation for submitting this Declaration.” He also alleges,
“On several occasions after my departure from Mr. Prince’s employ, Mr. Prince’s management has personally threatened me with death and violence.”
In a separate sworn statement, the former US marine who worked for Blackwater in Iraq alleges that he has “learned from my Blackwater colleagues and former colleagues that one or more persons who have provided information, or who were planning to provide information about Erik Prince and Blackwater have been killed in suspicious circumstances.” Identified as “John Doe #1,” he says
he “joined Blackwater and deployed to Iraq to guard State Department and other American government personnel.”
The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) condemns the announcement yesterday by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions before a gathering of the National Fraternal Order of Police (NFOP) that the administration of President Donald Trump intends to remove the restrictions on the government’s 1033 Program—transfer of deadly military grade equipment to local and state police forces.
According to BAP national organizer Ajamu Baraka,
“Since President Baraka Obama‘s administration’s so-called restrictions were merely a publicity stunt that had no measurable impact on the flow of deadly weapons going to police forces, the Trump administration’s announcement is intended to send another public message—that it intends to make war on Black and Brown people in the United States.”
Jeff Sessions claimed in Monday’s speech that the Trump administration is “rescinding restrictions from the prior administration that limited your agencies; ability to get equipment through federal programs.” However, we at BAP understand this order is meant as yet another green light for increased repression and brutality against Black and Brown working class and poor communities.
Therefore, BAP demands that an immediate halt to the racist, repressive 1033 Program and a suspension of all transfers of military grade equipment to local and state police that are currently being processed.
Furthermore, we specifically call on members of the Congressional Black Caucus (the “conscience of Congress”), and all progressive-minded congressional representatives, to take a public stand against all aspects of the 1033 Program.
The 1033 Program evolved out of the 1990 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)’s original authorization to facilitate the transfer of surplus military grade weaponry to state and local police forces as part of the federal government’s so-called “War on Drugs.” In the 1997 NDAA, the authorized transfer was named the 1033 program and it was expanded to include counter-terrorism. It has been largely responsible for the militarization of police forces across the nation as a result of over $5.4 billion worth of equipment being transferred to state and local police agencies.
Pressure from some members of Congress and demands from various organizations associated with the Black Lives Matter movement led to the Obama Administration placing some restrictions on a small class of equipment. But the flow of deadly equipment did not stop. In fact, according to the Department of Defense’s Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), which oversees the transfers, the value of the equipment reaching state and local police agencies actually increased the year after the restrictions were imposed.
It is clear that this “domestic weapons supply” program was never meant only to fight drugs or terrorism, but to contain and control Black and Brown bodies victimized by the rapacious consequences of a racist, capitalist order that has rendered whole sectors of the U.S. population disposable.
On the basis of reports in Jerusalem Post, Wall Street Journal, and other sources, the Zero Hedge news site not only documents and headlines on August 29th, “Israel Threatens To Bomb Assad’s Presidential Palace”but makes clear that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally informed Russian President Vladimir Putin of this intention during his meeting with Putin in Sochi on August 23rd, and that Netanyahu said there that Israel will do this unless Putin stops Iran and Shiites generally from defeating Al Qaeda, ISIS, and other Sunni fundamentalist organizations who are trying to take over Syria.
“Iran continues to threaten Israel’s existence, and it funds terror organizations and missile plans,” Netanyahu told Putin. “Wherever ISIS disappeared, Iran has taken over. Iran is already on its way to taking control of Iraq, Yemen, and in many ways has already taken over Lebanon.”
Whereas Netanyahu can accept the Sunni groups ISIS or Al Qaeda taking over Syria, he cannot accept continuance of Shiite Iran’s alliance with Syria and defeating ISIS and Al Qaeda in Syria.
The Arutz Sheva report closes:
According to the Prime Minister’s Office, Netanyahu’s meeting with Putin is just part “of a wider international effort led by Prime Minister Netanyahu and intended to impress upon the world how dangerous Iran’s foothold in Syria is.”
The Zero Hedge report suggests that U.S. President Donald Trump has already told Netanyahu that the U.S. isn’t going to do what Netanyahu is demanding be done — overthrow and replace Syria’s government:
The US has essentially signaled to Israel: you are on your own when it comes to Syria policy. Trump shut down the CIA program to topple Assad — a program which had the assistance of Israeli intelligence. Other world leaders like France’s Macron have further stated that Assad is here to stay for the near future.
The only way then to prevent Israel from invading Syria even more than it has been doing by the support that it has provided to Al Qaeda and ISIS there, and actually bombing the Presidential Palace, would be to overthrow and replace U.S. President Trump by his Vice President Mike Pence, who is a fundamentalist Christian whose entire career in public office has been unwaveringly pro-Israel. Perhaps Netanyahu is waiting for clear signs of whether Trump will soon be replaced, before launching his planned invasion of Syria.
Chemical and biological weapons conjure in the mind terror and have been repeatedly cited as a pretext for both acts of military aggression and even entire wars. Scenes of soldiers and civilians choking on toxic chemicals or covered in boils after exposure have been the stuff of nightmares both geopolitically and in fiction.
While current chemical and biological weapons are far more limited than movies and politically-motivated narratives suggest, emerging biotechnology is making possible a new generation of biological weapons that may actually live up to the terror current weapons inspire.
A US policy think tank as early as 2000 in a publication titled, “Rebuilding America’s Defense” (PDF), a virtual blueprint of the plans and means the US sought to utilize toward achieving global hegemony, would make particular note of bioweapons and the use of genotype-specific weapons, stating:
Although it may take several decades for the process of transformation to unfold, in time, the art of warfare on air, land, and sea will be vastly different than it is today, and “combat” likely will take place in new dimensions: in space, “cyber-space,” and perhaps the world of microbes…
…advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.
The prospect that rogue scientists could develop bioweapons designed to target certain ethnic groups based on their genetic differences was raised this week in a report by the British Medical Association (BMA).
The report, Biotechnology, Weapons and Humanity II, warns that construction of genetic weapons “is now approaching reality”. Such “genetic bombs” could contain anthrax or bubonic plague tailored to activate only when genes indicated the infected person was from a particular group.
The topic of genotype-specific bioweapons has held interest across the West for decades. The Apartheid regime in South Africa attempted to produce biological weapons to induce infertility among the nation’s black population.
In 1998 South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission held hearings investigating activities of the apartheid-era government. Toward the end of the hearings, the Commission looked into the apartheid regime’s Chemical and Biological Warfare (CBW) program and allegations that it developed a sterility vaccine to use on black South Africans, employed toxic and chemical poison weapons for political assassination, and in the late 1970s provided anthrax and cholera to Rhodesian troops for use against guerrilla rebels in their war to overthrow Rhodesia’s white minority rule.
While South Africa’s entire CBW program was abhorrent, what is particularly frightening is the use of South Africa’s national vaccination program as a vector for infecting black women with viruses meant to sterilize them. Now that vaccination programs are being pushed globally, there lies the danger that such weapons could be used against entire regions of the planet.
PBS would elaborate further on the CBW program, stating that the South African government:
Developed lethal chemical and biological weapons that targeted ANC [African National Congress] political leaders and their supporters as well as populations living in the black townships. These weapons included an infertility toxin to secretly sterilize the black population; skin-absorbing poisons that could be applied to the clothing of targets; and poison concealed in products such as chocolates and cigarettes.
PNAC’s dream of genotype specific bioweapons then, is not some far-off science fiction future, it is something that has been pursued in earnest for decades and apparently by interests aligned to the West, not enemies of it.
The JASON group, composed of academic scientists, served as technical advisers to the U. S. government. Their study generated six broad classes of genetically engineered pathogens that could pose serious threats to society. These include but are not limited to binary biological weapons, designer genes, gene therapy as a weapon, stealth viruses, host-swapping diseases, and designer diseases.
The report would go into detail regarding each weapon including gene therapy:
Gene therapy might just be the silver bullet for the treatment of human genetic diseases. This process involves replacing a bad gene with a good gene to normalize the condition of the recipient. Transfer of the “healthy” gene requires a vector to reach its target. Vectors commonly used are “viruses that have been genetically altered to carry normal human DNA” such as “retroviruses, adenoviruses, adeno-associated viruses, and herpes simplex viruses.”
Gene therapy has already been used during clinical trials to successfully treat blood cancers, hemophilia and rare genetic immunodeficiency conditions. It is under investigation to treat everything from blindness and deafness to diabetes and heart failure. In utilizing it as a weapon, the report would note:
Another significant gene therapy outcome was the mousepox virus experiment in Australia. Researchers inadvertently developed a lethal mousepox virus while attempting to prevent the plague, within the mice population. This genetically altered virus attacked the immune systems of the experimental mice; it killed all of them. Researchers also found that sixty percent of those mice previously vaccinated died within days of exposure. Although this was unintentionally created, if the same modified virus was added to smallpox, it could present the same lethality for humans.
Regarding “stealth viruses,” the report states:
The basic concept of this potential bioweapon is to “produce a tightly regulated, cryptic viral infection that can enter and spread in human cells using vectors” (similar to the gene therapy) and then stay dormant for a period of time until triggered by an internal or external signal. The signal then could stimulate the virus to cause severe damage to the system. Stealth viruses could also be tailored to secretly infect a targeted population for an extended period using the threat of activation to blackmail the target.
The most worrying aspect of these next-generation biological weapons is how they might be delivered to a targeted population.
With South Africa’s Apartheid government using its national vaccine program as a vector for genotype-specific biological weapons and with current international vaccine programs dominated by Western pharmaceutical corporations and foundations, efforts to infect entire nations or regions of the planet with dormant stealth viruses is a very real threat.
Vaccine programs in the US for example, particularly the flu shot, are suspiciously promoted with unparalleled enthusiasm by governments and the private sector they are partnered with who are otherwise disinterested in the health and well-being of the American population. Vaccines are distributed widely, even freely in neighbors lacking even basics like clean drinking water and viable education programs.
Such vaccine drives are being promoted elsewhere, beyond America’s borders, creating the perfect conditions for both centralizing and controlling ideal vectors for the biological weapons described by the US Air Force assessment.
As humanity’s collective understanding of human genetics improves, the ability of weapon developers to target aspects of our humanity governed by our biology more precisely, including our very temperament and intelligence, will only improve. Besides targeting a foreign nation’s population in the context of foreign wars and conquest, such weapons could also be used domestically to induce enhanced obedience and subservience.
Until nations and even communities take full responsibility for the state of human healthcare within their respective boundaries, including the independent development, production and distribution of pharmaceuticals and vaccines, this threat will only grow.
Defending Against the Next Generation of Biological Weapons
The US Air Force assessment would also note in regards to using gene therapy as a bioweapon that:
Nations who are equipped to handle biotechnology are likely to consider gene therapy a viable bioweapon. Groups or individuals without the resources or funding will find it difficult to produce this bioweapon.
Of course, not only will nations without the resources or funding to handle biotechnology be unable to produce such biological weapons, they will also be absolutely unable to defend against them.
Defending against biological weapons using gene therapy either directly or as stealth viruses requires national healthcare and defense infrastructure to be able to quickly read, write and edit genetic information.
Suspected victims of genotype-specific bioweapons would require having their genes examined through modern genetic sequencing, and countermeasures synthesized in the same manner gene therapy-based biological weapons are. If DNA can be edited maliciously, it can be re-edited to correct malicious code.
Thus, the development of a nation’s biotechnology infrastructure is not merely a means of taking advantage of possible scientific, human health and economic opportunities, it is also a matter of national defense.
Identifying and closing off the possible vectors of biological weapons, specifically vaccines and pharmaceuticals produced by Western monopolies, not only further enhances security, but encourages the local development of alternatives producing economic benefits to nations that undergo this essential transition.
Nations like China are already investing heavily in genetics and possesses infrastructure that could easily lead to a robust biological and genotype-specific weapon defense program. Other nations would be wise to follow suit.
Just as is the case regarding information technology and even conventional weapons, nations that lack self-sufficiency in biotechnology are exposing themselves and their populations to external threats materializing before their very eyes and wielded by eager aggressors in the West already engaged in conventional and cyberwarfare globally.
Ulson Gunnar is a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
All images in this article are from New Eastern Outlook.
Ladies and gentlemen, diplomats and administrators of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
I am pleased to meet with you on this day of the inauguration of your congress, which offers an important opportunity to share perspectives and experiences, discuss future State policies and propose innovative ideas that would push this Ministry to fulfill its missions even more effectively.
This meeting is important because of the acceleration of the dynamics of events in the world and in the region, particularly in Syria, especially since traditional or modern means of communication cannot replace these direct meetings aimed at configuring unified visions and formulating adopted positions. It is also a particularly important meeting given the complexity of the current situation in Syria.
Several parallel wars are taking place on Syrian soil
Indeed, this war that we have been living for years has proved that several parallel wars are taking place on Syrian soil. World and regional wars carried out by Syrian, Arab and foreign hands; which does absolutely not mean that it is by chance that the belligerents came to confront each other on this land. Throughout its history, Syria has been a target, the one who controls it gaining an important influence on the world stage or the international balance.
In order not to give in boasting as some might believe, let us recall once more the Battle of Qadesh about the year 1274 BC. It culminated in the first peace treaty drafted between the Pharaohs and the Hittites who met southwest of Homs. From this time on, the Pharaohs believed that the security of their kingdom passed through the domination of this region. Many other examples of this struggle for the control of Syria extend throughout the period of the Ottoman occupation and that which followed the departure of the French occupant. And, today, we are part of this struggle.
This is why it is very superficial to say that this war is the consequence of the positions taken by Syria, the West having decided to correct the Syrian state. Although this is absolutely true, it is only part of a wider reality related to the international conflict and attempts to change, or stabilize, international balances, through military or political ways and according to their economic or geographical consequences. In other words, by the creation of new States, the disappearance of other States or the modification of their borders.
For the West, this conflict is a valuable opportunity to settle its accounts and to subject many countries that have rebelled against its hegemony in recent decades. Among these countries: Syria, Iran, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Belarus, etc. Even Russia, a superpower and not an emerging country, is not allowed to revolt against Western hegemony.
The political West and the global conflict between two forces
When I speak of “the West” it is in the political sense of the term. I will not name the States that constitute it, we all know who runs it, as we know that much of this “political West” – with probably states located in extreme Asia – has nothing to do with politics, but walk with it. It is therefore about this West that I shall speak in my speech today.
This West is today experiencing an existential struggle, not because an enemy would seek to demolish it – such an enemy does not exist at all – but because it thinks that the pleasurable period of it’s hegemony since the dismantling of the Soviet Union is on the decline. A decline that accelerates every time States rebel against its hegemony. A hegemony that it believes can be prolonged indefinitely by the repression of the rebel states.
And today, the West lives a state of hysteria whenever it feels that a state wants to be a partner in making an international decision, in any field and anywhere in the world. This indicates its lack of self-confidence. But a lack of confidence that results in even more use of force and, therefore, less politics, less reason or no reason at all.
Because for the West, partnership is refused wherever it comes from. Dependence is the only option. In this case, the United States are not even the partner of their Western allies. They designate roles for them, specify the orientations, each step being strictly laid in the wake of the American line. And as a reward, the United States throws them economic crumbs.
Add to the scene that in the United States, the President is not the maker of policies, but the executor; which seems even more evident today. The real policy makers are lobbies, banks, large weapons manufacturers, big oil, gas and technology companies, and other lobbies, which run the state through democratically elected officials but who govern in the interest of the ruling elite. So the lobbies, the State or the regime, and here I will talk about “the US regime” rather than the State – which we are accused of – because the State respects the values of its people, fulfills its obligations, respects international law, respects the sovereignty of nations, respects the principles of humanity, and finally respects itself; while the “regime” does not respect any of this, but works only for the ruling elite, whether it is a financial elite or something else.
Therefore, the “deep State” in the United States does not govern in partnership with the President, but leaves him a small margin; the President and his administration do not work in partnership with the Europeans, but leave them a small margin; and the united Europeans are not partners of their agents and clients in our region and in the world, they leave them just a margin, while not themselves being partners for the rest of the world.
Hence, at present, a conflict between two forces. The former works for the interests of the ruling elites, even if it leads to violations of all international laws and norms, as well as the Charter of the United Nations, even if it leads to the murder of millions of people anywhere in the world. The latter confronts it and works to preserve the sovereignty of States, international law and the Charter of the United Nations, seeing in it its own interest and stability for the World.
Such is the result of the present forces. And if we were to speak of the Arab situation within this resultant, we would say that its weight is zero and that it is non-existent on the international political scene. That’s why I do not see any need to talk about it.
The Western project failed, but war continues
Apart from the strengths and balances of the moment, and apart from the winner and the loser, it is always the smallest countries that pay the price in this type of conflict. In Syria, we paid dearly for this war, but the counterpart is the failure of the Western project in Syria and in the world.
As far as we are concerned, this “Western project” obviously has several aspects, but its essence was that the Muslim Brotherhood governs our Arab region and the Middle East. Because they are representatives of religion, they were supposed to use it as a cover to dominate a believing society and street and lead them in the direction of western interests; which has always been the role of this brotherhood.
However, talking about the failure of the Western project does not mean that we have won the victory. In reality and without exaggeration: they have failed, but the war continues. Where will it take us and when can we talk about victory? That’s another topic. That is why we must remain precise: they have failed so far and we have not yet triumphed, the signs of victory being one thing and victory something else.
Some would say that they still achieved their goal because they destroyed Syria. I am simply saying that their aim was not the destruction of Syria. Their purpose was to seize it intact but subordinate and submissive, so that it was doomed to disintegrate and disappear. And that’s why, with regard to losses and profits, I repeat what I said in 2005: the price of resistance is much lower than the price of capitulation.
At the time, they were talking about the tree bending before the storm to straighten out once it’s gone. I told them that when it is not a storm, not a storm, but a bulldozer rushing through the ground to strike the roots, bending is useless. The only solution is that the roots are strong enough to break the bulldozer.
To our great regret, twelve years have passed and some people still use the same language without having learned the lessons, although the so-called storm did not flare up with the Iraq war but with the Iran-Iraq war in 1980, followed by the entry into Kuwait, and then the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and is still blowing over our region and Syria.
Therefore, it is not a storm, not a tree, nor a bulldozer. In fact, it is a guillotine erected above all the heads in our region, a guillotine that has already worked and harvested millions of souls. In this case, folding is therefore unnecessary. It is necessary either to remove the heads from below the guillotine, or to destroy it. There is no other solution.
Such a language repeated in the manner of parrots is not fitting here. Events proved it. I will give a simple example: in 2002, when we took a stand against the Iraq war, it was not only a position of principle against its invasion, but against what was preparing and was even more dangerous from the point of view of sectarianism and federalism that we find today in Syria.
The sectarian weapon
From that time on we had seen that what was happening in Iraq was not a mere invasion of the country or a temporary storm, but a different plan, which had been going on for at least three decades and was soon to reach the fourth. In the face of sectarian and federalist slogans, we had understood that to submit ourselves by “political pragmatism” was to place our head under the guillotine. That is why we opposed this war.
Now, if we compare the current repercussions of the Iraq war with those who immediately followed it, we would find that they are far more dramatic. They are growing, not the other way around, because it’s a plan. When we understand this image, we will understand that tactics and superficial pragmatism, suggested by some, have no place in our current reality.
I would like us to understand that what we are experiencing is not an isolated stage, but linked to those that have preceded it for several decades. We have lost the best of our young people and an infrastructure that has cost us a lot of money and sweat over several generations. But in return, we have gained a healthier and more harmonious society. It is the truth, not mere words said to please one and the other. This harmony is at the foundation of national cohesion, regardless of beliefs, ideas, traditions, customs, conceptions and opinions. Harmony does not imply their homogeneity, but the complementarity between them. It is this complementarity that leads to a single national color, which forms the unifying national union of all the children of the same country.
Some might reply: “What national union are we talking about when we always hear a sectarian discourse?” I would tell them that this is a speech already heard following the crimes of the Muslim Brotherhood in the eighties and that it did not last. The important thing is not what is said but what resides in the soul. Indeed, if this “separatist dimension” of a language heard in different circles of our society resided in souls, Syria would have fallen a long time ago and the so-called civil war harped on about by the Western media would be a fait accompli.
It was the first year of war that was the most dangerous because a “sectarian dimension”, although limited, was somewhere present in souls like fire under ashes. If it could have spread among the Syrians a few more years after the outbreak of this war, we might have lived an even more dangerous reality.
Therefore, the cohesion of society as we see it is our reality today. Society plays the essential role, a cumulative role throughout history. As for truths and the State, they undoubtedly have a role to play in the light of the lessons we have learned from the war. Nevertheless, if society had not been anti-sectarian, by nature, Syria would not have resisted as it did.
In this context, what happens is therefore a temporary situation, and we must distinguish between reactions and convictions. There is a confessional reaction, it is true, but there is no conviction in this matter and the difference is great between the first and the second.
The best example of this war is the reaction to a draft Constitution that speaks of a Syrian Republic and no longer of the Syrian “Arab” Republic. Now, how often has Arabism been insulted during this war, because some Arabs, and even a large part of the Arabs, have betrayed, while others were not of a great help. It was enough that the media talked about the removal of the word “Arab” so that these same Arabs would make a whole fuss about it. This confirms that most of the time we are dealing with reactions and that you, as diplomats and administrators of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, must remain vigilant about the terminology used and not be deceived by appearances.
The tactics and turn-arounds of the West
The result of this resistance (of Syria) and the price we paid (for it) is (also) the shifts that have occurred recently in Western statements, which did not occur because their human conscience awoke and regained its health, or because they have (finally) felt that Syria is oppressed or anything like that. (The West) made this change because of the resistance of the people, of the state and of the armed forces (of Syria). And of course because of the support of our allies.
(The West) did not make this change because it has ethics or morality, because we have never seen any such thing, even before the war. But it is the reality on the ground in Syria, and the reality on the ground in their own countries (which imposed this turnaround on them). And today, a week or a month do not go by without an event (terrorist attack) occurring which is the direct result of their stupidity in their decision making and support for terrorism in the region. It is these realities that have forced them to change their positions, even partially, in a shy manner and without conviction,but these shifts were imposed on them.
This change of position does not mean a change of policy. The West, like the snake, changes its skin depending on the situation. At first they talked about supporting the popular movement, the popular movement that has never exceeded, in the best case, 200,000 people paid (by the West and the Gulf) throughout Syria, a country of 24 million inhabitants.
And after having tried their best, with weapons beings present on the stage but in a hidden way, to perpetrate massacres and foment sedition, they have failed, and passed to the open support to armed groups but they gave them the name of “opposition” as a cover, that is to say they presented them as political (factions), giving them a political color, and they were presented as “moderate”, that is to say, as not extremists. Or the political denomination “opposition” was to (suggest) that they are not terrorists.
When this project failed and they were exposed for what they are (terrorists) in the eyes of the world public opinion, and in the eyes of the regional and local public opinion in their own countries, they switched to another version, the humanitarian pretext. We are currently at this stage. To summarize, it consists in keeping absolute silence as the terrorists advance or whatever, and perpetrate massacres and killings against civilians, but when it’s the (Syrian) Army that is advancing at the expense of terrorists, then suddenly we begin to hear cries, lamentation and intercession to stop us, with the pretext of humanitarian slogans to stop the effusion of blood, to escort humanitarian aid, and other excuses that we Syrians know well. Their real goal is to provide an opportunity for armed groups to reform their ranks, to motivate, to bring equipment and to send reinforcements to help them, so they can continue their terrorist acts.
In truth, all these various tactics they employed during these stages could never deceive us in any case. From day one, we recognized terrorism, and on the first day, we hit terrorism, during the first stage, the second and third, and will continue to do so, as long as there is any terrorist anywhere in Syria. As for the media and the psychological war they conducted during the last several years, it could never, not a single moment, influence us to be distracted from this goal, namely combating terrorism, or to push us towards fear or hesitation.
Initiatives stemming from bad intentions and traitors
This objective of combating terrorism has never been an obstacle to political action. Any action, initiative or proposal that does not base itself on this objective has no value.Therefore, the fight against terrorism is the objective and, at the same time, the basis of each of our actions. And as long as it is, this base will be the reference and the compass that guide us. This means that all their maneuvers had no effect.
That is why, based on this foundation and conviction, we have treated with great flexibility the various initiatives proposed since the first day of the crisis, although we already knew that most of them were based on bad intentions.
The aim of these initiatives was to achieve specific results that they could not achieve through terrorism. And, as everyone knows, they have resulted in modest results or, if we speak in non-diplomatic language, non-existent. Why? Because our interlocutors were either terrorists, either agents (working for foreign powers), or both. They receive money from their masters, and every word that comes out of their mouths is approved by them, and maybe even stamped on their tongue.
In other words, in practice, we engaged in dialogue with slaves. What could we expect from such a dialogue? What could we hope for when, at every meeting and dialogue, direct or indirect, they proposed everything that corresponded to the interests of foreign states, enemies of Syria, and went against the interests of the Syrian people and against the territorial unity of the homeland ?
These groups paid for by foreigners – today I speak very frankly, because after almost seven years, there is no longer any way to use diplomatic language, even if this is a meeting of diplomats. Naturally, we know this truth. We know that these characters and these groups are imaginary ghosts that do not exist and do not weigh – they have recently discovered that they do not weigh much and that they are simple instruments intended to be used only oncebefore being thrown into the trash. That is to say, they are like single-use medical equipment, which is opened, used and thrown, with the essential difference that they are not initially sterilized but are contaminated to the point of not being recyclable.
What is charming is that recently they began to talk about the errors of the revolution.During the past year, articles and declarations have spoken of this pure and immaculate revolution, themselves being pure and immaculate, but sometimes stained by the militarization of the revolution, sometimes because they have opened their space toextremists, and so on.
I disagree with them on this point and I think you agree with me. They were not mistaken.They did their duty. They were tasked to collaborate and fulfilled their collaborative role. In this field they have almost achieved infallibility in terms of discipline, dedication and loyalty, with irreproachable professionalism. But they made some mistakes: the first when they believed that the master attaches importance to his slave, I mean their masters. The second when they believed that a people who is his own master, such as the Syrian Arab people, would agree to submit to collaborators and traitors of their kind. The third error is when they said that the revolution had failed.
The truth is that the revolution has not failed. It has been a model of success and we are proud of it. But I am not talking about their revolution. I am talking about the revolution of the Syrian Army against the terrorists and the revolution of the Syrian people against the collaborators and the traitors.
They thought they had monopolized the term “revolution”, which had become a title that had been stuck to other titles and whose use was forbidden to anyone: the Revolutionary Professor so-and-so, the Revolutionary Doctor so-and-so, and so on. Faced with this, many Syrian patriots took this term in aversion, just because they had monopolized it. No… The term “revolution” is part of our language, we are always proud of it and we have not given it to anyone. That they have been called revolutionary, does not mean that they are and does not change anything to what they really are. How many people wear the names of Prophets, peace and blessings be upon them, without possessing anything of faith? The same applies to them. To be presented as revolutionary does not mean that they are. We are telling them now: the real revolutionaries are the patriotic elite, the human elite and the moral elite; but you, humanly, morally and patriotically, are no more than garbage.
The initiatives of Astana, Erdogan and de-escalation zones
Just as we have responded flexibly to promote dialogue initiatives, we welcomed positively those on the cessation of fighting, even if we had no doubt that terrorists would benefit from these initiatives to fool us (betraying their commitments), as they have done repeatedly. But our forces were on alert.
Hence the question: if the results of the meetings are non-existent and if they do not honor their agreements, why waste our time? Because since the beginning of the crisis, we have not missed any opportunity to stop the bloodshed without strive to grasp it, even when hope was minimal, in order to preserve the innocent.
From there, we attended the Astana meetings, starting from a clear national vision, and great trust in our friends, Iran and Russia. But what about the third partner Turkey?
We do not view it as guarantor or partner in the peace process and, of course, we do not trust it. It supports terrorists. It guarantees nothing but for terrorists. And the real reason for the participation of Turkey in Astana Congress is that Erdogan has no other options before him. Terrorists fall everywhere, successive defeats, scandals also because of his relations with terrorists. Therefore, to enter the process of Astana is on one hand a kind of cover, and also allows h to protect terrorists. That is what he did and, as you know, the blocking of a number of sessions took place to protect the terrorists.
On the other hand, the participation of Erdogan in the Astana meetings gives it a role in Syria, a role it seeks to legitimize its role and the presence of Turkish units in Syria, that is, to legitimize the occupation, whereas our position was straight away clear: any Turkish individual present on Syrian soil without the consent of the Syrian government is an occupier.
This means that Erdogan has practically become a kind of political beggar on the roadside, begging for any role, because he feels the imbalance in Turkey and the scandal of his relationship with terrorists that is clearly discovered throughout the world.
And indeed, if he remains in power, it is not for his wit and wisdom as some try to present it, but because he still has a role to play in supporting terrorists in Syria. But if the Syrian situation were to end in favor of terrorism or other forces supporting terrorism, he would become useless and no one would support his maintenance. He therefore remained in power because of his role of the moment in Syria: a destructive role.
One of Astana’s results corresponds to “de-escalation zones”. They have given rise to many questions. Do they correspond to a fait accompli in the direction of partitioning Syria? Will they benefit terrorists? Would they be equivalent to secured areas?
The truth is that, in general terms, they are not fundamentally different from previous initiatives concerning the cessation of hostilities. The differences are in form and concern geography, formulation and, to a certain extent, procedures, slightly different compared to previous initiatives, but their essence is the same: (they are meant) to stop the bloodshed, to allow the return of the displaced, channel humanitarian aid, give terrorists a chance to leave the terrorist strand and settle their situation so that they can return to the fold of the State.Such are the general aspect and the ultimate aim, which naturally includes national reconciliation, the restoration of the authority of the State, the exit of the terrorists who would lay down their arms; in other words, the return to normal status throughout the territory.
Concerning the “fait accompli”: there is no fait accompli as long as we do not stop the fight.We are talking about a single arena, the same terrorism, regardless of its different bases moving from one group to another and from one gang to another. As long as we continue to hit terrorism in this same arena, it will only weaken everywhere else. We strike him in one place, he weakens in all the others. And as long as the fighting continues, the situation remains limited in time, not the other way around. This means that there is no fait accompli and there is no question that as a Syrian government we accept a partition proposal under any title. This in the event that such a proposal had been advanced, which is not the case.
As to whether de-escalation areas will benefit terrorists, there is no need to worry about this.They have already tried, but our armed forces were on the lookout and crushed them more than once.
Finally, “secured areas” mean that US-led coalition aviation creates an area of air coverage for terrorists, allowing them to travel and expand, even hitting anyone who advances to fight them. The situation is different for “de-escalation zones”, because overflight of these areas is prohibited for all parties, but terrorists will be hit in case they move in any direction, and if they violate the agreement, as Syrian government, we have the right to make them the targets of our military operations.
And now what will happen? In practice, we are merely participating in the formation of dialogue committees representing the Syrian State, other committees will be formed by the parties residing in these [de-escalation] zones, in order to discuss the points of agreement referred to above, with the ultimate aim of achieving national reconciliation; which can only be realized by the departure of the terrorists and the restoration of the authority of the State throughout the territory. Nothing less, because it would mean that we have not achieved our goal.
That is why it is in our interest that this initiative be a success, and we will do all we can to make it successful. But it also depends on the capabilities and sincerity of the other parties, whether they are inside these areas or outside the Syrian borders, as foreign parties can negatively or positively affect the local parties.
What History will remember about ourselves, our brothers and our friends
Ladies and gentlemen,
Despite more than 6 years of this ferocious war against Syria and despite the fact that the Syrian army, with at its side the popular forces and our allies, leads the fiercest battles against the most formidable terrorist groups, supported by the most powerful and richest countries in the world, despite this, these forces, our forces made achievements and victories, week by week and day by day, crushing terrorists and purifying areas contaminated by (their presence), and they go on on this path.
What has been achieved by the heroes of the Syrian Arab Army, the armed forces and popular and allied forces, indeed heroic acts and sacrifices during the past war years, shows an example in the History of wars throughout History. And what they have accomplished in terms of sacrifices is a beacon for future generations, in the sense of commitment to national dignity, patriotism and sacrifices for the homeland and for the people. And the truth… [Applause]
And the truth is that it is these achievements that were the real lever to the march of national reconciliation that began 3 years ago, and it is they who have pushed many undecided (among armed groups) to come back in the lap of the nation. That is to say, to speak clearly and far from any embellishment, these military achievements of our armed forces were the very war and the very policy. Alongside the Army exploits, were it not for the endurance of the Syrian people, every citizen in his place, the student, the teacher, the worker, the civil servant, the diplomat,the employee, and so on in all layers and components of Syrian society, it would not have been possible that Syria resists to this day.
As for our friends and allies, they were a very important part of these achievements and successes.
Hezbollah, which needs no introduction and who willingly evades recognition and thanks, his fighters were no less attached to (the defense of) Syrian land than their brothers in arms in heroism of the Syrian armed forces. And when we talk about them, we speak with great pride, exactly the same as when we speak of any Syrian who defended his homeland. The same goes for their martyrs, their wounded and their heroic families.
As for Iran, it has not wavered in its presence with us since day one. It supplied weapons and quantities (of money, equipment and men) without any limit. It sent military advisers and officers to help us plan (the defense and offensive). It supported us economically, through the extremely difficult conditions we experienced. It led the political battles with us in all international issues and proved in each instance that it is sovereign and sole master of its decisions,true to its principles and its commitments, in which one can have full confidence.
Likewise for Russia. She used her veto several times in succession in her policy, in defense of the unity and sovereignty of Syria,and in defense of the UN Charter and international law. China did the same. And Russia has not limited herself to support the Syrian Army and provide everything it needed for its anti-terrorist operations. She later sent its air force and was directly involved in the fight against terrorism, offering martyrs on Syrian soil.
Thus, if the successes on the field have been made thanks to the determination of the heroes of the armed forces, Army and popular forces, the direct support of our allies, political, economic and military has greatly strengthened our capabilities to gain ground in the field, and narrowed losses and burdens of war. And therefore, they are now our true allies in these achievements, in the way of striking and completely annihilating terrorism and restoring security and stability in Syria.
And if the Syrian Arab people and with it the armed forces today are writing a new history for Syria and the region in general, there will also be volumes that will be written about our friends. About Iran and Imam Khamenei. About Russia and President Putin. About Hezbollah and Sayed Hassan Nasrallah. [Applause] These volumes will be written about their principles, their ethics, their virtues, for future generations to read.
The roadmap
What are the future directions of the Syrian policy? We begin with the traditional rule that we adopted since the early days of the war,which rests on two points. The first: to continue to fight and crush the terrorists wherever they are, in cooperation with the Allied Forces and friends.
The second: to pursue national reconciliation, wherever necessary, as it has demonstrated its effectiveness in different ways, and that is for us a chance to stop the bleeding and rebuild the country.
The third point is the improvement of our external contacts. The fact is that Western public opinion has changed. And you, in the Foreign Ministry, you are best placed to monitor the details. It is not only Western public opinion that has changed, but the world public opinion, especially Western. It changed mainly because (people) have discovered, after years, that the story (propaganda) was not well put together. For seven years, the same lie was told about the state that kills its people, about the world that supports the people against the state, which remained standing. This is an inconsistent speech doomed to fail and illogical even for children.
People have discovered that their leaders were lying and that their traditional media were also associated with the lies of the officials and state. Today, people have discovered that the story told is false, but it does not necessarily mean they know the real story; this task is up to you and your heart working diplomats. Now that the doors of the truth are open, we have to present it to the world public opinion and especially that of the West.
The fourth point is the promotion of the economy, especially as your congress coincides with the Damascus International Fair, which gives a great signal in this direction. Promoting economic opportunities already available and those that might be in the near future. At this point, let me say that the Syrian economy has entered a recovery phase, slowly but surely, although we are in a state of almost total siege. This too is part of the essential missions of the Syrian diplomacy.
The fifth point is very important: we must move politically, economically and culturally to the Orient (the East). The East is mostly taken in the political sense, and also in part in the geographical sense. This East today, without specifying the countries that comprise it, which as diplomats you know perfectly, the East has all the elements of development. It is no longer in the “Second World” as in the past, but is part of the “First World” in every sense of the term,at least in regard to our needs as a developing country. It is not necessary to look for the latest in science, but for all that is essential, the East has for sure all the goods and all the capabilities we need.
This East therefore has the elements of science and economy, it has the elements of civilization (that are lacking in the West), treats us as equals and with respect, without dictates, without pride or arrogance. All these behaviors are virtually absent from the side of the West, which never offered us anything even in the best times. The simplest things, such as scientific missions (were refused to us). Thus, when he thinks that such specialization could have a significant impact on development in Syria, he forbids us to enroll our students in it. Therefore, we must not rely on the West. I speak of an experience of over four decades, and especially since the October War in 1973.
About the reopening of some embassies
The West today is suffering from paranoia. If he speaks of international community, he speaks of himself, and in their eyes, the world is probably made of livestock herds and not (human) societies. If he cut his relations with us, he thinks he has cut us the oxygen. And if he closes his embassy, he says that we are isolated even though we kept our relationship with dozens of other countries. So we are an isolated country (according to the West), but how many of our ambassadors abroad are now present in this room, and how many foreign ambassadors in Syria? We are not isolated as Westerners think. But their arrogance leads them to think that way.
Lately we have started to hear about the possibility of reopening the embassies of some western countries who behaved as enemies of Syria and who sided with the terrorists. Some say they will open their embassies in exchange for our security cooperation, or claim that we would accept security cooperation only if they open their embassies; despite the fact that they have not asked us if we would accept the reopening of the embassies. This discourse suggests that we expect this day forward, as if we were sitting on the side of the road waiting for the day of deliverance where these foreign embassies would open their doors; and if not all of them, at least some. So maybe we might feel in our being, perhaps we might feel our legitimacy lost due to their absence, and more, maybe we would experience the feeling of having found our honor and national dignity when they reopen their embassies in Syria. This is how they think.
The truth is that we never talked about it this way. We never said that we accept cooperation security in exchange for the opening of embassies. We said that no relationship is possible, including security, in case of “political cover”, which requires a sound political relationship,rendered impossible as these countries support terrorism. That is why we will be clear: there will be no security cooperation, not reopening embassies, or even any role for some countries who have recently started saying they would participate in the resolution of the problem in Syria, as long as they will not cut their relations with terrorism and terrorists, in a clear, explicit and unambiguous way. Only then will it be possible to talk about the opening of embassies.
The Western political system is incapable to produce statesmen
This Western stupidity is not new. I still remember the subject of desertions that I never mentioned in my speeches and which has just been evoked to me in a question to which I replied. This subject is now forgotten, so it is good to remember it, especially as we had said that it was not of great importance for us, but it truly is. Indeed, (conceive that) dozens – some say hundreds, whatever – of people devoid of national feeling or paid by the abroad, were hidden in the various services of the State, that we knew nothing about them, and could not distinguish those who were attached to their country and those who were not, without our having the slightest clue. Imagine that all these years, these people were at the heart of (State) organizations, acting as a fifth column and plotting for the interests of these foreign states. So what was the situation? In all certainty, the situation was very difficult. How could we tell them, you are unpatriotic and untrustworthy, get out (of our services) of the State so that we can work correctly (since we did not know their identity)?
Well, these Western leaders in their stupidity did so. (These traitors) did not just come out of the State services, but of the whole country. That is, they made a cleaning operation, unprecedented, that we would have been unable to carry out. That is to say, whatever the points of difference between people and between countries, there are always points of convergence. Therefore I can say that the West supported these desertions, and we also stood by them and converged with him on that! We do not diverge on everything, and we agreed on this point.
Of course, there are also sanctions against Syria, even if they are secondary. The West also wanted to punish Russia with sanctions, but lost more than Russia has lost. In the end, this great power immediately compensated for its losses by its relations with other countries and increased its local production thanks to its diversified economy, with its vast territory and variety of natural resources. It is Russia who won. Thus, for at least twenty years, the West has continued to show his stupidity, as a consequence of the arrogance that characterizes him. The West has enormous resources and excellent capabilities in every area, but because of his lack of wisdom, he does not take advantage of them. That’s why he goes from a mistake to another, from one problem to another, from a dead end to another, and covers them with lies. It seems that the Western political system is no longer able to produce (true) statesmen.
As for Western society, it is undeniable that it is rich and advanced in all aspects of life. It is a fact that we do not deny. And it is capable of producing (even more). But its political system only allows those serving political, economic, financial or other elites to access the controls. Hence the results we see today.
The foundations of Syrian policy
What are the foundations on which rests the Syrian political and particularly at that stage, the stage of the war?
First: Everything about the fate and future of Syria depends 100% on the Syrians, not 99% and some cents, 100%. Even our friends clearly adopt this discourse.We accept the advice wherever they come from, but the final decision may only be Syrian.
(Second): The territorial unity of Syria is one of the evidences that absolutely admits no debate or discussion.
(Third): The Syrian national identity is indisputable, but the essence of this identity is Arabism in its civilizational unifying meaning of all children of the country and all sectors of society.
Fourth: We will not allow under any circumstances to enemies, adversaries or terrorists to get through the politics, what they could not accomplish on the ground through terrorism.
The last point: The war will not change our principles.The Palestinian cause stills remains essential to us, Israel is still the enemy who occupies our territories and we always support any resistance in the region as long as it is true and not falsified, as is the case of some resistance movements.
Ladies and gentlemen,
In this war we are fighting on many fronts and in several areas in order to defeat the terrorist plot and restore peace and security in Syria. We must realize that its extension is, on a certain side, due to the fear of our enemies and adversaries to see Syria become much stronger than it was before the war. This is why we must now seriously work to build Syria’s future on solid foundations: a Syria free, strong, independent, where terrorism, extremism, traitors and foreign agents do not have their place. And that is why we must realize that the work done will be the guarantee of our fidelity to the values, traditions and interests of Syria and the Syrians.
I wish you every success in your missions and your conference.
World War II was different — and not only because it was global, and not only because our side (the U.S. and UK and Soviet Union) won.
The basic principle determining whether an invasion even has a possibility to be good, is whether that invasion is truly essential in order for the invading country even to continue at all to exist — which means, its constitution to continue in force. Only such authentic national defense can ever justify an invasion.
During WW II, the continued existence of the Soviet Union, and of Britain, and of the United States (as well as of many other countries) was, indeed, seriously threatened by Adolf Hitler’s regime, and not only because it was aided by Benito Mussolini’s regime, and by Emperor Hirohito’s regime.
On the Allied side, “non-interventionists” in that situation were merely a combination of Hitlerites, and fools. Hitler had made clear, in his 1925 Mein Kampf, and in his 1928 Second Book, and in his speeches, and in his re-armament of Germany, that he was determined to exterminate all Jews and all disabled persons, and to enslave all Slavs (including Poles, Russians, Czechs, Slovaks, etc.), and that he despised and would never tolerate democracy, anywhere. This was known generally among the top economic classes and all national politicians, within his intended victim-countries — or, at least, among all of these elite who weren’t incredibly stupid. Nonetheless, some tried to negotiate with him, though his rearmament program made clear to anyone who had half a brain, that Hitler meant what he asserted in his books and speeches. The Wikipedia article on the matter says that
“Since World War II, both academics and laypeople have discussed the extent to which German re-armament was an open secret among national governments. A likely element in the thinking of some Western leaders was the willingness to condone a rearmed and powerful anticommunist Germany as a potential bulwark against the emergence of the USSR.”
But what this alleged belief by “some Western leaders” means, is those believers’ conviction that Hitler’s clear statements advocating conquest of other countries and introduction of his dictatorship there, were serious only against communist countries, and that his blatant and proudly expressed racism posed no actual threat beyond the geography of that restricted ideological sphere, the communist nations. In other words: one had to be either an ignoramus, or else an idiot, or else a liar, in order to be a “non-interventionist” after 1933. Any such persons were in clear denial, of clear reality. Hitler was a clear existential threat to all other nations.
So: the situation regarding WW II constitutes a very rare exception, in which invading a foreign country (in that case, the fascist Axis nations) is morally justifiable.
America’s invasion of Vietnam was entirely unjustifiable. This is a fact that can’t be published in America, because the official 47,434 U.S. “Battle Deaths,” and the official 10,786 “Other Deaths (In Theater),” and the official 32,000 “Other Deaths (in Service),” and the official 153,303 “Non-mortal woundings,” and all of those grieving American families, are presumed to oppose honesty about this basic matter of U.S. history. These soldiers died, and were wounded, and they killed Vietnamese etc., for nothing, other than for what America’s elite wanted.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that JFK and LBJ weren’t enormously pressured by the U.S. aristocracy to invade, nor that Richard Nixon wasn’t a psychopath for promising a “secret” plan to end the war by means of a U.S. victory that even he and Kissinger knew was actually impossible. But it does raise the question as to whether the U.S. President really represents the American public, or, instead, represents the U.S. aristocracy.
There are a great many other U.S. invasions that likewise were war-crimes that cannot be prosecuted, because the U.S. empire is beyond the reach of the law, and almost everybody is aware that this tragic situation applies to many U.S. invasions.
Donald Trump inherited some of these invasions/occupations, such as in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Libya, in Syria, in Yemen, and also in coups, such as in Ukraine (which the U.S. ‘news’media still call a ‘democratic revolution’, instead of a “coup”).
He’s continuing all of them — including the coups/juntas, and not merely the outright invasions/occupations.
The U.S. Government does not apologize for its crimes, and nobody can prosecute its crimes. So, what the world has instead, is lies, about these crimes. As long as these lies go on being repeated, there will be no possibility of change: these tragedies, and more of the same, will then inevitably continue.
Real victory is simply impossible without real truth. But, who even cares about that? There are always excuses, for repeating the deceptions of self, and of others. ‘History’ becomes as it is: one key omission after another, one key falsehood after another, all mixed in with enough truths so as to provide the myth that the aristocracy want the public to believe.
Outside of the United States, the truth about this particular matter is widely known: the only international poll that has ever been done on the question “Which country is the biggest threat to peace?” found that by an overwhelming margin, people around the world (but not in the United States) volunteered “United States” as the answer. 67,806 respondents were interviewed on that, from 65 countries. The poll was by WIN/Gallup, using scientifically random samples in each one of the 65 countries. Those people know it, but Americans do not.
International politics is in the midst of multiple paradigmatic changes as the emerging Multipolar World Order progressively replaces the existing unipolar-led one, and this has seen both the development of “non-traditional” partnerships and the weakening of historical ones. There are several examples that could be referenced in proof of this, but the most powerful have to do with Armenia, India, and Serbia’s changing relations with Russia.
All three long-standing Russian partners are diversifying their ties with Moscow to varying degrees and for different reasons, though the end result of their more Western-friendly newfound partnerships hasn’t been lost on the Kremlin.
Indian grenadiers march during the Victory Day parade at Red Square in Moscow, May 2015
Wayward Partners…
Armenia is insistent on signing an “Association Agreement” with the EU and partaking in large-scale multilateral NATO drills in Georgia and Romania, which led the author to write his recent analysis titled “Armenia Abandoning Russia: Consequences For The Caucasus”.
Similarly, India entered into an unprecedented military-strategic partnership with the US over the past year through its clinching of the LEMOA deal and attendant official designation as the Pentagon’s “Major Defense Partner”, two events which were easily foreseen by the author and predicted in his May 2016 article provocatively posing the question “Is India Now A US Ally?”, which was in its turn followed up by a “2017 Forecast For South Asia” in January of this year enumerating the over one dozen analyses confirming India’s pro-Western pivot. Earlier this week, US President Trump even asked India to “help us more with Afghanistan”, showing that the once-proud “multipolar-independent” state has now turned into the US’ regional “Lead From Behind” lackey.
As for Serbia, its long-serving strongman Aleksandar Vucic will stop at nothing to bring his country into the EU, and last year he also signed a very controversial “Individual Partnership Action Plan” (IPAP) with NATO, as well as recently agreeing to the first-ever joint NATO drills on Serbian territory this October.
…Or Jilted Lovers?
In defense of each of the aforementioned state’s pro-Western moves, their leadership might be responding to what they view as “unfriendly” moves by Russia, or those which are disadvantageous to their own national interests.
Armenia understandably doesn’t like that Russia has strengthened its ties with Turkey, a complex and multifaceted process that the author predicted and subsequently followed up on in a series of articles listed under his “2017 Forecast For The Mideast” about the Great Power Tripartite between Russia, Turkey, and Iran. Yerevan also can’t stand that Moscow is its rival Baku’s top arms supplier, but instead of understanding the neutral strategy behind such a maneuver as explained by the author in his September 2016 piece about how “Army Expo 2016 Showcases Russia’s Success At Military Diplomacy”, they see this as only being against them and can’t countenance any other explanation. Therefore, some of their leadership is flirting with the radical idea of replacing Russia’s traditional role with the West instead.
India is very similar to Armenia in many ways as regards Russia’s rapid rapprochement with Pakistan, which has seen the former Cold War-era foes tighten their diplomatic coordination over Afghanistan, partake in their first-of-a-kind joint military drills and commit to more robust military cooperation, and even expand their energy relations through a nascent North-South gas pipeline and other prospective projects. Just like Russia’s ties with Turkey and Azerbaijan concern Armenia, so too does Russia’s relationship with Pakistan bother India, though neither Yerevan nor New Delhi can “see the forest through the trees” and understand the nuances of Moscow’s “military diplomacy” and multipolar balancing act. Importantly, it should be noted that Russia’s partnership with Pakistan didn’t accelerate until after it was clear that India decided to become an American ally.
About Serbia, there’s a common feeling in the country that Russia could always, both in the recent past and presently, have “done more” to help them out of “Slavic Solidarity” and “Orthodox Brotherhood”, so one can surely sympathize with the misgivings that some Serbs have had towards Russian foreign policy when all that they receive from it is arms and energy. These are nevertheless substantial yields, but they lack the real-sector economic results and soft power sway that the West is providing, which to a growing number of Serbs is irresistibly attractive. It’s true that Russia has entered into a somewhat unexpected rapprochement process with Croatia over the past year, though this occurred after Belgrade’s pro-Western tilt, not before, and is actually unrelated to it in any case.
So Are They “Balancing” Against Russia Or “Betraying” It?
On the surface, there appears to be little difference between the overarching pro-Western shifts that Armenia, India, and Serbia have undertaken, nor the reasons behind them in doing so as a supposed reaction to their dissatisfaction with Russian foreign policy, but the reality is that what Armenia and India are doing is infinitely more destabilizing for Russian interests and those of the multipolar world in general than anything that Serbia could ever do. The reason for this is simple – Armenia and India are members of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAU) and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), and BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), respectively, and therefore have certain tacit institutional obligations to their fellow members, including Russia, whereas Serbia isn’t a member of any of these four groups and doesn’t share the same unstated responsibilities.
Russia and its EAU and CSTO partners never expected that Armenia would endanger their collective interests by frenziedly trying to reach a deal with the EU and ostentatiously showing off its new ties with NATO, nor did Russia and the other BRICS and SCO countries ever seriously think that India would become the US’ military-strategic bridgehead in the Southern Eurasian Rimland. The fact that Armenia and India have undertaken such dramatic policy reorientations in the past year demonstrates that their leaders are applying an extreme “zero-sum” Neo-Realist approach in caring only about their own subjectively perceived self-interests at the expense of their multilateral institutional partners, thereby making them highly disruptive forces in their said organizations and justifying the heightened threat perception that Russia and others see in them nowadays in response to their antics.
This goes far and beyond “balancing” because both states are unreservedly flouting their institutional obligations and deliberately making moves which interfere with the cohesiveness of their said organizations and massively undermining their security.
Serbia, however, is doing none of that, because unlike Armenia and India, it doesn’t have any legal obligations to Russia and its organizational partners due to its lack of membership in any of the aforesaid four institutions. Serbia’s prospective de-jure membership in the EU and shadow de-facto one in NATO would obviously harm Russia’s grand strategic interests if they ever came to pass, but they wouldn’t be a “betrayal” of Moscow because there’s nothing tangible for Belgrade to betray. Rather, any moves by Serbia in this direction would technically be “balancing” because they wouldn’t harm the internal institutional interests of Russia and its organizational partners, whereas similar actions by Armenia and India – due to these two states’ shared memberships in two separate but interlinked multipolar platforms – constitute geopolitical “betrayals” since they intentionally sow discord and confusion within these blocs.
Serbian military participating in 2015 Victory Parade in Moscow
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 global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare.
All images, except the featured image, in this article are from the author.
My just published book, ‘Central Bankers at the End of Their Rope?: Monetary Policy and the Coming Depression’, Clarity Press, July 2017, is now available for immediate purchase on Amazon.com, as well as from this blog. (see book icon)
The following is an excerpt from an article by the title of this blog post, that appears in ‘Z magazine’s September 1 issue–describing how central bank policies have become a major contributor to income inequality, subsidizing and boosting capital incomes, as well as now are a primary cause of recurrent financial crises.
“This September 2017 marks the nineth year since the last major financial crisis erupted in 2008. In that crisis investment banks Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers collapsed. So did the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the quasi-government mortgage agencies, that were then bailed out at the last minute by a $300 billion US Treasury money injection. Washington Mutual and Indymac banks, the brokerage Merrill Lynch, and scores of other banks and shadow banks went under, or were forced-merged by the government, or were consolidated or restructured. The finance arms of General Motors and General Electric were also bailed out, as were the auto companies themselves, to the tune of more than a hundred billion dollars. Then there was the insurance giant, AIG, that speculated in derivatives and ultimately required more than $200 billion in bailout funds. The ‘too big too fail’ mega banks—Citigroup and Bank of America—were technically bankrupt in 2008 but were bailed at a cost of more than $300 billion. And all that was only the US. Banks in Europe and elsewhere also imploded or recorded huge losses. The US central bank, the Federal Reserve, helped bail them out as well by providing more than a trillion US dollars in loans and swaps to Europe’s banking system as well.
Although the crisis at the time was deeply influenced by the crash of residential housing in the US. Few US homeowners were bailed out, unlike the big banks, insurance companies, auto companies, and other businesses. More than 14 million US homeowners were allowed to foreclose on their homes. A mere $25 billion was provided to rescue homeowners, and most of that going to bank mortgage servicing companies who were supposed to refinance their mortgages but didn’t. More than $10 trillion conservatively was provided to financial institutions, banks and shadow banks, and big corporations, and foreign banks by US policy makers in the government and at the US central bank, the Federal Reserve. $25 billion for 14 million vs. more than $10 trillion for capitalists and investors.
The Federal Reserve Bank as Bail Out Manager
A common misunderstanding is that the banking system bailouts were managed by the US Congress passing what was called the Trouble Asset Relief Program, TARP. Introduced in October 2008, TARP provided the US Treasury a $750 billion blank check with which to bail out the banks. But less than half of TARP was used, and most of that went to the auto companies and smaller banks. Only half of the $750 billion was actually spent. By early 2009 the remainder returned to the US Treasury. So Congress didn’t actually bail out the big banks—the AIG, Bank of America, Citibank, investors in the subprime mortgage bonds that collapsed, etc. The real bail out was engineered by the US central bank, the Federal Reserve, in coordination with the main European central banks—the Bank of England, European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan.
The Central banks bailed out the big banks. That has always been the primary function of central banks. That’s why they were created in the first place. It’s called the ‘lender of last resort’ function. Whenever there’s a general banking crisis, which occurs periodically in all capitalist economies, the central bank simply prints the money (electronically today) and injects it free of charge into the failing private banks, to fill up and restore the private banks massive losses that occur in the case of banking crashes. Having a central bank, with operations little understood by the general public, is a convenient way for capitalism to rescue its banks without having to have capitalist politicians—i.e. in Congress and the Executive—do so directly and more publicly. Central banks take the heat off of the politicians, who otherwise would have to raise taxes to bail out the banks—and thus incur the ire of the general public even more so than they do for not preventing the crisis.
From Bail Outs to Perpetual Bank Subsidization
But central banks since 2008 have been evolving toward a new primary function. No longer just bailing out the banks when they get in trouble. But providing a permanent regime of subsidization of the banks even when they’re not in trouble. The latter function is new, and has become a permanent feature of the capitalist global banking feature in the post-2008 period. For the US banks were fully bailed out by 2010. But the US central bank, the Federal Reserve, as well as other major central banks, have simply kept the flow of free money, often just printed money, into the banking system even after the banks were effectively bailed out. In other words, since 2010 the Federal Reserve has continued to provide free money to the banks and continued to buy up the collapsed subprime mortgage bonds from banks and individual investors. In short, it has been subsidizing the profits of the financial system for the past nine years.
With the Fed in the lead, in 2008-09 the central banks of the advanced capitalist economies simply created money—i.e. the dollars, the pounds, euros and yen—and allowed banks and investors to borrow it virtually free. That is, the Fed and other central banks simply opened electronic accounts for the banks within the central bank. Banks were then allowed to borrow that money that was ‘electronically printed’, at essentially no interest. It was free money.
But free money in the form of near zero interest was still not the full picture. The Fed and other central banks were also pro-active in providing money to the banks. The Fed and other central banks went directly to the banks, as well as other institutional and even private investors, and said: ‘we’ll also buy up your bad assets that virtually collapsed in price as a result of the 2008-09 crash. This direct buying of bad mortgage and government bonds—and in Europe and Japan, buying of corporate bonds and even company stocks—was called ‘quantitative easing’, or QE for short. And what did the central banks pay for the assets they bought from banks and investors, many of which were worth as low as 15 cents on the dollar? No one knows, because the Fed to this day has kept it secret how much they overpaid for the bad assets they bought from individual investors, bankers or corporations.
But the QE and the effectively zero interest rates continued for nine years in the US and the UK. And in 2015 it was accelerated even faster in Europe. And since 2014 faster still in Japan. And even in China after 2015, when its stock market bubble burst. Central banks of the major economies after 2008 have thus opened a ‘fire hose’ of free money to their private banks and their investors. And in the course of the past nine years, the private capitalist banking system has become addicted to the free money. They cannot ‘earn’ profits on their own any longer, it appears. They are increasingly dependent on the free money from their central bankers. This is a fundamental change in the global capitalist economic system in the past decade—a change which is having historic implications for growing income inequality worldwide in the advanced economies as well as for another inevitable global financial crisis that will almost certainly erupt within the next decade.
The $25 Trillion Banking System Bailout
In the last financial crisis of 2008-09, central banks rescued their private banks by ensuring zero interest rates at which they could borrow funds. But central banks went a step further. The Fed and others pro-actively went directly to banks and investors and bought up their collapsed subprime bonds and other securities as well. But we do know the total amount of ‘bad assets’ they bought? The total was more than $20 trillion—i.e. in free money provided at zero rates and by central banks buying the ‘bad assets’ from the banks and investors by paying them more than the collapsed market prices at the time for those mortgage bonds and securities.
In the US, the Fed officially purchased $4.5 trillion in ‘bad assets’ between 2009 and 2014. But it was actually more, perhaps as much as $7 trillion. That’s because as some of the Fed purchased bonds matured and were paid off, the Fed reinvested the money once again to maintain the $4.5 trillion. So US banks and shadow banks got free money loans at 0.1% interest rates for nine years, plus the Fed directly bought up additional securities from investors in the amount of around $7 trillion. The cumulative totals from the zero rates and QE bond buying are likely more than $10 trillion for the US alone. That’s how the US banks got ‘bailed out’, not by the US Congress and the TARP program.
But the same occurred by other central banks of the advanced economies. The 2008-09 crash was global, so the Fed was not the only central bank player is this massive money printing and bailout scam. The European Central bank, as of 2017, has bailed out Europe banks via its QE and other programs to the tune of $4.9 trillion so far. The Bank of England, another $.7 trillion. And the Bank of Japan as of mid-2017 by more than $5 trillion. The People’s Bank of China, PBOC, did not institute formal QE programs. But after 2011 it too started injecting trillions of dollar in equivalent yuan, its currency, to prevent its private sector from defaulting on bank loans, to bail out its local governments that over invested in real estate, and to stop the collapse of its stock markets in 2015-16. PBOC bailouts to date amount to around $6 trillion. And the totals today continue to rise for all, as the UK, Europe, Japan, and China continue their central bank engineered bail out binge, and in the case of Europe and Japan are actually accelerating their QE programs.
Conservatively, therefore, the total bail outs from QE and QE-like programs among the big central banks globally—US, UK, Europe, Japan, and China—amount easily to more than $25 trillion. That’s $25 trillion of money created out of thin air.
Contrary to many critiques of rising debt levels since 2009, it is not the level of debt itself that is the problem and the harbinger of the next financial crash. It is the inability to pay for the debt, the principal and interest on it, when the next recession occurs. So long as economies are growing, businesses and households and even government can ‘finance’ the debt, i.e. continue to pay the principal and interest some way. But when recessions occur, which they always do under capitalism, that ability to keep paying the debt collapses. Business revenues and profits fall, employment rises and wages decline, and government taxes collections slow. So the income with which to pay the principal and interest collapses. Unable to make payments on principal and or interest, defaults on past incurred debt occur. Prices for financial assets—stocks, bonds, etc.—then collapse even faster and further. Businesses and banks go bankrupt, and the crisis deepens, accelerating on itself in a vicious downward spiral. That’s a great recession—or worse, a bona fide economic depression.
Think of it another way: the $25 trillion plus is what the central banks transferred in bad debt from the balance sheets of the banks and private corporations to their own central bank balance sheets. In other words, the private corporate debt at the heart of the last crisis has not been removed from the globally economy. It has only been shifted, from the business sector to the central banks. And this central bank debt has nothing to do with national governments’ debt. That’s a totally additional amount of government debt, as is consumer household debt which, in the US, is more than $1 trillion each for student loans, auto loans, credit cards, and multi-trillions for mortgage loans. Ominously, moreover, in recent months defaults on student, auto and credit card debt have begun to rise again, already in the highest in the last four years in the US.
Finally, it’s not quite correct, moreover, to even say that the $25 trillion injection of money into the banking system since 2008 has successfully bailed out the banks globally. Despite the total, there are still more than $10 trillion in what are called ‘non-performing bank loans’ worldwide. Most is concentrated in Europe and Asia—both of which are likely the locus of the next global financial crisis. And that crisis is coming.
In the interim, the central banks’ free money and bank subsidization machine is generating a fundamental dual problem within the global economy. It is feeding big time the trend toward income inequality and it is helping fuel financial asset bubbles worldwide that will eventually converge and then burst, precipitating the next global financial crash.
The Fed as Engine of Income Inequality
In the US, the US central bank’s $4.5 trillion balance sheet—and the nine years of free money at 0.1% rates—have been at the heart of a massive income shift to US investors, businesses, and the wealthiest 1% households.
Where did all this $4.5 trillion (really $7 trillion), plus the virtually free borrowed money at 0.1%, go? The lie fed to the public by politicians, businesses, and the media was this massive free money injection was necessary to get the economy going again. The trillions would jump-start real investment that would create jobs, incomes, consumption and consequently economic growth or GDP. But that’s not where it went, and the US economy experienced the weakest nine year post-recession recovery on record. Little of the money injection financed real investment—i.e. in equipment, buildings, structures, machinery, inventories, etc. Instead, investors got QE bail outs and banks borrowed the free money from the Fed and then loaned it out at higher interest rates to US multinational companies who invested it abroad in emerging markets; or they loaned it to shadow bankers and foreign bankers who speculated in financial asset markets like stocks, junk bonds, derivatives, foreign exchange, etc.; or the banks borrowed and invested it themselves in financial securities markets; or they just hoarded the cash on their own bank balance sheets; or the banks borrowed the money at 0.1% from the central bank and then left it at the central bank, which paid them 0.25%, for a 0.15% profit for doing nothing.
This massive money injection, in other words, was then put to work in financial markets and multiplied several fold. Behind the 9 year bubbles in stock and bond markets (and derivatives and exchange as well) is the massive $7 to $10 trillion Federal Reserve bank money injections. And how high have the stock-bond bubbles grown? The Dow Jones US stock market has risen from a low in 2009 of 6500 to almost 22,000 today. The US Nasdaq tech-heavy market has surpassed the 2001 peak before the tech bust. The S&P 500 has also more than tripled. Business profits have also tripled. Bond market prices have similarly accelerated. The 9 year near zero rates from the Fed have enabled corporations to issue corporate bonds by more than $5 trillion in just the last five years.
So how do these financial asset market bubbles translate into historic levels of income inequality, one might ask?
The wealthiest 1%–i.e. the investor class—cash in their stocks and bonds when the bubbles escalate. The corporations that have raised $5 trillion in new bonds and seen their profits triple in value then take that massive $6 to $9 trillion cash hoard to buyback their stocks and to issue record level of dividends to their shareholders—i.e. the 1%. Nearly $6 trillion of the profits-bond raised cash was redistributed in the US alone since 2010 to shareholders in the form of stock buybacks and dividends payouts. The 1% get $6 trillion or more and the corporations and banks sit on the rest in the form of retained cash.
Congress and Presidents play a role in the process as well. Shareholders get to keep more of the $6 trillion plus distributed to them as a result of passage of legislation that sharply cuts capital gains and dividend taxable income. Corporations gain by getting to keep more profits after-tax, to distribute via buybacks and dividends, as a result of corporate taxation cuts as well.
The Congress and President sit near the end of the distribution chain, enabling through tax cuts the 1% and shareholders to keep more of their distributed income. But it is the central bank, the Fed, which sits at the beginning of the process. It provides the initial free money that, when borrowed and reinvested in stock markets, becomes the major driver of the stock price bubble. The Fed’s free money also drives down interest rates to near zero, allowing corporations to raise $5 trillion more cash from issuing new corporate bonds. Without the Fed and the near zero rates, there would be nowhere near $5 trillion from new bonds, to distribute to shareholders as a consequence of buybacks and dividends. Furthermore, without the Fed and its direct $4.5 trillion QE program, investors would not have the historic excess money to invest in stocks and bonds (and derivatives and currencies) that drive up the stock and bond prices to bubble levels.
The Fed, the central bank, is thus the initial enabler of the process, i.e. of the accelerating stock and bond prices that transfer so much income to the 1% when the buybacks and dividend payouts kick in. The Fed, as well as other central banks, is an originating source of the runaway income inequality that has plagued the US since late 1970s decade. It is not coincidental that income inequality began to accelerate about that time, which is also the period of which the Fed, and other central banks, themselves began to provide massive money injections to bankers and investors.
Income inequality is a function of two things. One the one hand, accelerating capital incomes of the 1% as a result of buybacks and dividend payouts that generate capital gains for the 1% which constitute nearly 100% of the 1%’s total income. On the other, stagnating or declining wage incomes of non-investor households. Inequality may rise if capital gains drive capital incomes higher; or may rise if wage incomes stagnate or decline; or may rise doubly fast if capital incomes rise while wage incomes stagnate or decline. Since 2000 both forces have been in effect: capital incomes of the 1% have escalated while wage incomes for 80% of households have stagnated or declined.
Mainstream economists tend to focus on the stagnation of wage incomes, which are due to multiple causes like deunionization, rise of temp-part-time-contract employment, free trade treaties’ wage depressing effects, failure to adjust minimum wages, high wage industry offshoring, cost shifting of healthcare from employers to workers, reduction in retirement benefits, shifting tax burdens, etc.. But they engage little in explaining why capital incomes have been accelerating so fast. Perhaps it is because mainstream economists simply don’t understand financial markets and investment very well; or perhaps some do, and just don’t want to ‘go there’ and criticize runaway capital incomes.
Central Banks as Source of Financial Instability
The fire hose of money that central banks still continue to provide the capitalist banking system provides the basis for the growing financial asset bubbles that have been occurring worldwide once again since 2009.
The zero interest rate and direct QE money continue to inject massive money and liquidity into the banking systems, at a rate far faster than investors can choose to reinvest it in real investment projects that produce real things, that hire real people, and provide real wage incomes that stimulate economic growth. As previously noted, the massive money injections are not flowing through the private banks into real investment and growth. The trillions of central bank provided money is flowing out of the advanced economies and into emerging economies; or it is flowing through the banks into the financial asset markets—i.e. stock markets, bonds, derivatives, etc.—driving up asset prices and creating bubbles in those markets; or it is being distributed in stock buybacks and dividend payouts; or it is just being hoarded in the trillions of dollars, euros, etc. on balance sheets of private corporations.
As a result of Fed and other central banks’ money injections now for decades, and especially since 2008, there is a mountain of cash—virtually trillions of dollars—sitting ‘on the sidelines’. That money is looking for quick, speculative capital gains profit opportunities. That means for reinvestment short term in financial asset markets worldwide. The mountain of cash moves in and out of these global financial markets, creating and bursting bubbles as its shifts and moves. Periodically a major bubble bursts—like China’s stock market in 2015. Or a housing speculation bubble here or there. Or junk bonds or consumer debt in the US. Or the bubble in US stocks which is nearing its limit.
A new global finance capital elite has arisen in recent decades, having directly benefited from and controlling this mountain of cash. There are about 200,000 of them worldwide, mostly concentrated in the US and UK, some in Europe, but with numbers rising rapidly in Asia as well. They now control more investible assets than all the traditional commercial banks combined. Their preferred institutional investment vehicles are the global ‘shadow banking system’. Their preferred investment targets are the global system of highly liquid financial asset markets. This system of new finance capitalists, their institutions, and their preferred markets is the real definition of what is meant by the ‘financialization’ of the global economy. That financialization is generating ever more instability in the global capitalist system. But it would not exist were it not for the decades of past central bank injection of free money into the global economy—an injection which has been accelerating since 2008.
Will the Central Banks Retreat?
In 2017 a minority of policymakers in the Fed and other central banks have begun to recognize the fundamental danger to their own system from their providing free money and QE bond and stock buying money injections. The injections have not succeeded in stimulating their real economies, they have not raised prices for goods and services which continue instead to slow and stagnate, they have not sufficiently reduce unemployment (when contingent jobs are considered), and they have not raised wage incomes while bloating capital incomes instead. They have been creating financial bubbles.
So led by the Fed, the central banks of the major economies are now considering raising interest rates from the zero floor and trying to reverse their QE buying. Central bankers will meet in late August 2017 at their annual Jackson Hole, Wyoming gathering. The main topic of discussion will be raising rates and reducing their QE bloated, $15 trillion cumulative balance sheets.
But as this writer has argued, they will fail in both raising rates and selling off their balance sheets. Just as they failed in generating real economic recovery since 2009. For the banking system has become addicted and dependent therefore upon their free money injections and their firehose of central bank bond-stock buying QE programs. Should the central banks attempt to retreat, they will provoke yet another financial and economic crisis. The global capitalist system has become dependent on the permanent subsidization of the banking system by their central banks after 2008. Bail outs and lender of last resort functions by central banks have transformed into a permanent subsidization function. The global capitalist system entered a new period after 2008, changing in ways fundamentally. One of those ways is a greater dependency on the capitalist state to maintain and expand levels of profitability. One of those ways is for their central banks to continue to provide free money.
But the contradiction is that continued free money provisioning is driving further income inequality as well as fueling the next financial crash.
Title:Central Bankers at the End of Their Rope?: Monetary Policy and the Coming Depression
Jack Rasmus is the author of the just published book, ‘Central Bankers at the End of Their Ropes?: Monetary Policy and the Coming Depressions’, Clarity Press, July 2017. He blogs at jackrasmus.com. For more information see http://claritypress.com/RasmusIII.html. The book is now available for order on Amazon.com.
This article was originally published by Jack Rasmus.
The Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa summit in Xiamen from September 3-5 is already inscribed with high tension thanks to Sino-Indian border conflicts. But regardless of a welcome new peace deal, centrifugal forces within the fast-whirling world economy threaten to divide the BRICS. South Africa, which plays host to the BRICS in 2018, is already a victim of these trends – even as President Jacob Zuma continues to use the bloc as a primary crutch in his so-called “anti-imperialist” (talk-left walk-right) political survival kit.
Beijing’s logo designers for this summit, perhaps unconsciously subversive, illustrated how the formerly overlapping, interlocking BRICS are now thin and flimsy, wedging themselves apart. Such a prospect was predictable earlier this year as a result of Donald Trump’s ascendance. Both Washington’s neo-conservative ‘Deep State‘ and the (fast-disappearing) paleo-conservatives were intent on ramping up conflict with China – though early on, BRICS splintering towards the US included not only proto-fascist India, for elites in Russia and Brazil also sought friendly relations.
A deeper reason for pessimism is that at the 2015 BRICS summit in Russia, just as world commodity markets began to collapse, Chinese premier Xi Jinping invoked the laws of physics. He asked fellow leaders “to boost the centripetal force of BRICS nations, tap their respective advantages and potentials and carry out cooperation in innovation and production capacity to boost competitiveness.” That’s the bloc’s theory – but practices are very different.
India fights China leaving BRICS as collateral damage
The most obvious geopolitical wedges are actually not Washington’s (for now), but instead Sino-Indian border conflicts. The most intractable is in Pakistani-held Kashmir, and concerns transport infrastructure needed by China to link its far western region to the sea.
A higher-profile fight unfolded over recent weeks where India and China share a border with Bhutan. When the Chinese built a small road on contested ground, fisticuffs were initiated by Indian soldiers. On Monday, India backed down and withdrew its troops (while claiming victory), but not before Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s staff hinted he would boycott Xiamen just as he had China’s Belt and Road Summit in May.
One analyst, Zhao Gancheng of the Shanghai Institute for International Studies, told the Australian Financial Review,
“The BRICS summit is the immediate reason for this disengagement announcement. If there is a serious confrontation between China and India, the major members of BRICS, it doesn’t look good for either country. This is an important meeting for China, which is hosting the summit and Modi is expected to attend.”
Modi also lost a similar show-down when hosting the Goa 2016 BRICS Summit, trying unsuccessfully to have Pakistan declared a terrorist state; China and Russia refused. The Chinese state mouthpiece Global Times ran a column last week headined, “New Delhi may disrupt BRICS Summit to blackmail Beijing.” In part, such renewed Chinese nationalist posturing is useful ahead of the coming National Congress of the Communist Party where Xi aims to consolidate power.
For example, even before last Friday’s outbreak of mob violence that left 36 dead in Punjab (caused when a close Modi ally – religious guru Ram Rahim Singh – was convicted of rape), Beijing had just issued its second travel advisory within six weeks to its citizens visiting India: “Pay close attention to the local security situation, improve self-protection awareness, strengthen security and reduce unnecessary travel.” It’s the very opposite of the BRICS’ stated objective last month: “increasing people-to-people links.”
But more durably, the Sino-Indian regional geopolitical turf battle also reflects the ungluing of economic globalisation, insofar as China is desperate to expand trade and investment opportunities to the south and west. Earlier this month at the Quanzhou Governance Seminar, participants “paid little attention to the ongoing India-China military stand-off,”complainedSudheendra Kulkarni, who chairs the (pro-BRICS) Observer Research Foundation of Mumbai. Kulkanri worried that the bloc’s “very credibility would be called into question if our two countries allowed the dispute to be escalated into an armed conflict. Obviously, the Chinese hosts did not want a divisive bilateral issue to get any kind of focus in the midst of deliberations at a BRICS seminar.”
Censorship, spying and repression
In this context, the BRICS Think Tank, Academic Forum, Civil BRICS, BRICS Trade Union Forum and BRICS Youth initiatives have drawn more than a thousand well-mannered scholars and civilised-society leaders to China over the past few months. But like the Quanzhou meeting, another revealing ethical-intellectual dilemma emerged in June in Fuzhou. There, the director of the Society for the Participatory Research in Asia, Kaustuv Kanti Bandyopadhyay, concluded that the main BRICS-from-the-middle conference was “mere symbolism.” BRICS visitors “had no dialogue or exchange within China, or between countries before meeting in Fuzhou. Understandably, in the absence such dialogues before, during and after the Forum, it is unrealistic to expect that civil society organisations will come up with any specific policy ask from their leaders when they meet in September.”
Reflecting the way such personnel typically toe the party line, the Fuzhou declaration failed to remark upon widespread repression and worsening austerity across the BRICS, often in the name of improved economic competitiveness. In contrast, explainedHindu newspaper commentator Anul Aneja, “political parties, think tanks and civil society organisations of the BRICS grouping counseled emerging economies to lead a new wave of globalisation, and step up the fight against international terrorism.”
Such cheerleading echoes Washington’s traditional (pre-Trump) fusion of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism, and also reflects Beijing’s worries about potential disruption to world trade, what with Brexit, Trump and high-profile trade deal cancellations. But beyond the economic deglobalisation threat, another Fuzhou Initiative statement by the academics and NGO staff is especially chilling:
“BRICS countries should also increase cooperation in cyber security and promote the development of Internet technologies and the governance of cyberspace globally.”
Ominously, such intra-BRICS spymaster collaboration is already underway. To be sure, global surveillance by the US National Security Agency and web manipulation by Google to direct traffic away from progressive websites also appear to be worsening, with Trump’s regime downplaying civil liberties at every opportunity.
But fighting fire with fire won’t work, because not only is the record of the Chinese and Russian states in this area utterly invasive, they joined even India and South Africa last year to vote against the main United Nations resolution on protection of human rights and privacy on the internet, a resolution co-authored by Brazil and co-sponsored by 70 other countries. (Even by far the world’s most totalitarian surveillance regime, the United States under Barack Obama, was shamed into supporting the resolution.)
Beijing’s reputation for intellectual censorship is peaking, after widespread protest forced Cambridge University Press to reverse itself, having removed 300 articles about China from its website there last week. The world’s main social media services are banned, and top Chinese scientists complain about their need to use Apple apps to bypass state internet restrictions on even scientific, academic and United Nations websites. Late last month, Apple surrendered to Beijing’s demand to cancel that service.
Social justice activists face even tougher restrictions: for example, The Feminist Voice in China was booted off the country’s Twitter-equivalent in February after merely posting an anti-Trump article from The Guardian.
In South Africa, which (mainly as a result of sustained uncivil-society protest) is the most open of the five BRICS, State Security Minister David Mahlobo is widely condemned for snooping. Last week came revelations about his tapping what are likely in excess of 150 000 cellphone accounts. As the leading watchdog group Right 2 Know put it when fighting Mahlobo’s proposed intervention into social media a few weeks ago,
“Giving State Security any role in ‘regulation’ is a sure path to internet censorship.”
Mahlobo’s party, the African National Congress (ANC) has ruled since Nelson Mandela’s presidency began in 1994 and is widely credited with ending apartheid. But after a multiply-dubious $5 billion arms deal and the rise of Zuma to its leadership in 2007, the ANC is now notorious for corruption. A “black ops war room“ last year generated fake news and bogus Twitter accounts against the ANC’s political opponents during a disastrous election campaign (it lost four of the five largest metro areas), before being exposed after failing to pay an IT consultant, who took the ANC to court.
Dirty tricks and repression are becoming the watchwords of regimes that need to keep a lid on dissent. In Hong Kong last week, 20-year old Umbrella Movement leader Joshua Wong and his alliesAlex Chow and Nathan Law were jailed (for eight months) after state prosecution for the massive 2014 peaceful uprising. Tens of thousands protested in solidarity last Sunday, so there’s no question as to the democrats’ durability.
Economic stresses from over-production to deglobalisation
Indeed, two days before the BRICS meet in Xiamen, a Hong Kong People’s Forum will be convened by the Confederation of Trade Unions, Borderless Movement Editorial Board, Globalization Monitor, the Catholic Diocese’s Justice and Peace Commission, the Labor Education Support Network and the Neighborhood and Workers’ Service Centre’s Labor Committee. This follows the critical counter-summit traditions of brics-from-below in Durban, 2013; the BRICS Dialogue on Development in Fortaleza, 2014; and the People’s Forum on BRICS in Goa, 2016. (Russia was too repressed to try a counter-summit in 2015.)
As the Hong Kong People’s Forum argues,
“Instead of offering an alternative, the BRICS actually offer a continuation to neo-liberalism. On top of BRICS there is also China’s new mega project, the Belt and Road initiative whose main purpose is to export China’s surplus capital, and in this process seek the cooperation and ‘mutual benefit’ of big foreign TNCs and regimes which are often authoritarian. The price of these investments is often borne by the working people and the ecological balance.”
Last week’s International Monetary Fund report confirmed China’s underlying capitalist crisis tendencies of over-production and over-indebtedness. Excess capacity levels had reached more than 30% in coal, non-ferrous metals, cement and chemicals by 2015 (in each, China is responsible for 45-60% of the world market). Chinese banks’ high-risk ratio rose from 4% in 2010 to more than 12% since early 2015. The Guardian’s Larry Elliott summed up IMF concerns over “methods used to keep the economy expanding rapidly: an increase in government spending to fund infrastructure programmes and a willingness to allow state-controlled banks to lend more for speculative property developments.”
The motors to expand capitalism rapidly – in China and everywhere – were meant to be foreign investment, trade and finance: i.e., economic globalisation. But all are running out of steam, or even veering towards collapse in the case of debt. According to the World Bank, global trade peaked at 61% of world GDP in 2008, crashed to 52% the next year, rose back to 61% in 2012, and then fell back to 2015’s 58% (although there has been a minor upturn in merchandise trade in early 2017).
IMF data on Chinese over-production and over-indebtedness
Declining trade and cross-border financial assets as % of world GDP
Sources: World Bank, IMF
Declining rates of corporate profits (BRICS at top and G7) and Foreign Direct Investment
Sources: World Bank and UNCTAD
The trade motor is sputtering in each of the BRICS, which from the early 1990s had raised their trade/GDP ratios by at least 10 points. But then,
Russia peaked first at a 69% trade/GDP ratio in 1999, and then fell steadily to 45% by 2016,
Brazil peaked at 30% in 2004 and is now down to 25%,
China peaked at 66% in 2006 and plummeted to 36%,
South Africa peaked in 2008 with 73% and is now 60%, and
India peaked last, in 2012 with 56%, and is now down to 40%.
As further evidence of economic deglobalisation’s centrifugal force, cross-border financial assets fell from 58% of world GDP in 2008 to 38% in 2016, in spite of fast-rising flows into high-risk (high-return) emerging markets and notwithstanding soaring overall indebtedness. In June, the Institute of International Finance announced that global debt has reached $217 trillion (327% of world GDP), up from $86 trillion (246% of GDP) in 2002 and $149 billion (276%) in 2007. Since 2012, emerging markets led by China have been responsible for all the addition to net debt.
Yet until a very recent uptick from extremely low levels, since 2008 (and indeed since the late 1980s) the BRICS’ corporate profit rates dropped even faster than did those of western firms. That decline was one reason for the halving of relative global Foreign Direct Investment: from 3.7% of world GDP in 2008 to 1.7% in 2016. But the next recession – which HSBC, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley economists last week acknowledged is imminent due to vastly over-priced stock markets and unprecendented corporate indebtedness – will also confirm how capitalist optimists have become over-exposed locally, even as they lose appetite for global markets.
Centrifugal realities crowd out centripetal fantasies
The centrifugal forces ripping apart world capitalism – first globalising, now deglobalising – have been forcing the metabolism of economic cycles into ever more intense bursts of crises since the 1970s, and ever-higher levels of world debt and central banks’ loose-money strategies are unable to restore growth. Global uneven development gave the BRICS a huge opportunity once economic stagnation hit the US, Europe and Japan in the 1970s, after the investment wave of the 1980s-90s in Asia’s smaller Newly Industrialising Countries ebbed. By the early 2000s, Goldman Sachs predicted the BRICs would provide capitalism’s new motor force. As the Financial Times put it in 2010, these “building BRICs” would “change the economic order” by marshalling both their own raw resource production and manufacturing capacity to, in turn, achieve sufficient weight to reduce unfairness in world trade and finance.
Notwithstanding the centripetal capitalism Xi has hoped for, the centrifugal contradictions manifest in over-production, debt and deglobalisation may put an end to those fantasies. The only recent relief came from the Chinese state’s massive urban construction investments (leaving scores of near-empty cities) and the Indian service sector-led boom, but the other three BRICS suffered recessions once the 2015 commodity price crash hit home (with South Africa yet to emerge into positive GDP growth). Xi’s centripetal BRICS has become a centrifugal force spiralling out of control.
And as for changing the manifestly unfair global system, in late 2015 the BRICS simply grabbed three of Obama’s multilateral-deform batons: promoting the Paris Climate Accord because it is non-binding, unambitious and outlaws climate-debt lawsuits by victims of Western and BRICS emissions; amending the World Trade Organisation so as to phase out any semblance of food sovereignty; and shifting IMF voting shares to favour BRICS at the expense of poorer countries.
Explains the Hong Kong People’s Forum,
“China has now evolved into a global engine promoting a neo-liberal agenda: from free trade agreements to corporate-led integration across borders. The 2017 World Economic Forum in Davos was one site where Xi clearly took the lead in promoting world corporate power, as Trump leads the US-UK retreat into crony-capitalist protectionism.”
The Brazilian government is no help, for as the Workers Party complained last week as its former leader Lula was convicted on an obvious petty corruption frame-up, “In the country of the coup, the big decisions are made in Washington and Wall Street, and the order given is to sell and loot Brazil.” They pointed to the 57 major privatisations now underway, social spending austerity and anti-labour legislation, at a time ‘President’ Michel Temer is approving corporate gold mining in an Amazonian state nature reserve the size of Denmark.
Moreover, at last month’s G20 summit in Hamburg, BRICS leaders were even more callous about the economicdamage to poorer countries they are inflicting in alignment with the G7 (and especially the G1 – in failing to materially punish Trump for climate change, e.g. through a major new carbon tax called for again in May by even Joseph Stiglitz). Consider the epithets of three seasoned political economists who in the past firmly favoured the BRICS:
The Third World Network’s Ravi Kanth complained, “For the first time, the Doha Development Agenda or the unresolved Doha issues were not even mentioned in the G20 leaders’ communique because of opposition from the United States as well as other major industrialised countries. China, India, Brazil, South Africa, and Indonesia who negotiated the Hamburg declaration along with their developed country counterparts seemed to have allowed the erasing of DDA” – i.e. what Kanth considers poorer countries’ balanced trade interests.
Added Yash Tandon (former head of the South Centre), “At the G20 Hamburg meeting, Africa was officially represented by only one country – South Africa, which was obsequiously behaving like a neo-colonythat it is.”
The problem is even deeper than the BRICS’ alliances with the West against rest, according to the Filippino politician and leading intellectual Walden Bello: “the stagnation of the once dynamic centers of the global demand — the U.S., Europe, and the BRICS — has made this model obsolete. It was, in fact, the non-viability of this once successful model of rapid growth in current global circumstances that pushed China, under Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, away from an export-oriented path to a domestic demand-led strategy via a massive $585 billion stimulus program. They failed, and the reason for their failure is instructive. In fact, a set of powerful interests had congealed around the export-oriented model.”
Xi and other Chinese Communist leaders committed to pro-corporate globalisation are inevitably going to seek more geographical band-aids like the trillion-dollar-plus Belt and Road mega-infrastructure to raise manufactured exports and energy imports through a restructuring Eurasia. But the BRICS’ financial short-term fixes – massive debt and stock market speculation – continue, too, as stock markets bubble in South Africa (today 90% higher than in 2010), India (70%) and Russia (50%). China’s stock exchanges were in the same league, but just as the yuan was made an IMF-acceptable global currency reserve in 2015-16, the Chinese markets lost more than $5 trillion in two share bubble bursts. Capital fled the country, requiring a re-imposition of Beijing’s tough exchange controls.
In what often seems a different universe entirely, Zuma pronounced last month to his ANC policy conference, “the ANC is part of the global anti-imperialist movement. We are historically connected with the countries of the South and therefore South-South cooperation such as BRICS is primary for our movement.
In reality, the centrifugal economic forces breaking up the bloc – growing ever stronger due to over-production, excessive debt and a deglobalising world economy – confirm the failure of Xi’s desired centripetal capitalism. As this process unfolds, expect yet more talk-left walk-right politics, as sub-imperialists try to pretend they’re anti-imperialists.
Patrick Bond is co-editor of BRICS: An anti-capitalist critique and is professor of political economy at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
On Tuesday, Security Council members “condemn(ed) the DPRK for its outrageous actions and demands that the DPRK immediately cease all such actions,” adding:
“The Security Council stresses that these DPRK actions are not just a threat to the region, but to all UN member states.”
Reportedly under consideration to replace Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, neocon US UN envoy Nikki Haley said
“(t)he United States will not allow their lawlessness to continue.”
Trump again said
“all options are on the table for North Korea.”
Russia’s UN envoy Vasily Nebenzya stressed
“(t)here can be no military solution to the issues on the Korean Peninsula. We believe that all the United Nations Security Council resolutions on North Korea must specify this condition,” adding:
“(A)ttempts to solve problems on the Korean Peninsula through sanctions and pressure produce little effect. This way will not help us to achieve the intended result. Besides, this way envisages no possibility of entering constructive talks with North Korea.”
China’s UN envoy Liu Jieyi denounced US THAAD missiles in South Korea, saying they
“severely jeopardize the regional strategic balance, undermining the strategic security interests of all regional countries, including China,” adding:
“China also urges countries to stop the practice of resorting to domestic legislation imposing unilateral sanctions on individuals and entities in other countries.”
Council members imposed no new sanctions on the DPRK. Others imposed earlier achieved nothing but heightened tensions on the peninsula.
During Security Council sessions on North Korea, including Tuesday’s, the real regional menace goes unmentioned.
Pyongyang poses none. America’s belligerence, regional presence, and rage for global dominance makes it the sole threat to Northeast Asia and everywhere else – along with NATO it controls, Israel and their rogue partners.
That’s what Security Council members should condemn. It’s why North Korea continues developing its nuclear and ballistic deterrent, genuinely fearing US aggression, and why not.
In the 1950s, its nation was terror-bombed to rubble, millions of its people slaughtered, largely defenseless civilians – Harry Truman’s war, naked US aggression falsely blamed on the DPRK.
America is now at war in multiple theaters, threatening more against North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela – with Russia and China on its list for regime change by color revolutions or naked aggression.
The threat of possible humanity-destroying nuclear war is ominously real – solely because of US imperial madness, more ruthlessly dangerous than any previous power in world history.
North Korea threatens no one – not now or any previous time in its history. Its powerful weapons are for defense, not offense.
America threatens everyone, including its own citizens, exploiting them, harming its most vulnerable grievously, the nation run by militarists and plutocratic tyrants.
Democracy is a practical joke. None whatever exists – not now or any previous time in its history from inception. The founders designed it this way, America to be owned and run solely by its privileged class. Elections are farcical when held.
Humanity’s survival is endangered because of US political, economic and military threats, demanding subservience from all other nations, terrorizing independent ones, waging endless wars of aggression to get its way.
That’s what Security Council members and the world community should address. America threatens everyone – North Korea nobody.
Never before has a prime minister of the Zionist entity appeared so confused as did Benjamin Netanyahu in his meeting with President Vladimir Putin. Netanyahu was looking through a set of papers he was holding, as if he’s hoping to find a way out. This is the first time he relied on what was written in his notes in such an important summit meeting.
The viewer did not need to hear what he was saying, because Putin’s stern expressions expressed his suspicion of the repeated Israeli usual dull hyperbolic claims about the Iranian threat, and the Russian President refused Netanyahu’s aggressive schemes. In Pravda’s report on 25 August 2017, entitled “Netanyahu’s nightmare becomes a reality,” the newspaper reveals that Putin answered Netanyahu saying:
“Iran is a strategic ally of Russia in the Middle East.” And when the latter exaggerated in describing the Iranian threat, President Putin responded: “Unfortunately, I cannot help you here.”
Pravda reports that Netanyahu failed to convince Putin of the by-now-boring Israeli argument about “Iranian expansion in the Middle East.” Commenting on the Putin-Netanyahu summit, the Israeli newspaper Maariv said in its reports on 23 August 2017: “Israel has become isolated on the international scene.” It’s only friend now is the ruling Wahhabi families in the Gulf, whose media, representatives and hired mercenaries mindlessly repeat Netanyahu’s claims.
But what is behind this Israeli hysteria and the visits by its official to the US and Russia in order to promote these “threats” to Israeli’s security? And what has happened recently that provoked such a reaction from the Zionist entity’s leaders? Does Netanyahu and the ruling clique in Tel Aviv really think that world powers are as stupid and naive as the rulers of Gulf Sheikhdoms?
The main event the provoked these reactions is the change that occurred in the regional balance of power after the Syrian and Iraqi armies and the forces of resistance advanced in several areas, liberating Mosul and reaching an agreement in southern Syria, that gave neither Jordan nor Israel a role in monitoring the deescalation zone.
Both the announced and the unannounced coordination and cooperation between Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, with the presence of Russia and Iran, in commanding this wide front from Iran to the Mediterranean have cost the Zionist entity its decade-long hegemony, which recently expanded to include the Saudi Kingdom and the Gulf States.
The Resistance has proven that breaking the backbone of this Israeli propaganda is not impossible, and that the enemy now needs to recalculate its position according to new realities on the battlefield, and on the regional and international levels. Another factor, no less important than the regional one, is the victory achieved by the forces of resistance and the Arab Army in Syria and Iraq, and in the Qalamoun region, and the rapid collapse of the terrorist groups across the board.
The capture of the strategic Qalamoun mountains, which connects Syria to Lebanon, has eliminated Israel’s terrorist mercenaries from that vital region, to the dismay of Israel’s rulers who reacted in a hysterical manner in front of the whole world. This victory has proven that Israel cannot hold an inch of our land through its terrorist mercenaries.
Also, the forces of resistance and the Arab Army in Syria and Iraq proved that they have reached unprecedented levels of military capabilities, a fact that frightens the Zionist enemy and leads it to alter its plans in any coming battle. The Zionist entity is not only concerned that its terrorist gangs are losing ground, but also it is worried about the future battle against those who seek to liberate the land from its despicable occupation.
No matter how much the Zionists train their army, it remains a theoretical training, as opposed to the filed experience of the battle-hardened forces of resistance and the Arab armies in Syria and Iraq. Also, the coordination between Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon is a nightmare that the Zionist enemy fears because its power is built on dividing the Arabs, because the Zionists know that when the Arab unite their strategies, plans, and actions, the Zionist entity would collapse as rapidly as its terrorist mercenaries.
Another important factor that concerns the Zionists is that their historic and strategic ally the United States is drowning in internal disputes, and has been losing its credibility as a Great Power both on the internal and international scenes, despite its looting of Saudi and Gulf wealth. So when their main partner couldn’t deliver assurances, the Zionists turned to Russia hoping to sway its decision makers, using the usual lies about their entity being under threat.
But in Russia, the Zionists were met by a strong leader who respects his words and commitments, and does not compromise his country’s fundamental principles. The Zionists realise that the Russian leader has the final word today in all issues in the Middle East, and the word of the United States, the West, and their Wahhabi mercenaries no longer counts.
It is a fact of life today that terrorism that hit Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, destroying their civilisational heritage and killing millions of their citizens is a Zionist terrorism funded by the Saudi royals. Former MI6 chief Richard Dearlove admitted in a lecture in London that Saudi Arabia helped ISIS (Daesh) in capturing Mosul and the whole of northern Iraq, and by association eastern Syria, and that the coming days will reveal Saudi Arabia to be a tool in the hands of the Zionists, and that both Saudi Arabia and Qatar paid billions of dollars to destroy Arab countries.
Today, we are in a time in which Zionist tools are collapsing in Syria and Iraq, and the leaders of the Zionist entity are trembling because the unjust war they waged alongside their Saudi mercenaries against our people has only made our armies and our resistance stronger and more competent. So what can our enemies do?
May God have mercy on the souls of our martyred young men who gave their lives for this Nation, and we pray for the wounded, for all of them have given their blood to serve this noble cause, the cause of all Arabs and Muslims, the cause of Palestine and the occupied land, and the rights of our peoples to live freely on their land.
The hysteria that befell the Zionist entity and its poorly calculated actions will only help further reveal its true role and the role of its operatives in the systematic destruction of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen. And history will also reveal the truth behind the events we experienced in the past few years. Netanyahu’s visit to Putin and his trembling body language is only the first sign, and there will be many more to come.
Natural disasters like Hurricane Harvey are greatly exacerbated by America’s neglected infrastructure nationwide – a deplorable situation unaddressed by Republicans and undemocratic Democrats alike for decades.
Poor maintenance, aging pipe networks installed up to a century ago, and lack of proper drainage facilities in flood-prone cities like Houston, New Orleans, and Chicago’s downtown Loop, along with poor communities in these and other cities left especially vulnerable, make disasters like Katrina and Harvey far worse than otherwise if proper protections were in place.
They’re not nationwide. America’s neglected infrastructure bears much of the blame for Houston’s epic disaster – worsening as rain keeps falling, making landfall a second time west of Cameron, LA, heavy rain hitting the state’s coastal areas.
The National Weather Service issued a flash flood emergency, its severest flood alert. Millions of Texas and Louisiana residents vulnerable. Rainfall in Houston already exceeds 50 inches.
By Tuesday afternoon, an estimated 444 square miles were flooded, an area six times the size of Washington, DC. Shocking, and things keep worsening as rain keeps falling – lightly in Houston, not torrentially like earlier, but floodwaters are still rising.
According to Rice University Environmental Engineering Professor Phil Bedient,
“Houston is the most flood-prone city in the United States. No one is even a close second – not even New Orleans, because at least they have pumps there.”
Rice University Environmental Law Professor Jim Blackburn said Houston’s system is designed to drain only up to 12 or 13 inches of rain per 24-hour period. It’s “so obsolete it’s just unbelievable,” he stressed.
Houston’s Harris County has the nation’s least-regulated drainage policy, according to Bedient. Reservoirs overflowed. Water pressing against 70-year-old dams was released, worsening downstream flooding.
Houston’s storm drain and pipe system is minimal compared to other cities. Overdevelopment eliminating green space exacerbated what’s ongoing.
Chairman of Residents Against Flooding Ed Browne said area politicians bend to the will of developers. Whatever they want they get.
According to Bedient, the way Houston is governed created “a perfect mix for the perfect storm. And that’s why we flood so often” – though never before like now.
The calamity is hugely aggravated by damaged oil refineries and fuel facilities along the Texas Gulf coast – releasing millions of pounds of toxic chemicals into the air and water, creating a serious health hazard for area residents.
Releases include carcinogenic benzene and nitrogen oxide. Texas environment director Luke Metzger warned that
“(i)t’s adding to the cancer risk to the community and well as respiratory problems.”
Area refineries and plants account for about 25% of America’s refining capacity, over 40% of its ethylene production, and more than half of its jet fuel.
The Gulf Coast is home to around half of the nation’s chemical manufacturing facilities. Hazardous gases were emitted during plant shutdowns.
The effects on human health won’t be known for some time. Exposure to toxins causes cancer and other diseases.
It’s just a matter of how many local residents will be harmed – besides damage or loss of homes and personal possessions.
China has warned that the situation on the Korean Peninsula has reached “tipping point,” just hours after Pyongyang launched a ballistic missile. Meanwhile, North Korea has accused the US of driving the region towards an “extreme level of explosion.”
Speaking at a regular news briefing on Tuesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said the situation is “now at a tipping point approaching a crisis. At the same time there is an opportunity to reopen peace talks.
“We hope relevant parties can consider how we can deescalate the situation on the peninsula and realize peace and stability on the peninsula,” she added, as quoted by AFP.
Hua went on to mention joint drills staged by the US and South Korea, the most recent of which began last week, saying the two sides “held one round after another of joint military exercises and they exerted military pressure on the DPRK (North Korea).
“After so many rounds and vicious cycles, do they feel they are nearer to peaceful settlement of the issue?
“The facts have proven that pressure and sanctions cannot fundamentally solve the issue,” Hua said, referring to UN sanctions imposed on Pyongyang.
The remarks came after North Korea launched a missile which, according to the Japanese and South Korean governments, passed through Japan’s northern airspace.
Seoul responded quickly following the launch, conducting bombing drills to demonstrate its “overwhelming” military force to the North. The show of force involved four F-15K fighter jets dropping Mk84 multipurpose bombs on a shooting range near the inter-Korean border in Taebaek, the presidential press secretary told reporters, according to Yonhap.
Tokyo also staged a pre-planned Patriot surface-to-air missile battery training exercise following the launch.
Hours after the launch, Han Tae-song, North Korea’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, stressed Pyongyang’s right to defend against “hostile” actions by the US.
“Now that the US has openly declared its hostile intention towards the Democratic People’s Republic of [North] Korea, by waging aggressive joint military exercises despite repeated warnings… my country has every reason to respond with tough counter-measures as an exercise of its right to self-defense,” Han told the UN Conference on Disarmament, as quoted by Reuters.
“And the US should be wholly responsible for the catastrophic consequences it will entail,” he added, while failing to explicitly mention Tuesday’s missile launch.
Tensions between Washington and Pyongyang have worsened since US President Donald Trump took office, with the American leader repeatedly vowing to “solve the problem” of North Korea.
During a 40-minute phone call with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe following the Tuesday launch, Trump stressed that the US is “100 percent with Japan,” with the two leaders agreeing to increase pressure on Pyongyang.
Meanwhile, China and Russia have proposed a “double freeze” plan which would see North Korea suspend its missile launches in exchange for a halt in joint US-South Korea military drills.
The plan was rejected by the US, with State Department spokesperson Heather Neuert stating earlier this month that the
“so-called double freeze, that’s not going to change. We’re allowed to do it (exercises). We’re allowed to do it with our ally, South Korea. We will continue to do that and that’s just not going to change.”
The Hurricane Harvey catastrophe deepened as a pair of 70-year-old reservoir dams began overflowing on Tuesday, adding to the rising floodwaters from the storm that have crippled the area after five consecutive days of rain. A new US record of rainfall for a tropical system has been set, measuring 51-plus inches.
President Trump visited Texas on Tuesday as the floodwaters continued to ravage the Houston metropolitan area and southeast regions of the state, in what the National Weather Service deemed an “unprecedented” event. The storm is expected to make a third landfall on the Texas/Louisiana border in the coming days.
An active rescue operation was still underway as the president and Melania Trump touched down in Corpus Christi, outside the area hard-hit by the storm. They headed to a local fire station where they were briefed on relief efforts by Republican Governor Greg Abbott, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator Brock Long, Texas Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, and others.
Texas National Guard soldiers deploy in flooded areas around Houston, Texas 27 August, 2017. (Photo by 1Lt. Zachary West, 100th MPAD)
While floodwaters continued to rise in nearby Houston, and stranded residents were still waiting for rescue by boat or helicopter, the atmosphere at the briefing was astonishingly complacent, taking on the air of Texas good old boys patting themselves on the back. Abbott, a longtime Trump supporter, traded praises with the president for the wonderful work they were doing. And Trump similarly complimented FEMA and the Coast Guard for their rescue work.
“We won’t say congratulations. We don’t wanna do that,” Trump said. “We don’t wanna congratulate. We’ll congratulate each other when it’s all finished, but you have been terrific.” The surreal nature of this gathering of the political establishment could aptly be summed up by the phrase: “Trump gloats, while Houston floats.”
Trump held a rally outside the firehouse that had the feel of a campaign stump speech, waving the Texas Lone Star flag, describing the storm as “epic,” and insuring the crowd that Texas would persevere.
About 200 miles northeast of Corpus Christi, in the Houston area, the disaster wrought by Harvey’s wrath continued to unfold. The two dams that began overflowing threatened downtown Houston. A levee at Columbia Lakes south of Houston was also breached, and Brazoria County authorities posted a message on Twitter telling people to “GET OUT NOW!!!”
On Monday, engineers had begun releasing water from the Addicks and Barker reservoirs, which are at record highs, to ease the strain on them, but it was not enough. The release of the water means that even more homes and streets will flood, and authorities said that some homes could be flooded for up to a month.
Authorities are still in “rescue” mode. More than 3,000 national and state guard troops have been deployed to assist in the rescue mission, and the Pentagon has said 30,000 National Guard troops could be mobilized. The Coast Guard has made an estimated 4,000 rescues, but there is no official count of those rescued by the hundreds of volunteers with canoes, paddleboards and other flat-bottom boats who have sprung into action to save their neighbors and strangers.
Texas National Guard soldiers in heavily flooded areas from the storms of Hurricane Harvey. (Photos by Lt. Zachary West , 100th MPAD)
The official death toll stands at 30. But as the tragedy of Katrina showed, the full extent of fatalities will not be known until the floodwaters clear, which may be weeks or months. The Saldovar family of Houston reported the fate of six of their family members, including four children, who are feared dead after their van was swept away by floodwaters while crossing a bridge attempting to escape.
There is no way to know how many victims lie in their vehicles submerged underwater, or in their flooded homes. While the Houston authorities reported receiving as many as 1,000 emergency calls an hour for rescue as of Tuesday, there is no official tally of how many people may still be trapped in houses and mobile homes, attempting to survive for days without power, clean water and food. Numerous tragedies like that of the Saldovar family are likely to emerge in the coming days and weeks.
Houston authorities have estimated that 17,000 evacuees will be seeking emergency shelter. Already the George R. Brown Convention Center, which is supposed to shelter 5,000 people, is holding more than 10,000 people. FEMA head Long’s assurances that the center would not become “another Superdome”—referring to the New Orleans sports stadium that housed evacuees in deplorable conditions in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005—cannot be taken as good coin when the convention center is packed at double capacity.
Hurricane Harvey portends a public health crisis as well. Medical staff have been trapped in hospitals with dwindling supplies of food and medicine, forcing more health care facilities to close and evacuate patients by boat. Memorial Sugar Land Hospital has had to evacuate patients temporarily.
An estimated 17,000 people have been evacuated. (Photos by Lt. Zachary West , 100th MPAD)
The Houston Chronicle reports that Ben Taub Hospital has resumed plans to transfer its most critical patients to other facilities, road conditions permitting. The biggest risk is running out of supplies, including medicine, due to high water limiting access to the facility. The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center cancelled outpatient services, appointments and surgeries through Tuesday.
The floodwaters not only displace people, but pose significant risks to health and safety. They can be full of contaminants.
“Flood water mixes with everything below it,” Dr. Richard Bradley, chief of the division of emergency medical services at McGovern Medical School at the University of Texas Science Center at Houston, told Time magazine.
“If it covers a field with pesticides, it picks up the pesticides. It can also carry animal waste from fields and forests.”
While the public focuses on the rescue, safety and health of their loved ones, Houston’s police chief Art Acevedo made a threat against any would-be looters, saying that armed robbers had been apprehended Tuesday and taken into custody. Acevedo said he had spoken with the Harris County district attorney’s office to lobby that anyone suspected of looting be prosecuted and given the most severe punishment allowed by Texas law. The allegations of “looting” were used to justify a law-and-order crackdown by police and military personnel during Hurricane Katrina.
Later Tuesday at the Texas Emergency Command Center in Austin, the president met with FEMA along with Texas and Trump administration officials. Among them was Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Tom Price, who explained that HHS’s responsibility in the crisis was to attend to public health, veterinary and mortuary services, making a grim allusion to the work of recovering and burying the expected casualties.
Ben Carson, secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), said his department’s role would be to insure loan guarantees for infrastructure recovery, to provide immediate foreclosure relief and mortgage insurance. He also said a key role for HUD was to disseminate information, as “the masses frequently become confused” in such situations.
The reality is that “the masses” are not confused, but infuriated under such situations when they find out they are not covered by insurance, or that their insurance is basically worthless. Only one in six Texans have flood insurance. And even for those who do have insurance, it doesn’t cover a flood caused by “Mother Nature,” such as a hurricane. Only a federal program covers flood disasters, and this program runs out at the end of September unless it is reauthorized by Congress.
Five years after Superstorm Sandy hit the Northeast US, some 80 percent of homeowners have not received compensation from their insurers for flood damage.
According to London’s Guardian, “US intelligence officials are under pressure from the White House to produce a justification to declare Iran in violation of a 2015 nuclear agreement” – despite no evidence suggesting it.
The IAEA declared Tehran in compliance multiple times. The White House wants intelligence cooked to show otherwise, giving Trump a pretext to renege on the deal – an international treaty strongly supported by other P5+1 countries.
Collapse of the deal won’t “trigger a new crisis over nuclear proliferation,” as the Guardian suggests. It would further heighten tensions between Washington and Tehran – already strained because of longstanding US aims for regime change by color revolution or war.
According to the Guardian,
CIA “(i)ntelligence analysts, chastened by the experience of the 2003 Iraq war, launched by the Bush administration on the basis of phony evidence of weapons of mass destruction, are said to be resisting the pressure to come up with evidence of Iranian violations.”
Former CIA analyst Ned Price said current agency operatives told him
there’s “a sense of revulsion. There was a sense of deja vu. There was a sense of ‘we’ve seen this movie before.’ “
Former deputy CIA director David Cohen called it “disconcerting” for Trump to conclude Iran is in noncompliance without credible evidence proving it.
“It stands the intelligence process on its head,” he said. “If our intelligence is degraded because it is politicized in the way that it looks like the president wants to do here, that undermines the utility of that intelligence all across the board.”
Langley was never shy about rigging intelligence for political purposes. Nor was Colin Powell as Bush/Cheney’s secretary of state – lying to Congress about nonexistent Iraqi WMDs, infamously claiming:
“(F)acts and Iraq’s behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction.”
False!
“(E)very statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are the facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”
False!
“The gravity of this moment is matched by the gravity of the threat that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction pose to the world.”
False again. None existed and Powell knew it. War was waged against a nation threatening no one, raping and destroying it, massacring its people, endless conflict continuing.
Does Trump have something similar in mind for Iran? Would he wage war on a country able to hit back hard regionally?
The Guardian:
“(T)here is now a general consensus among US intelligence and foreign intelligence agencies, the state department, the IAEA and the other five countries that signed the JCPOA, as well as the European Union, that there is no significant evidence that Iran has violated its obligations under the deal.”
Trump appears hellbent on reneging Washington’s treaty obligation anyway. He, administration and congressional neocons, along with Israel alone will be pleased if he acts irresponsibly.
On Monday, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini strongly supported the nuclear deal, saying it “was not an agreement between two countries. I have repeated it time and again, and I have the impression that we will need to repeat it time and again in the months to come,” adding:
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is “a commitment undertaken by the entire international community on one side and Iran on the other, supported by a resolution of the UN Security Council, and certified regularly by the International Atomic Energy Agency.”
“(C)ompliance with the deal is certified by the IAEA and by the Joint Commission I chair…not by one single individual country,” a clear reference to Trump’s likely intention to pull out.
America will be more of an international outlaw than already if he unilaterally decertifies the deal – what appears likely at this time around mid-October.
Featured image: Sea Shepherd vessel Steve Irwin heads out to intercept Japanese whalers. (Source: Inverse)
What a colourful run this outfit has had. Branded in 2013 by Judge Alex Kozinski of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit as pirates, the Sea Shepherd crew will be hanging up their hooks while rethinking their whale protection strategy. Their long designated enemy, the Japanese whaling fleet, will be given some respite this hunting season.
A crucial point here is evolution. The environmental battle, spearheaded by the Southern Ocean Whale Defence campaign, had become more troublingly sophisticated. “Military” tactics, claimed founder Captain Paul Watson, were being used by Japan. An already slippery adversary had raised the bar.
But Watson, in his announcement, was attempting to give some lustre to the long term efforts of the project. Against absurdly gargantuan odds, a small organisation’s resources were mustered to save whale species from imminent extinction.
“In 2005 we set out to tackle the world’s largest and most destructive whaling fleet.”[1]
It was a destruction centred on targeting 1,035 whales, including an annual quota of 50 endangered Fin whales and 50 endangered Humpbacks. The sceptics were to be found on all sides: they doomed the organisation’s mission to imminent, crestfallen failure.
The humble, worse for wear Farley Mowat was enlisted to harry Japanese whalers across the Southern Ocean. But to it were added, over time, the Steve Irwin, the Bob Barker, the Sam Simon the Brigitte Bardot and the Ocean Warrior.
For Watson and his dedicated piratical crew, the law of environmental protection often lagged, while political action and matters of enforcement proved timid. States with greater power and resources were simply not keen on ruffling Japanese feathers. Statements if disapproval hardly counted.
Japanese whalers have faced the legal music in a range of venues, though as with everything, the might of the gavel doesn’t necessary restrain the might of a state, whether directly used or incidentally employed. In November 2015, Kyodo Senpaku Kaisha was fined $1 million by the Australian Federal Court for hunting minke whales within an Australian sanctuary as defined by Australian environmental law.[2] The whaling company cared not to turn up nor subsequently cough up.
Enter, then, the organisation’s insistence on the use of “innovative direct-action tactics”, thereby putting a premium on investigation, documentation and the taking of “action when necessary to expose and confront illegal activities on the high seas.”
Preventive tactics, such as those employed in 2013 in the Southern Ocean, would feature attempts to prevent Japanese ships from taking refuelling sustenance from a tanker. On cue, both the crew of the Japanese vessels, and Sea Shepherd, would release material suggesting that the other had deliberately attempted to ram their ships.
On reaching the legal courts, the Sea Shepherd book of cetaceous protection tended to look more blotted. The Japanese angle in these instances was to emphasise the danger posed to crews, the potentially lethal bravado of the Sea Shepherd warriors. To do so offered a sizeable distraction from the legitimacy of the hunting activities.
“When you,” directed a stern Judge Kozinski, “ram ships, hurl glass containers of acid, drag metal-reinforced ropes in the water to damage propellers and rudders, launch smoke bombs and flares with hooks; and point high-powered lasers at other ships, you are, without a doubt, a pirate.”[3]
For years, the militant nature of the organisation brought various agents, and agencies, into play. It used guerrilla tactics of gumption and daring, though it was the sort of audaciousness that divided opinion, even in the environmental ranks. Such methods may well been crude but few could dispute their effects. In 2012/3, Japanese whalers, according to Watson, returned with a meagre 10 percent of intended kills.
The strategy of the Japanese whaling fleet, as Watson reflects, has always been shape shifting, apologetics followed by bellicosity; the fictional narrative of science overlaying arguments of culture. While still flouting legality, the number of intended whales has fallen to 333, a victory that can be, to a degree, chalked up to Sea Shepherd’s techniques of mass irritation and disruption. But to this can be added a more expansive scope embraced by their adversary: wider killing grounds, more opportunities to gather their quarry.
By 2016/7, it was clear to Watson that the Japanese were still able to net their quota, albeit at greater expense in terms of time and cost. That same hunting season also threw up a few new realities: the use by the Japanese of “military surveillance to watch Sea Shepherd movements in real time by satellite”. While the group, assisted by their helicopter, did get close to capture evidence of whaling, they “could not physically close the gap.” Hence the sombre admission by Watson:
“We cannot compete with their military grade technology.”[4]
Sea Shepherd’s mission remains, as outlined on its web site, “to end the destruction of habitat and slaughter of wildlife in the world’s oceans in order to conserve and protect ecosystems and species.”[5] But more than a few in the Japanese whaling fleet will be pleased at the organisation’s absence this killing season.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: [email protected]
When politicians are feeling the heat, they start a war and their popularity goes up even if the war is unnecessary or completely ridiculous. Donald Trump, the presidential candidate who promised that he would not take the nation into another Middle Eastern war, did so when he launched a fifty-nine cruise missile barrage against a Syrian Air Base even before he knew for sure what had happened on the ground. It was totally stupid but proved to be popular, even among talking heads and Congressmen, some of whom described his action as “presidential” in the best sense of the word.
It’s the same in Israel. For those who have not been following developments there, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been under pressure due to an ongoing investigation for corruption. One of the truly great things about Israel is that while they have a lot of corrupt politicians, just like everywhere else, they actually investigate, indict, prosecute, convict and send them to jail. The betting is that Netanyahu will soon be in prison, so he has been responding in the time-honored fashion by threatening his neighbors and hinting at the possibility of increased military action and even war. If there is a war going on, he believes, probably correctly, that no one will want to remove him.
In an amicable recent meeting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Netanyahu stressed that there are some red lines that Israel will not allow to be crossed, while also suggesting that some of them have already been violated, most notably through the alleged construction of an Iranian military base inside Syria. Netanyahu provided Putin with “top secret intelligence” to make his point and told the Russian premier that “Iran is making an accelerated effort to entrench itself militarily in Syria. This poses a danger to Israel, the Middle East and in my opinion the world itself.”
Netanyahu characteristically depicted himself as restrained in his responses, telling Putin that Israel had taken only limited action in Syria against Hezbollah supply lines, but that was a lie as Israel has also hit Syrian army positions. Netanyahu described an Iran that is largely a fantasy creation of his own Foreign Ministry,
“We don’t for a second forget that Iran continues to threaten Israel’s destruction on a daily basis. It arms terrorist organizations and initiates terror itself. It is developing intercontinental ballistic missiles with the intention to equip them with nuclear warheads.”
He went on to claim that his strategic objective was to prevent the development of an Iranian controlled land bridge, described as “territorial continuity,” that would extend through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon to the Mediterranean Sea.
The reality is, however, somewhat different, that Israel has long preferred chaos in Syria since it eliminates any threat from a unified and powerful government in Damascus. But just as nature abhors a vacuum that policy had a considerable downside with Iranian supported militias and Revolutionary Guard units increasingly become part of the conflict, picking up the slack where the Syrian Army has been too overstretched to operate. Iranian influence over Syria, both overtly and covertly, will continue after Damascus eliminates the last vestiges of al-Qaeda affiliates and ISIS, not to mention the rag-tag “moderate rebels.” And Iran will have standing behind it the Syrian Army, Iraqi Shi’a militias, and Russian firepower. This has meant that the Israeli plan to have a chronically weak state across its border has backfired, bringing into the fighting and post-war reconfiguration Iran, which Tel Aviv fears most as a regional adversary.
So Israel has two strong motives to begin a war with Iran, one political and the other ostensibly linked to national security. Ironically, however, it also knows, and has even admitted, that Iran does not actually pose any threat against a nuclear armed Israel that has complete air superiority over any or even all of its neighbors. The often-cited land bridge threat is also a bit of a chimera, as whether it could potentially exist or not depends on effective interaction with Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, all of which have their own political dynamics and are somewhat wary of Iranian involvement. If there is any actual threat against Israel it comes from Hezbollah in Lebanon, which is an independent player even though it has strong ties to Tehran, but even in that case the threat is not as serious as fearmongering government leaders have claimed.
All of which is not to suggest that Iran is toothless if Israel were to get really aggressive. Hezbollah would undoubtedly unleash its missile arsenal against Israeli cities, some of which would get through, and any attack on Iran using aircraft would be confronted by formidable air defenses. Iran could also strike back against Israel using its ballistic missiles, all of which means that attacking Iran would be far from cost-free.
From Netanyahu’s point of view, it is far better to stage an incident that brings in Washington and then allows Uncle Sam to do the heavy lifting. The U.S. has strategic military capabilities that Israel lacks, including heavy bombers and armaments that could penetrate Iranian defenses, but it also has vulnerabilities in terms of military bases within striking range and ships at sea that could be attacked by swarms of small boats and land launched missiles.
Israel believes that bringing Washington into the conflict is doable given that the U.S. media has heavily propagandized against Tehran and that inside-the-beltway groupthink largely perceives Iran as an enemy. Recently Henry Kissingerspelled out the new line of strategic thinking which Israel is already exploiting to make its case. Per Kissinger, the impending defeat of ISIS in Syria and Iraq will create a power vacuum which will open the door to the creation of an “Iranian radical empire,” a more evocative version of the “land bridge” warning, which he refers to as a “territorial belt reaching from Tehran to Beirut.” As Iran is also fighting ISIS, Kissinger warns against complacency, that “in the contemporary Middle East…the enemy of your enemy is also your enemy.”
Israel has been pushing hard on Washington, recently having sent a high-level combined intelligence and military delegation to confer with National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster and Special Mideast Envoy Jason Greenblatt to explain the alleged Iranian threat. And the neocon chorus is also signaling that it expects the Trump Administration to do something. Frederick Hof of the hardline Atlantic Council recently wrote that the fundamental mistake made by Washington consisted of not invading Syria and installing an acceptable government years ago, which would have kept Iran out.
Saudi Arabia, which is demonstrating some signs of political instability, would also welcome conflict with Iran, which means that there is an existing coming-together of parties who for various reasons would welcome the escape from other problems that war offers. Donald Trump himself was angry at the State Department in July because it had certified that Tehran was in compliance with the nuclear pact signed last year and Congress also vented its anger by initiating new sanctions against Iran. The next certification is due in October and the president would clearly like to have a good reason, contrived or actual, to break the agreement.
Speculation in Israel is that some kind of preemptive strike is being planned, possibly directed against an Iranian target inside Syria. The danger is that such a move could quickly escalate, with the U.S. Congress and White House quickly aligning themselves with Netanyahu. The United States has no real compelling interest to attack the Iranians and would again find itself in a conflict generated by feckless regional allies that are not allies at all. The results could prove catastrophic in practical terms as Iran is capable of striking back, and it could be devastating to actual American longer terms interests both regionally and worldwide. It is time to say “no” when Israel comes knocking.
Syrian government forces, supported by the Russian Aerospace Forces, reportedly eliminated the most battle-tested and well-armed unit of ISIS in the Euphrates River valley last weekend.
According to the Russian Defense Ministry, over 800 ISIS members, 13 battle tanks, 39 pickup trucks armed with large-caliber machine guns and 9 mortars and artillery guns were destroyed during the clashes near Ghanem al-Ali village. The ministry added that government forces are now advancing against ISIS along the Euphrates River.
The Syrian Arab Army and its allies took back Sabkha and Ghanem al-Ali villages and continued developing momentum in order to retake the rest of the areas near Maadan seized by ISIS during its large attack last week, according to pro-government sources.
The ISIS-linked news agency Amaq claimed that the Russian Aerospace Forces carried out over 100 airstrikes on ISIS positions in the southern Raqqah countryside over the weekend and claimed that about 50 SAA servicemen were killed in a SVBIED attack.
Reports have been circulating that at least 60 SAA service members have been killed and about 300 others have been missing since the start of the ISIS counter-attack in southern Raqqah.
In central Syria, the SAA and its allies recaptured from ISIS the entire area north of Palmyra liberating about 2,000 km2 from the terrorist group.
The SAA also seized the Syriatel hill 30km east of al-Sukhnah town on the al-Sukhnah-Deir Ezzor highway deplyoing in less than 75 km away from Deir Ezzor city besieged by ISIS.
Meanwhile, clashes continued in the Uqayribat area where another group of ISIS units had been encircled by the SAA.
The SAA, Hezbollah and the Lebanese Armed Forces got a full control over the Qalamoun area at the Syrian-Lebanese border after ISIS had agreed to withdraw from it under a ceasefire deal. About 350 ISIS fighters and their families were set to be evacuated to Deir Ezzor.
On Sunday, the Iraqi Army and the Popular Mobilization Units liberated the entire city of Tal Afar from ISIS in northern Iraq. Government forces also advanced in the Tal Afar countryside liberating the villages of Al-Alwliah, Kuitlah, Kaser, al-Haruniah, al-Fough, Qabaq and Alwa’ailiah as well as the Al-Kisk camp, the Tal Afar gas station and other nearby areas.
The Joint Operations Command released a statement on Sunday claiming that government forces killed over 200 ISIS members as well as defused 105 IEDs and 15 booby-trapped houses.
Meanwhile, Iraqi warplanes reportedly destroyed about 60 ISIS vehicles withdrawing from Tal Afar in the direction of al-Ayadiah.
The army and the PMU will likely secure the entire Tal Afar pocket will likely be secured in the near future.
The so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said the airlift was conducted in the town of al-Tabani, on the western outskirts of Dayr al-Zawr, on Saturday.
Syrian sources said that the operation was accompanied by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces’ artillery fire.
The sources speculated that the airlift was possibly meant to transfer US mercenaries fighting alongside Daesh or the terror outfit’s ringleaders who sought to defect.
On Thursday, the SOHR reported a similar operation, during which US helicopters took four Daesh members and a civilian from a house used as an arms depot in Beqres, a suburban area east of Dayr al-Zawr.
The five people transferred during the operation included a foreign bomb expert, three Egyptian Daesh members and a civilian, the report added.
The developments come at a time when Daesh has retreated from much of the territory under its control amid sweeping advances by Syrian army soldiers and allied fighters on the battlefield.
The US has long been accused of colluding with Daesh to provide safe passage and logistic support to members of the Takfiri group in conflict zones.
The US and its allies have been bombarding what they call Daesh positions inside Syria since September 2014 without any authorization from the Damascus government or a UN mandate.
The air raids, however, have on many occasions resulted in civilian casualties and failed to fulfill their declared aim of countering terrorism.
We live in dangerous times. A panic has gripped the American media over Russia. Anyone daring to question the anti-Russian hysteria is risking their careers and reputation. Thus Daniel Kovalik is a heroic man simply for writing his book “The Plot to Scapegoat Russia.” However the media seem oblivious of the dangerous situation they are creating by pushing the US towards a war with Russia which has the potential to end life on the planet with a push of a button.
Kovalik is best known for his work on the dirty war in Colombia has described the insanity of that war in which the US has armed and trained drug dealing death squads (and their sponsors in Colombia’s corrupt drug dealing political and military elite) all in the name of fighting drugs. Needless to say this policy has predictably resulted in a massive 300% increase in the amount of Cocaine arriving in the US from Colombia while also causing untold misery to the people of Colombia where 100,000 have been killed and 9 million refugees have been created as part of a massive land theft. Naturally this “Plan Colombia” has been hailed as a massive success in America.
Kovalik’s book is full of stories like this from america’s recent history. Chances are you will be extremely shocked to discover what he reveals. His book is about far more then Russia. He writes in the hopes of reminding us what many seem to forget. The American empire is far more dangerous to the world then Russia. Kovalik’s book is also a personal account of his own political awakening. Like many Americans he was raised on a steady diet of cold war mythology. The belief that America is a “global force for good” is drummed into it’s citizens heads not only by the propaganda that masquerades as news and history but also in the entertainment we consume the movies, tv, books.
Equally the idea that Russians are the villains has become an article of faith in much of the world after 100 years of cold war propaganda which began in 1917 with the original “red scare”. Of course Russophobia began centuries before that justified on racist (they were asiatic), and religious grounds (Both Protestants and Catholics hated the Orthodox church) and motivated by Russia and Britain’s imperial rivalry.
The point is after centuries of demonization it is easy for westerners to see Russians as inherently evil and bent on world domination. An objective view of 20th/21st century history shows that they were mostly acting defensively after having been invaded twice once by 14 countries including the US during the Russian Civil War and again when Hitler invaded in 1941 and killed 27 million soviets as well as destroying thousands of farms, Villages, factories, hospitals, and schools along with millions of homes. Thus during the Cold War it was always an absurd lie to claim that the Soviets were planning to invade western Europe at any moment. They were focused on rebuilding after the war while America completely undamaged had a monopoly on the Atom-Bomb prior to 1949 and would maintain nuclear dominance throughout the cold war.
However the US needed an excuse to keep it’s military industrial complex running and the Cold War provided a convenient excuse to silence critics, smash labor unions and intervene everywhere on the planet that US corporations felt their profit margins might be threatened by some third world president seeking to improve the lives of his or people. Kovalik gives many of the highlights of this war on the planet Guatemala where 200,000 people would die over the decades as a result of a CIA coup. Iran where democracy was destroyed and the Shah installed to prevent the people from benefiting from the oil revenues.
The horrifying wars in Korea and Vietnam which killed millions of people. It was in the 1980’s that Kovalik had his political awakening during the war on Nicaragua where Reagan was arming drug dealing death squads to terrorize the Sandinista government for daring to overthrow the Somoza dictatorship and attempt to improve the lives of their people. Kovalik went down to Nicaragua to see for himself what was going on there and has ever since tried to oppose the wars the US wages in Latin America.
This was probably the last time the US would have a strong anti-war left. Although there was a brief resurgence during the Bush II years this would largely fade with the coming to office of Obama. Thus most Americans have no idea what their empire has actually been up to lately. The news media has become ever more propagandistic because America’s foreign policy has become ever more insane. Kovalik’s book will bring you up to date on what has actually been happening. In Libya the US backed Al Qaeda terrorists with the full military might of NATO destroying this tiny socialist country where everyone received a share of the oil revenues under Gaddafi. Instead Libya is now ruled by racist al Qaeda warlords who fight for control who have waged a genocidal ethnic cleansing campaign against black Libyans. In Syria a similar strategy has been pursued Syria was nearly destroyed by terrorists armed by the US, the Saudis, Israel and NATO and seeking to turn the country into a chaotic wasteland. In Ukraine the US backed a fascist coup that sparked a civil war.
Clashes in Kyiv, Ukraine. Events of February 18, 2014-4 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
It was the war in Ukraine that lead to our current cold war 2.0 Since most people would be shocked to learn that the US was backing a government full of “neo-Nazis” everyone who pointed this fact out was labeled a Russian propagandist. America’s alliance with fascists is one of it’s dirtiest cold war secrets hundreds of thousands of fascist war criminals were settled across the US, Canada, Australia, and Latin America. They were kept active producing cold war propaganda and were used as secret armies to wage war on the Soviet Union in the early days of the cold war. They were funded and kept active through the World Anti-Communist League which united fascists, terrorists, and drug dealers from around the world. a scandal that emerged during the Iran/Contra era. Anyways this is one of my private obsessions so I couldn’t resist tossing it although Kovalik doesn’t discuss WACL he does discuss the history of the OUN-B the Ukrainian Fascists who committed horrifying war crimes during World War 2 and are now worshipped as heroes in post-Maidan Ukraine.
Of course the Russians are not exactly angels and Kovalik attempts to provide a balanced account of Russia’s recent history as well. Russia’s history since the fall of the USSR has been utterly disastrous in many ways. Thus the book is by no means a one sided account but it will hopefully help the reader to understand what has happened in Russia during and after the cold war. It also provides an account of this new Cold War which really began in the 1990’s with the massive NATO expansion, the War in Yugoslavia, and the disastrous economic policies the west imposed on the former socialist world with catastrophic effects.
Since 2014 the level of Anti-Russian Hysteria has only increased which is why Dan Kovalik is a brave man for writing this book. Despite all the topics and history it covers it is an easy read and has a wonderful heartfelt quality rare in books on these topics. Buy two copies one for yourself and one for a friend or family member who is in the grip of anti-Russian fever or who is unaware of recent history. Whether you are new to topics like these or if you are thanks to the internet and books like this one aware of what is actually going on you will certainly learn something by reading this book. I hope it will awaken in people a desire to search for the truth, think critically, and to fight for peace and justice. We live in dangerous times if you want to do something about it please read this book.
In the United States, facts, an important element of truth, are not important. They are not important in the media, politics, universities, historical explanations, or the courtroom. Non-factual explanations of the collapse of three World Trade Center buildings are served up as the official explanation. Facts have been politicized, emotionalized, weaponized and simply ignored.
As David Irving has shown, Anglo-American histories of World War 2 are, for the most part, feel-good histories, as are “civil war” histories as Thomas DiLorenzo and others have demonstrated. Of course, they are feel good only for the victors. Their emotional purpose means that inconvenient facts are unpalatable and ignored.
Writing the truth is no way to succeed as an author. Only a small percentage of readers are interested in the truth. Most want their biases or brainwashing vindicated. They want to read what they already believe. It is comforting, reassuring. When their ignorance is confronted, they become angry. The way to be successful as a writer is to pick a group and give them what they want. There is always a market for romance novels and for histories that uphold a country’s myths. On the Internet successful sites are those that play to one ideology or another, to one emotion or the other, or to one interest group or another. The single rule for success is to confine truth to what the readership group you serve believes.
Karl Marx said that there were only class truths. Today we have a large variety of truths: truths for feminists, truths for blacks, Muslims, Hispanics, homosexuals, transgendered, truths for the foreign policy community that serves the military/security complex, truths for the neocons, truths for the One Percent that control the economy and the economists who serve them, truths for “white supremacists,” itself a truth term for their opponents. You can add to the list. The “truth” in these “truths” is that they are self-serving of the group that expresses them. Their actual relation to truth is of no consequence to those espousing the “truths.”
Woe to you if you don’t go along with someone’s or some group’s truth. Not even famous film-maker Oliver Stone is immune. Recently, Stone expressed his frustration with the “False Flag War Against Russia.” Little doubt that Stone is frustrated with taunts and accusations from completely ignorant media talking heads in response to his documentary, Putin, based on many hours of interviews over two years. Stone came under fire, because instead of demonizing Putin and Russia, thus confirming the official story, he showed us glimpses of the truth.
The organization, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, published a report that completely destroyed the false accusations about Trump/Russian hacking of the US presidential election. The Nation published an objective article about the report and was assaulted by writers, contributors, and readers for publishing information that weakens the case, which the liberal/progressive/left in conjunction with the military/security complex, is orchestrating against Trump. The magazine’s audience felt that the magazine had an obligation not to truth but to getting Trump out of office. Reportedly, the editor is considering whether to recall the article.
So here we have left-leaning Oliver Stone and left-wing magazine, The Nation, under fire for making information available that is out of step with the self-serving “truth” to which the liberal/progressive/left and their ally, the military/security complex, are committed.
When a country has a population among whom there are no truths except group-specific truths, the country is so divided as to be over and done with. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” The white liberal/progressive/left leaders of divisive Identity Politics have little, if any, comprehension of where the movement they think they lead is headed. At the moment the hate is focused on the “alt-right,” which has become “white nationalists,” which has become “white supremacists.” These “white supremacists” have become epitomized by statues of Confederate soldiers and generals. All over the South, if local governments are not removing the statues, violent crazed thugs consumed by hate attempt to destroy them. In New Orleans someone with money bused in thugs from outside flying banners that apparently are derived from a communist flag to confront locals protesting the departure of their history down the Orwellian Memory Hole.
What happens when all the monuments are gone?
Where does the hate turn next? Once non-whites are taught to hate whites, not even self-hating whites are safe. How do those taught hate tell a good white from a bad white? They can’t and they won’t. By definition by Identity Politics, whites, for now white heterosexual males, are the victimizers and everyone else is their victim. The absurdity of this concept is apparent, yet the concept is unshaken by its absurdity. White heterosexual males are the only ones without the privilege of quotas. They and only they can be put at the back of the bus for university admissions, employment, promotion, and only their speech is regulated. They, and only they, can be fired for using “gender specific terms,” for using race specific terms, for unknowingly offending some preferred group member by using a word that is no longer permissible. They can be called every name in the book, beginning with racist, misogynist, and escalating, and no one is punished for the offense.
Recently, a professor in the business school of a major university told me that he used the word, girls, in a marketing discussion. A young womyn was offended. The result was he received a dressing-down from the dean. Another professor told me that at his university there was a growing list of blacklisted words. It wasn’t clear whether the list was official or unofficial, simply professors trying to stay up with Identity Politics and avoid words that could lead to their dismissal. Power, they tell me, is elsewhere than in the white male, the true victimized class.
For years commentators have recognized the shrinking arena of free speech in the United States. Any speech that offends anyone but a white male can be curtailed by punishment. Recently, John Whitehead, constitutional attorney who heads the Rutherford Institute, wrote that it is now dangerous just to defend free speech. Reference to the First Amendment suffices to bring denunciation and threats of violence. Ron Unz notes that any website that can be demonized as “controversial” can find itself disappeared by Internet companies and PayPal. They simply terminate free speech by cutting off service.
It must be difficult to teach some subjects, such as the “civil war” for example. How would it be possible to describe the actual facts? For example, for decades prior to the Union’s invasion of the Confederacy, North/South political conflict was over tariffs, not over slavery.
The fight over which new states created from former “Indian” territories would be “slave” and which “free” was a fight over keeping the protectionist (North) vs. free trade (South) balance in Congress equal so that the budding industrial north could not impose a tariff regime. Two days before Lincoln’s inaugural address, a stiff tariff was signed into law. That same day in an effort to have the South accept the tariff and remain in or return to the Union — some southern states had seceded, some had not — Congress passed the Corwin amendment that provided constitutional protection to slavery. The amendment prohibited the federal government from abolishing slavery.
Two days later in his inaugural address, which seems to be aimed at the South, Lincoln said:
“I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”
Lincoln’s beef with the South was not over slavery or the Fugitive Slave Act. Lincoln did not accept the secessions and still intended to collect the tariff that now was law. Under the Constitution slavery was up to the states, but the Constitution gave the federal government to right to levy a tariff. Lincoln said that “there needs to be no bloodshed or violence” over collecting the tariff. Lincoln said he will use the government’s power only “to collect the duties and imposts,” and that “there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.”
Here is Lincoln, “the Great Emancipator,” telling the South that they can have slavery if they will pay the duties and imposts on imports. How many black students and whites brainwashed by Identity Politics are going to sit there and listen to such a tale and not strongly protest the racist professor justifying white supremacy and slavery?
So what happens to history when you can’t tell it as it is, but instead have to refashion it to fit the preconceived beliefs formed by Identity Politics? The so-called “civil war,” of course, is far from the only example.
In its document of secession, South Carolina made a case that the Constitutional contract had been broken by some of the northern states breaking faith with Article IV of the Constitution. This is true. However, it is also true that the Southern states had no inclination to abide by Section 8 of Article I, which says that
“Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises.”
So, also the South by not accepting the tariff was not constitutionally pure.
Before history became politicized, historians understood that the North intended for the South to bear costs of the North’s development of industry and manufacturing. The agricultural South preferred the lower priced goods from England. The South understood that a tariff on British goods would push import prices above the high northern prices and lower the South’s living standards in the interest of raising living standards in the North. The conflict was entirely economic and had nothing whatsoever to do with slavery, which also had existed in the North. Indeed, some northern states had “exclusion ordinances” and anti-immigration provisions in their state constitutions that prohibited the immigration of blacks into northern states.
If freeing slaves were important to the North and avoiding tariffs was important to the South, one can imagine some possible compromises. For example, the North could have committed to building factories in the South. As the South became industrialized, new centers of wealth would arise independently from the agricultural plantations that produced cotton exports. The labor force would adjust with the economy, and slavery would have evolved into free labor.
Unfortunately, there were too many hot heads. And so, too, today.
In America there is nothing on the horizon but hate. Everywhere you look in America you see nothing but hate. Putin is hated. Russia is hated. Muslims are hated. Venezuela is hated. Assad is hated. Iran is hated. Julian Assange is hated. Edward Snowden is hated. White heterosexual males are hated. Confederate monuments are hated. Truth-tellers are hated. “Conspiracy theorists” are hated. No one escapes being hated.
Hate groups are proliferating, especially on the liberal/progressive/left. For example, RootsAction has discovered a statue of Robert E. Lee in the U.S. Capitol and urges all good people to demand its removal. Whether the level of ignorance that RootsAction personifies is real or just a fund-raising ploy, I do not know. But clearly RootsAction is relying on public ignorance in order to get the response that they want. In former times when the US had an educated population, everyone understood that there was a great effort to reconcile the North and South and that reconciliation would not come from the kind of hate-mongering that now infects RootsAction and most of the action groups and websites of the liberal/progressive/left.
Today our country is far more divided that it was in 1860. Identity Politics has taught Americans to hate each other, but, nevertheless, the zionist neoconservatives assure us that we are “the indispensable, exceptional people.” We, a totally divided people, are said to have the right to rule the world and to bomb every country that doesn’t accept our will into the stone age.
In turn the world hates America. Washington has told too many lies about other countries and used those lies to destroy them. Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, and large chunks of Syria and Pakistan are in ruins. Washington intends yet more ruin with Venezuela currently in the cross hairs.
Eleven years ago Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez resonated with many peoples when he said in his UN speech:
“Yesterday at this very podium stood Satan himself [Bush], speaking as if he owned the world; you can still smell the sulphur.”
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that America is a font for hatred both at home and abroad.
Though not forecast to continue for 40 days and nights, for residents of affected areas in Houston and surrounding areas, it must feel that way.
I’ve experienced two hurricanes and one earthquake years earlier, the latter scary but mild, the fury of heavy wind and rain downing trees and knocking out power worse, but nothing like Harvey.
Recovery was quick, life returning to normal, not for weeks or months for hardest hit Texas areas – a once in a lifetime event, likely the worst weather-related rainfall in US history before it ends.
On Friday evening, Harvey made landfall near Corpus Christi, its 130-mile-an-hour winds at Category 4 strength, bringing torrential rains with it, forecast to last until mid-week.
Now tropical storm Harvey, the National Weather Service said “life-threatening flooding continues over southeastern Texas.”
Rainfall through Thursday may approach or exceed 50 inches in hardest hit areas, a catastrophe of biblical proportions, many thousands affected.
According to meteorologist Jeff Masters,
“(t)he situation in Houston is particularly concerning, given that city’s vast size and population and its well-known vulnerability to flooding.”
Harvey made landfall 12 years to the day after Hurricane Katrina hit the tip of Florida before devastating New Orleans days later. Will anything like its aftermath follow in Houston and surrounding areas?
Katrina became a metaphor for disaster capitalism. It turned me into a writer and radio host, furious over federal, state and local authorities using it to reward business at the expense of New Orleans’ poor Blacks.
The city was woefully unprotected for what hit, levies protecting Black neighborhoods deliberately left weak. Then Rep. Richard Baker (R. LA) infamously said
“(w)e finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it but God did.”
Poor areas were erased, upscale condos and other high-profit projects replacing them. Katrina’s aftermath was class warfare against the city’s most vulnerable population – no match for predatory developers turning tragedy into profit, aided by city, state and federal authorities.
The entire region was affected, nearly 100,000 square miles of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama communities destroyed or heavily damaged.
Over a million people were displaced. Hundreds of thousands lost everything. Billions of dollars in promised aid went for luxury hotels, casinos, private clubs, the oil industry and gentrification.
It’s a familiar pattern nationwide, with or without natural disasters, a uncaring nation leaving its most vulnerable people largely on their own.
Post-Katrina, schools were privatized. Rents became unaffordable for displaced Black families. Emergency trailers initially provided were sold at public auction.
America the beautiful is for its privileged few alone, the nation’s poor and disadvantaged increasingly on their own.
Is that what poor residents of hard-hit Texas areas can look forward to?
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The executive director of the Haitian Dominican Redemption Network Jacques Viau said the U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti, “has left many girls raped, children without parents, women and children with machine guns, others killed, with the only answer that they were rebellious people.”
In light of this fact, Haitian activists have said the nation should consider consequences prior to agreeing to collaborate with United Nations along the Dominican-Haitian border.
According to the REDHJV, Haiti is still trying to remove the U.N. missions from the Caribbean country with the organization blaming the country’s current crisis and cholera epidemic on the mission.
“It is necessary to see if we — as a country — want to sign so that the United Nations, the entity that regulates the Minustah, is on the border,” the REDHJV chief, Altagracia Jean Joseph said, referring to the number of crimes committed by U.N. mission members against Haitians.
Prior to signing any agreement to collaborate with U.N. forces and opening its doors to further violations, Joseph urged the Haitian government to consider the toll it will take on society.
For years, the United Nations refused to accept full responsibility for causing a deadly cholera outbreak in Haiti which has killed up to 30, 000 people since 2010. Finally, in 2016, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon offered what he suggested was an official apology.
Additionally, in 2015, some 225 Haitian women stated they had been sexually exploited in exchange for necessities such as food, water and medication by foreign mission workers.
The exact number of cases remains unknown with a report drafted by the Office of Internal Oversight Services saying that U.N. peacekeepers, a group of around 125,000 individuals, showed that one-third of allegations of sexual abuse were against children under the age of 18.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) talks started on August 16 with very little of the fire and fury Donald Trump had promised during his campaign. His pledge to abolish the deal has largely been replaced with a plan to modernize it.
Some currents within the Trump administration would certainly like to get rid of NAFTA entirely. But, considering the strength of corporate interests both in and outside the government, this seems unlikely. Big business, NAFTA’s political-intellectual author, remains committed to the agreement and the neoliberal agenda more broadly. The capitalist class simply wields too much power to make abolition possible at this time.
The initial American proposals confirmed that the deal will remain in place, at least for now. Instead of dismantling NAFTA, the Trump administration has imported elements from the rejected Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that seek to deepen and extend investment guarantees, to open up more of the public sector and more public resources to private expropriation, and to extend coverage to new sectors.
Given the balance of forces, we know that these talks will only do further harm to ordinary people in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. This shouldn’t surprise us. After all, NAFTA is just one front in capital’s forty-year war on workers.
A Declaration of War
Big business declared war in the 1970s on the existing class equilibrium, which had granted unions some power and extended better wages, benefits, and working conditions to important sections of the working class.
Key sectors of big business in Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. had become alarmed in the 1960s and 1970s about declining profits, worker militancy, and social unrest. In Canada and Mexico, corporations also had to contend with rising economic nationalism. Their leaders came together around a project of social transformation and worked to mobilize broad sectors of their class behind their project. The Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (CUFTA, 1989), NAFTA (1994), and other free trade agreements have been essential weapons, but the war itself started much earlier.
Over the past four decades, they have largely shaped the economic perspectives of their class and political elites. Their premises and policies have become business’s new “common sense,” embraced by other capitalists, politicians, the media, and even some voters. They used TINA – the slogan that there is no alternative to neoliberal globalization – as a self-serving rationale to attack workers and the social safety net in the name of competition.
The core organizations of the new offensive by big business saw free trade agreements as central to their project. The Business Roundtable (BRT), launched in 1972, served as the model for the formation of the Business Council on National Issues (BCNI, now called the Business Council of Canada) in 1976. Together, they developed the foundations for CUFTA. In 1975, Mexican capitalists created the Business Coordinating Council (CCE), itself largely controlled by a smaller, even more elite organization, the Mexican Businessmen’s Council (CMHN), which started in 1962. The BRT and the CCE played crucial roles in writing NAFTA.
However, the assault on workers, unions, and the environment did not start with these agreements. Decades of attacks on worker and union rights, of state withdrawal and deregulation preceded them. Indeed, many aspects of the neoliberal offensive often attributed to the trade deals were already in the works before negotiations even began.
For example, American and Mexican businesses began relocating their plants to low-wage and non-union areas well before these deals were signed. The movement of American factories to the South and Southwest has a long history, as Jefferson Cowie describes in Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor, and this process has only sped up in the past four decades.
Similarly, companies from central Mexico followed the path of U.S. and Canadian companies in relocating production to Mexico’s northern border region to lower wages and escape unions and health and safety regulations. In northern Mexico, almost all factories, of whatever national ownership, have either no unions or phantom unions, involving corrupt intermediaries that sign pro-business contracts and preclude genuine collective bargaining.
However, while the capitalist classes were deepening their solidarity and changing the framework of class relations, organized labour responded as if the old rules of the game still applied. Unions fought neoliberalism with feeble sectionalist, economistic, and defensive battles, while the capitalist class, supported by each nation’s major political parties, rebuilt the whole structure.
The BCNI, BRT, CCE, and CMHN, alongside a panoply of capitalist-funded think tanks, whose numbers mushroomed in the 1970s and 1980s, transformed popular consciousness. Their propaganda presented globalization as a faceless and inexorable agent of change and threatened workers with unemployment unless they adapted to this new competitive world by conceding wages, benefits, and rights to their bosses.
But globalization and the degraded labour market it created was not a natural or inevitable process: the capitalist class deliberately and consciously enacted these reforms. Today, the same groups are fighting to expand these reforms and their power.
Capitalist Internationalism
As distasteful as they may find it, the capitalist class in the U.S. has no choice but to enact its agenda through a rhetorically populist and racist president.
The fragile Trump bloc, at the top, consists of a fluid and conflicted alliance of capitalists, ideologically diverse on many issues but united by a shared vision of deepening the war against workers and society. Their neoliberal vision is shared by the socially progressive capitalists in the Democratic Party and that party’s leadership.
Wide swaths of the corporate media, political elites, and the capitalist class truly dislike Trump’s protectionist rhetoric, his racism, xenophobia, sexism, and vulgarity. He promised his mass base an economic revival alongside the restoration of American values, which, with not particularly subtle coding, connoted a return to white supremacy. Many of his supporters believe their economic prospects have declined thanks to mass non-white immigration and black assertiveness.
While playing on racist, anti-immigrant, and populist sentiment, however, Trump’s biography and his announced policies on taxes, health care, and social spending show his strong commitment to accelerate the radical upward shift of income and wealth. His cabinet’s class composition – billionaires and generals – reassures capitalists: the Trump administration will carry out reforms that favor the 1 per cent.
Donald Trump signs a memo withdrawing the US from Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations on January 23. (Source: White House Photo)
This project finds support across the capitalist class’s political spectrum, from the right-wing Koch brothers and their many front organizations to the ideologically diverse BRT. The latter’s current head, Jamie Dimon (CEO of JPMorgan Chase), is a social liberal who denounces inequality while nevertheless fighting for policies that create more of it. Despite genuine disputes within the capitalist class, bosses and politicians alike agree on the broad contours of the USA’s neoliberal direction – one shared by capitalists and politicians across the NAFTA countries.
Business and political leaders in Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. see free trade agreements as a way of making neoliberal reform irreversible. As Jaime Zabludovsky, Mexico’s deputy chief negotiator in the NAFTA talks, said:
“By consolidating the opening of its economy in an international treaty with its powerful neighbor, Mexico made economic reforms permanent and, thus, extended the planning horizons for domestic and foreign investors.”
It’s important to remember that, although the U.S. has far more power than its treaty partners, American capitalists and politicians did not impose CUFTA and NAFTA on Canada and Mexico. The business leaders and governments of all three nations shared a vision for neoliberal transformation and worked together to prevent popular challenges to this new regime. And these three capitalist classes were already significantly intertwined, with extensive involvements in each other’s economies. As some critics have said, CUFTA and NAFTA were economic constitutions by treaty.
The American capitalist class enthusiastically promoted these deals because they provided great opportunities for U.S. business, especially by expanding access to Canada and Mexico’s natural resources as well as Mexico’s low-wage workers and anti-union industrial relations regime.
But Canadian and Mexican capitalists had quite a bit to gain as well. CUFTA and NAFTA guarded against American protectionism and enhanced their opportunities to become “world class” companies in the U.S. economy and beyond.
These treaties were less about opening trade than about extending corporate rights and power. In fact, most North American trade takes place intra-company or within specific companies’ supply chains. Most industrial production, especially in auto manufacturing, has become a continentally integrated process.
As the Wilson Quarterly recently pointed out, around 50 per cent of trade between the U.S. and Mexico consists of parts and materials. These components pass back and forth across the border repeatedly as they are transformed or incorporated into other components and finished products.
A 2004 study showed that goods exported to the U.S. from Mexico contained 40 per cent American value-added components, as parts are utilized at different stages in the same production process, often by the same company or its chain of parts producers. The top four categories of Mexico’s exports to the U.S. are identical to the top four categories of Mexico’s imports: machinery, vehicles, electrical machinery, and mineral fuels. This data further demonstrates the degree of economic integration across North America.
Fighting NAFTA Means Fighting Capitalist Power
CUFTA faced massive resistance in Canada but little in the USA: American workers did not see their Canadian counterparts as threatening U.S. jobs and wages. Conversely, many saw Mexico’s extremely low pay as a threat to their jobs and wages, and congressional Democrats, the labour movement, and environmentalists strongly opposed NAFTA.
Resistance grew so strong that it appeared the treaty might not be approved. It took intense effort from the BRT, CCE, the Mexican government, the Republican Party, and President Bill Clinton to bully congressional Democrats into voting for the agreement.
But Trump’s bombastic attacks on free trade, NAFTA, and immigrants have nothing to do with slowing down the offensive of capital against labour. Rather, he and his political allies want to ride the wave of popular discontent created by these neoliberal policies and cultural fears among sectors of the white working class to intensify the offensive.
Trump’s hateful rhetoric helps sustain corporate power by fragmenting working-class solidarity. Racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric intensifies conflict within the working class along ethnic, racial, and national lines, playing immigrant off non-immigrant, American worker off Mexican worker. Canada, seen as a fellow “white” nation, is not subject to this xenophobic antagonism, although specific trade disputes exist.
The corporate offensive will continue with or without Trump, with or without NAFTA, as long as capitalist power remains intact and popular forces remain fragmented and under the political leadership of neoliberal Democrats. We must challenge both Trumpism and the ideological, economic, and political power of big business in ways that don’t reproduce the political and ideological domination Democrats now enjoy over the nation’s progressive elements.
Supporting the Democratic Party as the lesser evil has disarmed the working class by contributing to the party’s hegemony over workers, unions, and oppressed groups. Neoliberal Democrats have allied with big business and the Republican Party to enact the corporate agenda – an agenda that created the conditions for Trump support among sections of the white working class. They also joined forces with Republicans to carry out policies of criminalization, welfare reform, and financial deregulation. Their agenda has been inimical to immigrant rights and has disproportionally affected black and Latino communities.
Their newfound progressive rhetoric should not disguise their past and present support for the corporate offensive or their close ties to the socially liberal wing of the capitalist class. The Left should ally with neoliberal Democrats only insofar as it helps us win specific battles against the many evils of Trumpism, but we should still expose and oppose their support for neoliberal policies.
We must build a working-class movement independent of the mainstream Democratic Party, a movement that embraces and incorporates racialized groups, immigrants, and other specially oppressed communities. The overwhelming majority of these groups already belong to the working class, but their oppression extends beyond their class position. Solidarity demands that the Left treat the distinct needs and demands of these groups as fundamentally important.
Further, we must extend the struggle beyond this or that treaty, this or that new assault, to a struggle against the system of capitalist power. If we remain at the level of defensive struggles, our victories are likely to remain ephemeral as long as capitalist power remains intact. We must fight these defensive battles in ways that deepen and widen working-class consciousness across ethnic, racial, regional, and national divides.
The capitalist classes in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico developed class solidarity and carried out a transformational project against the North American working class. Workers must now develop our own class solidarity and transformative project to take back our economies, societies, and states from big business’s destructive grip.
Edur Velasco Arregui is the coauthor of Continental Crucible: Big Business, Workers and Unions in the Transformation of North America. He is the former secretary-general of SITUAM (Sindicato Independiente de Trabajadores de la Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana), a professor of law, and a union activist in Mexico.
The vast majority of deaths from Yemen’s cholera epidemic occur in rebel-held areas on account of the attacks by the Saudi-led coalition on health centers and infrastructure and because of the coalition blockade:
Dr Homer Venters, director of programmes for the research group Physicians for Human Rights, told Al Jazeera that coalition hits on clinics and sewage works were a Saudi “tactic of war” that amounted to the “weaponisation of disease”. [bold mine-DL]
Coalition attacks and a blockade on fuel and other supplies have left civilians in Houthi areas more vulnerable to cholera, and less able to get antibiotics and other life-saving help than those in other parts of the Arab world’s poorest nation, he said.
“Aside from the devastation from air strikes on hospitals and clinics, the health emergency in Yemen has been made significantly worse by Saudi restrictions on petrol imports, leaving the remaining health centres without power,” Venters said.
The coalition blockade has also been a major factor in creating near-famine conditions in the same areas, and that makes the malnourished more susceptible to disease. Because malnourished children in particular are much more likely to die from disease, the coalition war and blockade are threatening their lives in at least two ways. This is another reminder that the multiple, overlapping humanitarian crises in Yemen did not just happen accidentally, but were produced as a result of the coalition’s targeting of civilian targets and infrastructure along with the deliberate effort to starve Yemenis into submission. The “weaponization of disease” that Dr. Venters refers to has now created the world’s worst cholera epidemic that has already infected well over half a million people in the span of a little over four months.
As humans, we have evolved with the natural environment over millennia. We have learned what to eat and what not to eat, what to grow and how to grow it and our diets have developed accordingly. We have hunted, gathered, planted and harvested. Our overall survival as a species has been based on gradual, emerging relationships with the seasons, insects, soil, animals, trees and seeds. And out of these relationships, we have seen the development of communities whose rituals and bonds have a deep connection with food production and the natural environment.
However, over the last couple generations, agriculture and food production has changed more than it had done over previous millennia. These changes have involved massive social upheaval as communities and traditions have been uprooted and have entailed modifying what we eat, how we grow our food and what we apply to it. All of this has been driven by geopolitical concerns and powerful commercial interests with their proprietary chemicals and patented seeds. The process of neoliberal globalisation is accelerating the process as farmers are encouraged to produce for global supply chains dominated by transnational agribusiness.
Certain crops are now genetically engineered, the range of crops we grow has become less diverse, synthetic biocides have been poured on crops and soil and our bodies have been subjected to a chemical bombardment. We have arrived at a point where we have lost touch with our deep-rooted microbiological and social connection with nature and have developed an arrogance that has placed ‘man’ above the environment and all other species. One of the consequences is that we have paid an enormous price in terms of the consequent social, environmental and health-related devastation.
Despite the promise and potential of science, it has too often in modern society become a tool of vested interests, an ideology wrapped in the vestiges of authority and the ‘superstition’ that its corporate-appointed priesthood should not be challenged nor questioned. Instead of liberating humankind, it has now too often become a tool of deception in the hands of companies like Monsanto, Bayer and Syngenta which make up the oligopoly that controls what is an increasingly globalised system of modern food and agriculture.
These corporations have successfully instituted the notion that the mass application of biocides, monocropping and industrial agriculture are necessary and desirable. They are not. However, these companies have used their science and propaganda to project certainty in order to hide the fact that they have no real idea what their products and practices are doing to human health or the environment (and in cases when they do know, they do their best to cover it up or hide behind the notion of ‘commercial confidentiality‘).
Soil microbiologists are still trying to fully comprehend soil microbes and how they function as an integrated network in relation to plants. The agrochemical sector has little idea of how their biocides have affected soils. It merely churns out public relations spin that their inputs are harmless for soil, plants and human health. Such claims are not based on proper, in-depth, long-term studies. They are based on a don’t look, don’t find approach or a manipulation of standards and procedures that ensure their products make it on to the commercial market and stay there. The devastating impacts on soil are increasingly clear to see.
And what are these biocides doing to us as humans? Numerous studies have linked the increase in pesticide us with spiraling rates of ill health. Kat Carrol of the National Health Federation is concerned about the impacts on human gut bacteria that play a big role in how organs function and our neurological health. The gut microbiome can contain up to six pounds of bacteria and is what Carroll calls ‘human soil’. She says that with their agrochemicals and food additives, powerful companies are attacking this ‘soil’ and with it the sanctity of the human body.
And her concerns seem valid. Many important neurotransmitters are located in the gut. Aside from affecting the functioning of major organs, these transmitters affect our moods and thinking. Feed gut bacteria a cocktail of biocides and is it any surprise that many diseases are increasing?
For instance, findings published in the journal ‘Translational Psychiatry’ provide strong evidence that gut bacteria can have a direct physical impact on the brain. Alterations in the composition of the gut microbiome have been implicated in a wide range of neurological and psychiatric conditions, including autism, chronic pain, depression, and Parkinson’s Disease.
Environmental campaigner Dr Rosemary Mason has written extensively on the impacts of agrochemicals (especially glyphosate) on humans, not least during child and adolescent development. In her numerous documents and papers, she cites a plethora of data and studies that link the use of agrochemicals with various diseases and ailments. She has also noted the impact of these chemicals on the human gut microbiome.
Writing in The Guardian, Mo Costandidiscusses the importance of gut bacteria and their balance. In adolescence the brain undergoes a protracted period of heightened neural plasticity, during which large numbers of synapses are eliminated in the prefrontal cortex and a wave of ‘myelination’ sweeps across this part of the brain. These processes refine the circuitry in the prefrontal cortex and increase its connectivity to other brain regions. Myelination is also critical for normal, everyday functioning of the brain. Myelin increases a nerve fibre’s conduction velocity by up to a hundred times, and so when it breaks down, the consequences can be devastating.
Other recent work shows that gut microbes control the maturation and function of microglia, the immune cells that eliminate unwanted synapses in the brain; age-related changes to gut microbe composition might regulate myelination and synaptic pruning in adolescence and could, therefore, contribute to cognitive development. Upset those changes, and, As Mason argues, there are going to be serious implications for children and adolescents. Mason places glyphosate at the core of the ailments and disorders currently affecting young people in Wales and the UK in general.
Yet we are still being subjected to an unregulated cocktail of agrochemicals which end up interacting with each other in the gut. Regulatory agencies and governments appear to work hand in glove with the agrochemical sector.
Carol Van Strum has released documents indicating collusion between the manufacturers of dangerous chemicals and regulatory bodies.Evaggelos Vallianatoshas highlighted the massive fraud surrounding the regulation of biocides and the wide scale corruption at laboratories that were supposed to test these chemicals for safety. Many of these substances were not subjected to what was deemed proper testing in the first place yet they remain on the market. Shiv Chopra has also highlighted how various dangerous products were allowed on the commercial market and into the food chain due to collusion between these companies and public officials.
Powerful transnational corporations are using humanity as their collective guinea pig. But those who question them or their corporate science are automatically labelled anti-science and accused of committing crimes against humanity because they are preventing their products from being commercialised ‘to help the poor or hungry’. Such attacks on critics by company mouthpieces who masquerade as public officials, independent scientists or independent journalists are mere spin. They are, moreover, based on the sheer hypocrisy that these companies (owned and controlled by elite interests) have humanity’s and the environment’s best interests at heart.
Many of these companies have historically profited from violence. Unfortunately, that character of persists. They directly profit on the back of militarism, whether as a result of the US-backed ‘regime change’ in Ukraine or the US invasion of Iraq. They also believe they can cajole (poison) nature by means of chemicals and bully governments and attack critics, while rolling out propaganda campaigns for public consumption.
Pesticides are in fact “a global human rights concern” and are in no way vital to ensuring food security. Ultimately, what we see is ignorance, arrogance and corruption masquerading as certainty and science.
“… when we wound the planet grievously by excavating its treasures – the gold, mineral and oil, destroy its ability to breathe by converting forests into urban wastelands, poison its waters with toxic wastes and exterminate other living organisms – we are in fact doing all this to our own bodies… all other species are to be enslaved or driven to extinction if need be in the interests of human ‘progress’… we are part of the same web of life –where every difference we construct artificially between ‘them’ and ‘us’ adds only one more brick to the tombstone of humankind itself.” – from ‘Micobes of the World Unite!’ By Satya Sager
The Persian Gulf harbors an array of extremely compromising secrets. Near the top is the Afghan heroin ratline – with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) positioned as the golden node of a transnational, trillion dollar heroin money laundering operation.
In this 21st century Opium War, crops harvested in Afghanistan are essentially feeding the heroin market not only in Russia and Iran but especially in the US. Up to 93% of the world’s opium comes from Afghanistan.
Contrary to predominant Western perception, this is not an Afghan Taliban operation. The key questions — never asked by Atlanticist circles — are who buys the opium harvests; refines them into heroin; controls the export routes; and then sell them for humongous profit compared to what the Taliban have locally imposed in taxes.
The hegemonic narrative rules that Washington bombed Afghanistan in 2001 in “self-defense” after 9/11; installed a “democratic” government; and after 16 years never de facto left because this is a key node in the Global War on Terror (GWOT), against al-Qaeda and the Taliban alike.
Washington spent over $100 billion in Afghan reconstruction. And, allegedly, $8.4 billion in “counternarcotics programs”. Operation Enduring Freedom — along with the “liberation” of Iraq — have cost an astonishing several trillion dollars. And still the heroin ratline, out of occupied Afghanistan, thrives. Cui bono?
Have a SIGAR
An exhaustive Afghanistan Opium Survey details the steady rise of Afghan opium production as well as the sprawl in production areas; “In 2016, opium production had increased by approximately 25 times in relation to its 2001 levels, from 185 tons in 2001 to 4800 tons in 2016.”
Another exhaustive report issued by the delightful acronym SIGAR (Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction) even hints — discreetly — at the crucial connection; Operation Enduring Freedom feeding America’s heroin epidemic.
Afghanistan is infested by contractors; numbers vary from 10,000 to tens of thousands. Military and ex-military alike can be reasonably pinpointed as players in the heroin ratline — in many cases for personal profit. But the clincher concerns the financing of US intel black ops that should not by any means come under scrutiny by the US Congress.
A Gulf-based intel source with vast experience across the Pentagon-designated “arc of instability” tells the story of his interaction with an Australian intel operative who served in Afghanistan;
“This was about 2011. He said he gave US Army Intelligence and the CIA reports on the Afghan heroin trade — that US military convoys from the ports of Pakistan were being used to ship the heroin out of Afghanistan — much of it was raw opium — for distribution as their backhaul.
No one answered.
He then cornered the key army intelligence operations and CIA at a meeting and asked why no action was taken. The answer was that the goal of the US was winning the hearts and minds of the population and giving them the poppies to grow won their hearts. He was then warned that if he brought this issue up again he would be returned to Australia in a body bag.”
The source is adamant,
“CIA external operations are financed from these profits. The charge that the Taliban was using the heroin trade to finance their operations was a fabrication and a form of misdirection.”
And that brings us to a key motive behind President Trump‘s going against his instincts and accepting a new Afghan surge;
“In the tradition of the opium wars of perfidious Albion in the 19th century, in which opium paid for tea and silk from India, and the taxes on these silk and tea imports financed the construction of the mighty British Navy which ruled the seas, the CIA has built itself up into a most powerful agent based on the trillion dollar heroin trade. It is impossible for Trump to overcome it as he has no allies to tap. The military are working together with the CIA, and therefore the officers that surround Trump are worthless.”
Past examples abound. The most notorious concerns the Golden Triangle during the Vietnam war, when the CIA imposed a food-for-opium scheme on Hmong tribesmen from Laos — complete with a heroin refinery at the CIA headquarters in northern Laos and the set up of nefarious Air America to export the opium.
The whole story was exposed on Prof. Alfred McCoy‘s seminal The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia — which drove Langley nuts.
A contemporary counterpart would be a recent book by Italian journalist Enrico Piovesana detailing the New Opium War in Afghanistan.
The return of Air America
A Pakistani intel source with vast Pashtun/ tribal area contacts delves into even more incendiary territory; “According to our best information the CIA has brought in their al-Qaeda-Daesh proxies into Afghanistan to justify the additional American troops”. That would neatly tie in with Trump being cornered by his generals.
And then, there’s Moscow. Last week, the Russian Foreign Ministry was adamantly denouncing “foreign fighters” transferred by “unknown helicopters” as the perpetrators of a massacre of Hazara Shi’ites in a northern Afghanistan province; “It seems that the command of the NATO forces controlling the Afghan sky stubbornly refuses to notice these incidents.”
It does not get more serious than that; Moscow denouncing sectors of the US-trained Afghan Armed Forces side by side with NATO engaged in covert ops supporting jihadis. Russian intel has hinted — discreetly — for quite some time that US intel is covertly sponsoring Daesh — a.k.a. “ISIS Khorasan” — in Afghanistan.
Russian intel is very much aware of the Afghan chapter in the New Great Game. Russian citizens are “collateral damage” of the Afghan heroin ratline as much as Americans. The Russian Foreign Ministry is tracking how tons of chemicals are being illegally imported into Afghanistan from, among others, “Italy, France and the Netherlands”, and how the US and NATO are doing absolutely nothing to contain the heroin ratline.
Well, Air America, after all, never died. It just relocated from the jungles of Southeast Asia to the arid crossroads of Central and South Asia.
The world is now casting its eyes on Xiamen, the coastal city in China’s Fujian Province, as it will host the ninth BRICS Summit themed “deepening the BRICS partnership and opening up a brighter future” in early September.
“BRICS”, since its birth as a new concept, has evolved into a cooperative mechanism guided by the regular meeting of leaders from the five emerging markets–Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
The mechanism also involves a series of exchanges and dialogue activities, including regular ministerial meetings, business forums and think-tank forums.
Over the past decade, the BRICS bloc has transformed itself from a concept to an entity by strengthening dialogue, deepening cooperation and establishing the New Development Bank (NDB) and Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA).
The members, as a result, have contributed much to stimulating world economic growth, reforming and improving global economic governance and boosting democratization of international relations.
BRICS countries enjoy enormous potential for cooperation since they, being in similar development phase, share similar historical missions, development objectives, large population, huge market and highly complementary economies.
A closer relationship among the BRICS members would impact not only their own development, but the world economic growth and international order.
A community of shared interest, first of all, must be established among the BRICS countries.
The Belt and Road Initiative proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013 has been recognized and supported by an increasing number of countries, among which Russia is an active one.
Xi and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin signed a joint statement on docking the Silk Road Economic Belt initiative and the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) construction in May, 2015.
Moreover, China and other BRICS partners are also moving forward to align their development strategies and regional cooperation plans. China’s investment and its external cooperation on production capacity can tighten the interest bonds of BRICS members and their peoples by giving a boost to their infrastructure construction and industry upgrade.
A community of actions should be set up among them as well. BRICS members, all influential nations in the region where they are located, share a strong sense of responsibility to promote the establishment of a global governance framework that can reflect the new world political and economic arena based on the principles of multipolarity.
The regular meetings between leaders can work as a platform on which the BRICS nations could exchange their views on key international and regional agendas, so that more joint actions could be launched to vindicate UN’s core status in international affairs, promote the democratization of international relations, and safeguard world peace and development.
By raising their voice and influence and sending a unified message, the five members have played a significant role in improving global governance and strengthening multilateralism.
A community of shared responsibility should also be built by the bloc.
As today’s world is still faced with rising trade protectionism, hegemonism and power politics, BRICS countries have a duty to safeguard the common interests of emerging markets and developing economies in terms of climatic change, reform of the International Monetary Fund, counter-terrorism, transnational crime, network security and other key agendas in global governance.
As big emerging markets and global stakeholders, BRICS nations have the responsibility for and the ability of providing rational solutions to address global challenges as well as more public goods for the international community on the premise of properly handling their own domestic affairs.
Li Hui is Chinese Ambassador to Russia.
This article was translated from Chinese and was originally published by People’s Daily.
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Comments Off on From A Concept to A Partnership: BRICS Members to Build Future Through Cooperation
The world is now casting its eyes on Xiamen, the coastal city in China’s Fujian Province, as it will host the ninth BRICS Summit themed “deepening the BRICS partnership and opening up a brighter future” in early September.
“BRICS”, since its birth as a new concept, has evolved into a cooperative mechanism guided by the regular meeting of leaders from the five emerging markets–Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
The mechanism also involves a series of exchanges and dialogue activities, including regular ministerial meetings, business forums and think-tank forums.
Over the past decade, the BRICS bloc has transformed itself from a concept to an entity by strengthening dialogue, deepening cooperation and establishing the New Development Bank (NDB) and Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA).
The members, as a result, have contributed much to stimulating world economic growth, reforming and improving global economic governance and boosting democratization of international relations.
BRICS countries enjoy enormous potential for cooperation since they, being in similar development phase, share similar historical missions, development objectives, large population, huge market and highly complementary economies.
A closer relationship among the BRICS members would impact not only their own development, but the world economic growth and international order.
A community of shared interest, first of all, must be established among the BRICS countries.
The Belt and Road Initiative proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013 has been recognized and supported by an increasing number of countries, among which Russia is an active one.
Xi and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin signed a joint statement on docking the Silk Road Economic Belt initiative and the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) construction in May, 2015.
Moreover, China and other BRICS partners are also moving forward to align their development strategies and regional cooperation plans. China’s investment and its external cooperation on production capacity can tighten the interest bonds of BRICS members and their peoples by giving a boost to their infrastructure construction and industry upgrade.
A community of actions should be set up among them as well. BRICS members, all influential nations in the region where they are located, share a strong sense of responsibility to promote the establishment of a global governance framework that can reflect the new world political and economic arena based on the principles of multipolarity.
The regular meetings between leaders can work as a platform on which the BRICS nations could exchange their views on key international and regional agendas, so that more joint actions could be launched to vindicate UN’s core status in international affairs, promote the democratization of international relations, and safeguard world peace and development.
By raising their voice and influence and sending a unified message, the five members have played a significant role in improving global governance and strengthening multilateralism.
A community of shared responsibility should also be built by the bloc.
As today’s world is still faced with rising trade protectionism, hegemonism and power politics, BRICS countries have a duty to safeguard the common interests of emerging markets and developing economies in terms of climatic change, reform of the International Monetary Fund, counter-terrorism, transnational crime, network security and other key agendas in global governance.
As big emerging markets and global stakeholders, BRICS nations have the responsibility for and the ability of providing rational solutions to address global challenges as well as more public goods for the international community on the premise of properly handling their own domestic affairs.
Li Hui is Chinese Ambassador to Russia.
This article was translated from Chinese and was originally published by People’s Daily.
The threat of cyberterrorism has competed for centre stage in American politics with fears of “Russian hackers” disrupting everything from elections to electrical grids. And yet as US policymakers wield threats of cyberterrorism to promote a long and growing list of countermeasures and pretexts for expanding its conflict with Moscow, it is simultaneously promoting very real cyberterrorism globally.
Worst of all, it does so under the guise of “activism.”
In it, readers may have expected a detailed description of how independent local activists were using information technology to inform the public, communicate with policymakers and organise themselves more efficiently.
Instead, readers would find a list of US-funded fronts posing as “nongovernmental organisations” (NGOs) engaged in subversion, including attacks carried out against Thai government websites aimed at crippling them, the dumping of private information of ordinary citizens online and coercing policymakers into adopting their foreign-funded and directed agenda.
US-Backed Cyberterrorism
The paper cites petitions created by the US-funded Thai Netizen Network on the US-based petition site, Change.org as well as distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) aimed at crippling essential government websites, a campaign defended by US-funded Thai Netizen as being “virtual civil disobedience.”
The paper would claim (our emphasis):
The most innovative countermeasure was a series of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks: an anonymous group, Thailand F5 Cyber Army, declared a cyberwar on the Thai government by encouraging netizens to visit listed official websites and continuously press F5 on their keyboards to refresh the pages. The goal was to overwhelm web servers and cause a temporary collapse of the websites of the Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Information and Communication Technology, Government House of Thailand, National Legislative Assembly, and Internal Security Operations Command. The group disseminated detailed instructions on the operation to its anonymous activists. It then demanded that the junta cancel its Single Gateway proposal.
Most of the attacks were successful. Activists wanted to demonstrate the government’s technological ineptitude and its lack of capacity to manage the Single Gateway. Arthit Suriyawongkul, coordinator of the Thai Netizen Network, described the campaign as virtual civil disobedience—an online version of the nonviolent resistance practiced by civil rights groups in the United States.
In another case, an activist group called Anonymous launched a #BoycottThailand campaign on Twitter and reportedly hacked government websites, snatched confidential information from official databases, and shared it online.
The Thai Netizen Network is funded by the US State Department via the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) subsidiary, Freedom House, Open Society and a number of other foreign governments and corporate-funded foundations.
The role of a foreign-funded front coordinating efforts to undermine Thailand’s national security, including promoting cyberterrorism as “civil disobedience,” carries with it many implications. That the US is the foreign state promoting these activities in Thailand, undermines its own efforts to define and combat cyberterrorism back home.
What is Cyberterrorism?
Cyberterrorism is described on the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) website as:
…the use of computer network tools to shut down critical national infrastructures (e.g., energy, transportation, government operations) or to coerce or intimidate a government or civilian population.
Attacking government websites millions of people across Thailand depend on for information and services while pilfering the personal information of thousands of ordinary citizens clearly fits the definition of not only cyberterrorism because of the political motivations involved, but also malicious criminality in general.
Unlike alleged Russian hacks which divulged emails detailing impropriety among American politicians, the information pilfered by US-backed hackers in Thailand included the personal information of millions of ordinary citizens using government services as part of their daily lives.
Bangkok Post would fill in the missing information intentionally omitted from the Carnegie Endowment paper, reporting that:
Files posted by Anonymous and examined by the Bangkok Post appear to be from the court system, as the Anonymous posters claimed.
An SQL database file of 1.1 gigabytes contains thousands of names, ID card numbers, photos, email addresses, personal phone numbers and more — all in clear text.
By dumping this information online, US-backed hackers targeted ordinary citizens, jeopardising their privacy and exposing them to criminal elements the world over involved in identity theft.
US Cyberterrorism is not “Activism”
The Carnegie Endowment paper itself was drafted by Janjira Sombatpoonsiri, assistant professor of political science at Thammasat University, Thailand. She is also cited as a member of the Carnegie Endowment’s Civic Activism Network. Not only is she an active, contributing member of Thailand’s foreign-backed opposition, she is admittedly involved in a foreign think-tank funded by foreign corporate interests.
The Carnegie Endowment includes among its sponsors in its 2016 annual report; the US government, pharmaceutical giants including Gilead, petrochemical monopolies including Chevron, British Petroleum and Shell, defence contractors including Lockheed Martin and several automakers including Ford.
US-funded Thai Netizen participates in a likewise foreign funded Amnesty International protest. Thai Netizen and the agenda is promotes is neither Thai nor activism. It is foreign interference, and now, constitutes aiding and abetting cyberterrorism.
Like many other episodes of extraterritorial political interference up to and including military intervention, America’s meddling in Thailand is done on behalf of corporate interests seeking to expand their respective and collective hegemony both regionally in Asia vis-a-vis Beijing, and globally. This interference is done under the cover of rights advocacy, both by the think tanks and foundations funding it and those in Thailand receiving foreign cash.
The US use of cyberterrorism in Thailand and beyond should come as no surprise. It augments already ongoing efforts by US-backed opposition in Thailand to destabilise and upend Thailand’s political order which has included armed terrorism.
Most recently, a string of bombings plagued Bangkok, including one targeting a hospital. At various junctures during Thailand’s political conflict, foreign-backed opposition has brought militants into the streets. In 2010, nearly 100 would die over the course of several weeks, culminating in citywide arson leaving areas of Thailand’s capital, Bangkok, resembling a war zone.
To see US-sponsored authors attempting to promote cyberterrorism as “activism” in Thailand also comes as no surprise. When Thailand’s opposition carries out armed terrorism, US-sponsored media and policy think tanks often attempt to spin it as well. Other forms of more traditional subversion are also regularly defended by the US and its myriad fronts posing as rights advocates as “activism.”
Understanding that it is not “activism,” but by America’s own very definition, cyberterrorism, helps disarm this malicious campaign posing as “civil disobedience” and “activism,” and allows nations like Thailand to defend themselves through enhanced technological security measure as well as legislation.
Joseph Thomas is chief editor of Thailand-based geopolitical journal, The New Atlas and contributor to the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
Featured image: The story of EpiPen pricing reveals why drug costs should be controlled. (Source: Greg Friese)
You may remember the EpiPen scandal — the massive price increases on the life-saving drug delivery system that saves people temporarily from allergic reactions — from awhile back. In 2016, The Daily Take Team wrote on Truthout,
Dozens of reports are now coming out about how Mylan Pharmaceuticals hiked the price of the very common life-saving EpiPen by over 450 percent since Mylan bought EpiPen in 2007.
You’ve probably heard of EpiPens, and you probably know someone who needs to carry two around with them at all times, just in case they have a severe allergic reaction as a result of some everyday occurrence — for example, encountering a food product with peanuts or being stung by a bee….
Global Research strives for peace, and we have but one mandate: to share timely, independent and vital information to readers across the globe. We act as a global platform to let the voices of dissent, protest, and expert witnesses and academics be heard and disseminated internationally.
We need to stand together to continuously question politics, false statements, and the suppression of independent thought.
Yet, more than six years into a war that’s caused such hardship and destruction, after so many attacks against it, Syria stands. Its leader, an inexperienced and fallible man but no tyrant, has thus far withstood Washington’s scurrilous pursuit of his removal. American-led military and diplomatic efforts to overthrow his government have failed, even with the Arab League’s shameless ejection of this founding member.
Using data compiled by a Geography and Native Studies professor from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, the indy100 team created an interactive map of U.S. military incursions outside its own borders from Argentina in 1890 to Syria in 2014.
Previously, when Netanyahu told historical untruths about Iran, Vladimir Putin did intervene, telling Netanyahu that it is best to focus on modern events rather than ancient history.
At a very important public awareness event, held by GeoengineerWatch.org in Northern California, on July 28th, 2017, Mr. Shipp presented a shocking and compelling presentation on numerous, horrific and ongoing government crimes.
The civil war in Syria is ‘de-facto over’. This is what Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said during a meeting with his Lebanese counterpart at the ongoing ARMY-2017 forum in Kubinka on Wednesday. Israel Shamir, a Russian-Israeli journalist and Middle East expert however told Sputnik Radio that some powers might not agree with this statement.
It’s hard arguing against the removal of Confederacy statues. In their Declaration of Causes, secessionist states said the following:
“We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.”
“That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding States.”
Abhorrent stuff, unacceptable then and now. While a case can be made for preserving US history, honoring figures supporting racism, bigotry, white supremacy and chattel slavery is disgraceful everywhere.
Confederate monuments honor figures involved in waging war to preserve an abhorrent system, Black human beings considered property, not people.
When Civil War began in 1861, they were considered aliens, according to Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney in his infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision.
We’ve come a long way from then in some respects, far from it in disturbing other ways – one step forward, two backward given deplorable US policies at home and abroad.
If Confederate statues warrant removal, should others of slaveholding presidents come down? Twelve owned them: Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Van Buren, WH Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Taylor, A Johnson and Grant.
Should George Washington University change its name? Should the University of Virginia disavow its founder Thomas Jefferson? Should Chicago’s Washington Park be renamed?
What about Jefferson Colleges in various cities, several Andrew Jackson high schools, others bearing James Madison’s name, some named after James Monroe, other presidents honored the same way?
Slave ownership was abhorrent. Benjamin Franklin called it “an atrocious debasement of human nature.” John Adams said it’s a “foul contagion in the human character.”
What about the nation’s warrior presidents, the lot of them war criminals, including Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt! TR lusted for war, saying “I should welcome almost any war for I think this country needs one” – referring to war as “spiritual renewal.”
FDR goaded Japan into attacking America to get the war he wanted. All US presidents involved in exterminating Native Americans were war criminals, including Washington.
Lincoln was a war criminal. He suspended the Constitution and habeas corpus, forcefully closed courts, arbitrarily ordered arrests, conscripted US citizens without congressional consent, and closed newspapers opposing his policies.
General Sherman’s march to the sea involved rape, pillaging and mass murder. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation didn’t free a single slave. He wanted them deported at war’s end to maintain America as a white supremacist society.
Glorifying him as one of the nation’s greatest presidents ignores the horrors defining his tenure.
History the way it’s taught in America conceals its dark side – uglier today than ever, a nation exclusively beholden to privileged interests, waging war on humanity at home and abroad.
Whether Confederate statues stay up or come down is inconsequential compared to vital issues left out of public debate.
In February, March and April of 2017, political violence pitting Left anarchist Antifa and Trump supporters exploded in the Battles of Berkeley.
On August 27, 2017, chaos once again turned the streets of Berkeley into a war zone, as another relatively small rally of Alt-Right and Trump supporters quickly devolved into violent chaos and street warfare, when Antifa armies (including the Bay Area-based By Any Means Necessary) swarmed Martin Luther King Park in large numbers, attacked Trump supporters (deemed “Nazis”), and overwhelmed what police presence there was.
The Berkeley police, severely criticized for standing down in the previous Berkeley incidents, initially maintained strict security measures, but “disappeared” or were driven out of the area, retreating to local stations as Antifa forces arrived.
Who ordered the retreat of the Berkeley police?
Outnumbered Trump supporters were swarmed and beaten. There were arrests, but much of the brutal violence went unreported.
Was this event staged to trigger violence and social divisions?
Tepid mainstream media accounts fail to capture the terrifying conditions reported on Twitter by those on the ground.
What has to be understood is that Antifa (self proclaimed Anti-fascists in black clad uniforms and boots) does not represent America’s progressive left. Quite the opposite, they are supported by corporate (tax free) foundations with a mandate to precipitate violence.
Antifa push into MLK park in Berkeley, where alt-right had a planned rally. People shouting "thank you" to hundreds of black-clad antifa. pic.twitter.com/qHFVYPgRFF
The chaos agenda, the Purple Revolution to overthrow Trump, continues escalating.
UPDATE
The San Francisco Chronicle almost seems to applaud the violence. Headline of the print version:
Masked anarchists rout right-wingers. Like sports. Subtitle: ‘Berkeley ‘No to Marxism’ demonstrators swamped by counterprotestors, some black-clad and violent’.
The Antifa violence is admitted in this title, and the articles. Yet another subtitle shows bias by condoning the violence in Orwellian fashion, quoting a counterprotest organizer. “It’s important for people to make it unacceptable for right-wing white supremacists to spew hate and incite violence.”
What the article does not focus on in any sufficient detail is the fact that Antifa forces completely overwhelmed the area, and attacked people—some innocent, with no affiliation with either side—when the police “disappeared for safety reasons”. And never returned.
These beatings are receiving major coverage in alt-media, but mainstream media has been studiously biased, deceptive and guilty of major omissions. Some accounts choose to portray brutal Antifa mob assaults as “mellow” peaceful expressions.
The political establishment is so far relatively quiet, including from the Trump administration, or even supportive of the anarchists.
Democratic-aligned officials, particularly in the San Francisco Bay area, are openly applauding the “triumphant rout” of “Nazis and white supremacists”.
Since the German Marshall Fund of the United States unveiled its “Alliance For Securing Democracy (AFSD),” I’ve resisted commenting, simply because the lobby group’s “Hamilton 68 dashboard” is too preposterous to merit serious analysis.
It has rightly been ridiculed by journalists and activists who never tire of knocking the Kremlin.
The portal purports to use “600 Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence efforts online” to prove how Moscow is trying to sow seeds of doubt in the Western political system, via the social network. However, the creators won’t reveal the users concerned, and results seem to suggest they are mostly members of the US alt-right and alt-left. Meaning this is yet another attempt to pass off American dissent as some Kremlin “Psy-op.” Which is beyond ridiculous.
Furthermore, the names behind AFSD betray the project’s real purpose: to shift blame from internal American and European factors to the convenient Russian bogeyman. Which, of course, suits its financial backers, including the State Department, NATO, and the ubiquitous weapons maker Raytheon. All of whom benefit commercially and politically from strained ties between Moscow and Washington.
To achieve these goals they’ve hired the usual roll call of reliably anti-Russia blowhards. Including Estonian-American politician Ilves Toomas and rent-a-quote talking head Michael McFaul, the ‘Mother Theresa of the Russia beat.’ Those two are joined by neoconservative windbag William Kristol and ex-CIA chief Michael Morell.
Convert zeal
The dashboard itself is helmed by a chap named J.M. Berger, who was apparently an expert on ISIS and the Middle East, before discovering the Russia-bashing gravy train this summer. This week, he’s taken to the pages of Politico to explain his plaything. What follows is best described as an inept and ignorant form of thrift-store McCarthyism.
Berger tells us how his dashboard displays “the near-real-time output of Russian Influence Operations on Twitter.” Something he calls RIOT, for short. And he cites things like RT’s coverage of Vladimir Putin’s recent pike fishing trip, a jaunt also prominently featured in The New York Times, The Daily Mail and The Sun, which incidentally described Putin as a “beefcake.” Meaning, either Paul Dacre and Rupert Murdoch are Russian agents, or this contention is just farcical.
The lobbyist also frets over this network’s widely-shared report on Oliver Stone’s Facebook post “condemning US sanctions against Russia and claiming US intelligence agencies are engaged in a ‘false flag’ war against Russia.” Which exposes a total lack of comprehension of how news works. Because Stone is one of Hollywood’s most famous figures and his name attached to a perspective like this was bound to attract plenty of attention, regardless of the messenger. It’s also worth pointing out (for the really obtuse) that RT obviously doesn’t control Stone’s Facebook and was merely bringing to a wider audience the American writer and director’s personal beliefs.
The examples become ever stranger. Berger bemoans “conspiracy theories seeking to discredit Bana al-Abed, a young girl in Syria who tweeted about the civil war.” But it doesn’t seem unreasonable to suggest the then seven-year-old was manipulated to serve a propaganda effort. Especially after a press interview revealed how the child couldn’t understand even rudimentary English, despite issuing hundreds of perfectly crafted tweets in the language.
Rock Bottom
Our hero descends further into hogwash when observing how “the most retweeted Russia Today stories recorded by the dashboard involved scaremongering videos appearing to show refugees swarming into Spain.” But, two weeks ago, a boatful of migrants did land on a Spanish tourist beach, near Cadiz, and quickly scattered to evade police detection. And numerous outlets, including The New York Times, The Guardian and the BBC prominently reported the story. But apparently, it’s only an issue when RT gives it coverage.
But the garrulous quack isn’t finished, asserting how RT “treads relatively carefully in their flirtation with the far right, and they devote a significant amount of space to the far left as well.” Hardly news, given how the channel openly admits offering a platform for alternative voices, regardless of their political compass. Incidentally, a mirror image of what America’s state broadcaster’s RFE/RL and VOA do in Russia where they laboriously detail the travails of nationalist politicians like Alexei Navalny and their leftist counterparts, such as Sergei Udaltsov. This is what alternative media does in every market, but it seems to be only unusual when “the Russians” are involved.
Berger does concede one salient point:
“it is important to note here again that we are not asserting Russia is responsible for creating or shaping this content,” he writes.
Which suggests he fully understands how his project is geared to smear anybody who opposes US policy as working for Moscow’s interests.
Yellow press
But, not content with mulching around the bottom of the barrel, he reaches into the depths when he states “while the alt-right has a very real base of support in the United States, it also enjoys deep and undisputed ties to Russia, many of which can be found offline in the real world.” Amazingly, the link he uses to justify his contention is a Daily Beast article on how American white supremacist Richard Spencer was married to an ethnic Russian. The lady involved has no profile in Russia, doesn’t live in the country and is a follower of a fringe philosopher called Alexander Dugin. Who is so far outside the Russian mainstream that he can’t even hold down a job in Moscow.
Dugin: so close to Putin he can't hold down a job in Moscow. Thus, is now so broke, he needs ask for €200 for media interviews. Go figure https://t.co/EWI7VV5aD1
The fact Berger has to descend to such irrelevant tittle-tattle to score a few points tells us all we need to know about the moral bankruptcy of the Alliance For Securing Democracy. This is pathetic, miserable and feeble stuff and the German Marshall Fund of the United States should be ashamed of themselves for financing this sort of muck.
Bryan MacDonald is an Irish journalist, who is based in Russia.
Featured image is from dashboard.securingdemocracy.org.
Why is it that countries are in the US cross hairs so often experience hyperinflation? In times of economic difficulties, such as war, it is normal to experience significant inflation. But in the countries mentioned as examples below, inflation was off the chart, where money became worth less than the paper it was printed on.
From time to time the New York Times publishes articles that contain extraordinary revelations, that show the real working methods of the CIA. These revelations are normally once-off news, never to be followed up. In 1992, the newspaper published an article with the headline “Fake-Money Flood Is Aimed At Crippling Iraq’s Economy“, which had some extraordinary revelations:
Iraq’s economy is the target of an American-led destabilization campaign to pour vast amounts of counterfeit currency into the country, Arab and Western officials here say.
The fake dinar notes are being smuggled across the Jordanian, Saudi, Turkish and Iranian borders in an effort to undermine the Iraqi economy, said the officials here who closely monitor the situation inside Iraq. Those officials said counterfeit dollars are being smuggled into Iraq in smaller quantities to further confound the banking system. The officials, who insisted on not being identified, said the countries behind the separate counterfeiting operations included Western nations, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Israel.
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The fake currency has contributed to Iraq’s severe inflation problem, which is aggravated by the fact that the Iraqi Government is printing money at uncontrolled speed to pay inflated salaries and cover the costs of reconstruction.
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A Saudi official, who insisted on not being identified, concurred with the reports, saying that “all borders are being used.”
To properly understand this tactic of the CIA, it is worth noticing that the target country, Iraq, already was under severe economic stress. A common theme in the targeted countries are pre-existing weaknesses that become strongly exacerbated by hyperinflation. The countries have been excluded from the international financial markets, thus making loans impossible.
1992 was the second year of what would turn out to be a 13 year economic blockade for Iraq. The country’s gold and hard currency reserves dwindled fast. Unable to get new hard currency earnings, the government was forced to print money to pay for salaries and reconstruction in the aftermath of the First Gulf War (1991). So an inflationary situation already existed.
As can be seen from the NYT article above, this left the field wide open for the CIA’s counterfeit experts to move in and flood the country with fake money. Given the service’s long experience and massive resources, the bills would be of high quality, indistinguishable from the real bills in circulation. NYT continues:
Along with international economic sanctions against Iraq, those measures have had mixed results since the Persian Gulf war ended in February 1991. They have clearly helped weaken the economy to the point where the local currency could become worthless, and they have loosened Mr. Hussein’s grip on the people […]
On the other hand, the measures buttressed the assertion, shared by a rising number of Iraqi nationalists including Sunni Muslims and Christians, that the West and its allies will not be content with the removal of Saddam Hussein, but only with partitioning and destroying the country.
And further down in the article it is said outright what Yugoslav government ministers hinted at a few years later, claims brushed aside as outlandish (my highlight):
Counterfeit money was dropped by United States helicopters in the southern marshland areas…
To see that these tactics are common in the US irregular warfare toolbox, it is worth remembering the CIA supplied the Mujahedin with at least 2 billion dollars in counterfeit Afghan money for transport and bribery during Operation Cyclone, the CIA support program for the religious guerrilla forces against Soviet and Afghan government troops in the 1980s. As a bonus, they got to fund these group on the cheap, where the target country suffer the inflationary consequences.
The scale, in the billions of dollars, might make one suspect this might just the top of a counterfeiting iceberg as a dirty tactic in the cold war.
Other great powers have used the same method. France used counterfeiting with great success to bring her recently independent colony Guinea to heel. In 1958, the country wanted to print its own money, but France flooded it with high quality counterfeit bills, making the local currency collapse. As a result, Guinea was forced to join the French-controlled CFA franc-zone.
Zimbabwe
The Zimbabwean situation is a bit more unclear, but it fits the pattern. The country is declared an «unusually and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy of the United States” and the leader (Mugabe) duly demonized. Of all the cases reviewed here, Zimbabwe is the one where this description is most absurd, as it cannot in any conceivably way be construed as a security threat to the US, except to big business interests.
Zimbabwe experienced hyperinflation in the 2000s, when there were endless articles in Western media describing the alleged horrors of the process of land reforms. If one should identify one single issue that got Zimbabwe in the cross hairs, it is the land issue. The economy was in the process of being restructured, from the grossly unfair old status quo, where 6000 (white) settlers owned most of the productive land, while 6 million (black) people lived on subsistence farms. This attempt to acquire land and distribute it to landless people alarmed Britain, the US and the financial world.
A weakness was identified, exacerbated and exploited. The country had an economy in transition and was vulnerable. As a first step, the country was sanctioned and blocked from international financial institutions. It could no longer take up loans to finance routine foreign trade. Export earnings went down, as a combination of several factors, among them the restructuring, drought and sanctions. The central bank would have to print money, with a following inflation, to keep the government apparatus going. And here comes a possible opening for the counterfeiters, when their efforts had maximum impact.
The country had a fairly heavy inflation in the period from the late 1990s, but in the period 2008-9, it changes to a massive hyperinflation. It was accompanied by a large psy-op campaign in the world press, with endless racist gloating over African mismanagement. Of course, this reporting was hiding and spinning the effects of the sanctions and the interference.
North Korea
This country hardly needs introduction as part of the “Axis of Evil;” one of the seven countries specifically singled out as a priority for regime change by the Pentagon. It experienced a severe hyperinflation in the years 2009-2011, leading to a currency reform.
Forbes magazine published an article in August 2017 by Richard Miniter, with the title “Bomb North Korea – With Its Own Money“. The articles seems to have been inspired by current thinking in the national-security apparatus.
The article suggests that if one dropped “phony North Korean won, like confetti, over every city and commune, the NK won would quickly collapse.” It would force the country and its inhabitants to do their business in foreign currencies, like the dollar or yuan. According to the article, the government had a flexible response to the last bout of hyperinflation in 2009-11, but as a result “today, more than half of transactions in the capital and at the Chinese frontier are in dollars or yuan.”
The article envisages the next bout of hyperinflation would lead to the government “turning a blind eye to the emerging market economy. Only this time, the dollarization and yuanization will spread from half of the economy to the whole of it.”… “Once weakened by hyperinflation followed by dollarization, the U.S. could target its few sources of hard currency.”…. “Quite simply, North Korea’s won would disappear as a medium of exchange. Dollars, yuan and other regional currencies will be used to settle nearly all accounts (certainly including payments to Pyongyang), making North Korea absolutely dependent on a consistent supply of outside money. This is leverage that the civilized world may use against it.”
As an interesting aside, with hints of what the military-security apparatus considers within the realm of the possible, the article also envisages a driving the global coal price down to below North-Korean production cost levels to damage its export earnings. This is comparable to the low oil prices the last few years in relation to the economic drive against Russia and Venezuela.
As a sign that this counterfeiting might be a continuous operation, UPI reported in May 2016 in an intriguing notice:
A “massive pile of fake North Korean money weighed about 330 pounds [150 kg], and was found in a heap of wastepaper in south-western Seoul”… “The counterfeit bills were printed in 5,000 North Korean won denominations.”
This amount of North-Korean fake money would be useless in the south, and difficult to justify for financial gain by ‘normal’ counterfeiters. A reasonable explanation would be that it was part of a routine operation to smuggle fake money into North-Korea, somehow gone amiss.
Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia experienced two spikes in hyperinflation, 1992-3 and 1999. During the wars of secession, draconian sanctions were introduced and the country blocked from access to international finance. President George W. Bush declared Yugoslavia to “constitute and unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security “in May 1992, due to the civil war in recently independent Bosnia, where Yugoslavia (which now consisted mostly of Serbia) was accused of meddling.
The second spike came in 1999, during the Clinton-administration, when US/NATO was in full war drive to make Kosovo independent and attempt to topple president Milošević.
Yugoslav authorities were aware of the possibility of counterfeit money being smuggled into the country. An article in the Washington Post before the Kosovo war claimed:
“[Yugoslav] government officials quietly and seriously discuss what the CIA might be up to further the Clinton administration’s goal of getting Milosevic removed from power. They wonder, for instance, if the agency might be airdropping counterfeit Yugoslav dinars to sow further turmoil in the economy.”
Steve H. Hanke, an expert in the field of hyperinflation, with really extensive experience working closely for the US government in many capacities, gives us several interesting anecdotes in his article with the title Syria’s Other Problem: Inflation:
“In October 1999, [Yugoslav] Minister for Information Goran Matic claimed that I was in charge of shipping huge quantities of counterfeit Yugoslav dinars into Milosevic’s Serbia, in an attempt to cause the dinar to collapse and inflation to soar.”
Henke denies the veracity of the accusation, but mentions in the same piece that the Syrian government had similar suspicions a few years ago:
“The Syrian Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Affairs, Qadri Jamil, claimed that Britain, Saudi Arabia, and the United States were engaged in a conspiracy to undermine the Syrian pound by flooding Lebanon and Jordan with counterfeit Syrian pound notes.”
Iran
It is worthwhile to take a look at possibly the same tactic is being used for Iran, where counterfeiting the rial might have been used in an attempt to crash the national currency. Hanke gets enthusiastic about having identified a period of hyperinflation in Iran in 2012. The groundwork was there, as Washington Post wrote in a story from 2012 with the title Hyperinflation finally arrives… in Iran:
“Since 2010, the United States has been steadily tightening sanctions on Iran. A good chunk of Iran’s $110 billion foreign exchange reserves is locked up in offshore accounts that are now frozen. Overseas banks have been barred from doing business with Iran’s central bank. And Iran is having trouble selling its oil abroad. Add it all up, and those sanctions have restricted the supply of dollars and other foreign currency reaching Iran.”… “U.S. sanctions are biting down and inflicting a vicious bout of hyperinflation on the country. “… “That problem finally exploded last month. In the black markets, the value of Iran’s rial has now plunged 65 percent in the past few week” What triggered last month’s sudden collapse? That’s not yet clear.”
Nicaragua
The same hypothesis could be used for Nicaragua, which also declared “an unusual and extraordinary threat” by Reagan. In the 1980s, at the same time as the US printed counterfeit money for the Mujahedin in Afghanistan, Nicaragua experienced hyperinflation, from June 1986 – March 1991.
The country was fighting the Contras, a guerrilla/terrorist group almost exclusively financed by the CIA. One might remember that the CIA and Contras had no qualms to smuggle large amounts of cocaine into the US, so printing and distributing fake money would hardly have been reagarded as beyond the pale. The campaign against the country followed the same pattern: demonization, years of steadily tightening sanctions, inflation when the government was forced to print money, which then goes into overdrive as hyperinflation.
Venezuela
Today this tactic might be in use against Venezuela at this very moment. The currency has crashed during the last few years. One could of course say that it is entirely due to ‘natural’ economic factors, but the pattern is there. The country has been in the cross hairs since at least 2002. The United States declared Venezuela “a national security threat” in March 2015, and has imposed steadily stricter sanctions. The economy is in such a weak position that counterfeit money would strongly exacerbate existing problems.
The country even prints its bills abroad, which gives Western intelligence services access to the printing plates. Counterfeit bolivares would be indistinguishable from the real thing. As in several of the other places, one can observe a massive campaign in the international press to highlight the inflation, and thereby further reduce faith in the currency.
Russia, the biggest challenge
Russia is a different ball game. Ever more draconian sanctions and attempts to lock the country out from international financial mechanisms have had limited success. Russia is such a big and self-sufficient global power that it would take an operation of a scale never seen before to make the economy scream. The stage has not reached where introduction of large amount of counterfeit money will exacerbate an already exiting weakness. To be truly successful, the tactic needs to have stopped all forms of credit and significantly damaged export earnings. Of course, in the meantime, counterfeit money, being virtually free, could finance all sort of groups working to topple the government.
Conclusion
Introducing fake money is an incredibly devastating measure in an economic war. A weak country gets targeted for counterfeiting with forgeries of superb quality, and the central bank is unable to effectuate proper countermeasures, in fear of creating a panic.
Instead, the central bank is forced to play along in CIA’s game. Since the government is dependent on it for funding, despite the threatening hyperinflation, the bank is forced to print ever higher denominations.
Maybe a million people died in the 13 years of sanctions against Iraq. Destroying the currency helped in this process, by pauperizing the population, making them unable to afford even basics necessities and destroying their lives.
Observers of other nations in the cross hairs should be aware of this possibility. Smaller economies, say Bolivia or Pakistan, that are in the bad books, should be aware that financial warfare isn’t only done with above board tactics, such as sanctions. It can be very hard to counter a flood of false money at the country’s weakest moment if the other elements of an economic siege have been successfully put in place.
Terje Maloy is a Norwegian/Australian translator and blogger. The text is Creative Commons for non-commercial purposes.
This article was originally published by Midt i fleisen.
Featured image: Polish Deputy Prime Minister Morawiecki (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
The Polish government of the Law and Justice party (PiS) announced earlier this month that it would demand reparations from Germany for the massive damage done to the country under the Nazi occupation in World War II. Just a few days earlier, the European Union had initiated legal proceedings against Poland which could result in the country losing its voting rights in the EU. The developing conflict is symptomatic of the renewed eruption of national conflicts in Europe, which led to two world wars in the 20th century.
During World War II, some six million Poles (about 20 percent of the population) lost their lives under Nazi occupation, including over three million Polish Jews. Over 200,000 Polish civilians were killed just during the destruction of Warsaw in the summer of 1944 by the German Wehrmacht. Millions of Polish workers were employed as forced laborers in the German war economy.
Polish vice prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki has stated that it was “clear” that the “historical accounts” had “not been settled. Our neighbors, especially the Germans, massacred Poland. I am not just talking about the six million Polish lives that were taken. Not even one percent of this was compensated.”
For decades, Berlin has been rejecting demands for reparations from Poland as well as from numerous other European countries. The German government’s vice press secretary Ulrike Demmer declared that the question of reparations to Poland had been settled, both legally and politically. Last year, former foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier had similarly stated that any kind of reparation payments to Poland were out of the question.
In rejecting any demands for reparations, the German government is basing itself on contracts from 1953 and, particularly, the so called “Treaty of Good Neighborship” between Poland and Germany from 1991. The payments which occurred based on this agreement are absurdly low. Germany paid only 750 million Deutsche Marks (about 375 million Euros) directly as reparations, in addition to a few billion Euros paid to former forced laborers. This starkly contrasts with the actual material damage that Poland suffered under the Nazi occupation, which the Polish government estimated to amount to some $850 billion right after the war.
Politicians of the ruling PiS party have repeatedly raised the issue of reparations in the past. However, previous social democratic and liberal governments deliberately avoided advancing such demands, as they are politically explosive. Thus, former Polish president Aleksander Kwaśniewski warned back in 2004:
“If we were to invoice [the reparations] we would indeed destroy united Europe.”
The fact that PiS is now taking up the issue in such an aggressive manner is indicative of the renewed eruption of fundamental geopolitical conflicts between Germany and Poland. Especially since the inauguration of US president Donald Trump and in light of the growing tensions between Washington and Berlin, the relations between Warsaw and Berlin have considerably deteriorated, while the domestic political crisis in Poland has deepened.
During his visit to Poland in early July, Trump signalled open support for the so called Three Seas Initiative, a thinly veiled revival of the Intermarium project. With this project, the PiS is seeking to build an alliance of Eastern and Central European states that would be directed against both Russia and Germany.
However, the Polish bourgeoisie is deeply divided over this issue. The liberal opposition is oriented toward the EU and particularly Germany, Poland’s most important trading partner.
Donald Tusk, Poland’s former prime minister and an influential figure in the liberal opposition party Civic Platform (PO), is playing a central role in the EU’s maneuvers against the PiS government. Only a few months ago, Tusk was reelected as the president of the European Council against the opposition of the PiS government. He is considered a close ally of German chancellor Angela Merkel.
On a formal level, the legal proceedings are directed against bills providing for changes to the country’s judicial system, which the PiS introduced in the wake of Trump’s visit. By subordinating the judiciary to the government, these bills implement the de facto end of the division of powers in Poland.
In Brussels, Tusk said of the EU’s proceedings against Poland:
“Today, there is a big question mark over Poland’s European future.”
Further, he cautioned that Poland could soon announce
“that it does not need the European Union and that the European Union does not need Poland. I’m afraid that this moment is now drawing closer.”
For about two years, the liberal opposition has been leading a protest movement against the abolition of the separation of powers and other reactionary measures of the PiS-government, such as the undermining of the right of abortion. It is supported by sections of the urban middle class who see their future bound up with that of the EU.
In contrast, the PiS represents a wing of the Polish bourgeoisie that insists on national independence and is, for this purpose, seeking a closer alliance with Washington. To prop up its policies, the PiS is trying to mobilize layers in the rural regions and sections of the working class which have particularly suffered from the neoliberal policies of Brussels and Berlin.
The EU is exploiting the conflicts within the Polish bourgeoisie and the opposition to the dictatorial measures by the PiS to step up the pressure on the Polish government.
At this point, cracks are beginning to show within the government camp. President Andrzej Duda, who was long considered a mere puppet of Jarosław Kaczyński, the head of the PiS, vetoed two of the PiS’s judicial bills, and is now in a public feud with justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro. Several members of the government and PiS have publicly supported Duda’s steps and the PiS leadership is now fearing that the president could try and build his own movement with their support.
For all the rhetoric, what is involved for the EU is neither the “rule of law” nor “democracy. ” Rather, vicious conflicts are taking place, behind closed doors, over Poland’s foreign policy orientation.
What the EU really thinks of democracy was proven not least of all in Greece, where it pushed through brutal austerity diktats against massive protests and a referendum voicing the opposition of the majority of the population. And when it comes to undermining democratic rights and building a powerful surveillance and police apparatus, Brussels is well ahead of Warsaw.
Brussels and Berlin view with great concern the emerging alliance between the right-wing PiS government and the Trump administration in Washington. The latter is now openly backing the construction of a political and military alliance in Eastern Europe under Poland’s leadership.
The Intermarium-style alliance envisioned by the PiS would create military and political structures that are independent from the EU. The Polish government’s demands for German reparations are not least of all aimed at mobilizing the support of nationalist forces within Poland to support this policy.
The liberal opposition is oriented toward Germany and the EU and rejects this policy. The liberal Newsweek Polska, which is owned by the German publishing house Axel Springer, condemned the whipping up of “anti-German resentment” through the PiS as “extremely irresponsible and fundamentally stupid.”
The conservative newspaper Rzeczpospolita, which cautioned in an earlier commentary against an exclusive orientation toward the United States, also rejected the demands for reparations. While acknowledging that they were “morally justified,” the newspaper warned of deteriorating relations with Berlin. Further, the editors commented:
“Yes, Donald Trump, who spoke so nicely about us in Warsaw, is on the other side of the ocean. But that’s precisely the problem. He is on the other side of the ocean, and recently he has been looking mostly toward Asia…. ”
The Three Seas Initiative was “interesting,” the newspaper wrote, but:
“It is enough to take a look at the structure of Polish exports to notice that our current economic relations with this region are extremely loose…”
On a political and military level too, the ties are rather poor, it observed.
Therefore, according to Rzeczpospolita, “an institutionalization of the Three Seas Initiative can only be realized within the framework of the EU. ” However, the PiS’s policy toward Germany, the editors stated, was undermining such a possibility. The commentary cited a well-known statement by the authoritarian inter-war dictator of Poland, Józef Piłsudski, who declared that Poland could not simultaneously fight Germany and Russia without losing its independence, and concluded: “Let’s be frank: it doesn’t look good [for us].”
Featured image: Israeli Minster of Defense, Avigdor Lieberman
On Thursday, Israeli Minster of Defense, Avigdor Lieberman said during a press conference at the Israel Institute of Energy and Environment that Israel will not sit and watch how the Iranian influence growing in Syria.
“Iran, via its Revolutionary Guard, is trying to create a new reality in the region with Iranian air force and naval bases in Syria, with Shiite militias numbering thousands of mercenaries and by manufacturing precise weaponry in Lebanon,” Lieberman said. “Israel does not intend to resign itself to these attempts and will not act as onlooker from the sidelines.”
Although Iranian presence in Syria is indeed growing Iran isn’t building any naval or air bases in Syria. Moreover, many experts doubt that the Iranian Air Force can handle a real deployment in Syria. However, Iran has mutliple facilities used as logistic bases across the country.
In turn, Israel is likely trying to create a pretexts that it may use later if it decides to intervene in the Syrian south or to conduct more air operations against the Syrian Arab Army.
The Lieberman statement was the second Israeli warning in two days. On August, 23 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Russian President Vladimir Putin that Israel is ready to defend its interests and to counteract the Iranian influence in Syria.
“Israel opposes Iran’s continued entrenchment in Syria. We will be sure to defend ourselves with all means against this and any threat,” Netanyahu said according to Reuters.
Furthermore, Netanyahu accused Iran of controlling Yemen and a large part of Lebanon, and working to take control of Iraq and Syria. Netanyahu also claimed that there is a bigger chance for a peaceful solution in Syria without Iran.
“I made it clear to Putin that Iran’s establishing itself in Syria will not aid stability in the region, and I told him that we want to prevent a future war and therefore it is important to warn in advance,” Said Netanyahu according to Haaretz.
Netanyahu also claimed that Israel is fighting terrorists in Syria.
However, the Israeli Air Force has conducted dozens of airstrikes against the SAA mainly.
So far Israel has not had any problems with Al-Qaeda former branch in Syria Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) or ISIS-affiliated Jaysh Khalid bin Walid who control large areas on the zone of separation in the Golan Heights.
As the SAA and its allies continue to gain momentum against militants, the chances of Israeli military actions against the Damascus government increase.
For sure, it will be very hard for Israel to see how the current Syrian government, the important ally of Iran, is re-establishing its control all around Syria.
According to Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, US-supported al-Nusra allied with other terrorist gangs into a so-called Northern Army, comprised of thousands of fighters. More on this below.
Developments show the urgency of expediting de-escalation zones, strengthening ceasefire conditions, and improving the humanitarian situation as soon as possible, she stressed.
Besides supporting ISIS and other terrorist groups, along with terror-bombing Raqqa and other areas, massacring civilians and destroying infrastructure, Washington is waging information war on Syria.
Last week, the State Department repeated fabricated accusations, claiming Syrian use of CWs, despite no evidence suggesting it, plenty showing toxic agents used by US-supported terrorists numerous times.
Washington is trying to “torpedo” peaceful conflict resolution, Zakharova explained – based on unanimously adopted Security Council Resolution 2254.
It calls for ceasefire and diplomatic conflict resolution – opposing sides (excluding terrorist groups) initiating a political process toward establishing “inclusive and non-sectarian governance” within six months by Syrians alone, free from outside interference.
New elections would follow in 18 months, along with drafting a new constitution, likely little different from the current one – overwhelmingly approved by national referendum in February 2012, with revisions from its initial draft.
According to General Igor Korobov, head of the Main Directorate of Russia’s General Staff, dozens of terrorist gangs banded together to form a Hayat Tahrir ash-Sham group with over 25,000 fighters – US-supported al-Nusra playing the “key role” with over 15,000 foot soldiers.
ISIS numbers exceed 9,000, according to Korobov. Heavily armed by foreign sources, they’re a “formidable foe,” using “bee swarm” tactics.
They involve “chaotic shelling and surprise attacks on the Syrian military, carried out by small, but well-coordinated mobile units,” Korobov explained.
They’re well-equipped with “state-of-the-art armaments, intelligence and electronic warfare, and improvised toxic substances.”
Drones are used for reconnaissance and attacking Syrian forces.
“Armored vehicles and artillery are deployed in residential areas near hospitals, schools, mosques and other socially significant facilities to avoid destruction by airstrikes,” he explained.
Civilians are used as human shields, Korobov adding
“(w)e’re dealing with a strong and dangerous enemy, which poses a threat not only to the Middle East, but to the other regions of the world.”
“Our task is to inflict the maximum damage on the terrorists on Syrian soil.”
After six-and-a-half years of US aggression on Syria for regime change, resolution remains a distant objective – significant progress made, but endless fighting continues.
Featured image: Late Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic
The exoneration of a man accused of the worst of crimes, genocide, made no headlines. Neither the BBC nor CNN covered it. The Guardian allowed a brief commentary. Such a rare official admission was buried or suppressed, understandably. It would explain too much about how the rulers of the world rule.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague has quietly cleared the late Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, of war crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, including the massacre at Srebrenica.
Far from conspiring with the convicted Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, Milosevic actually “condemned ethnic cleansing,” opposed Karadzic and tried to stop the war that dismembered Yugoslavia. Buried near the end of a 2,590-page judgment on Karadzic last February, this truth further demolishes the propaganda that justified NATO’s illegal onslaught on Serbia in 1999.
Milosevic died of a heart attack in 2006, alone in his cell in The Hague, during what amounted to a bogus trial by an American-invented “international tribunal.” Denied heart surgery that might have saved his life, his condition worsened and was monitored and kept secret by U.S. officials, as WikiLeaks has since revealed. [Independent reports suggest that he was poisoned and assassinated].
Milosevic was the victim of war propaganda that today runs like a torrent across our screens and newspapers and beckons great danger for us all. He was the prototype demon, vilified by the Western media as the “butcher of the Balkans” who was responsible for “genocide,” especially in the secessionist Yugoslav province of Kosovo. Prime Minister Tony Blair said so, invoked the Holocaust and demanded action against “this new Hitler.”
Exaggerating the Death Toll
David Scheffer, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes, declared that as many as “225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59” may have been murdered by Milocevic’s forces.
This was the justification for NATO’s bombing, led by Bill Clinton and Blair, that killed hundreds of civilians in hospitals, schools, churches, parks and television studios and destroyed Serbia’s economic infrastructure.
It was blatantly ideological; at a notorious “peace conference” in Rambouillet in France, Milosevic was confronted by Madeleine Albright, the U.S. Secretary of State, who was to achieve infamy with her remark that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children were “worth it.”
Albright delivered an “offer” to Milosevic that no national leader could accept. Unless he agreed to the foreign military occupation of his country, with the occupying forces “outside the legal process,” and to the imposition of a neo-liberal “free market,” Serbia would be bombed.
This was contained in an “Appendix B,” which the media failed to read or suppressed. The aim was to crush Europe’s last independent “socialist” state.
Once NATO began bombing, there was a stampede of Kosovar refugees “fleeing a holocaust.” When it was over, international police teams descended on Kosovo to exhume the victims.
The FBI failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily denouncing “a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines.”
The final count of the dead in Kosovo was 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the pro-NATO Kosovo Liberation Front. There was no genocide. The NATO attack was both a fraud and a war crime.
All but a fraction of America’s vaunted “precision guided” missiles hit not military but civilian targets, including the news studios of Radio Television Serbia in Belgrade. Sixteen people were killed, including cameramen, producers and a make-up artist. Blair described the dead, profanely, as part of Serbia’s “command and control.”
In 2008, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Carla Del Ponte, revealed that she had been pressured not to investigate NATO’s crimes.
A Model for More Wars
This was the model for Washington’s subsequent invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and, by stealth, Syria. All qualify as “paramount crimes” under the Nuremberg standard; all depended on media propaganda.
While tabloid journalism played its traditional part, it was serious, credible, often liberal journalism that was the most effective – the evangelical promotion of Blair and his wars by the Guardian, the incessant lies about Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction in the Observer and the New York Times, and the unerring drumbeat of government propaganda by the BBC in the silence of its omissions.
At the start of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush ordered the U.S. military to conduct a devastating aerial assault on Baghdad, known as “shock and awe.”
At the height of the bombing, the BBC’s Kirsty Wark interviewed General Wesley Clark, the NATO commander. The Serbian city of Nis had just been sprayed with American cluster bombs, killing women, old people and children in an open market and a hospital. Wark asked not a single question about this, or about any other civilian deaths.
Others were more brazen. In February 2003, the day after Blair and Bush had set fire to Iraq, the BBC’s political editor, Andrew Marr, stood in Downing Street and made what amounted to a victory speech. He excitedly told his viewers that Blair had “said they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right.”
Today, with a million dead and a society in ruins, Marr’s BBC interviews are recommended by the U.S. Embassy in London.
Marr’s colleagues lined up to pronounce Blair “vindicated.” The BBC’s Washington correspondent, Matt Frei, said,
“There’s no doubt that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially to the Middle East … is now increasingly tied up with military power.”
Obeisance to Power
This obeisance to the United States and its collaborators as a benign force “bringing good” runs deep in Western establishment journalism. It ensures that the present-day catastrophe in Syria is blamed exclusively on Bashar al-Assad, whom the West and Israel have long conspired to overthrow, not for any humanitarian concerns, but to consolidate Israel’s aggressive power in the region.
The jihadist forces unleashed and armed by the U.S., Britain, France, Turkey and their “coalition” proxies serve this end. It is they who dispense the propaganda and videos that becomes news in the U.S. and Europe, and provide access to journalists and guarantee a one-sided “coverage” of Syria.
In front of the Citadel in Old Aleppo
The city of Aleppo is in the news. Most readers and viewers will be unaware that the majority of the population of Aleppo lives in the government-controlled western part of the city. That they suffer daily artillery bombardment from Western-sponsored Al Qaeda is not news. On 21 July, French and American bombers attacked a government village in Aleppo province, killing up to 125 civilians. This was reported on page 22 of the Guardian; there were no photographs.
Having created and underwritten jihadism in Afghanistan in the 1980s as Operation Cyclone – a weapon to destroy the Soviet Union – the U.S. is doing something similar in Syria. Like the Afghan Mujahedeen, the Syrian “rebels” are America’s and Britain’s foot soldiers. Many fight for Al Qaeda and its variants; some, like the Nusra Front, have rebranded themselves to comply with American sensitivities over 9/11. The CIA runs them, with difficulty, as it runs jihadists all over the world.
The immediate aim is to destroy the government in Damascus, which, according to the most credible poll (YouGov Siraj), the majority of Syrians support, or at least look to for protection, regardless of the barbarism in its shadows. The long-term aim is to deny Russia a key Middle Eastern ally as part of a NATO war of attrition against the Russian Federation that eventually destroys it.
Nuclear Risk
The nuclear risk is obvious, though suppressed by the media across “the free world”. The editorial writers of the Washington Post, having promoted the fiction of WMD in Iraq, demand that Obama attack Syria. Hillary Clinton, who publicly rejoiced at her executioner’s role during the destruction of Libya, has repeatedly indicated that, as president, she will “go further” than Obama.
Gareth Porter, a journalist reporting from Washington, recently revealed the names of those likely to make up a Clinton cabinet who plan an attack on Syria. All have belligerent Cold War histories; the former CIA director, Leon Panetta, says that
“the next president is gonna have to consider adding additional special forces on the ground.”
What is most remarkable about the war propaganda now in flood tide is its patent absurdity and familiarity. I have been looking through archive film from Washington in the 1950s when diplomats, civil servants and journalists were witch-hunted and ruined by Sen. Joe McCarthy for challenging the lies and paranoia about the Soviet Union and China. Like a resurgent tumor, the anti-Russia cult has returned.
Hillary Clinton speaking at a rally in Phoenix, Arizona, March 21, 2016. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)
In Britain, the Guardian’s Luke Harding leads his newspaper’s Russia-haters in a stream of journalistic parodies that assign to Vladimir Putin every earthly iniquity. When the Panama Papers leak was published, the front page said Putin, and there was a picture of Putin; never mind that Putin was not mentioned anywhere in the leaks.
Like Milosevic, Putin is Demon Number One. It was Putin who shot down a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine. Headline: “As far as I’m concerned, Putin killed my son.” No evidence required.
It was Putin who was responsible for Washington’s documented (and paid for) overthrow of the elected government in Kiev in 2014. The subsequent terror campaign by fascist militias against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine was the result of Putin’s “aggression.” Preventing Crimea from becoming a NATO missile base and protecting the mostly Russian population who had voted in a referendum to rejoin Russia – from which Crimea had been annexed – were more examples of Putin’s “aggression”.
A Warmongering Media
Smear by media inevitably becomes war by media. If war with Russia breaks out, by design or by accident, journalists will bear much of the responsibility.
In the U.S., the anti-Russia campaign has been elevated to virtual reality. The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, an economist with a Nobel Prize, has called Donald Trump the “Siberian Candidate” because Trump is Putin’s man, he says.
Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. (Photo credit: David Shankbone)
Trump had dared to suggest, in a rare lucid moment, that war with Russia might be a bad idea. In fact, he has gone further and removed American arms shipments to Ukraine from the Republican platform.
“Wouldn’t it be great if we got along with Russia,” he said.
This is why America’s warmongering liberal establishment hates him. Trump’s racism and ranting demagoguery have nothing to do with it. Bill and Hillary Clinton’s record of racism and extremism can out-trump Trump’s any day. (This week is the 20th anniversary of the Clinton welfare “reform” that launched a war on African-Americans). As for Obama: while American police gun down his fellow African-Americans the great hope in the White House has done nothing to protect them, nothing to relieve their impoverishment, while running four rapacious wars and an assassination campaign without precedent.
The CIA has demanded Trump is not elected. Pentagon generals have demanded he is not elected. The pro-war New York Times – taking a breather from its relentless low-rent Putin smears – demands that he is not elected. Something is up.
These tribunes of “perpetual war” are terrified that the multi-billion-dollar business of war by which the United States maintains its dominance will be undermined if Trump does a deal with Putin, then with China’s Xi Jinping. Their panic at the possibility of the world’s great power talking peace – however unlikely – would be the blackest farce were the issues not so dire.
“Trump would have loved Stalin!” bellowed Vice-President Joe Biden at a rally for Hillary Clinton. With Clinton nodding, he shouted, “We never bow. We never bend. We never kneel. We never yield. We own the finish line. That’s who we are. We are America!”
Britain’s War Party
In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn has also excited hysteria from the war-makers in the Labour Party and from a media devoted to trashing him. Lord West, a former admiral and Labour minister, put it well. Corbyn was taking an “outrageous” anti-war position “because it gets the unthinking masses to vote for him.”
In a debate with leadership challenger Owen Smith, Corbyn was asked by the moderator:
“How would you act on a violation by Vladimir Putin of a fellow NATO state?”
Corbyn replied:
“You would want to avoid that happening in the first place. You would build up a good dialogue with Russia … We would try to introduce a de-militarization of the borders between Russia, the Ukraine and the other countries on the border between Russia and Eastern Europe. What we cannot allow is a series of calamitous build-ups of troops on both sides which can only lead to great danger.”
Pressed to say if he would authorize war against Russia “if you had to,” Corbyn replied:
“I don’t wish to go to war – what I want to do is achieve a world that we don’t need to go to war.”
The line of questioning owes much to the rise of Britain’s liberal war-makers. The Labour Party and the media have long offered them career opportunities.
For a while the moral tsunami of the great crime of Iraq left them floundering, their inversions of the truth a temporary embarrassment. Regardless of Chilcot and the mountain of incriminating facts, Blair remains their inspiration, because he was a “winner.”
Dissenting journalism and scholarship have since been systematically banished or appropriated, and democratic ideas emptied and refilled with “identity politics” that confuse gender with feminism and public angst with liberation and willfully ignore the state violence and weapons profiteering that destroys countless lives in faraway places, like Yemen and Syria, and beckon nuclear war in Europe and across the world.
The stirring of people of all ages around the spectacular rise of Jeremy Corbyn counters this to some extent. His life has been spent illuminating the horror of war. The problem for Corbyn and his supporters is the Labour Party.
In America, the problem for the thousands of followers of Bernie Sanders was the Democratic Party, not to mention their ultimate betrayal by their great white hope.
In the U.S., home of the great civil rights and anti-war movements, it is Black Lives Matter and the likes of Codepink that lay the roots of a modern version.
For only a movement that swells into every street and across borders and does not give up can stop the warmongers. Next year, it will be a century since Wilfred Owen wrote the following. Every journalist should read it and remember it.
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
John Pilger is an Australian-British journalist based in London. Pilger’s Web site is: www.johnpilger.com
Israeli Prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu and other government officials are to be arrested if they ever show up in Spain.
Former PM and minister of Army, Ehud Barak, current minister of army Avigdor Lieberman, former minister of strategic affairs Moshe Yaalon, former interior minister Eli Yishai, israel geologist and politician Benny Begin and vice admiral Maron Eliezer, were also named in the list of arrest.
Reportedly, Spanish national court judge Jose de la Mata ordered the Spanish police to alert him if Netanyahu or any of the other government officials come to Spain.
This is after Israeli forces attacked Gaza Freedom Flotilla in 2010 which is affiliated to a humanitarian solidarity movement that stands in solidarity with Gaza against human rights violations.
A fleet of six ships were attempting to break an Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip. The six ships were carrying around 500 passengers, humanitarian aid and construction materials. Israeli Forces raided the ship leaving nine human rights activists dead and another activist died later the same due to being wounded in the attack.
After the case was put on hold by Jose de la Mata in 2010 it is now reopened Prime Minister Netanyahu and other officials now face charges.
Reportedly, the Israeli foreign ministry spokesperson Emmanuel Nachshon said that,
“We consider it to be a provocation. We are working with the Spanish authorities to get it cancelled. We hope it will be over soon.”
Featured image: Imam Abdelbaki Es Satty (Source: Le Figaro)
A spate of news reports last week raised questions about US and European government foreknowledge of the August 17 terror attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils that killed 15 people and wounded more than 100, and how this attack was allowed to proceed. It is ever clearer that the Islamic State (IS) terror cell was under close surveillance by multiple intelligence services of NATO powers, including France, the United States, and Belgium.
Astonishingly, only days before the attack, several members of the terror cell visited Paris, a center of intelligence monitoring of Islamist activity in Europe. They were under surveillance, and French officials informed Spanish officials after they were spotted in France, driving the Audi A3 car that they used to plough into pedestrians in the seaside resort of Cambrils, killing one woman. The car was flashed by a speed camera in France.
BFM-TV reported,
“Two members of the jihadist cell that attacked Barcelona and Cambrils, including Younes Abouyaaqoub, the suspected driver in the attack on Las Ramblas, made an ‘express’ round-trip to Paris” on August 11-12. The Audi was photographed at 1 p.m. on August 11 at the Lestelle toll booths in the Pyrénées traveling north, before being flashed by a speed camera for speeding. The two cell members reportedly spent the night in a budget hotel in the Paris suburb of Malakoff and visited a mall before returning to Spain.
French Interior Minister Gérard Collomb then tersely confirmed that Paris was following these individuals and had passed on this information to the Spanish government. He said,
“The car was indeed flashed by a camera in the Paris area. Yes, we saw what was in the offing, but we did not know these individuals. We had passed on these reports … This group came to work in Paris, but it was a quick round-trip.”
Collomb’s statements raise more questions than they give answers. If French authorities knew to follow someone not known to them, who gave them the tip-off? And if they saw “what was in the offing”—i.e., a terror attack—and then notified Spanish officials, why was no action taken even though both French and Spanish intelligence services were aware of the threat?
This question is all the more serious in that intelligence agencies in the United States had detailed knowledge from Abouyaaqoub of the group’s plans.
Abouyaaqoub was in direct electronic communication via WhatsApp with Exeintel, a private US intelligence agency which proclaims on its Twitter account that it provides “actionable intelligence” that will “only be accessible to law enforcement.” According to a report in Público, an Exeintel operative posing as another jihadist terrorist texted Abouyaaqoub on July 31 and obtained extensive details from him about the terror cell’s operational planning.
Abouyaaqoub confirmed to Exeintel that he was located in Spain, that his “emir” or leader was also in Spain, and that he was monitoring police deployments in order to be able to carry out multiple attacks in small towns across Catalonia. He said that the group used bitcoin transactions to hide from financial monitoring. He also claimed to be in contact with three “brothers” in the United States, from whom they were seeking to obtain weapons Público writes,
“what Exeintel Group Intelligence Service definitely says that it did, as it stresses on its web page, is that it launched a ‘Red Alert’ to US and European intelligence services. This was 17 days before the massacre.”
There has been no explanation given by security officials as to how this attack was allowed to proceed, although Spain was on high alert and France is under a state of emergency that suspends basic democratic rights, ostensibly to allow the state to fight terrorism.
The Barcelona attacks follows a series of similar attacks by purported jihadists linked to the Islamic State (IS) in major cities in Europe. The attackers—including the shooters at Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan theater in Paris in 2015 and the Brussels attack in 2016—were virtually all known to police and European intelligence services prior to the attacks. They all came from a network of Islamist operatives working in Europe and fighting in various NATO wars for regime change in the Middle East (see: “Intelligence accounts raise more questions on origins of Brussels, Paris attacks”).
Thousands of European Islamist fighters were traveling back and forth between Europe and Syria, as the NATO powers backed Islamist proxy forces to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government. It appears that the Barcelona attackers were part of this network.
A key figure in planning the attack, Imam Abdelbaki Es Satty, reportedly lived between January and March 2016 in Belgium. He was in Vilvoorde, which police treat as a center of terrorist recruitment in Belgium. It remains unclear whether he was staying there during Brussels attack of March 22, 2016. Es Satty was killed along with another two others during the night of Wednesday, August 16 in an explosion at a house in Alcanar, a village south of Barcelona, that was reportedly being used as a bomb factory and headquarters by the jihadist cell.
French news magazine l’Obs writes that Belgian police reported Es Satty to the Catalan regional police, Mossos d’Esquadra, after he tried to become imam in a mosque of Diegem, Belgium.
The mosque ultimately refused to offer Es Satty the job. The president of the mosque, Soliman Akaychouch, stated,
“He did not follow the Prophet, he went at it with more violence and he was more extreme … Abdelbaki Es Satty came to ask us for a job as an imam. Of course we asked for his identity papers to check them. And when we asked for his documents, he behaved in a very suspect way.”
Belgian Interior Minister Jan Jambon insisted that there had been “contacts between the Belgian police services” and their Spanish counterparts about Es Satty, after this episode aroused authorities’ suspicions.
According to l’Obs, Belgian police wrote to Mossos to ask,
“Is is possible for you to give us information on the following person who wants to serve as an imam in Vilvoorde?”
At the time, the Catalan police responded that it had no information related to terrorism on Es Satty in their database, but that he had served time in prison for drug trafficking in Spain.
“Um povo ignorante é instrumento cego de sua própria destruição. Temos sido dominados mais pela ignorância que pela força.” Simón Bolívar
A cultura está diretamente ligada ao sentimento do indivíduo, é a expressão mais viva da sua personalidade, da sua história, dos seus costumes, das suas raízes, das suas paixões. Soma de todas as realizações humanas transmitidas de geração a geração, a cultura é a auto-afirmação da nossa identidade, essência do ser humano que o sacia interiormente quando expressada livremente.
Muito além de elementos materiais tais como moradia, alimentação, vestimenta, arquitetura, tipos de celebração, idioma, maneira de se expressar, prática esportiva, dança e artes em geral, a cultura envolve aspectos espirituais da vida do ser humano, entre os quais: ideias e ideais, princípios e valores, as mais diversas crenças não apenas em termos religiosos, mas também em relação a, por exemplo, o que é sublime ou antiquado, e até bonito ou feio.
Pois ao contrário do que o sistema competitivo e individualista em que vivemos tenta-nos inculcar, não existem culturas superiores, mas sim diferentes. Certa vez, o jornalista Milton Neves fez esta feliz observação:
“Quem esquece as raízes possui, no mínimo, caráter duvidoso”. Já o filósofo, político e cientista político italiano Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), escreveu: “Uma geração que ignora, desvaloriza e apequena a geração que a precedeu, que não consegue reconhecer sua grandeza e seu significado histórico e necessário, mostra-se mesquinha, que não tem confiança em si mesma ainda que assuma pose de gladiadora, e que exiba mania de grandeza”.
“A cultura é força” Ludovico Silva, escritor e filósofo venezuelano
Quando há valorização e respeito à própria cultura, algumas consequências naturais disso são aumento da auto-estima, valorização e respeito à cultura e a toda a história de outros povos, enxergando-os e admirando-os como diferentes, sim, porém jamais como inferiores, superiores e nem, muito menos, como inimigos. Outra consequência é ser valorizado por eles em retorno.
Essa sábia atitude, antes de tudo para consigo mesmo, também acaba levando naturalmente ao diálogo, à soberania e à convivência multicultural, universal e pacífica, calando sem maiores esforços vozes xenófobas e devastadoras.
No caminho inverso, a perda da identidade leva o indivíduo a ser facilmente dominado psicologicamente, tornando o terreno propício para a implantação do contemporâneo “poder brando” teorizado pela primeira vez em 2004 pelo professor de Harvard Joseph Nye, que consiste na imposição por parte de um corpo político ou de um Estado através de meios sutis, tais como o exercício da influência cultural e a midiática, ideologia tão dominadora quanto o tradicional “poder duro”, por meios militares e econômicos.
Conforme observa José Alfredo de Araújo, mestre em Educação e professor de História da Rede Pública do Estado da Bahia, “a educação é um mecanismo poderoso para imprimir os valores do grupo dominante”. Já Joseph Goebbels, ministro de Propaganda de Adolf Hitler, disse certa vez: “Quando ouço falar em cultura, levo a mão ao coldre do meu revólver”. Menor valorização cultural e opções ao seu acesso também acabam abrindo vácuo que, certamente, será preenchido por sentimentos de depressão, pelo uso de drogas e cometimento de crimes em geral entre a sociedade.
A preservação cultural é o que afirma a identidade de uma nação, fazendo-a grande e respeitada. É só uma questão de liberdade, valor inegociável do indivíduo e de um povo.
“A língua é instrumento de controle social poderosíssimo, de opressão e repressão, de exclusão social e conservação dos privilégios.” Marcos Bagno, linguista
Featured image: MARJAH, Helmand province, Islamic Republic of Afghanistan – Corporal Mark Hickok, a 23-year-old combat engineer from North Olmstead, Ohio, patrols through a field during a clearing mission April 9. Marines with Company B, 1st Tank Battalion, learned basic route clearance techniques from engineers like Hickok, who are deployed with 1st Combat Engineer Battalion. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. John M. McCall)
This week, President Donald Trump, just like his predecessor Obama, promised to continue the utterly corrupt failure of a brutal occupation that is Afghanistan—despite running on a campaign to end it. For decades, the United States has been subsidizing—to the tune of billions of US tax dollars—failed projects, infrastructure, military, police, and yes, even terrorism. Yet Afghanistan is worse off today than they were before the government lied to Americans, claiming they were responsible for 9/11 instead of Saudi Arabia.
In a recent speech on the state of the Afghanistan quagmire, Congressman Thomas Massie (R) KY, exposed some hard truths that very few people in Washington are courageous enough to address. While most politicians cheered Trump’s insane decision to increase US presence in Afghanistan this week, Massie Blew the lid off of it.
For years, Massie has pointed out that the US has blown billions of dollars on failed projects alone. As of last year, the number of failed projects totaled over 100 billion.
To put this number in perspective, the entire amount of money the United States allocates to spend on rebuilding America’s crumbling highways every year is less than half of what it’s blown on failed projects alone in Afghanistan.
In addition to $ trillion+ war, we've spent $113 billion rebuilding Afghan… that's 2x our own $50 billion annual federal highway spending!
Massie noted that hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on a hydroelectric damn that the US thought the Taliban would destroy. However, they did not destroy it. Want to know why, Massie asked,
“The get the electricity! We’re paying the light bill for the Taliban now. They get 30 percent of the electricity in exchange for not blowing it up, or shooting the operators who are running the damn.”
US taxpayer dollars go to a hydroelectric dam in Afghanistan that provides 30% of its power to the Taliban. What's the goal in Afghanistan?
But it’s not just the wasted money giving terrorists electricity, the US is also protecting and funding the drug trade.
Of that wasted $100 billion, $8 billion was spent failing to eradicate the Afghan opium trade. Not only did the this massive amount of money not stop the opium trade and production but it doubled it!
USA spent $8billion to eradicate poppy in Afghanistan and they doubled annual production of poppy (opium). What's wrong with this picture?
It is also no secret that Afghanistan opium production has increased by 3,500 percent, from 185 tons in 2001 to 6,400 in 2015, since the US-led invasion.
In the video below, Massie explains how he asked the inspector general why they don’t just spray herbicide on all the poppy fields to eradicate the plants. Massie was told they cannot eradicate the plants as the Taliban needs the money from opium production.
“By the way,” Massie explained, “The Taliban used to prevent people from growing poppy.”
If you think that Trump doesn’t know that a continued US occupation of Afghanistan will lead to a larger heroin epidemic, more innocent civilians killed, more troops needless dying, and more terrorism, think again. For years, Trump decried the war on Terror, pointing out the horrific nature of occupation.
Ron Paul is right when he says we are wasting lives and money in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The lunacy of continuing the occupation in Afghanistan, knowing the only ones who benefit from it are warlords, drug cartels, the CIA, terrorists, and the military industrial complex, is staggering.
Innocent people will die, your children’s children will be forever indebted to the Federal Reserve, and the global war machine—which knows no home country—will be empowered and expanded. For what?
“I had hoped the Afghanistan war would end soon, but now it’s inevitable that babies born during the war will be deploying to the war in 2019,” Massie said shortly after Trump’s speech Monday night.
Sadly, Massie is only accompanied by a handful of people in the house and senate in his stance. The overwhelming majority want more war because their lobbyists tell them that’s what will keep them in their seat.
As you listen to the speech below, remember, every single representative, senator, and adviser, all the way up to Trump, knows these facts, yet they choose to perpetuate them.
This is not only shameful—it’s criminal. Troops aren’t protecting your freedom in Afghanistan, they are being used to enrich a corrupt group of sadistic elites. Please share this article with your friends and family to show them the destructive, deadly, and criminal act of continuing a war in Afghanistan.
In Canada, liberal defenders of free speech say all voices must be heard. They say hatred is not easily distinguishable from strong disapproval. Therefore, prohibiting anti-immigrant protests might silence important voices. It is about rights to freedom of expression.
But some peoples’ rights don’t figure. They will never figure because people don’t figure. This was known hundreds of years ago to anti-liberals who were anti-liberals because they were anti-imperialist.
There is not much freedom to express those ideas. They’re not discussed in universities, or liberal media outlets like CBC, BBC, and Aljazeera. The word “imperialism” is not heard there.
Italian journalist, Gianni Minà, writing about Latin America, asks what sort of “verdadera incomprehención cultural” protects us from the horrified gaze of 80% of the world’s population. 1 Why doesn’t it matter, he asks, that the system providing a good life for 20%, the one making us “developed”, does so by creating hell for the majority?
Minà calls it cultural ignorance, explained by how we live, what we take for granted.
In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Sethe goes to jail with her back straight and head high. Sethe killed her baby daughter and wanted to kill her two boys. Her friend, Paul D, says “more frightening than what Sethe did was what Sethe claimed”.
She claimed love. Sethe escaped slavery to another state. After 28 days with her children, no longer enslaved, her former slave master comes after her. She sees him coming, knowing his hat. Sethe takes her children to the shed, and grabs a handsaw. She kills her daughter to “protect” her.
Her community doesn’t understand. Sethe’s friend, Paul D, reminds Sethe that “used-to-be-slaves” should pick “the tiniest stars out of the sky to own”. It is not reasonable, Paul D explains, to “love thick”. He is figuring out how, in the context, used-to-be-slaves can live well (enough).
Reading the novel, you understand Sethe’s choice: Dehumanization is worse than death. Paul D is rational. He knows slave reality and accommodates himself. But Toni Morrison shows us Sethe as rational. We see that it becomes reasonable to pick “the tiniest stars out of the sky to own” when reason accommodates itself to dehumanization.
Dehumanizing cultures make humanness inconceivable. Yet “developed” cultures, claiming freedom, don’t ask how to know humanness. Those anti-liberals who were anti-liberal because they were anti-imperialists did ask this question. José Martí, the first outright anti-imperialist, before Lenin, put it in his Montecristi Manifesto, political declaration of the Cuban Revolutionary Party in 1895.
Martí associated freedom with truth. 2 He thought of freedom the way Marx did: the realization of essential human capacities. North American political theorists talk about development this way. It’s even trendy. But they don’t ask how to know such capacities. They must think they already do.
When Paul D says “More frightening than what Sethe did was what Sethe claimed”, he recognizes truth. He doesn’t understand it. Truth is like this sometimes: You know it matters before you understand. You pursue it anyway. It is hard.
Or, you pick the tiniest stars in the sky to own, accepting without question the cultural ignorance that makes most of the world’s people of no real consequence as long as we “live well” – as long as we’re happy.
In Les Misérables,Victor Hugo writes,
“Thoughtful people rarely use the terms, the happy and the unhappy…. The true division of humanity is this. Those filled with light and those filled with darkness”.
Hugo thought truth more interesting than happiness, especially when they conflict, which happens often in dehumanizing systems.
Hugo shared ideas with Martí. They both emphasized beauty. Neither pursued art for tranquility and diversion. Martí describes beauty as a sword, using the metaphor 370 times. 3 It is the beauty of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. It breaks you and tears you down but then you see better.
It is the beauty of Ana Belén Montes.4 She recognized truth and pursued it, without hurting anyone. She’s in jail in the US under harsh conditions. (Please sign petition here.)
Jean Paul Sartre understood. Introducing Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, he told Europeans they wouldn’t understand Fanon’s account of colonialism, just by reading. He urged them to “enter in”, like we enter Beloved, and be wrenched. “Turn and turnabout”, Sartre writes, “from these shadows from which a new dawn will break, it is you who are the zombies”.
Imperialist culturesexpress hatred. It’s been known for a long time, by Martí, first, and then by others – Rubén Villena, Juan Antonio Mella, Juan Marinello, Blas Roca – who kept his message alive during dark decades after what Lenin called the first imperialist war when the US intervened in Cuba’s struggle against Spain. A US colony was established, called “free”.
It is the old story. There’s not much freedom for that story about “freedom”.
Martí had the surprising insight that development does not mean being like Europeans and North Americans. The idea is still alive, thanks in particular to the Cuban Revolution and the struggle in Venezuela. That idea too should have a right to freedom. There’s only one story out there now and that’s liberalism. Liberals insist on rights to expression but not all views are expressed, or can be.
We need rights to beauty, the sword sort – against imperialism, for truth.
Hugo writes,
“If we were forced to choose between the barbarians of civilization and the civilized representatives of barbarity, we would go for the barbarians”.
The “civilized barbarity” he refers to cares about happiness, more than truth. Maybe we need Martí’s sword of beauty, and maybe we need it first, so that what we are “free” to express can be more than civilized barbarity.
Susan Babbitt is author of Humanism and Embodiment (Bloomsbury 2014) and José Martí, Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Global Development Ethics (Palgrave MacMillan 2014)
Notes
1. Un continente desaparecido (Havana: Casa Abril 2001)
2. In “Patria” 14 March 1893
3. Berta Elena Romero Molina, “Sobre la sed de belleza martiana”, Anuario del Centre de Estudios Martianos 36 (2013): 236-250
I’m talking about Syria here. Knowing that I write this at my peril, I continue. Not as a defense, but as an argument, one from a different and, I believe, a worthy perspective. Because some acknowledgement must be made– especially by those who are aware of the terrible might of US power and Washington’s determination to destroy Syria at any cost–of that small, ancient nation’s astonishing ability to resist. Just as those who applaud Palestinians’ resolute pursuit of statehood; just as those who now regard Viet Nam with admiration for its emergence as a self-reliant, noble nation.
Syria’s current struggle against multiple assaults is not over by any means. It remains in a highly vulnerable state. Its people are scattered across the globe, its highly educated citizens lost to other nations ready to exploit their skills. Refugees in camps and those suffering at home are uncertain of anything at all. Syria’s military has lost tens of thousands of mortally wounded men. (And what about the injured?) Its youths flee conscription. Syria’s once strong economy is crippled and barely recognizable. Its social institutions are overwhelmed, and its cultural riches, including contemporary theater and television, are shrunken or destroyed.
Yet, more than six years into a war that’s caused such hardship and destruction, after so many attacks against it, Syria stands. Its leader, an inexperienced and fallible man but no tyrant, has thus far withstood Washington’s scurrilous pursuit of his removal. American-led military and diplomatic efforts to overthrow his government have failed, even with the Arab League’s shameless ejection of this founding member.
Not only is Syria still intact, albeit terribly crippled on so many levels. It has managed to sustain alliances with its few supporting powers—from Iran to China. Its military gains (regains really) in the past two years are astonishing by any standard, however high the cost and however unlikely it seemed, considering the formidable opposition it faced. (Compare this with US military impotence in Afghanistan.)
Assaults are directed at Syria by US-supported Arab forces, by ISIS and Al-Qaeda militants, by local insurgents, by Arab Gulf States lined up with the West and Israel, by Turkey on its northern border and by Israel and Jordan along its southern frontier, with Israeli and US fighter jets bombing at will. (One strike by US bombers killed dozens and maimed another hundred Syrian soldiers.) What an opposition lined up against a nation of under 30 million people! All this without Syrian (or Russian) retaliation against either Israel or the USA.
Unquestionably Syria’s military achievements have been possible with Russian air support. Russia’s diplomatic assistance has also been critical: first in arranging for the removal of chemical threats, and before that in preventing the UN Security Council backing an American anti-regime agenda.
Early in the crisis in 2011, living in Damascus, I spoke with a longtime colleague, an experienced bureaucrat but no longer a government official. I was struck by his confidence in the Russia-China veto just declared in the UN Security Council. (Both countries rejected the US-led attempt to censure and sanction Syria.) Six months on, when we met again, there was widespread belief among foreigners and some expectation within Syria too that Al-Assad’s government would soon collapse. My colleague however was emphatic in his assessment of the Russia-China veto: “Russia will stay with us”, he declared confidently. I guess government insiders and military leaders shared this judgment. But who could have anticipated how many months of war would follow before the tide began to turn?
In early 2016, Syria (and Russia) achieved the first of a series of impossible victories against its ISIS foes. Meanwhile the western press (despondently) described successfully recovered territory as “falling into government hands”. Even from afar, with no inside track about military strategies, one could sense that those victories exhibited a resolve of a special order, akin perhaps to the victories of Cuba and of Venezuela under Chavez—also targets of US imperial power.
Some American allies who had once endorsed the removal of the Syrian president now appear to be backing away from that position. Opponents have never been able to convincingly prove that Syria deployed chemical weapons, more so after research findings by MIT chemical weapons expert T. Postol, and following journalist Seymour Hersh’s investigations on the subject.(Hersh’s report has been ignored by the US media.) Wikileaks’ release of US state department exchanges on Syria that point to plans by the US to overthrow the Syrian government have also undermined Washington’s arguments.
As for “the people”, this month witnessed some easing of their hardships. Although US air strikes continue, aimed ostensibly at ISIS but taking a heavy civilian toll. A sign of renewed vitality for besieged civilians was the international fair that recently took place in Damascus. It drew hundreds of exhibitors from many nations, and offered rare respite and pleasure to tens of thousands of citizens. That such an international gathering could even be arranged is remarkable. Yet, so threatening was this promise of renewed hope for peace that the site was bombed, resulting in the death of several fairgoers.
During the 1990s and up to the outbreak of conflict, Syria had achieved remarkable progress on a number of fronts– diplomatic, economic, educational, social and cultural. Yet, Washington and its allies, the U.K and Israel, persisted with their agenda. Sanctions against Syria remained and were enhanced, and vilification of its leader and attacks on Baath ideology by a compliant press persisted. In the face of Syria’s survival as a state, if ISIS is crushed, what are the options for an alliance of the US, UK and Israel who would never admit defeat?
The first map below from the last Syria summary shows the forming of two cauldrons north and north-west of Palmyra. ISIS forces there were enclosed by the Syrian army progressing eastwards on several axes.
Ten days later the most eastward of those cauldrons has been eliminated.
The Syrian army progresses further east and continues to move onto Deir Ezzor on three axes.
ISIS attempted counterattacks towards the supply line to Aleppo and along the Euphrates southeast of Raqqa. Both were defeated within a day or two and the attacking ISIS forces were eliminated. There is clearly a change in the pattern of ISIS deployment. It is now lacking manpower and is giving up in outlining areas. Its counterattacks use swarming tactics and lack the command and force of monolithic military units. In Iraq the army and the popular militia units took just 10 days to liberate the ISIS held city of Tal Afar. Of the estimated 2,000 ISIS forces there only some 200 non-locals had remained. 1,800 had been evacuated towards east-Syria, In the Qalamun area at the Lebanese border the Lebanese army and Hizbullah attacked the last ISIS enclave along that border. Today the remaining 200 ISIS fighters in the area agreed to lay down arms in exchange for an evacuation towards east-Syria.
Three ISIS pockets remain in Syria. One is in Raqqa where the enclosed ISIS units will fight to death. The U.S. military and its Kurdish proxy forces are literally destroying the city to save it. It is unlikely that the remaining ISIS forces in the city will give up or agree to an evacuation deal. In an earlier deal with Kurdish forces a group of ISIS fighters negotiated a retreat from the Tabqa dam in exchange for free passage towards Raqqa. The U.S. military broke the deal by attacking the retreating ISIS fighters.
A second pocket is in the semi desert north-west of Palmyra. ISIS fighters there have dug elaborate cave systems (video). The caves may protect against detection from the air but these positions are indefensible against a ground assault. The area will likely be cleansed within a week.
The third ISIS pocket left is near the Israeli border in Golan heights. The area still awaits a solution but there is no doubt that the Takfiri forces there will eventually be eliminated. Israel has tried to press the U.S. and Russia for protection of the area from an expected onslaught by the Syrian Hizbullah. It also asked to suppress all Iranian influence in Syria. But Washington as well as Moscow rejected the Israeli requests. Netanyahoo lost the war he waged on Syria and Israel will now have to live with a far more capable force along its northern borders.
What is left of ISIS, probably some 10,000 fighters in total, is now confined to east Syria and west Iraq. No more replenishment is coming forward. No new fighters are willing to join the losing project. Its resources are dwindling by the day. The U.S. is extractingits assets within the organization. The Euphrates valley west and east of Deir Ezzor will become the last defensible territory it holds. Six month from now it will be defeated. Its Caliphate will be gone. ISIS though will probably continue as a desert insurgency.
The other Jihadi project in Syria is run under the various names of al-Qaeda in Syria. It is now mainly confined to Idleb province. The estimated strength is some 9,000 fighters with some 12,000 auxiliary forces of local “rebels”. Like ISIS, al-Qaeda in Syria is now isolated and no one is willing to come to its help. Its local helpers will give up and reconcile as soon as the Syrian army will move in on them. The hard-core militants will be killed.
The U.S. has told its proxy “rebels” to give up on their political project. Jordan is sending peace signals towards Damascus. The Syrian President Assad will not be removed and the country will stay under the protection of Russia and Iran. The U.S. still supports the Kurdish YPG fighters in Syria’s north-east. But its relation with its NATO member Turkey will always be more important than any national Kurdish project. In the end the Kurds, like others, will have to accept the condition Damascus will set for them.
Featured image: US Knows best. NDI “teaches” Cambodians how to run their nation.
The government of Cambodia has exposed and expelled a US network attempting to interfere in the nation’s political processes. The US National Democratic Institute (NDI) was reportedly ordered to end its activities in the country and remove all of its foreign staff.
In a statement, the foreign ministry accused the National Democratic Institute (NDI) of operating in Cambodia without registering, and said its foreign staff had seven days to leave.
Authorities were “geared up to take the same measures” against other foreign NGOs which fail to comply with the law, the ministry added.
The article also noted that:
Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has ruled Cambodia for more than three decades, on Tuesday ordered the English-language The Cambodia Daily newspaper to pay taxes accrued over the past decade or face closure. The paper was founded by an American.
He also lashed out at the United States and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and accused them of funding groups attempting to overthrow his government.
The announcement comes less than a week after documents leaked on Facebook and circulated on government-affiliated media appeared to show political cooperation between NDI and the opposition party, amid increased tension in recent weeks between the government and U.S.-backed NGOs and media outlets.
NDI could not immediately be reached for comment.
Radio Free Asia and Voice of America have also both been accused of not fulfilling tax and registration obligations. The Cambodia Daily, whose publisher is a U.S. citizen, was hit with a $6.3 million unaudited tax bill and threatened with imminent closure if it is not paid by September 4.
Reuters would cite NDI’s own website in an attempt to inform readers about what its role is in Cambodia claiming,
“the NDI works with political parties, governments and civic groups to “establish and strengthen democratic institutions.”
Besides being called “The Cambodia Daily,” everything about the newspaper is American including its owner.
Yet, even a cursory investigation of NDI and the media and political organisation in its orbit and the very nature of even its proposed role in Cambodia’s political process indicates impropriety and subversion Reuters is intentionally failing to convey to readers.
What NDI Really is and What it Really Does
NDI is a US government and US-European corporate-funded organisation chaired by representatives from America’s business and political community. Of the 34 listed members of NDI’s board of directors, virtually all of them either have direct ties to US corporations and financial institutions, are members of corporate-funded policy think tanks or previously were employed by the US State Department, or a combination of the three.
Directors with particularly prominent conflicts of interests include:
NDI director Thomas Daschle, for example, actually has foreign political parties as paying clients through is “Daschle Group,” including VMRO DPMNE based in Macedonia as revealed by The Hill. NDI is likewise active in Macedonia, providing support directly to VMRO DPMNE, even co-hosting events in the country according to NDI’s own social media account on Facebook.
It appears that such conflicts of interests are not the exception, but the rule indicating that NED and its subsidiaries including NDI pursue the collective corporate and financial interests of their boards of directors merely behind the guise of “strengthening democratic institutions.”
An examination of NDI’s corporate sponsors casts further doubts upon its alleged mission statement. Its financial sponsors, according to NDI’s 2005 annual report (PDF), include:
British Petroleum
Bell South Corporation
Chevron
Citigroup
Coca Cola
DaimlerChrysler Corporation
Eli Lilly & Company
Exxon Mobil
Honeywell
Microsoft
Time Warner
Donors also include convicted financial criminal George Soros‘ Open Society Foundation as well as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) of which NDI is a subsidiary of, as well as the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the US State Department itself.
Corporations like BP, Chevron, Citigroup, Coca Cola, Exxon, defence contractor Honeywell and IT giant Microsoft are not interested in promoting democracy. They are using democracy promotion as a means behind which to create conditions more conducive to expanding markets and increasing profits. This includes undermining governments impeding foreign corporate control of national resources and markets, or entirely removing and replacing governments with more obedient client regimes.
The contemporary history of American foreign wars and its practice of “regime change” and “nation building” provides self-evident confirmation of the motives and means used to expand US hegemony and clearly illustrates where organisations like NDI fit into the process.
In Cambodia’s case, a much larger, overarching agenda is in play than merely national resources and markets. US activities in Cambodia to coerce or replace the current government in Phnom Penh is done specifically to encircle and contain China through a united front of client states assembled by the United States across Southeast Asia.
Cambodia, along with the rest of Southeast Asia, has begun strengthening ties with Beijing economically, politically and militarily. Large infrastructure programmes, weapon acquisitions, joint-training exercises and trade deals are all on the table between Beijing and Phnom Penh.
China delivers Z-9 military helicopters to Cambodia, a tangible sign of strengthening ties between Beijing and Phnom Penh.
The US, conversely, has provided few incentives beyond its failed Trans-Pacific Partnership scheme and coercion through networks like NDI and the myriad media and political proxies they fund and operate in Cambodia.
With NDI shuttered, its foreign staff expelled and the organisations and publications it was funding facing similar closures and evictions, it appears what little the US had on the table has been swept away. Cambodia’s particularly bold move may be replicated across Southeast Asia where similar US networks are maintained to manipulate and coerce the political processes of sovereign states.
“Democracy Promotion” From Abroad is a Contradiction
The notion that NDI is “promoting democracy” is at face value an absurdity. Democracy is a means self-determination. Self-determination is not possible if outside interests are attempting to influence the process.
A political party funded and directed by US interests through organisations like NDI, supported by media outfits and fronts posing as nongovernmental organisations likewise funded from abroad preclude any process of self-determination and is thus not only in no shape, form or way “democracy promotion,” it is a process that is fundamentally undemocratic.
In the US where it is widely understood that money dominates campaigns and wins elections, it is difficult to perceive the US pouring money into opposition parties abroad for any other reason besides skewing electoral outcomes in favour of US interests.
Additional irony is provided by the fact that should any other nation attempt to pursue similar programmes aimed at America’s domestic political process, those involved would be quickly labelled foreign agents and their activities halted immediately.
The mere allegations that Russia attempted to interfere with America’s domestic political processes resulted in sanctions and even threats of war. Cambodia is a nation that cannot afford nor effectively impose sanctions upon the United States nor wage war against it, but shuttering a flagrant example of foreign interference in its internal political affairs is something Cambodia and its neighbours in Southeast Asia can and are beginning to do.
Cambodia’s use of existing laws regarding taxation and the registration of foreign entities has been effectively used to deal with these organisations. Neighbouring nations may begin to require foreign-funded organisations to register as foreign lobbyists, subject them to taxation and more stringent regulations and taking away from them the smoke screen of “democracy promotion” and “rights advocacy” they have cloaked their activities behind for decades.
Joseph Thomas is chief editor of Thailand-based geopolitical journal, The New Atlas and contributor to the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
In June 2014, the so-called Islamic State (IS) occupied about one-third of Iraq’s territory, including Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul. It meant the radical islamists were close to capturing Baghdad and imposing its authority over all of Iraq. At that point the Iraqi government recognized the real danger of the situation and started forming militia units to liberate the country from IS. The Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) played a decisive role in that process.
The PMU (Al-HashdAl-Sha’abi) are pro-government forces operating under the formal leadership of the Iraqi military and consisting of about 70 factions. They were formed at the directive of Iraqi religious authorities after IS seized large swaths of territory in several provinces north of Baghdad in 2014.
Establishment history
One of the internal political factors which led to the PMU’s appearance in Iraq was the failure of state capacity in the realm of national security, against the backdrop of the rise of IS influence. The fall of Mosul due to massive corruption and Iraqi army’s inability to carry out its key functions meant then-PM Maliki lost faith in the armed forces. According to former Minister of Interior Mohammed Al-Ghabban,
“The PMU is a unique, successful and necessary experience that was produced by the period.”
Having armed loyal Shia militias, in contrast to the doubtfully reliable multi-ethnic Iraq units, turned out to to be a far more effective means of restoring order.
On June 15, 2014, the leader of Iraqi Shia Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani issued a fatwa calling for struggle against IS and establishing the PMU. One should note here that Sistani did not limit his fatwa to Iraqi Shia. He insisted on characterizing the national mobilization forces as a national institution with the participation of all ethnic, religious, and social groups.
Composition
The core of the PMU are such armed Iraqi Shia formation as the Badr Organization, Asaib ahl al-Haq, Kata’ib Hezbollah, Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada, Harakat Hezbollahal-Nujaba, Kata’ib al-Imam Ali, and Kata’ib Jund al-Imam. These units collaborate with certain Sunni tribes in the Salaheddin, Niniveh, and Anbar provinces that were occupied by IS. In addition, PMU includes units consisting of Christians, Turkmen, Kurds, and Yazidis.
Badr Organization. This formation was created in 2003 from the Badr Brigades, the paramilitary organization of the Shia Islamist party “Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq” (ISCI). Its leader is Hadi Al-Amiri. At present it is not only a military organization but also a political party with 22 seats in Iraqi parliament. Its military units are 10 to 15 thousand troops strong. Its units were spotted in every PMU operation against IS.
Asaib ahl al-Haq (League of Righteous People). This group was formed in 2006 and is closely tied to Lebanese Hezbollah. Its ideology supports the official line of Iran’s leader Ayatollah Khamenei. Its leader is Qais al-Khazali. As of 2016, it had about 10 thousand troops. Its subunit, called Haidar al-Karar Brigades, is operating on Syria’s territory.
Kata’ib Hezbollah (Battalions of the Party of God). This organization was formed in 2003 in order to resist the US invasion of Iraq. Led by Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and has up to 30 thousand troops. Its fighters also support government forces in Syria.
Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada (Martyrs of Sayyid Battalions). Militarized Iraqi Shia militia. Formed in 2013 to defend “Shia holy sites around the world” and preserving the country’s unity. Led by Abu Mustafa al-Sheibani who used to be a member of Iraq’s Supreme Islamic Council. These units also fight in Syria in support of the government, mainly in Damascus province. No information on personnel strength.
Harakat Hezbollahal-Nujaba (Movement of the Party of God’s Nobles). Formed in 2013 in response to the drawn-out war in Syria and to disputes with Asaib ahl al-Haq leadership. The two groups still maintain close ties and often cooperate on the battlefield. Led by Sheikh Akram al-Kaabi whose ideology is consistent with that of Ayatollah Khamenei. No information on strength. These units also operate in Syria.
Kata’ib al-Imam Ali (Imam Ali Battalions). Armed wing of the Iraq Islamic Movement. Formed in June 2014 in response to IS aggression. Led by Shibl al-Zayd who earlier fought in the Mahdi Army under Moqtada al-Sadr. Its distinguishing feature is a unit formed from Christians, the Spirit of God Jesus Son of Mary Battalions. No data on strength. Its units participated in liberating Palmyra, battles for Tikrit, and the siege of Mosul.
Kata’ib Jund al-Imam (The Imam’s Soldiers’ Battalions). Its leader ‘Abu Ja’afar’ Ahmed al-Asadi is the PMU press secretary. Its ideology is consistent with that of Khamenei. No data on strength. Its units participated in the liberation of Baiji (2014-15).
By various estimates, the PMU today is 60-90 thousand strong. The national mobilization reserve on Iraq’s territory is up to 3 million, including women. National mobilization forces also include support units (combat engineers, medical, logistics, media). Most PMU fighters have significant combat experience amassed during the US invasion of Iraq.
Falih al-Fayyadh, Head of PMU
The PMU is headed by Falih al-Fayyadh whose deputy and military commander is Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, an engineer. In military respects the PMU are subordinate to the Iraqi army and executive authority. One should also add that the PMU has several HQs in Baghdad and Najaf.
Iraqi government is supporting the PMU both militarily and financially. Its budget is about 1.16 trillion Iraqi pounds. Iraq’s population is making major financial contributions to the PMU. Weapons and munitions come mainly from neighboring Iran. The government of Iran, Hezbollah, and the Syrian Arab Army have sent their best-trained officers and junior commanders to the PMU units in order to increase their combat effectiveness.
Weapons and equipment
PMU have a large number of Soviet-made APCs provided by the Iraqi army, and also many repaired and overhauled armored vehicles. Armor provided by Iran (such as BMP-1s, as well as T-55 and T-72 tanks and their clones) is also found in PMU. Moreover, PMU has been observed using US-made armor (M1 Abrams, M113 APCs, Humvees, MRAPs). PMU manufactures and makes extensive use of improvised rockets and munitions, and also perform major engineering preparation of the battlefield, including river crossings, fortifications, and airfields.
Operations
Since the moment of its creation, PMU conducted many defensive and offensive ops against IS. The first major success is the lifting of the blockade off Amirli, in Salahaddin province in June-August 2014. Turkmen units and fighters from Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq particularly distinguished themselves in this fight. From October through December 2014, PMU liberated Dhuluʿiya and Jurf Al Sakhar.
In November 2014 the operation to liberate Anbar province capital Ramade was launched, which resulted in a decisive victory of popular mobilization forces and the Iraqi army. Radical islamists brutally killed over 1200 inhabitants, whose bodies were found in the city and its outskirts. This victory had a major psychological impact and revealed the true face of the adherents of the “one true Islam.”
The operation to liberate Baiji took place between December 2014 and October 2015. The city was home to a large oil refinery and also a construction materials factory. Participants in this battle included Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, Kata’ibHezbollah, Badr Organization subunits, and others. The road connecting Baiji to Baghdad was seized by government forces which allowed them to use the city as a jumping off point for offensive on Mosul.
The battle for the capital of Salahaddin province, Tikrit, took place in March and April 2015, with PMU support. This operation saw the participation of Asaib ahl al-Haq, Kata’ib al-Imam Ali, Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada, subunits of the Badr Organization, Turkmen formations (16-th Brigade) as well as Sunni militia, the Martyrs of Salahiddeen (up to 5,000 fighters).
In early March 2016, the Operation Imam Ali al-Hadi was initiated in order to liberate Samara in Salahaddin province. All PMU units participated in support of federal police and Iraqi army. This operation had several objectives: liberating Baghdad and Salahaddin provinces, ensuring access to the tombs of two imams, surrounding Anbar province, and liberating Samarra.
On May 23, 2016, Iraqi PM Haidar al-Abbadi announced Operation Destruction of Terrorism to liberate Falluja. This operation saw the participation of Iraqi army, federal police, the Golden Division, PMU units, and local militias. PMU participation was limited to fighting IS militants on the outskirts of Falluja and the Khaldiya island. The city was liberated on June 26.
It’s possible that the most important PMU achievement is its contribution to liberating Mosul, which began on October 17, 2016. PMU did not participate directly in the assault, but played an important role in besieging the city from direction of Tal-Afar. These operations cut off IS fighters’ retreat corridors toward Syria, and blocked possible reinforcements from Syria. The Mosul city itself was taken under control by government forces, but the operation is continuing since not all the militants have been eliminated.
Separately, the PMU also launched an effort aimed at reaching the border with Syria west of Tal Afar. PMU fighters liberated a large area from ISIS, including Al-Baaj, al-Qayrawan and Hatra, and reached the border with Syria. Controlling a part of the Syrian-Iraqi border, the PMU once again confirmed its important role in the ongoing anti-ISIS effort in Syria and Iraq and set a foothold for further operations in the border area.
In August 2017, the PMU participated alongside the Iraqi Army and Federal Police in a liberation of Tal Afar.
The PMU are also playing an important humanitarian role, using their volunteers to collect contributions, distribute humanitarian aid, and provide medical assistance to civilians forced to leave their homes by the fighting. The PMU dramatically transformed the battlefield since it is they who undermined IS ascendancy. They were able to rapidly concentrate a large number of troops in a given sector and deploy units without the need to coordinate with higher HQs. One should also note the media component of PMU operations, which use IS’ own weapon against it. Media were used to organize objective coverage of operations which took public criticism into account.
Role in future political life of Iraq
The liberation of Mosul, IS military defeats in Syria, and the announced death of its leader, have placed a new question on the agenda—who will govern Iraq.
Western media are circulating information that Iraq’s Sunnis have begun to form a new insurgency. Tarikat Nakshbandi, Revolutionary Brigades of 1920, and Khavija City Baathists in the Kirkuk province have declared their intent to fight against the current Iraqi government after IS is destroyed.
Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order. The armed wing of the Tarikat Nakshbandi Sufi order. By some estimates, its size and influence are second only to the IS. It has some 5 thousand fighters. It waged guerrilla warfare against US forces and Iraqi government forces. Remarkably, in June 2014 they participated in the assault on Mosul alongside IS. Its leader, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri was the Deputy Chairman of Iraq’s Revolutionary Command Council between 1979 and 2003, and right now is one of the most US-sought high-ranking Saddam Hussein-era officials.
Therefore the defeat of IS will only be to their benefit, since it will eliminate the main competitor, and moreover after IS terror any other group looks more attractive to the Sunnis.
Moreover, with the defeat of IS Al-Qaeda could also reinvent itself, though it seems unlikely. IS collapse may show islamists of the whole world that Al-Qaeda’s strategy to establish a khalifate only in the final stage of the jihad, when the entire population already unconditionally shares jihadist ideology, is more productive than a khalifate established by violence. However, al-Qaeda currently does not play the role in the world of radical Islam that it played 10-15 years ago.
One also shouldn’t dismiss IS. The physical suppression of IS and Shia celebrations will hardly have a positive effect on Iraqi and Syrian Sunni dispositions. One can’t rule out new Sunni terrorist groups. Since the start of the Mosul battle, IS militants were able to carry out several major and bloody terror attacks in various parts of Iraq, including Kirkuk, Tikrit, Samarra, and Baghdad. With IS transitioning to guerrilla war after military defeat in Iraq and Syria, one can expect more of them. And it will be more difficult to determine who, radical Sunnis or IS survivors, is behind them.
One may draw a conclusion from the Middle East chaos that US policies have totally failed. But that would be incorrect. US will continue to exert significant influence on political processes. If one were to leave everything as it is, Iran would fill the created vacuum using Shia militias which exist to varying extent in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq. This will threaten the positions of such countries as Israel and Jordan.
The relations between Iraqi Kurds and the government are also complex. The Iraqi Kurdistan is a self-sufficient autonomous entity with own administration, economy, police, and army. Moreover, a referendum is planned for Sept. 25, 2017 on Iraqi Kurdistan independence, which can’t help but create tensions with Iraq’s federal government and with minorities who live on IK territory (Turkomen, Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs). The Arab-Kurd relations are mde worse by the memory of Saddam Hussein’s repressions during the Iran-Iraq war, and the Kurds’ active support of the US administration during its occupation of Iraq.
As far as PMU future is concerned, there are several nuances. PMU has no single political leader as it is a militarized entity. There are current and potential frictions within PMU due to competition for power among three factions: Khamenei’s, Ali al-Sistani’s, and Moqtada al-Sadr’s.
The Khamenei faction includes several relatively small entities formed by Iran. Its leaders are proud of that affiliation, emphasizing their religious obedience to Khamenei. These groups include, for example, Saraya Khurasani and Kata’ib Abu Fadhl al-Abbas. This faction has the aim of furthering Iranian interests in Syria, and protecting Iran’s border regions. These militarized formations are either fully formed political parties, or are becoming them in anticipation of planned 2018 provincial and parliamentary elections. These groups are close to former PM Maliki, who convinced them to join the Coalition for Rule of Law during the Iraq parliamentary elections in 2014. Though initially formed as military organizations, these formations have become genuine political parties under former PM’s leadership.
The second PMU faction includes several military formations which swore allegiance to the supreme leader of Iraqi Shia, Ayatollah Sistani, and whose interests are non-political. They were formed exclusively by Sistani’s fatwa to protect Iraqi Shia holy sites and literate territory from IS. In 2014, there was a real threat that IS could destroy Shia holy sites in Baghdad and other provinces. This faction’s main formations are Saraya al-Ataba al-Abbasiya, Saraya al-Ataba al-Hussainiya, Saraya al-Ataba al-Alawiya, and Liwa ‘Ali al-Akbar. Each of those names corresponds to one of the four sacred mosques in Kadhimi, Karbala, and Najaf. According to some of leaders and members of these groups, they will be disbanded as soon as IS threat dissipates. This view is based on Sistani’s fatwa being issued in response to a specific threat and having a temporary character. Their key mission is protecting Shia zones and obeying Sistani’s orders. It means this faction’s groups could be disbanded or integrated into Iraqi military.
Peace regiments (Sarai al-Salam) were formed by radical Shia leader Moqtada al-Sadr right after the slaughter perpertrated by radical islamists in 2014 in Camp Speicher. This amounted to rebranding the Mahdi Army which was disbanded in 2008 but retained its core of commanders and specialists. They were easily remobilized, since Sadr had more experience working with militarized formations than other leaders. By some estimates Sarai al-Salam could quickly mobilize up to 100,000 men. According to faction leaders, its power is not limited by number of volunteers but by shortage of resources, particularly money and military equipment. That’s because, unlike other factions, Moqtada al-Sadr’s group is largely cut off from Iranian funding. The movement, and its semi-military character, is popular in Iraq due to its activities in Iraq prior to the US invasion in 2003. Unlike other parties and military groups, Sadrists were not part of the elite that returned to Iraq after US-led invasion. The movement was embedded with ordinary Iraqi citizens, not elites. Sadr has charted his own course, to the disappointment of Iran’s leaders who poured resources into Mahdi Army in 2003-10. Today Sadr and his militarized formations have a strong pro-national position, reject Khamenei’s politics, and are against the presence of any foreign troops in Iraq. This stance has introduced confusion concerning the role Sarai al-Salam in PMU. From time to time, Sadr’s supporters claim they are part of PMU, yet in other instances they claim they are not. This is partly the result of not recognizing Khamenei’s faction as part of PMU, and an even greater rejection of Iranian influence and of former PM Maliki in Iraq. However, this faction finds it useful to declare itself part of PMU due to its popularity among Iraqis.
Matters of contention within the PMU
Involvement in Syrian affairs. Khamenei’s faction remains close to Iran and favors aiding Assad’s government. Many of those groups, particularly the core of seven militarized formations, still support the legitimate government of Syria and are ready to help defend Damascus. But Sistani’s and Sadr’s supporters were against getting involved in aiding Assad. Sadr even criticized Hassan Nasrallah and Hezbollah for its official involvement in Syria in 2014. He claimed that Shia movements and parties ought to observe their own jurisdictions and not complicate their politics by intervening in other countries’ affairs. He also criticized Iraqi Shia militiamen for their presence in Syria. Moreover, many of Sistani’s unit commanders are more concerned with protecting Shia territory and holy sites in Iraq than intervening in Syria.
Integrating PMU into the existing Iraqi security institutions is another contentious matter. Khamenei’s faction is wary of being integrated into the Iraqi army or police, since they are still too weak post-2014. For their part, most groups tied to Sistani and Sadr voiced readiness to integrate into state institutions or even disband some of their military formations.
Whether PMU is integrated into existing armed forces or preserved as a separate branch of forces will have consequences not only for Iraq’s security but for its politics. If the acting Prime Minister Abadi is able to effectively and painlessly integrate PMU into Iraqi military, it will be a convincing argument in favor of his leadership. But the fact that Abadi kept PMU from participating in assault on Mosul and send them to a secondary sector, even though Iraqi military showed weakness and PMU could have been used effectively along the main axis of advance, shows that PMU will continue to have a decisive influence on the political balance of power in Iraq. Thus next year PMU will inevitably become a political instrument used by all parties in their efforts to attain power in Iraq.
Conclusion
The PMU may be considered one of the biggest military and civilian organizations in the Middle East. They are the most likely and desirable center of political power in Iraq. The PMU unites numerous Sunni, Shia, Christian, Yazidi, Turkoman, and Kurdish armed formations, which means that the PMU, in spite of internal disagreements, is a platform for dialogue on military and political matters, and also a guarantee against the internal or external threat of radical Islam. Currently only the PMU has major experience of conducting military operations, working with local population on humanitarian matters, and ensuring objective media coverage. Most ordinary Iraqis believe the PMU should have a political future, because it is they who broke the back of ISIS in Iraq and are ready to aid neighboring Syria.
For Iraq to be able to address own problems, it should strengthen local and federal institutions in order to combat armed terrorists and reach mutual understanding among ethno-religious communities. Only then will Iraq be able to translate its current military victories into long-term political dividends and ensure peace and stability in the region.
It has been 16 years since the crimes of September 11th, 2001. In that time, facts have been revealed that led more than a third of Americans to believe that the U.S government was involved in the attacks. This blog noted 14 such incredible facts on the 14th anniversary of the crimes. Here are 16 more.
In the nine years before 9/11, the FBI failed miserably at preventing terrorism. There are many examples of how FBI leadership under director Louis Freeh facilitated and covered-up acts of terrorism during this time. After 9/11, the FBI took extraordinary measures to hide evidence related to the attacks.
CIA director George Tenet led an agency that also failed in its duties related to counterterrorism and those failures appear to have been intentional. Like Freeh, Tenet had developed secret paths of communication with Saudi authorities. The facts suggest that Tenet facilitated the crimes of 9/11.
The FBI and CIA have made a mockery of the U.S. justice system as it relates to 9/11. While these agencies are suspected of involvement, they have charged others with the crimes using secret evidence in a secret military trial. The accused have been held in seclusion for nearly 15 years while FBI and CIA agents attempt to insert themselves as defense team members, ensuring total control of the narrative.
CIA officers responsible for identifying deception in others fail to notice that the characteristics of deception are amply demonstrated when government representatives respond to questions about 9/11.
There have been four, distinctly different, official accounts given for how the North American air defense system failed to intercept any of the hijacked planes. The last account says that dozens of military officers spent years lying to Congress, the 9/11 Commission, and everyone else, in ways that made the military look bad. Few observers considered the simpler explanation—that the 9/11 Commission lied to divert attention from many difficult questions.
Parts of the official account of 9/11 are based on the highly improbable flight path of a military cargo plane called Gofer 06. The crew of this plane witnessed the crashes of two of the four planes that day despite those crashes occurring 127 miles and less than 30 minutes apart.
There are dozens of unanswered questions about the events at the Pentagon and the plane that reportedly crashed there.
The 19 young men accused within 72-hours of the attacks were known to enjoy strip bars, alcohol, drugs, and other things that are clearly non-Muslim activities. Moreover, these suspects were not capable of accomplishing most of what was needed to pull off the crimes.
Mohamed Atta, the man called the “9/11 ringleader,” had a lot in common with Lee Harvey Oswald—the man accused of killing President Kennedy. Both Atta and Oswald were suspected of using illicit drugs, seemed to be protected by authorities, and were associated with CIA-linked entities.
The New York Times led the propaganda behind the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and it also led the propaganda behind the cover-up of the 9/11 crimes. It did so by ignoring many of the most relevant facts, by promoting false official accounts, and by belittling those who questioned the 9/11 events.
On the day of the attacks, firefighters, journalists, survivors, and eyewitnesses testified to secondary explosions in the World Trade Center buildings. Videos of these testimonies were held secret for years by the government agency NIST and released only via FOIA request after public interest died down. Scientists have explained that the towers came down due to explosions and that the NIST investigation was fraudulent.
Among the evidence ignored by the mainstream media are many facts indicating the presence of thermite at the World Trade Center. Thermite is a chemical mixture that can be used to melt and cut structural steel. Instead of addressing this evidence, supporters of the official account have engaged in deception and distraction in order to obfuscate the facts.
Despite recent, worldwide protests against the abuse of science, the most glaring example of politically motivated pseudoscience continues to be ignored by many scientists. That is the 7-year sequence of contradictory explanations provided by U.S. government investigators for the destruction of the WTC buildings.
Links between 9/11 and the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City lead to questions about the company that controlled security for many of the facilities impacted on 9/11, including the WTC complex. For instance, that WTC security company shared the same OKC airport office later occupied by the flight trainer for Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged “20th”
Media and certain government representatives have hinted at Saudi Arabian ties to the 9/11 crimes. However, those hints always omit the most interesting links between the 9/11 attacks and Saudi Arabia—links that implicate powerful people in the United States.
When the long-awaited 28 pages missing from the Congressional Joint Inquiry Report into 9/11 were finally released, those pages reinforced concerns that deep state players were involved in the attacks.
As the crimes of 9/11 continue to go unsolved and largely unquestioned, Americans should be aware that another 9/11 could happen at any time. If that happens, everyone should realize that ongoing failure to question obvious deception in terrorism could take society to places where freedom to question is no longer an option.
This article was originally published by Dig Within.
“America’s fate was sealed when the public and the anti-war movement bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory. The government’s account of 9/11 is contradicted by much evidence. Nevertheless, this defining event of our time, which has launched the US on interminable wars of aggression and a domestic police state, is a taboo subject for investigation in the media. It is pointless to complain of war and a police state when one accepts the premise upon which they are based.” – Paul Craig Roberts, How America Was Lost
David Ray Griffin is an international treasure and truth teller, who, while being ignored by the mainstream corporate media (MSM) for his extraordinary series of books exposing the false flag attacks of September 11, 2001, will someday be lauded as a modern prophet. To those who know and have studied his work, he is an inspiration for his persistent insistence in a dozen books since 2004 that the truth about the US treachery of that infamous day is essential for understanding the violence, planned by neo-conservatives and embraced by neo-liberals, that the United States has subsequently inflicted on the world.He has consistently argued that to believe in the government’s explanation for 9/11, one has to reject logic, scholarship, and the basic laws of modern science.
Bush And Cheney: How They Ruined America And The World is Griffin’s latest, and probably last, effort to reach those people who, out of fear, ignorance, or laziness, have walled themselves into a cyclopean labyrinth of denial about the defining event of our time. Without the clarifying truth about the attacks of September 11, 2001, there will be no exit from the continuing nightmare the world is experiencing.
If you are reading this review, you are probably not one of those people Griffin is trying to reach. Ay, there’s the rub! As the title of his book suggests, he is using reversed logic to try and reach those who have accepted the official fiction that is The 9/11 Commission Report (No doubt without having read it. Outside of serious researchers, I have never met a person who has, except for some of my students) and all the antecedent and subsequent government and MSM propaganda.
To this end, the first three-quarters of the book is devoted to the “destructive transformations of America and the world as a whole” that were initiated and justified by 9/11, many of which have been accepted by innumerable people as being based on government lies, most notably the war against Iraq. Griffin’s hope is that if he can convince skeptical readers that the government would lie about Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, etc., resulting in the deaths and maiming of millions of innocent people and the destruction of their countries, it would also lie about the attacks of September 11 that “legitimized” such carnageand the ongoing shredding of the US Constitution.
The Will to Examine Miracles?
It’s an ingenuous and compelling method, culminating with his concluding section on “15 major miracles” of 9/11, by which he means “violations of the laws of nature” in the strictest scientific sense. Astutely logical, deeply sourced, and scientifically compelling, the book’s conclusion can only be rejected by one adamantly closed to accepting the ugly truth about the US government and its media accomplices.
But getting skeptical people to read the book is the trick. I think that is very hard but much easier than to get the MSM to do so and give it a fair shake. People have friends whom they trust, and sometimes friends can convince friends to at least take a look. Speaking of the MSM, Griffin puts it thus:
However, while granting that the Bush-Cheney administration told big and disastrous lies, which led to millions of deaths, most mainstream commentators have considered the idea that this administration engineered the 9/11 attack to be so absurd that they can render judgment without checking the evidence.
“Judging without checking the evidence” is the job of the MSM, who are stenographers for the government, but regular people might be persuaded to check the evidence before reaching a conclusion, if they can be led to that assessment one logical step after another. One can even hope that left-wing alternative media critics of the government, many of whom avoid this issue like the plague, might find the courage to reassess their anti-scientific denials in light of Griffin’s work. After all, “the laws of physics don’t lie,” and logical reasoning has generally been a strength of many dissenters, especially those well-skilled in the art of disputation.
The Birth of the Tangled Web
Griffin is a master logician, so he begins with the obvious fact that the Bush-Cheney administration failed to prevent 9/11 and therefore failed to keep America safe that day, as Donald Trump said in a 2016 election debate, for which he was castigated by his opponents and the media. But he was right; it is a fact, whatever Bush-Cheney’s deceptive excuses. As a result of those attacks, the US attacked Afghanistan, claiming that was because Osama bin Laden orchestrated the attacks from that country. No evidence of bin Laden’s guilt was ever presented, though Colin Powell initially said it would be shortly forthcoming (he quickly reneged on the promise). The invasion of Afghanistan, planned well in advance of 9/11, was the start of the war on terror that’s been going on for 16 years with no end in sight. A 16-year-old war based on no evidence, just lies. Griffin shows how the alleged “evidence” that was eventually produced – the bin Laden videos – were fraudulent; that they were indeed “produced,” and not by bin Laden; they were “bogus” according to Professor Bruce Lawrence of Duke University, the leading academic expert on bin Laden. And the FBI reported that it had “no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.” But the administration and the media sang of bin Laden’s guilt in unison. The public, beaten down in fear and trembling, accepted the claim as a fact, as they were further traumatized by additional lies about the anthrax attacks that are a key component of the entire propaganda campaign of fear and intimidation that resulted in The Patriot Act. (Graeme MacQueen’s masterful analysis, The 2001 Anthrax Deception, should be required reading; for he shows how the often forgotten anthrax attacks are intimately linked to those of September 11 and when studied closely, prove that 9/11 was an inside job.)
So Griffin begins with the lie about bin Laden that led to the lie about Afghanistan that led to the illegal and immoral and ongoing war against Afghanistan and all the millions of deaths and destruction that have ensued.
So knowing how lie leads on to lie, let us count some of the lies that followed. Griffin documents these in deeply sourced details, but I will list them concisely:
US Government Lies Subsequent to the 9/11 Attacks:
That the 9/11 attacks were surprises, a “New Pearl Harbor.”
That there was solid evidence for bin Laden’s guilt.
That the invasion of Afghanistan (and Pakistan) was therefore justified.
That the “war on terror” and therefore The Patriot Act were necessary.
That Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11, was developing nuclear weapons, and had weapons of mass destruction
That the attacks on Muslim countries were not based on Islamophobia
That the chaos and destruction unleashed throughout the Middle East were not pre-planned and intentional.
That the Obama administration’s attack on Libya was a humanitarian response to the “madman” Gaddafi, who adopted a rape policy fueled by Viagra drugged troops ready to unleash a blood bath.
That the war against Syria was not a CIA-instigated plan to overthrow Assad under the guise of “liberating” the Syrian people.
That the jihadists in Syria, including ISIS, were not armed and supported by the US, with many of those arms being shipped out of Benghazi, Libya, under the direction of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, General David Petraeus, and Chris Stevens, the US ambassador to Libya.
That the Syrian “White Helmets” are independent volunteer do-gooders, not a propaganda outfit funded by the US and UK governments.
That the wars against Muslim countries throughout the Greater Middle East are not connected to the Israeli occupation of Palestine and serve as American support for Israel’s agenda in the region.
That drone killings are legal and morally justified.
That the US Constitution has not been shredded.
That the coup d’état in Ukraine was not a US operation as part of a continuing US aggression toward Russia and a growing threat of a nuclear annihilation.
That the US buildup of military forces along Russia’s western borders and the massive transfer of US Naval forces to China’s east are not US acts of aggression making nuclear war more likely, but are acts of self-defense.
That the threat of ecological holocaust is not connected to a 770 billion dollar “defense” budget, a trillion dollar nuclear weapons modernization program, and US wars against countries containing vast amounts of fossil fuels and rare minerals.
That is only a sample of the lies that Griffin uses to lead the reader back to 9/11, the alleged reason for the death and destruction justified by such lies. If the US government would lie in all these ways, he is saying, why would they not have lied with the Big Lie that started this string of destructive deceptions.
September 11, 2001
Thus the last section of the book (a little more than 25%) is devoted to “9/11: A Miraculous Day.” Herein he explains why George W. Bush and Dick Cheney should not be trusted on 9/11. They did not want an investigation into the September 11 attacks; wanted the public to just trust them. They were eventually forced into an investigation by public pressure; originally named Henry Kissinger to head it (don’t laugh – ha! ha!); rigged its makeup and had Philip Zelikow, arch neo-con and Bush insider, appointed its Executive Director. In short, they did everything possible to prevent an honest investigation. And we know that the result was The 9/11 Commission Report that is a piece of legerdemain on a par with The Warren Commission Report. In other words, a cover-up.
Griffin shows that “Bush and Cheney lied about their activities on 9/11” and that their relationship to the subsequent anthrax attacks, a key motivator for The Patriot Act and “the war on terror,” suggest that their administration was the source of those attacks and therefore the 9/11 attacks. (see Graeme MacQueen’s The 2001 Anthrax Deception). Griffin further notes how declassified official accounts refute “central features of the Bush-Cheney account of 9/11.”
And then – the coup de grace – he shows how the official account of 9/11 depends on “miracle stories.” Yet, “a look at the evidence shows that many people who accept science on tobacco, evolution, and global warming, accept miracles, implicitly, on the subject of 9/11, especially in relationship to the World Trade Center (WTC).” Herein lies the great stumbling block to convincing people of the truth of 9/11. Science, logic, careful reasoning, evidence, documentation, what you can observe with your own eyes, etc. – none of this matters when you are intent on being deceived (or pretending to be) because of the implications of examining the evidence and reaching conclusions that are deeply disturbing to your world view, ideology, or sense of self. To admit that you have believed a pack of lies for years is very difficult to accept. But regular people of good will can do so. These are the people Griffin is trying to reach. To convince those who have for years publicly and professionally dismissed those who have questioned the official version of 9/11 as conspiracy nuts is probably an impossible task. To convince the MSM that have worked hand-in-glove with the government to conceal the truth is preposterous. To convince those fine people who are devoted to truth in other areas to reconsider their positions on this core issue is conceivable. Surely the world is full of weird events that logic and science cannot explain. But when the defining event of recent history that has resulted in the world teetering on the edge of final destruction is explained by at least the following 15 miracles that Griffin lists, only a delusional person or one whose will to untruth is set in stone would not be moved to ask how these could be possible, and draw the obvious conclusions.
A Miraculous Precedent: The Assassination of JFK
I am reminded of that other foundational case in modern American history: the CIA-directed assassination of JFK. Dan Rather, the famous CBS news anchor, was in Dallas that day, and after seeing the Zapruder film (which was then kept from the American public for a decade), went on television to say that when the president was shot in the head he violently lurched forward, clearly implying that the shot came from Oswald from the rear.Of course once the public was able to see the film, it was obvious to anyone with eyes that he was violently thrown back and to his left, therefore having been shot from his front right, not by Oswald. Bingo: a conspiracy. Then in 2012, another famous TV personality, Bill O’Reilly wrote a book called Killing Kennedy in which he claims that he and his co-author watched the Zapruder film “time after time to understand the sequence of events,” but still concluded that The Warren Commission was correct and that Oswald shot Kennedy from behind despite the obvious visual evidence to the contrary. Miracles then, miracles now – they seem to define the two key events of modern American history for those wanting to obfuscate the truth.
Do you believe in miracles?
Here is a Summation of Griffin’s 15 Major Miracles:
The Twin Towers and WTC 7 were the only steel-framed high-rise buildings ever to come down without explosives or incendiaries.
The Twin Towers, each of which had 287 steel columns, were brought down solely by a combination of airplane strikes and jet-fuel fires.
WTC 7 was not even hit by a plane, so it was the first steel-framed high-rise to be brought down solely by ordinary building fires.
These World Trade Center buildings also came down in free fall – the Twin Towers in virtual free fall, WTC 7 in absolute free fall – for over two seconds.
Although the collapses of the of the WTC buildings were not aided by explosives, the collapses imitated the kinds of implosions that can be induced only by demolition companies.
In the case of WTC 7, the structure came down symmetrically (straight down, with an almost perfectly horizontal roofline), which meant that all 82 of the steel support columns had to fall simultaneously, although the building’s fires had a very asymmetrical pattern.
The South Tower’s upper 30-floor block changed its angular momentum in midair.
This 30 floor block then disintegrated in midair.
With regard to the North Tower, some of its steel columns were ejected out horizontally for at least 500 feet.
The fires in the debris from the WTC buildings could not be extinguished for many months.
Although the WTC fires, based on ordinary building fires, could not have produced temperatures above 1,800℉, the fires inexplicably melted metals with much higher melting points, such as iron (2,800℉) and even molybdenum (4,753℉).
Some of the steel in the debris had been sulfidized, resulting in Swiss-cheese-appearing steel, even though ordinary building fires could not have resulted in the sulfidation.
As a passenger on AA Flight 77, Barbara Olson called her husband, telling him about hijackers on her plane, even though this plane had no onboard phones and its altitude was too high for a cell phone call to get through.
Hijacker pilot Hani Hanjour could not possibly have flown the trajectory of AA 77 to strike Wedge 1 of the Pentagon, and yet he did.
Besides going through an unbelievable personal transformation, ringleader Mohamed Atta also underwent an impossible physical transformation.
Griffin examines each of these “miracles” in detail. Taken together, they reduce the official explanation of 9/11 to a story told to credulous children who are afraid of the dark. One can only hope that Americans are ready to grow up and accept that the bogeyman is real and that he is out to devour them and the rest of the world if they don’t awaken from their hypnotic sleep.
The Overwhelming Consensus of Experts
It is important to note that David Ray Griffin is not alone in his assessment that 9/11 was an inside job done to legitimize disastrous policies at home and abroad. There are thousands of scholars, religious leaders, scientists, engineers, airline pilots, firefighters and countless others who agree with him after studying the evidence. Griffin names many of these experts in his conclusion. And they are not afraid of the absurd way the government and media accuse them of being “conspiracy theorists,” since they know “as Lance deHaven-Smith explained in his book Conspiracy Theory in America, [that] the CIA started using ‘conspiracy theory’ as a pejorative term in 1964 to ridicule the growing belief, contrary to the Warren Report, that President Kennedy was killed by people within the US government, including the CIA itself.” Thoughtful people know, and the evidence has long proven, that the US government is guilty of an extensive list of conspiracies, ranging from the alleged Gulf of Tonkin attack to its conspiracy to convince the American people that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and extending back through many CIA-engineered coup d’états, the assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, RFK, etc. The name calling has lost its sting when the documentary records confirm that the name callers are the conspirators.
So if you care about truth, your country, and the world; if you hate to be lied to; if you care about the victims of American violence everywhere – you should read Bush And Cheney: How They Ruined America And The World. It is a brave and brilliant book. Look at the evidence. Show others. Pass the book on.Give it as a gift.
And tip your hat to David Ray Griffin, a truth teller extraordinaire, who for thirteen years has been asking us to wake out of the hypnotic state of denial that has allowed the liars to bring the world to the edge of destruction. Griffin’s persistence is the sign of hope we all need to join him in the fight against these unspeakable forces of evil.
Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/
You have the overwhelming support of the peoples of the world.
On 25 August President Trump signed an executive order slapping Venezuela with the most sweeping economic sanctions ever. They practically paralyze Venezuela, threaten to plunge her into famine. It’s an economic coup of the worst kind. It’s outright financial warfare. For all those western nations for which such unilateral actions by the Zionist-led Washington regime has become the new normal – it is one of the highest criminal assaults a nation can impose on another nation.
To be sure, this is an act of highest treason of international law. It is a war crime, as it endangers and threatens the lives of the Venezuelan people. Furthermore, Donald Trump, has the impunity to threaten Venezuela with an overt US military invasion. ‘Overt’ – because military and secret services, i.e. CIA personnel and their proxies, trained, funded and armed, are already for years fomenting unrest and death in the streets of Caracas and elsewhere in the country.
Justifying the measures, the White House said,
“[they] are carefully calibrated to deny the Maduro dictatorship a critical source of financing to maintain its illegitimate rule.” The subsequent statement by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin explains literally that these sanctions are aiming at ‘choking’ Venezuela into submission; however, that “exceptions will be made for a 30-day phase-in period and for certain transactions between the US and Venezuela, including petroleum exports and imports involving Citgo, PDVSA’s American unit, as well as financing for humanitarian efforts.”
How ‘human’ can Mr. Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs partner – still be called? How human is the entire Trump military entourage? How much humanity do such people have left? Three generals are calling the shots on Trump’s presidency. How more proof is needed for the world to see that Washington is run by the Pentagon – is a pure military-police state, with the populace stripped of 95% of their civil and human rights – by ever enhanced successive versions of the Patriot Act and related legislation? Humanity at its worst.
The venom and evil of our western society never stops to amaze me. How did we get here? The beginning may date back some 5000 years. But that’s a different story. We are living now, and have to eradicate this egocentric, blood-thirsty pathological greed society, greed economy, NOW – meaning now to spare as many lives as possible.
Trump’s stated reason for slamming Venezuela with sanctions – of course a lie, like everything coming out of Washington – is the recent popular vote for a National Constituent Assembly – ANC – Asamblea Nacional Constituyente. It’s the utmost form of democracy – a National Assembly voted by the people. The opposition which vigorously boycotted the July 30, 2017 vote, are now complaining of having no seats on the ANC. Of course not. They presented no candidates.
According to both Jimmy Carter, former US President and head of the Carter Institute on monitoring international elections, as well as Noam Chomsky, MIT Professor of Linguistics and reputed scholar of geopolitics, Venezuela has the most thorough democracy in the Americas and arguably in the world. Obviously, this does not please the world’s Dictator – cum – Assassin-in-chief, the United States of America.
The largest tyrant in the world calls for atrocious ‘suffocating’ killer sanctions on a sovereign, oil- and gas rich nation in “Washington’s backyard”, under the pretext that it has gone from democracy to dictatorship which the tyranny of the north cannot tolerate, but in a gesture of generosity it grants Venezuela temporary ‘humanitarian’ relieve. What a sham!
The Trump administration, or any of his predecessors, couldn’t give a hoot about democracy and human rights in any of the countries they want to dominate. Quite to the contrary, what they want is installing chaos to be able to exploit the country’s natural resources; and that is what they consistently do. In the case of Venezuela – the world’s richest nation in hydrocarbon reserves – the objective is to retake the riches and put them back to where they were before President Chavez took over in 1998, namely under firm control of US petrol giants.
Venezuela will never tolerate this.
Curiously, it looks like Trump has been dictated to adopt a new doctrine of ‘the loots of war’. His recent declaration of increasing troops in Afghanistan – without time limit – clearly has to do with the mineral riches of that central Asian country, copper, cobalt, iron, barite, sulfur, lithium, lead, silver, zinc, niobium, and an estimated 1.4 million metric tons of rare-earth elements (REEs). The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) estimates the total resources in the Afghan grounds in excess of US$ 1 trillion. Never mind that the US has already spent between US$ 1 and 2 trillion in the 16 years of illegal war in Afghanistan, resulting in massive killings, in tens of thousands of deaths.
In the case of North Korea, it’s iron ore, the US wants, plus, of course, strategic access to China and Russia. In Syria, it’s the infamous Qatari pipeline that would allow western petro-giants shipping trillions worth of oil and gas to Europe to the detriment of Russian’s European gas contracts. Bashar al Assad has refused the pipeline ever since the CIA approached him in 2008, and so did his father already in the early 2000s. This refusal sealed Syria’s fate. In Venezuela, the intended theft is, of course, oil and gas.
It is of little importance that Trump is contradicting himself royally. His adamant and firm pre-election promises – no longer interference in far-away countries, no longer creating ‘democracies’ US style; in the future, the US will respect other countries’ lifestyle. “We will no longer use our force in foreign lands – these days are now over”.
Wonderful. Maybe he meant it. Like perhaps he really meant making peace with Russia. This is most likely the reason why he was elected. But, would Trump be so naïve, not to know that the military industrial complex wants – no, NEEDS war? This diabolical lot wants natural resources for eternal wars.
The vast majority of people want peace not war. They want to respect Venezuela’s sovereign democracy – not interfere with it. It’s their fascist puppet leaders (sic-sic) and those who make up the Latin American regional organizations that feel obliged to submit to the demands of the naked emperor.
The extractive industry, hydrocarbons, minerals has skyrocketed exponentially since the ascent of neoliberalism in the eighties like never before in modern history. The reasons are wars and conflicts. It is estimated that today almost two thirds of the plunders of worldwide extractive industries – an unspeakable calamity to human health, local communities and the environment – goes to the international military industrial complex, with the forerunner, the US of A.
***
The new sanctions on Venezuela have become “common staple”, for all those vassals around the western globe, who for some obscure reason – for fear or for earning kudos? – bend over backwards to lick President Trump’s boots. Donald Trump, the megalo-psychopath, is a mere caricature of the American electorate. Trump’s opinion and policies dance in the wind as only an immature master can muster. Hence, the world is kept confused and on her toes, never quite sure when another bomb shell will be dropped.
Dear Mr. Maduro, this act of war can only be committed by the United States of America, because it commands our western dollar-based totally fraudulent, privately run, debt and usury based, monetary system – for profit of the FED and Wall Street banksters. Period. The western world is still enslaved to it – though on a steadily declining scale, but still not free. The east, Russia, China and the entire Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is rapidly detaching themselves from the dollar hegemony.
Venezuela – in my humble opinion – has to do likewise, as soon as possible. There is no time to ponder: detach from the dollar, with whatever implications of asset and monetary loss this may have; and it will, but it will whether you do or whether you don’t. The rabid dog of Washington never lets loose, it bites to the end, and it will never release confiscated assets. Proof is time and again all through the world, just look at Iran.
Venezuela may want to cut her losses and starting from scratch, linking closely with the economies of Russia and China, as she is already doing – but may need to move on a more rigorous and radical basis. No more deals in dollars. Stop all dollar / bolívar manipulations from Miami. The dollar has to become a banned currency for the public in Venezuela, strictly enforced by law, only to be used by government authorities. This is still the casein in Cuba, and Cuba has survived 60 years – and counting. No euros either. The euro is in the same league with the dollar. It has been created as the foster child of the dollar – fiat currency, no backing whatsoever.
New transactions are to take place only in local currencies and / or the currencies of Russia and China – through respective Central Bank swaps – and international payment systems, outside of the privately-run FED, Wall Street, BIS (Bank for International Settlement) and SWIFT, for example through the Chinese International Payment System (CIPS). Russia is about to launch a similar scheme, detached from the western-dominated financial transaction modes, like SWIFT. Once the new Russian international transfer system is in place, together with the Chinese CIPS, the western monopoly on international payments – and sanctions – will be completely upset. International trade will be reset to function outside the dollar hegemony. Russia’s, as well as China’s economies are fully backed by gold.
***
Under these massive and sweeping financial sanctions, imposed on Venezuela thanks to the western monetary system, Venezuela is basically barred from any international financial transactions. There is a total banking blockade directed against the Venezuelan national oil and gas company, PDVSA- Petróleos de Venezuela SA, making direct hydrocarbon transactions impossible.
It is a stranglehold on Venezuelan’s economy – a recipe for starving a country and its population into submission, weakening it to be taken over – for plundering its resources. Venezuela will NEVER allow this to happen. Citgo, PDVSA’s US subsidiary, can no longer send back dividends to Venezuela – another blow to Venezuela’s foreign exchange earnings. There is a tacit threat, Citgo’s profits in the US may be confiscated – what else than highest treason of international law is this?
Venezuela has never done any harm to another nation. To the contrary, Venezuela has stood by other countries, helping them out with low cost credits and loans, with hydrocarbon at favorable prices, when the ‘market’ was abusive with artificially driven high prices, i.e. US$ 120 / barrel and higher, with the purpose to bleed developing countries into submission. Today, crude has dropped to US$ 47 / barrel, less than half of what it was 2 years ago. The same speculators are behind this drastic drop, another willful, ill-intended manipulation. Yes, by the Saudi vassals, but even more so by Wall Street and its chief executive mobster – Goldman Sachs, to hurt especially Venezuela, Iran and Russia.
This, Mr. Maduro, is an Economic Coup. It is outright financial warfare. It is criminal, illegal and punishable according to war crimes, if there was any international court in the world not yet ‘prostituted’ by the United States and its Deep Dark Zionist handlers. Blocking bank transactions with Venezuela / debt and equity swaps with creditors / debtors is a crime. Blocking Venezuela national oil company from selling hydrocarbon abroad is a crime.
Russia’s Rosneft bought a US$ 6 billion stake in in the Venezuelan PDVSA and acquired 49.9% collateral share in its US-based CITCO. This corresponds to about a 13% of Venezuela’s total production, almost the entire contingent is resold mainly in Latin America by Russia to Venezuela’s customers, despite US ‘sanctions’.
Venezuela might want to consider negotiating concession agreements or outright sales of larger portions of PDVSA to Rosneft and other Russian and Chinese petrol giants, to be repurchased once the crisis is over. Sweden has made such arrangements, nationalizing the banking sector to overcome their banking crisis in the 1990s; an elegant alternative to bailouts. It worked. Banks were later re-privatized. Russia might sell Venezuelan petrol throughout the world, with focus on honoring contracts with Venezuelan customers. No sanctions to be expected from the White House. Who could be sanctioned if transactions took place outside of the dollar economy?
Notwithstanding Trump’s threat of a direct military intervention in Venezuela, there is also a strong possibility of a US naval blockade of Venezuela’s ports. However, today, the US is no longer the sole master of the universe. Russia and China may be invited to form a counter-blockade and even to bring troops into Venezuela.
Russia’s intervention in Syria, at the behest of President Bashar Al-Assad has worked wonders; in fact, it has liberated Syria from the siege of NATO, the US, France, UK, Germany. All criminal nations, dancing to the tune of the dying emperor. Russia’s recent air force parade over the Pacific Ocean, the Sea of Japan, the Yellow Sea and the East China Sea, with nuclear-capable Tupolev-95MS bombers in the midst of the massive and provocative US-Japan-South Korea military exercises off the coast of the Korean Peninsula, has prompted Japan and South Korea to scramble jets to escort Russia’s Tupolevs. The Russian demonstration has had an impressive impact of respect. – Why would it not be a deterrent for a US navy blockade? Or to forego Trump’s threat of direct military intervention?
***
Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research, ICH, RT, Sputnik, PressTV, The 4th Media (China), TeleSUR, The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.
There is no doubt that Vladimir Putin is the world’s most powerful President. By comparison, while China’s Xi Jinping is highly powerful and intelligent, China’s leadership retains a collective element while in Russia, Vladimir Putin maintains an unwritten but obvious veto power over all major decisions. In the United States, the very idea that Donald Trump is an all-powerful President is now laughable even to most Americans, including those who support Donald Trump.
By the same extrapolation it is abundantly clear that Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli leader is the world’s most powerful liar. His power comes from the fact that he is in charge of the highest portion of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East, including nuclear weapons.
His dishonesty is immediately revealed by his statements about Iran. When speaking in front of the Russian President, Netanyahu said,
“…where the defeated Islamic State (Daesh) group vanishes, Iran is stepping in”.
This statement is disingenuous on many levels. First of all, Netanyahu stated to Putin that he felt that Iran is a danger and secondly, that this danger is tantamount to that of Daesh.
Iran has not invaded a country in its modern history and there is no evidence to indicate that this will change. By contrast, Israel occupies Syria and Palestine and formerly occupied Lebanon and Egypt. During the course of Syria’s struggle against Takfiri terrorism, Israel repeatedly bombed Syria illegally. Inversely, Iran’s presence in Syria, like that of Russia, is legal according to international law as it is at the behest of the Syrian government.
Secondly, to equate a state like Iran with Daesh is preposterous. Iran is first of all far more powerful than Daesh has ever been. Daesh is a terrorist group which is quickly crumbling in both Syria and Iraq. Iran is a large state with a professional and highly trained armed forces.
Iran however, uses its military and political influence to fight Takfiri terrorism whose methods, and sinister ideology is anathema to the Iranian Constitution and to the values of the Islamic Revolution.
If one is even slightly interested in fighting Daesh, it logical to thank Iran for its valiant efforts against the wicked group which along with Russia are the only two major non-Arab countries which are combatting a group which has set up base across the Arab world.
During his meeting with Vladimir Putin, Netanyahu also said,
“Iran is already well on its way to controlling Iraq, Yemen and to a large extent is already in practice in control of Lebanon”.
This again is a lie. Iran controls Iran and no one else. Iran does not have puppet states in the region in the way that America has had and continues to have puppet states and client states throughout the world. What Iran does have and what it has increasingly, is respect in the Arab world. Iranian forces are in Syria because the Syrian government asked for their assistance in fighting Takfiri terrorism and Iran agreed. Russia finds itself in the same position.
Iran has many supporters and admirers in Baghdad and Iran has helped train Iraqi volunteer units which are fighting and winning the battle against Daesh in Iraq. In Lebanon, Hezbollah is of course a pro-Iranian political party, one which holds two Cabinet level ministers in the Lebanese government. Hezbollah’s military aims are defensive. Their primary goal is to prevent further occupations of Lebanon by Israel. Hezbollah also has worked with the Syrian government to fight Daesh and al-Qaeda.
Israel is a country that has fought wars with all of its neighbours and has occupied most of them. Iran by contrast has occupied none of its neighbours but in the 1980s was the victim of a war that Iraq started with western support. The two situations are objectively incomparable.
One does not have to be ‘pro-Iranian’ to realise this fact. It is a fact that the world acknowledges, including elements of the Arab world which are hostile to Iran.
Vladimir Putin wisely refrained from responding to Netanyahu’s anti-Iranian tirade. The nature of modern Russian diplomacy is to quietly execute its objectives without needlessly entering into arguments with extremists.
Previously, when Netanyahu told historical untruths about Iran, Vladimir Putin did intervene, telling Netanyahu that it is best to focus on modern events rather than ancient history.
Israel’s anti-Iranian rhetoric is increasingly unpopular in the wider world. Even in Europe, most companies and many countries would rather do business with Iran rather than enter into an ideological struggle on Israel’s terms.
Only the United States, Saudi Arabia and Saudi’s client states share Israel’s stance about Iran and none of the Arab countries have the ability or in reality the nerve to start a way with Iran that they would clearly not win.
The great pity is not that Netanyahu continues to tell provocative lies about Iran and the wider region, the pity and the danger is that anyone could still believe him. Iran does not threaten any nation with aggressive war, but if Netanyahu’s impassioned rhetoric foments a war, Iran will defend itself. Those interested in peace ought to ignore Netanyahu and work instead for the important cause of greater peace, cooperation and dialogue, not just in the Middle East but in the wider world.
Irregular women workers—part-time and/or short-term contract workers without job security or benefits—are emerging as the new face of organized labor in South Korea. On June 29, ahead of a nationwide strike called by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) for an increase in the national minimum wage, tens of thousands of contract workers at public schools walked off their jobs. They are mostly women who work as caregivers, cleaners, and cafeteria staff, and they demand regular employment (i.e., full-time with job security and benefits) as well as an increase in wages. Workers in over three thousand public schools—27 percent of public schools nationwide—participated in the walk-out, forcing many schools to cut classes short, according to the South Korean Ministry of Education.
KCTU is known for its militant actions by predominantly male industrial unions like the Korean Metal Workers Union, and it’s rare to see women at the fore of its mass strikes. But women comprise the majority of the South Korean irregular workforce, currently estimated at nearly 9 million and steadily growing due to neoliberal policies aimed at increasing labor flexibility and reducing labor costs. Once overlooked by government institutions as well as organized labor, this growing sector of irregular and largely women workers has become an important force in the country’s economy.
Forty-three percent of all public school employees are irregular workers, according to the National School Irregular Workers Union, which includes cafeteria and administrative staff, librarians, computer room assistants, caregivers, as well as special education teachers and counselors. The unionestimates the total number of irregular public school employees at approximately 400,000—including 141,965 education support staff, 153,015 teachers, 27,266 dispatch workers, and 42,033 temporary/substitute teachers.
Sweating for Half the Pay
“I stand next to a hot grill and a boiling pot all day,” wrote an anonymous cafeteria worker on the union’s public bulletin board, which has emerged as an archive of worker testimonies about the job-related hardships they endure.
“I become soaked with sweat down to my underwear. We don’t even have time to get a drink of water. I work like crazy so that I can take a short break, but my supervisor thinks I’m resting because I don’t have enough to do. He doesn’t see how hard I hustle just so that I can take a ten-minute break.”
“My one wish is to work in a relaxed atmosphere where I can take a leisurely lunch,” someone else wrote, “They say we work so that we can eat, but in the cafeteria, we eat so that we can work. Heartburn and indigestion from eating too quickly are nothing; they happen all the time.”
“We’re not asking for pity,” wrote another, “What we are saying is give us some relief by reducing the intensity of labor. At least give us half the wages of civil servants. We work more than they do, but our wages aren’t even half of theirs….”
South Korean irregular workers on average are paid 54 percent of what their full-time counterparts make, and public school employees are no exception. Irregular workers are denied the annual salary increases that regular employees receive. Consequently, the wage gap between regular and irregular workers intensifies the longer they have been employed, according to the Education Workers Solidarity Division of the Korean Public Service and Transportation Workers Union (KPTU Ed-sol). In the case of school nutritionists and librarians, the starting salary of irregular workers is 70.5% of that of regular workers, but after ten years of employment, their salary is only 57.1% of that of regular workers, and after twenty years, only 45.6%. Irregular workers in public schools are also denied year-end bonuses, as well as paid holidays and vacations, to which regular workers are entitled.
The workers who led the strike in June say they are fighting for the rights of all working women, but not all women were sympathetic to their cause. National Assemblywoman Lee Eon-ju of the centrist People’s Party referred to the striking women as “mad bitches” in a conversation with a news reporter and said,
“They are just middle-aged neighborhood women who make rice. It’s no big thing. Why do they need to be regular workers?”
Two striking workers, who confronted Lee at the National Assembly building, accused her of giving a “fake apology after making reckless remarks” and treating them “like dogs and pigs.”
Lee was forced to issue a public apology the next day, but her comments reflect a widespread belief that is at the root of subpar working conditions for women in South Korea. The patriarchal belief that reproductive labor, such as cooking, cleaning, and caregiving, is undeserving of formal recognition as essential labor undergirds the growing problem of labor flexibility in women-dominated sectors like service and education support. It also explains why South Korea has the biggest gender paygap of all OECD nations.
Fighting for Gender and Class Equality
Defying such deeply-held societal views to establish a union of irregular and women workers was no easy feat, according to Pak Geum-ja, a cafeteria worker turned labor organizer.
“I woke up at the break of dawn to cook and wash my kids’ school uniforms before going to work. As soon as I finished work, I would organize in the evenings,” she said.
Pak founded the National School Irregular Workers Union in 2010. As a cafeteria worker, Pak was prohibited from using her cell phone while on the job and with no access to a fax machine, thus reaching out to workers in other schools required a double-agent like prowess on her part.
“I had to hide in the storage closet to make phone calls,” she explained. “A lot of our communication was via fax, but getting access to the school fax machine was impossible. I had to rely on my husband, who worked in the school admissions office. I would tell him when and to where to send the fax. To make sure that supervisors at the receiving end wouldn’t see it, I would call the workers in advance and instruct them to wait by the fax machine at the exact time.”
To devote herself to organizing, Pak had to first work out an understanding with her family:
“One day I sat my husband and children down and said to them, ‘All these years, I’ve lived my life for my family. I didn’t have a life of my own. I just want one year to live my own life. So let’s divide up the house work.’”
Without support from her family, she said, it would have been impossible to organize the union.
The fight of irregular public school employees is part of a long history of struggle by South Korean women standing up for labor rights and gender equality. The very “miracle” of South Korea’s economic expansion during Park Chung-hee’s dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s was achieved on the backs of young women who toiled in export industrial zones that produced textiles, garments, electronics, and chemicals. In their opposition to Park Chung-hee’s Yushin system and in their assertion of their right to organize democratic labor unions, the Chunggye Pibok Garment Makers Union, which represented 20,000 women at Seoul’s Peace Market, and the women of Dongil Textile defied humiliation and intimidation from the police and company-hired goons. Their fight inspired the famous 1985 strike of tens of thousands of women workers at the Kurodong Industrial Estate in solidarity with the striking workers of Daewoo Apparel—which, in turn, led the way for the mass democratic labor uprising that followed two years later. The modern-day labor movement in South Korea stands on the shoulders of countless nameless women workers, who risked their lives to resist labor exploitation and sexual violence at the workplace.
“Striking women workers at Dongil Textile in 1978” (Source: Ziksir.com)
Striking factory workers in 1970—“Too hungry to live. Give us food. (Source: blog.aladin.co.kr)
Striking women at Kurodong Industrial Estate in 1985 (Source: egloos)
Although proud of the union’s accomplishment, Pak carries guilt for not having been around for her family. At the height of the union organizing drive, she could only go home every two or three weeks. She gets upset when she talks about her daughter, who boiled instant noodles for dinner on the eve of her college entrance exam because she wasn’t home.
“It’s hard trying to build a union while raising children as housewives,” she said, “But this is how we all did it.”
Pak and her colleagues organized 1,700 irregular public school workers in just forty days and launched the union in October 2010. After repeated rejections, the Labor Department finally recognized them as an official union in 2011. They now boast 50,000 members.
Striking for a Better Future
The strike by 20,000 school workers in June 2017 was a coordinated action by three different unions that organize irregular workers in the public schools—the Education Workers Solidarity Division of the Korean Public Service and Transportation Workers Union (KPTU EdSol), the National School Irregular Workers Union of the Korean Confederation of Service Workers’ Unions, and the Korean Women’s Trade Union. Regularization of their employment status—i.e., direct employment by the Ministry of Education as opposed to subcontractors—as well as a collective bargaining agreement that guarantees a raise in wages and seniority allowance topped their list of demands.
Striking irregular public school employees in 2015 (Source: workingvoice.net)
While South Korea’s corporate media denounced the walk-out for forcing students to go without lunch for a day, many students and parents applauded the striking workers. A junior high school student in Incheon said in a local TV interview on the day of the strike,
“I support them. It’s wrong to discriminate against irregular workers, who perform the same work as regular workers.”
The cafeteria in her school was adorned with hand-written posters made by students and parents in support of the strike.
“Your fight is also for our children’s future,” read one.
“Don’t worry about us! Safe travels and stay cool in the heat,” read another.
In Seoul, where the education chief is progressive, the strike has definitely paid off. The Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education announced on August 2 a plan to phase in a set of policies to guarantee job security for and end discrimination against irregular school employees. According to its policy guideline, subcontracted workers, including cooks, security guards, janitors, and call center operators, will be hired directly by the Office of Education and become regular public service employees. Those who work 40 hours or more per week will see their hourly wages increase by 10,000 won (USD 8.85) starting next year. Those who work less than 40 hours will also see their hourly wages increase from average 8,400 won (USD 7.44) to 10,000 won (USD 8.85)—an increase of 24.4%. The Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education says it will also consider ways to expand the collective bargaining table to include all fifty-some different types of occupations that are part of the education support sector for future contract negotiations.
Collective Bargaining at the National Level
Workers in other regions are not so fortunate. Due to the decentralized responses to the workers’ demands by the various city/province level offices of education, working conditions vary greatly from region to region.
Daycare workers at elementary schools in Gangwon Province, for example, are still fighting. They rallied outside the provincial education office on August 10 to demand an increase in their paid work hours to reflect the increase in workload.
“The school system is constantly introducing new programs that require us to perform more administrative duties on top of caregiving, but we are only paid to work five hours a day,” said Jeong Hyeon-mi, the chief of the Gangwon division of the National School Irregular Workers Union, “We have to get to work earlier and leave later to perform all our tasks, but most of us are denied overtime pay.”
The workers demand an eight-hour paid work day, but the Gangwon Province Office of Education has so far brushed them off. Buoyed by the momentum of the national strike in June, the caregivers in Gangwon Province are gearing up for a local strike next month.
Perhaps the greatest achievement of the national strike in June was the right of irregular public school employees to collectively bargain at the national level directly with the Ministry of Education. If effectively carried out, this would unify working conditions across the country and eliminate the burden of workers at the local level, like the caregivers in Gangwon Province, to fight their battles alone.
The Ministry of Education and the consortium of irregular public school workers unions held their first negotiation on August 18. The workers presented their basic demands, which include a seniority allowance (a salary increase of 50,000 won (USD 44.31) each year after two years of employment) and a regular bonus. The parties agreed to hold a series of talks with the goal of completing the negotiations by late September.
Fighting for Systemic Change and Eradication of Precarious Labor
Irregular workers in the education support sector turned out the largest force in KCTU’s social general strike for a higher minimum wage on June 30.
“We support the KCTU’s main demands—elimination of precarious labor and raising the minimum wage to 10,000 won (USD 8.85),” said a spokesperson for KPTU Ed-Sol.
Soon after his election, President Moon Jae-in pledged to eliminate precarious labor and introduced aroad map to “usher in an era of zero irregular work in the public sector.” KPTU Ed-sol says its primary concern is to make sure that the predominantly-women and historically marginalized sector of education support workers are no longer excluded from national policies aimed at improving labor conditions.
Seong Jeong-rim, the head of the Seoul division of the National School Irregular Workers Union, agrees. The task of the “candlelight revolution” that brought together millions last year to oust previous President Park Geun-hye is incomplete, she said:
“The most important demand of the ‘candlelight revolution’ was systemic change, and the biggest systemic failure in South Korean society is class polarization. Since the financial crisis of 1997 and subsequent structural changes imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the number of irregular workers has continuously increased and the wage gap between regular and irregular workers has grown.”
Seong says her union’s plan to fight for broader systemic change includes participating in the political arena and supporting the formation of a new progressive party. “We share the values and goals of the New People’s Party,” she said, referring to left/progressive forces that are coming back together for the first time since the dissolution of the radical Unified Progressive Party in 2014 by the former Park Geun-hye administration. The party-in-formation has said its top priorities are the eradication of precarious labor, peaceful reunification of the Korean peninsula, and the creation of a unified progressive front. It will formally launch as the New People’s Party in early September, then join forces with other progressive parties to re-launch with a new name in early October.
Seong says her union plans to work closely with the new party to participate directly in local elections that will take place across the country next year and elect candidates who stand on the side of women, irregular workers and other historically-marginalized people.
“Our members want to be part of creating systemic change,” she said.
Women irregular workers promise to be a force to be reckoned with in the growing fight to eradicate precarious labor in South Korea.
This article was originally published by Zoom in Korea.
Featured image: YOKOSUKA, Japan (June 17, 2017) The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Fitzgerald (DDG 62) returns to Fleet Activities (FLEACT) Yokosuka following a collision with a merchant vessel while operating southwest of Yokosuka, Japan. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Peter Burghart/Released)
“That gives us great cause for concern that there’s something out there that we’re not getting at.” – Admiral John Richardson, New York Times, Aug 21, 2017
The large question for naval watchers and those with an interest in maritime matters is what is happening to the US navy. All powerful, seemingly all invincible, it has been humbled of late by a series of severe mishaps, some of the most severe since 1989, when the USS Iowa lost 47 sailors to a turret explosion. If it is a question of navigation and safety, things have been far from rosy.
In June, the Philippine-flagged merchant vessel ACX Crystal collided with the USS Fitzgerald 50 miles southwest of Yokosuka, leading to the deaths of seven sailors. Cmdr. Bryce Benson and Cmdr Sean Babbitt, first and second-in-command respectively, were fired for having “lost trust and confidence in their ability to lead”.[1] But nothing could get rid of that nagging feeling that something else was afoot, a deeper problem rooted in the navy.
What beggars belief is that two entities of such size could possibly collide in the first place, even if the view from Haaretz is that such incidents “are bound to happen” in a world unqualified merchant ship crews and crowded waterways.[2]
With little else to make sense of, the naval report could only add some soothing balm to a terrible loss, noting those “swift, and in many cases, heroic actions” of the crew in saving lives. But the damage was done.
The latest accident – on August 21 – was even more gruesome, seeing the loss of 10 sailors, and triggering the search and rescue teams of several countries, including Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. Remains have been found within the USS John S. McCain, which wound its wounded way back to Singapore’s Changi naval base after colliding with the Liberia-flagged tanker, the Alnic MC. The McCain’s portside had been given a frightful puncture, leading to flooding that found its way into crew compartments.
The Alnic MC was more fortunate, sustaining damage near the front some 7 metres above the waterline. There were no reported injuries, nor was there a disastrous oil spill that would have compounded the entire fiasco. The John S. McCain, it would seem, did not stick to its designated traffic lane, pathways meticulously crafted by the Singapore authorities. The tanker, on the other hand, did.
In dramatic fashion, and one distinctly more so for a superpower, a global “operational pause” was ordered by Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson for its startled fleet. A mighty force had been halted, to be subject to a general review of training and seamanship standards, with a more specific investigation of the Pacific theatre.
The Fitzgerald and McCain accidents mean that the navy is short of two operational guided missile destroyers that would provide ballistic missile defence, a point that troubles such maritime watchers as the director of the Centre for American Seapower at the Hudson Institute, Seth Cropsey. “The US combat fleet,” he claims solemnly, “is already overstretched.”[3]
Such incidents – there have been four this year so far, including January’s run aground in Tokyo Bay of the poorly guided missile cruiser USS Antietam, and May’s collision between the cruiser USS Lake Champlain and a South Korean fishing boat – do much to feed Chinese assumptions that US prowess may be waning.
The reasons vary, a sort of medley of entropic decline: exhaustion, constant deployment, thinly stretched operations after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Also telling is its logistical link: the recent chain of command has no line to patrol boats or destroyers. Bread and butter basics are being neglected. The way these basic points have been ignored by those in the Fox News camp is to suggest that the Chinese may well have been behind it – in the sense of an electronic attack.[4]
In the aftermath of the McCain collision, Admiral Scott Swift, commander of the US Pacific Fleet, would pencil a lesson from history, showing “that continuous operations over time causes basic skills to atrophy and in some cases gives commands a false sense of overall readiness.”[5]
In the dark view of Bryan McGrath, deputy director of the Centre for American Seapower in the Hudson Institute, and himself a former destroyer commander, naval decline was already recognised fifteen years ago. Despite the making of various changes, the “Pacific Fleet has really been pressurized in a way that has harmed the surface forces’ proficiency in very basic things.”
Even the three-star Vice Admiral Joseph Aucoin of the Seventh Fleet had to concede that, despite each incident being unique, “they cannot be viewed in isolation.” Last Wednesday, any moments of humility were deemed insufficient, and Auscoin was relieved, despite being a few weeks from retirement. Those in Pyongyang and Beijing may well be crowing at the spectacle, while sailors will reflect on Cmdr. W.B. Hayer’s famous misquotation of Thucydides:
“A collision at sea can ruin your entire day”.[6]
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: [email protected]
A quagmire is defined as a complex or unpleasant position that is difficult to escape. President Trump’s recently announced war plans in Afghanistan maintain that quagmire. They come at a time when US Empire is failing and its leadership in the world is weakening. The US will learn what other empires have learned, “Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires.”
During the presidential campaign, some became convinced that Trump would not be an interventionist president. His tweets about Afghanistan were one of the reasons. In January of 2013, he tweeted,
“Let’s get out of Afghanistan. Our troops are being killed by the Afghanis we train and we waste billions there. Nonsense! Rebuild the USA.”
Now, we see a president who carries on the interventionist tradition of US Empire.
While Afghanistan has been a never-ending active war since 9-11, making the 16-year war the longest in US history, the truth is the United States became directly involved with Afghanistan some 38 years ago, on July 3, 1979. As William Rivers Pitts writes
“On that day, at the behest of National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter signed the first directive in an operation meant to destabilize the Soviet-controlled government of Afghanistan.”
Trump’s Afghan policy is inaccurately described as a new approach but has only one element that is new – secrecy, as Trump will not tell us how many soldiers he will send to this war. His so-called new strategy is really a continuation of the permanent war quagmire in Afghanistan, which may be an intentional never ending war for the empire’s geopolitical goals. Ralph Nader reviews 16 years of headlines about Afghanistan, calling it a “cruel boomeranging quagmire of human violence and misery… with no end in sight.”
Another Afghan Review Leads To Same Conclusion: More War
During his campaign for president, Trump called for the US to pull out of Afghanistan. Early in his administration, President Trump announced a review of the Afghanistan war. This week when he announced escalation of the war, Trump noted this was his instinct. Unfortunately, the president did not trust his previous instincts and missed an opportunity to end the war.
We have seen how President Trump refuses to admit mistakes, so it is highly unlikely he will change course from this mistaken path. His rationale is so many US soldiers have given their lives that we must stay until the United States wins. This is the quandary – the US must continue the war until we win because soldiers have died but continuing the war means more will die and the US must stay committed to war because more have died.
After we read President Trump’s Afghanistan war speech, we went back and re-read President Obama’s Afghanistan war speech given in March 2009. It is remarkable how similar the two speeches are. When Russian president Putin was interviewed by filmmaker Oliver Stone as well as when he was interviewed by Megyn Kelly, he made a point proven by US policy in Afghanistan,
“Presidents come and go, and even the parties in power change, but the main political direction does not change.”
Both presidents conducted a lengthy review early in their administration and both talked with generals and diplomats who convinced them to escalate rather than end the war. Both presidents put forward what they claimed was a new strategy but in reality, was just doing the same thing over again: more troops, building up Afghanistan’s military by working closely with them, using economic and diplomatic power and putting pressure on Pakistan not to be a safe haven for the Taliban and those fighting against the United States.
To ensure a quagmire both presidents said that decisions would not be based on a timeline but on conditions on the ground. Both promised victory, without clearly defining what it would mean; both raised fears of the Taliban and other anti-US militants using Afghanistan to attack the United States again. Trump had the advantage of knowing that President Obama’s approach had failed despite repeated bombings in Pakistan and working with Afghan troops, but that didn’t alter his course.
Afghanistan Victims of a February, 2012 US air strike that killed 8 children in Kapisa, Afghanistan.
Trump noted that the Afghanistan-Pakistan region was now the densest part of the world when it comes to anti-US militants, saying there were 20 terrorist groups in the area. President Obama added tens of thousands of troops to the Afghanistan war, dropped massive numbers of bombs and the result was more terrorism. The US was killing terrorists but the impact was creating more anti-American militants. Trump failed to connect these dots and understand that more US attacks create more hatred against the United States.
After Obama failed to ‘win’ the war by adding tens of thousands of troops, with more than 100,000 fighting in Afghanistan at its peak, Trump should have asked his generals how adding thousands more (reports are between 4,000 and 8,000 soldiers) would change failure to success. Wasn’t there anyone in the room who would tell Trump there is nothing new in the Trump strategy that Obama and Bush had not already tried. Steve Bannon was the most opposed to war in the administration and reportedly fought against more war, but he was not in the room. Did anyone in the room stand up to the hawk-generals?
The policy of working more closely with the Afghan military in order to build them up ended in disaster in the Obama era. The New Yorker wrote in 2012:
“We can’t win the war in Afghanistan, so what do we do? We’ll train the Afghans to do it for us, then claim victory and head for the exits.”
But, the US discovered that it could not train the Afghans in the ‘American way of war.’ In 2012, the Obama administration ended the program of fighting alongside Afghan soldiers to train them because those soldiers were killing US soldiers. How many US soldiers will die because Trump was ignorant of this lesson?
Trump also took the wrong lesson from the Iraq war and occupation. He inaccurately described the so-called withdrawal from Iraq as hasty. He points to the rise of ISIS as created by the vacuum in Iraq when the US reduced its numbers of troops. Trump said
the US “cannot repeat in Afghanistan the mistake our leaders made in Iraq.”
In fact, ISIS rose up because the killing of hundreds of thousands, some reports say more than a million, of Iraqis, displacement of more than a million more, the destruction of a functioning government as well as war crimes like the Abu Gharib torture scandal made it easy to recruit fighters. Furthermore, the training and supply of weapons to Sunnis during the ‘Awakening’ created armed soldiers looking for their next job.
It was US war and occupation that created ISIS. The seeds had been planted, fertilized and were rapidly growing before the US reduced its military footprint. Trump is repeating the mistake of more militarism, and in the end ISIS or some other form of anti-US militancy will thrive.
The US does not want to face an important reality – the government of the United States is hated in the region for very good reasons. Bush lied to us about 9-11 when he claimed they hate us for our freedoms. No, they hate the US because US militarism kills hundreds of thousands of people in the region, destroys functioning governments and creates chaos.
Victory Means Something Different to an Empire
In trying to understand why the US is fighting a war — a war that has been unwinnable for 16 years — it helps to look at a map and consider the resources of an area.
Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former adviser, predicts the US will be in Afghanistan for the next 50 years. Indeed, that may be the ‘victory’ the empire seeks. Afghanistan is of geopolitical importance. It is a place where the US can impact China’s ‘One Belt One Road’ to Europe where China can take the place of Russia and the United States in providing wealthy Europeans with key commodities like oil and gas. Just as the United States has stayed in Germany, Italy and other European states and Japan after WW II, and in Korea after the Korean war, the empire sees a need to be in Afghanistan to be well positioned for the future of the empire. Terrorism is not the issue, economic competition with China, which is quickly becoming the leading global economic power, is the real issue.
And, competition with Russia and China is at the top of the list of the bi-partisan war party in Washington. Pepe Escobar points out that
“Russia-China strategic partnership wants an Afghan solution hatched by Afghans and supervised by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (of which Afghanistan is an observer and future full member). So from the point of view of neocon/neoliberalcon elements of the War Party in Washington, Afghanistan only makes sense as a forward base to harass/stall/thwart China’s Belt and Road Initiative.”
Afghanistan is next to China, India and Pakistan, three nuclear powers that could pose military risks to the United States. Having multiple bases in Afghanistan, to allegedly fight terrorists, will provide the forward deployment needed to combat each of those nations if military action is needed.
Afghanistan also borders on Iran, which could be a near-future war zone for the United States. Positioning the US military along the Afghanistan-Iran border creates a strategic advantage with Iran as well as with the Persian Gulf where approximately 18.2 million barrels of oil per day transit through the Strait of Hormuz in tankers.
Afghanistan’s land contains $3 trillion in rare earth minerals needed for computers and modern technology including rich deposits of gold, silver, platinum, iron ore and copper. The US has spent $700 billion in fighting a failed war and President Trump and empire strategists are looking to make sure US corporations get access to those minerals. Since the US Geological Survey discovered these minerals a decade ago, some see Afghanistan as the future “Saudi Arabia of lithium”, a raw material used in phone and electric car batteries. US officials have told Reuters that Trump argued at a White House meeting with advisers in July that the United States should demand a share of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth.
Jeffrey St. Clair reminds us not to forget the lucrative opium trade. Afghanistan is the largest source for heroin in the world. He writes:
Since the start of Operation Enduring Freedom, opium production has swelled, now accounting for more than one-third of the wrecked Afghan economy. In the last two years alone, opium poppy yields have doubled, a narcotic blowback now hitting the streets of American cities from Amarillo to Pensacola. With every drone strike in the Helmond Province, a thousand more poppies bloom.
The decision on a never ending war — with no timetable for exit — is evidence that the Pentagon and intelligence agencies are in charge of US foreign policy with Trump as a figurehead. Of course, the war also ensures immense profits for the war industry. St. Clair emphasizes that “in 2016, the Pentagon spent $3.6 million for each US soldier stationed in Afghanistan. A surge of 4,000 to 10,000 additional troops, either as ‘private military units’ or GIs, will come as a welcome new infusion of cash to the dozens of defense corporations that invested so heavily in his administration.”
The firing of Steve Bannon just before the meeting that decided Afghanistan’s future was not coincidence as he was the opponent of escalation. Glenn Greenwald writes in the Intercept that this permanent power structure has been working since his election to take control of foreign policy. He also points to the appointment of Marine General John Kelly as chief of staff and how National Security Adviser, General McMaster, has successfully fired several national security officials aligned with Steve Bannon and the nationalistic, purportedly non-interventionist foreign policy. The deep state of the permanent national security complex has taken over and the Afghan war decision demonstrates this reality.
With these geopolitical realities, staying Afghanistan may be the victory the Pentagon seeks — winning may just be being there. The Intercept reported this week that the Taliban offered to negotiate peace, but peace on the terms of the Taliban may not be what the US is seeking.
Call for an End to War for Empire
It would be a terrible error for people to blame Trump for the Afghanistan war which began with intervention by Jimmy Carter, became a hot war after 9-11 under George Bush, escalated under Obama and now continues the same polices under Trump. The bi-partisan war hawks in Congress for nearly 40 years have supported these policies. Afghanistan is evidence of the never ending policy of full spectrum dominance sought by the US empire. The bi-partisans warriors span the breadth of both parties, Jeffrey St. Clair highlights the Afghanistan war cheering by Senator John McCain and Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Throughout recent decades the United States has failed to show what Kathy Kelly called the courage we need for peace and continues the cowardice of war. In fact, many ask why are we still at war in Afghanistan: Osama bid Laden is dead, other alleged 9-11 attack attackers are caught or killed. This shows that calling Afghanistan the longest running Fake War in US history is right — fake because it was never about terrorism but about business. If terrorism were the issue, Saudi Arabia would be the prime US enemy, but Saudi Arabia is also about business.
In an obscene testament to U.S. vanity and the psychopathological commitment to global white supremacy, billions have already been wasted, almost three thousand U.S. lives lost and over 100,000 dead. It is time to admit defeat in Afghanistan and bring the war to an end. Justice and common sense demand that the bloodletting stop.
When we understand the true motives of US Empire, that conclusion is even worse — to steal resources from a poor nation and put in place permanent bases from which to conduct more war. US hegemony is costly to millions of people around the world and at home it sucks more than 54% of discretionary spending from the federal budget and creates an empire economy that only serves the wealthiest corporate interests that profit from transnational military dominance while creating a record wealth divide where most people in the United States are economic slaves. It is not only time to end the Afghanistan war but to end US Empire.
Kevin Shipp was a decorated CIA officer who refused to look the other way in regard to government criminality and cover-up.
At a very important public awareness event, held by GeoengineerWatch.org in Northern California, on July 28th, 2017, Mr. Shipp presented a shocking and compelling presentation on numerous, horrific and ongoing government crimes.
The total persecution of anyone who dares to tell the truth about rampant government tyranny is also fully exposed. The paradigm we have all known has been built on deception and the dark agendas of the global power structure.
The courage Kevin Shipp has shown by doing his best to expose government criminality and tyranny serves as a stellar example to us all. We desperately need other individuals in government agencies and the US military to follow Kevin’s lead.
All of us are essential in the battle to help wake the masses to the truth so that the whistleblowers have the support they need to come forward.
If we have any chance of stopping the completely out of control criminal cabal that currently runs our country and much of the world, we must all make our voices heard, we must all join the fight for the greater good.
The implementation of de-escalation zones in Syria and the separation of terrorists from the opposition have allowed the fight against terrorism to intensify, effectively ending the civil war in the country, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said during the meeting with his Lebanese counterpart, Yaacoub Sarraf.
The Russian Defense Minister, however, stressed that the movement of terrorists from one country to another “cannot continue indefinitely.”
“I would like our Western partners… finally to separate the moderate opposition from terrorists and stop rendering assistance across the board,” Shoigu said.
Sputnik Radio discussed this statement with Israel Shamir, a Russian-Israeli journalist and Middle East expert, who said that the Russian Defense Minister could be a “little bit overoptimistic.”
“There is a danger that some external forces would not agree with the settlement of the Syrian war. Those forces are Saudi Arabia and Israel,” Shamir told Sputnik.
Once upon a time, Syria was a powerful state, he went on. However now it is in disarray, therefore Saudi Arabia and Israel are worried that this change on the ground could be to the advantage of Iran.
“That is why there is a possibility that the war, which until now was viewed as a war between proxies would be replaced by direct intervention of Israel and Saudi Arabia,” he finally stated.
Featured image is from Sputnik/ Mikhail Voskresenskiy.
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