Notre site en Français: mondialisation.ca
Nuestro sitio en español: GlobalizacionAugust 27th, 2017 by Jason Bermas
Jason Bermas breaks down the media’s manufactured outrage regarding the events in Charlottesville VA and asks where the valid outrage is regarding the Trump administration.
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August 27th, 2017 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark
It has been a week of bollards in Australia. And defence barriers. And hedges and vegetation. No, not the radio garden hour, or the herbaceous borders special featured on prime time television, delivered by a bearded man with a facial forest so vast it could regenerate several lost species.
This is the anti-terrorist flick of the week, and given that Australia’s Turnbull government is nearing its next blow, awaiting another stroke in the aftermath of the citizenship crisis, a suitably urgent package filled with alarmist goodies to distract the public was in the offing.
The Prime Minister was grave in his August 20 statement introducing the “toolkit” to reduce terrorist threats, part of an investigation solicited last year after the carnage witnessed in Nice along the Promenade des Anglais.
“As we have seen from tragic events in Paris, London, Berlin and Barcelona, terrorists continue to target crowded places.”
With each murderous adventure, often culminating in the shooting death of the perpetrator, the security doyens are asked what can be done. The behind-closed doors approach varies between overexertion and inactivity. An entirely secure strategy would entail abolishing freedom of movement and basic civil liberties. What matters for the public is the reassurance, the placebo effect.
The public face of such an approach must seem splendidly busy, putting more personnel on the streets, increasing awareness among members of the population, and getting various defences at the ready.
In Sydney, Turnbull made a special point of appearing in a manner that only gave the impression he was overegging the pudding. (Is Australia waiting for its own variant of the Intifada?) Alongside him were the New South Wales Minister for Police Troy Grant, the NSW Minister for Counter-Terrorism David Elliott, the Federal Police Commissioner Andrew Colvin, the NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller, and the Commonwealth Counter-Terrorism Coordinator Tony Sheehan.
The strategy, released last Sunday (always good to get people on their day of rest), emphasised the threat posed to areas frequented by the humble civilian: sports stadia; pedestrian malls; shopping centres.
“Offenders with guns or knives or bombs or chemical devices are also a threat, it’s a full range of threats. But what Nice demonstrated was the lethality of somebody using a truck in a crowded place.”[1]
A response fashioned on various structural and “resilience” measures was considered vital, including those traditional intrusions such as closed-circuit television. (Surveillance always goes down well as a seller when attempting to foil the next attack.) Importantly, Turnbull insists on casting the language differently: assessing a site’s vulnerability and then “see how they can make it safer”. Terms like “militarise” or a “ring of steel” are ignored.
At the same press conference with Turnbull, NSW Police Commissioner Fuller recapitulated those usual fragmentary pointers that may say nothing about a potential terrorist attack but furnish a tick-list for the paranoid and concerned. “It’s about looking for a person that may be suspicious, maybe sweating profusely for the time of year, dressed inappropriately, carrying a bag that doesn’t fit within the environment.”[2]
What impressed Turnbull was the need, in various cases, to adopt a somewhat different take:
“You can obviously have bollards, you can have seating… you can have works of art, you can have steps, planter boxes.”[3]
There has been no criticism of these measures, virtually no protest, and certainly no disagreement. The state is flexing its muscles, and the critics are on holiday. The fear factory has become a factory of acceptance.
Papers sport resounding measures of support; everyone, it seems, wants a hand in perpetuating the national security state against threats of inflated potency. Never mind their inchoate nature. Members of the business community were reported in the Australian Financial Review as approving of “subtle” barriers – architectural or natural – that would speckle the city landscape.[4]
For Ken Morrison, chief of Property Council of Australia, intelligence, security and police forces might well be shouldered with the primary responsibility in terms of anti-terrorist measures, but “there is a lot that owners can do.”
Peter Allen of the Shopping Centre Council of Australia was also willing to add a supporting voice to the latest anti-terror strategy. Those involved in the shopping centre industry were keen to work together with “relevant security agencies”.
So, no demurrals, minimal scepticism and a conspicuous lack of comment about the drumming nature behind this latest anti-terrorism response. The sheer school-boy eagerness in wishing to be relevant in a world of cruel and sudden killings, in wanting to fear, is gratingly apparent.
“Our agencies,” stated Turnbull before the gathered journalists, “are the best in the world.”
Such comments are only ever made to render smaller threats significant, the lesser enemy rigorously dangerous.
But what is even more troubling – far more than this urchin enthusiasm – is the sense of permanent emergency, its normalised footing. As the “threat is constantly evolving”, it follows that Australian authorities must make sure that they, too, “are constantly improving and updating the measures we have to keep Australians safe.” This will mean more obstacles: more barriers; more bollards and, of course, more surveillance.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: [email protected]
Notes
August 27th, 2017 by Adam Garrie
Nedka Babliku sits down with Adam Garrie to discuss the true meaning of Trump’s surge in Afghanistan.
Digital Divides: Where Empires Die
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This video was published by Digital Divides.
August 27th, 2017 by Adam Garrie
Nedka Babliku sits down with Adam Garrie to discuss the true meaning of Trump’s surge in Afghanistan.
Digital Divides: Where Empires Die
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This video was published by Digital Divides.
August 27th, 2017 by Tony Cartalucci
For those who know from whence real power flows in America’s political establishment, the uninterrupted continuation of America’s 16 year war in Afghanistan came as no surprise.
For those voters who believed US President Donald Trump represented the public’s desire to withdraw from multiple foreign wars and entanglements and place “America first,” President Trump’s announcement that not only would that not happen, but that these wars would be expanded, must have come as a surprise.
However, perhaps it is the first in a long series of hard lessons for the American public to learn – that no matter who they vote for in Washington, it is clear agendas are decided upon and pressed from elsewhere.
The Hill, in its article, “5 takeaways from Trump’s Afghan speech,” touched upon several points regarding President Trump’s recent speech regarding Afghanistan, where the US currently has 8,400 troops deployed, and is poised to deploy thousands more.
The Hill reported:
Trump is expected to send nearly 4,000 more troops, but he neither divulged a number nor said how long additional U.S. forces would spend in the country.
“We will not talk about numbers of troops or our plans for future military activities,” Trump said. “Conditions on the ground, not arbitrary timetables, will guide our strategy from now on. America’s enemies must never know our plans. . . I will not say when we will attack, but attack we will.”
This is in stark contrast to his campaign promises, which The Hill noted:
“Why are we continuing to train these Afghanis who then shoot our soldiers in the back? Afghanistan is a complete waste. Time to come home!” he wrote on Twitter in 2012.
The Hill also claims:
The United States has about 8,400 troops in Afghanistan now. The forces are on a dual mission of training, advising and assisting Afghan forces in their fight against the Taliban and conducting counterterrorism missions against groups such as al Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
And indeed, that is precisely what policymakers, politicians, and military leaders have stated regarding the Afghan conflict for well over a decade and a half – spanning the presidencies of George Bush, Barack Obama, and now Trump.
President Trump would claim that the goal was no longer withdrawal within a certain time frame, but would be dictated by conditions on the ground:
“A core pillar of our new strategy is a shift from a time-based approach to one based on conditions. I’ve said it many times how counterproductive it is for the United States to announce in advance the dates we intend to begin, or end, military options.”
The “conditions” apparently require the US-backed client regime in Kabul “to take ownership of their future,” despite claims that the US is not engaged in “nation building” countries in America’s “own image.” They are conditions that are – even at face value – contradictory and repetitive of promises made and broken by President Trump’s predecessor, former President Obama.
Flirting With Further War in Pakistan
President Trump – like Bush and Obama before him – also threatened neighboring Pakistan, accusing the nation of undermining its military presence in Afghanistan. President Trump would ultimately warn:
“We have been paying Pakistan billions and billions of dollars at the same time they are housing the terrorists that we are fighting. But that will have to change, and that will change immediately,” Trump vowed.
“It is time for Pakistan to demonstrate its commitment to civilization, order and to peace.”
In reality, the US never invaded Afghanistan nor remains there today to fight terrorism. The organizations that it is allegedly fighting are not funded or directed by Afghanistan, they are funded and directed by the United States’ closest and oldest allies in the Middle East – including Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Instead, the US is occupying Afghanistan for the same reason the British Empire invaded and occupied it multiple times – in a bid to expand hegemony over Central and South Asia.
Afghanistan conveniently borders Iran, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and even China. A permanent US military presence in Afghanistan and control over the regime in Kabul, gives the US a springboard for direct and indirect geopolitical influence – including military operations – in all directions. Evidence indicates that exploiting this strategic foothold in this manner has already long-ago begun.
The US has sought to pressure Iran and Pakistan for decades, with long-drawn plans regarding both nations.
Regarding Pakistan, before the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, the US had very few options in terms of coercing Islamabad. With the US military now on Pakistan’s border and with special operations and unmanned drones regularly conducting missions within Pakistan’s borders, Washington’s ability to coerce and influence Islamabad has drastically increased.
Should President Trump announce direct military action against Pakistan for whatever reason, the US already conveniently has multiple military bases on its border to launch it from – bases that have developed their infrastructure over the course of 16 years and counting. Should the US decide to expand covert support for separatist movements the US is sponsoring within Pakistan currently, it can also do so conveniently from Afghanistan.
Target China
While it may not seem obvious at first – Washington’s ability to project influence into Pakistan from Afghanistan poses a direct threat to China and its regional interests as well.
China’s emerging One Belt One Road initiative includes extensive infrastructure in neighboring Pakistan involving ports, rail and roadways, pipelines, power production, and more.
The Gwadar Port in Pakistan’s western Baluchistan province is located right at the center of efforts by US-backed terrorists and opposition groups to carve the entire region off from Pakistan’s control and establish an independent state.
Movements in Baluchistan – both political and militant – have enjoyed immense US backing, including US National Endowment for Democracy programs promoting independence movements, political organizing, protests, and anti-government media.
Within the pages of US policy papers, policymakers have openly conspired to organized and array armed resistance against Islamabad in Baluchistan, noting how strategically compromising to both Pakistan and China’s rise the move would be.
In a 2012 paper published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace titled, “Pakistan: The Resurgence of Baluch Nationalism” (PDF), it would be stated unequivocally that (emphasis added):
If Baluchistan were to become independent, would Pakistan be able to withstand another dismemberment—thirty-four years have passed since the secession of Bangladesh—and what effect would that have on regional stability? Pakistan would lose a major part of its natural resources and would become more dependent on the Middle East for its energy supplies. Although Baluchistan’s resources are currently underexploited and benefit only the non-Baluch provinces, especially Punjab, these resources could undoubtedly contribute to the development of an independent Baluchistan.
Baluchistan’s independence would also dash Islamabad’s hopes for the Gwadar port and other related projects. Any chance that Pakistan would become more attractive to the rest of the world would be lost.
Not only would it be Pakistan’s loss regarding the Gwadar Port, it would be China’s loss as well, enhancing America’s attempts to reassert regional primacy over Eurasia.
However, should US troops withdraw from Afghanistan – these plans would be seriously compromised, if not entirely foiled. Thus, yet another American president who promised to withdraw from the endless war in Afghanistan has predictably backtracked – and instead of fighting Al Qaeda and the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS) at its source – in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or even Washington itself – President Trump has proposed to Americans to spend additional blood and treasure to fight them in Afghanistan.
And while President Trump has promised no “nation building,” it is clear that the conditions that must be met in order for the US to withdraw is the existence of a regime in Kabul created in America’s own image and beholden to US interests, including continuing efforts to undermine political stability in neighboring Iran, Pakistan’s Baluchistan region, and ultimately against China’s growing regional influence.
President Trump and his supporters find themselves standing next to a geopolitical chessboard where US special interests are engaged in a game for influence and domination in a region on the other side of the planet – a game in which they are not participants, but spectators.
The Hill would also quote President Trump as saying:
“My original instinct was to pull out, and historically I like following my instincts, but all of my life I’ve heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office.”
Indeed – when one sits behind the desk in the Oval Office, presidents realize they are spokespeople not for voters, but for unelected corporate-financier interests on Wall Street. Withdrawing from wars that are about long-term efforts to establish and expand global hegemony are not decisions Wall Street would be expected to make – because Wall Street is the benefactor of the trillions being spent on such an endeavor.
For voters, they should realize that the only “vote” they have that actually counts is when they open their wallets after receiving their monthly paycheck, and decide to pay it either to local businesses to strengthen their communities, or to large multi-billion dollar multinational corporations who have hijacked their nation, their resources, and their destiny.
Tony Cartalucci is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
This article was originally published by New Eastern Outlook.
All images in this article are from the author.
August 27th, 2017 by Stephen Lendman
VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].
On Friday, the Trump administration escalated economic war on Venezuelan sovereign independence.
Since established in 1999, the nation’s Bolivarian social democracy was targeted for elimination. Washington wants fascist tyranny replacing it.
The geopolitical prize is gaining control of Venezuela’s huge oil resources, the world’s largest – the Trump administration waging political, economic and resource war to achieve its objective, maybe military intervention if current tactics fail.
By executive order on Friday, Trump imposed tough new illegal financial sanctions on Venezuela prohibiting:
Dealings in new debt with a maturity of longer than 90 days by, on behalf of, or for the benefit of PDVSA.
Dealings in new debt with a maturity of longer than 30 days by, on behalf of, or for the benefit of any other government or Venezuela entity aside from PDVSA.
Dealings in new equity issued by, on behalf of, or for the benefit of the Government of Venezuela, including PDVSA.
Transactions involving bonds issued by the Venezuelan government prior to the EO’s effective date.
Transactions involving dividend payments or other distributions of profits to the Venezuelan government by any of its owned or controlled entities.
Purchasing any securities from Venezuela other than offerings qualifying as new debt as described above.
Oil exports and imports aren’t affected. A White House press secretary statement repeated disinformation and Big Lies about President Nicolas Maduro’s government.
He’s no “dictator” as claimed. He doesn’t “deprive the Venezuelan people of food and medicine, imprison the democratically-elected opposition, and violently suppress freedom of speech.”
The democratically elected Constituent Assembly tasked with revising or rewriting the nation’s constitution, restoring order and preserving Bolivarian social democracy is constitutionally permitted. Its establishment “usurp(ed)” nothing.
Neocon Vice President Pence lied, claiming
“we’re seeing the tragedy of tyranny play out before our eyes.”
It’s headquartered in Washington, not Caracas.
Dark US forces don’t “stand with the people Venezuela.” US economic war on the country punishes them severely.
US economic sanctions often preceded military intervention. Trump earlier said
“(w)e have many options for Venezuela, including a possible military option if necessary” – igniting a firestorm of opposition from Latin American leaders strongly against war in the hemisphere.
Newly imposed sanctions are the toughest so far, intended to make Venezuela’s economy scream more than earlier, targeting the country’s financial sector, harming its ability to raise badly needed revenue.
In response, Maduro asked
“(c)an the world accept this?”
He urged solidarity worldwide against Trump’s hostile action, adding today “begins the stage of post-domination by the United States, with Venezuela again at the center of this struggle for dignity and liberation.”
He said Trump’s action is similar to decades of US blockade on Cuba, stressing it will fail the same way.
Most Venezuelan bonds are held by Western investors, mainly US ones. “What will they do with them now,” Maduro asked?
He invited US investors and companies buying Venezuelan oil to Caracas to discuss how best to respond to Trump’s hostile act.
Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza blasted Washington’s aim to dominate the hemisphere, stressing
“(w)e will never accept this. We are studying all measures that we can take in response to these sanctions.”
It’s time for Russia and China to defy Trump, announce strong support for Maduro’s government, provide economic aid to counter tough sanctions, let Washington know its actions won’t be tolerated.
Russian oil company Rosneft helped earlier by cooperating economically with Venezuela’s state-owned PDVSA.
PDVSA Gas, Isla de Margarita. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
In late July, both oil giants expanding strategic cooperation, including for developing and operating untapped Venezuelan hydrocarbon resources.
Rosneft acquired a small share of PDVSA, some Venezuelan oil sales made through the company, perhaps greater amounts ahead.
China relies on Venezuelan oil. Its interests are served by dealing with its independent government, free from US control. It’s important for Beijing to aid its ally in need.
Cuba survived over half a century of US blockade and hostile actions, short of military intervention after the failed April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.
So can Venezuela as long as Washington doesn’t wage hot war on the country.
It sovereign independent Bolivarian social democracy is vital to defend and preserve.
VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].
My newest book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”
http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html
Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.
August 27th, 2017 by Rachel Blevins
A bill that will allow homes to be searched without a warrant was passed with overwhelming support by the United States Congress, and signed into law by President Trump—and it happened with no media coverage and very little fanfare.
On the surface, House Joint Resolution 76 looks harmless. The title of the bill claims that its purpose is “Granting the consent and approval of Congress for the Commonwealth of Virginia, the State of Maryland, and the District of Columbia to enter into a compact relating to the establishment of the Washington Metrorail Safety Commission.”
“Whereas the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, an interstate compact agency of the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the State of Maryland, provides transportation services to millions of people each year, the safety of whom is paramount; Whereas an effective and safe Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority system is essential to the commerce and prosperity of the National Capital region; Whereas the Tri-State Oversight Committee, created by a memorandum of understanding amongst these 3 jurisdictions, has provided safety oversight of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority.”
The proposal for a safety commission to act as a wing of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority may sound logical, when its power includes thing such as the ability to “Adopt, revise, and distribute a written State Safety Oversight Program” and to “Review, approve, oversee, and enforce the adoption and implementation of WMATA’s Public Transportation Agency Safety Plan.”
However, there is one major red flag buried within the text of the bill that stems from the list of “powers” given to the Washington Metrorail Safety Commission, and it violates one of the basic tenets of the U.S. Constitution.
“In performing its duties, the Commission, through its Board or designated employees or agents, may: Enter upon the WMATA Rail System and, upon reasonable notice and a finding by the chief executive officer that a need exists, upon any lands, waters, and premises adjacent to the WMATA Rail System, including, without limitation, property owned or occupied by the federal government, for the purpose of making inspections, investigations, examinations, and testing as the Commission may deem necessary to carry out the purposes of this MSC Compact, and such entry shall not be deemed a trespass.”
The text gives the Commission the authority to enter property near the Metro Rail System “without limitation” and without a warrant, for the purpose of “making inspections, investigations, examinations, and testing.”
This clearly goes against the Fourth Amendment, which states that Americans’ rights “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause.”
When the bill was brought to a vote in the House of Representatives, there were only five Congressmen who voted against it: Representatives Justin Amash, a Republican from Michigan; Walter Jones, a Republican from North Carolina; Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky; Alex Mooney, a Republican from West Virginia; and Mark Sanford, a Republican from South Carolina.
“Only 5 of us voted against bill allowing govt to enter/search private property in parts of VA, MD & DC w/o warrant,” He wrote on Twitter.
Only 5 of us voted against bill allowing govt to enter/search private property in parts of VA, MD & DC w/o warrant. https://t.co/SVhTWqbPaB
— Justin Amash (@justinamash) July 18, 2017
This is not the first time Congress has quietly passed a bill that will take away some of the most basic rights from law-abiding citizens in the U.S., and it won’t be the last. One of the most important things to remember about this legislation is that it was ignored by the media, and while it may only affect the Washington D.C. metro area now, it could be laying the blueprint for future legislation across the country.
Featured image is from the U.S. Department of State.
August 27th, 2017 by Prof. John McMurtry
There has been endless commentary on Britain’s “Stay or Leave the EU” referendum and the narrow victory of the ‘Leave’ side which is being cemented into British government and history by the very near June 8 election.
It is worth noting that the original wording of the ‘Brexit’ referendum was (italics added) “Britain should remain in the EU – Yes or No”. Few observed that the framing of the Tory question appeals directly to the tidal wave of popular resentments that have built up against transnational trade treaties and mass immigration everywhere, Britain included. “Should remain” is re-set to “Leave” as the dominant choice in a negative feeling context
The visible movement of foreign-speaking cultures into everyday rural Britain for new benefits and low-wage competition with British workers has widely inflamed anti-passions, as anyone familiar with British culture knows. The near daily featuring of Islamic ‘terrorist attacks’ has stigmatized the EU system along with such continuous disorders as the torturous financial ruin of Greece.
Leave on the ballot in a mysteriously well-funded and media-captivated campaign triggered enough of a primordial fuck-EU sentiment that a very slim majority was won. It did not matter that false claims and demagogic showmen were given immense publicity in the Leave campaign in which the most important issues were completely out of the discussion.
Nor did it not matter that the Leave vote was mainly rural England, nor that remaining Scotland was thereby propelled into breaking up Great Britain itself. There were no editorials exposing the facts that the new-PM Theresa May had herself warned UK voters that Brexit was “dangerous” and could have seriously damaging effects on the economy, the security, and the survival of the United Kingdom. There was no media memory that she had said that leaving the EU would be “fatal for the Union with Scotland” and that she had formerly proclaimed “as Home Secretary [that] remaining a member of the European Union means we will be more secure from crime and terrorism”.
Nothing seemed to matter except the new fait accompli of Britain ending its half-century partnership in the European Union on the flimsy basis of a referendum for which the overwhelming majority of citizens did not vote or approve.
Minority Brexit Vote = Massive De-Regulation of Finance and Food
No-one seemed to report that this Leave vote itself (17, 410, 742) represented only 37% of the total electorate (46, 500, 001) as enumerated by the Electoral Commission. No mainstream media featured the 12, 948, 018 voters left out of the count, over two-thirds the number of those who voted Leave. Only one source clearly reported that those whose votes were not cast in the single June 23 event voted 2:1 against leaving once the results were known.
Most deeply and unspeakably, there was no hint of media attention to the first question of forensic inquiry, cui bono or who stands to gain most? Even up to June 2, no-one has joined the dots that show the Leave EU referendum and vote has been an ideal political bludgeon to force Britain’s departure from the historical European Union just as its long-evolved Directives are in the process of enforcing policies and regulations on all-powerful London private banks and finance, and just as long developed environmental and green policies on industrial Big Agriculture and GMO-contaminating crops and fake foods remained unchanged by all the captive-state negotiations seeking to pull their teeth.
What no-one has evidently understood is that Brexit ensures that the very same dominant financialization forces that have hollowed out Britain’s working people, the productive economy and its green environment since 1979 are now freed from any EU regulation or accountability just as effective new financial oversight mechanisms as well as organic agricultural and food policies are due to be further implemented, monitored and enforced.
This is the undertow historical meaning of the near-hate campaign that has been waged for endless months on the ‘EU bureaucracy’ larded in selective anecdotes without principled substance.
Such is the standard method of big-money campaigns against public regulation for the public life good. If more private profit is not fixed into the new regime, it is relentlessly attacked and denounced as ‘suffocating red tape’ and a ‘ruinous burden on business’. This is the signature demand and condition of transnational corporate rule.
Cui Bono? Remembering the Past to Now
The rootless global money party centred in London has long run Britain with flagrant Thatcherite governance for transnational banks and corporations overthrowing the post-War labour-capital settlement in Britain.
Big London money backed by the Murdoch press was then consolidated in Blair’s ‘New Labour’ capitulation to corporate power through Gordon Brown Labour-light to the election of financier-scion David Cameron. PM Cameron then took the Brexit spectacle as the occasion to resign to avoid, insiders say, the outing of his unexposed financial fraud as PM.
PM Theresa May
Now the government of Great Britain is in the hands of a secretively advised Theresa May. Although as Home Secretary she was unequivocally anti-Brexit, something happened. Despite the very dubious results of the leave-the-EU referendum, she reversed field from support of the EU once in the PM office, and was instantly re-branded as full-square behind Leave as “Brexit is Brexit” and “the irreversible decision of the British people”.
Now-PM May has led official erasure of the fact that the winning vote was by an (official Electoral Commission tally) was only by a 37 % minority of voters. In the same vein of memory-hole command, PM May and her backers ignored the LSE scientific survey reporting that non-voters polled 2-to-1 against Leave once they learned the outcome. The reigning protocol, as with Trump with whom she became bonded in ‘the special relationship’ of the US and the UK that runs British politics, is to annihilate life-protective regulations as new freedom, and enforce follow a bigger corporate tax-cut than Reagan or Trump to a 10% level.
Where did the mandate come from for such radical hollowing out of government capacities to govern on behalf of the common interests of society, citizens and their environment? There has been no mandate, but only a one-off 37%- popular referendum result with no legally binding force until it is locked into the ‘Great Repeal Act’ and June 8 UK election to legitimate it with no public understanding of the meaning.
The die had been cast behind the scenes. A 37% vote against the considered will of the majority to stay in the EU was going to be used as a no-alternative mandate for massive deregulation and de-taxation of big money powers across the UK with public debate on these issues or even recognition of them. An Orwellian erasure of facts and totalitarian silencing beneath conscious choice has gone to days before the finish without anyone evidently knowing it.
The PR cover-up ever since the ever more lavishly suited Theresa May became PM has been to brand her office in Maggie-2 resonance as a resolute and honourable defender of the democratic will of the British people and an anchor of stability to steer Britain’s new future.
PM May and advisers have accordingly changed the 2017 general election –she had committed to 2020 before her behind-the-scenes management took over – to an ad hominem vote over her character as PM, not about the radical de-regulation of finance, the environment and the tax code to, in essence, serve the rich while dispossessing the great majority of their labour, social and environmental protections and rights.
It is the sort of action from the top that the original Magna Carta stopped to regulate an out-of-control King, only now the unaccountable ruler Lord is bank and corporate money profit seeking even more unequal and total rights over the soon to be rump England. The money party cares nothing for nation including n Great Britain except as it fits their divide-and-rule agenda over the trillions of dollars they control daily in play for more asset control over the world.
Now firmly in the supreme office with cabinet and media support, PM May’s office has masterfully managed transition to doing the opposite of what she formerly stood for. The Brexit program for private money control over public forces and rules of how society is to live has remained unflagged by even the Opposition and radical left voices. None see through to the ultimate that the ruling party behind political scenes, nor to the ultimate fact that it is not economically efficient or even productively capitalist.
Its hidden financialization forces and anti-labour-and-ecological agenda of radical de-regulation are, in principle, counter-productive, parasitic and self-multiplying against the common interest of its organic, social and environmental life hosts.
The Unasked Question Who Wins Now?
On the PR face of it, Theresa May is the clergyman’s daughter soundly risen to PM office. But she is, more deeply, the perfect foil behind which to sneak a Brexit end to the still proceeding threat of EU regulation of the most life-destructive private d money powers of Britain.
Brexit is in sinister parallel with the life-blind deregulatory forces of the Trump/Republican forces letting the ruling money party run free to become multiply richer while stripping scientific environmental regulations, monitoring and prevention of cumulatively ecocidal externalities of global financialization and environmental toxification.
The difference is that the English financial and factory-food lords are far stealthier and unseen in their demonstrable strategic plan to Leave the EU because it leads the world in scientific method, life-protective regulation and implementation. No-one seems yet to recognise this in the UK, unlike the rising US awareness of at least the Trump-Republican threat to the US and global environment and – more specifically – the Environmental Protection Agency and even the century-evolved and world-leading US national parks.
“Making America great again” excludes the life ground.
When PM Theresa May now hard-presses Leave the EU even when formerly opposed to it – most of all because of its weakening of Britain’s defences against terrorism – who can doubt something has re-motivated her to reverse the agenda to what she now leads.
People paying tribute to the victims of the Manchester bombing (Source: VOA News)
The tell-tale avoidance of truth is seen when she lashes Jeremy Corbyn for even connecting the terrorist operation of Manchester back to the facts of Britain’s war-waging in poor foreign nations from which the suicide bombers come.
“Many experts, including professionals in our intelligence and security services,” Labour leader Corbyn observes, “have pointed to the connections between wars our government has supported or fought in other countries, such as Libya, and terrorism here at home”.
Joining the dots is taboo.
In such closure to facts, PM May implicitly justifies government actions commands Leave the EU on the basis of the legitimacy of past state actions which are war-criminal under international law, and – beneath notice again – stopped Libya specifically from its gold-dinar Bank of Africa plan based on oil revenues to lend to other African countries without the debt enslavement long coveted by London-connected private financing of states (including the British government itself).
Who do these actions of repression of war-criminal facts and seizure of other people’s assets serve?
In this light, consider PM May’s capacity to carry Leave the EU as PM compared to its most charismatic leader on the ground, Boris Johnson. Although he has along been London finance’s man as Mayor as well as leader of the Brexit campaign, the master plan cannot go forward with him any further because, as a known liar and bounder, he is completely unfit as a credible finisher in PM office.
Those who lead here know very well how to rule behind effective public relations to keep their control acceptable on the public stage– as Wall Street has done with one elected US president after another. This is why the known libertine and shameless US-born self-promoter Boris Johnson was – however charming and useful – stopped for the job of ‘Prime Minister of Great Britain’. He might indeed provoke across parties into reaction against pushing a onetime minority poll into a reversal of modern British history which took away the EU passports and future opportunities of England’s young professional classes.
There is much to cover up here that needs a steady woman ruler with a better manner and more socially just in bearing. So Prime Minister Theresa May it was. Thus the sole regulatory powers in place keeping the private financial superpower of London in check against another 2008 emptying of the public treasury and pensioners’ incomes – not to mention the deregulation de-greening of England by an industrial factory frankenfood system – escaped the public’s attention.
To credibly cover up what nobody knows while believing in her mission is made-to- order for PM May, and so the Trump-like super de-regulation and de-tax agenda has gone all the way to days before the June 8 British general election with far less fuss.
Boris was meanwhile made Foreign Minister to insult the EU onto their heels in England’s revolution backwards for the unproductively and villainously rich. Few noticed that all these political shenanigans served a unifying function. The new EU financial regulations on London’s big banks could not be implemented, monitored or enforced with Brexit stopping it all in its tracks. EU Organic Agriculture Regulations protecting the environment and natural ecosystems from genetic contaminations and industrial clearances of green life was simultaneously terminated with hardly any notice.
That foods themselves are released from safe and scientific EU standards has remained a non-issue. For poignant household example, British demands for hygiene standards to be changed to US rules so as to permit chicken meat sanitized only by chlorinated water, to allow beef raised with growth hormones, and to free genetically engineered substitute foods or GMO’s from production and label restrictions have all been stopped dead by Brexit.
With London finance as well as industrial agriculture and false foods freed from evolved norms of responsibility to the common life interest long evolved, tested and instituted within Britain and the European Union, the most predatory and counter-productive forces in Britain are allowed to run free with no public notice before the June 8 general election.
EU labour rights (eg., 48-hour week), human rights (e.g., maternity allowances), financial supervision of any independent kind (as we have seen), and virtually all environmental standards developed beyond the US model, all are discontinued by the Great Repeal Act.
With no evolved EU standards of economic, social or environmental protection legally obligatory and enforceable any more, the June 8 election will lock it all into the future with no way back that can be reasonably relied on without electoral reversal in a few days.
With all the historical bearings and force of precedent, independent adjudication and law left behind by Leave, a US-UK deregulation and de-taxation orgy can proceed as ‘democratic’ if PM May wins the election. This is why PM Theresa May came out holding hands with Donald Trump on his first visit to Britain.
Demonstrating its confidence in the liberated financial rule of Britain to come as the Great Repeal Bill proceeded, Goldman-Sachs simultaneously committed to a $500-million headquarters in central London.
London Finance with Goldman-Sachs Escapes All EU Financial Regulation
The very definition of the EU Central Bank’s mandate to investigate and supervise “the business model, risk management, and capital, liquidity and funding” of private-profit bank and financial institutions including London (via a rigorous Supervisory Review and Evaluation Process by elite teams of professional accountants) is anathema to the long unregulated US-UK financial system.
London finance like Wall Street is very used to increasingly devouring public treasuries, pensions and savings to become 40% and rising of the entire economy. They have done this through the global financial meltdown they have caused to multiply their money-demand control of the planet in a myriad of algebraically concealed ways with no oversight supervision, no independently verifiable standards, and no real reforms.
The European Central Bank has finally moved to institute commons standards across the board, what was done after the Great Depression but has been reversed since. Private London-Wall Street banks and finance will do anything to stop this regulatory reform to protect their many trillions of assets and liabilities running free to continue unimpeded in the greatest unearned and still rising transfer of wealth to the rich in history.
The economic stakes are unprecedentedly high, and so the silencing of any notice of the reforms to regulate them has in the UK been total in the mass media and even in Labour policy recognition. Consider the vast treasure involved. “Existing financial rules” in London banks have been officially judged by independent experts as “woefully inadequate”, and all of London’s foreign currency trading (globally dominant and largest in Euros) remains unregulated and untaxed.
Vast investment banking, cross-border sales of securities, Euro liquidity to clearing houses, non-performing loan recognition, coverage and write-offs also escape independent regulation by Brexit and the Great Repeal Act.
Revenue-cap norms on skyrocketed financial pay to executives, standards of internal audit, deferred tax assets and credits masked as capital, capital adequacy, liquidity requirements and ability to pay liabilities are all also blocked by post-referendum laws.
Boris Johnson
Unnoticed too are overdue binding norms on regulating the competence of new members of management and key function holders (say, Boris Johnson) and oversights of collective investments in transferable securities by captive states and unilateral tax advantages gained by their public issue and sale for profit.
In sum, the Capital Requirements Directive and Regulations are all set on fire at once by the Great Repeal of European Union obligations now to be locked in by the June 8 election.
What are boasted as ‘elegant and sophisticated innovations of investment instruments’ and so on, are in fact systemic methods of fraudulent diversion with no qualified, independent accounting authority allowed into check their schemes fixed to maximally profit powerful private financial dealers against transparency and liability, elected government accountability, and the common interests of everyone else as investors or lives on Earth.
The Great Silencing
This whole joining of fateful dots has been covered in silence. Big London bank and finance has so far got away with veiled abolition of all the overdue EU financial rules, monitoring and enforcement to regulate them after the 2008 financial meltdown in which an estimated $26 trillion of public money has swallowed by the transnational private banking system led by Wall Street and London.
In faint contrast, there has been slight exposure of the Brexit reverse of evolved EU environment protections, monitoring sciences, directive laws, and feed-back enforcement processes.
But here too any information has occurred only in news and journal fragments, with no connections to the EU’s life-protective binding rules on industrial farming, GMO products, and industrial chemical pollutions and toxins.
For example, you will not see in any government press release or corporate mass media any mention of the European Union’s world-leading environmental protection by its Organic Agriculture Regulations setting out “the principles, aims and rules of food production and labelling”. No-one mentions in the media or government that these regulations are precisely what are eliminated from monitoring, feedback and enforcement in Britain once the Great Repeal Act is legitimated by the June 8 election.
All binding EU regulations protecting life and life conditions are, instead, eliminated from discussion and sweepingly attacked as “Brussels red tape” and “bureaucratic nonsense”.
In similar vein, there is a white-out of pre-and-post-Brexit reference to EU’s historic and definitive Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH). It is by far the most advanced environmental and human health protection system that is scientifically validated in existing government and the world. But it too is made invisible in the ruling discussions and debates, including George Monbiot who has said nothing on any of these issues, the limit of existing mass-media journalism.
The big-money Tory state and corporate media behind the PM Maggie-May front of the Great Repeal have effectively expunged any mention or discussion of any of these revolutionary steps backwards of Brexit, with again the pre-conscious collaboration of the corporate press and opinion makers.
The jam-it-through strategy has been shrouded throughout in the pervasive image of PM May vs. hapless Corbyn Labour. This is the only issue raised for voters in the June 8 election.
The global media too have consciously or unconsciously collaborated in making this most important election in British history in financial and environmental terms, a non-issue.
Yet even all this has not been enough for the great cover-up still in motion. There has been a Lobbying Act to stop informed NGO’s – but not any of the London-based big transnational banks and corporations – from lobbying before the June 8 election, a new law which has frightened them into silence with Greenpeace already convicted and fined.
What Does Not Fit the Life-Blind Program?
One underlying principle governs beneath the political scenes, speeches and choral commentaries on stage. It also governs the UK-US ‘special relationship’ and Wall Street-London axis at the same time, in different ways:
De-fund and de-regulate all life-protective laws, agencies and enforcements that cost public and corporate money to subsidize instead the unproductive or counter-productive private money party’s multiplying growth.
The method is the same at base. Private Wall-Street and London banks behind the scenes print the world’s money by debt issue for maximum profit to the top while producing nothing but multiplying their private money demand over all that exists – thus the term, ‘the masters of the universe’ .
Jeremy Corbyn’s back-to-the basics Labour movement is hopeful in that it is not bound like the war-criminal Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ to the crocodile Murdoch media and big corporations controlling the agenda via governments committees and PFI’s. And this is why Corbyn’s grass-roots leadership is pervasively belittled in the dominant media while historic stakes of the June 8 election itself have been systematically blinkered out.
Yet the stakes keep getting higher as June 8 approaches. As I write, the Trump administration has just withdrawn from the Paris Accord on ‘climate change’.
There is far more involved here than is spoken on the public stage in official euphemism of ‘climate change’. In fact, hydrological-cycle destabilization is the baseline force of world life and life means destruction. But again the unifying concept is not allowed into public discussion.
The connected global forces of life and life means destruction are screened out by the established framework of meaning. As these forces released from what modest public regulation has developed to protect organic, social and ecological life systems, the systemic despoliation of global life-organisation becomes only worse in running down biodiverse energy capacities on all levels to carry evolving life on Earth forward rather than backwards into cumulative planetary degradation and death.
The ultimate screen against the reality of these global forces of life destruction and pollution continuing is ignore-ance of all of them.
The never-mentioned political items include the cover-up of all the momentous issues in the campaign before ‘Brexit’ and after it to today, the clear and transient minority vote for Leave the EU in a largely apathetic and cynical referendum with no binding force.
Then WHAM , the shock doctrine in construction led by mountebanks, privately financed without a question from outside, and no investigation at all into the political plate-shift to pure lies and show as better images to convert England into a side-show money machine with tentacles of debt, seize and short everywhere with no instituted independent life-protective law and norms secure against the carcinomic private debt and money control system.
The Great Repeal Act of them and the early unscheduled election to cement it in as legitimate before the public wakes up tell us the meaning.
All of these are giant steps in the greatest system-wide reverse and financial boondoggle by far in modern English-speaking economic history and social-ecological evolution.
There is No Alternative
The re-grounded Labour movement does the best it can for the working people and dispossessed across Great Britain, the only organised institution to do so in the country. But this too is only ridiculed and condescended to in the corporate press even as its people message gets through
In recent days, Labour has stood for returning the looted national railway system and other privatized utilities to a productive public direction, for taxing the rich more to fund falling public services, and for connecting Britain’s terrorist problem to its armed-force actions in other countries from which the terrorists come.
This has given a spike in the polls to Corbyn labour. Yet still the profound major issues of ‘Brexit’ itself have been covered over. The dots of the essentially phoney Leave the EU referendum are not yet joined. The holus-bolus financial and environmental deregulation by the Brexit scheme remains undefined. The basic outline for the historic hoax has remained undetected into June.
The de-regulation coup and de-taxation revolution have remained invisible behind PM May’s save-the-day public image over the hapless Corbyn people as the impossible alternative.
“There is no alternative” has been reconstituted into the 2017 election. The underlying driver to cement the unaccountable private money power demanding ever more into a de-regulation frenzy remains unnamed. The profitable despoliation of life means and organisation at every level is what it stands for.
Not even the master slogan of ‘Brexit’ is deconstructed as a public relations mask of the greatest backward move in life-protective norms in historical record: and all to serve life-means destroying or unproductive money-party powers that are fronted by photogenic leaders at all levels.
The rationally self-maximizing growth of private-profit power over all existing assets is built into the meta program. But it is not comprehended. It exactly follows the inner logic of ruling economic, military and strategic game theory in models and calculations, but there is no making of the connections to link across the simultaneous phenomena which are life blindly forming the future.
At the pop level, it is the objective correlative of the fictional Matrix.
Summary
The June 8 British election is set to lock in the big-money coup against long evolved regulations and norms protecting human, social and environmental life. The crisis is incomprehension of the meaning.
A corrosive cynicism of EU capacity to govern for the public interest (Greece the continuous demonstration), media-debased public perceptions suppressing the historic stakes involved, a US presidency speaking out of both sides of its mouth, NATO-supported Nazism in Ukraine as Western freedom, and other degenerate trends have not been connected in their unifying pattern – within which UK money-party reversal of post-War socio-economic evolution is taking place.
The conversion of organic, social and ecological life organisation into more money demand for fewer is now being rapidly instituted into place. Britain’s June 8 snap election is the stamp of money-power rule as legitimate in the founding nation of English-speaking civilisation.
PM Theresa May is the political face of the great leap backwards once certain that she will win with a 24% poll lead over Labour, now closing fast. So far the ruling politics of one distracting spectacle after another has worked. Yet there is a growing intuition of the fast slippage of social and ecological life order into UK chaos with no human centre of gravity in charge. The British public may still see through to the underlying radical program of government de-regulation, de-taxation, and de-funding to further empower the financial looting and life-despoiling forces at work.
Joining the dots behind the scenes reveals the emerging plot of meaning. The Great Brexit:
(1) stops the EU Central Bank Regulators and Supervisors from finally checking out the models, risk culture methods, inadequate reserves and so on of big London banks involved including Goldman-Sachs in the 2007-8 financial collapse, and
(2) eliminates the binding force of all the long-evolved and scientific EU regulations structured to prevent, in particular, the corporate industrial food system’s polluting and despoiling US-led methods undermining the British people’s health and environment.
Brexit’s Great Repeal Act and PM May’s snap June election is the only way to achieve (1) and (2) without negotiation or exposing public issue.
London financial accountability has most of all been silenced as an issue. Its growing trillions of nano-second fast-dealing to enrich the already rich by unregulated methods and calculations remain immune from any independent oversight while the trepid Dodd-Frank legislation in the US is stripped out at the same time.
Similarly, the very aims and principles of the binding, monitored and still developing Organic Agriculture Directive are anathema to Britain’s US-led Big Agriculture and Food lobbies, not only around GMO restrictions – which US trade authorities and British GMO ‘science’ have made war on for over 15 years – but around every EU restriction on pesticides and herbicides to clear-cutting environments for monocultural factory methods to commodity motor rackets and pollutions to norms of licensed “food quality” in the corporate market.
The very governing EU objectives of “biodiversity”, “animal protection”, and “organic natural systems and cycles” are a threat to Big Food production and products when attached to exactly defined, inspected and enforceable life standards. Long used to pervasive public relations sales pitches of “feeding the world” in place of accountable, life-protective environmental and nutrition standards, this very powerful British lobby is next to London Big Finance as the covertly moving major profit-first force behind the Brexit coup d’etat.
Both are in principle life-blind in their mechanical financial models. Both are governed only by self-maximizing private money sequencing in exponential growth with no life-coherent ground or norms to stop their march across the world through organic, social and ecological life hosts. Both have led the Great Repeal of developed EU life standards beneath the radar of media coverage, parliamentary diagnosis, and academic silos.
It is not an exaggeration to observe that the founding nation of the English-speaking world chooses more than its own life future in the June 8 2017 general election.
Dr. John McMurtry is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and author of the three-volume study, Philosophy and World Problems of UNESCO’s Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS). His most recent book is The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: from Crisis to Cure.
August 27th, 2017 by Eric Toussaint
Featured image: Yanis Varoufakis (Source: CC – Flickr – Marc Lozano)
In his latest book, Adults in the Room, Yanis Varoufakis gives us his version of the events that led to the Tsipras government’s shameful capitulation in July 2015. It essentially analyses the period 2009-2015, though it makes incursions into earlier periods.
With this voluminous work (550 pages), Yanis Varoufakis shows that he is a gifted narrator. At times he succeeds in moving the reader. His direct and vivid style makes it easy to follow events.
This initial article will cover the first four chapters of a book that comprises 17 in all. It deals with the proposals Varoufakis made before he became a member of the government in January 2015.
From the author’s demonstration, we can clearly see that his behaviour and the politico-economic orientation he defended contributed to the disaster. Yanis Varoufakis clearly claims to have played a major role in working out the strategy adopted by a handful of Syriza leaders — Alexis Tsipras, Yanis Dragasakis, and Nikkos Pappas, essentially — before their victory in the January 2015 election.
Varoufakis does not plead guilty. He is convinced that had Tsipras actually taken the orientation he proposed and which Tsipras had agreed to late in 2014, the result would not have been defeat for the Greek people.
But, contrary to the conviction Varoufakis expresses, an attentive reading of his book leads to the conclusion that he contributed to that defeat.
Varoufakis explains how he gradually convinced Tsipras, Pappas, and Dragasakis not to follow the orientation adopted by Syriza in 2012, then in 2014. He explains that along with them, he worked out a new orientation that was not discussed within Syriza and was different from the one Syriza ran on during the January 2015 campaign. And that orientation was to lead, at best, to failure, and at worst to capitulation.
The measures defended by Varoufakis
Varoufakis sums up the content of the agreement he made with Alexis Tsipras, Dragasakis and Pappas in November 2014 during a meeting in Tsipras’s apartment. The meeting had been organized by the Tsipras-Pappas-Dragasakis trio to convince Varoufakis to agree to become Finance Minister in the government that would shortly be formed by Syriza.
“Alexis then delivered his offer, unassumingly and under Dragasakis’s watchful eye. ‘If we win, and there is no doubt we shall, we want you to become finance minister.’” |1|
Varoufakis sums up six priority measures he proposed to Tsipras, Dragasakis, and Pappas and to which they agreed. What these measures implied was that Greece would remain in the Eurozone.
Varoufakis writes: “I felt the need to recapitulate one more time what we had agreed our aims to be:”
Varoufakis states clearly that these measures were to substitute for the measures in the Thessaloniki Programme Tsipras had presented in September 2014. Here is what he writes about that Programme:
Taking Winston Churchill as a positive reference in a public criticism of the Thessaloniki Programme took some doing. It was Churchill who organized the bloody repression of the demonstrations and strikes that shook Greece in late 1944 when, under the Yalta agreements, Britain took control of the country by repressing the very forces that had freed the country from the Nazi occupation.
Let us examine the measures as Varoufakis outlines them:
1. Debt restructuring
Varoufakis proposes restructuring the debt without reducing the debt stock. This first, very moderate measure depended on the good will of the Troika. In fact it was mere wishful thinking. Without recourse to a suspension of payment, combined with other unilateral acts including conducting an audit of the debt (with citizen participation), it was impossible to force the creditors to accept a real radical reduction of the debt. Varoufakis’s main proposal regarding restructuring the debt, as he says himself, is in line with his “Modest Proposal for Resolving the Euro Crisis.” Putting that proposal, which consisted in mutualising the public debts of the Eurozone, into practice would have required a joint decision by the governments of the Zone to ease public finances and abandon austerity policies. This is technically possible, and is politically desirable from the point of view of boosting the economy and creating a new neo-Keynesian social contract. But despite the moderate nature of the proposal, it is totally incompatible with the policies of the majority of the governments concerned. One would have to be extremely naive to think that the government leaders in place in most European capitals could be favourable to a Keynesian stimulus. Basing a solution on such a hypothesis shows a total lack of awareness of the power balance and the motivations of European policymakers.
With regard to debt, Varoufakis’s most recent version of the proposal, issued in 2014-2015, does not call for questioning or reducing the debt owed to the IMF and to the private creditors, but rather for making an arrangement with the European partners on the following points:
1. Our government would issue new perpetual bonds, with the same face value as the bonds the ECB owned, bearing a small interest rate but with no expiry or redemption date ;
2. Existing debt obligations to Europe’s bailout fund would be swapped with new Greek government thirty-year bonds, again of the same value as the existing debt (so no formal haircut) but with two provisions: first, annual payments were to be suspended until the country’s income recovered to beyond a certain threshold; second, the rate of interest would be linked to the rate of growth of the Greek economy. |4|
Comment: These two proposals were just as unfeasible politically as was the idea of mutualising debt.
Moreover, Varoufakis’s entire proposal regarding debt was and is unacceptable from a left-wing point of view because it presupposes evacuating any debate as to the legality and legitimacy of the debts whose repayment is being demanded of Greece. Varoufakis’s proposal is in direct opposition to the position adopted by Syriza in 2012, which was to unilaterally suspend repayment and conduct an audit of the debt (I will return to this point later). Further — and this is important — in his proposal Varoufakis does not explicitly include the abandonment of the conditions imposed by the creditors.
Varoufakis himself recognises that his proposal is extremely moderate:
Comment: It is evident that this approach was also explicitly in opposition to a legitimate refusal to continue repayment of an odious debt.
2. “A primary surplus of no more than 1.5 per cent of national income and no new austerity measures.”
Comment: Committing to a primary surplus of 1.5% is totally incompatible with a true policy of stimulation of the economy, public and private employment, and purchasing power for the mass of the population. In Greece, a left-wing government which wishes to actually implement a stimulus policy and respond to a humanitarian crisis must apply a policy of deficit spending over a period of several years and refuse to secure a primary surplus.
3. Wide-ranging reductions in sales and business tax rates
Concerning this measure — which Varoufakis sums up as follows: “This would require sharp reductions in VAT and the corporate tax rate in order to re-energize the private sector” — he cites a question from Tsipras:
Comment: Promising an undifferentiated reduction in corporate taxes is simply incompatible with a politics of the Left. Tax rates must be increased for large corporations, and the increase enforced. But there is no reason why the tax rates on small companies can’t be lowered at the same time. In any case, the belief that reducing corporate taxes will increase corporations’ contribution to revenues has never been demonstrated, and is more liberal incantation than reasoned argument.
4. Strategic privatizations under conditions that preserve labour rights and boost investment
Varoufakis says:
Comment: Whereas Syriza was fighting to put an end to privatisations and to renationalise a group of companies that had been privatised, Varoufakis — as indeed would be his practice once he became Minister — was favourable to the continuation of certain privatisations. This attitude condemned the government to submission to the major corporations, and in particular to foreign capital. The effect was to reduce the public authorities to impotence.
5. Creation of a development bank
“Fifth, the creation of a development bank that would use remaining public assets as collateral to generate a domestic investment drive, and whose dividends would be channelled into public pension funds.” Varoufakis proposes the creation of a rump development bank as a consolation prize in exchange for the privatisations and the transfer of the Greek banks into the hands of the foreign creditors (see Proposal 6).
Varoufakis writes:
Comment: Varoufakis presents the creation of a public development bank in order to wash down the bitter pill of Proposals 4 and 6, which are in total contradiction with a left-wing strategy. Measure 4 consists in continuing the privatisations and Measure 6 in relinquishing the power the Greek public authorities still had over the Greek banks. Measure 5 served as a lure to make it appear as though the public authorities were going to set up a true public development instrument.
6. “Transferring bank shares and management to the European Union.” (sic!)
Varoufakis describes the idea as being “that these bankrupt banks be placed under the management and ownership of the EU. …this was an extraordinarily challenging proposal for a left-wing party that tended if anything towards nationalizing the banking sector.”
Comment: The Greek state was the principal shareholder of all the Greek banks and Syriza’s position was that the public authorities should actually exercise their power over the banks. In proposing to Tsipras, Pappas, and Dragasakis that the shares owned by the Greek public authorities should be transferred to the EU, Varoufakis was making an additional — and potentially tragic — step towards the complete abandonment of sovereignty.
After summing up these six proposals that he claims were accepted by Tsipras-Pappas-Dragasakis, Varoufakis comes to the strategy a Syriza government should bring to bear in negotiating with the EU. He explains that if the EU decided to directly sabotage the government, the ECB would do the dirty work. It would cut off the cash flow to the Greek banks and require them to shut their doors, as was done in March 2013 in Cyprus, according to Varoufakis.
Varoufakis says that Tsipras-Pappas-Dragasakis agreed to respond in the following manner:
I will return to this issue of negotiating strategy in a forthcoming article in which I will discuss the period that followed the elections in January 2015.
Varoufakis tells us that following the meeting with the Tsipras-Pappas-Dragasakis trio, he accepted the position of Finance Minister. Dragasakis, for his part, would occupy the post of Deputy Prime Minister and would directly supervise three key ministries, including Finance.
Eric Toussaint is a historian and political scientist who completed his Ph.D. at the universities of Paris VIII and Liège, is the spokesperson of the CADTM International, and sits on the Scientific Council of ATTAC France. He is the author of Bankocracy(2015); The Life and Crimes of an Exemplary Man (2014); Glance in the Rear View Mirror. Neoliberal Ideology From its Origins to the Present, Haymarket books, Chicago, 2012 (see here), etc. See his bibliography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89ric_Toussaint He co-authored World debt figures 2015 with Pierre Gottiniaux, Daniel Munevar and Antonio Sanabria (2015); and with Damien Millet Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank: Sixty Questions, Sixty Answers, Monthly Review Books, New York, 2010. Since the 4th April 2015 he is the scientific coordinator of the Greek Truth Commission on Public Debt.
Translated by Snake Arbusto in collaboration with Vicki Briault
This article was originally published by CADTM.
Notes
|1| Yanis Varoufakis, Adults in the Room, Bodley Head, London, 2017, p. 98.
|2| Ibid., p. 102.
|3| Ibid., p. 88-89.
|4| This citation and all the following ones are from Chapter 4.
August 27th, 2017 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark
Featured image: Former Deputy Assistant to the US President, Sebastian Gorka (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Troubling times, indeed, if we are noting the ecstasy of Wall Street traders at the departure of a White House official. What troubles the financiers and banksters would surely delight Main Street. But this was not any ordinary cheer, nor ordinary celebration. It was August 7, 2017, and the White House had bled another casualty. Steve Bannon, the key strategist behind Trumpism, was on his way out, to be assuming duties at the shock news agency that had made his name.
As he explained in an interview with The Economist,
“You’re the enemy. You support a radical idea, free trade. I mean it, that’s a radical idea.”[1]
Hence the cheering from those diligent worshippers of Mammon.
On Friday, President Donald Trump’s Deputy Assistant Sebastian Gorka followed, claiming a resignation that was then considered by an unnamed White House official to be a non-resignation. As with everything coming out of the Trump administration, such an account was disputed: who, it seemed, was faking it on this occasion?
One thing that Gorka is probably not faking is where he will be heading: returning with resplendent ideological glory to the old Breitbart News that some argue started the Trump revolution. There, he hopes to reunite with Bannon.
The turn of events this August has been telling for the ideologues, who at least could claim some measure of control over the opening phases of the administration. For Gorka, concern centred on the Afghanistan strategy, which suggested more of the same, lacking strategic focus let alone definable goals. Rather than extricating himself from the mire, the president seemed to be backing a longer, more continuous engagement.
“I realised after the president’s speech this week on Afghanistan that he [hasn’t] been well served.”
Gorka elaborated upon his reasons for departing in a letter of consternation to the President, reproduced in parts in The Federalist.[2] “Regrettably, outside yourself, the individuals who most embodied and represented the policies that will ‘Make America Great Again’, have been internally countered, systematically removed, or undermined in recent months.”
The prickling language is classic vanguardism turned rear guard action: the slighted revolutionary who can do better work outside the establishment than within it because the dream has drifted:
“[G]iven recent events, it is clear to me that forces that do not support the MAGA promise are – for now – ascendant within the White House. As a result, the best and most effective way I can support you, Mr President, is from outside the People’s House.”
What, then, will Gorka be doing from without? Presumably what he did when Major General Matthew C. Horner Chair at Marine Corps University, in addition to wearing the Breitbart News cap: refocus the attack on the global bogeyman.
This threat is less a man than a phenomenon, an ideology in religious, theocratic visage: Islamic fundamentalism. “The fact that those who drafted and approved the speech [on Afghanistan] removed any mention of Radical Islam or radical Islamic terrorism proves that a crucial element of your presidential campaign has been lost”.
It was Gorka who managed to find a berth in the Trump administration to express his own binary view of the world, one simple and ultimately simplistic. From satanic communism, the threat moved to Islam.
There was never any perceived need on Gorka’s part to update and re-adjust his cultural apparatus (he shows little interest in understanding ground conditions, social structures, language), the ideologue in need or re-skilling for the modern battle. Such world views are immaculately transferable tickets, commies and towel heads seen as part of the same anti-civilisational viciousness. To combat them, Gorka would project a mirrored fundamentalism of his own, one fashioned from the toolkit of revanchist nationalism.
There is no greater principle of creation than chaos, but the Trump administration has shown that too much chaos results in inertia, or at the very least, a form of habituated, neutralising destructiveness between the combatants.
Ever since Sean Spicer fled the halls of mayhem, he has been duly succeeded by the hired and the fired. With all this bloodletting, it has been easy to forget the relevance of the Democrats to the broader debates, or that of any self-proclaimed progressive forces.
With the departure of each ideologue, cheers are registered. Farhana Khera, executive director of Muslim Advocates, relished a parting shot.
“Good riddance to Sebastian Gorka. Muslim Advocates has vocally advocated for his ouster from the very beginning, because, even in a White House crawling with white supremacists, Gorka stood out for his consistent and lifelong commitment to anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic causes.”[3]
The GOP functionaries, for whom Trump never had much time for, have been banished. The ideologues have been whisked out, many (like Bannon) feeling that influence has a lesser measure of effect than power. Even the practical “can do” men like the departed Mooch (Anthony Scaramucci), who pride themselves in avoiding the ideologues when they aren’t squashing them, live on borrowed time. No one, it seems, is safe in this self-cannibalising environment.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: [email protected]
Notes
August 27th, 2017 by Robert Parry
Despite the chaos and ugliness of the past seven months, President Trump has finally begun to turn U.S. foreign policy away from the neoconservative approach of endless war against an ever-expanding roster of enemies.
This change has occurred largely behind the scenes and has been obscured by Trump’s own bellicose language, such as his vow to “win” in Afghanistan, and his occasional lashing out with violence, such as his lethal Tomahawk missile strike on a Syrian airfield.
Some Trump advisers also have downplayed the current shift because it may fuel the Democrats’ obsession with Russia-gate as a much-desired excuse to impeach Trump. Every peaceful move that Trump makes is called a sop to Russia and thus an excuse to reprise the dubious allegations about Russia somehow helping to elect him.
Yet, despite these external obstacles and Trump’s own erratic behavior, he has remained open to unconventional alternatives to what President Obama once criticized as the Washington “playbook,” i.e. favoring military solutions to international problems.
In this sense, Trump’s shallow understanding of the world has been a partial benefit in that he is not locked into to the usual Washington groupthinks – and he personally despises the prominent politicians and news executives who have sought to neuter him since his election. But his ignorance also prevents him from seeing how global crises often intersect and thus stops him from developing a cohesive or coherent doctrine.
Though little noted, arguably the most important foreign policy decision of Trump’s presidency was his termination of the CIA’s covert support for Syrian rebels and his cooperation with Russian President Vladimir Putin to expand partial ceasefire zones in Syria.
By these actions, Trump has contributed to a sharp drop-off in the Syrian bloodshed. It now appears that the relatively secular Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad is regaining control and that some Syrian refugees are returning to their homes. Syria is starting the difficult job of rebuilding shattered cities, such as Aleppo.
President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at joint press conference on Feb. 15. 2017. (Screen shot from Whitehouse.gov)
But Trump’s aversion to any new military adventures in Syria is being tested again by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is threatening to attack Iranian and Hezbollah forces inside Syria.
Last week, according to Israeli press reports, a high-level delegation led by Mossad chief Yossi Cohen carried Netanyahu’s threat to the U.S. government. The Israeli leader surely has raised the same point directly in phone calls with Trump.
Tiring of Bibi
I was told that Trump, who appears to be growing weary of Netanyahu’s frequent demands and threats, flatly objected to an Israeli attack and brushed aside Israel’s alarm by noting that Netanyahu’s policies in supporting the rebels in Syria contributed to Israel’s current predicament by drawing in Iran and Hezbollah.
This week, Netanyahu personally traveled to Sochi, Russia, to confront Putin with the same blunt warning about Israel’s intention to attack targets inside Syria if Iran does not remove its forces.
A source familiar with the meeting told me that Putin responded with a sarcastic “good luck!” and that the Russians thought the swaggering Netanyahu appeared “unhinged.”
Still, a major Israeli attack on Iranian positions inside Syria would test Trump’s political toughness, since he would come under enormous pressure from Congress and the mainstream news media to intervene on Israel’s behalf. Indeed, realistically, Netanyahu must be counting on his ability to drag Trump into the conflict since Israel could not alone handle a potential Russian counterstrike.
But Netanyahu may be on somewhat thin ice since Trump apparently blames Israel’s top American supporters, the neocons, for much of his political troubles. They opposed him in the Republican primaries, tilted toward Hillary Clinton in the general election, and have pushed the Russia-gate affair to weaken him.
President Obama faced similar political pressures to fall in line behind Israel’s regional interests. That’s why Obama authorized the covert CIA program in Syria and other aid to the rebels though he was never an enthusiastic supporter – and also grew sick and tired of Netanyahu’s endless hectoring.
Obama acquiesced to the demands of Official Washington’s neocons and his own administration’s hawks – the likes of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, CIA Director David Petraeus, his successor John Brennan, and United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power.
The Syrian conflict was part of a broader strategy favored by Washington’s neocons to overthrow or cripple regimes that were deemed troublesome to Israel. Originally, the neocons had envisioned removing the Assad dynasty soon after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, with Iran also on the “regime change” menu. But the disastrous Iraq War threw off the neocons’ timetable.
‘Regime Change’ Chaos
The Democratic Party’s liberal interventionists, who are closely allied with the Republican neocons, also tossed in Libya with the overthrow and murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Then, weapons from Gaddafi’s stockpiles were shipped to Syria where they strengthened rebel fighters allied with Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and other Islamist groups.
Faced with this troubling reality – that the U.S.-backed “moderate rebels” were operating side by side with Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate and its allies – Washington’s neocons/liberal-hawks responded with sophisticated propaganda and devised clever talking points to justify what amounted to indirect assistance to terrorists.
Ousted Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi shortly before he was murdered on Oct. 20, 2011.
The “regime change” advocates portrayed a black-and-white situation in Syria with Assad’s side wearing the black hats and various anti-Assad “activists” wearing the white hats (or literally White Helmets). The State Department and a complicit mainstream media disseminated horror stories about Assad and – when the reality about Al Qaeda’s role could no longer be hidden – that was spun in the rebels’ favor, too, by labeling Assad “a magnet for terrorists” (or later in cahoots with the Islamic State). For years, such arguments were much beloved in Official Washington.
But the human consequences of the Syrian conflict and other U.S.-driven “regime change” wars were horrific, spreading death and destruction across the already volatile Middle East and driving desperate refugees into Europe, where their presence provoked political instability.
By fall 2015, rebel advances in Syria – aided by a supply of powerful U.S. anti-tank missiles – forced Russia’s hand with Putin accepting Assad’s invitation to deploy Russian air power in support of the Syrian army and Iranian and Hezbollah militias. The course of the war soon turned to Assad’s advantage.
It’s unclear what Hillary Clinton might have done if she had won the White House in November 2016. Along with much of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, she called repeatedly for imposing a “no-fly zone” in Syria to stop operations by the Syrian air force and Russia, a move that could have escalated the conflict into World War III.
But Trump – lacking Official Washington’s “sophistication” – couldn’t understand how eliminating Assad, who was leading the fight against the terrorist groups, would contribute to their eventual defeat. Trump also looked at the failure of similar arguments in Iraq and Libya, where “regime change” produced more chaos and generated more terrorism.
Pandering to Saudis/Israelis
However, in the early days of his presidency, the unsophisticated Trump lurched from one Middle East approach to another, initially following his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s grandiose thinking about recruiting Saudi Arabia to an “outside-in” strategy to settle the Israel-Palestine conflict, i.e., enlisting the Saudis to pressure the Palestinians into, more or less, letting Israel dictate a solution.
Kushner’s “outside-in” scheme was symbolically acted out with Trump making his first overseas visit to Saudi Arabia and then to Israel in May. But I’m told that Trump eventually cooled to Kushner’s thinking and has come to see the Israeli-Saudi tandem as part of the region’s troubles, especially what he views as Saudi Arabia’s longstanding support for Al Qaeda and other terror groups.
Senior White House Adviser Jared Kushner, and his wife, Assistant to the President Ivanka Trump, U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus are seen as they arrive with President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump to the Murabba Palace as honored guests of Saudi King Salman, May 20, 2017, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
Perhaps most significantly in that regard, Trump in July quietly abandoned the CIA’s covert war in Syria. In the U.S., some “regime change” advocates have complained about this “betrayal” of the rebel cause and some Democrats have tried to link Trump’s decision to their faltering Russia-gate “scandal,” i.e., by claiming that Trump was rewarding Putin for alleged election help.
But the bottom line is that Trump’s policy has contributed to the Syrian slaughter abating and the prospect of a victory by Al Qaeda and/or its Islamic State spinoff fading.
So, there has been a gradual education of Donald Trump, interrupted occasionally by his volatile temper and his succumbing to political pressure, such as when he rushed to judgment on April 4 and blamed the Syrian government for a chemical incident in the remote Al Qaeda-controlled village of Khan Sheikhoun.
Despite strong doubts in the U.S. intelligence community about Syria’s guilt – some evidence suggested one more staged “atrocity” by the rebels and their supporters – Trump on April 6 ordered 59 Tomahawk missiles fired at a Syrian air base, reportedly killing several soldiers and some civilians, including four children.
Trump boasted about his decision, contrasting it with Obama’s alleged wimpiness. And, naturally, Official Washington and the U.S. mainstream media not only accepted the claim of Syrian government guilt but praised Trump for pulling the trigger. Later, Hillary Clinton said if she were president, she would have been inclined to go further militarily by intervening with her “no-fly zone.”
As reckless and brutal as Trump’s missile strike was, it did provide him some cover for his July 7 meeting with Putin at the G-20 summit in Germany, which focused heavily on Syria, and also for his decision to pull the plug on the CIA’s covert war.
Saudi-backed Terror
I’m told Trump also has returned to his pre-election attitude about Saudi Arabia as a leading supporter of terror groups and a key provocateur in the region’s disorders, particularly because of its rivalry with Iran, a factor in both the Syrian and Yemeni wars.
Though Trump has recited Washington’s bipartisan (and benighted) mantra about Iran being the principal sponsor of terrorism, he appears to be moving toward a more honest view, recognizing the falsity of the neocon-driven propaganda about Iran.
Trump’s new coolness toward Saudi Arabia may have contributed to the recent warming of relations between the Sunnis of Saudi Arabia and the Shiites of Iran, a sectarian conflict dating back 1,400 years. In a surprising move announced this week, the two countries plan an exchange of diplomatic visits.
President Donald Trump poses for photos with ceremonial swordsmen on his arrival to Murabba Palace, as the guest of Saudi King Salman, May 20, 2017, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
Even in areas where Trump has engaged in reckless rhetoric, such as his “fire and fury” warning to North Korea, his behind-the-scenes policy appears more open to compromise and even accommodation. In the past week or so, the tensions with North Korea have eased amid backchannel outreach that may include the provision of food as an incentive for Pyongyang to halt its missile development and even open political talks with South Korea, according to a source close to these developments.
On Afghanistan, too, Trump may be playing a double game, giving a hawkish speech on Monday seeming to endorse an open-ended commitment to the near-16-year-old conflict, while quietly signaling a willingness to negotiate a political settlement with the Taliban.
One alternative might be to accept a coalition government, involving the Taliban, with a U.S. withdrawal to a military base near enough to launch counterterrorism strikes if Al Qaeda or other international terror groups again locate in Afghanistan.
Many of Trump’s latest foreign policy initiatives reflect former White House strategist Steve Bannon’s hostility toward neoconservative interventionism. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon-Mobil chief executive, also shares a more pragmatic approach to foreign affairs than some of his more ideological predecessors.
Albeit still in their infancy, these policies represent a new realism in U.S. foreign policy that, in many ways, paralleled what President Obama favored but was often unwilling or unable to see through to its logical conclusions, given his fear of Netanyahu and the power of the neocons and their liberal-hawk allies.
Still, some of Obama’s most important decisions – not to launch a major military strike against Syria in August 2013 and to negotiate an agreement with Iran to constrain its nuclear program in 2013-15 – followed a similar path away from war, thus drawing condemnation from the Israeli-Saudi tandem and American neocons.
As a Republican who rose politically by pandering to the GOP “base” and its hatred of Obama, Trump rhetorically attacked Obama on both Syria and Iran, but may now be shifting toward similar positions. Gradually, Trump has come to recognize that the neocons and his other political enemies are trying to hobble and humiliate him – and ultimately to remove him from office.
The question is whether Trump’s instinct for survival finally will lead him to policies that blunt his enemies’ strategies or will cause him to succumb to their demands.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
August 27th, 2017 by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin
If it is a truism that after a war the victor writes the history, then it could be argued that the victor also chooses the language in which the history will be written. If it is a war of the coloniser against the colonised then the language takes on a special significance as typically the coloniser imposes their language on the colonised.
Paulo Freire described the way in which cultural conquest leads to the cultural inauthenticity of those who are invaded. They then start to take up the outlook of the invader in terms of their values, standards and goals. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire wrote that cultural invasion would only succeed if the invaded believed in their own cultural inferiority. When convinced of their own inferiority they would see the coloniser and his culture as being superior. Over time, as people become more alienated from their own culture they would see only positives in the culture of the invader and desire to become more and more like them, “to walk like them, dress like them, talk like them.”[1]
However, post-revolutionary, post-colonial situations are complex and reversal of cultural norms a difficult process. The African writer Chinua Achebe wrote about the problems of communication in post-colonial African countries asserting that African writers wrote in English and French because they are “by-products” of the revolutionary processes that led to new nations-states and not just taking advantage of the global French and English language book markets.[2]
This then leads to a difficult situation with competing groups, some using the native languages for the first time on a state level competing with the remnants of the old order who may only be able to speak the language of the former coloniser. As new nation states, post-revolution, usually have more pressing practical problems that need to be dealt with, and in a language the majority can understand, the cultural aspects tend to be put on the back boiler until some time in the future when they may even be forgotten about entirely.
Yet, the regularity with which language issues crop up around the world today is significant and points to a sharpening of political tensions. As inter-élite competition increases, language becomes a battleground upon which political power is augmented or maintained. The Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci identified the problem very clearly when he noted that the rise in language issues meant that something more serious was bubbling below the surface. He believed that the makeup and widening of the governing class and their need to have popular support led to a change in the cultural hegemony in society.[3] This usually happens when different ethnic or language groups in society become dissatisfied with the services and benefits the state bestows on them and assert a new identity based on language and ethnic history.
In most post-colonial situations language issues centre around struggle over which languages will be taught in schools, the language used in parliament and national media, and even placenames and personal names. In a recent article by Aatish Taseer, he writes about the changing politics of India where placenames have become sites of contention. He notes the fact that there are many competing ideas of history and even “names reflect that very basic need of having the world see you as you see yourself.” He believes that a former self-confidence in India has given way to a new oversensitivity and a desire to control India’s image.[4]
Taseer sees the source of this oversensitivity as the strengthening of Hindu nationalism which has undergone changes in recent years. In the past people referred to Varanasi by its multiple names including its Muslim-era name Banaras and its ancient Sanskrit name, Kashi. The rise of Hindu nationalism has politicized culture and, according to Taseer, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has been built on a weaponized idea of history. Ignoring Muslim sensitivities as a minority ethnic group in India, the B.J.P. president, Amit Shah, described the Muslim period as part of a thousand-year history of slavery in Goa last year.[5]
This monolithic view of Muslims and Muslim culture only serves to stereotype and demonise Muslims and imply that a minority group is oppressing a majority rather than the other way around. The maintenance of power by a linguistic and/or political majority by imposition of its beliefs and linguistic norms on a minority has a long history in Ireland since the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922. While initially the conservative nationalist forces which won the civil war after British withdrawal (except for the northern 6 counties) brought in some measures for the protection and promulgation of the Irish language (Gaelic), the project declined and soon became associated with the radical nationalist ideology of the defeated forces instead.
The weakness of the current situation for Gaelic can be illustrated with an example of a conservative backlash which played out in Dingle in 2011, a popular small town in the southwest of Ireland. The difficulties and complexities of name change could be seen in the decision to officially rename the town ‘An Daingean’, its original Gaelic name. As placenames in Ireland are in English (Anglicised versions of Gaelic names) and Gaelic, they can become focal points for cultural conflict as Gaelic speakers try to move away from historical colonial influence. The local people fought back and after six years the President at the time, Mary McAleese, reinstated the town’s name back to the Anglicised version ‘Dingle’.[6] Many of the local people saw the Anglicised name as a tourism brand and feared a loss of business through tourist confusion with its Gaelic name.
Similar preference for the language of the colonizer can be seen in a recent article on Algeria in The Economist. In the article the competing school languages of French and Arabic were joined by Berber, made even more complicated by the lack of decision on which of its six dialects to teach. Berber is spoken by around 25% of Algerians and was only recognized last year despite independence from France in 1962. The writer notes that “Algeria’s French-speaking élite prefer their old masters’ lingo.”[7] One adviser to the education minister, Nouria Benghebrit, stated that Arabisation was a mistake and that Algerians “shouldn’t confuse the savage, barbaric colonialism of France with the French language, which is a universal vehicle of science and culture.”[8]
These negative overtones towards Arabic and Berber have parallels in Ireland that Gaelic speakers will recognise from Irish history. In the late nineteenth century, the increased support for Gaelic provoked reaction from various quarters particularly in the academic field. T. W. Rolleston, speaking at the Press Club in 1896 described the language as unfit for thought or consideration by educated people. Supporters of Irish and other aspects of Gaelic culture were seen as parochial traditionalists looking backward and trying to hold back the tide of history.
The struggle for the recognition of Irish as a modern language meant suffering the indignity of a challenge from Rolleston to prove that a piece of prose from a scientific journal could be translated into Irish and then back into English by another translator, without loss of meaning. This was duly carried out successfully by Hyde and MacNeill, two leading Irish nationalists, and accepted by Rolleston. (Of course, the strong historical connection between Arabic and science should also be mentioned here.)
The dubbing of Gaelic speakers as ‘parochial traditionalists’ is still used to swipe at people who assert their linguistic rights [Gaelic is the first official language of Ireland alongside English], won through many decades of political and cultural struggle with the state. The association of Gaelic with radical nationalism has always been a thorn in the side of conservative Anglophiles in Ireland.
Linguistic issues around the world are shaped, as in Ireland, by problems such as negative attitudes, the difficulties of learning new, or old, languages, and élite control of the state and the education system. As Gramsci notes, when cultural conflicts arise we can be sure that something more serious is happening entailing a closer look at local ideologies of inter-élite and class struggles. In Ireland, the fortunes of the Gaelic language rose and fell according to the cultural and ideological needs of the ruling class. The language movements were harnessed when considered a political threat and dismissed when weak.
This can be seen globally where the role of language can be positive or negative depending on the politics of the groups involved. Language is not inherently progressive or reactionary but acts as a carrier of culture as well as a means of communication. Openness towards diverse and different languages and cultures in society implies openness and tolerance towards different groups and a guard against monolithic simplification and racist provocation. When language issues arise they can also demonstrate that for minority groups, the survival of their language depends just as much on social and economic issues (emigration, unemployment, poverty) as the rights it is accorded by the state.
In Ireland, the refusal to accord linguistic rights by British colonialism to Gaelic speakers played an important part in the move of cultural nationalists to political nationalism and the subsequent War of Independence. Colonisers and conservative dominant élites both learned that their own ‘parochial traditionalism’ could be the author of their downfall in the play of history.
Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist, lecturer and writer. His artwork consists of paintings based on contemporary geopolitical themes as well as Irish history and cityscapes of Dublin. (http://gaelart.net/). His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art and politics along with research on a database of Realist and Social Realist art from around the world can be viewed country by country at http://gaelart.blogspot.ie/.
Notes
[1] Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (London: Penguin, 1990) 122.
[2] Ali A. Mazrui, The Political Sociology of the English Language: An African Perspective (The Hague: Mouton, 1975) 218.
[3] Antonio Gramsci, Selections From Cultural Writings. Eds. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, trans. William Boelhower (Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1985) 183-184.
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/26/opinion/india-history.html?mcubz=1
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/26/opinion/india-history.html?mcubz=1
Featured image is from M. Adiputra (CC BY-SA 3.0).
August 27th, 2017 by Hugo Turner
First published in April 2017
The empire is on the rampage across the planet. World War 4 is intensifying with disastrous results for the world. The US has expanded its aggression against so many countries at once that is hard to keep up.
North Korea is under threat of an unprovoked attack. However North Korea is prepared to defend itself and Trump will probably be forced to back down. In fact he already has made a fool of himself with his ghost armada.
In Afghanistan he dropped a MOAB bomb on Torah Bora suffocating and incinerating untold numbers of Afghanis. In fact he plans another pointless surge in Afghanistan when everyone knows the war is lost.
Yemen which has already known untold suffering in the 2-year long war will now suffer even more as the US expands its role in the conflict attempting to rescue the genocidal Saudi royals from a humiliating defeat at the hands of Yemen’s people.
The US is expanding its decades long war on Somalia.
In Ecuador the US is trying to undermine the election of Lenin Moreno. NATO is cementing its ties to the fanatical bloodthirsty royals of the GCC countries (the Saudis, Qataris, and other tyrants) through the NATO-Istanbul cooperation Initiative which means NATO and Al Qaeda are basically officially allied as if it wasn’t already obvious after the horrifying wars on Libya and Syria.
In other words Trump is massively expanding every dirty war and destabilization campaign the Empire is involved in and doubtless in future months we will learn of countries now peaceful being thrown into chaos as a result of CIA/NED operations now being launched of which we have no idea. We can only hope that Russia and China are working on some plans of their own.
For now, however, I must focus on the two countries which are among the most important fronts in World War 4: Syria and Venezuela. Thankfully the initial attack on Syria was far from the all out war I feared. Brave soldiers and civilians were killed but the Syrians were able to get the air base back online the next day. However it sets a dangerous precedent for the US to attack Syria whenever the NATO death squads are loosing some battle.
In Venezuela there is yet another attempt to overthrow the government and install US puppets. The Neoliberal opposition in Venezuela have been rioting revealing their true character with the evil and stupidity of their antics. However the people of Venezuela have taken to the streets to oppose the latest plots against their country.
We’ll probably never know what actually happened behind the scenes but instead of launching an all out regime change assault on Syria, Trump merely did openly what the US has been doing “accidentally” since it began bombing Syria. He targeted the SAA and doubtless their Russian and Iranian allies at Shayrat airbase which the Syrian Arab Air force was using to support the SAA’s victorious counter-offensive in the battle of Hama and in its attacks on ISIS controlled areas. It was also of course the same base from which allegedly Syria shot down an Israeli jet which was openly serving as ISIS air force. The rumor is that using electronic warfare Russia was able to disable more then half the Tomahawks. Only 23 of 59 hit their targets. It is unclear how many were killed as Syria attempted to portray the effects as minimal in order to avoid boosting enemy morale. Regardless of the damage the strikes have had little effect on the course of the war. The SAA is advancing victoriously across the country although NATO’s terrorist death squads are also launching fierce counter-offensives they made only temporary gains that were quickly reversed. Once again Syria has proved itself the most heroic country on the planet. In the face of Trump’s treachery, the endless lies of the mainstream media and genocidal “Human Rights” groups, the threats of the US and NATO, and attacks by the US and Israel they refuse to lose heart or to stop even for a single day their war to liberate their country from the terrorist death squads.
These monsters whom the west calls moderates sunk to a new level of infamy last week with their murder of over 200 people of whom 116 were children. We will never forget the horrible massacre at Rashideen. The people killed were refugees from the towns of Foua and Karfaya who have suffered one of the most tragic sieges of the war.
I learned of them at the same time as I learned of the work of the courageous Eva Bartlett back in 2015. Her articles were both horrifying and heartbreaking. Often lacking food, electricity, clean water, or medicine, they were being continually bombarded by death squads who fired rockets, artillery and “Hell Cannons” Fuel canisters turned into fire bombs.
Families watched as their loved ones died because of lack of medicine. Children starved to death or were killed by terrorists. Yet their plight was of course completely ignored by the propagandists in the mainstream media. Since then their ordeal has continued shelling hunger and being forced to repel constant attacks. Finally a deal was struck to evacuate them to safety in the same way as the Syrian government has allowed the terrorists to flee unharmed with their lives and families.
But the terrorists of course cannot be trusted to show similar mercy to their victims. Instead they decided to murder the children of the refugees. First they held the refugees captive on the buses for two days. Then a car drove up offering to give away food to the starving passengers. As the children gathered around to collect bags of potato chips the NATO death squads detonated a bomb killing over 200 people 115 of them children. The poor refugees of Foua and Karfaya were not even allowed to keep the corpses of their murdered children but were forced to watch as the terrorists and some turkish ambulances collected and then drove off with their children’s corpses. It is hard even to find words to describe the monstrous depravity of this crime which is on the hands not just of the terrorists but their US-NATO-GCC-Israel backers and above all on the western media who the terrorists knew could be counted on to completely ignore their many crimes.
Thankfully heroic independent journalist Vanessa Beeley was there to further investigate and expose this terrible tragedy which was caught on film. We must never forget the horrifying massacre of Rashideen.
Although Trump’s missile strikes have failed to shift the balance of the war far more menacing are his plans to invade and occupy Syria which are ever expanding. The Pentagon is now talking about sending 50,000 troops to invade an occupy Syria. In addition to the massive territory the US is occupying in northern Syria using the kurds as a front, the US now plans to do the same for the Wahhabi death squads in the south and the East. The US, the Jordanian army, and their terrorist allies have launched an invasion from the south. The US also sent helicopters to land an Invading US army to the east of Deir Ezzor the Heroic Syrian city that has been surrounded by ISIS for years and has refused to surrender.
Clearly the US plans to seize as much Syrian territory as possible so it will have a base to endlessly wage war on Syria. The US plans to create a terrorist proxy state in Eastern Syria. In reality it will be a US approved version of ISIS that will be given a huge swath of territory under US protection. As a reward for the many horrific crimes they have committed, murder, looting, rape, slavery, destruction of Syria’s heritage, destruction of hospitals, schools, food storage, electric facilities, poisoning water, Suicide bombings, hell cannons, Mutilation torture and genocide the NATO backed rebels will be given their own state guarded by american troops.
People who blow up busloads of children will be rewarded for their crimes with their own american puppet state. This possibility is too sickening to contemplate but the Trump administration is moving with lightning speed to insure that this plan is carried out creating yet another terrorist proxy army the “Eastern Shield” whose ranks are sure to swell with “former” ISIS members and other terrorists fighting alongside US Marines. It’s another planned disaster for the empire of chaos. Death, destruction, Chaos will be the inevitable results of this insane policy. With typical 21st century insanity this scheme is called “Safe Zones.”
In Venezuela, yet another coup scheme is under way. Syria appears to be the blueprint for what they have planned for Venezuela. Simply label terrorism as peaceful protests and use the chaos as an excuse to intervene. Instead of Al Qaeda however the foot soldiers are the fascist fifth column the US has spent nearly 20 years funding and training. They hope to create as much death and destruction as possible in the hopes it can be blamed on the Venezuelan Government and be used to trigger an intervention.
In fact the “opposition” has been flying to Washington DC plotting their coup quite openly. They hope to install a puppet regime with the aid of US troops composed of Venezuela’s old corrupt politicians. These would impose the same unpopular neo-liberal austerity measures carried out in Brazil and Argentina after their soft coups against the wishes of the public who are brutally repressed. Thankfully the CIA created opposition who were foolishly elected to the national assembly a year and a half ago have since discredited themselves. At the same time since those elections the failure of the government to cope with the economic war inspired the grass roots Bolivarian movement the people not the politicians to come up with their own solutions.
Visitors to Venezuela now claim that the worst is over and that things are once again improving. It is the ultimate revenge of Hugo Chavez even from the grave he was able to inspire the Venezuelan people to put his ideas into practice.
This is precisely what has inspired the rage in the fascist opposition and their CIA backers. Of course racist billionaire emperor Trump hates the Bolivarian Socialist Republic of Venezuela as do his drug dealing cuban terrorist friends in brigade 2506. Doubtless he okayed this new coup scheme. Thus like the bombing of the buses in the Massacre at Rashideen by terrorists emboldened by Trump’s cruise missile strikes the crimes of the fascist opposition are also the result of his criminal policies.
Thankfully for the people of Venezuela the rich fascists are amateurs compared to the “moderate rebels” but their intent is no less monstrous. A woman is on her way from work suddenly a frozen bottle of water tossed out of a window high up in an apartment complex by a Venezuelan fascist comes crashing down onto her head. As I write she is still in the hospital in critical condition. The incident demonstrates the total contempt for ordinary Venezuelans that the fascist opposition shows. It was the result of calls by opposition politicians for attacks on Chavista protestors calling for turning flower pots into weapons although the woman was merely heading to work.
In another incident 4 fascists attacked a Venezuelan police officer who had fallen off his motorcycle they ripped out 4 of his teeth as a macabre form of torture. They have engaged in a campaign of looting arson and terror.
The most memorable incident proving their total depravity was an attack on a maternity hospital full of newborns and their mothers. They were forced to evacuate the hospital when a mob of fascists began throwing rocks and glass then set a huge trash fire to try and smoke them out. Long ago near the beginning of World War 4 the Kuwaiti ambassadors daughter coached by the Hill and Knowlton PR firm pretended to be a nurse who had witnessed savage Iraqi soldiers stealing incubators from helpless babies. This completely fabricated story was used as an excuse to launch a war followed by sanctions that killed half a million Iraqi children.
Now the US is funding an Opposition group that is doing almost exactly the same thing as the Iraqi’s were accused of. Many of the children needed help breathing but were forced to flee. Even the Iraqis were not accused of setting fires aimed at killing the newborns the way Venezuela’s fascist opposition have done. Of course the US state department will instead condemn the Maduro government demanding they give free reign to the fascists in the hopes of a Maidan style coup. Venezuela has already been warned not to interfere with their rights to attack women and children or to perform amateur dental torture on unwilling victims. The attack on the Maternity Hospital is the latest example of the fascist opposition which hates the ordinary people of Venezuela so much that it attempts to destroy every program aimed to improve their lives whether hospitals aiming to heal or subsidized stores intending to provide affordable food. If allowed to continue they would happily wreak the same misery on Venezuela as the NATO death death squads have inflicted on Syria.
Thankfully neither the Maduro Government nor the Venezuelan people will allow these fascist scum to seize control of their country. Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans held Anti-Imperialist marches demanding an end to outside interference in their country. To discourage an Invasion Maduro plans to massively expand the armed civilian militia from 100,000 to 500,000. Thus if the US and it’s allies should ever invade the Venezuelan people are prepared to fight for however long it takes to liberate their country and perhaps the entire continent. At the same time the Government is prepared to defend Venezuela. They have instituted Plan Zamora a massive drill aimed at readying their defenses. They have already arrested a Colombian Death squad planning to carry out an assassination campaign under cover of the fascist riots. They also foiled a military coup attempt and arrested a ringleader. Thus we have reason to hope that this latest coup attempt will fail like all the others. However the empire of chaos will never stop trying to destroy Venezuela. A dozen people have already died during this latest coup attempt.
The Struggle continues. World War 4 is heating up. The future seems bleak. Yet we can draw inspiration from the heroic spirit of the peoples of Syria and Venezuela. No matter what they have suffered they simply refuse to give up. This determination to struggle on no matter the odds or how long it takes is the only thing that has ever been able to defeat the empire as the peoples of Vietnam and Korea have shown in the past. The whole world is in deadly danger and every single one of us must rise to the occasion if there is to be any hope for a future. The bright dream of Venezuela that we can build a better world and the grim determination of Syria never to surrender are an inspiration to the world.
Sources
Vanessa Beeley on one of the greatest war crimes in recent memory the massacre at Rashideen
https://syria360.wordpress.com/2017/04/21/rashideen-massacre-children-lured-to-their-slaughter-by-nato-state-terrorists/
Pepe Escobar on Mad Emperor Trump’s War on the world
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-14/pepe-escobar-trumps-new-normal-piece-cake-foreign-policy
Tony Cartalucci on the US Plan B for Syria Stealing Massive amounts of Syrian Land to Create a “Safe Zone” for Al Qaeda and the US Kurdish Mercenaries
https://syria360.wordpress.com/2017/04/18/us-didnt-change-priorities-in-syria-it-lost/
The Latest news from Syrian Perspective
Fascist Attack on a Maternity Ward in Venezuela
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2017/04/21/venezuela-attack-on-hospital-is-a-war-crime-crime-against-humanity/
The Fascist coup plot in Venezuela
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2017/04/20/venezuela-opposition-coup-plans-fascist-dictatorship/
The Latest Incidents in the fascist terror campaign in Venezuela
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2017/04/21/venezuela-fascist-gangs-attack-maternity-childrens-hospital/
August 27th, 2017 by Robert Parry
First posted by Global Research in April 2017
The looming threat of World War III, a potential extermination event for the human species, is made more likely because the world’s public can’t count on supposedly objective experts to ascertain and evaluate facts. Instead, careerism is the order of the day among journalists, intelligence analysts and international monitors – meaning that almost no one who might normally be relied on to tell the truth can be trusted.
The dangerous reality is that this careerism, which often is expressed by a smug certainty about whatever the prevailing groupthink is, pervades not just the political world, where lies seem to be the common currency, but also the worlds of journalism, intelligence and international oversight, including United Nations agencies that are often granted greater credibility because they are perceived as less beholden to specific governments but in reality have become deeply corrupted, too.
In other words, many professionals who are counted on for digging out the facts and speaking truth to power have sold themselves to those same powerful interests in order to keep high-paying jobs and to not get tossed out onto the street. Many of these self-aggrandizing professionals – caught up in the many accouterments of success – don’t even seem to recognize how far they’ve drifted from principled professionalism.
Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations on Feb. 5. 2003, citing satellite photos which supposedly proved that Iraq had WMD, but the evidence proved bogus. CIA Director George Tenet is behind Powell to the left.
A good example was Saturday night’s spectacle of national journalists preening in their tuxedos and gowns at the White House Correspondents Dinner, sporting First Amendment pins as if they were some brave victims of persecution. They seemed oblivious to how removed they are from Middle America and how unlikely any of them would risk their careers by challenging one of the Establishment’s favored groupthinks. Instead, these national journalists take easy shots at President Trump’s buffoonish behavior and his serial falsehoods — and count themselves as endangered heroes for the effort.
Foils for Trump
Ironically, though, these pompous journalists gave Trump what was arguably his best moment in his first 100 days by serving as foils for the President as he traveled to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on Saturday and basked in the adulation of blue-collar Americans who view the mainstream media as just one more appendage of a corrupt ruling elite.
Breaking with tradition by snubbing the annual press gala, Trump delighted the Harrisburg crowd by saying:
“A large group of Hollywood celebrities and Washington media are consoling each other in a hotel ballroom” and adding: “I could not possibly be more thrilled than to be more than 100 miles away from [the] Washington swamp … with much, much better people.”
The crowd booed references to the elites and cheered Trump’s choice to be with the common folk.
The photograph released by the White House of President Trump meeting with his advisers at his estate in Mar-a-Lago on April 6, 2017, regarding his decision to launch missile strikes against Syria.
Trump’s rejection of the dinner and his frequent criticism of the mainstream media brought a defensive response from Jeff Mason, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, who complained:
“We are not fake news. We are not failing news organizations. And we are not the enemy of the American people.”
That brought the black-tie-and-gown gathering to its feet in a standing ovation.
Perhaps the assembled media elite had forgotten that it was the mainstream U.S. media – particularly The Washington Post and The New York Times – that popularized the phrase “fake news” and directed it blunderbuss-style not only at the few Web sites that intentionally invent stories to increase their clicks but at independent-minded journalism outlets that have dared question the elite’s groupthinks on issues of war, peace and globalization.
The Black List
Professional journalistic skepticism toward official claims by the U.S. government — what you should expect from reporters — became conflated with “fake news.” The Post even gave front-page attention to an anonymous group called PropOrNot that published a black list of 200 Internet sites, including Consortiumnews.com and other independent-minded journalism sites, to be shunned.
But the mainstream media stars didn’t like it when Trump began throwing the “fake news” slur back at them. Thus, the First Amendment lapel pins and the standing ovation for Jeff Mason’s repudiation of the “fake news” label.
The Washington Post building in downtown Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Washington Post)
Yet, as the glitzy White House Correspondents Dinner demonstrated, mainstream journalists get the goodies of prestige and money while the real truth-tellers are almost always outspent, outgunned and cast out of the mainstream. Indeed, this dwindling band of honest people who are both knowledgeable and in position to expose unpleasant truths is often under mainstream attack, sometimes for unrelated personal failings and other times just for rubbing the powers-that-be the wrong way.
Perhaps, the clearest case study of this up-is-down rewards-and-punishments reality was the Iraq War’s WMD rationale. Nearly across the board, the American political/media system – from U.S. intelligence analysts to the deliberative body of the U.S. Senate to the major U.S. news organizations – failed to ascertain the truth and indeed actively helped disseminate the falsehoods about Iraq hiding WMDs and even suggested nuclear weapons development. (Arguably, the “most trusted” U.S. government official at the time, Secretary of State Colin Powell, played a key role in selling the false allegations as “truth.”)
Not only did the supposed American “gold standard” for assessing information – the U.S. political, media and intelligence structure – fail miserably in the face of fraudulent claims often from self-interested Iraqi opposition figures and their neoconservative American backers, but there was minimal accountability afterwards for the “professionals” who failed to protect the public from lies and deceptions.
Profiting from Failure
Indeed, many of the main culprits remain “respected” members of the journalistic establishment. For instance, The New York Times’ Pentagon correspondent Michael R. Gordon, who was the lead writer on the infamous “aluminum tubes for nuclear centrifuges” story which got the ball rolling for the Bush administration’s rollout of its invade-Iraq advertising campaign in September 2002, still covers national security for the Times – and still serves as a conveyor belt for U.S. government propaganda.
New York Times building in New York City. (Photo from Wikipedia)
The Washington Post’s editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, who repeatedly informed the Post’s readers that Iraq’s secret possession of WMD was a “flat-fact,” is still the Post’s editorial page editor, one of the most influential positions in American journalism.
Hiatt’s editorial page led a years-long assault on the character of former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson for the offense of debunking one of President George W. Bush’s claims about Iraq seeking yellowcake uranium from Niger. Wilson had alerted the CIA to the bogus claim before the invasion of Iraq and went public with the news afterwards, but the Post treated Wilson as the real culprit, dismissing him as “a blowhard” and trivializing the Bush administration’s destruction of his wife’s CIA career by outing her (Valerie Plame) in order to discredit Wilson’s Niger investigation.
At the end of the Post’s savaging of Wilson’s reputation and in the wake of the newspaper’s accessory role in destroying Plame’s career, Wilson and Plame decamped from Washington to New Mexico. Meanwhile, Hiatt never suffered a whit – and remains a “respected” Washington media figure to this day.
Careerist Lesson
The lesson that any careerist would draw from the Iraq case is that there is almost no downside risk in running with the pack on a national security issue. Even if you’re horrifically wrong — even if you contribute to the deaths of some 4,500 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis — your paycheck is almost surely safe.
The same holds true if you work for an international agency that is responsible for monitoring issues like chemical weapons. Again, the Iraq example offers a good case study. In April 2002, as President Bush was clearing away the few obstacles to his Iraq invasion plans, Jose Mauricio Bustani, the head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons [OPCW], sought to persuade Iraq to join the Chemical Weapons Convention so inspectors could verify Iraq’s claims that it had destroyed its stockpiles.
President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney receive an Oval Office briefing from CIA Director George Tenet. Also present is Chief of Staff Andy Card (on right). (White House photo)
The Bush administration called that idea an “ill-considered initiative” – after all, it could have stripped away the preferred propaganda rationale for the invasion if the OPCW verified that Iraq had destroyed its chemical weapons. So, Bush’s Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton, a neocon advocate for the invasion of Iraq, pushed to have Bustani deposed. The Bush administration threatened to withhold dues to the OPCW if Bustani, a Brazilian diplomat, remained.
It now appears obvious that Bush and Bolton viewed Bustani’s real offense as interfering with their invasion scheme, but Bustani was ultimately taken down over accusations of mismanagement, although he was only a year into a new five-year term after having been reelected unanimously. The OPCW member states chose to sacrifice Bustani to save the organization from the loss of U.S. funds, but – in so doing – they compromised its integrity, making it just another agency that would bend to big-power pressure.
“By dismissing me,” Bustani said, “an international precedent will have been established whereby any duly elected head of any international organization would at any point during his or her tenure remain vulnerable to the whims of one or a few major contributors.” He added that if the United States succeeded in removing him, “genuine multilateralism” would succumb to “unilateralism in a multilateral disguise.”
The Iran Nuclear Scam
Something similar happened regarding the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2009 when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the neocons were lusting for another confrontation with Iran over its alleged plans to build a nuclear bomb.
Yukiya Amano, a Japanese diplomat and director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
According to U.S. embassy cables from Vienna, Austria, the site of IAEA’s headquarters, American diplomats in 2009 were cheering the prospect that Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano would advance U.S. interests in ways that outgoing IAEA Director General Mohamed El Baradei wouldn’t; Amano credited his election to U.S. government support; Amano signaled he would side with the United States in its confrontation with Iran; and he stuck out his hand for more U.S. money.
In a July 9, 2009, cable, American chargé Geoffrey Pyatt said Amano was thankful for U.S. support of his election.
“Amano attributed his election to support from the U.S., Australia and France, and cited U.S. intervention with Argentina as particularly decisive,” the cable said.
The appreciative Amano informed Pyatt that as IAEA director-general, he would take a different “approach on Iran from that of ElBaradei” and he “saw his primary role as implementing safeguards and UNSC [United Nations Security Council] Board resolutions,” i.e. U.S.-driven sanctions and demands against Iran.
Amano also discussed how to restructure the senior ranks of the IAEA, including elimination of one top official and the retention of another.
“We wholly agree with Amano’s assessment of these two advisors and see these decisions as positive first signs,” Pyatt commented.
In return, Pyatt made clear that Amano could expect strong U.S. financial assistance, stating that
“the United States would do everything possible to support his successful tenure as Director General and, to that end, anticipated that continued U.S. voluntary contributions to the IAEA would be forthcoming. Amano offered that a ‘reasonable increase’ in the regular budget would be helpful.”
What Pyatt made clear in his cable was that one IAEA official who was not onboard with U.S. demands had been fired while another who was onboard kept his job.
Pandering to Israel
Pyatt learned, too, that Amano had consulted with Israeli Ambassador Israel Michaeli “immediately after his appointment” and that Michaeli “was fully confident of the priority Amano accords verification issues.” Michaeli added that he discounted some of Amano’s public remarks about there being “no evidence of Iran pursuing a nuclear weapons capability” as just words that Amano felt he had to say “to persuade those who did not support him about his ‘impartiality.’”
In private, Amano agreed to “consultations” with the head of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, Pyatt reported. (It is ironic indeed that Amano would have secret contacts with Israeli officials about Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program, which never yielded a single bomb, when Israel possesses a large and undeclared nuclear arsenal.)
U.S. Army Pvt. Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning.
In a subsequent cable dated Oct. 16, 2009, the U.S. mission in Vienna said Amano “took pains to emphasize his support for U.S. strategic objectives for the Agency. Amano reminded ambassador [Glyn Davies] on several occasions that he was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.
“More candidly, Amano noted the importance of maintaining a certain ‘constructive ambiguity’ about his plans, at least until he took over for DG ElBaradei in December” 2009.
In other words, Amano was a bureaucrat eager to bend in directions favored by the United States and Israel regarding Iran’s nuclear program. Amano’s behavior surely contrasted with how the more independent-minded ElBaradei resisted some of Bush’s key claims about Iraq’s supposed nuclear weapons program, correctly denouncing some documents as forgeries.
The world’s public got its insight into the Amano scam only because the U.S. embassy cables were among those given to WikiLeaks by Pvt. Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, for which Manning received a 35-year prison sentence (which was finally commuted by President Obama before leaving office, with Manning now scheduled to be released in May – having served nearly seven years in prison).
It also is significant that Geoffrey Pyatt was rewarded for his work lining up the IAEA behind the anti-Iranian propaganda campaign by being made U.S. ambassador to Ukraine where he helped engineer the Feb. 22, 2014 coup that overthrew elected President Viktor Yanukovych. Pyatt was on the infamous “fuck the E.U.” call with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland weeks before the coup as Nuland handpicked Ukraine’s new leaders and Pyatt pondered how “to midwife this thing.”
Rewards and Punishments
The existing rewards-and-punishments system, which punishes truth-tellers and rewards those who deceive the public, has left behind a thoroughly corrupted information structure in the United States and in the West, in general.
Across the mainstream of politics and media, there are no longer the checks and balances that have protected democracy for generations. Those safeguards have been washed away by the flood of careerism.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko shakes hands with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry shakes hands with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin in Kiev, Ukraine, on July 7, 2016.[State Department Photo)
The thinking goes that if the United States can overthrow a troublesome government by exploiting media/propaganda assets, deploying trained activists and spreading selective stories about “corruption” or other misconduct, isn’t that better than sending in the Marines?
While that argument has the superficial appeal of humanitarianism – i.e., the avoidance of armed conflict – it ignores the corrosiveness of lies and smears, hollowing out the foundations of democracy, a structure that rests ultimately on an informed electorate. Plus, the clever use of propaganda to oust disfavored governments often leads to violence and war, as we have seen in targeted countries, such as Iraq, Syria and Ukraine.
Wider War
Regional conflicts also carry the risk of wider war, a danger compounded by the fact that the American public is fed a steady diet of dubious narratives designed to rile up the population and to give politicians an incentive to “do something.” Since these American narratives often deviate far from a reality that is well known to the people in the targeted countries, the contrasting storylines make the finding of common ground almost impossible.
If, for instance, you buy into the Western narrative that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad gleefully gases “beautiful babies,” you would tend to support the “regime change” plans of the neoconservatives and liberal interventionists. If, however, you reject that mainstream narrative – and believe that Al Qaeda and its friendly regional powers may be staging chemical attacks to bring the U.S. military in on their “regime change” project – you might favor a political settlement that leaves Assad’s fate to the later judgment of the Syrian people.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Similarly, if you accept the West’s storyline about Russia invading Ukraine and subjugating the people of Crimea by force – while also shooting down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 for no particular reason – you might support aggressive countermoves against “Russian aggression,” even if that means risking nuclear war.
If, on the other hand, you know about the Nuland-Pyatt scheme for ousting Ukraine’s elected president in 2014 and realize that much of the other anti-Russian narrative is propaganda or disinformation – and that MH-17 might well have been shot down by some element of Ukrainian government forces and then blamed on the Russians [see here and here] – you might look for ways to avoid a new and dangerous Cold War.
Who to Trust?
But the question is: whom to trust? And this is no longer some rhetorical or philosophical point about whether one can ever know the complete truth. It is now a very practical question of life or death, not just for us as individuals but as a species and as a planet.
The existential issue before us is whether – blinded by propaganda and disinformation – we will stumble into a nuclear conflict between superpowers that could exterminate all life on earth or perhaps leave behind a radiated hulk of a planet suitable only for cockroaches and other hardy life forms.
Illustration by Chesley Bonestell of nuclear bombs detonating over New York City, entitled “Hiroshima U.S.A.” Colliers, Aug. 5, 1950.
You might think that with the stakes so high, the people in positions to head off such a catastrophe would behave more responsibly and professionally. But then there are events like Saturday night’s White House Correspondents Dinner with self-important media stars puffing about with their First Amendment pins. And there’s President Trump’s realization that by launching missiles and talking tough he can buy himself some political space from the Establishment (even as he sells out average Americans and kills some innocent foreigners). Those realities show that seriousness is the farthest thing from the minds of Washington’s insiders.
It’s just too much fun – and too profitable in the short-term – to keep playing the game and hauling in the goodies. If and when the mushroom clouds appear, these careerists can turn to the cameras and blame someone else.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
August 27th, 2017 by Jayati Ghosh
This article was first published in November 2013.
The member states of BRICS will be meeting in Xiamen, Fujian Province in early September
Despite its strange origins and some serious challenges confronting it, the bloc of countries that has emerged into the international arena under the acronym BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) has the potential for being a positive force in world affairs. Strange things happen in the world. Imagine a grouping of countries spread across the globe, which gets formed only for the simple reason that an analyst for an investment bank decides that these countries have some things in common, including future potential for growth, and then creates an acronym of their names! Bizarre but true.
The original categorisation of the BRIC countries (by Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs in an article in 2001) contained only Brazil, Russia, India and China. He described the countries with the most economic potential for growth in the first half of the 21st century, based on features like size of population and therefore potential market; demography (predominantly young populations with likely falling dependency ratios); recent growth rates; and embrace of globalisation. So China was to become the most important global exporter of manufactured goods (which indeed has already occurred); India the most significant exporter of services (which has not occurred as expected, although it remains important); and Russia and Brazil would dominate as exporters of raw materials.
In a process that has since surprised many, this initial statement caught the imagination not only of the global financial community and the mainstream media, but even of policy makers in the countries themselves! Although geographically separated, economically and politically distinct, with different levels of development and with not such strong economic ties at that time, these countries began to see themselves as a group largely because of foreign investor and media perceptions.
The group had its first summit meeting in June 2009 in Yekaterinburg, Russia. In 2010 South Africa was included (at the instigation of China). The enlarged BRICS have since had summit meetings in Brasilia, Brazil, in 2010; Sanya, China, in 2011; New Delhi, India, in 2012; and Durban, South Africa, in 2013. The BRICS now cover 3 billion people, with a total estimated GDP of nearly $14 trillion and around $4 trillion of foreign exchange reserves. Each country is effectively a sub-regional leader. Of course, that does not mean there are no other potential candidates for inclusion. Indeed, several countries are often mentioned as possible members of an enlarged group on the basis of their actual and potential global economic significance: for example, South Korea and Mexico (both OECD members), Indonesia, Turkey, Argentina.
BRICS is one of several new initiatives of different countries in the world to break out of the Northern axis: G12 (G20-G8), IBSA, BASIC (BRICS minus 1) and so on. While the origin of the grouping may be odd, and the countries are indeed remarkably diverse, there are some commonalities that are important. Subsequently, in fact, these countries have since shown significant interest in meeting periodically, working together, and finding some synergies and new ways of cooperation.
So trade between BRICS countries soared after they became recognised as a combination (although of course this is a period when trade between developing and emerging markets in general has grown much faster than aggregate world trade). Investment links have been growing too, mainly through Chinese involvement in different countries and some interest shown by large Indian capital. And more recently there have been other moves that suggest an appetite for newer and further forms of close economic and political interaction and co-ordination. They have recently acted in concert in several international platforms, most recently pledging $75 billion to the International Monetary Fund (conditional on IMF voting reform). Other economic initiatives include agreement to denominate bilateral trade in each other’s currencies, and plans for a development bank. There have also been declarations in favour of a shared approach in foreign policy, particularly responses to US and European policies in the Middle East and elsewhere.
In fact there is great potential in these five countries not just combining to address global issues, but perhaps even more significantly, learning from one another. For example, India has much to learn from Brazil and China in the matter of development banking. From the early 1990s, India has set about destroying the potential of its own development banks, in both agriculture and industry – but there is still scope for their renewal and rejuvenation. And the example of Brazil, and in particular the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES), in entering areas and promoting activities that would not occur purely through the incentives determined by the market, could provide some guidance about how this can occur even in a very open and largely market-driven economy.
Similarly, there are areas in which other BRICS countries could learn from India, while the description of the work of the South African Development Bank illuminated the strategy of creating financial structures and mechanisms to promote the ‘green economy’ through environmentally desirable activities and technologies. There are also immense possibilities for technology sharing and even co-ordinating technology development, in a world where intellectual property rights still largely controlled by Northern multinational companies have emerged as a major constraint on development. There is also great potential for ‘Marshall Plan’-type capital flows from surplus to deficit countries (even those outside the BRICS) to enable them to withstand the impact of global recession – and a BRICS Bank could be a first step in that direction.
Common challenges
But it is not only comparing experiences of the recent past and learning from each other’s approaches that may be important. Despite their many differences, the BRICS countries do face some common challenges, and the very urgency of these challenges points to the benefits of cooperation to develop new strategies. At least four such challenges deserve mention, as do some possibilities of combined action to confront them.
The first is the fact of the continuing global crisis and the near-certainty that the Northern economies (the US and Europe in particular) are unlikely to provide much positive stimulus to the global economy. For all the BRICS, these countries still dominate as export destinations and the domino effect of declining Northern markets must be accepted. So clearly, there is a need to diversify exports, a process that has already started but still needs to go a long way. Of course bilateral currency trade would encourage more trading activity between the BRICS, and this is desirable.
But the current state of the global economy suggests the need for greater ambition. In particular, the time is clearly ripe for some sort of ‘Marshall Plan’ for the developing world, and the BRICS countries (particularly China and Russia) are uniquely positioned to take this process forward. This would involve developing mechanisms to finance imports by countries with low incomes and low levels of development, simultaneously delivering markets to other developing countries and more development potential to the recipient countries.
The other challenges are more internal, but surprisingly common across the BRICS. The recent growth process has been substantially associated with increasing income and asset inequality (other than in Brazil, which once again provides some lessons for the others, but where Gini coefficients still remain among the highest in the world). It is now more evident that such inequality is socially and economically dysfunctional, and also that it gives rise to political tensions that can be even more damaging. So there must be measures to address this.
Inadequate productive employment generation has been a central feature of the past growth process, and is clearly linked with the growing inequality. Economic policies within BRICS countries must be concerned with this, and in particular with how to promote more opportunities for decent work.
Another major aspect of inequality has been the inequality in access to basic social services and utilities. The strategies of privatisation and reduced public spending in such areas in all the BRICS countries have not only reduced access for the poor but also created tremendous inequalities. It is increasingly necessary for innovative strategies to promote more universal provision of necessary services and utilities.
Finally, recent growth in all the BRICS countries has been associated with a construction and real estate boom, and it is interesting to note that this boom is also in the process of winding down in all five countries. This creates all sorts of difficulties, in terms of both the employment losses as well as the health of the financial sector, and it is particularly galling given the continued shortage of adequate mass housing. All of these countries will need effective strategies to deal with this challenge, even while they continue to promote affordable and better-quality mass housing, and so surely there are opportunities here for creative policy thinking that can be shared.
South-South relations
What of the relations of the BRICS with other countries of the Global South? Two issues are important here. The first is whether the BRICS or the G20 will ignore or substitute for the views of the G77 or larger bodies of developing countries whose voices are only too rarely heard in international policy discourse. This is a concern, and one that it is important for the BRICS themselves to address directly. The recent attempt by South Africa to include many other African nations as observers or participants in the latest BRICS Summit was in that sense welcome, but the nagging question is whether this was simply a cosmetic attempt at suggesting wider representation than actually existed.
The second issue is whether the BRICS countries’ dealings with other countries of the South are following desirable patterns or simply replicating North-South interaction. It used to be believed that economic interaction between developing countries (South-South integration) would necessarily be more beneficial than North-South links. After all, North-South economic interaction mostly reproduced the global division of labour that emerged by the mid-20th century: the developing world specialises in primary commodities and labour-intensive (and therefore lower productivity) manufactured goods, while the North keeps the monopoly of high-value-added production. By contrast, trade and investment links between countries in the Global South were supposed to allow for more diversification because of their more similar stages of development, thus creating more synergies.
However, recent global economic patterns have led many to question these easy generalisations. The emergence of East Asian countries (especially China) as giant manufacturing hubs has been driven to a significant extent by North-South trade and investment. Even the interaction between developing countries has not always been along the predicted lines. Accusations of ‘new colonialism’ are now more common – especially in the hypocritical North, but also in the South. There are questions about whether groupings like the BRICS will feed into this, especially by controlling their own backyards and other weaker developing countries.
So there are fears that growing trade and investment links of the BRICS with poorer developing countries seek to exploit the natural resource base of these countries, siphoning them off in ways that are ecologically damaging, inherently unequal and of little benefit to the local people. There are concerns that cheaper exports from these semi-industrial countries undermine the competitiveness of local production in the poorer countries, thereby causing further shifts into primary commodity exporting and thereby stunting their development process. China is said to be dumping its products in economies across the world, and using the resulting foreign exchange surpluses to invest in and provide aid to authoritarian regimes that allow access to natural resources. Similarly Indian corporate investors are said to be engaged in large-scale land grabs in countries of North Africa and predatory behaviour elsewhere. Many recent South-South trade and investment agreements (and the resulting processes) have been similar in unfortunate ways to North-South ones, not just in terms of the protection they afford to corporate investors but even in guarding intellectual property rights!
As always, the reality is complex. Primary exporting countries are better off if there is increased competition among imperialists or traders, since that allows for better terms of such exports. Even China’s relationship with poorer countries is not based on colonial-style control of political power, but more arm’s-length. New manufacturing hubs with increasing import demand have allowed less developed countries indirect access to the developed-world market, while the fast growth of the BRICS has resulted in rapidly growing internal markets from which these countries stand to gain. This provides an important source of demand stimulus even as developed countries are increasingly mired in financial crisis and economic stagnation.
The basic point is that it is not economic interaction per se, but its nature, that has to be considered. Much of recent South-South interaction (including amongst the BRICS) has been corporate-led, which has determined the focus on trade and investment and the encouragement of particular patterns of trade and investment. To the extent that companies everywhere have similar interests (the pursuit of their own profits), it is not surprising that older North-South patterns are replicated.
But surely the focus should be to democratise the interaction itself, to work out the ways in which the patterns of trade and investment flows can be altered to emphasise the creation of decent employment. For this, a change of direction is required both within and outside the BRICS. The potential for positive change exists, but process needs to be more people-oriented, not profit-determined. Ultimately, sustainable economic diversification to higher-value-added and ecologically viable activities remains the key to growth and development not just in the BRICS countries but in other developing countries as well. This period of global flux actually provides a valuable opportunity to encourage and develop new ways of taking such strategies forward through cooperation.
Jayati Ghosh is an economics professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.
June 2013, pp 5-7
August 27th, 2017 by Prof Michel Chossudovsky
Next week in early September 2017, the member states of BRICS, will be meeting in Xiamen, Fujian Province, China.
This article was first published by Global Research in April 2015.
* * *
The financial media as well as segments of the alternative media are pointing to a possible weakening of the US dollar as a global trading currency resulting from the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) initiative.
One of the central arguments in this debate on competing World currencies hinges on the BRICS initiative to create a development bank which, according to analysts, challenges the hegemony of Wall Street and the Washington based Bretton Woods institutions.
The BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) was set up to challenge two major Western-led giants – the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. NDB’s key role will be to serve as a pool of currency for infrastructure projects within a group of five countries with major emerging national economies – Russia, Brazil, India, China and South Africa. (RT, October 9, 2015, emphasis added)
More recently, emphasis has been placed on the role of China’s new Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which, according to media reports, threatens to “transfer global financial control from Wall Street and City of London to the new development banks and funds of Beijing and Shanghai”.
While the creation of BRICS has significant geopolitical implications, both the AIIB as well as the proposed BRICS Development Bank (NDB) and its Contingency Reserve Arrangement (CRA) are dollar denominated entities. Unless they are coupled with a multi-currency system of trade and credit, they do not threaten dollar hegemony. Quite the opposite, they tend to sustain and extend dollar denominated lending. Moreover, they replicate several features the Bretton Woods framework.
Towards a Multi-Currency Arrangement?
What is significant, however, from a geopolitical standpoint is that China and Russia are developing a ruble-yuan swap, negotiated between the Russian Central Bank, and the People’s Bank of China,
The situation of the other three BRICS member states (Brazil, India, South Africa) with regard to the implementation of (real, rand rupiah) currency swaps is markedly different. These three highly indebted countries are in the straightjacket of IMF-World Bank conditionalities. They do not decide on fundamental issues of monetary policy and macro-economic reform without the green light from the Washington based international financial institutions.
Currency swaps between the BRICS central banks was put forth by Russia to:
“facilitate trade financing while completely bypassing the dollar. “At the same time, the new system will also act as a de facto replacement of the IMF, because it will allow the members of the alliance to direct resources to finance the weaker countries.” (Voice of Russia)
While Russia has formally raised the issue of a multi-currency arrangement, the Development Bank’s structure does not currently “officially” acknowledge such a framework:
“We are discussing with China and our BRICS parters the establishment of a system of multilateral swaps that will allow to transfer resources to one or another country, if needed. A part of the currency reserves can be directed to [the new system]” (Governor of the Russian Central Bank, June 2014, Prime news agency)
India, South Africa and Brazil have decided not to go along with a multiple currency arrangement, which would have allowed for the development of bilateral trade and investment activities between BRICs countries, operating outside the realm of dollar denominated credit. In fact they did not have the choice of making this decision in view of the strict loan conditionalities imposed by the IMF.
Heavily indebted under the brunt of their external creditors, all three countries are faithful pupils of the IMF-World Bank. The central bank of these countries is controlled by Wall Street and the IMF. For them to enter into a “non-dollar” or an “anti-dollar” development banking arrangement with multiple currencies, would have required prior approval of the IMF.
The Contingency Reserve Arrangement
The CRA is defined as a “framework for provision of support through liquidity and precautionary instruments in response to actual or potential short-term balance of payments pressures.” (Russia India Report April 7, 2015). In this context, the CRA fund does not constitute a “safety net” for BRICS countries, it accepts the hegemony of the US dollar which is sustained by large scale speculative operations in the currency and commodity markets.
In essence the CRA operates in a similar fashion to an IMF precautionary loan arrangement (e.g. Brazil November 1998) with a view to enabling highly indebted countries to maintain the parity of their exchange rate to the US dollar, by replenishing central bank reserves through borrowed money.
The CRA excludes the policy option of foreign exchange controls by BRICS member states. In the case of India, Brazil and South Africa, this option is largely foreclosed as a result of their agreements with the IMF.
The dollar denominated $100 billion CRA fund is a “silver platter” for Western “institutional speculators” including JP Morgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Goldman Sachs et al, which are involved in short selling operations on the Forex market. Ultimately the CRA fund will finance the speculative onslaught in the currency market.
Neoliberalism firmly entrenched
An arrangement using national currencies instead of the US dollar requires sovereignty in central bank monetary policy. In many regards, India, Brazil and South Africa are (from the monetary standpoint) US proxy states, firmly aligned with IMF-World Bank-WTO economic diktats.
It is worth recalling that since 1991, India’s macroeconomic policy was under under the control of the Bretton Woods institutions, with a former World Bank official, Dr. Manmohan Singh, serving first as Finance Minister and subsequently as Prime Minister.
Moreover, while India is an ally of China and Russia under BRICS, it has entered into a new defense cooperation deal with the Pentagon which is (unofficially) directed against Russia and China. It is also cooperating with the US in aerospace technology. India constitutes the largest market (after Saudi Arabia) for the sale of US weapons systems. And all these transactions are in US dollars.
Similarly, Brazil signed a far-reaching Defense agreement with the US in 2010 under the government of Luis Ignacio da Silva, who in the words of the IMF’s former managing director Heinrich Koeller, “Is Our Best President”, “… I am enthusiastic [with Lula’s administration]; but it is better to say I am deeply impressed by President Lula, indeed, and in particular because I do think he has the credibility” (IMF Managing Director Heinrich Koeller, Press conference, 10 April 2003 ).
In Brazil, the Bretton Woods institutions and Wall Street have dominated macro-economic reform since the outset of the government of Luis Ignacio da Silva in 2003. Under Lula, a Wall Street executive was appointed to head the Central Bank, the Banco do Brazil was in the hands of a former CitiGroup executive. While there are divisions within the ruling PT party, neoliberalism prevails. Economic and social in Brazil is in large part dictated by the country’s external creditors including JPMorgan Chase, Bank America and Citigroup.
Central Bank Reserves and The External Debt
India and Brazil (together with Mexico) are among the World’s most indebted developing countries. The foreign exchange reserves are fragile. India’s external debt in 2013 was of the order of more than $427 Billion, that of Brazil was a staggering $482 billion, South Africa’s external debt was of the order of $140 Billion. (World Bank, External Debt Stock, 2013).
External Debt Stock (2013)
Brazil $482 billion
India $427 billion
South Africa $140 billion
All three countries have central banks reserves (including gold and forex holdings) which are lower than their external debt (see table below).
Central Bank Reserves (2013)
Brazil $359 billion
India: $298 billion
South Africa $50 billion
The situation of South Africa is particularly precarious with an external debt which is almost three times its central bank reserves.
What this means is that these three BRICS member states are under the brunt of their Western creditors. Their central bank reserves are sustained by borrowed money. Their central bank operations (e.g. with a view to supporting domestic investments and development programs) will require borrowing in US dollars. Their central banks are essentially “currency board” arrangements, their national currencies are dollarized.
The BRICs Development Bank (NDB)
On 15 July 2014, the group of five countries signed an agreement to create the US$100 billion BRICS Development Bank together with a US dollar denominated ” reserve currency pool” of US$100 billion. These commitments were subsequently revised.
Each of the five-member countries “is expected to allocate an equal share of the $50 billion startup capital that will be expanded to $100 billion. Russia has agreed to provide $2 billion from the federal budget for the bank over the next seven years.” (RT, March 9, 2015).
In turn, the commitments to the Contingency Reserve Arrangement are as follows;
Brazil, $18 billion
Russia $18 billion
India $18 billion
China $41 billion
South Africa $5 billion
Total $100 billion
As mentioned earlier, India, Brazil and South Africa, are heavily indebted countries with central bank reserves substantially below the level of their external debt. Their contribution to the two BRICs financial entities can only be financed:
In both cases, dollar hegemony prevails. In other words, the Western creditors of these three countries will be required to “contribute” directly or indirectly to the financing of the dollar denominated contributions of Brazil, India and South Africa to the BRICS development bank (NDB) and the CRA.
In the case of South Africa with Central Bank reserves of the order of 50 billion dollars, the contribution to the BRICS NDB will inevitably be financed by an increase in the country’s (US dollar denominated) external debt.
Moreover, with regard to India, Brazil and South Africa, their membership in the BRICS Development Bank was no doubt the object of behind closed doors negotiations with the IMF as well as guarantees that they would not depart from the “Washington Consensus” on macro-economic reform.
Under a scheme whereby these countries were to be in be in full control of their Central Bank monetary policy, the contributions to the Development Bank (NDB) would be allocated in national currency rather than US dollars under a multi-currency arrangement. Needless to say under a multi-currency system the contingency CRA fund would not be required.
The geopolitics behind the BRICS initiative are crucial. While the BRICS initiative from the very outset has accepted the dollar system, this does not exclude the introduction, at a later stage of a multiple currency arrangement, which challenges dollar hegemony.
August 26th, 2017 by Dr. T. P. Wilkinson
1984 is probably one of the worst books of the 20th century because of its mis-interpretation!
a) Although Orwell was writing about ENGLAND, in fact, and not as allegory, the exigencies of anti-Soviet propaganda required that the story be defined as a dystopia about the world under Soviet control. Whatever Orwell may have thought about Stalin, 1984 was a story directly attacking the Labour Party and the policies that would become enshrined in Labour governments dominated by graduates from Oxford and to a lesser extent Cambridge. Anyone outside of Britain might be forgiven at the time for missing this but today the oversight is simply rooted in ignorance — willful or unwitting.
b) Orwell, who served in the colonial police in Burma, was well acquainted with the methods of social control used in Britain’s colonies — including torture and surveillance. He had no reason to draw on reports from the Soviet Union, true or false. He also worked in the British government’s propaganda department. The BBC was created in 1922 as a radio monopoly in part to improve the government’s campaign against organised labour. There the fabrication of “news” was daily routine, as it is today.
c) Post-war Britain was — in comparison to the US esp. — a disaster area. After two world wars, Britain was bankrupt. The empire which had subsidised the metropolitan standard of living was collapsing. Indian independence alone would mean an initial massive balance of payments deficit to the Union, not to mention debt to the US. The economy was more or less in ruins. The standard of living had sunk drastically for all but the very rich. It did not take any imagination to invent “Victory Gin” — Britain was nominally on the side of the winners but had lost everything. For someone like Orwell this was very obvious.
d) Too little attention is paid to the actual structures that Orwell describes. The Party and the Thought Police are most frequently mentioned. This focus distorts Orwell’s depiction of a complex mechanism of social control. Ironically many people who have read Noam Chomsky’s essays do not grasp the point which Orwell makes and Chomsky reiterates — albeit avoiding too much attention to this embarrassing point.
Orwell distinguished between the “inner party”, the “outer party” and the “prols”. This classification is very important for comprehending the whole process. Propaganda — that is the constant manipulation of data in forms to create what counts on any one day as “true” — is directed primarily at the “outer party”. The “inner party” is not concerned with what is actually true, this virtually invisible group is interested only in power. The “outer party” is governed by rigorous ideas of truth and virtue which have to be policed — precisely because the very idea of “truth” is a policing tool — not unlike sexual purity. The “truth” is of no material importance to the mass — the “prols” in Orwell’s depiction. But the “outer party” — the intellectuals, the bureaucrats, middle managers, functionaries of all types whether in the state or private sector, in short those who claim citizenship based on supposed intelligence and virtue/merit — need constant policing.
They must be told not only what is fashionable but what counts as true or as the acceptable/polite consensus. These people cannot be left in abject ignorance since they are needed to maintain the system. They are in short the “Gene Sharp factor” — the percentage of the population with which one moves the whole. (Ironically the first edition (1993) of Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy was published in Burma — where Orwell began his police career.) They are too numerous in comparison to the “inner party” to be ignored but not as disorganized as the “prols” so that they cannot be beaten down physically as a mass.
Perhaps Noam Chomsky does not focus too much on his observation that it is the middle class intellectual/managerial class that is the target of most regime propaganda (most heavily propagandised) because he belongs precisely to that class. In fact, on some issues he might be confused with an asset of the Thought Police — coming too as he does from a central US Thought Police institution — MIT.
Orwell was an Old Etonian. Eton College is the pinnacle of the “outer party” cadre institutions in Britain. It is run for the “inner party” and many of the “inner party” are also Old Etonians but the English public school is notorious for enforcing class distinctions even among those of the same college. All Etonians are equal too, some are more equal than others.
e) Who is “Big Brother”? Big Brother is always supposed to be a kind of Stalin allegory. However, unlike the US, Britain has a constant figure who constitutes the focus of all loyalty and affection — the reigning monarch. The British royal family changed their name when war was declared against Germany in 1914. It became inappropriate to have a German king ordering illiterate British peasants and workers into war against another German king who was directly related for reasons that could not be admitted openly and still cannot. So the name “Windsor” was adopted. Edward VIII both before and after his abdication maintained a healthy relationship with blatant fascists of the old style.
This does not mean that the British royal family ever renounced its affinity for fascism (e.g. Franco and Salazar). Moreover it is almost impossible to criticise the monarchy substantively in the United Kingdom. The actions of its members, singularly or collectively, are beyond review or public reproach — except in matters trivial like taste or polite speech. The pretense that the most wealthy private individual in the country (and one of the world’s wealthiest), the reigning monarch, has no personal interest in the policies of the British government and has no practical influence over the government in defense of those interests is about as great a self-deception as one can demand of any person, let alone an entire country.
God save the King/Queen…
f) It is even arguable that Orwell was more concerned about the US because this was the country which switched sides and manipulated the war aims the most — without any cost to itself. During WWII it was clear that the Soviet Union was fighting a vicious war just to survive in the face of the Western onslaught. However, sober people also saw that the US stood to be the only beneficiary of the war. In 1945, this was obvious. No sooner had the war ended but the US proclaimed a war against the Soviet Union. Britain could not have afforded such a position — even if Churchill would have liked. He gave his deceptive “iron curtain” speech for Truman because of dependence on the US not because Britain could have afforded an anti-Soviet policy on its own.1 Orwell could certainly see the absurdity of an impoverished Britain having been on the side of the Soviet Union against Hitler now aligned with the US against the Soviet Union.
In fact, it could be argued that Orwell’s novel is very coherent with Roger Waters’ The Wall (and its sequel The Final Cut) in their specifically BRITISH views of mass culture and pseudo-democracy concealing party dictatorship. It has little, if anything, to do with Russian society, let alone politics. That is only natural. Orwell never lived in Russia and would not have been able to explain Russian society. For that one has to turn to Russians themselves; e.g., Tolstoy or Sholokhov or Pasternak. On the other hand many Americans believe that they understand British society — this is due largely to saturation with BBC programming. However similar Britain may appear to the US, it is actually a very different country and culture (except perhaps for the highest strata of the Anglo-American ruling class). The illusion that Britons are only more quaint Americans has done much to promote the mis-understanding of Orwell.
One of the great intellectual travesty’s of the 20th century is the ascendency of US liberal ideology — in its broadest sense.2
There is probably not a country in the world today with so much influence on intellectual and cultural activity from such a depraved and obscene level of general ignorance and stupidity. The capacity to saturate the world with this structural mendacity and almost genetic stupidity is probably worse than any other weapons system the country’s psychopaths have produced — because it is the basis for acceptance of all those weapons in the first place.
Dr T.P. Wilkinson writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket between the cradles of Heine and Saramago. He is also the author of Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa (Maisonneuve Press, 2003). Read other articles by T.P..
Notes
1. Churchill, unlike Truman, had attended the meetings with Stalin and Roosevelt at Yalta where it was agreed that the Soviet Union would occupy the Eastern European territories that had been absorbed into the German Empire, in part as a basis for war reparations due to the enormous destruction suffered by the Soviet Union — almost all of the European part of the country was razed to the ground. He knew that the Soviet occupation had been agreed by all the Allies. He also knew that the Allies were attempting to deprive the Soviet Union of the reparations due from Germany. In short he knew that it was the West that was hanging an “iron curtain” in front of the Soviet Union in the hope that it would collapse after WWII. Britain could not have afforded such a policy. Among other things the collapse of the empire would deprive it of its cheap access to all sorts of raw materials making it vulnerable to world market fluctuations.
2. A more precise clarification of what might otherwise be called the ideology of the North Atlantic Establishment would exceed the scope of this brief note. Carroll Quigley’s The Anglo-American Establishment provides a fairly useful summary of its principles and the way it has been expressed through the 20th century. It should be noted that one of the key cadre institutions for academics according to Quigley is the All Souls College of Oxford University– where Gene Sharp also completed his doctorate.
This article was originally published by Dissident Voice.
Featured image is from Countercurrents.
August 26th, 2017 by Adeyinka Makinde
“That land over there is yours. You’ll go back to it one day, because your fight will prevail. And you’ll have your homes and your mosques back again, because your cause is right and God is on your side.”—Zbigniew Brzezinksi
We are joined by the lawyer and university lecturer Adeyinka Makinde for the second installment of a two-part interview centering in his recent article, “The Pan-Islamic Option : The West’s Part in the Creation and Sustaining of Islamist Terror”.
In this second part we discuss some of the historical background to the West’s use and support of violent Islamist groups, looking at examples of German, British and US policy since the early days of the Twentieth Century.
Adeyinka Makinde trained for the law as a barrister. He lectures in criminal law and public law at a university in London, and has an academic research interest in intelligence & security matters. He is a contributor to a number of websites for which he has written essays and commentaries on international relations, politics and military history. He has served as a programme consultant and provided expert commentary for BBC World Service Radio, China Radio International and the Voice of Russia.
This article was originally published by The Mind Renewed.
August 26th, 2017 by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
In the United States “conspiracy theory” is the name given to explanations that differ from those that serve the ruling oligarchy, the establishment or whatever we want to call those who set and control the agendas and the explanations that support the agendas.
The explanations imposed on us by the ruling class are themselves conspiracy theories. Moreover, they are conspiracy theories designed to hide the real conspiracy that our rulers are operating.
For example, the official explanation of 9/11 is a conspiracy theory. Some Muslims, mainly Saudi Arabians, delivered the greatest humiliation to a superpower since David slew Goliath. They outsmarted all 17 US intelligence agencies and those of NATO and Israel, the National Security Council, the Transportation Safety Administration, Air Traffic Control, and Dick Cheney, hijacked four US airliners on one morning, brought down three World Trade Center skyscrapers, destroyed that part of the Pentagon where research was underway into the missing $2.3 trillion, and caused the morons in Washington to blame Afghanistan instead of Saudi Arabia.
Clearly, the Saudia Arabians who humiliated America were involved in a conspiracy to do so.
Is it a believable conspiracy?
The ability of a few young Muslim men to pull off such a feat is unbelievable. Such total failure of the US National Security State means that America was blindly vulnerable throughout the decades of Cold War with the Soviet Union. If such total failure of the National Security State had really occurred, the White House and Congress would have been screaming for an investigation. People would have been held accountable for the long chain of security failures that allowed the plot to succeed. Instead, no one was even reprimanded, and the White House resisted all efforts for an investigation for a year. Finally, to shut up the 9/11 families, a 9/11 Commission was convened. The commission duly wrote down the government’s story and that was the “investigation.”
Moreover, there is no evidence to support the official conspiracy theory of 9/11. Indeed, all known evidence contradicts the official conspiracy theory.
For example, it is a proven fact that Building 7 came down at freefall acceleration, which means it was wired for demolition. Why was it wired for demolition? There is no official answer to this question.
It is the known evidence provided by scientists, architects, engineers, pilots, and the first responders who were in the twin towers and personally experienced the numerous explosions that brough down the towers that is described as a conspiracy theory.
The CIA introduced the term “conspiracy theory” into public discourse as part of its action plan to discredit skeptics of the Warren Commission report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Any explanation other than the one handed down, which is contradicted by all known evidence, was debunked as a conspiracy theory.
Conspiracy theories are the backbone of US foreign policy. For example, the George W. Bush regime was active in a conspiracy against Iraq and Saddam Hussein. The Bush regime created fake evidence of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction,” sold the false story to a gullible world and used it to destroy Iraq and murder its leader. Similarly, Gaddafi was a victim of an Obama/Hillary conspiracy to destroy Libya and murder Gaddafi. Assad of Syria and Iran were slated for the same treatment until the Russians intervened.
Currently, Washington is engaged in conspiracies against Russia, China, and Venezuela. Proclaiming a non-existant “Iranian threat,” Washington put US missiles on Russia’s border and used the “North Korean threat” to put missiles on China’s border. The democratically elected leader of Venezuela is said by Washington to be a dictator, and sanctions have been put on Venezuela to help the small Spanish elite through whom Washington has traditionally ruled South American countries pull off a coup and reestablish US control over Venezuela.
Everyone is a threat: Venezuela, Yemen, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Aghanistan, tribes in Pakistan, Libya, Russia, China, North Korea, but never Washington. The greatest conspiracy theory of our time is that Americans are surrounded by foreign threats. We are not even safe from Venezuela.
The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR, and the rest of the presstitutes are quick to debunk as conspiracy theories all explanations that differ from the explanations of the ruling interests that the presstitutes serve.
Yet, as I write and for some nine months to date, the presstitute media has itself been promoting the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump was involved in a conspiracy with the president of Russia and Russian intelligence services to hack the US presidential election and place Trump, a Russian agent, in the White House.
This conspiracy theory has no evidence whatsoever. It doesn’t need evidence, because it serves the interests of the military/security complex, the Democratic Party, the neoconservatives, and permits the presstitutes to show lavish devotion to their masters. By endless repetition a lie becomes truth.
There is a conspiracy, and it is against the American people. Their jobs have been offshored in order to enrich the already rich. They have been forced into debt in a futile effort to maintain their living standards. Their effort to stem their decline by electing a president who spoke for them is being subverted before their eyes by an utterly corrupt media and ruling class.
Sooner or later it will dawn on them that there is nothing they can do but violently revolt. Most likely, by the time they reach this conclusion it will be too late. Americans are very slow to escape from the false reality in which they live. Americans are a thoroughly brainwashed people who hold tightly to their false life within The Matrix.
For the gullible and naive who have been brainwashed into believing that any explanation that differs from the officially-blessed one is a conspiracy theory, there are available online long lists of government conspiracies that succeeded in deceiving the people in order that the governments could achieve agendas that the people would have rejected.
If liberty continues to exist on earth, it will not be in the Western world. It will be in Russia and China, countries that emerged out of the opposite and know the value of liberty, and it will be in those South American countries, such as Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia that fight for their sovereignty against American oppression.
Indeed, as historians unconcerned with their careers are beginning to write, the primary lesson in history is that governments deceive their peoples.
Everywhere in the Western world, government is a conspiracy against the people.
NOTE: Americans cannot easily escape the 9/11 lie, because they have been trained by the presstitutes to hate and distrust Muslims. The result is: “The Muslims must have done it.”
August 26th, 2017 by José Vicente Rangel
Featured image: Pres. Nicolas Maduro and Jose Vicente Rangel (Source: Cuba Debate)
In the legal, political and institutional framework that was just created in Venezuela after this categorical national pronouncement in favor of peace and against violence, dualism is inadmissible. A choice has to be made between acting in the realm of violence or in the realm of peace. No-one can have both things. Whoever intends to break this basic principle of democracy, which is the rule of law, will be sanctioned according to the Constitution and the laws of the Republic, and whoever respects the juridical organization of the nation will enjoy every single one of the guarantees it provides. Venezuelans are beginning to enjoy the new climate that has been created after the people expressed themselves through the polls in July. These are the renovating effects of the Constituent process.
Labyrinth
Clumsiness has been installed in the White House. President Donald Trump increasingly resembles a bull in a china shop. In the short time he has been in charge he has opened dangerous fronts in foreign policy, internal policy, finance and economy. He shows himself to the world as a thug. He easily falls for the routine provocations of the North Korean leader, who always manages to exasperate him. He toughens relations with Russia and China, and then backpedals with a levity that is improper for a president of the largest power in the world.
Trump’s banalization of power is shocking. Regarding Venezuela, his attitude has made Maduro a favor. With his threats of invasion, he has managed to change the stance—at least the public one—of the neoliberal leaders of the region: Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Peru and Mexico. They went from a position of encouragement of interference in Venezuela’s internal affairs, and even military intervention, to condemning any such attempts after Trump spoke. The US president also left Venezuela’s internal opposition out on a limb: they had to come up with an absurd statement in which they reject a military intervention that they had previously demanded through a convoluted and ambiguous argument, which is revealing of the economic nature of that relation.
But we mustn’t underestimate this man. He is too powerful and represents an alliance of the darkest interests in the US. He’s the man of the most aggressive and voracious financial sector, a leader of the hawks of the Armed Forces and the intelligence and “security” organisms. The same ease with which he builds a clothing business for him or his daughter anywhere in the world, he can use to invade nations or use immoral commercial practices to his own interest. The destiny of the world in the hands of this son of the Empire is uncertain and unpredictable.
Venezuela is a target. We mustn’t forget that. Buet we must accept this challenge with intelligence, with creative audacity and with courage. As we Venezuelans have always been able to do when we face a challenge.
The act of war against the Paracamay fort, headquarters of the powerful 41st Armored Brigade, as well as the determination of insurrect elements to advance in the putschist initiative until the last consequences…
In the early hours of Sunday 13 this month, a group of mercenaries, paramilitaries, and retired and active officials of the Bolivarian Armed Forces of Venezuela, broke into this military unit and managed to get hold of about a hundred rifles and other weapons.
Of course, those who planned and executed this operation underestimated the troops’ ability to respond. That reaction, which frustrated other dark purposes of the plan, confirms that putschism has no future, and that those who act in those lines should reflect on its consequences.
The military institution has an answer, and everything indicates their willingness to repel any aggression and to sanction the wrongdoers with all the force of military justice. The High Command is aware of its responsibility, and also united in their respect for the law and in their defense of national sovereignty.
Until now, after this terrorist attack, some local political leaders have been proven to be involved, but the research also reveals names of renowned political figures.
August 26th, 2017 by Mike Whitney
The United States and South Korea are currently engaged in large-scale, joint-military war games that simulate an invasion of the North, the destruction of the DPRK’s nuclear weapons sites, and a “decapitation operation” to take out the supreme leader, Kim Jong-un. The objective of the operation is to intensify tensions between North and South thereby justifying the continued US occupation of the peninsula and the permanent division of the country.
Imagine if North Korea decided to conduct massive “live fire” military drills, accompanied by a Chinese naval flotilla, just three miles off the coast of California. And, let’s say, they decided to send formations of strategic high-altitude aircraft loaded with nuclear bombs to fly along the Canada and Mexico borders while tens of thousands of combat troops accompanied by hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles rehearsed a “shock and awe” type blitz onto US territory where they would immediately crush the defending army, level cities and critical civilian infrastructure, and topple the regime in Washington.
Do you think the Trump administration would dismiss the North’s provocative war games as merely “defensive maneuvers” or would they see them as a clear and present danger to US national security warranting a prompt and muscular response from the military?
It’s a no brainer, isn’t it? If North Korea treated the US like the US treats North Korea, then Washington would turn everything north of the 38th Parallel into a smoldering wastelands. That much is certain.
But double standards aside, the United States has always treated Korea with contempt and brutality. The ongoing war games are just the latest in a long line of provocations dating back more than a hundred years. In 1871, the US launched its infamous Korean Expedition in which US warships were deployed to the peninsula to force open markets and seize whatever wealth was available. Not surprisingly, the so called “diplomatic” mission quickly devolved into a full-blown conflagration as an armed contingent of 650 US troops landed on the Korean island of Ganghwa where they captured several Korean forts and slaughtered over 300 Korean soldiers. The battle culminated in a ferocious struggle for a citadel called Gwangseong Garrison. The Korean forces defended the fortress honorably, but their ancient matchlocks were no match for the American’s vastly-superior Remington rolling-block carbines. The Korean forces were butchered defending their own country while the invading American army barely suffered a scratch. (Just three Marines were killed in the fighting.) This was Korea’s first taste of US savagery.
Washington’s hatred for Korea reached its apex during the Korean War, a conflict in which the meddlesome US had no reason to be involved. The nationalist militias that had finally triumphed over 40-years of Japanese occupation, now had to face the full-force of the US military which was committed to containing communism wherever it popped up. In its demented attempt to impose its own values on the rest of the world, the US killed upwards of 3 million people, reduced most of the North to rubble, razed the main population centers to the ground, and viciously carpet-bombed reservoirs, irrigation dams, rice crops, hydroelectric dams, and all of the other life-sustaining infrastructure and food sources. The magnitude of the devastation was unimaginable, everything north of the 38th parallel was transformed into a moonscape. Washington wanted to make sure that survivors would face widespread famine, disease and Stone Age-type conditions for years to come. The US couldn’t win the war, so it destroyed every trace of civilization.
According to the Asia-Pacific Journal:
“By the fall of 1952, there were no effective targets left for US planes to hit. Every significant town, city and industrial area in North Korea had already been bombed. In the spring of 1953, the Air Force targeted irrigation dams on the Yalu River, both to destroy the North Korean rice crop and to pressure the Chinese, who would have to supply more food aid to the North. Five reservoirs were hit, flooding thousands of acres of farmland, inundating whole towns and laying waste to the essential food source for millions of North Koreans.10 Only emergency assistance from China, the USSR, and other socialist countries prevented widespread famine.” (“The Destruction and Reconstruction of North Korea, 1950 – 1960”, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Japan Focus)
The idea that the conflict was a “civil war” was a charade to conceal what was actually taking place. In reality, the US was engaged in a battle to the death with a weaker but more determined national liberation movement that sought to break to bonds of foreign occupation. The US could not prevail in the conflict, but they did manage to force a compromise on their adversary, the partitioning of the state along the 38th parallel followed by the installing of a military dictatorship in Soule. This is the bitter peace the US imposed on Korea.
Had the US had been defeated in Korea as they had been in Vietnam, the situation on the peninsula would probably be similar to that of Vietnam today. The country would be integrated under a central government, standards of living would have likely improved as the economy strengthened, and many of the ideological trappings of communism would have been discarded as the nation became more actively engaged in global trade.
Pyongyang in rubble (1953)
But the US was not defeated in the Korean War, it merely withdrew to military bases in the south where more than 30,000 US combat troops reside to this day. As a result, the southern part of the peninsula remains occupied territory, its government in Seoul largely complies with Washington’s diktats, and the country is still split along the 38th parallel. Also, as the recent verbal confrontation between Washington and Pyongyang illustrates, hostilities could flare up at any time.
It’s worth mentioning that since the war ended in 1953, the United States has toppled or attempted to topple over 50 sovereign governments. In that same period of time, the North has not attacked, toppled or invaded anyone, nor have they leveled sanctions on anyone, nor have they armed and trained neo Nazis, Islamic jihadists or other fanatical militants to execute their proxy wars in far-flung regions around the globe, nor have they established black sites where they brutalize their kidnapped victims with extreme forms of torture. North Korea may be a seriously-flawed and, perhaps, even tyrannical regime, but it has not pummeled entire nations into dust sending millions fleeing across continents to seek refuge. It has not bombed wedding parties, hospitals, mosques etc wreaking havoc while plunging the world deeper into chaos and despair. North Korea is far from perfect, but compared to the United States, it’s looks like a paragon of virtue.
The North Koreans want peace. They want a formal end to the war and they want guarantees that the United States won’t preemptively attack them. Is that too much to ask?
But the United States won’t sign a treaty with the North because it is not in its interests to do so. Washington would prefer for things to stay just the way they are today. In fact, Hillary Clinton said as much in a speech she made to Goldman Sachs in 2013. Here’s an excerpt:
CLINTON: “We don’t want a unified Korean peninsula, because if there were one South Korea would be dominant for the obvious economic and political reasons.
We [also] don’t want the North Koreans to cause more trouble than the system can absorb. So we’ve got a pretty good thing going with the previous North Korean leaders [Kim Il-sung and Kim Jung-il]. And then along comes the new young leader [Kim Jung-un], and he proceeds to insult the Chinese. He refuses to accept delegations coming from them…..So the new [Chinese] leadership basically calls him [Kim Jung-un] on the carpet. …Cut it out. Just stop it. Who do you think you are? You are dependent on us [the Chinese], and you know it. (WikiLeaks)
There it is in black and white. The US does not want a unified Korea. (“for obvious economic and political reasons.”) The US wants to keep the country split up so it can keep the North isolated and underdeveloped, maintain the South’s colonial dependence on the US, and perpetuate the occupation. That’s what Washington wants. The goal is not security, but power, greed and geopolitical positioning.
From Washington’s point of view, the status quo is just dandy which is why there is no incentive to end the war, sign a treaty, wind down the occupation, or provide security guarantees for the North. As Hillary cheerily opines, “We’ve got a pretty good thing going on.”
Indeed. The only fly in the ointment is that young Kim is now toying with nuclear weapons which seems to have caught Washington by surprise.
But how could Washington be surprised when they’ve known the DPRK has had a nuclear weapons program since the early 1990s? Clearly, the issue should have been seriously addressed much earlier.
Even so, Washington’s elite powerbrokers have yet to settle on a remedy for this fast emerging crisis, which is why the Trump administration is running around twisting arms (Russia and China) and escalating his bombast rather than taking the rational approach and engaging the North Koreans directly in bilateral negotiations.
Has anyone even considered that option yet?
The North is eager to negotiate because the North wants peace, it’s as plain as the nose on your face. The North does not want a confrontation with the US because they know what the outcome would be. Complete and total annihilation. They know that and they don’t want that. Nor do they want to unilaterally disarm and end up like Gadhafi or Saddam. That’s why they built nukes in the first place, to avoid the Gadhafi scenario.
At this stage of the game, the US has just two options:
1. Ignore the issue until the North develops the ballistic missile technology needed to strike the mainland USA, thus, putting American cities and civilians at risk.
2. Negotiate an end to the war, provide security guarantees, and some economic inducements (oil and light-water reactors for electricity) in exchange for denuclearization and routine weapons-and-facilities inspections.
So what’s it going to be: Door Number 1 or Door Number 2?
We’ve been down this road before. In the 1990s the Clinton administration worked out the terms for the so called Agreed Framework which could have succeeded had Washington kept up its end of the deal. But it didn’t. Washington failed to meet its obligations, so now we’re back to Square 1, and the Trump administration has to decide whether they’re capable of making a rational decision or not. (Don’t hold your breath) Here’s how Jimmy Carter summed up the previous agreement in a Washington Post op-ed in 2010:
“Pyongyang has sent a consistent message that during direct talks with the United States, it is ready to conclude an agreement to end its nuclear programs, put them all under IAEA inspection and conclude a permanent peace treaty to replace the ‘temporary’ cease-fire of 1953. We should consider responding to this offer. The unfortunate alternative is for North Koreans to take whatever actions they consider necessary to defend themselves from what they claim to fear most: a military attack supported by the United States, along with efforts to change the political regime.” (“North Korea’s consistent message to the U.S.”, President Jimmy Carter, Washington Post)
There’s a peaceful way out of this crisis. Just sit down and negotiate. It’s no big deal. People do it all the time. Heck, if Trump is half the wheeler-dealer he claims to be in his autobiography, it should be a piece of cake.
Let’s hope so.
Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be reached at [email protected].
Featured image is from Jake Cvnningham | CC BY 2.0.
August 26th, 2017 by Eric Margolis
President Trump’s ability to trigger a nuclear war is ‘pretty damn scary’ said former US intelligence director James Clapper this week. Remember when Trump vowed to ‘bomb the shit’ out of his enemies?
I don’t have much respect for Clapper, who brazenly lied to Congress and is a ringleader of the deep government’s efforts to overthrow Trump. But this time, Clapper is 100% right. He’s scared and I am too.
This week, Trump proclaimed he would continue the pointless, stalemated US colonial war in Afghanistan and might ask India to help there – a sure-fire way to bring nuclear-armed India and Pakistan into a terrifying confrontation.
Meanwhile, Trump has backed himself into a corner over North Korea. His threats and bombast have not made the North’s leader Kim Jong-un stop threatening to launch nuclear-armed missiles at the US island of Guam, Hawaii, Japan and South Korea. That is, if the US and South Korea keep up their highly provocative annual military war games on North Korea’s borders that each year invoke North Korea’s fury.
The Pentagon insists these war games are just a routine military exercise. But that’s not the view in Pyongyang, and, as a long-time Korea military analyst, not mine.
North Korea, which faces the 500,000-man South Korean Army (ROK) most of which is just down the main highway, has good reason to be nervous. I’ve been with the 1st ROK Division up on and under the Demilitarized Zone. The South Koreans are heavily armed with top line equipment and tough as nails. They are backed by massive US/South Korean air and naval power.
North Koreans are well aware that Egypt deceived Israel in the 1973 war by using frequent military exercises to mask its plans to storm the Suez Canal. It worked. Israel was caught flat footed by the surprise Egyptian attack on the canal.
By refusing a peace to end the 1950-53 Korean War, and by continuing economic and political warfare against North Korea, the US has only itself to blame for North Korea developing nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them. Kim Jong-un saw what happened to Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi (thanks to Hillary Clinton) and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.
Trump is now in a serious fix over North Korea. Jong-un has called Trump’s bluff and sneered at the Donald’s fire and brimstone threats. So Trump’s choices are to back away from the Korean crisis he created or else attack North Korea. But the North’s weapons and leadership are very well dispersed and deeply dug into the mountains. A US conventional attack on the North is estimated to cost 250,000 American casualties.
The US can certainly knock out some of Kim’s medium and longer-ranged missiles in a major blitz, but it can’t be certain that a few nuclear tipped N. Korean missiles won’t survive to strike Japan, South Korea, Hawaii, Okinawa or Guam – and maybe even Los Angeles and San Francisco. It is unlikely that South Korea and the US can decapitate North Korea’s leadership by using conventional weapons – starting with Kim Jong-un.
Unless, of course, Trump, who managed to avoid Vietnam era military service because of a bump on his foot, decides to go nuclear. This would mean hitting North Korea with a score or more nuclear weapons, large and small, before the North could riposte. North Korea would be totally destroyed, and its 25 million people left dying, maimed or starving. Japan, the world’s third largest economy, would also be shattered.
Nuclear fallout would shower South Korea, Northern China, and Pacific Russia – and eventually blow east to the US and Canadian west coasts. If the Trump administration decided to use nuclear weapons against North Korea, then why not in Afghanistan? The temptation will be obvious.
President Dwight Eisenhower refused pleas by France to use nuclear weapons to rescue the besieged French garrison at Dien Bien Phu. Trump may not be as cautious. He can’t afford to be seen backing away from the Korean crisis. His aides clearly did not think through the ramification of his bellicose threats against North Korea. Bullies tend to grow lazy.
That’s why I’m as nervous as Lt. Gen. Clapper.
Eric Margolis [send him mail] is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World. See his website.
Featured image is from LobeLog.
August 26th, 2017 by Moon of Alabama
A month ago we warned of the upcoming war on Venezuela. Such a war could blow up huge in many nations of the region.
The U.S. trained and financed opposition has tried to create violent chaos in the streets but failed to gain traction with the majority of the people. The only support it has inside the country is from the richer bourgeois in the major cities which despises the government’s social justice program. Workers and farmers are better off under the social-democratic policies of first Hugo Chavez and now Nicolas Maduro. The coup attempt as step one of a U.S. takeover of Venezuela has failed.
Last month a new constitutional assembly was voted in and it is ready to defend the state. The opposition boycotted the election to the assembly but is now complaining that it has no seats in it. One of the assemblies first moves was to fire the renegade General Prosecutor Luisa Ortega Diaz. She had condemned the government for its resistance to the coup attempts. She now has fled the country together with her husband. The Miami Herald admits that she is on the U.S. payroll:
Ortega, a longtime government insider who became chief prosecutor in 2007, is likely safeguarding some of the administration’s most damning legal secrets. And she’s thought to be working with U.S. law enforcement at a time when Washington is ratcheting up sanctions on Caracas.
Word is that Ortega’s husband was blackmailed by the U.S. after he was involved in large illegal transactions.
U.S. President Trump threatened to use military force should the dully elected President Maduro not give up his position. The CIA head Pompeo recently visited countries neighboring Venezuela “trying to help them understand the things they might do”. Did he suggest weapon supplies to some proxy forces or an outright invasion?
Today the Trump administration imposed severe sanctions on Venezuela:
The sanctions Trump signed by executive order prohibit financial institutions from providing new money to the government or state oil company PDVSA. It would also restrict PDVSA’s U.S. subsidiary, Citgo, from sending dividends back to Venezuela as well as ban trading in two bonds the government recently issued to circumvent its increasing isolation from western financial markets.
Venezuela was prepared for at least some of these sanctions. A few moth ago the Russian oil giant Rosneft acquired a share of PDVSA and at least some oil sales are routed through that company:
Russian oil firm Rosneft has struck deals with several buyers for almost its entire quota of Venezuelan crude for the remainder of the year, traders told Reuters on Wednesday, the first time it has conducted such a large sale of the OPEC member’s oil.
…
Venezuela’s oil deliveries to the United States have declined in recent years amid falling production, commercial issues, and sanctions on Venezuelan officials.
The White House statement calls Maduro a “dictator” and his Presidency “illegitimate”. Both descriptions are laughable. Maduro was elected in free and fair elections. The former U.S. president Jimmy Carter called the election system in Venezuela the best in the world. The new sanctions will likely increase the support for the current government.
The White House hinted at further economic measures:
In a call to brief reporters on the measures, the [senior Trump] official said the United States has significant influence over Venezuela’s economy but does not want to wield it in an irresponsible manner that could further burden the already-struggling Venezuelan people.
Venezuela will now have some troubling times. But unless the U.S. launches an outright military attack on the country -by proxy of its neighbors, through mercenaries or by itself- the country will easily survive the unjust onslaught.
With 300 billion barrels the proven oil-reserves of Venezuela are the largest of the world. They are the reason why the U.S. wants to subjugate the country. But neither Russia nor China nor anyone else wants to see those reserves under U.S. control.
Featured image is from Photos.de.tibo via Flickr.
August 26th, 2017 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark
Featured image: Australian Sen. Matthew Canavan (Source: @mattjcan / Twitter)
It was nothing short of fabulous. Before the public, the political lie is deemed an imperative, instinctively cultured to repel anything that might appear, let alone resemble, truth. Never, whatever you do in political garb, reveal the game, convey the reality, even if power is only held on trust. Those idiots (the voters, that is) won’t know.
Before the judicial bench, however, the same figures find themselves on the horns of a dilemma. Pull the wig over those judicial eyes – or risk perjuring yourself? With that in mind, the story about how the Nationals Senator Matt Canavan became an Italian citizen, making him ineligible as a sitting member of Parliament according to the Australian Constitution, was instructive.
The original version of the story was a stumbling search for how he acquired that form of Italian citizenship. When pressed on the point, Canavan blamed his mother, who seemed to resemble an unmonitored demiurge intent on creating a universe of mischief. (Naturally, the son had no idea, revealing his degree of competence, or the extent of pure ignorance that every parliamentarian should be proud of.)
Even then, cracks started to appear in the fabricated story. Discussions about his citizenship and maternal suggestions in that direction, were being had around the family table prior to the sneaky visit to the Italian consulate in Brisbane.
The directions hearing in the High Court saw a change of heart. Mum was left out of it. Legal counsel representing Senator Canavan argued that he had been an Italian citizen since 1983 (not 2006, as Canavan had claimed, courtesy of his mother’s intervention), due to a change in Italian law. This rendered Canavan a citizen by descent, rather than birth.
This could only have one meaning, claimed legal counsel representing Canavan: section 44 of the Australian constitution would not apply. To read the section any other way, claimed David Bennett, QC, would result in a “ridiculous” interpretation, one that would also disqualify up to half the population from sitting in Parliament. A grim, and truly undemocratic prospect indeed.
Canavan was not the only one to revise his shoddy account before the High Court directions hearings. Having given the world a version of events suggesting diligence, enthusiasm and a spirit of inquiry into whether he had either Indian or British citizenship, One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts revealed that he had only filled in his renunciation documents after his election to parliament.
Left with the mountainous task of defending Roberts, a post-truth pedlar who insists that the Murdoch empire offers papers of unimpeachable balance, Senior Counsel Robert Newlinds was knotted and bound. He duly submitted to Chief Justice Susan Kiefel that the British authorities were the ones who had been confusing – confusing, that is, on when renunciation of UK citizenship had been accepted.
Roberts is a particular problematic case, given his lukewarm efforts during the renunciation process. For him, email efforts sufficed (of course, he was very insistent when sending them): the first directed to the British Home Office to renounce British citizenship; the second to again reiterate that same point. (The number of emails has, over time, altered.)
He then claimed, without more ado, that he had documents showing the same. He was not a citizen, either of India, or the UK, and he had the paperwork to prove it, with a UK acknowledgement on December 5 last year that he had successfully achieved his goal.
Not that this paperwork was ever adduced before an ever sceptical audience. As Roberts’ spokesman, Sean Black, explained to Fairfax media in rather telling fashion, the senator “is choosing to believe that he was never British.”[1] A belief to move mountains.
Newlinds, despite casting a weary eye over the awful mess his client had found himself in, sensed some wriggle room. The UK Home Office subsequent to Roberts’ election sent him a form to accept the renunciation. But what did it mean? For the desperate advocate, it was unclear whether the British authorities were “accepting the renunciation by the form, or the earlier email.” Pigs, at this point, were well and truly airborne.
Confidence continues to be unduly high with the Attorney-General, George Brandis, and Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull. This is a constitutional disaster that will be resolved sensibly, without fuss. But to do so will require the High Court judges to overturn a conservative reading of section 44 that has been in place for decades.
Turnbull remains “very, very confident that our members who have been caught up in this will be held by the court to be eligible to sit in the Parliament and therefore eligible to be ministers.” This absurdist drama is far from over, and will continue in October. In the meantime, the numbers of the purportedly ineligible representatives will simply grow. More discoveries about hidden citizenships are to be had.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: [email protected]
Note
[1] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-27/malcolm-roberts-says-he-renounced-british-citizenship/8750772
August 26th, 2017 by Keith K. C. Hui
As the world’s focus recently came to Guam, the people there told us that “the gravest threat isn’t North Korea, it’s the United States”.
Leilani Ganser, an indigenous rights organizer for Guam and a Next Leader at the Institute for Policy Studies, uses words to give us a video-audio portrait of the real daily life in Guam:
“While tourists ads depict the South Pacific as a tranquil safe haven, that tranquility is pierced by the roars of B-52 bombers and submarine water-to-shore artillery blasts.”
“With military bases come extreme pollution, the occupation of sacred lands, and what some scholars describe as an invisible public health crisis …… Over the years Guam has been home to nuclear weapons, mustard gas, and countless other carcinogens. In the 1980s, the Navy discharged radioactive water into a harbor my family has used for fishing …… Multiple wells accessing the island’s one aquifer have had to be shut down due to chemical contamination from areas under or adjacent to these military bases.”
“In fact, they (the Navy) restrict the indigenous populations’ ability to engage in traditional means of subsistence and poison the resources locals rely on for self-sustainability” [Note 1].
The more mainstream media Boston Review also published an “Open Letter from Guam to America” written by Victora-Lola M. Leon Guerreo. She shows us a historical account in addition to their present-day sufferings:
“The worst bombs that have ever been dropped on Guam were yours near the end of the World War II. At the beginning of the war, you left us defenseless to the Japanese … You safely boarded your white military wives on ships and sent them home months before the attack, but did nothing to protect us. … you surrendered in 2 days and left 20,000 people to suffer, many falling victim to the most atrocious of war crimes….”
“When you returned in 1944, you leveled our island with your bombs, leaving most families without a home to return to. We were scattered and displaced so you could build your enormous bases.”
“You play endless war games emitting fumes and dumping waste into our air, water, soil, bodies. We breathe in the fallout when you test your bombs on our sister island upwind. We eat fish from the waters you bomb around us. Grieve the beached whales who rot at the shore, led astray by your sonar testing …” [Note 2]
It is increasingly clear that the American public opinion disapproves a military combat, in any form, initiated by Washington against North Korea — the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Ordinary citizens simply dislike war, and many of them even dislike the government.
Some scholars are worried about the financial as well as political costs, and some analysts have the insight of foreseeing the unbearable consequences of a real nuclear threat onto the American soldiers in South Korea, Japan and Guam.
Steve Bannon, the outgoing strategist for President Trump, implicitly admitted that the American life is at risk by telling an American Prospect journalist that
“Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here. They got us” [Note 3] .
The Pentagon may not care about the lives of the civilians in Guam, but they can never dare to report to the President and the general public of the United States that they have failed to save the lives of their thousands of foot soldiers in the West Pacific.
The White House has only two choices, one is to make a deal for peace, another one is to withdraw all their soldiers from South Korea and Japan before bombing DPRK against the will of President Moon Jae-in.
The latter is obviously a betrayal of the American allies, so it is unspeakable.
Guam might be bombed, but not because of North Korea, instead it would be because the White House put “America first”.
Notes
1. Foreign Policy In Focus, “In Guam, the gravest threat isn’t North Korea — It’s the United States”, Aug 3, 2017.
http://fpif.org/in-guam-the-gravest-threat-isnt-north-korea-its-the-united-states/
2. Boston Review, “An Open Letter from Guam to America”, Aug 11, 2017.
https://bostonreview.net/war-security/victoria-lola-m-leon-guerrero-open-letter-guam-america
3. The American Prospect, “Steve Bannon, Unrepentant”, Aug 16, 2017.
August 26th, 2017 by Niles Niemuth
US Defense Secretary James Mattis declared during a trip to Ukraine on Thursday that the American government is actively considering moving forward with a plan to arm Kiev with lethal weaponry for the first time.
While alleged Russian intervention in the country’s eastern Donbass region and the annexation of Crimea are put forward as the reasons for the American-led military buildup in Ukraine, the conflict was sparked by the 2014 US- and German-backed, fascist-led coup in Kiev. The Obama administration supported the rabidly nationalist and anti-Russian movement that ousted the Russian-aligned president, Viktor Yanukovych, after he refused to sign an association agreement with the European Union.
The Kremlin responded to the coup by annexing Crimea after a popular referendum in the Russian-speaking peninsula registered overwhelming support for joining the Russian Federation. Moscow has also supported pro-Russian separatists in the eastern part of Ukraine. Some 10,000 have already been killed and more than 2 million displaced in more than three years of war triggered by the dispatch of Ukrainian troops to crush the rebellion in the east by the government of billionaire oligarch Petro Poroshenko in Kiev. The escalation being prepared by the Trump administration portends even greater bloodshed.
Under a provocative plan drawn up by officials at the Pentagon and State Department, first reported by the Wall Street Journal at the end of July, the Trump administration would deliver Javelin antitank missiles, antiaircraft weaponry and other lethal arms to the regime in Kiev. The Obama administration held off on such a move, supplying only so-called “nonlethal” arms, in part to assuage Germany, France and other EU countries, which opposed it. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, at the initiative of Germany and France, negotiated the Minsk peace accord in September of 2014 with Russia, Kiev and the eastern Ukraine rebels in large part to head off US plans to arm the Kiev regime.
Mattis’s trip to Ukraine, the first visit by a US defense secretary in a decade, was timed to coincide with the country’s celebration of its 1991 declaration of independence from the Soviet Union.
After reviewing a military parade in which a US National Guard unit marched alongside Ukrainian soldiers, the Pentagon chief addressed the question of arms shipments, declaring that any weapons the US provided would be used only for “defensive” purposes.
“On the defensive lethal weapons, we are actively reviewing it,” Mattis announced at a joint press conference with Poroshenko, where both adopted a hostile posture towards Russia.
Mattis’s remarks made clear that a decision on the provisioning of weapons would come soon after he returned to Washington.
“I will go back now having seen the current situation and be able to inform the secretary of state and the president in very specific terms what I recommend for the direction ahead,” he said.
President Donald Trump has given Mattis and his generals wide leeway in setting military policy. American military planners are already considering locations for training Ukrainian soldiers on how to use the Javelin missiles. According to anonymous administration officials cited by the New York Times, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who visited Kiev in July, supports the plan.
“Defensive weapons are not provocative unless you are an aggressor, and clearly Ukraine is not an aggressor since it is their territory where the fighting is happening,” Mattis told reporters.
Poroshenko made clear that the weaponry would be used to attack any Russian forces perceived to be threatening Ukraine.
“Any defensive weapons would be just to increase the price if Russia makes a decision to attack my troops and my territory,” he declared.
A proposal to send billions of dollars in lethal weaponry to the Ukrainian government, including antitank missiles, was first floated by officials within the Obama administration in early 2015. President Barack Obama eventually rejected the proposal, which was seen as a highly inflammatory measure that could spark a wider conflict in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states.
The Obama administration focused instead on building up the Ukrainian armed forces by deploying military trainers to the country and providing hundreds of millions of dollars of “nonlethal” aid, including body armor, night vision goggles, first aid kits, Humvees and radar for pinpointing mortar fire. A training outpost staffed by British, Canadian, Lithuanian, Polish and US National Guard soldiers on a rotational basis has been operating in western Ukraine near the border with Poland since 2015.
While Trump had expressed hopes for improved relations with the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin, diplomatic and military relations have continued to sour. Trump signed a new round of sanctions targeting Russia earlier this month after a sanctions bill was overwhelmingly approved by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress by a veto-proof margin.
Eastern Europe, Syria and East Asia are all potential flash points for a catastrophic war between nuclear-armed powers.
In Eastern Europe, Russia is preparing to undertake the Zapad 17 war games in mid-September, which will mobilize thousands of military personnel and support staff in Belarus, mainland Russia and the exclave of Kaliningrad, which borders Poland, Lithuania and the Baltic Sea. During his visit to the Baltics in July, Vice President Mike Pence discussed the possibility of deploying Patriot missile systems to Estonia in response to the Russian exercises, which are reportedly the largest since the Cold War.
In Syria, the US is backing the predominantly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces while Russia is backing the government of President Bashar al-Assad. While the two militaries regularly communicate about their operations in Syria, a single mishap could cause the situation to spiral out of control. In June, the US shot down a Syrian fighter jet and two Iranian drones as they approached areas controlled by US-backed forces.
In East Asia, President Trump recently threatened North Korea, with which Russia and China both share borders, with a nuclear attack if it did not give up its nuclear weapons program. Russia responded to joint war games between the US and South Korea this week by flying nuclear-capable bombers accompanied by fighter jets and surveillance aircraft around the Korean peninsula. Japanese and South Korean fighters were scrambled to intercept the Tupolev bombers as they flew through international airspace over the Pacific Ocean, the Sea of Japan, the Yellow Sea and the East China Sea.
August 26th, 2017 by Israel Shamir
Colour revolutions usually occur only in the countries blessed with a US diplomatic presence. You need an American embassy to find the perspective ruler to be uplifted by a human swell and placed on the throne; you need an American embassy to bring in enough cash to cover expenses of the organised mayhem; you need an American diplomat to protect the revolutionaries and to order the present dictator to desist. Could it be that there is now an American Embassy in America?
The Great American Colour Revolution marches on. The script is very similar to the ones they have used overseas. Usually it includes toppled monuments. The pro-American forces toppled monuments to Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, to Felix Dzerzhinsky in Moscow, to Vladimir Lenin in Kiev, to the Russian soldier-liberator in Tallinn and Warsaw. And now the trend came back home to America like a boomerang, with toppling Confederate statues.
This is not meaningless vandalism, but a symbolic declaration of victory. The victorious side topples the monuments of the defeated. And the defeated spitefully grumble, but can’t do anything. However, watch their hands: everywhere and every time, the colour revolutionaries choose some dated memorials of little importance to the majority. This is a difference with real revolutions, where actual symbols of power go down.
A real revolution in France 1789 destroyed the Bastille, a real revolution in Russia 1917 destroyed the Tsar’s statues and took over the Winter Palace. A real revolution in the US will probably take over the Federal Reserve and topple statues of recent presidents. But colour revolutions are fake, faux-revolutions, so they choose an easy target. Lenin in Kiev, or Lee in Charlottesville were sitting ducks. Lenin’s cause had been defeated in 1990, a quarter century ago, while the cause General Robert Lee fought for had been defeated over 150 years ago. A lot of people are rather upset by their removal, but very few people would care enough to take up arms and defend them. It is a PR action, and a very effective one.
The wonderful Steve Sailer wrote:
“The American deep state has taken down various opposing regimes via the mechanism of a Colour Revolution.”
This is a good reading, but not a sufficient one. The force behind the colour revolutions, including the present American one, is not an American force, not even the American deep state, but a global one, serving the globalist elite and the shadowy world government. Until recently, they used US power for their ends, now they successfully fight the rising Golem of the United States as they fought much a weaker Ukraine or Sweden. “Golem, know thy place” is the incantation used by the Wizard of Prague, the creator of the Golem, in the medieval Jewish legend. This spell suborns the creature.
People close to power in the US know or feel the global hegemony. Its bearers are heavily Jewish liberal groups, who use their PC, their hostility to the Church, their approval of gender flux in order to undermine the mind and mentality of an ordinary American, of a redneck, of a working class Goy (as in the Goy, Bye headline). They ceaselessly tease and annoy this goy, in order to cause his premature acts of rebellion to be easily squashed. In order to spite the worker, they even put on the latest aircraft carrier only toilet bowls and no urinals ‚ to make it more comfortable for supposed transgenders and to enrage the rednecks.
“The Storming of the Bastille”, Visible in the center is the arrest of Bernard René Jourdan, m de Launay (1740-1789). (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
The world globalists received a serious blow when their candidate Hillary Clinton lost the election, but they didn’t waste time and immediately mobilised for a fight. They aren’t going to give up hegemony. Practically all the media, judicial system, Congress, intelligence services are in their hands. Charlottesville provided an occasion to show rednecks in whose hands rests hegemony.
Hegemonists have their own storm troops – Antifa. This extremist movement was born in Germany. There they walk on the streets on the anniversary of Dresden bombings with Israeli flags and chant: “Death to Germany! Long live Bomber Harris” (the British commander of the Air Force, a big fan of the carpet bombing of Germany). They managed to terrorize the Germans: as soon as someone objects they call their opponent a Nazi and beat him up. And if they encounter resistance, the police comes to the rescue. That’s why in Germany resistance to the mass inflow of migrants was almost imperceptible. It is spoken about in the kitchen, but not on the streets.
And now Antifa came to America. They have the same mode of action as in Germany. Whoever is against them is a Nazi, or a “white racist”. They proved their mettle in Charlottesville, the city blessed with the Jewish mayor who chose the city police. Many Jewish activists came to participate, from as far as Boston. After the scuffle, the newspapers raised a hue and cry: Nazis attack Jews!
President Trump condemned both sides participating in the brawl‚ both white nationalists and Antifa. It is exactly what his opponents were waiting for. His attempt to stay above the brawl was doomed to defeat: liberal hegemonists immediately branded him a racist and neo-Nazi. Trump reminded them that not all defenders of the monument were white racists, but this argument didn’t work.
The public response to the dog-whistle “racist” was overwhelming. The Jews responded first. Rabbis said they do not want Trump to telephone them and greet them with the forthcoming Jewish High Holidays. 300 Jews, former Yale classmates of Mnuchin, the treasury secretary, imploring him to resign. (Aren’t there too many Jewish alumni in Yale? What about some diversity?)
A known Jewish writer Michael Chabon called upon Ivanka to kill her father, by magical means of going into full mourning for a still living President. Jews believe this should kill a living man as sure as a bullet. Chabon’s hysterical screed must be read to be believed.
“Now you know [Trump is] an anti-Semite — a Nazi sympathizer, a friend of the Jew-hating Klan,” he declared.
And more and more Jews came in calling to impeach Trump the racist and anti-Semite.
However, non-Jews meekly followed while Jews played them like a fiddle. Industrialists resigned from the presidential council, generals issued a rebuke to their Commander-in-Chief, thousands of non-Jews participated in marches and demonstrations against “white racists”. In short, Jews played as a team, and they dictated the rules. Very, very few persons offered a learned defence of Trump. They would be ostracised, if they did, and Trump proved he is not going to stand for his friends. If his position on Flynn didn’t make it clear, his dismissal of Bannon supplied the sterling proof.
In the present political climate, you are not allowed to speak against the hegemonist view. If you do, you are a white racist, i.e. your opinion is not simply rejected, but it is declared as an unlawful and inadmissible view. This is what hegemony is: when an opposed view is delegitimised.
One can argue for racism (it is anyway better than greed, a mortal sin; it is a natural defence of a tribal territory), but it is a hard way, and quite futile. Before Trump the Racist, there was Trump the Russian Spy, and he was preceded by Trump the Pussy Grabber. New reasons for impeachment will be found, surely.
It is easier to turn the racism weapon against the adversary, for the Jewish adversary of Trump is as racist as any KKK member is likely to be, or worse. Last week it became known, that in Israel, Jewish settlers established a road sign saying:
“The area where you are located is under Jewish control. The entry of Arabs is absolutely forbidden and constitutes a mortal danger to you!”
You couldn’t find such signs in the Deep South even in Jim Crow days! Was there any response from “antiracist” American Jews? (This is a rhetoric question).
One issue of a Jewish newspaper daily would supply you with sufficient amount of Jewish racism exemplified. Here is a Rabbi calling to exterminate goyim (like vermin they are), here are Jews stealing Palestinian land, here are Jewish judges who approve of a obvious thievery as it delivers Christian houses into Jewish hands.
Is it something Trump doesn’t know? If he knows why doesn’t he use it for his defence? This is not a rhetoric question. The answer to it is that he decided to ally with the Zionist Jews against Liberal Jews. This is the method tried by the Far Right in France, Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden. Perhaps it was useful for a while (to get access to the mainstream media) but like every immoral device this one has a limited shelf life. Zionists are a hedging fund of the Jewish People, betting against the governing paradigm. They can’t endear you with the owners of mass media, their status at the World Government is dubious to the extreme. Zionist Jews can – for a while – defend you from an accusation in anti-Semitism, but they will stab you in the back whenever expedient.
It’s not that the Zionist Jews are good for nothing. Zionists are good for one thing. They are excellent for revealing the hidden Jewish racism. Palestinian activists – and there are Jews among them, too – can explain that to the Americans. Alison Weir’s book and site are called If Americans Knew, and it is built for such a purpose. Norman Finkelstein can add to that, and so can quite a few Jews and non-Jews with experience of pro-Palestinian activism.
It is possible to beat the Jews and their entourage in the Blame-the-Racist game by attacking Israeli racism. Actually, this is the only method that works, as the other methods do not. Bannon proclaimed his Zionism, and he ended with Goy, Bye. Richard Spencer said he loves Israel, and became a pariah. Now President Trump went down the same path leading to defeat and oblivion. American nationalists who support Zionism lose their moral superiority and get nothing in exchange.
Taking a position against Israeli racism is not only moral, it is practical and realistic. It is the way to solve the Israeli – Palestinian conflict. Demand that Israel drop its Jim Crow laws. Let the Palestinians have equal rights, the same as Jews in the Holy Land. Let them have a right to vote, equal employment, freedom of movement in the same buses as the Jews.
A separate independent Palestinian state is not good enough, especially bearing in mind that the Jews aren’t likely to grant it. Remind them that the Jewish Freedom Riders did not support an idea of separate Bantustans for the Blacks, but demanded equality for Blacks and Whites in the whole United States of America. The same attitude should be applied in Israel/Palestine. This is the solution to the problem.
If you want to troll them a bit, call for removal of a memorial for a Jewish slave-driver David Levy Yulee, who was called “the Florida Fire Eater” for his inflammatory pro-slavery rhetoric in the U.S. Senate. He resigned his US Senate seat to support the Confederacy, but his statue still stands high in Fernandia, Amelia Island, Florida, reports Michael Hoffman who notes that neither the ADL nor the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) called for it removal. This is the time to demand Florida to overturn its (year 2000) designation of Yulee a “Great Floridian”.
I’d advise president Trump: Appeal to the better side of human nature. If your fellow Americans want less racism, give it to them – by rejecting Zionism. And proceed with your agenda. I watched with great satisfaction that you laid off North Korea and referred to Jeff Bezos, your enemy. However, your Afghanistan proposal is a mistake. It will give you no kudos. It would be better to stick to the original plan, that is to cut losses and withdraw from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria before shrewd Netanyahu can embroil you in a war not of your choosing. Begin to pull back home troops and bases. Go Obama one better: demolish Guantanamo and return it to the Cubans, with the remaining inmates. Let them deal with the tenants.
It is quite unnecessary to antagonise Blacks. There is no profit in it. They are not against you, they are not against whites, they are not even against white nationalists. They are partly white, as a rule. Yes, present diversity-driven overestimation of Blacks’ contribution to the American civilisation can be annoying, especially as it is supposed to provide cover for the exceedingly high rate of their incarceration. Deal with it. There are by far too many inmates in the US Gulag. Bring their number down to the level of, say, 1970. Undo Clinton’s draconian laws. You will be called Trump the Liberator, and the main reason for artificial aggrandisement of the blacks will vanish.
A colour revolution can be defeated by being stern of purpose. You are a golfer: keep your eyes on the ball, Mr President.
This article was originally published by The Unz Review.
August 26th, 2017 by Brian H. Hayden
Featured image: Prime Minister of Pakistan Nawaz Sharif (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
The generals of the Pakistan Army overthrew Nawaz Sharif government by the command of Pervez Musharraf. The quiet coup was done without any general opposition and Nawaz Sharif’s Cabinet also took a neutral stand till he lonely be tried.
The Pakistani military court quickly sentenced Sharif to life imprisonment for kidnapping, attempt to murder, airplane hijacking and financial corruption. But with Saudi and American pressures, the verdict which was supposed to be execution changed to life imprisonment and then to 10 years exile in Saudi Arabia.
Nawaz went to Jeddah, where he set up a steel mill with facilities provided by the Saudi government. Later, Musharraf remembers in his memoirs that Saudi Arabia and the Kingdom of Fahd were the ones who saved Nawaz Sharif from death.
Since 2006, Nawaz’s effort to return to power began until 2007, the Pakistani court allowed the return of Nawaz Sharif and his brother Shahbaz to Pakistan. At the first attempt to enter Pakistan, Nawaz was not successful and was sent back to Saudi Arabia.
But for the second time, with mediation and pressure from Saudi Arabia, he was able to enter the country through Lahore, and this time, with the direct support of the Saudis, Nawaz Sharif became prime minister.
But however, Nawaz Sharif was not a good guy and could not rule the Pakistani army and make absolutely subject the army to himself.
Saudi Arabia without knowledge of Islamabad, declared Pakistan as the member of Arabic coalition and Decisive Storm Operation and ordered to Nawaz Sharif to join Saudi-led coalition attack on Yemen and put Pakistan’s air, military, Navy and sea forces at Riyadh’s disposal for Yemen war.
But Nawaz Sharif faced with the severe resistance of Army, public opinion and parliament and failed to execute King Salman‘s direct order. Therefore, in the declaration of Pakistan’s position Nawaz Sharif was forced to emphasize the need for a peaceful solution to the Yemeni crisis.
Nawaz Sharif has practically rejected Saudi’s request from Pakistan to join the coalition attack on Yemen and relations between Nawaz Sharif and Mohammad Bin Salman have deteriorated sharply.
The great effort of Nawaz Sharif to prove his complicity with Riyadh led to agree on the dispatch of General Raheel Sharif, Pakistan Army chief, to take over the command of the Arab coalition in the war against Yemen in the past May.
Many experts were unanimous that Saudi dollars have caused widespread Riyadh influence in the Cabinet of Pakistan, and at least the prime minister in addition to four ministers monthly receive a salary from the Saudi embassy in Islamabad, which has led the Pakistan occasionally plays the role of the Riyadh colony. It caused that the independence and People’s identity in Pakistan have nothing to do with Islamabad’s behaviors.
American strategists have a proverb for describing Pakistani officials and army: Pakistani officials are purchasable and Pakistani army is for rent.
In The 2017 Qatar diplomatic crisis, King Salman officially informed Nawaz Sharif through Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador to Islamabad to cut off diplomatic relations with Qatar without the passing of time.
This command placed Nawaz Sharif in a severe crisis, so to revision of King Salman’s order, he went to Riyadh twice on the dates of 12/06/2017 and 19/06/2017 (Under the pretext of Hajj), until Malek Salman exempts him from this order, because Nawaz Sharif has been able to reject accusations in the leaked documents of the Panama Papers with the help of the Qatari prince’s letter as a documentary to provide his financial source.
In addition to the army, the deep influence of the Brotherhood’s thinking in Pakistan prevented the execution of King Salman’s order.
It will be humiliating for the independence and history of a nation, if it becomes known that the prime minister of the country personally owes to Qatar in getting a donation (bribe), in addition to Saudi Arabia.
Nawaz Sharif’s renewed refusal to execute Riyadh’s orders caused to cut his relationship with Mohammad Bin Salman, who has taken all the power in Riyadh.
With a cut in Riyadh’s support of Nawaz Sharif and the diminution of Al-Saud’s support shadow of from Nawaz Sharif, the Pakistani army simply removed him from the scene, under the pretext of Panama’s financial record.
However, Nawaz Sharif completely put his country at Riyadh’s disposal in a 9-year period and Riyadh’s interests are preferred Islamabad’s interests. Pakistan ignored its strategic interests due to the plundering of its authorities in Saudi dollars.
Of course, Riyadh’s influence in Islamabad is in a wide range. With the removal of Nawaz Sharif, we should not expect any change in approaches, but the question is whether public opinion and Pakistani elites have value for their independence, cultural and territorial identity or not?
This article was originally published by Modern Ghana.
August 26th, 2017 by Prof Alfred McCoy
[This piece has been adapted and expanded from the introduction to Alfred W. McCoy’s new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.]
In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, Washington pursued its elusive enemies across the landscapes of Asia and Africa, thanks in part to a massive expansion of its intelligence infrastructure, particularly of the emerging technologies for digital surveillance, agile drones, and biometric identification. In 2010, almost a decade into this secret war with its voracious appetite for information, the Washington Post reported that the national security state had swelled into a “fourth branch” of the federal government — with 854,000 vetted officials, 263 security organizations, and over 3,000 intelligence units, issuing 50,000 special reports every year.
Though stunning, these statistics only skimmed the visible surface of what had become history’s largest and most lethal clandestine apparatus. According to classified documents that Edward Snowden leaked in 2013, the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies alone had 107,035 employees and a combined “black budget” of $52.6 billion, the equivalent of 10% percent of the vast defense budget.
By sweeping the skies and probing the worldwide web’s undersea cables, the National Security Agency (NSA) could surgically penetrate the confidential communications of just about any leader on the planet, while simultaneously sweeping up billions of ordinary messages. For its classified missions, the CIA had access to the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command, with 69,000 elite troops (Rangers, SEALs, Air Commandos) and their agile arsenal. In addition to this formidable paramilitary capacity, the CIA operated 30 Predator and Reaper drones responsible for more than 3,000 deaths in Pakistan and Yemen.
While Americans practiced a collective form of duck and cover as the Department of Homeland Security’s colored alerts pulsed nervously from yellow to red, few paused to ask the hard question: Was all this security really directed solely at enemies beyond our borders? After half a century of domestic security abuses — from the “red scare” of the 1920s through the FBI’s illegal harassment of antiwar protesters in the 1960s and 1970s — could we really be confident that there wasn’t a hidden cost to all these secret measures right here at home? Maybe, just maybe, all this security wasn’t really so benign when it came to us.
From my own personal experience over the past half-century, and my family’s history over three generations, I’ve found out in the most personal way possible that there’s a real cost to entrusting our civil liberties to the discretion of secret agencies. Let me share just a few of my own “war” stories to explain how I’ve been forced to keep learning and relearning this uncomfortable lesson the hard way.
On the Heroin Trail
After finishing college in the late 1960s, I decided to pursue a Ph.D. in Japanese history and was pleasantly surprised when Yale Graduate School admitted me with a full fellowship. But the Ivy League in those days was no ivory tower. During my first year at Yale, the Justice Department indicted Black Panther leader Bobby Seale for a local murder and the May Day protests that filled the New Haven green also shut the campus for a week. Almost simultaneously, President Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia and student protests closed hundreds of campuses across America for the rest of the semester.
In the midst of all this tumult, the focus of my studies shifted from Japan to Southeast Asia, and from the past to the war in Vietnam. Yes, that war. So what did I do about the draft? During my first semester at Yale, on December 1, 1969, to be precise, the Selective Service cut up the calendar for a lottery. The first 100 birthdays picked were certain to be drafted, but any dates above 200 were likely exempt. My birthday, June 8th, was the very last date drawn, not number 365 but 366 (don’t forget leap year) — the only lottery I have ever won, except for a Sunbeam electric frying pan in a high school raffle. Through a convoluted moral calculus typical of the 1960s, I decided that my draft exemption, although acquired by sheer luck, demanded that I devote myself, above all else, to thinking about, writing about, and working to end the Vietnam War.
During those campus protests over Cambodia in the spring of 1970, our small group of graduate students in Southeast Asian history at Yale realized that the U.S. strategic predicament in Indochina would soon require an invasion of Laos to cut the flow of enemy supplies into South Vietnam. So, while protests over Cambodia swept campuses nationwide, we were huddled inside the library, preparing for the next invasion by editing a book of essays on Laos for the publisher Harper & Row. A few months after that book appeared, one of the company’s junior editors, Elizabeth Jakab, intrigued by an account we had included about that country’s opium crop, telephoned from New York to ask if I could research and write a “quickie” paperback about the history behind the heroin epidemic then infecting the U.S. Army in Vietnam.
I promptly started the research at my student carrel in the Gothic tower that is Yale’s Sterling Library, tracking old colonial reports about the Southeast Asian opium trade that ended suddenly in the 1950s, just as the story got interesting. So, quite tentatively at first, I stepped outside the library to do a few interviews and soon found myself following an investigative trail that circled the globe. First, I traveled across America for meetings with retired CIA operatives. Then I crossed the Pacific to Hong Kong to study drug syndicates, courtesy of that colony’s police drug squad. Next, I went south to Saigon, then the capital of South Vietnam, to investigate the heroin traffic that was targeting the GIs, and on into the mountains of Laos to observe CIA alliances with opium warlords and the hill-tribe militias that grew the opium poppy. Finally, I flew from Singapore to Paris for interviews with retired French intelligence officers about their opium trafficking during the first Indochina War of the 1950s.
The drug traffic that supplied heroin for the U.S. troops fighting in South Vietnam was not, I discovered, exclusively the work of criminals. Once the opium left tribal poppy fields in Laos, the traffic required official complicity at every level. The helicopters of Air America, the airline the CIA then ran, carried raw opium out of the villages of its hill-tribe allies. The commander of the Royal Lao Army, a close American collaborator, operated the world’s largest heroin lab and was so oblivious to the implications of the traffic that he opened his opium ledgers for my inspection. Several of Saigon’s top generals were complicit in the drug’s distribution to U.S. soldiers. By 1971, this web of collusion ensured that heroin, according to a later White House survey of a thousand veterans, would be “commonly used” by 34% of American troops in South Vietnam.
None of this had been covered in my college history seminars. I had no models for researching an uncharted netherworld of crime and covert operations. After stepping off the plane in Saigon, body slammed by the tropical heat, I found myself in a sprawling foreign city of four million, lost in a swarm of snarling motorcycles and a maze of nameless streets, without contacts or a clue about how to probe these secrets. Every day on the heroin trail confronted me with new challenges — where to look, what to look for, and, above all, how to ask hard questions.
Reading all that history had, however, taught me something I didn’t know I knew. Instead of confronting my sources with questions about sensitive current events, I started with the French colonial past when the opium trade was still legal, gradually uncovering the underlying, unchanging logistics of drug production. As I followed this historical trail into the present, when the traffic became illegal and dangerously controversial, I began to use pieces from this past to assemble the present puzzle, until the names of contemporary dealers fell into place. In short, I had crafted a historical method that would prove, over the next 40 years of my career, surprisingly useful in analyzing a diverse array of foreign policy controversies — CIA alliances with drug lords, the agency’s propagation of psychological torture, and our spreading state surveillance.
The CIA Makes Its Entrance in My Life
Those months on the road, meeting gangsters and warlords in isolated places, offered only one bit of real danger. While hiking in the mountains of Laos, interviewing Hmong farmers about their opium shipments on CIA helicopters, I was descending a steep slope when a burst of bullets ripped the ground at my feet. I had walked into an ambush by agency mercenaries.
While the five Hmong militia escorts whom the local village headman had prudently provided laid down a covering fire, my Australian photographer John Everingham and I flattened ourselves in the elephant grass and crawled through the mud to safety. Without those armed escorts, my research would have been at an end and so would I. After that ambush failed, a CIA paramilitary officer summoned me to a mountaintop meeting where he threatened to murder my Lao interpreter unless I ended my research. After winning assurances from the U.S. embassy that my interpreter would not be harmed, I decided to ignore that warning and keep going.
Six months and 30,000 miles later, I returned to New Haven. My investigation of CIA alliances with drug lords had taught me more than I could have imagined about the covert aspects of U.S. global power. Settling into my attic apartment for an academic year of writing, I was confident that I knew more than enough for a book on this unconventional topic. But my education, it turned out, was just beginning.
Within weeks, a massive, middle-aged guy in a suit interrupted my scholarly isolation. He appeared at my front door and identified himself as Tom Tripodi, senior agent for the Bureau of Narcotics, which later became the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). His agency, he confessed during a second visit, was worried about my writing and he had been sent to investigate. He needed something to tell his superiors. Tom was a guy you could trust. So I showed him a few draft pages of my book. He disappeared into the living room for a while and came back saying, “Pretty good stuff. You got your ducks in a row.” But there were some things, he added, that weren’t quite right, some things he could help me fix.
Tom was my first reader. Later, I would hand him whole chapters and he would sit in a rocking chair, shirt sleeves rolled up, revolver in his shoulder holster, sipping coffee, scribbling corrections in the margins, and telling fabulous stories — like the time Jersey Mafia boss “Bayonne Joe” Zicarelli tried to buy a thousand rifles from a local gun store to overthrow Fidel Castro. Or when some CIA covert warrior came home for a vacation and had to be escorted everywhere so he didn’t kill somebody in a supermarket aisle.
Best of all, there was the one about how the Bureau of Narcotics caught French intelligence protecting the Corsican syndicates smuggling heroin into New York City. Some of his stories, usually unacknowledged, would appear in my book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. These conversations with an undercover operative, who had trained Cuban exiles for the CIA in Florida and later investigated Mafia heroin syndicates for the DEA in Sicily, were akin to an advanced seminar, a master class in covert operations.
In the summer of 1972, with the book at press, I went to Washington to testify before Congress. As I was making the rounds of congressional offices on Capitol Hill, my editor rang unexpectedly and summoned me to New York for a meeting with the president and vice president of Harper & Row, my book’s publisher. Ushered into a plush suite of offices overlooking the spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, I listened to those executives tell me that Cord Meyer, Jr., the CIA’s deputy director for covert operations, had called on their company’s president emeritus, Cass Canfield, Sr. The visit was no accident, for Canfield, according to an authoritative history, “enjoyed prolific links to the world of intelligence, both as a former psychological warfare officer and as a close personal friend of Allen Dulles,” the ex-head of the CIA. Meyer denounced my book as a threat to national security. He asked Canfield, also an old friend, to quietly suppress it.
I was in serious trouble. Not only was Meyer a senior CIA official but he also had impeccable social connections and covert assets in every corner of American intellectual life. After graduating from Yale in 1942, he served with the marines in the Pacific, writing eloquent war dispatches published in the Atlantic Monthly. He later worked with the U.S. delegation drafting the U.N. charter. Personally recruited by spymaster Allen Dulles, Meyer joined the CIA in 1951 and was soon running its International Organizations Division, which, in the words of that same history, “constituted the greatest single concentration of covert political and propaganda activities of the by now octopus-like CIA,” including “Operation Mockingbird” that planted disinformation in major U.S. newspapers meant to aid agency operations. Informed sources told me that the CIA still had assets inside every major New York publisher and it already had every page of my manuscript.
As the child of a wealthy New York family, Cord Meyer moved in elite social circles, meeting and marrying Mary Pinchot, the niece of Gifford Pinchot, founder of the U.S. Forestry Service and a former governor of Pennsylvania. Pinchot was a breathtaking beauty who later became President Kennedy’s mistress, making dozens of secret visits to the White House. When she was found shot dead along the banks of a canal in Washington in 1964, the head of CIA counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, another Yale alumnus, broke into her home in an unsuccessful attempt to secure her diary. Mary’s sister Toni and her husband, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, later found the diary and gave it to Angleton for destruction by the agency. To this day, her unsolved murder remains a subject of mystery and controversy.
Cord Meyer was also in the Social Register of New York’s fine families along with my publisher, Cass Canfield, which added a dash of social cachet to the pressure to suppress my book. By the time he walked into Harper & Row’s office in that summer of 1972, two decades of CIA service had changed Meyer (according to that same authoritative history) from a liberal idealist into “a relentless, implacable advocate for his own ideas,” driven by “a paranoiac distrust of everyone who didn’t agree with him” and a manner that was “histrionic and even bellicose.” An unpublished 26-year-old graduate student versus the master of CIA media manipulation. It was hardly a fair fight. I began to fear my book would never appear.
To his credit, Canfield refused Meyer’s request to suppress the book. But he did allow the agency a chance to review the manuscript prior to publication. Instead of waiting quietly for the CIA’s critique, I contacted Seymour Hersh, then an investigative reporter for the New York Times. The same day the CIA courier arrived from Langley to collect my manuscript, Hersh swept through Harper & Row’s offices like a tropical storm, pelting hapless executives with incessant, unsettling questions. The next day, his exposé of the CIA’s attempt at censorship appeared on the paper’s front page. Other national media organizations followed his lead. Faced with a barrage of negative coverage, the CIA gave Harper & Row a critique full of unconvincing denials. The book was published unaltered.
My Life as an Open Book for the Agency
I had learned another important lesson: the Constitution’s protection of press freedom could check even the world’s most powerful espionage agency. Cord Meyer reportedly learned the same lesson. According to his obituary in the Washington Post,
“It was assumed that Mr. Meyer would eventually advance” to head CIA covert operations, “but the public disclosure about the book deal… apparently dampened his prospects.”
He was instead exiled to London and eased into early retirement.
Meyer and his colleagues were not, however, used to losing. Defeated in the public arena, the CIA retreated to the shadows and retaliated by tugging at every thread in the threadbare life of a graduate student. Over the next few months, federal officials from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare turned up at Yale to investigate my graduate fellowship. The Internal Revenue Service audited my poverty-level income. The FBI tapped my New Haven telephone (something I learned years later from a class-action lawsuit).
In August 1972, at the height of the controversy over the book, FBI agents told the bureau’s director that they had “conducted [an] investigation concerning McCoy,” searching the files they had compiled on me for the past two years and interviewing numerous “sources whose identities are concealed [who] have furnished reliable information in the past” — thereby producing an 11-page report detailing my birth, education, and campus antiwar activities.
A college classmate I hadn’t seen in four years, who served in military intelligence, magically appeared at my side in the book section of the Yale Co-op, seemingly eager to resume our relationship. The same week that a laudatory review of my book appeared on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, an extraordinary achievement for any historian, Yale’s History Department placed me on academic probation. Unless I could somehow do a year’s worth of overdue work in a single semester, I faced dismissal.
In those days, the ties between the CIA and Yale were wide and deep. The campus residential colleges screened students, including future CIA Director Porter Goss, for possible careers in espionage. Alumni like Cord Meyer and James Angleton held senior slots at the agency. Had I not had a faculty adviser visiting from Germany, the distinguished scholar Bernhard Dahm who was a stranger to this covert nexus, that probation would likely have become expulsion, ending my academic career and destroying my credibility.
During those difficult days, New York Congressman Ogden Reid, a ranking member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, telephoned to say that he was sending staff investigators to Laos to look into the opium situation. Amid this controversy, a CIA helicopter landed near the village where I had escaped that ambush and flew the Hmong headman who had helped my research to an agency airstrip. There, a CIA interrogator made it clear that he had better deny what he had said to me about the opium. Fearing, as he later told my photographer, that “they will send a helicopter to arrest me, or… soldiers to shoot me,” the Hmong headman did just that.
At a personal level, I was discovering just how deep the country’s intelligence agencies could reach, even in a democracy, leaving no part of my life untouched: my publisher, my university, my sources, my taxes, my phone, and even my friends.
Although I had won the first battle of this war with a media blitz, the CIA was winning the longer bureaucratic struggle. By silencing my sources and denying any culpability, its officials convinced Congress that it was innocent of any direct complicity in the Indochina drug trade. During Senate hearings into CIA assassinations by the famed Church Committee three years later, Congress accepted the agency’s assurance that none of its operatives had been directly involved in heroin trafficking (an allegation I had never actually made). The committee’s report did confirm the core of my critique, however, finding that “the CIA is particularly vulnerable to criticism” over indigenous assets in Laos “of considerable importance to the Agency,” including “people who either were known to be, or were suspected of being, involved in narcotics trafficking.” But the senators did not press the CIA for any resolution or reform of what its own inspector general had called the “particular dilemma” posed by those alliances with drug lords — the key aspect, in my view, of its complicity in the traffic.
During the mid-1970s, as the flow of drugs into the United States slowed and the number of addicts declined, the heroin problem receded into the inner cities and the media moved on to new sensations. Unfortunately, Congress had forfeited an opportunity to check the CIA and correct its way of waging covert wars. In less than 10 years, the problem of the CIA’s tactical alliances with drug traffickers to support its far-flung covert wars was back with a vengeance.
Opium poppy field in Gostan valley, Nimruz Province, Afghanistan (Source: United States Marine Corps)
During the 1980s, as the crack-cocaine epidemic swept America’s cities, the agency, as its own Inspector General later reported, allied itself with the largest drug smuggler in the Caribbean, using his port facilities to ship arms to the Contra guerrillas fighting in Nicaragua and protecting him from any prosecution for five years. Simultaneously on the other side of the planet in Afghanistan, mujahedeen guerrillas imposed an opium tax on farmers to fund their fight against the Soviet occupation and, with the CIA’s tacit consent, operated heroin labs along the Pakistani border to supply international markets. By the mid-1980s, Afghanistan’s opium harvest had grown 10-fold and was providing 60% of the heroin for America’s addicts and as much as 90% in New York City.
Almost by accident, I had launched my academic career by doing something a bit different. Embedded within that study of drug trafficking was an analytical approach that would take me, almost unwittingly, on a lifelong exploration of U.S. global hegemony in its many manifestations, including diplomatic alliances, CIA interventions, developing military technology, recourse to torture, and global surveillance. Step by step, topic by topic, decade after decade, I would slowly accumulate sufficient understanding of the parts to try to assemble the whole. In writing my new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, I drew on this research to assess the overall character of U.S. global power and the forces that might contribute to its perpetuation or decline.
In the process, I slowly came to see a striking continuity and coherence in Washington’s century-long rise to global dominion. CIA torture techniques emerged at the start of the Cold War in the 1950s; much of its futuristic robotic aerospace technology had its first trial in the Vietnam War of the 1960s; and, above all, Washington’s reliance on surveillance first appeared in the colonial Philippines around 1900 and soon became an essential though essentially illegal tool for the FBI’s repression of domestic dissent that continued through the 1970s.
Surveillance Today
In the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, I dusted off that historical method, and used it to explore the origins and character of domestic surveillance inside the United States.
After occupying the Philippines in 1898, the U.S. Army, facing a difficult pacification campaign in a restive land, discovered the power of systematic surveillance to crush the resistance of the country’s political elite. Then, during World War I, the Army’s “father of military intelligence,” the dour General Ralph Van Deman, who had learned his trade in the Philippines, drew upon his years pacifying those islands to mobilize a legion of 1,700 soldiers and 350,000 citizen-vigilantes for an intense surveillance program against suspected enemy spies among German-Americans, including my own grandfather. In studying Military Intelligence files at the National Archives, I found “suspicious” letters purloined from my grandfather’s army locker. In fact, his mother had been writing him in her native German about such subversive subjects as knitting him socks for guard duty.
In the 1950s, Hoover’s FBI agents tapped thousands of phones without warrants and kept suspected subversives under close surveillance, including my mother’s cousin Gerard Piel, an anti-nuclear activist and the publisher of Scientific American magazine. During the Vietnam War, the bureau expanded its activities with an amazing array of spiteful, often illegal, intrigues in a bid to cripple the antiwar movement with pervasive surveillance of the sort seen in my own FBI file.
Memory of the FBI’s illegal surveillance programs was largely washed away after the Vietnam War thanks to Congressional reforms that required judicial warrants for all government wiretaps. The terror attacks of September 2001, however, gave the National Security Agency the leeway to launch renewed surveillance on a previously unimaginable scale. Writing for TomDispatch in 2009, I observed that coercive methods first tested in the Middle East were being repatriated and might lay the groundwork for “a domestic surveillance state.” Sophisticated biometric and cyber techniques forged in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq had made a “digital surveillance state a reality” and so were fundamentally changing the character of American democracy.
Four years later, Edward Snowden’s leak of secret NSA documents revealed that, after a century-long gestation period, a U.S. digital surveillance state had finally arrived. In the age of the Internet, the NSA could monitor tens of millions of private lives worldwide, including American ones, via a few hundred computerized probes into the global grid of fiber-optic cables.
And then, as if to remind me in the most personal way possible of our new reality, four years ago, I found myself the target yet again of an IRS audit, of TSA body searches at national airports, and — as I discovered when the line went dead — a tap on my office telephone at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Why? Maybe it was my current writing on sensitive topics like CIA torture and NSA surveillance, or maybe my name popped up from some old database of suspected subversives left over from the 1970s. Whatever the explanation, it was a reasonable reminder that, if my own family’s experience across three generations is in any way representative, state surveillance has been an integral part of American political life far longer than we might imagine.
At the cost of personal privacy, Washington’s worldwide web of surveillance has now become a weapon of exceptional power in a bid to extend U.S. global hegemony deeper into the twenty-first century. Yet it’s worth remembering that sooner or later what we do overseas always seems to come home to haunt us, just as the CIA and crew have haunted me this last half-century. When we learn to love Big Brother, the world becomes a more, not less, dangerous place.
Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular, is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of the now-classic book The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, which probed the conjuncture of illicit narcotics and covert operations over 50 years, and the forthcoming In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power (Dispatch Books, September) from which this piece is adapted.
Featured image is from Collective Evolution.
August 26th, 2017 by Global Research News
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Venezuelan Collapse? Wishful Thinking? Caracas Oil Deals with Russia and China
By , August 26, 2017
From a geopolitical aspect, this means ever closer relations with Russia and China, which together with a couple more anti-western South American countries, could result in a ‘backyard’ full of pickles! Will it be allowed to happen, or are we about to witness another ‘North Korean’ drama, but this time in South America?
The Structure of Power in American Society: A Military Junta is Now Ruling the United States
By , August 25, 2017
The usual NATO propaganda outlets are retching up fear over an upcoming Russian maneuver.
The Broader Global Crisis.“Big Picture” Interview with Michel Chossudovsky
By , August 25, 2017
In this “big picture” interview, Michel Chossudovsky concentrates on the broader global crisis including North and South Korea; the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review overhauling US nuclear doctrine, tactical nukes reclassified as conventional; horrors of the Korean War; Korean reunification; sanctions and naval blockade of Qatar; Qatari and Iranian jointly owned natural gas fields the largest worldwide; pipelines; Turkey in Qatar; major realignments of the Middle East chessboard…
Phony Pretext of Combating ISIS: US Terror-Bombing Turned Raqqa Into a Moonscape
By , August 25, 2017
Washington wants control over northern Syria and whatever other territory it can grab. Russia, Iran and Hezbollah support the country’s sovereign independence and territorial integrity.
US Airstrikes Killing Hundreds of Civilians in Syria’s Raqqa
By , August 25, 2017
Earlier this week, at least 100 civilians were killed in a span on 48 hours in Raqqa. Observers put the figure at 168 in the past 10 days, and 458 in US airstrikes against the city since June, including 134 children.
US Military Bio-labs in Ukraine, Production of Bio-weapons and “Disease Causing Agents”
By , August 24, 2017
Today thirteen American military bio-labs operate in Ukraine, The International Mass Media Agency reports. They employ only American specialists being entirely funded from the budget of the Department of Defense. Local authorities have pledged not to interfere in their work. These military labs are reported to be mainly involved in the study and production of disease-causing agents of smallpox, anthrax and botulism.
US Threatens Pakistan as Part of New Afghan War Drive. Islamabad Seeks Beijing’s Support
By , August 24, 2017
Rattled by Washington’s threats, Islamabad has turned to Beijing for support, further heightening tensions in a region where India and China are engaged in their most serious border stand-off since their 1962 border war, and Indian and Pakistani troops routinely exchange fatal artillery barrages across the Line of Control that separates Indian- and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir.
August 26th, 2017 by Marwan Salamah
The oil and business press is abuzz with predictions of an imminent Venezuelan financial collapse, as a prelude to its political implosion, which should oust President Maduro and erase the Hugo Chavez ambitious experiment.
The country is running out of money, and is unexpected to pay some US$ 3.5 Billion in international loans coming due in October/November 2017. Such a default will trigger creditors to seize its assets, especially oil export shipments, which would stall oil production and end its last hope of salvation.
A very dire prediction indeed. It not only psychologically undermines the Venezuelan population and government, but also, scares off banks and financial institutions from dealing with a stricken nation. Western banks are reported to have stopped issuing letters of credit to buyers of Venezuelan oil, let alone extend new credit, or postpone loans coming due for payment.
So, Venezuela seems to have been set up to fall and become a collapsed state, after which it can be “saved” by the opposition, backed by western credit and thus, return it to its preordained status as a ‘backyard’ vegetable!
As for its OPEC partners, they are watching from the sidelines, drooling at the prospect of Venezuelan oil going off the market and triggering the, oft prayed for, spike in oil prices.
All the above assumes that Venezuela is a docile nation, population wise and government wise. That it doesn’t have the wherewithal to survive, the will power to resist or the intelligence to think outside the box – especially as it is deemed cornered, with the odds heavily stacked against it.
But the facts are different, and Venezuela has reacted. Initially, by borrowing from China and Russia against oil deliveries, but more importantly, it was recently announced that it had consigned its oil sales to Rosneft, the Russian oil and gas giant, who has so far sold the entire Venezuelan oil production until December, including sales to major US oil companies and refineries. This a smart move, that guarantees Venezuelan oil is neither embargoed, seized nor are its payments withheld.
Additionally, Venezuela continues to sell some of its oil assets (upstream and downstream) to Russia and China and hence ensuring proper funding for its oil operations.
If this development is allowed to continue, the chances of a Venezuelan (and Nigerian) oil production disruption diminish, and the argument for an oil price spike falters. Not only so, but in a worst-case scenario, Venezuela (and Nigeria) can, in desperation, dump oil on the markets and crash prices like never seen before.
From a geopolitical aspect, this means ever closer relations with Russia and China, which together with a couple more anti-western South American countries, could result in a ‘backyard’ full of pickles! Will it be allowed to happen, or are we about to witness another ‘North Korean’ drama, but this time in South America?
Marwan Salamah is a Kuwaiti economic consultant and publishes articles on his blog: marsalpost.com
August 26th, 2017 by South Front
ISIS has made a desperate attempt to regain the initiative in the battle for central Syria.
On August 24, ISIS launched a large counter-attack and recaptured the villages of al-Muqlah, al-Atshanah, Salem al-Hamad, al-Bu Hamad, Zor Shumr, al-Huwijah and Ghanem al-Ali in the southern Raqqa countryside.
According to the ISIS-linked news agency Amaq, ISIS killed 42 Syrian Arab Army (SAA) soldiers during the attack. 58 more SAA members were allegedly killed in a car bomb attack on a gathering of SAA soldiers near Ghanim al-Ali village.
On August 25, clashes continued with the SAA and it sallies were attempting to regain momentum in the area.
Earlier this month, the SAA re-deployed many units of the Tiger Forces and Tribal Forces from the southern Raqqa countryside central Syria in order to conduct a large encirclement operation that ended earlier this week. This was one of the key reasons behind the ISIS success near Ghanem al-Alli.
The advance in southern Raqqa followed the offensive in the eastern Hama countryside where ISIS, supported by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda) and the Free Syrian Army, made a fierce attempt to cut off the the Salamiyah-Ithriyah-Khanassir-Aleppo road, the only government supply line to Aleppo city.
On August 23 and August 24, an intense fighting was ongoing at Wadi al-Adib and Shayk Hilal and as-Saan. However, by August 25, the SAA, the Qalamoun Shield Forces and the National Defense Forces (NDF) had stabilized the situation repelling all attempts to cut off the strategic supply line.
Meanwhile, the SAA Tiger Forces, the NDF and their allies further advanced against ISIS north of Palmyra and took control of Bi’r Qudaym and Jabal ‘Asab. The ISIS pocket north of Palmyra is rapidly shrinking because of ISIS’s lack of manpower there. According to local sources, ISIS has much more defense positions, manpower and weapons in the Uqayrabat area.
On the Syrian-Lebanese border, the SAA and Hezbollah liberated the Ras al-Shahut crossing, Wadi al-Magharah al-Kabir and Wadi al-Magharah al-Saqir heights from ISIS. There are reports about negotiations between Hezbollah and ISIS about a possibility of the ISIS withdrawal from the area. However, it’s unclear either there is a real possibility of the ISIS withdrawal or not.
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August 25th, 2017 by Abayomi Azikiwe
Featured image: SADC Executive Secretary and South African Minister of International Cooperation
Pretoria, South Africa was the scene of the 37th Summit of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) on August 19-20.
President Jacob Zuma was sworn in as the new chairperson taking over the reins of authority from King Mswati III of the Kingdom of Swaziland.
This regional organization founded in 1992 in Windhoek, Republic of Namibia, after previously being formed in 1980 as the Southern African Development Coordination Conference (SADCC), met under the theme of “partnering with the private sector in developing industry and regional value chains.” The gathering took place amid profound challenges facing the sub-continent including climate change, the decline in primary commodities prices for export and consumption which has plunged the largest economy in the region, the Republic of South Africa into recession, security concerns, rising gender-based violence, among other challenges.
At the beginning of the Summit SADC existed as a regional economic grouping consisting of 15 member states: Angola, Botswana, Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The organization is designed to foster sub-continental integration and the elimination of poverty throughout Southern Africa by encouraging economic cooperation along with enhancing peace and security.
As a result of the historical legacy of apartheid colonialism in South Africa, the neighboring states in the SADC region are dependent upon the continent’s most developed economy for labor participation, transportation links and communications infrastructure. All of the leaders meeting in South Africa recognized that the organization must move rapidly to transform the economy of the region in order to stave off further social stagnation, job losses and impoverishment of the workers, farmers and youth.
President Zuma noted after accepting his appointment as chair that:
“The key activities during our chairmanship will be the development of a high impact annual operation plan with targeted interventions and public policy tools to foster the development of regional value chains in agro processing, pharmaceuticals and mineral beneficiation. Secondly, we will promote a Member State driven process through an industrial development forum to facilitate the identification of cross border projects that will strengthen regional value chains and contribute to the development of the region.” (sadc.int, Aug. 22)
During the course of the Summit the leaders elected other officers to implement the SADC policies over the next year. Those chosen at the meeting were His Excellency, Dr. Hage G. Geingob, President of the Republic of Namibia as Deputy Chairperson of SADC, His Excellency, Jose Eduardo dos Santos President of Angola as Chairperson of the Organ on Politics, Defense and Security Cooperation and elected His Excellency Edgar Chagwa Lungu and President of the Republic of Zambia as the Chairperson of the Organ.
An important addition to the SADC grouping was the Union of Comoros bringing the number of members to 16. The Comoros Islands are located in the Indian Ocean on the Mozambique Channel.
There are four major islands in the archipelago along with many smaller ones: Grande Comore; Moheli; Anjouan; and Mayotte. Nonetheless, Mayotte chose to reject national independence and remains a colony of France. Comoros declared itself as a sovereign state in 1974 and considers the integration of Mayotte with France to be null and void.
The population of the Union is less than 800,000 and is a largely agricultural territory. However, the government of President Azali Assoumani believes that joining SADC with its focus on re-industrialization will assist the economy in its development efforts.
Declaration of the SADC Summit
Some of the highlights of the final declaration included commendation of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for its efforts to maintain stability inside this vast nation. SADC condemned attempts by western governments to interfere in the internal affairs of the DRC by imposing sanctions on political figures acknowledging that the holding of national elections would not be feasible by December of 2017.
A Double Troika established to monitor events in the Kingdom of Lesotho was continued. The summit encouraged the Prime Minister Motsohae Thomas Thabane to abide by the agreements designed by SADC to ensure democratic practice in Lesotho where elections were recently held leading to the creation of a coalition government.
The declaration noted its displeasure with the lack of progress in moving toward independence in the Western Sahara still under the control of the Kingdom of Morocco. The North African state was readmitted to the African Union (AU) in 2016 over the objections of several SADC member-states. Morocco had withdrawn from the predecessor of the AU, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), as early as 1984 when the continental body voted to recognize the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) as a full member.
According to the section specifically related to the Western Sahara, the declaration emphasizes:
“Summit was concerned that colonialism on the continent is yet to be eradicated. In this regard, Summit approved the convening of a SADC Solidarity Conference with Western Sahara, after whose outcomes will be shared with the African Union Commission.”
As it relates to the challenges of health care in the region, the 37th Summit said as well:
“HIV and AIDS remains a major challenge affecting significant numbers of adolescents and young people, predominantly females, and that the high prevalence in HIV and AIDS is exacerbated by drugs abuse. Summit directed the Secretariat to urgently develop a comprehensive Regional Strategy to deal with drug abuse and cyber-crime.”
Destabilization Remains Major Threat to the Region
During the course of the SADC Summit demonstrations were held outside of the venue in Pretoria. Many of the protesters advanced causes that would undermine the independence and sovereignty of member-states along with the overall regional structures in Africa.
A group calling itself the “SADC Democracy Forum” criticized the Republic of South Africa for not turning over Republic of Sudan President Omar Hassan al-Bashir to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Netherlands when the leader attended an AU summit inside the country in June 2015. The desire of the government of President Zuma to withdraw South Africa from the Rome Statute which guides the ICC has been thwarted by the constitutional court.
These same protesters also demanded that Republic of Zimbabwe First Lady Grace Mugabe not be granted diplomatic immunity after a South African model alleged that she was assaulted by her. Mugabe was allowed to leave South Africa without being forced to answer to the claims which received wide publicity in the media.
Zambia was targeted by the protesters when they insisted that President Edgar Lungu not be allowed to speak due to the state of emergency declared and the previous detention of a prominent opposition leader. The DRC was attacked for not holding elections as demonstrators demanded the resignation of President Joseph Kabila, a long-time member of SADC.
The acceptance of such demands advocated by opposition groups gathered outside the Summit venue would overturn the protocols of both the AU and SADC. Such positions coincide with those of the western imperialist states designed to reverse advances made toward African unity and cooperation between internationally-recognized governments.
Police utilized crowd control tactics to prevent further disruptions. The objective of the demonstrations was to bring into question the very essence of regional unity and integration in contemporary Africa.
These developments must be viewed within the broader context of the worsening economic crisis on the continent emanating from the existing international division of labor and economic power. Military forces from the United States under the banner of the Africa Command (AFRICOM) are deployed in at least 35 of the 55 member-states of the AU.
A mechanism for re-colonization is already firmly in place and if the AU member-states and their regional affiliates do not move rapidly towards a unified political, economic and military strategy prospects for genuine growth and development will remain stifled. Peace and stability can only be realized through the initiatives of the African people based upon their own interests and priorities.
August 25th, 2017 by Moon of Alabama
According to a 1950s political theory The Structure of Power in American Society is mainly build on three elite groups, the high military, the corporation executives and the political directorate. (The “political directorate” can best be described as the bureaucracy, the CIA and their proxies within Congress.)
On election day I noted that only the military had supported The Not-Hillary President. The corporate and executive corners of the triangle had pushed for Hillary Clinton and continued to do so even after Trump had won. (Only recently did the “collusion with Russia” nonsense suddenly die down.) I wrote:
The military will demand its due beyond the three generals now in Trump’s cabinet.
That turned out to be right. A military junta is now ruling the United States:
Inside the White House, meanwhile, generals manage Trump’s hour-by-hour interactions and whisper in his ear — and those whispers, as with the decision this week to expand U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, often become policy.At the core of Trump’s circle is a seasoned trio of generals with experience as battlefield commanders: White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and national security adviser H.R. McMaster. The three men have carefully cultivated personal relationships with the president and gained his trust.
…
Kelly, Mattis and McMaster are not the only military figures serving at high levels in the Trump administration. CIA Director Mike Pompeo, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke each served in various branches of the military, and Trump recently tapped former Army general Mark S. Inch to lead the Federal Bureau of Prisons. […] the National Security Council [..] counts two other generals on the senior staff.
With the firing of the renegade Flynn and various other Trump advisors, the Junta has already removed all independent voices in the White House. It is now attaching more control wires to its “salesperson” marionette:
The new system, laid out in two memos co-authored by [General] Kelly and Porter and distributed to Cabinet members and White House staffers in recent days, is designed to ensure that the president won’t see any external policy documents, internal policy memos, agency reports, and even news articles that haven’t been vetted.
Trump has a weakness for the military since he attended a New York military academy during his youth.
But he does not like to be controlled. I expect him to revolt one day. He will then find that it is too late and that he is actually powerless.
—
The Zionist propaganda is claiming that Iran is taking over Syria and that its sole concern is to create a land-corridor between Iran and Lebanon. The AP is now reporting this myth as if it were fact. The argument the AP writers make is illogical and fails:
The land-route would be the biggest prize yet for Iran in its involvement in Syria’s six-year-old civil war. […] It would facilitate movement of Iranian-backed fighters between Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon as well as the flow of weapons to Damascus and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Iran’s main proxy group.
That landline would facilitate something that, according to further AP “reporting”, has already been achieved without it:
The route is largely being carved out by Iran’s allies and proxies, a mix of forces including troops of Syrian President Bashar Assad, Hezbollah fighters and Shiite militias on both sides of the border aiming to link up. Iran also has forces of its own Revolutionary Guard directly involved in the campaign on the Syrian side.
So, apparently, Iran needs a land corridor to move weapons and fighters to Syria and Lebanon. To open that currently closed-off land corridor it has moved weapons and fighters to Syria and Lebanon. Somehow that argument is not convincing at all.
—
The usual NATO propaganda outlets are retching up fear over an upcoming Russian maneuver:
Russia is preparing to mount what could be one of its biggest military exercises since the cold war, a display of power that will be watched warily by Nato against a backdrop of east-west tensions.Western officials and analysts estimate up to 100,000 military personnel and logistical support could participate in the Zapad (West) 17 exercise, which will take place next month in Belarus, Kaliningrad and Russia itself.
It follows a lot of speculation and obvious bullshit. In reality Zaphad is a series of smaller maneuvers taking place over some six month. It includes local police and civil defense agencies which lets the numbers look big. Each year such maneuvers take place in one of the four military districts of Russia. The number of soldiers at the core of the exercise will amount to about a division size force of 13,000-15,000 troops. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is unusual with that maneuver but the NATO propaganda attempts to make it look like an imminent Russian invasion of western Europe.
Featured image is from New Eastern Outlook.
August 25th, 2017 by RT News
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.
“Iran is already well on its way to controlling Iraq, Yemen and to a large extent is already in practice in control of Lebanon,” Reuters quoted Netanyahu as saying. “We cannot forget for a single minute that Iran threatens every day to annihilate Israel.”
“Israel opposes Iran’s continued entrenchment in Syria. We will be sure to defend ourselves with all means against this and any threat.”
Iran supports Syrian President Bashar Assad in the civil war that has been gripping the country for six years. Israel considers the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah to be little more than a proxy of Tehran, and fears a Syrian government victory will further amplify Iranian influence at its borders and give Tehran access to the Mediterranean.
Israel publicly considers Iran an even bigger threat to its security than Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL).
“It is not an exaggeration to think that within a certain period of time, the Islamic State will lose its territorial footholds in Syria,”said Netanyahu, as quoted by Haaretz. “There will be a much better prospect for cutting the current civil war short and preventing a future war if Iran is not in Syria.”
“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.”
Israeli officials may be particularly concerned about an Iranian presence near the Golan Heights, a disputed territory between Israel and Syria, part of which is under Israeli occupation. In July, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) opened fire on Syrian positions in response to two stray shells landing on the Israeli-claimed side.
The Israeli Air Force (IAF) have repeatedly carried out air strikes on the Syrian territory since the beginning of the Syrian conflict. In July, it was reported that Israel has carried out dozens of strikes in Syria, allegedly targeting Hezbollah arms convoys. Netanyahu seemingly admitted to that during a meeting with the prime ministers of Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia.
“We built the wall because there was a problem with ISIS and Iran trying to build a terror front [in the Golan Heights]. I told Putin, when we see them transferring weapons to Hezbollah, we will hurt them. We did it dozens of times,” the Israeli prime minister said at that time, referring to an earlier meeting with the Russian president.
In April, Reuters reported that the IAF targeted Hezbollah’s “arms supply hub” near Damascus Airport used to stockpile weapons and ammunition coming from Iran on “commercial and military cargo aircraft.”
At that time, Israeli Intelligence Minister Israel Katz commented on the issue by saying that the incident in Syria “corresponds completely with Israel’s policy to act to prevent Iran’s smuggling of advanced weapons via Syria to Hezbollah.”
In March, the Russian Foreign Ministry summoned the Israeli ambassador to Moscow, Gary Koren, to demand explanations for the airstrikes Israel conducted near the Syrian city of Palmyra after the IDF warplanes hit several targets near the ancient city, allegedly destroying advanced arms provided to Hezbollah.
In January, Damascus accused Tel Aviv of bombing the Mezzeh military airport west of the country’s capital.
Putin has not publicly responded to Netanyahu’s comments about Iran, which Moscow considers a partner in maintaining the de-escalation zones in Syria. However, on Tuesday Russia’s ambassador to Israel Alexander Petrovich Shein said that it will keep Israeli interests in mind when dealing with Syria.
“We take the Israeli interests in Syria into account,” Shein told Channel One television. “Were it up to Russia, the foreign forces would not stay.”
At the same time, Russia repeatedly emphasized the importance of the role that Iran plays in Syria. The Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov particularly praised the trilateral cooperation between Russia, Iran, and Turkey as the most effective way of resolving the Syrian crisis, adding that
“the Russia-Iran-Turkey ‘troika’ has proven with actual deeds that it is in demand.”
After the Sochi meeting, Netanyahu flew back to Israel, where he is due to sit down with US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to discuss the Palestinian-Israeli peace process.
August 25th, 2017 by Prof Michel Chossudovsky
In this “big picture” interview, Michel Chossudovsky concentrates on the broader global crisis including North and South Korea; the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review overhauling US nuclear doctrine, tactical nukes reclassified as conventional;
horrors of the Korean War; Korean reunification;
sanctions and naval blockade of Qatar; Qatari and Iranian jointly owned natural gas fields the largest worldwide; pipelines; Turkey in Qatar; major realignments of the Middle East chessboard;
NATO member Turkey purchases Russian S-300 Defense System; re-drawn map of Syria and “Free Kurdistan”; crosscutting coalitions;
Russia; China; India and Pakistan join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization signaling a major geopolitical shift;
destabilization of Venezuela; Venezuela has largest oil reserves worldwide;
breakdown in relations between Cuba and Venezuela; the same foundations funding the opposition in Venezuela are funding intellectuals in Cuba; effects of dual currency systems.
August 25th, 2017 by Steve Horn
Featured image: The defendant, Red Fawn Fallis, right, at her mother’s memorial. (Source: FreeRedFawn Facebook Video)
As tensions rose at Standing Rock last fall, Red Fawn Fallis was one of many arrested at the scene of the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) protests near Cannon Ball, North Dakota. However, her charges stood apart: Attempted murder of police officers, an indictment later dropped for lesser charges.
Still, the claim that Fallis shot at police has stuck in the minds of North Dakotans who may have to judge her culpability and is one reason she could not get a fair trial in the area, her lawyers argue. Attorneys for Fallis, a 38-year-old Oglala Lakota Sioux woman from Colorado, have posited that the case should be moved to a different federal court district.
Their argument, made in a pair of recent pre-trial motions for a venue change, revolves around the public relations campaign waged by law enforcement, private security, and public relations firms hired by Dakota Access owner, Energy Transfer Partners. That campaign was headed by firms such as TigerSwan, the National Sheriffs’ Association, Delve and Off the Record Strategies, as reported by The Intercept and DeSmog.
The recent motions pushing for a venue shift cite as exhibits multiple documents and emails previously obtained and published by DeSmog and The Intercept, along with other law enforcement communications and media efforts.
The exhibits include two emails and a talking points memorandum written by the founder and owner of Off the Record Strategies, North Dakota native Mark Pfeifle, who led communications efforts for the Iraq War under the George W. Bush administration. These documents were previously covered in a story by DeSmog.
Source: U.S. District Court for the District of North Dakota, Western Division
“This email shows active attempts to influence public perception of Water Protectors in media markets throughout North Dakota in collaboration with ‘DAPL folks’ utilized to reinforce law enforcement narratives,” reads one of the motion’s footnotes about the Pfeifle communications. Many of those protesting the pipeline refer themselves as “water protectors.”
Though Morton County prosecutors dropped the attempted murder charge against her, Fallis still faces charges for possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, civil disorder, and discharge of a firearm during a crime of violence. She was involved in an incident in which she allegedly drew a gun on officers arresting her, while they subdued her on the ground, on October 27, 2016 at the protests against Dakota Access in North Dakota.
Fallis has pled not guilty to the charges and her supporters describe her as a pacifist, though in 2003 she was convicted of being accessory to an attempted first-degree murder in Colorado, which is a felony.
‘Poison Their View’
Fallis’ legal team also points to recent surveys done by the National Jury Project in the counties housing the federal court district, which is based in Bismarck. The defense argues that those surveys — conducted in Cass County, Morton County, and Burleigh County — illustrate that a potential jury pool chosen in this federal court district could be heavily biased against its client.
“An attitudinal survey by the National Jury Project revealed that the vast majority of juror-eligible residents … have been exposed to publicity about the anti-DAPL protesters, have formed a negative opinion about the protests and the protesters, believe that the arrested protesters are ‘guilty,’ and cannot be fair and impartial if selected as jurors for the trial of a protester,” reads the June 16 motion for venue transfer.
The lawyers representing Fallis also make the explicit legal argument that the conduct of law enforcement and the role the media played in echoing its claims have made it nearly impossible to assemble an unbiased jury pool for the case going forward.
“Fallis has presented the Court with substantial evidence of massive, pervasive, and negative media reports, often generated by law enforcement, which have aroused negative community sentiment about the anti-DAPL protests [and] the protesters in general,” her legal team wrote.
“These stories and reports, together with personal citizen encounters with anti-DAPL protests and police activities and the resulting community involvement have, as evidenced by the [National Jury Project] attitudinal surveys conducted in Morton, Burleigh, and Cass Counties, so prejudicially impacted the prospective [jury pool] as to poison their view of protesters, including Fallis, and make it impossible for her to empanel a fair and impartial jury and thereby obtain a fair trial within the District of North Dakota.”
‘Best Interests of Justice’
Grounding its legal argument in the 5th and 6th Amendments — a citizen’s rights to due process, a fair and impartial jury, and a fair trial — Fallis’ legal team has said that a shift in venue would be in the “best interests of justice.”
According to the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, a defendant has the right to transfer his or her trial for prejudice “if the court is satisfied that so great a prejudice against the defendant exists in the transferring district that the defendant cannot obtain a fair and impartial trial there.”
The survey results collected by the National Jury Project, contend Fallis’ attorneys, make the case for the trial being moved elsewhere under those rules.
“The NJP surveys found that as of mid-December 2016, approximately 75 percent of the juror-eligible population of Morton County and 77 percent of the juror-eligible population of Burleigh County stated that DAPL protesters who have been charged with crimes are probably or definitely guilty,” wrote Fallis’ attorneys on June 16.
“Moreover, approximately 88 percent of the juror-eligible population of Morton and Burleigh Counties indicated strong signs of prejudice by declaring one or more of the following: that they could not be fair and impartial jurors, that they had previously expressed their opinion that the arrested protesters were guilty, and/or that they thought that most of the protesters charged with crimes are probably or definitely guilty.”
Though the surveys never asked about Fallis specifically, respondents cited her case in answering a question about the potential guilt of protesters.
Source: U.S. District Court for the District of North Dakota, Western Division
Department of Justice Responds
On the contrary, U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ responded on July 28 to the motion to shift venues. The federal government suggested that this issue could be resolved during the jury selection process when attorneys for both sides can eliminate biased jurors from the pool, in the standard court procedure known as the voir dire process. From there, if assembling a fair jury seems infeasible, then a motion for venue shift could still take place, argue the DOJ attorneys.
“A majority of people in Burleigh and Morton Counties were exposed to media coverage of the protest activities in general, but have had very little exposure to the incident involving the defendant in this case,” the DOJ argues. “It is not a due process violation for a court to seat jurors who have heard something about the case.”
The prosecutors also point to the 2001 U.S. Court of Appeals case, U.S. v. Blom, a ruling which cautions against venue changes except under “rare and extreme cases.”
“Because our democracy tolerates, even encourages, extensive media coverage of crimes such as murder and kidnapping, the presumption of inherent prejudice is reserved for rare and extreme cases,” reads the ruling in that case.
Further, the DOJ says these surveys have already been cited in a different state-level case (North Dakota v. Kelli Maria Peterson in Morton County) and unsuccessfully, while also arguing that many other juries have been seated on this topic in the area. The DOJ contends that other tools already exist to ensure an unbiased jury.
“[M]ultiple juries have been seated in Morton County, North Dakota cases arising from charges related to pipeline protest activity, some resulting in not guilty verdicts,” it wrote.
“There are many tools available to the Court to help ensure a fair and impartial jury, including: juror questionnaires; potential individualized voir dire; jury instructions; assembling a larger than normal jury pool; an increased number of peremptory strikes; and importing jurors from outside” the North Dakota federal court’s Western Division.
‘Among the Strongest’
But Mykol Hamilton, a psychology professor at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, and research director for the American Society of Trial Consultants Foundation, told DeSmog that the motion for venue change was “among the strongest” she had seen in her entire career and a “slam dunk” decision.
“The most important thing I believe is the percentage of people that already assumed she’s guilty. And those were really high in Bismarck where she is supposed to be tried and not that much weaker than in Cass County,” said Hamilton. “So the guilt, and then I’ve never seen a case with 100 percent recognition either. The closest I’ve come with the recognition factor is 97 percent, and usually it’s in the 70 or 80 percentages, and often that’s enough to get a change of venue,” she says, while also mentioning, “in a lot of different ways the survey shows the prejudices there, which is the central issue.”
Hamilton was quick to say that success “depends 99 percent on the judge,” who has the final say in the motion for venue change. She also noted that voir dire is not a foolproof measure, as her research shows that it often serves to intimidate potential jurors into suppressing their actual beliefs.
She has come to call this phenomenon “prehabilitation” in her scholarship, wherein a judge, and often the attorneys, will inform prospective jurors they must be fair and impartial, and that it is their duty to put their biases aside. Instead of having people open up about their thoughts and feelings on the case, helping the judge and lawyers understand who would make for a good juror, it intimidates prospective jurors into burying their biases, Hamilton argues.
The DOJ attorneys and press team declined to comment for this story, as did attorneys for Fallis.
August 25th, 2017 by David North
Sundar Pichai
Chief Executive Officer
Google, Inc.
Lawrence Page
Chief Executive Officer/Director
Alphabet, Inc.
Sergey Brin
President/Director
Alphabet, Inc.
Eric Schmidt
Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors
Alphabet, Inc.
Gentlemen:
Google’s mission statement from the outset was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Its official code of conduct was proclaimed in Google’s famous motto: “Don’t be evil.” In recent years, you have seriously lost your way. You are now engaged in hiding the world’s information, and, in the process, are doing a great deal of evil.
When Google officially discontinued its China-based search engine, due to censorship by the Chinese government of search engine results for political criticism, Mr. Brin publicly stated that for Google, “it has always been a discussion about how we can best fight for openness on the Internet. We believe that this is the best thing that we can do for preserving the principles of the openness and freedom of information on the Internet.”
In 2013, when Mr. Schmidt visited Burma, he spoke in favor of free and open Internet use in the country. In light of Google’s recent actions, the statements of Mr. Brin and Mr. Schmidt appear utterly hypocritical.
Google, and by implication, its parent company Alphabet, Inc., are now engaged in political censorship of the Internet. You are doing what you have previously publicly denounced.
Google is manipulating its Internet searches to restrict public awareness of and access to socialist, anti-war and left-wing websites. The World Socialist Web Site (www.wsws.org) has been massively targeted and is the most affected by your censorship protocols. Referrals to the WSWS from Google have fallen by nearly 70 percent since April of this year.
Censorship on this scale is political blacklisting. The obvious intent of Google’s censorship algorithm is to block news that your company does not want reported and to suppress opinions with which you do not agree. Political blacklisting is not a legitimate exercise of whatever may be Google’s prerogatives as a commercial enterprise. It is a gross abuse of monopolistic power. What you are doing is an attack on freedom of speech.
We therefore call upon you and Google to stop blacklisting the WSWS and renounce the censorship of all the left-wing, socialist, anti-war and progressive websites that have been affected adversely by your new discriminatory search policies.
The WSWS is the online newspaper of the international Trotskyist movement. It is the most widely read socialist publication on the Internet. Since its launch in the year 1998, the WSWS has published more than 60,000 articles on politics, history, science and culture in more than a dozen languages. It is a significant and unique intellectual resource.
WSWS articles are reposted on innumerable websites and are published in printed newspapers all over the world. Material posted by the WSWS is frequently cited in university research papers and included in college syllabi. Leading American scholars, such as historians James McPherson and Allen Guelzo, and Shakespeare expert James Shapiro have granted interviews to the WSWS. The film and theater reviews posted on the site have attracted a large international following. World-renowned filmmakers—Wim Wenders, Mike Leigh, Richard Linklater, Bertrand Tavernier, and Abbas Kiarostami, to name only a few—have discussed their work with the World Socialist Web Site. Essays and lectures posted on the WSWS have been included in anthologies produced by publishers with no connection to the World Socialist Web Site.
The World Socialist Web Site also provides coverage of labor struggles and social issues that are either inadequately covered or completely ignored by the corporate-controlled media.
As a result of our principled opposition to war, our focus on social inequality, and our high standards of political and journalistic integrity, the WSWS is indisputably an authoritative publication on world political events, the global economy, international socialism, the history of the twentieth century, the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, and contemporary Marxism. It is a leading international voice in the fight against the resurgence of racism, xenophobia and fascism.
By the beginning of this year, the WSWS had achieved a global Alexa ranking of 36,525, and a ranking of 16,679 in the United States. In the spring, the number of monthly visitors to the WSWS exceeded 900,000. In April 2017, according to our data, 422,460 visits to the WSWS originated from Google searches.
Beginning in April of this year, Google began manipulating search results to channel users away from socialist, left-wing, and anti-war publications, and directing them instead towards mainstream publications that directly express the views of the government and the corporate and media establishment (i.e., the New York Times, Washington Post, etc.), and a small number of mildly left “trusted” websites whose critiques are deemed innocuous (i.e., Jacobin Magazine and the website of the Democratic Socialists of America, which functions as a faction of the Democratic Party).
As a pretext for these actions, Google announced that it was making changes to its search algorithm “to surface more authoritative content,” a term that brings to mind efforts by authoritarian regimes to censor the Internet and, specifically, political views deemed outside the consensus as defined by the establishment media.
Ben Gomes, Google’s vice president for search engineering, attempted to justify the imposition of political censorship with a blog post on April 25, claiming that the changes to the algorithm were a response to “the phenomenon of ‘fake news,’ where content on the web has contributed to the spread of blatantly misleading, low quality, offensive or downright false information.”
Google, according to Gomes, has recruited some 10,000 “evaluators” to judge the “quality” of websites. These evaluators are trained to “flag” websites that are deemed to “include misleading information” and “unsupported conspiracy theories.” Gomes explained that the blacklists created by these evaluators will be used, in combination with the latest developments in technology, to develop an algorithm that will impose censorship automatically, in real time, across future search results.
Whatever the technical changes Google has made to the search algorithm, the anti-left bias of the results is undeniable. The most striking outcome of Google’s censorship procedures is that users whose search queries indicate an interest in socialism, Marxism or Trotskyism are no longer directed to the World Socialist Web Site. Google is “disappearing” the WSWS from the results of search requests. For example, Google searches for “Leon Trotsky” yielded 5,893 impressions (appearances of the WSWS in search results) in May of this year. In July, the same search yielded exactly zeroimpressions for the WSWS, which is the Internet publication of the international movement founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938.
Other frequently used words and phrases that no longer include the WSWS in Google search results include: socialism, class struggle, class conflict, socialist movement, social inequality in the world, poverty and social inequality, antiwar literature, and the Russian revolution. A search for socialism vs. capitalism, which, as recently as April, would have listed the World Socialist Web Site as the eighth result on the first page of search results, now no longer returns any results at all for the WSWS. Of the top 150 search queries that returned results for the WSWS in April, 145 now no longer do so.
All the search terms listed above are employed frequently by users seeking a left-wing, socialist or Marxist take on events. Far from protecting readers from “unexpected” responses to their search requests, Google is manipulating its algorithm to make sure that the left-wing and progressive segment of their users, who would be most interested in the World Socialist Web Site, will not find it. Moreover, the extent and precision of the exclusion of the WSWS from search results strongly suggests that the anti-socialist bias of the new algorithm is being supplemented by the actual physical intervention of Google personnel, enforcing authoritarian-style direct and deliberate blacklisting.
As stated above, since April, other left-wing publications that present themselves as progressive, socialist or anti-war also have suffered significant reductions in their Google search results:
* alternet.org fell by 63 percent
* globalresearch.ca fell by 62 percent
* consortiumnews.com fell by 47 percent
* mediamatters.org fell by 42 percent
* commondreams.org fell by 37 percent
* internationalviewpoint.org fell by 36 percent
* democracynow.org fell by 36 percent
* wikileaks.org fell by 30 percent
* truth-out.org fell by 25 percent
* counterpunch.org fell by 21 percent
* theintercept.com fell by 19 percent
Google justifies the imposition of political censorship by using a loaded term like “fake news.” This term, properly used, signifies the manufacturing of news based on an artificially constructed event that either never occurred or has been grossly exaggerated. The present-day furor over “fake news” is itself an example of an invented event and artificially constructed narrative. It is a “fake” term that is used to discredit factual information and well-grounded analyses that challenge and discredit government policies and corporate interests. Any invocation of the phrase “fake news,” as it pertains to the WSWS, is devoid of any substance or credibility. In fact, our efforts to combat historical falsification have been recognized, including by the scholarly journal American Historical Review.
The facts prove that Google is rigging search results to blacklist and censor the WSWS and other left-wing publications. This raises a very serious question, with far-reaching constitutional implications. Is Google coordinating its censorship program with the American government, or sections of its military and intelligence apparatus?
Google probably will dismiss the question as an example of conspiracy theorizing. However, it is legitimate given the ample evidence that Google maintains close ties with the state. In 2016, Barack Obama’s defense secretary, Ashton Carter, appointed you, Mr. Schmidt, to chair the Department of Defense Innovation Advisory Board. Earlier this month, Defense Secretary James Mattis visited Google headquarters to discuss the ongoing and close collaboration between the company and the Pentagon. More generally, according to a report in The Intercept, Google representatives attended White House meetings on average at least once a week from January 2009 through October 2015.
Google claims to be a private corporation, but it is deeply involved in the formulation and implementation of government policy. The distinction between commercial interests and state objectives is increasingly difficult to detect. By obstructing the free access to and exchange of information, Google’s censorship program is aimed at enforcing a twenty-first century version of Orwellian “Right-Think.” It is undermining the development of progressive and constitutionally protected political opposition. It is benefiting the proponents of war, inequality, injustice and reaction.
The censorship of left-wing websites, and the WSWS in particular, reflects the fear that a genuine socialist perspective, if allowed a fair hearing, will find a mass audience in the US and internationally. There is widespread popular opposition to your efforts to suppress freedom of speech and thought. That is why Google feels compelled to cloak its anti-democratic policies with misleading arguments and outright lies. An online petitioncirculated by the WSWS demanding a halt to Google’s censorship efforts has already attracted several thousand signatures from readers in 70 different countries on five continents. We are determined to resist Google’s efforts to censor our publication, and to continue to raise awareness internationally about Google censorship. As long as this policy continues, Google will pay a heavy price in lost public credibility.
The International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Sites demands that the anti-democratic changes to the Google search result rankings and its search algorithm since April be reversed, and that Google cease its effort to curtail search accessibility to the WSWS and other left-wing, socialist, anti-war and progressive web publications.
Sincerely,
David North
Chairperson, International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site
August 25th, 2017 by Stephen Lendman
VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].
America raped and destroyed Mosul on the phony pretext of combating ISIS and liberating the city.
Thousands of civilians were killed. Indiscriminate terror-bombing, including use of banned weapons, massacred them.
Raqqa is being raped and destroyed the same way, civilians killed daily. Satellite images reveal a virtual moonscape, large parts of the city turned to rubble, maybe thousands of corpses buried beneath it – largely civilian men, women and children, victims of us imperial viciousness.
Terror-bombing continues targeting residential areas. Vital infrastructure was destroyed. Western media ignore the carnage and devastation – merciless terror-bombing of civilians on the phony pretext of combating ISIS Washington supports.
Thousands remain trapped in the city. Humanitarian conditions are dire, civilians with virtually no access to essentials to life.
The UN expressed “deep concerns” over what’s happening, failing to denounce US Nuremberg-level high crimes of war and against humanity.
UN humanitarian official Jan Egeland said heavy bombing, shelling and fighting makes escape from the city almost impossible.
“I cannot think of a worse place on earth now than” five Raqqa neighborhoods where 20,000 people struggle to survive, he said, numbers among them dying daily, others enduring horrendous suffering.
Washington wants control over northern Syria and whatever other territory it can grab. Russia, Iran and Hezbollah support the country’s sovereign independence and territorial integrity.
The struggle for Syria’s soul continues – no end of conflict in sight as long as Washington wants war, not restoration of peace and stability.
VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].
My newest book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”
http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html
Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.
Featured image is from SURYAA.
August 25th, 2017 by Jason Ditz
Heavy US airstrikes in densely populated residential areas have, throughout the ISIS war, proven a recipe for massive civilian casualties. This is increasingly the prevailing theme in the ISIS capital of Raqqa, where US strikes are killing many hundreds of civilians.
Earlier this week, at least 100 civilians were killed in a span on 48 hours in Raqqa. Observers put the figure at 168 in the past 10 days, and 458 in US airstrikes against the city since June, including 134 children.
These strikes are meant to support the Kurdish invasion of Raqqa, but the fact that they are pounding residential districts in a war-torn city means that a lot of what they’re hitting are buildings packed with civilian bystanders.
The Pentagon has continued the defend the practice, insisting they are the most careful military in history about civilian casualties, and pointing to their own official bodycounts, which are usually less than 10% of the number documented by NGOs.
Perhaps even more importantly, these strikes really aren’t doing much to support the Kurdish invasion, as the Kurdish forces have been described as holding about 45% of the city for the last several weeks, and despite a marked increase in US strikes and civilian deaths, don’t seem to be making any progress.
The UN is even pushing the US to halt its airstrikes against the city indefinitely, saying another 20,000 civilians should be allowed to flee without fearing being a target of US airstrikes. There is, as yet, no indication that is being seriously considered.
Jason Ditz is news editor of Antiwar.com.
Featured image is from the author.
August 25th, 2017 by NovoRossia Today
1,500 documented reports of war crimes committed by the nazi Ukraine regime have been sent to the European Court of Human Rights! The public commission of DPR Donetsk people’s republic have gathered all documented reports from victims, residents of DPR who have suffered from the criminal war waged by war criminal and nazi coup leader of Ukraine Poroshenko!
The public commission have been operating the last two years and recording and documenting war crimes in Donbass by the pro-nazi Ukraine regime, according to commission member Elena Shishkina. As of today, 1,513 case complaints/documents have been sent from DPR residents who have suffered from the crimes committed by the Kiev regime.
Documented reports also include the murder of 171 civilians, serious and grave bodily harm and property damage this year 2017.
The public commissions office recording the war crimes committed by the Ukraine junta regime in Donbass began its work in 2015. Investigations have been carried out by law and criminal investigative officials.
DPR also has a special investigative team special commission documenting all Kiev regime war crimes, it was established under the direct order of DPR president Alexander Zakharchenko. ~ZN
August 25th, 2017 by Stephen Lendman
VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].
Sound absurd? It’s part of the daily disinformation war on the country because of its sovereign independence, its opposition to America’s imperial agenda, its military might able to challenge the US, and its vast resources Washington wants control over.
Russia more than any other country deplores Nazism. The ravages it experienced during WW II at the hands of Hitler’s war machine remain indelible in its history, triumph over its scourge commemorated annually.
The neocon Washington Post is a CIA house organ, masquerading as a legitimate broadsheet. Far from it.
Claiming white supremacists in America are inspired by Russia, not Nazi Germany, is trash, WaPo misreporting.
WaPo:
“Russia…cater(s) to…white supremacists who brought bloodshed to Charlottesville.”
“…Moscow’s relations with neo-fascist contingents across Europe — in France, in Hungary — are well-known, less has been said about its extensive efforts to cultivate like-minded actors in the United States.”
Fact: Russia deplores what fascism represents. It caters to no “neo-fascist contingents” anywhere.
Fact: By France, WaPo means Marine Le Pen, criticized for meeting with Putin in Moscow, calling sanctions on Russia “unfair…silly (and) counterproductive,” along with urging normalized relations with Moscow.
Fact: By Hungary, WaPo has Prime Minister Viktor Orban in mind because he’s pro-Russia. The country’s Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto earlier said Russia threatens no other nations.
Fact: Moscow “cultivate(s)” no “neo-fascist” elements in America or anywhere else.
WaPo:
“…Moscow’s government mouthpieces have enthusiastically promoted the views of American neo-Nazis and white nationalists.”
Fact: Utter rubbish! Truth is polar opposite.
A WaPo disclaimer of sorts admitted Charlottesville isn’t “directly attributable to Moscow.”
At the same time, it claimed (nonexistent Russian US election meddling) aimed to turn “the United States against itself (by) cultivating, encouraging and goading groups that would create internal disruption and prevent the United States from promoting a liberal, international order.”
“An America rending itself apart is a fervent dream for those cloaked in power in Moscow. After Charlottesville – and after Trump revealed that he has little capacity for condemning white nationalists – the United States is one step closer to granting the Kremlin’s wish.”
Fact: Brainwashed readers alone would believe this rubbish. Trump denounced white supremacists, neo-Nazis, the KKK and other hate groups.
WaPo:
Russia “cultivate(s) American secessionists from Texas, Puerto Rico and California,” calling them “witting agents in Moscow’s efforts to implode Trump’s America.”
Fact: WaPo lied. Not a shred of evidence suggests it.
Russia seeks normalized, cooperative relations with America and all other nations – supporting multi-world polarity, peace and stability.
Washington aims to control planet earth, its resources and people – wars of aggression its main strategy.
Which agenda do you support?
VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].
My newest book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”
http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html
Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.
August 25th, 2017 by Zero Hedge
Featured image: Ambassador of the Russian Federation to the Republic of Sudan, Mirgayas M. Shirinskiy
Eight months after the Russian ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, was shot dead in broad daylight, on Wednesday yet another Russian ambassador has died. According to Russian news agency RIA Novosti, the Ambassador of the Russian Federation to the Republic of Sudan, Mirgayas M. Shirinskiy, was found dead in his home in Khartoum Wednesday.
Al Arabiya adds that the ambassador was found drowned in the swimming pool at his home.
Employees of the embassy discovered Shirinsky at his residence around 6pm local time, the press secretary of the Sudan mission, Sergey Konyashin, according to RT. The diplomat, who was 62 years old, appeared to have symptoms consistent with a serious heart seizure, Konyashin said, adding that doctors were immediately called to the scene, but were unable to save his life.
Russian embassy in Khartoum
According to Sputnik, before taking his post in Sudan, Shirinskiy served at the Russian embassies in Egypt, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Rwanda. The diplomat’s body was taken to a morgue in a Khartoum hospital, the spokesman said, adding that procedures are now in place to arrange for its return to Russia.
The Russian Foreign Ministry confirmed the death:
“We inform you with regret that Russian Ambassador to Sudan Mirgayas Shirinsky died in Khartoum on August 23,” the Russian ministry said. “Immediately after receiving detailed information from employees at the Russian embassy in Khartoum, we will inform you about the circumstances of our colleague’s death,” the ministry said.
The Sudanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs also praised Shirinskiy’s “friendly and sincere efforts to develop relations between the two countries and their peoples in various fields.”
The death of Shirinskiy marks the 9th Russian diplomat who has died in the past year. Here is a list of the more prominent recently deceased Russian diplomats:
Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union in May during the peak of the Trump Russian witchhunt, Former Director of National Intelligence and Trump’s arch-nemesis, James Clapper, discussed the “pattern” of dead Russians:
“Well, this obviously has been a curious pattern… We have had difficulty, though, in actually generating an evidentiary trail that could equate convincingly and compellingly in a court of law a direct connection between certain figures that have been eliminated who apparently ran afoul of Putin.” Clapper said it is an “interesting pattern. I will put it that way.”
The wife of one of Putin’s most prominent critics, activist and journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza, said her husband had been poisoned again, after experiencing kidney failure and being put in a medically induced coma in February. She reportedly said the doctors diagnosed him with an “acute poisoning by an unidentified substance.”
Perhaps the former head of US intelligence was merely projecting US tactics onto the Russians.
All images in this article are from the author.
August 24th, 2017 by Michael Welch
“But we must acknowledge that there is a process of smearing the independent media, which means that more than ever we need our readers to get the word out. In social media and across the land, these issues must be understood and debated. Again, the Global Research News Hour is playing a very important role in this regard.”
– Professor Michel Chossudovsky (May 5, 2017 program).
For the duration of the summer, the Global Research News Hour is highlighting past shows. Broadcasters are welcome and encouraged to use the repeat broadcasts on this webpage. However, broadcasters are free to avail themselves of any of the shows on the Global Research News Hour webpage.
In a brilliant new book, author and past guest Dmitry Orlov postulates the existence of something called the ‘technosphere’, analogous to the biosphere, which came into existence as soon as human inventions started impacting the natural world. This artificial construct, appears not to embrace life as we know it, nor does it have any affinity for the human species, beyond what can be manipulated into the technosphere’s service!
In one of our program’s most provocative interviews yet, Dmitry Orlov further explains the characteristics of the technosphere, the short-comings of techno-fixes for our ecological crises (eg: ‘renewable energy’), how organized religion and progressive social movements are enabled by and artifacts of the technosphere, and how this force imperiling all life on Earth can ultimately be overcome and human freedom secured.
LISTEN TO THE SHOW
Originally aired October 21, 2016
Click to download the audio (MP3 format)
This episode of the Global Research News Hour attempts to take a fearless look at the Dakota Access Pipeline resistance, and what is at stake, not just for the people in the area, but for the future of authentic environmental and Indigenous struggles.
In the first half hour, we hear from two water protectors, who identify as Cedar Woman (Lorraine Clements) and Wopilawin (Paula Antoine, an organizer and veteran of a similar anti-Keystone XL action). They spoke from their vantage point on how the camp came together, the violent actions against campers by law enforcement and security personnel, mis-portrayal of the camp by media as ‘riotous’, and the importance of remaining united in the face of this common struggle.
Later on, retired Canadian biophysicist Dennis LeNeveu utilizes his own research and provides an assessment of the hazards stemming from the pipeline if it proceeds along the projected path.
Finally, London, Ontario based writer and researcher Cory Morningstar, returns to the program with a critical evaluation of the many non-profits, celebrities, and even corporations like Unilever, which have jumped on the Standing Rock bandwagon, to the detriment of the Tribal peoples and ecological causes those ‘allies’ purport to support. Following up on her research into the “non-profit industrial complex” (NPIC) Morningstar reveals the hidden and unwholesome motives of Warren Buffett, and other ‘philanthropists’, who finance anti-pipeline activism to the tune of millions of dollars through their foundations.
Originally aired February 10, 2017
Click to download the audio (MP3 format)
What is behind this jousting between nuclear powers, and what could be the consequences for the region and the world? These are the questions we hope to address in this week’s installment of the Global Research News Hour, featuring this week’s special guest Michel Chossudovsky.
Over the course of the hour, the discussion will delve into the true reasons for the Korean War, the intended target of the THAAD anti-missile system, the prospect of Trump’s unpredictable foreign policy as a Nixonian ‘Madman’ strategy, the disturbing normalization of the use of nuclear weapons within Washington’s civilian bureaucracy, and the necessary conditions for reversing the drift toward a third and final world war.
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August 24th, 2017 by Deborah S. Rogers
On April 27, 2017, a hapless cow wandered off-course during a seasonal cattle drive in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and ended up over the campfire of some Indigenous hunters. The traditional lands of these groups (Batwa and related groups) are routinely trampled by cattle, cut for old-growth timber, or grabbed for mineral resources including diamonds and coltan — generally illegally. As their wild game diminishes from these impacts, the Batwa have come to view cattle as fair game.
The cattle herders followed their cow’s tracks, and upon learning her fate, agreed to share the meat with the Batwa. But when they returned to their village, a local self-appointed “defense militia” was infuriated, returning to kill and mutilate eight of the Batwa.
The global economy’s demand for hard-to-obtain minerals and tropical timber, coupled with a long history of contempt and exploitation by neighboring tribes, have made these Batwa hunter-gatherers easy targets for land grabs and violence. Specifically targeted during a massive regional conflict to gain control over resources, in the early 2000s, an estimated 70,000 Batwa were tortured, killed and even cannibalized in northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), according to American University’s Inventory of Conflict and Environment Case Studies.
There is only one word for the attempted eradication of an entire group of people through the wholesale slaughter of men, women and children, whatever the reason. That word is genocide.
The conflict is now heating up again, this time in southeastern DRC. Since September 2016, volunteer investigators on the ground have been gathering names and numbers of Indigenous community members killed, injured, raped and displaced. These numbers, no doubt gross underestimates, show that well over 1,200 Batwa have been killed in the past 12 months — primarily in skirmishes with non-Indigenous neighboring communities intent on expanding their access to land and resources.
In one recent case, on July 4, 2017, a national online news source in DRC said that daylong clashes between Batwa and other ethnic groups were triggered after the Batwa killed two adversaries near the provincial capital of Kalemie. No casualty list was provided in the news article, but according to our sources, 189 Batwa people were killed that day, including men, women and children.
In the worst attack we have documented so far, on the night of January 13-14, 2017, there was a nighttime attack against the Batwa near a town called Moba. Six hundred Batwa people were slaughtered outright; at least 1,600 women and girls were brutally raped, and were being cared for using traditional medicines because there are no health centers. No pain-killers; no antibiotics; no urgently-needed surgeries; no forensic evidence; no psychological counseling. More than 40 of those women and girls had already died or were on the verge of death several days after the attack.
A desperately inadequate RFI news report on the event, translated from French, says,
“On 13 January, clashes took place … 25 kilometers from the city of Moba. Four villages were partially or totally burned down and the population fled to Moba. In total, 24 people — four Bantus and twenty [Batwa] — lost their lives in one week.”
Is this destined to be an off-the-record genocide?
Knowledgeable sources on the ground say that neighboring tribes are intent on exterminating (yes, a dehumanizing term) the Indigenous people, and that the DRC government is determined to prevent word of this massacre from becoming known internationally. This is to be expected: President Joseph Kabila, who refuses to hold elections as required by DRC’s constitution, prefers to get rid of anything that stands in the way of enriching elites in his kleptocracy. Indigenous people’s traditional land rights are an impediment to uncontrolled resource extraction.
Less expected is the lack of forthright information by the UN’s peacekeeping force in DRC. The UN’s radio station in DRC routinely downplays these incidents, and fails to distinguish between deaths of Indigenous peoples and others. A July 11, 2017, article in IRIN, which reports on crises for the UN, left the dangerous misimpression that conflict and large-scale internal displacements of people in this region are instigated primarily by Indigenous Batwa militias. Without providing any objective breakdown of casualty statistics or detailed descriptions of incidents, the article presents, unchallenged, the anti-Batwa statements of individuals, primarily from the very tribal groups who are engaged in driving the Batwa off their lands.
This opacity is a major contributing factor to the ongoing crisis, providing cover for those looking to profit from the chaos. Local news sources fail to provide acceptable coverage, and international media are (rightly) afraid to send reporters in. The DRC government’s information cannot be trusted. UN investigators have been killed. Local journalists have been killed. Human rights advocates have been killed or barred from entering the country. International NGOs have sounded the alarm about conflicts and conflict minerals in the region, but only one organization has paid close attention to the genocide against the Indigenous Batwa. And on July 19, 2017, the UN announced plans to shut down five of its monitoring and peacekeeping bases in DRC, courtesy of the Trump administration’s refusal to meet US funding commitments.
There is, however, a way to obtain accurate and timely information on the situation: from the locals. My organization works with a network of local groups and individuals who are already on the ground and can tap into sources of information from the various ethnic communities and factions. Their cross-verified Field Reports provide one of the only current sources of insight into the devastation faced by the Batwa in eastern DRC.
With awareness comes the possibility of transformation. On January 16, 2017, just two days after the Moba massacre, delegates from organizations across the region convened along the shores of Lake Kivu to form a multi-ethnic coalition to defend the survival and rights of the Batwa people. With strong Batwa leadership, they developed a plan of action to monitor human rights violations and violent conflict, undertake legal interventions, launch a region-wide public awareness campaign on behalf of Indigenous rights, and implement genuine conflict resolution mechanisms (unlike the feeble government efforts led by Emmanuel Shadary, an internationally sanctioned human rights violator, which have failed to bring necessary issues and actors to the table).
We have a choice: we can either look away in horror, or we can take action to help stop the killing. If Congolese people of all ethnic backgrounds can join together to defend Indigenous rights, despite the horrendous civil and regional conflict of the past two decades, the least we in the international community can do is to back them up where we have influence. We need to educate ourselves and others, then support civil society efforts on the ground, demand that African Union and United Nations peacekeepers do their jobs, and block multinational resource extractive companies from providing financial incentives for genocide.
My colleagues in DRC end many of their communications with the exhortation, “Courage!” Let’s follow their lead.
Deborah S. Rogers is president of Initiative for Equality, a global network of local partners working to empower marginalized people, and affiliated researcher with Stanford University’s Institute for Research in the Social Sciences. She can be reached at [email protected].
Copyright, Truthout. Reprinted with permission.
August 24th, 2017 by Stephen Lendman
Featured image: Rasmea Odeh (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)
VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].
It’s rife in America, thousands incarcerated and abused for political reasons – notably people of color and Muslims, deplorably treated like fifth column threats.
Chicago-based Palestinian/American Rasmea Yousef Odeh is a noted community leader, an activist, feminist, educator and champion of human and civil rights, a widely respected figure.
Born in Palestine, she was victimized by Israeli viciousness, imprisoned unjustly in its gulag from 1969 – 1979, horrifically mistreated, tortured and sexually abused.
Her sentenced was commuted as part of a prisoner release deal. Deported to Lebanon, in 1995 she emigrated to America, becoming a Chicago resident in 2005, continuing her activist work, ongoing for over 40 years.
A founding member of the United States Palestinian Community Network (USPCN) Chicago chapter, the organization earlier called her “a living legend in the eyes of thousands across the world, one of our precious elders.”
In October 2013, she was arrested in Chicago, prosecuted in Detroit, the jurisdiction where she applied for citizenship, wrongfully charged and convicted for unlawful procurement of naturalization – pertaining to allegedly lying on her 1994 immigration application, omitting her lawless arrest and imprisonment in Israel nearly five decades ago.
She committed no crimes. So-called evidence of her involvement in 1969 Jerusalem bombings was based on her confession under torture, given to stop the pain, not for any wrongdoing.
Israel pressed for her prosecution in America. US Muslims are war on terror scapegoats, unjustly vilified and abused.
Judge Gershwin Drain sentenced Odeh to time served, 33 days in 2014, a $1,000 fine, plus loss of citizenship and deportation to Jordan.
Last Thursday in Detroit federal court, during her sentencing hearing, she recounted her horrific mistreatment, along with conditions under brutal Israeli occupier.
Here’s what she said in full, a moving, forthright, factual statement by a glorious woman, deserving high praise, not what she’s been put through.
“On this court’s platform, I’m standing today to raise my voice on behalf of myself as a Palestinian woman and on behalf of all Palestinian people, whether under occupation, in refugee camps, or scattered in exile across the world,” she began.
“Honorable Judge Drain: First, I would like to clarify that my following message is not directed at you personally.”
“I am a Palestinian woman who was born into a family that had simple dreams and desires to live in peace and tranquility, far away from bombs, explosions, murder, and displacement.”
“But those dreams turned into a nightmare at the hands of the Zionist Haganah gangs whose crimes are hard to imagine. The Zionists committed massacres, killing children and the elderly without any consideration of human values.”
“They displaced hundreds of thousands of my people, and killed thousands more, in 1947 and 1948, upon the establishment of the state of Israel.”
“They turned us into strangers in our own country, and pushed us into the inhumane conditions of refugee camps inside Palestine and other Arab countries.”
“The Israeli goals were not satisfied in 1948, so they pursued the ambitions of Zionism and launched another war in 1967, illegally occupying the rest of Palestine and parts of surrounding Arab countries.”
“International law prohibits the following practices, and considers them punishable offenses:
The Israeli occupation of Palestine is a crime. Its use of biological and chemical weapons is a terrorist crime. Demolishing schools, homes, hospitals, clinics, and places of worship is a crime.”
“Imprisoning hundreds of political organizers and resisters (including dozens of children) without charge is a crime. Putting up the Apartheid Wall is a crime.” killing people is a crime; and collective punishment is a crime!”
“Many countries in this world have struggled to win their independence. International law and all the United Nations conventions state that people have the right to fight for their independence, and to expel the colonizer and the occupier.”
“People in the US struggled against British colonialism for their independence, and that is the reason the 4th of July is celebrated. Why are the Palestinians prohibited from struggling for our independence?”
“When Palestinians have fought for our rights over the years, all US administrations have responded by supporting Israeli crimes and brutal aggression, falsely describing Israel’s acts as ‘self-defense.’ “
“At the same time, the US government calls us terrorists by placing all of our legitimate resistance organizations on its terrorist list!” – because Israel demand it.
“I wonder how the US or any other country would respond if they were invaded by a foreign force? If people in the US were to defend themselves, would they be considered terrorists, and would their resistance organizations be placed on a terrorist list?”
“I am sure that they would have the full right to protect their country, just as my people should have the right to protect our country.”
“The Arms Export Control Act of 1976 prohibits the US from exporting arms in situations where such arms would ‘aid in the development of weapons of mass destruction (or) increase the possibility of outbreak or escalation of conflict…,’ and also prohibits use of such arms against civilians and innocents.”
Thus, the US government or any US company violates the law if it exports weapons to a state or group that uses them in this way.”
“The reality is that the US, as Israel’s patron, violates its own laws by supporting Zionist aggression. That means the US is also guilty of crimes against the Palestinians.”
“This country’s military, political, economic, and diplomatic support allows Israel to continue its colonization and military occupation of Palestine, and to commit crimes prohibited by international law and US law.”
“That is why we organize for Palestinian rights in the US, because it is this government that must also be held responsible for Israel’s state terrorism against my people.”
“We, the Palestinians, have been struggling against oppression for one hundred years, ever since the British Balfour Declaration promised the world that it would support the colonization of our country. And for almost 70 years, the manufactured state of Israel has been doing the bidding of the powerful British and US empires.”
“This Israel has no right to exist as a racist state of white settler colonialists, just like South Africa had no right to exist as the racist, Apartheid state it was.”
“This Israel represents nothing but violence and ethnic cleansing against my people.”
“Many years of negotiations for a political settlement have been a huge failure, because Israel continuously demands recognition as a Jewish state, which goes against all notions of equality and democracy; and because it wants to liquidate all the rights of the Palestinians, including our rights to return, self-determination, equality, and political independence.”
“Each Israeli government moves more and more to the extreme right, and Netanyahu’s is the worst of them, launching three horrible wars on Gaza.”
“It destroyed homes, schools, health clinics, and our infrastructure as a whole, killing thousands, and finally imposing a siege on the entire Gaza Strip.”
“Recently, Israel installed metal detectors and security cameras at the entrance to the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, prompting weeks of massive protests. Three Palestinians were killed, and a thousand injured, before Israel was forced by our mass movement to remove the barriers.”
“At the same time, Israeli laws that discriminate against Palestinians in Jerusalem, as well as settler violence against Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank, are official policies meant to force more and more Palestinians out of our country, and to consolidate Israeli control over Greater Jerusalem. It is quite clear that many, if not most, Israelis do not want Palestinians around at all.”
“I personally experienced a harsh, unstable, and terror-filled life in Palestine, like all my people under occupation. I was pushed off my land two separate times.”
My family home was destroyed twice, and my young sister was killed by the trauma of war. I was a political prisoner who was brutally tortured and raped by Israeli soldiers and prison authorities, and was almost killed more than once.”
“I continue to be terrified of the future for myself and my people. I can still almost feel the accelerated pounding of the people’s hearts while they are running to find shelter, the horrific screaming of the children, the moans of the people under the rubble of their homes, and the sounds of them dying from bombs, missiles, and bullets.”
“My people have the right to struggle to rid ourselves of the Israeli occupation of our country. The US government must stop disavowing our rights, and stop working with the Israelis to prosecute activists and organizers here.”
“Most of the people and governments in the rest of the world are with us. Millions of people are supporting the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.”
“Black-Palestinian unity and solidarity is at its absolute height in the US, because both peoples recognize that the racist nature of the US government and the racist nature of Israel are the same.”
“When I saw those white racists marching in Virginia, all I could think of was the white settlers in Israel burning Palestinian children to death or marching to attack my people in Jerusalem.”
“Many of the social justice forces – from the Women’s March, the Movement for Black Lives, and anti-occupation and anti-Zionist American Jews, to immigrant rights, anti-torture, and civil liberties organizations – that supported my defense campaign did it not only because they support me as a survivor of torture and injustice, but also because they support the much more important cause of the liberation of all of Palestine – a democratic, secular Palestine for all.”
A powerful statement by a glorious woman about to be wrongfully deported to an uncertain fate in Jordan – because Israel wants her persecution, pain and suffering continued, no other reason.
VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].
My newest book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”
http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html
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August 24th, 2017 by Edu Montesanti
Guam tem estado no centro do noticiário internacional nos últimos dias, devido ao acirramento das tensões entre Washington y Pyongyang. Em resposta às ameaças dos Estados Unidos, o mandatário da Coreia do Norte, Kim Jong-um, disse que estava examinando cuidadosamente a ilha guamesa, território norte-americano desde o final da Segunda Guerra Mundial. Além disso, Kim afirmou que enviaria um míssil balístico intercontinental a 40 quilômetros de Guam, jamais que atacaria a ilha.
Ao apontar que a ilha vizinha serve como armazenamento de bombas dos Estados Unidos, um porta-voz do Exército norte-coreano afirmou em 9 de agosto à agência de notícias KCNA, controlada pelo regime de Pyongyang: “Esta grave situação exige que o KPA [Forças Armadas] observe de perto Guam, o posto avançado e a cabeça de praia por invadir a Coreia do Norte, e necessariamente tomar ações práticas significativas, para neutralizar isso”.
Desde então, a sempre tendenciosa mídia ocidental, pró-Washington, passou a alardear que Pyongyang estava na iminência de atacar Guam com armas nucleares, fato negado por Kim na semana passada.
“É a presença dos Estados Unidos aqui, que nos torna alvo preferencial da Coreia do Norte no conflito com os norte-americanos”, afirma para esta reportagem a acadêmica e ativista social guamesa, Lisa Natividad, professora adjunta da faculdade de Serviço Social da Universidade de Guam, fundadora e presidenta de Guahan Coalition for Peace and Justice (Coalizão de Guam pela Paz e Justiça), e membro de Guam Decolonization Commission (Comissão pela Descolonização de Guam).
“Guam não se sente segura com a presença do Exército dos Estados Unidos na ilha”, declara Lisa dias após o presidente estadunidense, Donald Trump, ter dito que não havia sido duro o suficiente ao afirmar que responderia com “fogo e fogo” ao regime de Kim Jong-um, por este ter declarado que observava com muita atenção o território vizinho de Guam. “Se ele fizer algo com Guam, acontecerá algo que ninguém jamais viu”, disse Trump em 10 de agosto, sem definir o que significava isso.
No dia 1º, o senador republicano pela Carolina do Sul havia dito em entrevista à CNN que ainda que “haja uma guerra para brecá-los [os norte-coreanos], será por lá mesmo. Se milhares morrerem, será por lá mesmo, não aqui enquanto [Trump] disse na minha cara… Eu estou dizendo que [opção militar] é inevitável, se a Coreia do Norte prosseguir”.
No mesmo dia, porém, o secretário de Estado Rex Tillerson dissera que o regime de Tio Sam não buscava uma troca de regime na Coreia do Norte. “Nem o colapso do regime, nem a rápida reunificação da Península, não buscamos desculpa para uma intervenção militar ao norte do paralelo 38”.
Procurado pela reportagem para comentar os desencontros e a agressividade da administração de Trump, John Kiriakou, ex-agente da CIA eu denunciou o sistema secreto de torturas de Bush e acabou preso por dois anos, não acredito que o treta de sabre do presidente Trump seja uma “política”. Eu acho que é uma ação descoordenada, fora do manguito, que o Trump fez sem consultar nenhum de seus conselheiros, inclusive aqueles nos Departamentos de Estado ou Defesa.
Consultada pela reportagem para analisar do ponto de vista jurídico um suposto ataque dos Estados Unidos contra a Coreia do Norte, a renomada jurista estadunidense Azadeh Shahshahani condena o tom belicista do regime de Trump, afirmando que qualquer ação militar contra os norte-coreanos violaria gravemente o direito internacional.
“O lançamento de um ataque militar contra a Coreia do Norte seria muito problemático. A Carta da ONU apenas permite o uso da força militar pelos Estados para autodefesa, ou quando há uma ação coletiva pelo Conselho de Segurança da ONU. Nenhum desses pré-requisitos é encontrado neste caso”, pondera Azadeh, fundadora e diretora jurídica do Project South, e ex-presidente de National Lawyers Guild.
Contudo, a devastação total sempre foi o limite para o Império mais terrorista da história: foi no exatamente no vizinho guamês que Harry Truman realizou os dois únicos ataques com bombas nucleares da história, sobre Hiroshima e Nagazaki em agosto de 1945.
O Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Boletim dos Cientistas Atômicos) publicou em janeiro deste ano, no anual Doomsday Clock (Cronômetro do Dia do Juízo Final), a iminência de confronto nuclear em “2,5 minutos da meia-noite” [início de uma guerra nuclear], nível mais crítico desde janeiro de 1953, último ano da sangrenta Guerra da Coreia. O principal motivo para o alerta do Bulletin era um só, dentro das tensões crescentes nos últimos anos: chegava à Casa Branca no início do ano o imponderável magnata de ultra-direita, Donald Trump.
“O perigo existe quando um lado leva o outro a blefar”, considera para esta reportagem o especialista nuclear estadunidense Peter Kuznick, quem concorda desde o ano passado que o risco de guerra nuclear é muito alto. E desta vez, a preocupação de Kuznick acompanha à do Bulletin: “Quando há imbecis como Trump e Graham que não parecem valorizar a vida humana, agindo como palhaços machistas, a ameaça de guerra torna-se real”.
Também procurado pela reportagem, o economista canadense Michel Chossudovsky convda a humanidade a pensar, em especial a sociedade norte-americana: “Quem representa ameaça à segurança da humanidade, a Coreia do Norte? Não! Os Estados Unidos, sim”.
O pesquisador canadense relembra que, devido aos bombardeios dos Estados Unidos durante a Guerra da Coreia (1950-53), foi dizimada 30% da população do Sul e 20% do total da sociedade do Norte sendo que este teve, se não bastasse o genocídio, nada menos que 97% de sua paisagem devastada. O especialista nuclear estadunidense aponta no mesmo sentido de Chossudovsky: “Os coreanos não se esqueceram do genocídio dos seus povos, tanto o Norte quanto o Sul durante a Guerra da Coreia”.
Chossudovsky recorda também que os Estados Unidos fizeram da Coreia do Sul sua maior base militar na Ásia, e a cada ano desde o fim da Guerra da Coreia – provocada justamente pelos Estados Unidos -, o regime de Washington realiza exercícios militares em território sul-coreano. Atualmente, há 15 bases norte-americanas na Coreia do Sul.
“Diante disso tudo, os norte-coreanos deram-se o direito de se defender, e será que os cidadãos norte-americanos são capazes de se colocar em algum momento no lugar dos norte-coreanos?”, questiona o renomado economista, diretor do Centre for Research on Globalization, no Canadá. “Os Estados Unidos não são um modelo de sociedade a ninguém no mundo, como vocês têm visto aí mesmo, no Brasil”, completa Chossudovsky.
Existem quase 800 bases militares nos Estados Unidos hoje fora do território norte-americano: “É inaceitável. O exército de uma nação deve ser estabelecido apenas para sua defesa, e usado dentro das fronteiras de um país”, respondeu a estes números, indignada, a presidenta de Guahan Coalition for Peace and Justice.
Na ilha de Guam, em cuja capital Hagåtña habitam cerca de 163 mil pessoas, o principal grupo étnico é o dos indígenas denominados chamorros. A líder social, também uma Chamorro, diz que seu povo conhece o “terrível poder de uma bomba nuclear” ao recordar que a ilha asiática foi invadida durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial pelos japoneses, o que fez do território guamês uma zona guerra ativa de 1941 a 1944. “Conhecemos muito bem as realidades da guerra”.
“Conscientes de um ataque iminente [por parte do Japão], os Estados Unidos retiraram todo seu pessoal militar e seus dependentes, deixando nosso povo indígena chamorro para trás sofrendo em uma guerra – em nome deles”, recorda Lisa. “Durante esse período, nosso povo sofreu grandes atrocidades de guerra que incluem estupros, famílias tendo que morar em barracas, fome e desidratação, e finalmente a morte”.
Lisa se emociona ao dizer que seu povo sofreu grandes atrocidades de guerra então, que segundo ela incluem estupros, famílias tendo que morar em barracas, fome e desidratação, e finalmente a morte. “Nós, chamorros, continuamos sofrendo do trauma histórico desta experiência que afetou o que somos hoje”.
Território dos Estados Unidos desde 1950, Guam abriga três bases militares estadunidenses a fim de ameaçar os rivais do regime de Washington na Ásia, e sofre por causa deste neocolonialismo nos mais diversos aspectos da vida cotidiana.
Em pleno século XXI, Guam continua sendo uma colônia inclusive segundo a lista das Nações Unidas de Territórios Não Autônomos desde o início dessa lista, em 1945, fato lamentado pelo ativista residente do povoado de Inarajan habitado por não mais de 2.200 pessoas. “A colonização norte-americana de Guam criou grandes problemas para nossa ilha, e para o nosso povo”.
Em 1985, a ilha introduziu o Guam Commonwealth Act, projeto de lei enviado aos seus neocolonizadores do Congresso dos Estados Unidos, que continham a fórmula de auto-governo para Guam, alterando o status político da ilha em direção a uma comunidade dos Estados Unidos. Após algumas negociações, o projeto foi finalmente negado em 1997.
“Não foi uma escolha perfeita, mas sem dúvidas era mais vantajosa em comparação a um território não incorporado como somos hoje”. Os guameses não têm direito ao seu próprio Exército, nem de votar para o presidente dos Estados Unidos. Guam recebe um assento para delegado no Congresso no Congresso dos Estados Unidos, no entanto essa pessoa não possui direitos de voto completos. O delegado guamês pode votar no mesmo nível do Congresso, mas apenas se o voto não for um desempate: no caso de a votação promover um desempate, será considerado nulo e sem efeito
“Essa realidade é um grande escárnio contra nossa ilha, e simplesmente cria uma ilusão de inclusão no sistema democrático norte-americano”, denuncia Lisa. “Além disso, nos é oferecido apenas um sétimo do financiamento federal disponível para os Estados”.
Outro fator de descontentamento em diversos segmentos guameses é o Jones Act: estabelece que todos os bens transportados por água entre os portos dos Estados Unidos e Guam sejam transportados em navios com a bandeira dos Estados Unidos, construídos nos Estados Unidos, de propriedade de cidadãos estadunidenses, e os cidadãos e residentes permanentes dos Estados Unidos são os únicos que podem servir em suas respectivas tripulações.
“O Jones Act é altamente prejudicial para a economia de Guahan, pois não permite que as importações de linhas de transporte com base na Ásia sejam enviadas diretamente à ilha. Isso resulta em um custo muito maior de bens”, observa Lisa.
Guahan Coalition for Peace and Justice foi fundada após o anúncio da assinatura de um acordo entre os EUA e o Japão a fim de transferir oito mil marinheiros norte-americanos de Okinawa no Japão e da Coreia do Sul para Guam, em 2006.
Desde o início, a organização de Lisa concentra-se em questões de descolonização política e desmilitarização da ilha através da organização de palestras, fóruns públicos, divulgação nos meios de comunicação e apresentação dos problemas da nação guamesa diante de organizações internacionais como as Nações Unidas.
Lisa diz que enxerga avanços na mentalidade da sociedade guamesa e relação ao domínio estrangeiro. “Algumas pessoas ainda compram a retórica norte-americana de que suas forças armadas estão presentes na ilha, ‘proteja-nos’”, reconhece a ativista e docente. “No entanto, com o crescente estabelecimento do ativismo e do conhecimento comunitário mais profundo das realidades da colonização e da militarização, as pessoas estão começando a questionar exatamente o quanto é segura a presença dos militares dos Estados Unidos em Guam”.
“Pobreza, habitação precária, abuso de substâncias tóxicas, encarceramento, evasão escolar, gravidez na adolescência, suicídio, câncer e problemas de saúde mental: apenas para citar alguns casos” são parte dos problemas que, de acordo com Lisa, atingem mais em cheio os chamorros da ilha asiática.
“A ilha educa a comunidade no processo de descolonização através do trabalho da Guam Commission on Decolonization (Comissão de Guam pela Descolonização), na esperança de ter resolvido o estatuto político nos próximos anos”.
Pois tal ocupação é mais uma descarada justificativa do regime de Washington para espalhar bases militares pelo globo, em nome de seus interesses econômicos e estratégicos, escancarado agora no acirramento das tensões com os norte-coreanos.
Questionado sobre isso, Kuznick concorda e vai além: “Trump também precisa de uma ameaça externa para justificar o aumento maciço do seu regime em gastos militares, além de cortes inconciliáveis em programas domésticos e gastos sociais”.
A cultura local foi um dos primeiros valores atacados pelo imperialismo em Guam, como sempre ocorreu na história em todo o mundo. “Estou fazendo aulas para aprender minha própria língua… Outro subproduto da colonização!”, diz Lisa, observando que poucos na ilha falam a língua nativa, denominada também de chamorro.
Questionada sobre a mídia local, a líder guamesa avalia que os meios locais estão fortemente ligados aos Estados Unidos, “relatando sob a perspectiva de doutrinar as pessoas com o intuito de levá-las a acreditar que os Estados Unidos são a maior potência mundial, e que a ocidentalização e norte-americanização são o caminho do sucesso”.
Para ela, tal postura midiática, quando não confrontada, resulta também em um aumento de patriotismo norte-americano entre seu povo e, portanto, Washington prossegue com caminho livre em direção à colonização de Guam.
“Os meios guameses também são usados para promover a agenda global dos Estados Unidos, contando apenas um lado diante dos acontecimentos geopolíticos e justificando o complexo industrial militar dos Estados Unidos”, reclama Lisa.
“Estamos felizes em atingir a mídia global, disposta a ajudar-nos a espalhar a mensagem de colonização e expansão da militarização dos Estados Unidos, a fim de nos ajudar a promover o diálogo e construir uma solidariedade global em favor de um mundo livre e pacífico “, diz Lisa Natividad ao mesmo tempo que afirma que se os Estados Unidos desejam respeitar a ilha, devem apoiar e participar do seu processo de descolonização.
Para Lisa, a escolha sobre os futuros de Guam deve ser decidida exclusivamente pelo povo guamês, e por ninguém mais. Inclusive, “para decidir o grau de militarismo que queremos estabelecer em nossa ilha”.
A docente lembra que na década passada houve uma avalanche de ativismo da juventude da ilha, “intolerantes diante do nosso status atual, comprometidos em resolver essa questão e exercer seu sagrado direito à autodeterminação”.
Na entrevista para este autor, intitulada A História Não Contada dos Crimes de Guerra dos Estados Unidos, o especialista nuclear já havia ponderado algo da mais alta relevância no que diz respeito ao risco de confronto nuclear: “o que Kennedy e Khrushchev aprenderam com a crise dos mísseis cubanos é que, uma vez que uma crise se desenvolve, ela rapidamente foge do controle. Apesar de ambos terem tentado desesperadamente evitar uma guerra nuclear em 1962, perceberam que perderam o controle”.
Quanto às perspectivas de ataque nuclear neste momento, para Kuznick “o perigo existe quando um lado leva o outro a blefar. Portanto, crise prolongada é o cenário mais provável o que, aliás, também serve a Trump como distração dos escândalos que envolvem sua administração”.
A docente guamesa diz que seu povo é, desgraçadamente, familiar às armas nucleares. “Na Micronésia, conhecemos seu terrível poder”. Mais uma vez recorrendo à história, Lisa ressalta que as vizinhas Ilhas Marshall sofreram detonação de 67 bombas nucleares pelos Estados Unidos durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial. “As pessoas de Marshall foram evacuadas das ilhas residenciais de Bikini, Rongelap e Enewetak, e convidadas para ser assistidas pelo serviço da humanidade para a promoção da paz mundial”, acrescenta a guamesa.
“Hoje, sabemos que as bombas nucleares não promovem a paz mundial”. Sobre o risco de seu território ser alvo deste tipo de armamento, Lisa Natividad mostra-se claramente preocupada: “Enquanto queremos acreditar que os Estados Unidos nos manterão seguros durante esses dias de ameaças nucleares, nossa experiência passada têm apontado exatamente o oposto…”.
Edu Montesanti
August 24th, 2017 by David Bush
Last Tuesday the new British Columbia NDP government announced it was raising the province’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2021. The new government had already announced it would raise the minimum wage by 50 cents on September 15, bringing it to $11.35 an hour. In fact, this 50 cent raise had been planned by the previous Liberal government.
The announcement makes British Columbia the third province to bring in a $15 minimum wage. This is undoubtedly a win for the larger Fight for $15 movement in Canada and the United States.
However, the four-year phase-in to $15 is the longest pathway so far in Canada. The Alberta NDP, the first to bring in a plan for $15, is doing it within 24 months. The Ontario Liberals are aiming to do it in 18 months, with the bulk of the raise coming within six months.
The BC NDP’s extremely slow rollout of the minimum wage increase leaves much to be desired. There has been no outline of scheduled increases to $15, simply an announcement that a “Fair Wages Commission” would consult “stakeholders” about a timeline. They are also planning on keeping the liquor server exemption to the minimum wage. It currently stands at $9.60, but will be raised by 50 cents to $10.10 an hour on September 15, still well below the general minimum wage.
Placating, Emboldening Business
The BC NDP’s announcement also tried to address the fears that a minimum wage increase would hurt businesses. The Minister of Labour, Harry Bains, told the media,
“we’ve listened to business owners, who have told us gradual, predictable increases are the way to go to minimize the impact on their businesses.”
If that argument sounds familiar, it’s because it is the same line used by the Ontario Chamber of Commerce and others in the business lobby to oppose the minimum wage increase in Ontario. Echoing the business lobby’s arguments is unlikely to discourage employers from aggressively attacking a raise to the minimum wage.
In fact, there is already a strong indication that the business community will use the Fair Wages Commission to further delay or even kill the proposed $15 minimum wage. Stephan Truscott, the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses BC spokesperson, has already said the proposed hike by 2021 is too much, too soon. He advocated for a six-year phase-in, or $15 by 2023!
The Fair Wages Commission will certainly give the opponents of the minimum wage hike both space and time to organize against the proposed increase and push for offsets. When asked about policies such as tax breaks or relaxing labour laws to mitigate the cost to business owners, NDP Labour Minister Bains said the government would consider it. But placating the business lobby will not work. The tepid rollout by the BC NDP will simply embolden the forces lining up against the minimum wage hike.
The business lobby can already smell blood. Green Party leader Andrew Weaver helped to quash the NDP following through on their campaign promise of card check union certification. And Weaver is sending mixed signals about the $15 minimum wage, saying that while he welcomes it, he opposes the government’s timetable of 2021 preferring the Fair Wages Commission to be allowed to impartially determine the phase in. Weaver supports consultation with small business and stated,
“minimum wage is just one way we can move toward all British Columbians having a livable income.”
This is not exactly a ringing endorsement of a $15 minimum wage by the Green Party. Given the NDP’s reliance on the Greens to be able to hang on to government this is a wedge that can be exploited to water down the NDP’s most progressive campaign promises. It is also worth remembering the NDP’s minority government status can equally be exploited by labour and the left to wrench out concessions, but this requires a willingness to fight.
What Happened to BC’s Fight for $15?
The BC Federation of Labour has voiced its displeasure with the BC NDP’s timeline saying the province should follow the lead of Alberta and Ontario. The BC Fed launched the Fight for $15 campaign in the province in 2014. The campaign has involved other community allies and has been fairly successful at gathering petition signatures. Unlike the Fight for $15 and Fairness in Ontario, however, it has not been successful at organizing a broad grassroots campaign. The campaign has not built community, campus, or workplace chapters. Nor has it been able to link its demands with workers in struggle, as we saw with the $15 strikes by Mississauga library workers and food service workers at York University and UofT-Scarborough.
The low level of self-activity by workers in the campaign, especially outside Vancouver, has meant much of the early excitement and drive of the campaign has fizzled. Regular campaign events have dried up and the focus has been on lobbying and the election.
Now faced with an NDP minority government committing to implementing $15 at a snail’s pace and a hostile right-wing business lobby, the Fight for $15 and the BC Fed will face a serious challenge. The low-level of activity in the campaign over the last nine months means it has less capacity to pressure the government.
Rebuilding a Struggle for $15
The Fight for $15 and the BC Fed should aim to roll out an aggressive campaign that pushes for faster timelines, getting rid of minimum wage exemptions, and advancing demands in other areas like fair scheduling and sick days. This will require more resources and a focus on building the capacity of workers across the province to engage in the struggle. If there is political will inside the labour movement and amongst community allies this can be done.
Considering the BC Liberals kept the minimum wage frozen from 2002 to 2010, and housing costs are spiralling out of control in Vancouver and other parts of the province, there is no good reason for the BC NDP’s slow timeline to $15.
Leaving the liquor server exemption to the minimum wage in place, having no firm timetable for increases, giving the business community a platform to resist the increases via the Fair Wages Commission, and signalling an openness to implementing business-friendly policy offsets reveals a lot. Instead of raising the bar to address poverty wages for workers as many dippers would expect, the BC NDP is lowering the sights of the movement across the country.
The BC NDP’s announcement is a victory for the Fight for $15 movement. But the delayed rollout shows that a grassroots movement aimed at organizing and mobilizing workers across the province is needed to stand-up to the business lobby and force governments, even one’s led by the NDP, to pass much needed reforms for workers in the here and now.
David Bush is a Ph.D. student at York University. He is active with the Fight for $15 and Fairness club at York University. This article first published on the RankandFile.ca website.
Featured image is from the author.
August 24th, 2017 by Ezili Dantò
Featured image: Jean Jacques Dessalines, president and then emperor of Haiti (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
So, sorting fiction from reality, which one is the “land of the free and the brave, the pioneers of human rights, freedom and liberty in the Western Hemisphere? Which nation didn’t make white folks 3/5ths human even after 300-years of brutal, rape and enslavement? But gave the few whites who fought alongside the African warriors, Haitian citizenship, full and equal rights?” Haiti, of course.
The triumphant Haiti revolution triggered the selling to Thomas Jefferson of the Louisiana Purchase which doubled the size of the United States. Also, the second contingent of 20,000 soldiers sent by Napoleon to the Louisiana Territory for French control of all in the U.S. had to be redirected to go fight in Haiti after the Afrikan warriors, led by Desalin and the indigenous Haiti army, which Desalin called the “armies of the Incas,” decimated the first 50,000 French soldiers sent in 1802 and led by Bonaparte’s brother in law, General Lerclerc. Later, Desalin, Haiti’s founding father, declared, in the name of the slaughtered since 1492, “I have avenged America!”
This historical triumph of the enslaved Afrikans in Haiti – Black men, women and children – against the greatest and most well-armed European armies of the era – first the French, then Spanish, then English armies – a U.S. embargo and then Napoleon’s French armada, is what stopped the U.S. from possibly being conquered by the French, whose 20,000 troops were, at that point in U.S. history, larger and much more battle-experienced than the U.S. armed forces. Haiti’s win, helped make the U.S. the superpower that it is but it has been terrorized by the white tribes since its independence. President Thomas Jefferson conspired with General Napoleon Bonaparte and the rest of the slavers and rapists nations to force besieged and embattled Haiti to pay an Independence Debt that was 10 times more than what Jefferson paid for the Louisiana purchase. Yet, Haiti’s land mass is as small as Rhode Island. Jefferson paid Napoleon $15million francs for the Louisiana Purchase which ended up creating, in part and whole, 15 new American states.
Haiti, a country smaller than Rhode Island was forced, at the point of 300 gunboat cannons, to pay ten times that amount – $150million to France as reparations for France losing Haitians as their slaves. (After this debt help cost Haiti to lose the Eastern side of the Island now called Dominican Republic, the amount was reduced to $90million Francs)
It took Haiti 122 years to finish paying this 1825 slave-trade debt. This moral perfidy, after the Afrikans gave 300 years of FREE labor (1503-1804) to the European terrorists, slavers, rapists, plunderers and colonists. Haiti is not the poorest country because it still has vast riches, protected by the Afrikans, for over 200 years from the grasp of the hoarders. But, it is the most exploited nation. Its resistance continues to this day….as under Barrack Hoe-bama, his U.S. colonial “exceptionalism,” its pretensions and the disaster capitalism of the devastating 2010 earthquake, Haiti has presumably lost, without world scrutiny, nearly 30% of its landmass. This, through Bill Clinton’s HRC – U.S. sanction of puppet president Martelly decrees that gerrymander and gives away, to the corporatocracy, Haiti offshore islands and prime lands. Through the Clintons’ World Bank amendment to Haiti constitution, if not stopped, Haiti will loses control of its gold belt, shorelines, iridium, oil and gas reserves, all the Caracol zone and Haiti’s Northern and Southern deep water ports.
It simply cannot be over-emphasized, how there’s no one in power to protect the bullied, disenfranchised and brutally suppressed Haiti masses from the international crime syndicate, now in Haiti behind a humanitarian front, which is steadily extracting rare earth metal resources and mining gold on another earthquake fault line in Haiti – the Septentrional fault line in the North. (See also, The dangers of building garment factories next to one of Haiti’s most important marine national parks/a US $3.2 trillion mangrove and coral reef ecosystem and Tourism is not development)
The Independence Debt that Haiti was forced to pay France for losing the grangrans as property, caused such internal dissatisfaction and protest within Haiti, that the destabilization (along with a devastating 1843 earthquake in Northern Haiti) allowed space for the Eastern side of Haiti to separate into what is today known as the Dominican Republic. The Spanish immediately pounced to retake this landmass. On its part, the French terrorists returned to Haiti with the Independence Debt, which meant controlling Haiti economically and then ecclesiastical colonialism, which meant controlling Haiti education…. Haiti has yet to recover. And then they all returned, a world war to stop the Black masses’ celebration of the Haiti bicentennial, in 2004, with a popularly elected Haiti president.
President Aristide was and is the first and only Haitian president to ask France to return the Independence Debt.
For that temerity, Bush the lesser, unleashed his shock and awe military on an island nation with no military, that was no threat but merely wished peaceful co-existence. To live free and sovereign on lands paid for in 300 years of free labor, over 214 years in containment in poverty; a 60-year U.S. embargo; a 19-year U.S. occupation where the Marines carted out Haiti gold reserves in 1914 never to be returned; and 122-years of paying off an Independent Debt to France to be recognized as a free nation after slavery and winning our Independence in combat and losing half the Black population (250,000) in that revolutionary war. (See, Haiti: Until She Spoke and, Three Simple Èzili principles for a Just New World)
August 24th, 2017 by Edu Montesanti
Uma das manifestações mais vivas da realidade cultural de uma nação e da identidade do indivíduo, a língua está sempre em transformação de acordo exatamente com as relações sociais, e não com as vontades dos gramaticoides de plantão, geralmente instrumentos de opressão linguística que não consideram em seus estudos, excessivamente teóricos, as implicações sociais envolvendo o idioma em questão.
Tal mutação também deu origem a novas línguas ao longo da história. Assim, vi em sueco, em norueguês e em dinamarquês (nós, em português) deságua em wir em alemão, wij em holandês e we em inglês. Vogn em norueguês e em dinamarquês transformou-se em vagn em sueco, que equivale a Wagen em alemão, wagon em inglês, em holandês e em francês (com pronúncias diversas), vagone em italiano, vagonem romeno, vagón em espanhol e em galego, vagó em catalão, bagoi em basco, vagão em português.
Já a modalidade esportiva que hoje é a mais popular do planeta, de fotball na Noruega acabou fotboll na vizinha Suécia, vindo a ser voetbal na Holanda, fodbold na vizinha Dinamarca, desceu um pouco mais o mapa do norte europeu para se transformar em Fußball na Alemanha, football em francês e em inglês que se hispanizou fútbol e se aportuguesou sendo simplesmente futebol, certamente, no início, gerando inconformismo nos setores mais conservadores das sociedades falantes de língua espanhola e portuguesa por não ser pronunciado como em inglés (algo semelhante a fuut-ból), da mesma maneira que lead em inglês, referindo-se ao primeiro paragrafo das notícias, virou lide em português.
Por sua vez, o idioma chamorro da ilha asiática de Guam, a oeste do Oceano Pacífico, que sofreu colonização espanhola de 1668 até 1898, possui exemplos desse processo linguístico: Bem vindo = Bien binidu (em espanhol, Bienvenido); Boa tarde = Buenas tåtdes (esp., Buenas tardes); Tchau = Ådios esta (esp. Adiós); Boa sorte = Buena suette (esp., Buena suerte); Boa viagem = Buen biåhe (esp., Buen viaje).
Retrocesso e Discriminação
Opondo-se a esta natural transformação até que se torna impossível resistir por muito tempo, os gramaticoides estudam a língua de maneira estática, a gramática pela gramática que se encerra na própria gramática, não tendo a sociedade como referência, autêntico sujeito da história: para eles, a sociedade e a própria história são objeto da gramática. Desta maneira, apregoam, deve-se adequar sua realidade, sua história, seus sentimentos, sua personalidade a ela. Em outras palavras: deve-se se submeter ao que lhe é ditado por seres completamente afastados de sua realidade cultural. No caso do Brasil, escravizado em pleno século XXI pelas regras e pela cultura lusitana que não é a sua, trancafiado neuroticamente em uma, na prática, inexistente comunidade lusófona internacional.
Como a sociedade brasileira é altamente polarizada e discriminadora, em todos os aspectos (regional, étnico, sexista, de gênero, de classe), tal caráter acaba se refletindo, invariavelmente, em um tipo de fragmentação e de preconceito que permeiam a sociedade ao mesmo tempo que acabam passando desapercebidos diante do forte apelo moralista e da reivindicação intelectual que os discriminadores trazem em seu bojo: a discriminação linguística, fortemente opressora.
A polarização, que se evidencia de maneira inconteste nestes efervescentes dias no Brasil, tem atingido inclusive linguistas das mais diversas vertentes, radicalizando cada vez mais ambos os lados. Se por um lado é inegável que a língua bem falada não pode ter como parâmetro a literatura portuguesa do século XIX, que possui peculiaridades regionais (regionalismos) absolutamente necessárias que devem ser preservadas e que, conforme já observado, ela se transforma (evolutivamente, espera-se) como reflexo das mais diversas experiências passadas de geração a geração (este é o conceito de cultura), por outro é inaceitável se justificar a língua mal falada neste quesito.
E exatamente isso tem ocorrido no Brasil: acentuada polarização entre gramaticoides – indivíduos de mentalidade elitista, a qual se transfere para a esquizofrenia linguística – e, digamos assim, os populistas que, no afã de ganhar adeptos na raivosa briga que atinge a classe dos linguistas, apela inclusive para, “quem está defendendo tal ideia linguística são os mesmos golpistas conservadores que saem às ruas hoje contra o povo”, a fim de estigmatizar toda e qualquer divergência (embora exista um grande fundo de verdade nisso, o que será abordado a seguir).
Evidentemente, existe um limite entre regionalismo, entre a realidade cultural de uma comunidade/nação, isto é, aquilo que se configura como perfeitamente aceitável dada a realidade inclusive daquela elite intelectual específica (segurem na cadeira, o “noi fumo” do campo paulista herdado do italiano noi = nós, por exemplo, tendo como célebre representante Adoniran Barbosa), e determinados atentados que não podem ser tolerados (o secular “tu qués” do estado brasileiro de Santa catarina, mesmo entre a elite econômica local, por exemplo, ou o “dar ele para eu“). Este é o motivo de choque entre as vaidades dos linguistas hoje.
‘Presidenta’ ou ‘Presidente’?
As classes média e alta têm causado grande polêmica sobre isso, que toma conta das faculdades de Letras e de Comunicação Social de péssimo gosto no Brasil – em sua maioria contrários, indignados diante do uso de ‘presidenta’. Trata-se de mais um tema em que simplesmente não há diálogo, mesmo entre estudantes e profissionais da área das letras e da comunicação.Pois trata-se também de mais um preconceito que, contra a “presidenta” Dilma, manifesta-se desde que assumiu o Palácio do Planalto das mais diversas maneiras; na verdade, todas as mulheres em um país, conforme apontado, altamente machista que permeia todos os segmentos da sociedade, da classe D à A.
O que a nata intelectual tupiniquim ignora (também) sobre o uso de “presidenta”, é que esta forma feminina foi aprovada por lei federal número 2749, no ano de 1956. Embora não haja consenso entre linguistas sob alegação de determinados setores de que “presidenta” pertence à classe das palavras comuns de dois gêneros, ambas as formas acabam sendo aceitas, tanto a feminina quanto a masculina. Contudo, no sentido estritamente gramatical, a regra manda aplicar a forma feminina. No idioma espanhol, por exemplo, apenas “presidenta” é admitido para mulheres.
A divergência entre linguistas se dá pela ampla consideração entre eles de que, segundo comunicado através do dicionário Lexikon, “substantivos e adjetivos de dois gêneros terminados em -ente não apresentam flexão de gênero terminado em -a”. Por isso, segue o informe, não se utiliza as formas “‘gerenta”, ‘pacienta’, ‘clienta’ etc. Caso fosse ‘presidenta’, por coerência, diríamos ‘a presidenta está contenta’ e ‘o presidente está contento'”.
Ao longo da história, algumas formas masculinas têm encontrado resistência em serem usadas oficialmente no feminino justamente pelo caráter sexista das sociedades globais. Entre a sociedade brasileira, especialmente entre linguistas o termo “engenheira”, utilizado pela primeira vez e aprovado nos idos do século XIX, gerou indignação inicial. Hoje, apenas a forma feminina é aplicada às profissionais da área do sexo feminino.
Se entre linguistas brasileiros o que aparentemente está em discussão são questões técnicas para a flexão do termo, a sociedade não tem pautado a histeria com base na consciência gramatical, longe disso: completamente afastada dela, permite que o que é regra, apesar da controvérsia de certos linguistas, seja motivo para polarização recheada do velho ódio discriminatório.
Como nos mais diversos casos atualmente no Brasil, que caminha de mal a pior, nossa elite do bem-dizer e do alto-saber, nesta questão do uso de “presidenta” ou “presidente”, para não perder o costume tem se fundamentado em letra morta – mas aqui, o que tampouco é exceção, com um q de ironia que marca de maneira bastante peculiar tais caçadores de bruxas: a mesma gramática à qual agressivamente se apegam (apenas de maneira teórica) para atacar e discriminar, a contradiz.
Também para o bom uso da nossa língua, o brasileiro anda precisando de livros, sim (e urgentemente), mas muito mais que isso: carece do exercício da cidadania que requer sentir o cheiro do povo. Isso tudo faz lembrar a ideia de Jesus aos fariseus de sua época, a cúpula religiosa conservadora, parasitária e corrupta: Quanto mais estudam menos sabem, e mais se distanciam de suas causas. Foram os próprios religiosos, mais estudiosos que esperavam pelo Messias, os que mataram Jesus fechados em suas letras mortas, tornados míopes por suas ideias pré-concebidas que produziam intolerância. Tropeçaram fatalmente naquilo que tanto usavam para atacar ao próximo.
Contextualizando tal realidade à brasileira dos tempos atuais, é exatamente nossa elite econômica e bem educada nas faculdades, que comercializam diplomas e formam grandes imbecis à sociedade, que estão matando nossa democracia acarretando, no futuro próximo, mais retrocesso cultural. De novo…
Edu Montesanti
Fonte da imagem : http://conpoema.org/?p=2253
August 24th, 2017 by South Front
The Syrian-Iranian-Russian alliance has achieved a large progress in its operations against ISIS in the province of Homs.
On August 20, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) liberated the key held village of Humaymah, which had been controlled by ISIS near the Iraqi border. The SAA allegedly lost a bulldozer and an unknown number of fighters during the clashes for the area. On August 21, government troops continued operations in order to seize the T2 pumping station that remained that last valuable ISIS strong point in this part of the administrative border between the provinces of Homs and Deir Ezzor.
On August 20, the SAA Tiger Forces, backed up by Russian attack helicopters, liberated from ISIS the village of Taybah and the Maqbarah Mountain located at the Resafa-Sukhna road posing a real threat of creating the second ISIS pocket in the province.
On August 19, pro-government sources reported that warplanes of the US-led coalition bombed the Tiger Forces in Kadir north of Taybah. No videos or photos from the area appeared. However, even the airstrikes took place they didn’t prevent government forces from further advances against ISIS.
Pro-government experts believe that the SAA and its allies will be able to clear the entire area north of the Homs-Palmyra highway from ISIS within a month.
The Russian Aerospace Forces have destroyed a large ISIS military column heading to the area of the city of Deir Ezzor “to regroup and equip their last base in Syria”, the Russian Defense Ministry said. Over 200 ISIS members were reportedly killed and about 20 vehicles equipped with large-caliber weapons were destroyed.
On August 20, the Iraqi Army, Federal Police, SWAT forces and the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) launched a large-scale operation to liberate the ISIS-held Tal Afar area in northern Iraq. The Iraqi military had deployed 40,000 fighters for the operation. According to the Pentagon, ISIS has about 2,500 members in and around Tal Afar. By August 21, Iraqi forces have achieved notable progress in the town’s countryside liberating over 12 villages and facing little ISIS resistance. The main fighting will likely take place inside Tal Afar itself.
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August 24th, 2017 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark
Statues of historical weight tend to represent heroism – of sorts. It might be of the doomed variety, and often is. Rebellious causes assume the visage of a stony form, to gaze soullessly across promenades or parks, often ignored by many who have long lost a sense of their meaning.
In history, their removal is an act that flies directly into the wrinkled face of memory. Sometimes, as happened in the case of the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn commemorating the Soviet “liberation” of Estonia in 2007, the figure is relocated. The statue must change with the times.
Others, such as the defiant figure of the Hapsburg Croatian official, Ban Josip Jelačić, return to their place of erection, in his case, to a post-civil war Zagreb. (He had been, in 1947, placed in a socialist deep freeze, an uncomfortable reminder of Croatian nationalism in Titoist Yugoslavia.)
The whole nasty business in Charlottesville, Virginia that unfolded on August 12 started with a gathering of neo-Nazis and white supremacists over a statue of the Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
The figure of the distinguished general was set for removal by agreement of the municipality, a point the protesters disagreed with. Counter-protestors demurred. It turned bloody, with the death of Heather Heyer, and two Virginia State Police officers, Trooper-Pilot Berke M. M. Bates and Pilot Lt. H. Jay Cullen, who perished in their helicopter after monitoring the protests.
The subsequent and desperate effort to identify some ground of equivalence between protestors (Nazis or anti-Nazis) and the premise of protest (White Supremacists or pro-Unionists), is only understandable in the context of civil war, one which forever reminds the states of the Confederacy of defeat.
That failure entails a vigorous jostle over the still smoking remains of an era where the defeated cry for some recognition, be it in their military achievements against the industrial might of the north, or the various war time heroes who did much with little. The other, more venal element, is that of slavery, codified and structured, a so-called peculiar institution that also went with the Confederacy’s effort to secede.
The effort to mark that period with a coating of equivalence resounded with US President Donald Trump, never a history boffin, and more of its mugger. If you were to remove General Lee from his podium, “are we going to take down statues to George Washington?” Trump’s personal lawyer also got busy in the equivalence business:
“You cannot be against General Lee and be for General Washington (because) there literally is no difference between the two men.”[1]
Hardly very sharp observations. For one, Washington was Lee’s shadow in terms of military prowess, and fortunate to be facing forces more incompetent than his own. (To measure achievement against an adversary such as Lord Cornwallis is setting the bar low.) But he was saved by one point: founding father patriotism.
Some of the Confederate figures, it is true, dazzle in their competence. To Lee’s own exploits could be added the able Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. But both men were marked by a common cause of perfidy, that bit of treason against the Union that would have seen slavery, not merely retained, but expanded. Brilliant they have been, but they fought for that institution, a world of plantations, cotton and pre-industrial tradition.
The modern pro-Confederate protestor finds succour in these seemingly fallen figures, suffering a perverse variant of what W.E.B. Du Bois discerned as a “double consciousness”.[2] But this is not the consciousness of the “black soul” of Du Bois’ analysis, one where white eyes mediate a black identity. This is, rather, the plantation identity, an anachronistic, ostracised, alienated awareness that was firstly defeated in 1865, subjected to the trauma of slave emancipation and Reconstruction, then given over to the efforts of desegregation and the civil rights movement. Theirs is a consciousness of contrived victimhood, a grand failure.
For such figures, these white folk of torment, the punishment merely continued, and they, being part of the union, endured a punishment by being forced into accommodation, accord and settlement. With Trump’s victory in November last year, the waters stirred. That forced, imposed consensus of what might be deemed wrong, inappropriate and outrageous, the views of the defeated from the Civil War, could now gradually bubble to the surface, to again be reclaimed in a public fashion.
Such reclamation has been boisterous, noisy, and ugly. It has taken the form, not of genteel Southern manners and tableside grace, but the virulence of KKK protest and neo-Nazi enthusiasts. It manifested in the form of a neo-Nazi who decided to drive into a group of countering protestors in Charlottesville on August 12, resulting in Heyer’s death and injuries to 19 others.
History is often a messy ordeal. Reconstruction was the belt taken to the back of the southern states, and the response was one of memorial retribution. We might have lost those pre-war institutions, went this sentiment, but we shall damn well make every effort to frustrate change. You took away our slaves, but you won’t take away our monuments. Jim Crow laws transmogrified into stone and reminders of heroic exploits, what might have been if only the Confederacy could have held out.
The Charlottesville echo is reverberating in other states concerned that the Confederacy matter may become a contagion. University of Texas President Gregory L. Fenves announced late Sunday night that he would remove four Confederate statues from the Austin campus. The statues, in light of the violence in Virginia, had become “symbols of modern white supremacy and neo-Nazism.”
For Fenves, the statues depicting General Robert E. Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston, John Reagan and former Texas governor James Stephen Hogg, were reminders that had to be done away with.
“Erected during the period of Jim Crow laws and segregation, the statues represent the subjugation of African Americans. That remains true for today for white supremacists who use them to symbolize hatred and bigotry.”[3]
University of Houston student Mark Petersen, saw it differently. This was an erasure, one of history one directed at his people, those “of European descent who built this country.”[4] A history of gore, but also a history of treason.
The removal of such monuments, accompanied by such statements as those of Fenves, is the sound of the victor’s narrative favouring that side of memory. It is the victory of the Union, with its all binding mysticism, reaffirmed, and the memory of the Confederacy revived to only remind all of what went wrong.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: [email protected]
Notes
Featured image is from WLWT.
August 24th, 2017 by Goran Lompar
Ukraine turned into the proving ground for the new generation of US biological weapons, European mass media report.
In 2015, American alternative media outlet InfoWars accused the Pentagon of developing new types of biological weapons in secret military laboratories in Ukraine. The facilities were constructed under the terms of the bilateral agreement signed between the Ministry of Health of Ukraine and the Department of Defense in 2012.
Today thirteen American military bio-labs operate in Ukraine, The International Mass Media Agency reports. They employ only American specialists being entirely funded from the budget of the Department of Defense. Local authorities have pledged not to interfere in their work. These military labs are reported to be mainly involved in the study and production of disease-causing agents of smallpox, anthrax and botulism. The facilities are located in the following Ukrainian cities: Odessa, Vinnytsia, Uzhgorod, Lviv (three), Kharkiv, Kyiv (four), Kherson, Ternopil.
The network of military bio-labs in Eastern Europe gives the hawks the opportunity to avoid the Geneva Convention of 1972 on the prohibition of development, production and stockpiling of biological and chemical weapons the US Senate ratified in 1973. So we witness the blatant violation of international laws.
Local media in Ukraine have frequently reported about splashes of contaminant diseases in that country since the beginning of the 2010s, the time American military facilities were opened. Western European media also express concern over splashes of contaminant diseases in that country this summer and point at American bio-labs as pockets of infection.
https://blogs.mediapart.fr/ivendurepos/blog/200817/la-menace-biologique-creee-par-washington
Experts warn this kind of weapon may be captured by terrorists due to the lack of security measures in Ukraine, the country being suffered from frozen conflict with pro-Russian rebels in its Eastern part and ongoing political turmoil after the flee of the Kremlin-backed leader Viktor Yanukovych in February, 2014. Latest terrorist acts in Europe show the jihadists are looking for new methods of attacks. Use of bio-weapons in densely populated regions will bring catastrophic consequences.
Chemical and biological weapons may be dangerous for the whole world because of their infectious effect. Modern diseases can travel through countries and reach any continent with just one plane passenger. And that is the big problem. Despite the remoteness of potential objects of infection from the territory of the United States, viruses still can reach the North American continent.
Goran Lompar is a free journalist and postgraduate at University of Donja Gorica, Montenegro.
All images in this article are from the author.
August 24th, 2017 by Adam Johnson
As President Donald Trump tries to make the case for staying indefinitely in Afghanistan, the stakes for those actually living there are rarely broached by US corporate media.
In dozens of write-ups, recaps and reports on Trump’s “major” Afghan War speech, almost no outlets took time out to note the plight or condition of the people the US is nominally there to save. The New York Times (8/21/17, 8/22/17), Washington Post (8/21/17), Chicago Tribune (8/22/17), CNN (8/21/17, 8/21/17), NBC News (8/21/17), ABC News (8/21/17) and CBS News (8/21/17), among others, didn’t mention the Afghan death toll at all in their summary of events in the region.
Almost all, however, reserved airtime and column inches to mention the number of US soldiers and cost to the US treasury—presumably the only moral metric that matters. One notable exception was Ali Velshi at MSNBC (8/21/17), who did mention live on air how many Afghans were killed in the first half of 2017—a scope curiously limited to the term of the current Republican president, but an improvement on silence nonetheless.
US media also continued their rich tradition of not blaming the US or Trump for the war—instead laying responsibility at the feet of some unknown geopolitical dark matter that has forced the US to occupy Afghanistan permanently. The US isn’t waging ongoing war in the Central Asian country; it is simply “stuck,” according to the AP (8/21/17) and the Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty. Trump isn’t continuing the occupation; according to the Sacramento Bee (8/21/17); he “Keeps US Stuck in Afghanistan Quagmire.” The US doesn’t seek further war and occupation, but to “break free from the quagmire,” the Chicago Tribune(8/22/17) spells out.* Bush, Obama and Trump didn’t make a deliberate choice to bomb Afghanistan, according to PBS’s Judy Woodruff (8/21/17); attacking the country just became “the burden of three presidents.” War was consistently depicted as being thrust upon the US government by forces outside of its control.
The number of Afghan civilians killed during the 16-year US military occupation is well over 31,000, according to researchers at Brown University. The average American couldn’t possibly know this fact, since it’s almost never mentioned when weighing the cost/benefit ratio of further military occupation and bombing.
Just as the thousands killed in Yemen by US-backed Saudi bombing don’t inform coverage of the famine there, the causal effect of US military action on poor, faceless brown people is never clearly laid out. The US bombs and, on a totally separate note, people are dying. That the United States may be causing the suffering, and could choose to stop doing so, is never really considered, much less argued in any meaningful way.
*The Chicago Tribune editorial does mention civilian deaths, referring to a 2016 UN report, but the paper attributes them solely to “ambushes and suicide bomb attacks” by insurgent forces, whereas the UN holds the US and the US-backed government responsible for nearly a quarter of the carnage there. The Tribunealso misstates the UN civilian death toll more than threefold, confusing deaths with casualties (which include injuries).
Adam Johnson is a contributing analyst for FAIR.org.
Featured image is from the author.
August 24th, 2017 by Mouin Rabbani
Featured image: Logo of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)
It is tempting, and not entirely inaccurate, to dismiss the escalating crisis between Qatar and a number of its neighbors as a petulant princely playground spat. Extending this tempting logic, one could conclude that decisive victory by each of the protagonists would be the optimal outcome. Yet the dispute also reflects deeper dynamics in Arab and regional politics that are shaping the increasingly turbulent and violent realities of the Middle East.
Saudi Arabia’s Gulf Cooperation Council
The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which is the locus of the present crisis, was established in 1981 by Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Its formation consummated the expiration of the concept of collective Arab action that the League of Arab States aspired to but was designed never to achieve, and presaged the pre-occupation of the region’s regimes with confronting Iran rather than Israel. Although formally established to promote greater economic, political, and security coordination among its member states, the impetus for the GCC’s formation was the collective threat presented to its members by both the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran on the eastern littoral of the Persian Gulf and the Iran-Iraq War, launched the following year by Saddam Hussein, whose efforts the Gulf Arab states supported and bankrolled in intimate coordination with the United States.
In the early 1980s, the only GCC member of consequence was Saudi Arabia–whose size, population, resources, and wealth dwarfed that of the others combined–and, to a much lesser extent, Kuwait. Although Oman, unlike its peers, had not severed relations with Egypt after the latter signed a separate peace with Israel in 1979, the prospect that GCC members would even contemplate pursuing a regional or foreign policy independent of Saudi Arabia in those days would have been considered beyond the realm of fantasy. It is for example inconceivable, after blowback struck and Iraq occupied Kuwait in 1990, that Qatar or Bahrain would have opted for a negotiated settlement of the crisis rejected by Riyadh (and its patron in Washington). Nor could they have permitted the United States to deploy troops and establish military bases on their territory had the Saudis not led by example and consented to such moves.
During the 1990s, this equation began to gradually change. The Iran-Iraq, Kuwait, and Cold Wars were over, the price of oil slumped, and the United States maintained a growing and seemingly permanent military or naval presence within every GCC state. Riyadh, in addition to its relatively diminished strategic importance and ailing, sclerotic leadership, was also dealing with the substantial debts it had incurred–again in intimate coordination with the United States–to assemble and fund the coalition of states that evicted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. By contrast, Dubai, with its diversified economy fueled in part by extensive sanctions-busting trade with Iran, and never lacking for gaudy ambition, was well on its way to becoming a global city and replacing Kuwait as regional trendsetter. In 1995, Qatar, which even many Arabs would in those days have struggled to find on a map, made the news when its amir was overthrown by his son, Shaykh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, in a bloodless palace coup while yet again vacationing in Switzerland.
A Coup in Doha
Much like Oman after Sultan Qabus seized the throne from his primeval father in 1970, Hamad embarked on a program to transform his country into a late twentieth-century state. Unlike Oman in the 1970s, Qatar was neither in the throes of a decade of armed insurrection (Dhofar) nor shared a border with a communist neighbor (the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen), and could therefore proceed at a measured, deliberate pace. The new ruler of Doha was additionally able to finance his efforts with the proceeds of the as yet undeveloped North Dome/South Pars natural gas field, the world’s largest by several orders of magnitude that it shares with Iran. Production began in 1997, and within a decade Qatar became the world’s leading exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG), accounting for almost a third of global supply.
In a different contrast with Qabus, Hamad’s seizure of power was not sponsored by the United Kingdom or other foreign power, thus giving regional discontents–first and foremost Saudi Arabia–the opportunity to reverse this affront to seniority and established conventions of succession. A foiled attempt to restore the ousted amir in 1996 and an additional bid to depose Hamad in 2005 further demonstrated that the construction of modernized states in the GCC region was an infrastructural and administrative rather than political project. Several thousand members of the Bani Murra, whose territory straddles the Saudi-Qatari border (where clashes over unresolved border issues had erupted as recently as 1992), had their citizenship revoked after several of their number were implicated in the attempted counter-coups.
Shaykh Hamad quickly set to work to reduce his vulnerability. Approximately one billion US dollars was invested in the expansion of Al Udeid Air Base so it could accommodate every aircraft in the US fleet. When the US military’s Central Command (CENTCOM), whose area of responsibility covers more than four million square miles on three continents, vacated Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia to reduce the political exposure of the House of Saud after 11 September 2001, it was invited to establish its forward operating headquarters in Al Udeid. The US military presence, with some ten thousand personnel today its largest in the Middle East, provided protection from both Iran and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. More importantly, it also served to deter Saudi designs on its tiny neighbor, which, measuring some 4,500 square miles, is smaller than Yorkshire or Connecticut.
An aerial overhead view of”Ops Town”at at Al Udeid Air Base (AB), Al Rayyan Province, Qatar (QAT), taken from a US Air Force (USAF) KC-135 Stratotanker during Operation IRAQI FREEDOM. (Source: Department of Defense / Wikimedia Commons)
Domestically, Hamad initiated a massive development of Qatar’s physical and financial infrastructure, and of its public services. According to most indices the country today has, at USD 130,000, the highest GDP per capita in the world. Its approximately 300,000 citizens enjoy cradle-to-grave welfare and benefits, while in excess of 1.5 million migrant workers keep its institutions, services, and rapidly expanding construction sector operating at maximum capacity. The Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), the sovereign wealth fund established during the previous decade, is among the world’s best run and resourced. It has purchased iconic locations and prime real estate around the globe, as well as shares in leading corporations such as the London Stock Exchange and Volkswagen. The natural gas that is Qatar’s main export is, in contrast to oil, less prone to sudden price fluctuations, tends to be sold on the basis of long-term contracts that can run decades, and is under significantly less pressure from efforts to deal with global warming and climate change.
Qatar Leaves Home
It was within the region that Qatar made its biggest mark. In the mid-1990s, a joint Arabic-language satellite broadcasting venture between Saudi Arabia and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) came to a premature end after its news station aired reports that violated Riyadh’s strict taboo against critical scrutiny of its policies. Qatar snapped up the suddenly available and professionally trained staff, and less than USD 150 million later it launched the Al Jazeera Satellite Channel on 1 November 1996. Breaking the mold of vacuous reporting by terrestrial channels that specialized in the limitless glorification of mediocre rulers, Al Jazeera was by 1999 providing round-the-clock, free-to-air, high quality satellite news and reporting across the region, and to Arabic-speaking diasporas worldwide. Qatar, its leadership, and foreign policy objectives almost never rated a mention in these broadcasts unless legitimately newsworthy, and doing otherwise would have been superfluous. When some years ago rumors spread that Al Jazeera would be defunded or even shuttered, Shaykh Hamad was reported to have dismissed them with the observation that the broadcaster was of greater value to Qatar than its entire diplomatic corps.
Indeed, Al Jazeera not only offered substantive news coverage but also prioritized issues that spoke to the concerns and aspirations of Arabs from Marrakesh to Muscat, and it was common knowledge that this had been made possible by Qatar’s rulers. It also pioneered deeply unpopular practices, such as interviews with Israeli government officials responsible for perpetuating the occupation of Arab territory. On the whole Al Jazeera offered a refreshingly broad range of perspectives, as a result of which eight Arab states and Ethiopia at one time or another recalled their ambassadors from Doha. Yet those promoting or sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist currents seemed to be consistently over-represented in its broadcasts. One such figure was Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, the influential exiled Egyptian cleric who has resided in Qatar since the 1960s and serves as Chairman of the International Union of Muslim Scholars. Widely viewed as the Brotherhood’s pre-eminent theologian, he for many years had a one-hour program on Al Jazeera every Sunday evening. Entitled Shari’a and Life, it habitually strayed beyond matters of faith to offer Al-Qaradawi’s views and prescriptions on current events.
Many Muslim Brotherhood leaders and rank-and-file members had found a home away from home in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, where political parties are strictly prohibited, after Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and other republican, nationalist regimes expunged them from their body politic beginning in the 1950s–in some cases defining mere membership as a capital offense. Although the Brotherhood as an organization does not share the Salafist orientation of its new hosts, it was a valuable ally to the conservative monarchies and their Western sponsors during the Arab cold war that was raging across the region. Its members were also an important source of skilled labor in the teaching profession and other sectors requiring linguistic or religious proficiency, at a time when the local labor force was still unable to meet such needs. In the 1980s, as Islamist activism took an increasingly militant turn, the Muslim Brotherhood played an important role in funneling fighters away from their home countries to the anti-Soviet Jihad in Afghanistan that Riyadh and Washington alike came to view as their finest hour.
The relationship began to sour during the 1980s, with the emergence of the Sahwa movement in Saudi Arabia. Combining Salafist thought with Muslim Brotherhood politics, it was a persistent thorn in the authorities’ side. These tensions culminated during the early 1990s, with the Brotherhood’s failure to embrace Riyadh’s acquiescence in the stationing of western troops on its soil during the Kuwait Crisis which was subsequently deemed an act of disloyalty and ingratitude, and additionally an implicit challenge to the House of Saud’s Islamic credentials.
By replacing Riyadh as chief patron of the region’s largest and best-organized opposition force, Shaykh Hamad was able to snap up yet another vehicle for projecting his country’s influence. (Salafi Jihadi movements, which during the 1990s would come to openly advocate the violent overthrow of not only the region’s secular republics but also its “apostate” monarchies, were less tolerated. Yet GCC rulers–presumably hoping to keep the peace–tended to turn a blind eye to sympathetic subjects who, as during the Afghan jihad, continued to funnel money and other forms of support to al-Qa‘ida and other such groups.) Although Qatar is the only other Muslim state that has elevated Salafism to official religious doctrine (Doha’s main mosque is named after Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab, the rigidly puritanical eighteenth-century cleric and co-founder of the Saudi state), few of the grim practices that are government policy in Saudi Arabia are enforced in Wahhabism’s second home.
His Excellency Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassim Bin Jabr Al-Thani, Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs for the State of Qatar (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
By 2010, Doha had successfully escaped from Riyadh’s formerly lightproof shadow. Another Hamad, Shaikh Hamad bin Jasim Al-Thani (commonly known in the West as HBJ), had been a key player in this regard. A cousin of the amir, HBJ had served as Qatar’s foreign minister since 1992, and in 2007 became its prime minister as well. Concurrently the head of the QIA, his business activities and resultant fabulous personal wealth led the amir to quip that while he ruled the country, HBJ owned it. Another prominent Qatari during this period was Shaikha Moza bint Nasir Al-Masnad, the second and most influential of the amir’s three wives. From her perch atop the philanthropic Qatar Foundation, she personified the country’s soft power. Together Moza and the Qatar Foundation sponsored leading international universities and institutions to set up branches in Doha, and established a string of non-governmental organizations to promote freedoms and values across the region rejected and suppressed within Qatar.
Within little more than a decade, such efforts began to pay off. In 2008 Doha successfully brokered an end to a political crisis that had plagued Lebanon for over a year, facilitated by generous payments to its numerous protagonists. It similarly sought to mediate a peace agreement in Darfour, a ceasefire between the Yemeni government and the Houthi movement, as well as one between Djibouti and Eritrea over a border dispute that led to the deployment of Qatari peacekeepers to the Horn of Africa. On more than one occasion, it sought to displace Egypt as sponsor of reconciliation efforts between Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority and Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.
When in early 2009 the Arab League, under Saudi and Egyptian pressure, refused to convene an emergency summit in response to Israel’s brutal assault against the Gaza Strip, Qatar, partial to Hamas which had since 2007 ruled Gaza, organized an alternative gathering in Doha in support of the Palestinians. The two Hamads used the considerable powers of persuasion and resources at their disposal to call in favors, outbid Saudi offers to boycott the meeting, and exploit the region’s deepening rivalries. In the end, political realities prevailed and the conclave fell short of a quorum, in part because no other GCC state (or Arab League official) saw fit to defy Riyadh. For good measure, Doha had assigned the Palestinian seat at the conference table to Hamas leader Khalid Mashal after PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas begged off, citing irresistible pressure to forsake his people during their hour of need. Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and a representative of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez flew in to address those present. Qatar also announced the closure of the trade office Israel had maintained in Doha since 1996, and in subsequent years began to slowly downgrade what had been an increasingly public relationship with the Israeli government at the most senior levels (though Shimon Peres would again make an “unofficial” visit in 2007).
If the Hamads had done well by Qatar, their achievements prior to 2010 would also be easy to exaggerate; a self-assured UAE had similarly poked Riyadh in the eye in 2009 when it scuttled plans for a GCC monetary union after Saudi Arabia used its clout to locate the proposed central bank in its capital rather than Dubai. More notably, Oman several years later hosted secret American-Iranian negotiations that would in 2015 result in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the Iran nuclear agreement). While Qatar had successfully placed itself on the map and was adeptly punching above its weight, only the most paranoid potentate considered its activities a threat to the regional order. It was, after all, part and parcel of this order.
Hubris
As with so much else, things began to change with the era of upheaval the Arab world entered in December 2010. As the Muslim Brotherhood used its organizational experience and acumen to enter government in Egypt, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia, and carve out a leading role in the Syrian opposition, Al Jazeera became the official broadcaster of the Arab uprisings. It seemed to take particular glee in the downfall of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, whose intelligence services had participated in the aborted 1996 coup to restore Shaykh Hamad’s father to power. Within a month Yusuf Al-Qaradawi returned to Cairo and delivered the Friday sermon in Tahrir Square. Attended by hundreds of thousands, it was simultaneously broadcast on Egyptian state television and of course Al Jazeera.
Qatar was suddenly the most influential member of the Arab League, engineering its endorsement of foreign military intervention in Libya, in which it participated, as well as the suspension of Syria’s membership and transfer of its seat to Doha’s protégé, the opposition Syrian National Council. When the Syrian uprising against nearly half a century of Ba’thist rule metamorphosed into civil war, Qatar was a leading financier and supplier of the armed opposition groups that emerged throughout the country. It seemed the entire region was being remade, if not in Qatar’s image, then at least in accordance with decisions made in Doha. The mouse was audibly roaring. In 2010 Qatar even succeeded–widespread allegations of bribery notwithstanding–in winning the rights to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup. In 2013, acting with US consent, it invited the Afghan Taliban to open an office in Doha to facilitate negotiations to end the conflict in central Asia.
Doha’s indulgence of challenges to the region’s ancien régimes also had clear limits, particularly as the unrest spread closer to home. It endorsed and supported the Saudi-led 2011 GCC intervention in Bahrain to crush popular protests against the highly repressive Al Khalifa monarchy, and that same year signed on to a GCC plan for Yemen that saw President Ali Abdallah Salih transfer power to his deputy rather than cede it to those seeking to install a new and different kind of political system. Disturbances in Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich, Shi’a-majority Eastern Province were also pointedly ignored.
Similarly, Qatar’s rulers, as thin-skinned and absolute in their powers as their GCC counterparts, did not hesitate to jail domestic critics inspired by regional events. In 2011, local poet Muhammad al-Ajami received a life sentence for the crime of lèse-majesté on the basis of several verses he had composed. The Doha-based Arab Democracy Foundation, which specialized in bombastic declarations about how the will of Arab peoples elsewhere would never be defeated, had not a word to say on the matter, while the Doha Centre for Media Freedom made do with an expression of “concern.” Nary a peep emanated from the numerous foreign institutions that had accepted Qatari largesse; many had done so with all but a formal communiqué implying they were motivated by the opportunity to civilize a new generation of Arabs. (Al Ajami received a royal pardon in 2016.) More recently the abysmal conditions experienced by migrant workers building the facilities for the 2022 World Cup has become an international scandal, but one that journalists in situ find almost impossible to investigate.
Several factors helped Qatar achieve a role out of any proportion to its geography, demography, or even economy. Egypt had for some time ceased to fulfill its traditional leadership role in the Arab world. In Saudi Arabia, the waning years of King Abdallah’s reign were characterized by an increasingly dysfunctional and divided Saudi elite often incapable of formulating a consistently coherent foreign policy and keeping other GCC members in line. Qatar’s closest regional ally, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, by contrast suffered from an excess of clarity and ambition, commanded one of the region’s largest and most powerful states, and unlike his predecessors took a keen interest in the Middle East. Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) additionally had much in common with the Muslim Brotherhood, and promoted itself as a model for the latter’s various Arab branches as they tried their hand at governance. Finally, Qatar took a pragmatic approach to foreign affairs. It maintained relationships with both Israel and Hamas, the United States and Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Nemesis
In almost dialectical fashion, Doha’s moment of triumph also sowed the seeds of its unraveling. By 2012 the reputation of Al Jazeera Arabic offerings, now serving as an undisguised soapbox for ever more explicit Qatari foreign policy goals and the various allies and proxies mobilized to achieve them, was diminishing rapidly. As the saying goes credibility takes years to build, is sacrificed in an instant, and once lost is gone forever. (Al Jazeera English, whose relevance to regional politics is minimal, by contrast largely continued as a conventional news broadcaster.)
The ascendant Muslim Brotherhood, with its very different conception of Islamist politics to that practiced by Gulf regimes, its promotion of the ballot box as arbiter of political power, and growing role in government, was perceived as an existential threat by the region’s hereditary rulers. So too was the possibility that more militant Islamists groups, which openly challenge the potentates’ religious credentials and which called for their heads, might gain in strength. Where the custodians of the regional order had heretofore prioritized containing Iran–a project in which various Sunni Islamist organizations could play a useful role–they now focused primarily on restoring the regional status quo, in which such organizations would need to be removed from power and their Qatari and Turkish sponsors marginalized. (With many specialists convinced that the Brotherhood would easily sweep a theoretical election in Saudi Arabia, King Abdallah declared it his country’s main enemy).
Anti-Morsi demonstrators marching in Cairo, 28 June 2013 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
A key turning point was the 2013 coup that deposed elected president Muhammad Morsi and his government in Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous and pivotal state. The seizure of power replaced the Muslim Brotherhood with a military regime led by Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who was determined to eradicate it. It also represented a shift from a Qatari client to one virtually dependent on Saudi and Emirati patronage for survival. Egypt re-imposed its blockade on the Gaza Strip, now exponentially more severe than anything enforced during the worst days of Mubarak; Tunisia’s Islamists voluntarily stepped out of government; and Qatar’s candidates began to fall short in Syrian opposition leadership elections.
Within the Gulf, the campaign reached its apex in the UAE where al-Islah, an association established by exiled Brotherhood members that had been licensed by the authorities during the 1970s, was accused of establishing a clandestine military organization to seize power in the country. The trial of ninety-four purported plotters resulted in the sentencing of fifty-six of them. If it was a sham, it was no show trial; a relative of one defendant was imprisoned for tweeting about the proceedings. In 2014, both Saudi Arabia and the UAE listed the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization.
A week before al-Sisi’s coup, Shaykh Hamad suddenly abdicated in favor of his–and Moza’s– thirty-three-year-old son, Tamim. Although Hamad had undergone two kidney transplants, health reasons were neither cited nor convincing as an explanation. According to some reports, it was part of an informal deal with Riyadh and other GCC detractors whereby the amir’s departure would ensure that the furious Saudi-led counterrevolution would not consume the Al-Thani family, who were perceived as chief sponsors of regional instability. Others surmised that the voluntary transfer of power to a new generation was a final, two-fingered salute directed at the octogenarian monarch next door, whose trusteeship Hamad had spent most of his career defying. Perhaps it was both. In the event, Shaykh Hamad took HBJ with him into retirement, as the latter’s prominence and power would have made it impossible for Shaikh Tamim to rule in his own right.
Whether Riyadh and Abu Dhabi believed the new amir was as errant as his father, wanted to test the youngster’s mettle, or were simply determined to ensure Qatar would once again play by old rules, crisis ensued in March 2014. In a prelude to the current dispute, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain withdrew their ambassadors from Doha and threatened further measures if Qatar did not correct its conduct. Tamim was said to have reneged on commitments undertaken at a 2013 GCC summit relating to the preservation of regional security and stability, hostile media, and members’ non-interference in each other’s affairs–concepts so broad they could encompass a poor restaurant review.
Within months the dispute was overtaken by a more urgent crisis when the Islamic State movement swept from northeastern Syria into northwestern Iraq and its second city of Mosul, declaring a caliphate. Reports that negotiations between Iran and the United States over the nuclear file were making unprecedented progress towards an international agreement additionally spurred the GCC to close ranks. On the strength of various understandings, a new document that restated the 2013 commitments, and Qatar’s expulsion of a number of Brotherhood leaders and cadres, Kuwait successfully mediated a November 2014 return of the recalled ambassadors to Doha. Yet the underlying tensions that had been building over nearly two decades remained unresolved.
The Reinvention of Saudi Arabia
In January 2015, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdallah, who had effectively ruled the country since his predecessor and half-brother Fahd was incapacitated in 1995, breathed his last. The kingdom’s founder, King Abdulaziz (commonly known as Ibn Saud), had fathered over forty sons from numerous marriages. Although Ibn Saud passed the crown to one of his sons, succession since then has proceeded horizontally among siblings rather than vertically between generations. With nature steadily depleting the supply of available candidates (two of Abdallah’s half-brother crown princes died within the space of a year), the monarch established the Allegiance Council (a princely consultative body) in 2006 as well as the position of deputy crown prince in 2014, to ensure a consensual and therefore smooth transition to the next generation. Such measures were necessary because, in contrast to traditional monarchies, every one of Ibn Saud’s numerous grandsons, rather than just the offspring of the last of his sons to occupy the throne, are eligible for the succession, thus multiplying the possibility for rivalry and royal conflict within the world’s largest oil exporter.
When Salman became king in 2015, he appointed his half-brother Muqrin as crown prince and his nephew, the powerful interior minister (and Washington’s favorite Saudi) Muhammad bin Nayif, to the position of deputy crown prince. It was the first time a member of the third generation had been placed in the line of succession, and the seeming absence of widely-anticipated dissent appeared to vindicate the measures Abdallah had taken before his death.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Nayef (L) and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (R)
A mere three months later, however, King Salman ousted Muqrin, promoted Muhammad bin Nayif to crown prince, and appointed his own twenty-nine-year-old son, Muhammad bin Salman (often referred to as MBS) as deputy crown prince. The supreme offices in the kingdom were now concentrated in a branch of the House of Saud descended from only one of Ibn Saud’s wives, Hissa Al-Sudairi, whose sons–including former King Fahd, former Crown Prince and Defense Minister Sultan, former Crown Prince and Interior Minister Nayif, and King Salman–are known as the Sudairi Seven. Not less importantly, the royal reshuffle strongly suggested that the ailing Salman sought to pass the crown to his own progeny, thereby transforming Saudi Arabia into a “regular” monarchy.
Almost immediately, MBS began to amass powers to rival a monarch, including Minister of Defense, Chairman of the newly-established Council for Economic and Development Affairs, and head of the newly-created Aramco Supreme Council, effectively usurping energy policy from the Ministry of Energy, Industry, and Mineral Resources.
The following year MBS unveiled Vision 2030, a blueprint inspired by McKinsey & Company consultants that sought to transform the Saudi economy (and by implication, society) in response to the prolonged decline in oil prices since the US shale industry burst onto the scene. A centerpiece of the plan, which has been highly controversial domestically and within royal circles as well, calls for the sale of five per cent of Saudi ARAMCO, the state-owned oil company valued at between USD 1-2 trillion that is the jewel in the Saudi crown. The proceeds, in combination with savings resulting from various reforms and austerity measures, are to be leveraged to achieve a catalogue of utterly preposterous targets including a five-fold increase in non-oil government revenue, a five-fold increase in the non-profit sector’s contribution to GDP, a fifty per cent expansion of the private sector, and an increase in life expectancy by six years–all by the end of the next decade. Vision 2030 was also clearly designed to serve the more attainable objective of enabling MBS to leapfrog his cousin Muhammad bin Nayif in the line of succession before his father’s death.
That MBS was determined to fling the traditional Saudi policy-making process to the wind was even more evident in foreign affairs. The days in which Riyadh carefully crafts a domestic, regional, and international consensus before leading a change in direction from behind were replaced with aggressive recklessness. According to a leaked report authored by the German intelligence service BND:
The previous cautious diplomatic stance of older leading members of the [Saudi] royal family is being replaced by an impulsive policy of intervention … [MBS] is a political gambler who is destabilizing the Arab world through proxy wars … [His concentration of power] harbors a latent risk that in seeking to establish himself in the line of succession in his father’s lifetime, he may overreach … Relations with friendly and above all allied countries in the region could be overstretched.
This was most clearly evident in Yemen, where within months of becoming the world’s youngest defense minister, MBS unleashed a war supported (among others) by Qatar and the United States, to restore the government of Abd-Rabbu Mansur Hadi that had been ousted by Houthi rebels working in alliance with former president Salih.
But instead of resulting in the quick and decisive victory that would bolster his military and leadership credentials, the war on Yemen has developed into an ongoing quagmire that has fragmented and effectively destroyed the country, killed many thousands of civilians, and made Yemen a first-order humanitarian emergency. It has inflicted material as well as human losses on Saudi Arabia, and additionally enabled Yemeni incursions and missile attacks into Saudi territory. As a consequence, MBS appears eager to bring his adventure to an end, but conditions that preserve rather than damage his reputation and ambition have yet to be found.
The Houthi relationship with Iran, much exaggerated but becoming a reality on account of the war, was cited as a key motivation by Saudi Arabia. This reflects a broader shift in Riyadh, where confronting and containing Iran’s growing influence in the region has since the 2014-2015 thaw in US-Iranian relations often taken precedence over marginalizing other Islamists and restoring the status quo disturbed by the Arab uprisings. In Syria, for example, the Saudis put aside their rivalry with Qatar and Turkey over control of the Syrian opposition, and crafted Jaysh al-Fath, a coalition of Syrian rebel groups in which Jabhat Al-Nusra, the Syrian affiliate of al-Qa‘ida, played a leading role. Similarly, an International Crisis Group report published this year found that Saudi Arabia was engaging in “tacit alliances” with al-Qa‘ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and “regularly fought alongside” the forces of Ansar al-Shari’a, an AQAP subsidiary. Writing earlier for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Gulf affairs specialist Neil Partrick reached a similar conclusion, and additionally noted that “Saudi Arabia made sure to repair its relations with the MB [Muslim Brotherhood] Islah Party” during the run-up to the war, and that this effort included putting it “back on Riyadh’s payroll.”
Another Gulf State Punches Above Its Weight
Although the UAE has been the most active member of the coalition in terms of committing ground forces to Yemen, it has eschewed alliances with Islamists. This reflects both its congenital hostility to them since 2011 (which also explains its comparative absence from the Syrian theatre), and the reality that its forces operate primarily in areas of the country where the Houthi-Salih coalition has been expelled, and the primary conflict is now between government forces and Islamist militias. The UAE, a federal state comprising seven hereditary emirates in which the ruler of Abu Dhabi, whose territory encompasses eighty-five per cent of the country, traditionally serves as president, was under its founding leader Shaikh Zayid bin Nahyan generally characterized by neutrality in inter-Arab conflicts and a balanced regional policy within a context of deference to Saudi leadership.
More recently it has developed a much more assertive stance. Although the UAE for example does not recognize Israel, the latter is permitted to maintain a diplomatic mission in the UAE capital under the umbrella of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). The Emirati air force has also conducted joint exercises with its Israeli counterpart in the United States and Greece. Informal security links are said to run extremely deep and include the purchase of Israeli weapons systems and technology.
Spearheading such changes has been Muhammad bin Zayid (MBZ), who has since 2004 been Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE armed forces, and the country’s de facto ruler. Early on, he adopted Palestinian warlord Muhammad Dahlan to unseat Hamas after the latter won the 2006 Palestinian Authority legislative elections. Since Dahlan’s defeat in the Gaza Strip and then downfall in the West Bank on account of a personal dispute with his chief patron, Mahmoud Abbas, MBZ has been promoting him as Abbas’s successor. He was appointed national security advisor to the emirate of Abu Dhabi, and conducts various missions on behalf of his new benefactor in Egypt, Libya, Serbia, and elsewhere. (In a more recent twist, Hamas and Dahlan in mid-June reached a number of understandings on cooperation in a joint effort to weaken Abbas. Because their implementation is reliant on Egyptian facilitation and Emirati funding, this effectively puts the UAE and Hamas in the same camp, even as Abu Dhabi points to Qatar’s sponsorship of the Palestinian Islamists as a factor in the present GCC crisis.).
One of MBZ’s most notable achievements has been the development of the UAE special forces into a significant military asset and their deployment across the region. Crucial to this endeavour was Erik Prince, formerly of Blackwater and brother of US Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and a large contingent of Colombian mercenaries imported by Prince to develop the force. The prince’s contract reportedly netted Prince in excess of half a billion dollars.
UAE ground forces have fought in Yemen to regain territory from the Houthis, and participated in a botched February 2017 raid in conjunction with US Navy Seals to eliminate an AQAP leader that resulted in the killing of numerous civilians. More recently, reports have emerged of horrific torture chambers operated by the United Arab Emirates in Yemen, in what appears to be close coordination with the United States. The Emirati air force has been active against Islamic State movement targets, and as far afield as Libya in support of renegade general (and former CIA asset) Khalifa Haftar. Such adventurism has led US Defense Secretary James Mattis to label the country “Little Sparta.” Even though serving a different agenda and using different instruments, the UAE’s growing regional clout in important respects echoes that of the other small state to its north, Qatar. In a further resonance, Saudi and Emirati forces have recently been working at cross-purposes in Yemen, competing for dominance over various proxies.
When King Salman succeeded to the Saudi throne and immediately set about systematically deposing or marginalizing Abdallah’s courtiers and confidantes, with whom MBZ had maintained close relationships, the elevation of Muhammad bin Nayif to crown prince caused particular concern in Abu Dhabi. A Wikileaks cable that detailed how MBZ had in a discussion with US diplomat Richard Haass compared the Saudi prince’s father to a monkey, caused what might be termed a permanent rupture. The UAE’s comparatively warm welcome of the Iranian nuclear agreement strained matters further.
MBZ rebuilt the relationship by assiduously cultivating the like-minded MBS, who conveniently was together with his father clipping Muhammad bin Nayif’s wings at every opportunity. MBZ was also quick to cultivate Donald Trump after the 2016 election. In December, he flew to New York to meet the president-elect and his key aides at Trump Tower without–contrary to protocol–informing the US government of his visit (according to the Washington Post the White House only learned of it when his name was discovered on a flight manifest). Shortly thereafter, the same newspaper reported, MBZ and his brother brokered a covert meeting between Erik Prince and an associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean, where the UAE has extensive property holdings, to set up a backchannel between the incoming American administration and the Kremlin. MBZ is also said to have arranged for MBS’s audience with Trump shortly after he took office, which in turn resulted in Trump’s May 2017 visit to Riyadh.
Enter Trump
By any measure, the Saudis have played their hand with the Trump administration extremely well. They reached out to his closest associates, provided the new president with the effusive praise that gets his attention, and then sent MBS to Washington to detail the contributions Saudi Arabia can make to both his foreign and domestic agendas. With the new administration’s relationships with its neighbors and traditional allies experiencing various levels of crisis, they succeeded in making Riyadh rather than Mexico City, Ottawa, or London the destination of Trump’s inaugural foreign visit.
The previous November, the Saudis had been eagerly counting the days until Obama would be replaced by Hillary Clinton, and US Middle East policy would revert to its longstanding pattern of intimate partnership with the Kingdom on the basis of a shared regional agenda and pursuit of common objectives, particularly in Syria and Iran. While no less taken aback than the rest of the planet by Trump’s unexpected victory, the Saudi leadership was additionally apprehensive on account of his inflammatory campaign rhetoric against their country, faith, and resources. But this was trumped by the winning candidate’s consistent hostility to Iran on the campaign trail, and the even greater animosity towards it expressed by presidential gurus like Steve Bannon and the incoming national security team.
Demonstrating their influence and authority by convening a GCC and Arab/Islamic summit to supplement the Saudi-US one (the source of Trump’s idiotic claim that history had never witnessed such a gathering and probably never would again), the Saudi leadership announced the formation of a new Islamic coalition (a “Middle Eastern NATO”) against “terrorism,” with Trump as its spiritual godfather; dangled the prospect of an Arab-Israeli peace agreement in front of the US president and his son-in-law; reheated existing deals concluded with the Obama administration, and additionally signed letters of intent for new ones that allowed the new US president to boast that he had secured hundreds of billions of dollars in new contracts; and lost no opportunity to engage in the ostentatious displays of wealth and kitsch that Trump so adores.
The reset in US-Saudi relations was a superlative success, to the extent that Trump virtually held Shi’a Iran responsible for the emergence and growth of Sunni extremist organizations across the region. More importantly, he anointed his new best friend Salman as Washington’s indispensable Arab partner and supreme leader of the Arabs and Muslims. Trump had effectively extended Salman carte blanche to remake the region in accordance with their joint vision of durable security and stability, and appointed him regional commander of the alliance against Tehran. The neglect that had characterized the Obama years, always more a matter of perception than reality, had come to a definitive end, and Riyadh felt empowered and emboldened to reassert its leadership role. In the immediate term, this meant bringing Qatar to heel.
Crisis
During the Riyadh summit, Saudi and Emirati leaders are said to have complained to Trump about Qatari misconduct with respect to Iran and Islamist groups, pointing out that this undermined the key pillars of Trump’s Middle East policy. When the US president relayed these concerns and their source during his separate meeting with the Qatari ruler, Shaykh Tamim reportedly retorted that the US president was barking up the wrong tree, noting that not only al-Qa‘ida but also the Islamic State movement obtain most of their funding and support from Saudi and Emirati sympathizers, and that Dubai additionally serves as the Iranian economy’s main window to the world. Yet only days later Doha, citing irresistible pressures, expelled a number of Hamas military leaders with immediate effect and informed the movement that additional measures may follow.
According to the Financial Times, the Saudis and Emiratis were particularly perturbed by a complex deal brokered by Qatar in April of this year to obtain the release of twenty six of its citizens–including at least one member of the royal family–who had been taken hostage in southern Iraq in 2015 by pro-Iranian Shi’a militias while on a hunting expedition. In addition to paying a ransom of some 700 million US dollars to the captors, most of which is said to have ended up in the coffers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the hostages’ freedom was made contingent on a population exchange in Syria. The Syrian component of the deal included the evacuation of several thousand Syrian Shi’a civilians from the town of Madaya, where they had for several years been under siege by Syrian Islamist groups including Jabhat Tahrir al-Sham, the recently re-branded al-Qa‘ida affiliate formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra. With Qatar disbursing an additional 200 million US dollars to the Syrian rebel groups to secure the evacuation, it stood accused of not only directly funding al-Qa‘ida, but engaging in a pattern of using hostage negotiations as cover to fund radical Islamists in Syria in order to promote regime change in Damascus and consolidate its influence over the Syrian opposition. (The operation was exposed when bales of cash totaling hundreds of millions of dollars were discovered in a Qatari plane at Baghdad Airport).
Then, days after the conclusion of the Trump visit, the official Qatar News Agency (QNA) website on 24 May carried statements attributed to Tamim in which he expressed support for Hizballah and Hamas; praised Iran and Israel; denounced Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt; and disparaged both Trump and the purported deals concluded in Riyadh. Qatar denied its amir had made the statements, claimed the QNA website had been hacked, and called in the FBI to investigate. By then the media war had already begun. The statements were massively circulated and vociferously denounced by Saudi and Emirati-sponsored media, and the circulation and transmission of Qatari-sponsored media were blocked in the offended states. The tone and ruthlessness of the ongoing media campaigns easily matches that of countries that have been engaged in prolonged warfare.
In early June, the email account of the UAE’s Ambassador to the United States, Yusuf al-Otaiba, described by the New York Times as “a personal tutor in regional politics to Jared Kushner”, was hacked. Its embarrassing contents–particularly concerning Otaiba’s calls to relocate CENTCOM’s regional headquarters away from Qatar, his close relationship with the extreme pro-Israel Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and disparaging assessments of Trump in exchanges with Obama officials during the transition–were prominently publicized by Qatari-owned media.
Immediately thereafter, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt on 5 June announced they were severing diplomatic relations with Qatar. In addition to recalling their diplomats from Doha and giving Qatar’s emissaries forty-eight hours to leave, they severed all land, sea, and air links with it; closed their air space to Qatar’s national airline in apparent violation of the Convention on International Civil Aviation; ordered the repatriation within fourteen days of all Qataris residing in their territory as well as (Egyptians excepted) of their citizens living in Qatar; and expelled Qatar from the coalition that has been reducing Yemen to rubble. Because Qatar’s only land border is with Saudi Arabia, through which it obtains forty per cent of its food supply (including more than ninety-five per cent of fruits and vegetables), this has amounted to a virtual blockade. A number of Arab and Muslim recipients of Saudi and Emirati largesse including Jordan, Mauritania, The Maldives, the exiled government of Yemen, and the powerless one of Libya, also announced a downgrading or severance of their relations with Qatar. Jordan additionally revoked Al Jazeera’s operating license.
The following days saw additional measures imposed against Qatar, particularly by the UAE. Qatalum, the aluminum producer jointly owned by Qatar Petroleum and Norway’s Norsk Hydro, was forced to re-route exports from its traditional port, Dubai’s Jabal Ali, to alternatives in Oman. Similarly Qatar, the world’s second largest producer of helium, had to close down production facilities on 12 June because the gas could no longer be exported overland through Saudi Arabia. On 7 June, the authorities in Abu Dhabi announced that any resident expressing opposition to its policy towards Qatar, or sympathy for Doha, faced the prospect of fifteen years in prison and a hefty fine. Saudi Arabia and Bahrain followed suit with similar measures.
The rapidity with which this crisis escalated and intensified has been remarkable. Amidst unverifiable rumors of divisions within the Qatari, Saudi, and Emirati leaderships about their respective handling of events, and even talk of a military option if the political one fails, Kuwait and Oman–the only GCC states that declined to take measures against Qatar–commenced mediation efforts. But tensions were further heightened when President Trump, who appeared unaware that Qatar hosts the largest US military base in the region, in his Twitter account all but took personal responsibility for the campaign against it, presenting it as a signal achievement of his foray into the Middle East to slay the beast of terror. Needless to say, his comments left the State Department and Pentagon scrambling to re-assure Doha that neither CENTCOM’s relocation nor regime change are under consideration.
While details remain scarce, Qatar’s detractors have strenuously denounced “violations” of the agreement that ended the 2014 diplomatic rupture. Although there have been reports of a list of ten demands, others speak only of “grievances.” The Qataris, who insist they will only discuss issues relating to compliance with GCC commitments and only after the blockade has been lifted, for their part maintain that the Kuwaiti and Omani mediators have yet to transmit or be provided with a list of specific violations or demands in this regard.
Whether the expulsion of Hamas from Qatar and the closure of Al Jazeera form an opening gambit or are designed for rejection is difficult to divine, but Qatar’s adversaries initially seemed to be holding all the cards. Doha was forced to rely on Iran and Turkey for food and other imports, and their airspace for its national carrier to remain operational, thus making its conduct only more suspect. Furthermore, a diminished Al Jazeera lacked the credibility and audience it once had to mobilize regional public opinion. Qatar’s currency and credit rating have been in decline, and questions are being raised about its ability to successfully host a World Cup in which it had already invested massively.
Where some observers took the demands made of Qatar seriously, others suggested the specific issues raised were either submitted for propaganda value or are marginal to the real interests of Saudi Arabia and the others. Rather, their purpose is to force Doha to dance to the GCC tune, cut it back down to its miniature size, and ensure that it once again follows the lead of more powerful neighbors rather than pursue an independent regional agenda that too often works at cross purposes with theirs.
Qatar’s fortunes took a sudden turn for the better on 7 June. Trump called Tamim, and during their discussion the US president emphasized the importance of restoring calm and stability to the GCC, invited his Qatari counterpart to the White House, and offered help with mediation efforts–thereby giving the Kuwaiti-Omani mission a vital endorsement. Earlier that day, the FBI announced that QNA had indeed been hacked by Russian parties, but left unstated on whose behalf they may have been acting. That same evening the Turkish parliament—with whom Qatar had in 2016 concluded a mutual defense treaty—adopted a resolution to dispatch an additional three thousand troops to the beleaguered country. The tripwire force that effectively took any military option being contemplated off the table arrived the following week, during a joint military exercise between Qatari and US forces that sent an equally pointed message. Meanwhile a growing chorus of international powers, including Russia, the European Union, and Germany, made clear they need another crisis in the Middle East, this time between its main energy exporters, like a hole in the head. Unsurprisingly, they have consistently pressed for a speedy and peaceful resolution.
Two days later, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, presumably in consultation with the White House, issued prepared remarks in which he essentially praised Qatar and its alliance with the United States, while also calling upon it to more rapidly take more effective measures against the “funding of terrorism.” He further appealed to its adversaries to begin lifting the blockade on account of its humanitarian impact during the month of Ramadan, and the obstruction of US military and business activities. He again endorsed and offered to participate in a negotiated resolution of the dispute. Only hours later President Trump, in prepared rather than impromptu remarks of his own, repeatedly denounced Qatar as a virtual state sponsor of terrorism. For good measure, he revealed that its misconduct had been raised with him by his “good friend” King Salman during his visit to Riyadh, once again throwing his weight behind the states ranged against Doha. Earlier that same day Saudi Arabia and the UAE designated fifty-seven individuals and entities connected to Qatar as terrorists–some of whom are also known for links to Saudi Arabia and some of whom are said to be in prison. A week later, Trump would, despite his assessment of Doha’s nefariousness, celebrate the sale of advanced fighter aircraft worth 12 billion US dollars to its air force.
Consequences
The unsustainable intensity of the Qatar crisis suggests it is headed for either catastrophic escalation or speedy resolution. Absent the removal of Tamim and his replacement with a pliant relative in the very near future, a scenario that seemed at best highly improbable and is now increasingly distant after an attempt was recently foiled, a renewed Qatari commitment to the 2014 agreement, sweetened with a few symbolic concessions, a public reconciliation, and a monitoring mechanism, seems the most likely outcome.
That said, the situation is sufficiently tense that a rash move or miscalculation could have unforeseen consequences–particularly as Qatar and its increasingly reckless adversaries have each failed to rally decisive regional and international support, while Washington’s response has been divided at best. While uncontrolled escalation would be disastrous for Qatar, it is also unlikely to be kind to Saudi Arabia or the UAE and indeed the GCC as a whole, for whom a reputation for stability and insulation from regional upheaval is these days no less valuable than its energy products. The impact on the broader global economy could also be significant.
Should a quick resolution that essentially sweeps the dispute under the rug indeed materialize, it would be an impressive reversal of Qatari fortunes. At the same time, this crisis, not unlike the war in Yemen, is intended to showcase MBS’s leadership abilities and thus his eligibility for the Saudi throne. He can therefore ill afford a climb down that further punctures his reputation. For the UAE and MBZ, the stakes are arguably more ideological, and the crisis will have been a poor investment if it does not produce a clean break between Doha and the Muslim Brotherhood.
The big winners so far are Iran, Syria, and their Lebanese ally Hizballah, who cannot but be delighted by the audible cracks in the alliance ranged against Damascus and Tehran and that may well spell the end of the GCC. Iran and Hizballah will additionally hope that Hamas has finally learned the lesson that no ally of the United States can be a true friend of the Palestinians. Turkey has also, yet again, demonstrated that in today’s Middle East it has a role to play in every crisis and that others ignore Ankara’s interests– whether in the Gulf, Syria, or Iraq–at their peril. On the flip side, there are growing noises within Riyadh and Abu Dhabi that the campaign should expand to include Turkey–which has recently been claiming that the UAE is implicated in the 2016 coup attempt against Erdogan.
The crisis has also been of enormous propaganda value to Iran as it ferries hundreds of tons of food and other basic necessities to Qatar in an effort reminiscent of the Berlin airlift–albeit to the richest country on earth rather than the Gaza Strip. Turkey, and–perhaps more significantly in view of attempts to place Doha under Arab quarantine–Morocco have been stocking Qatar’s supermarket shelves as well. Yet, even as The Economist concludes that the blockade “isn’t working,” over the longer term structural dependence on Iran and Turkey is not an option Qatar’s rulers can sustain for political reasons.
Israel appears to be a beneficiary as well. A restrained Qatar that reduces support to Hamas is a welcome gain, but more importantly Tel Aviv has been able to further consolidate its budding relationship with other Gulf states. The Netanyahu government’s June decision to drastically reduce electricity supplies to the Gaza Strip pursuant to a contemptible request by Mahmoud Abbas, which it had previously rejected because the Israeli security establishment warned this could lead to a new conflagration with Hamas, can only be read as an effort to demonstrate its value and reliability to its Arab partners, and the feasibility of a diplomatic approach that focuses on Arab-Israeli normalization rather than Palestinian statehood to the new regime in Washington.
The clear losers are, of course, the Arabs–all of them. Their institutions have once again revealed themselves to be thoroughly and irredeemably dysfunctional. The crisis is being resolved not within or by the region, but rather on the basis of which protagonist can buy the most US weapons, recruit the most lobbyists, and elicit the most patronizing statements from the White House, Pentagon, State Department, and European capitals. The fate of Qatar is being decided by the location of CENTCOM.
However this crisis is resolved, Qatar will have to seriously weigh the consequences before it again contemplates punching above its intrinsically light weight, and will to one extent or another have been brought to heel within a Saudi-dominated coalition directed against not only Iran, but also further upheaval in the region that even today retains the possibility of transforming its disenfranchised subjects into empowered citizens. This crisis is thus both a petulant princely playground spat worthy only of indifference, and an attempt to determine the future of an entire region in which indifference is not an option.
Postscript: House of Salman?
On the morning of 21 June, King Salman deposed Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayif, simultaneously stripping him of all government functions and powers, and replaced him with his son, MBS. Although as discussed above the move has been widely anticipated, the timing nevertheless caught most by surprise, and raises the possibility that Salman is either seriously ill or intends to abdicate soon in favor of his son. Simultaneously, and in a development that is certain to have far-reaching political consequences even if intended for only one-time invocation, Salman “amended sections of the 1990 Basic Law to move to vertical royal succession from father to son for the office of king.”
Thus far, no new deputy crown prince has been appointed, and given the generational shift there is reason to suspect the post may be abolished altogether. Although these changes have been formally endorsed by the Allegiance Council and the clerical establishment, reports of dissent, particularly from within the ruling family, are rife. There are additional suggestions of discontent among clerics considered close to Muhammad Bin Nayif and Prince Mit’ib bin Abdallah, son of the previous monarch who remains commander of the National Guard, the regime’s praetorian guard. There may well be serious trouble ahead for the House of Saud on account of this power play.
In the meantime MBS, now also deputy prime minister, has consolidated his position further, most prominently through Salman’s appointment of Prince Abdulaziz bin Saud bin Nayif, considered an MBS ally, to the position of interior minister. Abdulaziz is also a nephew of Muhammad bin Nayif, “thus perpetuating Nayif’s old fiefdom over the most important ministry for domestic security.” No doubt this appointment was concurrently made with a view to limiting partisan royal dissent to the latest reshuffle.
MBS now single-handedly controls Saudi energy, security, economic, and foreign policy. The partnership between MBS and the UAE’s MBZ can now be expected to dominate GCC decision-making and regional policy. This does not augur well for the prospects of GCC-Iranian détente, is likely to produce a further improvement in relations with Israel at the expense of the Palestinians, and will almost certainly result in an intensification of the Syria conflict and other proxy wars, including that in what is left of Yemen.
The elevation of MBS also suggests a hardening of the Saudi-Emirati position towards Qatar. Yet, unless Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have an ace up their sleeve or are reckless enough to directly intervene in Qatar, it is difficult to see how they can prevail in view of growing international impatience with the persistence of this crisis and the instability it is producing in a corner of the world critical to the global economy.
August 24th, 2017 by Keith Jones
US government officials have begun to spell out the meaning of Trump’s threat to punish Pakistan if it does not suppress Afghan insurgents operating from its border regions. These punishments include not just cuts to aid and payments for services rendered in fighting the Afghan war, but also encouraging India, Pakistan’s arch-rival, to play a larger role in Afghanistan, and a more pro-Indian stance on the seven-decade-old Kashmir dispute.
India has repeatedly boasted of its readiness to mount military raids inside Pakistan, even if they risk provoking all-out war between South Asia’s rival nuclear powers.
Rattled by Washington’s threats, Islamabad has turned to Beijing for support, further heightening tensions in a region where India and China are engaged in their most serious border stand-off since their 1962 border war, and Indian and Pakistani troops routinely exchange fatal artillery barrages across the Line of Control that separates Indian- and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir.
Trump insisted that Pakistan must “immediately” change course and stop “harboring criminals and terrorists” in his Monday evening speech outlining plans for a massive US escalation of the Afghan war. Elaborating on this, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told a Tuesday press conference that Washington’s relations with Islamabad will henceforth be determined by whether it heeds US demands on the conduct of the Afghan war. Those who provide “safe haven” for terrorists have been “put on notice,” he declared, “warned (and) forewarned.”
Failure to comply, Tillerson suggested, would cost Islamabad financially and result in a further downgrading in relations, or worse. Asked what specific actions Washington might take against a recalcitrant Pakistan, he said,
“We have some leverage that’s been discussed in terms of the amount of aid and military assistance we give them; their status as a non-NATO alliance partner. All of that can be put on the table.”
Although Tillerson did not mention it, senior Trump administration officials are known to have considered threatening Pakistan with designation as a “state sponsor of terrorism.” Such a designation would automatically entail the loss of all US financial support and scrapping of all US arms sales, and likely lead to the sanctioning of government and military officials.
Lisa Curtis, who last month was named deputy assistant to the president and senior White House director for South and Central Asia, called, in a report issued by the Heritage Foundation last February, for the “terrorist state” designation to be held in reserve for use beyond the Trump administration’s “first year.”
Tillerson also indicated that the US will resume the drone strikes that have killed thousands of Pakistani civilians and terrorized the impoverished population of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The former Exxon CEO refused to directly answer a question at Tuesday’s press conference about the drone strikes, which are a flagrant violation of international law. But in sidestepping the question, he declared,
“We are going to attack terrorists wherever they live.”
The US military-security establishment, along with Democratic and Republican Party leaders, has long blamed the resilience of the Afghan insurgency on Pakistan’s reputed failure to crack down on the Taliban and its allies, especially the Haqqani Network.
The reality is that Washington and its NATO allies are waging a brutal neo-colonial war of occupation, propping up a corrupt and reviled puppet government in Kabul with night raids, drone strikes and other acts of terror.
Consequently, the Taliban, notwithstanding its reactionary Islamist ideology, is able to draw on widespread popular support. Pentagon officials themselves concede that, despite the US spending close to a trillion dollars, losing more than 2,400 troops, and raining death on one of the world’s most impoverished countries for the past 16 years, the Taliban insurgency is the strongest it has been since American forces invaded the country in October 2001.
Mentioned only in passing by Tillerson on Tuesday was the other element in Washington’s double-pronged threat to Pakistan: Trump’s call for India to become more involved in Afghanistan, especially in the provision of economic assistance.
India lost no time in welcoming Trump’s new Afghan war strategy, which includes among its core elements removing all restraints on US commanders targeting civilian areas and otherwise using the US war machine as they see fit.
“We welcome President Trump’s determination to enhance efforts to overcome the challenges facing Afghanistan and confronting issues of safe havens and other forms of cross-border support enjoyed by terrorists,” said an Indian External Affairs Ministry statement.
India’s corporate media has lauded Trump’s endorsement of India in his Afghan speech as a “key security and economic partner” of US imperialism. In an op-ed column titled, “Donald Trump’s Afghanistan policy presents India a chance to increase sphere of influence in South Asia,” Firstpost senior editor Sreemoy Talukdar termed Trump’s Afghan policy a “loud” endorsement—one that has huge implications for India in South Asia, where it jostles for influence with a mercantile China.”
To the dismay of Pakistan’s ruling elite, New Delhi has supplanted Islamabad over the past dozen years as American imperialism’s principal regional ally. With the aim of building up India as a counter-weight to China, Washington has showered India with strategic favours,
Under Narendra Modi and his three year-old Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, the Indo-US strategic alliance has undergone a qualitative transformation. India has parroted Washington’s provocative stances on the South China Sea and North Korea disputes, dramatically increased its military-strategic cooperation with America’s principal Asia-Pacific allies, Japan and Australia, and thrown open its ports and bases to routine use by US warships and fighter jets.
The US establishment, be it National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster and the rest of Trump’s cabal of generals, or the liberals of the New York Times, accuse Islamabad of playing a “double game”—that is, of fighting the Pakistan Taliban and providing logistical support to the US war in Afghanistan, while surreptitiously protecting the Haqqani Network and other elements of the Taliban with close ties to Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.
This is truly a case of the pot calling the kettle black. It was the CIA that instructed the Pakistani ISI in the use of Islamist militia as proxy forces. At America’s behest, Islamabad helped organize and train the Mujihadeen who were used to draw the Soviet Union into the Afghan civil war, then to bleed it militarily for the next decade.
Moreover, the US has repeatedly employed Islamist militia and terror groups, including in regime-change operations in Libya and Syria. And it has done so while cynically claiming they are the target of the “war on terror” that successive US administrations have invoked as the pretext for military interventions in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia and for sweeping attacks on democratic rights at home.
Pakistan’s maintenance of ties with sections of the Taliban is bound up with its strategic aim of securing a major say in any political settlement of the Afghan war and its mounting anxiety over the “global Indo-US strategic alliance.”
For years, Islamabad has been warning Washington that its strategic embrace of India is fueling an arms and nuclear arms race in South Asia and encouraging Indian belligerence. But these warnings have been curtly dismissed. At most, Washington would agree to somewhat curb India’s ambitions in Afghanistan. Now even that is being set aside.
As the US has downgraded its relations with Pakistan, Islamabad has increasingly turned to its “all-weather friend,” China, to offset Indian pressure. Beijing, for its part, long sought to woo New Delhi with offers of investment, including a leading role in its One Belt-One Road Eurasian infrastructure-building scheme. But with India under Modi emerging as a frontline state in Washington’s military-strategic offensive against China, Beijing’s stance has changed markedly.
Over the past two months, Chinese government officials and the state-owned media have repeatedly threatened India with a border war unless it withdraws its troops from a remote Himalayan ridge, long under Beijing’s control but also claimed by Bhutan.
Underscoring the extent to which the US drive to harness India to its war drive against China has drawn South Asia into the maelstrom of great power conflict and is polarizing the region along India-US versus China-Pakistan lines, Beijing has given Islamabad a strong show of support in the wake of Trump’s Afghan war speech.
First, a Chinese Foreign Ministry representative came to Pakistan’s defence, saying the country had made “great sacrifices” and “important contributions” to the fight against terrorism. Then, the Chinese foreign minister, who was already in Pakistan on a previously scheduled visit, agreed in meetings with the Pakistani leadership to “maintain the momentum” of high level military-security and economic cooperation. This is to include Beijing and Islamabad enhancing policy coordination in the “emerging global and regional situation” and pressing forward with the development of the $50 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor.
Russia has also made clear its opposition to Washington’s plans to intensify the Afghan War and bully Pakistan. Russia’s presidential envoy to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, said Tuesday,
“Putting pressure [on Pakistan] may seriously destabilize the region-wide security situation and result in negative consequences for Afghanistan.”
Traditionally, Russia has enjoyed very close relations with India. But New Delhi’s alignment with Washington is placing the Indo-Russian strategic partnership under severe strain.
August 24th, 2017 by Keith Jones
US government officials have begun to spell out the meaning of Trump’s threat to punish Pakistan if it does not suppress Afghan insurgents operating from its border regions. These punishments include not just cuts to aid and payments for services rendered in fighting the Afghan war, but also encouraging India, Pakistan’s arch-rival, to play a larger role in Afghanistan, and a more pro-Indian stance on the seven-decade-old Kashmir dispute.
India has repeatedly boasted of its readiness to mount military raids inside Pakistan, even if they risk provoking all-out war between South Asia’s rival nuclear powers.
Rattled by Washington’s threats, Islamabad has turned to Beijing for support, further heightening tensions in a region where India and China are engaged in their most serious border stand-off since their 1962 border war, and Indian and Pakistani troops routinely exchange fatal artillery barrages across the Line of Control that separates Indian- and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir.
Trump insisted that Pakistan must “immediately” change course and stop “harboring criminals and terrorists” in his Monday evening speech outlining plans for a massive US escalation of the Afghan war. Elaborating on this, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told a Tuesday press conference that Washington’s relations with Islamabad will henceforth be determined by whether it heeds US demands on the conduct of the Afghan war. Those who provide “safe haven” for terrorists have been “put on notice,” he declared, “warned (and) forewarned.”
Failure to comply, Tillerson suggested, would cost Islamabad financially and result in a further downgrading in relations, or worse. Asked what specific actions Washington might take against a recalcitrant Pakistan, he said,
“We have some leverage that’s been discussed in terms of the amount of aid and military assistance we give them; their status as a non-NATO alliance partner. All of that can be put on the table.”
Although Tillerson did not mention it, senior Trump administration officials are known to have considered threatening Pakistan with designation as a “state sponsor of terrorism.” Such a designation would automatically entail the loss of all US financial support and scrapping of all US arms sales, and likely lead to the sanctioning of government and military officials.
Lisa Curtis, who last month was named deputy assistant to the president and senior White House director for South and Central Asia, called, in a report issued by the Heritage Foundation last February, for the “terrorist state” designation to be held in reserve for use beyond the Trump administration’s “first year.”
Tillerson also indicated that the US will resume the drone strikes that have killed thousands of Pakistani civilians and terrorized the impoverished population of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The former Exxon CEO refused to directly answer a question at Tuesday’s press conference about the drone strikes, which are a flagrant violation of international law. But in sidestepping the question, he declared,
“We are going to attack terrorists wherever they live.”
The US military-security establishment, along with Democratic and Republican Party leaders, has long blamed the resilience of the Afghan insurgency on Pakistan’s reputed failure to crack down on the Taliban and its allies, especially the Haqqani Network.
The reality is that Washington and its NATO allies are waging a brutal neo-colonial war of occupation, propping up a corrupt and reviled puppet government in Kabul with night raids, drone strikes and other acts of terror.
Consequently, the Taliban, notwithstanding its reactionary Islamist ideology, is able to draw on widespread popular support. Pentagon officials themselves concede that, despite the US spending close to a trillion dollars, losing more than 2,400 troops, and raining death on one of the world’s most impoverished countries for the past 16 years, the Taliban insurgency is the strongest it has been since American forces invaded the country in October 2001.
Mentioned only in passing by Tillerson on Tuesday was the other element in Washington’s double-pronged threat to Pakistan: Trump’s call for India to become more involved in Afghanistan, especially in the provision of economic assistance.
India lost no time in welcoming Trump’s new Afghan war strategy, which includes among its core elements removing all restraints on US commanders targeting civilian areas and otherwise using the US war machine as they see fit.
“We welcome President Trump’s determination to enhance efforts to overcome the challenges facing Afghanistan and confronting issues of safe havens and other forms of cross-border support enjoyed by terrorists,” said an Indian External Affairs Ministry statement.
India’s corporate media has lauded Trump’s endorsement of India in his Afghan speech as a “key security and economic partner” of US imperialism. In an op-ed column titled, “Donald Trump’s Afghanistan policy presents India a chance to increase sphere of influence in South Asia,” Firstpost senior editor Sreemoy Talukdar termed Trump’s Afghan policy a “loud” endorsement—one that has huge implications for India in South Asia, where it jostles for influence with a mercantile China.”
To the dismay of Pakistan’s ruling elite, New Delhi has supplanted Islamabad over the past dozen years as American imperialism’s principal regional ally. With the aim of building up India as a counter-weight to China, Washington has showered India with strategic favours,
Under Narendra Modi and his three year-old Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, the Indo-US strategic alliance has undergone a qualitative transformation. India has parroted Washington’s provocative stances on the South China Sea and North Korea disputes, dramatically increased its military-strategic cooperation with America’s principal Asia-Pacific allies, Japan and Australia, and thrown open its ports and bases to routine use by US warships and fighter jets.
The US establishment, be it National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster and the rest of Trump’s cabal of generals, or the liberals of the New York Times, accuse Islamabad of playing a “double game”—that is, of fighting the Pakistan Taliban and providing logistical support to the US war in Afghanistan, while surreptitiously protecting the Haqqani Network and other elements of the Taliban with close ties to Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.
This is truly a case of the pot calling the kettle black. It was the CIA that instructed the Pakistani ISI in the use of Islamist militia as proxy forces. At America’s behest, Islamabad helped organize and train the Mujihadeen who were used to draw the Soviet Union into the Afghan civil war, then to bleed it militarily for the next decade.
Moreover, the US has repeatedly employed Islamist militia and terror groups, including in regime-change operations in Libya and Syria. And it has done so while cynically claiming they are the target of the “war on terror” that successive US administrations have invoked as the pretext for military interventions in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia and for sweeping attacks on democratic rights at home.
Pakistan’s maintenance of ties with sections of the Taliban is bound up with its strategic aim of securing a major say in any political settlement of the Afghan war and its mounting anxiety over the “global Indo-US strategic alliance.”
For years, Islamabad has been warning Washington that its strategic embrace of India is fueling an arms and nuclear arms race in South Asia and encouraging Indian belligerence. But these warnings have been curtly dismissed. At most, Washington would agree to somewhat curb India’s ambitions in Afghanistan. Now even that is being set aside.
As the US has downgraded its relations with Pakistan, Islamabad has increasingly turned to its “all-weather friend,” China, to offset Indian pressure. Beijing, for its part, long sought to woo New Delhi with offers of investment, including a leading role in its One Belt-One Road Eurasian infrastructure-building scheme. But with India under Modi emerging as a frontline state in Washington’s military-strategic offensive against China, Beijing’s stance has changed markedly.
Over the past two months, Chinese government officials and the state-owned media have repeatedly threatened India with a border war unless it withdraws its troops from a remote Himalayan ridge, long under Beijing’s control but also claimed by Bhutan.
Underscoring the extent to which the US drive to harness India to its war drive against China has drawn South Asia into the maelstrom of great power conflict and is polarizing the region along India-US versus China-Pakistan lines, Beijing has given Islamabad a strong show of support in the wake of Trump’s Afghan war speech.
First, a Chinese Foreign Ministry representative came to Pakistan’s defence, saying the country had made “great sacrifices” and “important contributions” to the fight against terrorism. Then, the Chinese foreign minister, who was already in Pakistan on a previously scheduled visit, agreed in meetings with the Pakistani leadership to “maintain the momentum” of high level military-security and economic cooperation. This is to include Beijing and Islamabad enhancing policy coordination in the “emerging global and regional situation” and pressing forward with the development of the $50 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor.
Russia has also made clear its opposition to Washington’s plans to intensify the Afghan War and bully Pakistan. Russia’s presidential envoy to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, said Tuesday,
“Putting pressure [on Pakistan] may seriously destabilize the region-wide security situation and result in negative consequences for Afghanistan.”
Traditionally, Russia has enjoyed very close relations with India. But New Delhi’s alignment with Washington is placing the Indo-Russian strategic partnership under severe strain.
August 24th, 2017 by Eva Bartlett
In early 2016 the hillside town of Madaya, just northwest of Damascus, was the focus of sudden Western and Gulf media campaigns featuring harrowing photos of emaciated elderly and children splashed widely across print, online and social media. Throughout 2016, these stories continued in Madaya, as well as in al-Waer, Homs, and in eastern-Aleppo areas.
The Syrian government was accused of not allowing in food and medical aid, of deliberately starving its people; the terrorists’ presence was largely unmentioned. On Madaya, The Telegraph ran a headline, “Starving Syrians in besieged town of Madaya are reduced to eating cats and dogs,” and subheadline, “The people of Madaya outside Damascus – besieged by regime forces and Hezbollah since July – are surviving on boiled leaves and street animals,” with no mention of al-Qaeda or Ahrar al-Sham.
The Independent accused the “Assad regime” of deliberately starving 40,000 civilians and, while citing the Red Cross in the article, neglected to cite that organization stating it had sent in food aid in October 2015, and also failed to mention al-Qaeda’s presence in the town. In the same vein, the New York Times ran a piece stating aid was denied from coming in, while also ignoring the realities on the ground and prior aid deliveries.
On Aleppo, corporate media extended the blame to Russia. The Independent published “Russia and Assad regime accused of ‘starving’ Aleppo,” in early 2016, and in a July article fear-mongered about starvation after the Syrian army secured a key road which had connected Turkey to al-Qaeda in Syria and other extremists occupying areas of Aleppo. In November, The Independent reported that “a quarter of a million people in rebel-held east Aleppo will starve unless aid is allowed into besieged areas,” ignoring that aid had been sent in numerous times prior, also ignoring that the al-Nusra-led coalition, Jaysh al-Fatah, had in mid-September rejected further aid coming into eastern Aleppo.
Completely unmentioned was the terrorists’ hoarding of food and medicines, occupation of hospitals and schools, and trying of civilians in Sharia courts resulting in jailing (usually in underground prisons with tight solitary confinement cells) and/or execution, among other heinous crimes.
Throughout 2016 Aleppo and the district of al-Waer, Homs, were the subject of the same claims, with even more propaganda and slick media campaigns the intent of which was to vilify those fighting the terrorists dubbed “rebels” by the Western media.
Filed from abroad—or even as close as Lebanon or Turkey—such reports relied on unnamed sources, “‘activists” who themselves often had ties to terrorist factions, and the Western-funded, terrorist-affiliated, White Helmets — a group that acclaimed journalist John Pilger recently denounced as a propaganda construct, which has received US$23 million from the US government alone.
Some of the those called “rebels” were members of Ahrar al-Sham (listed as a terrorist group in US Congressional documents), Nour el-Din el-Zenki (known for their beheading of a Palestinian youth in mid-2016), and even, unbelievably, al-Qaeda in Syria—Jabhat al-Nusra (rebranded as Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, and now Hayat Tahrir al-Sham).
The US “Syrian Train and Equip Program” saw $500 million approved in 2014 for training “Syrian rebels.” Shortly after the US-trained Division 30 “Syrian rebels” entered Syria in mid-2015, their commander (and presumably all of the weapons the US had provided) was taken by al-Nusra.
A November 2014 Newsweek article cites former CIA operative Patrick Skinner, who stated:
“The main problem with plans that arm and train the ‘moderates’—who ominously are moderate only in their fighting abilities– … is that it assumes perfect knowledge, or ‘good enough’ knowledge, about the people being armed. When in fact there is nothing close to that.… The background info on these fighters is next to nothing and misleading, especially in Syria, where we don’t have a liaison relationship, and so the vast majority of even check-the-box vetting is by third parties [who are] out-of-the-country players with a stake in the game.”
Indeed, the US support has included more than mere training. It has also encompassed the supply of TOW missiles to some “opposition” groups, and the turning a blind eye to Saudi supplying of many more armed groups with these missiles.
A June 2016 article on Medium.com outlined the different factions possessing TOWs, and noted:
“Northern Thunder Brigade appears to be the most recent TOW supplied group, and is a special case as this group is part of a new wave of North Aleppo Vetted Syrian Opposition [VSO] who have been trained and equipped in part by the US Department of Defense [DoD].
Important to keep in mind, other TOW groups have historically liaised with the CIA in terms of US agencies under the covert “Timber Sycamore” program, and this CIA/DoD lack of coordination and differing outlook is a major complicating factor with regards to foreign backing of the Syrian Opposition and the associated TOW program.”
Since the liberation of Aleppo, and the restoring of peace to Madaya and al-Waer, most Western media have gone silent on the areas, even though it is now possible to visit all of them and hear from civilians who lived under the rule of what the West deemed “moderate rebels.”
That is what I did again in June 2017.
East Aleppo starved and trapped by the Syrian government?
I first went to Aleppo in July 2016, returning there in August and twice more in November. What I learned and experienced there was almost completely absent in Western media reports, which ignored Aleppo’s over 1.5 million civilian population and ignored the terrorists’ sniping and bombing of civilians. By the end of 2016, nearly 11,000 civilians in Aleppo had been killed by these attacks.
Instead, Western corporate media focused almost exclusively on areas occupied by al-Qaeda and other extremists but usually disregarding their presence while spinning war propaganda against the Syrian government.
In November 2016, while I was standing on the Castello Road humanitarian crossing, two mortars hit nearby, the closest within 100 meters. They originated from areas west of the crossing occupied by militants of the Jaysh al-Fatah coalition, which included al-Qaeda in Syria, Ahrar al-Sham, and others. This was not the first time that armed groups attacked crossings, preventing civilians from leaving.
Roughly a week later, in a school sheltering internal refugees, I met a family from the eastern Halloq district who had fled their area in late October, along with over 40 others. The father said that on two prior occasions he had been arrested and beaten by terrorists when he tried to flee.
“In the beginning, they beat us and imprisoned me,” he said of a short period of imprisonment.
According to him, people trying to flee would be punished, but not necessarily with long-term imprisonment.
He spoke of militants hoarding and controlling the food, forcing women to cover themselves head to foot, and attempting to intimidate civilians from fleeing by telling them the Syrian army would rape their women and murder the men.
Footage again emerged of civilians coming under fire from militants while escaping to greater Aleppo.
Some weeks later, Aleppo was secured, and the testimonies of horrors under ‘rebel’ rule were heard, including the accounts of civilians who blamed the ‘rebels’ for their suffering and hunger. Western media spun the liberation of Aleppo from terrorists as the city having “fallen.” The jubilation of Syrians in Aleppo directly contradicted this lie.
The state Eye and Children’s Hospitals, in the eastern district of Shaar, were militarized by terrorists of Tawhid Brigade, as well as by al-Qaeda in Syria and ISIS. In the bowels of the hospital, when I visited in June 2017, I saw remnants of food and medical aid — sent from Gulf states, Turkey, America, and various organizations — controlled and hoarded by terrorists.
Terrorists’ Sharia Court and prison in hospital complex
A building in the Eye Hospital complex which was used by the Liwa Tawhid brigade as a headquarters, Aleppo Syria, June, 2017. (Eva Bartlett/MinPress News)
In November 2016, descending several levels underground in an area of Lairamoun that had been controlled by the CIA armed and funded Free Syrian Army’s 16th Brigade, I saw the rooms that had been used as prisons by the FSA, as well as narrow, concrete and metal solitary-confinement cells.
This June, in the Eye Hospital complex, I passed a building marked as the headquarters of the Tawhid Brigade, and a building marked on an outside wall with the writing, “The Sharia court in Aleppo and its countryside,” before entering and descending to another underground prison.
It contained the same tight solitary confinement cells as in Lairamoun, as well as many dank, windowless, concrete rooms serving as mass cells for the unfortunate Aleppo residents imprisoned by the terrorists.
A heavy steel door grants access to a solitary confinement cell in the makeshift underground prison in the Eye Hospital complex, Aleppo Syria, June, 2017. (Eva Bartlett/MintPress News)
Many of the cement room-cells contained religious texts, in boxes and plastic crates, and on the main level two rooms had been used as classrooms, segregated by sex, for teaching the extremists’ beliefs to Aleppo’s mostly-Sunni Muslims.
Prisoners’ writings, with dates, on the walls showed that at least some of them were held in this dungeon for over a year. The fate of some prisoners was execution, depending on the perverted rulings of terrorist judges.
Western media played down the militarization of hospitals in Aleppo by al-Qaeda affiliates.
Independent British journalist Vanessa Beeley visited the hospital complex-turned-prison in April 2017 and interviewed a man who had been imprisoned for seven weeks by Jabhat al-Shamiya (the Levant Front coalition of al-Qaeda and Salafi terrorists) because he talked about how bad conditions were in East Aleppo, under the terrorists.
Beeley told me some of what the man, Ahmad Aldayh, a shopkeeper, had told her:
“I was eyewitness to one execution: A young man, the only child in his family, was arrested because the terrorists found on his mobile phone a photo of his friend holding the Syrian flag. They tortured him for more than four hours and then executed him.
We were all treated very badly. One woman begged three times for food and said she was starving. The warden ordered the prison guards to torture her for three hours as punishment for complaining. Just before the SAA fully liberated the area and the Eye Hospital on the 4th December 2016, 22 other prisoners were executed. They were all shot. They were also about to throw another prisoner off the roof of the building but the SAA advance was so fast they fled without killing him.”
Looking at just one example of the kind of propaganda coming from Western and Gulf media on Aleppo, a Newsweek article by Lucy Westcott, comparing Madaya with Aleppo, lamented what it said were 250,000 people besieged in Aleppo, while also lamenting the Children’s Hospital “irreparably damaged by bombs dropped by the Syrian government last week, according to residents and medical workers…”
But neither Westcott nor any of her colleagues could verify the reported 250,000 number. In the end, 110,000 civilians registered at the Jibreen Registration center; another estimated 10 percent might have gone straight to stay with family instead; and according to the Red Cross, 35,000 people (“fighters” and their family members) were evacuated out of Aleppo. The total number was thus at most 150,000, most likely significantly lower.
Westcott also failed to mention the militarization of the Eye and Children’s Hospitals, let alone the below-ground dungeons for imprisoning civilians. She decried the use of siege, a common tactic of wars past, and one which America employed in Iraq (for example the over 4-year siege of Sadr city), and whitewashed the crimes of al-Qaeda and partners in Aleppo.
A room used to imprison tens of civilians in the underground prison in the Eye Hospital complex, Aleppo Syria, June, 2017. (Eva Bartlett/MintPress News)
The Syrian Ambassador to the UN, Bashar al-Ja’afari, in mid-January 2016, stated:
“The reality of the so-called besieged, hard-to-reach areas is that some of those areas are controlled by terrorist groups who are using civilians as human shields, and other areas are besieged from the terrorist groups who are preventing the delivery of humanitarian assistance”
Meaning that the terrorist armed groups are two categories. One category is exerting, besieging on the civilians from within inside. And the other category is exerting, besieging from outside.
In Kafraya and al-Foua, the terrorists are besieging the two towns from outside, surrounding the two towns, in Idlib.
But in Madaya and al-Zabadani, the terrorists are inside. So they are using the civilians as human shields while they are inside.”
This applied to Aleppo and al-Waer, among other areas, as well.
MSF’s “destroyed” Quds hospital?
The April 28, 2016 edition of the Washington Post.
In April 2016, media, in chorus, reported that the Syrians or Russians had “destroyed” the Quds hospital in Sukkari, eastern Aleppo. The source of this claim was Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), which reported:
“According to hospital staff on the ground, the hospital was destroyed by at least one airstrike which directly hit the building, reducing it to rubble.”
The lie was repeated, including in this Washington Post report:
“Airstrikes Wednesday night collapsed a hospital supported by Doctors Without Borders and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).”
Yet, in June 2017, I stood inside the intact Quds hospital, which had not been reduced “to rubble” as MSF had claimed. It is not plausible that the building was “destroyed” and then rebuilt while eastern areas of Aleppo were under military siege.
On one ground floor wall inside the building, I saw a poster with the logo of an association (WATAN) backed by the Norwegian Aid Committee (NORWAC) in the colors of the Free Syrian Army logo. Next to it, a poster of another NORWAC-supported association, Khayr.
Inside the al-Quds hospital, two Norwegian-supported associations which offer support solely to al-Qaeda and affiliates’ occupied areas of Syria. (Eva Bartlett/MintPress News)
NORWAC openly declares its support of the two organizations that are based solely in areas controlled by al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. WATAN’s lofty self-description includes being a “nonpolitical and nonsectarian organization” and having the mission to develop “a sustainable, healthy and educated community, based on inclusive society that positively engages, supports and improves the lives of each individual, regardless of their gender, faith or ethnicity.” The fact, however, that they work with al-Qaeda and other extremist Islamists, which actively attack people of non-Muslim faith and oppress women, speaks the less lofty truth about WATAN’s concern for Syrians.
In November 2014, an article in Norwegian media revealed that ISIS had taken over the area (Tel Abyad) where since 2013 NORWAC had supported a hospital, providing 250,000 kroner a month to hospital staff. Soon after, another article noted the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ decision to cut support to the hospital, as ISIS had control of the area and its members were being treated in the hospital. The article noted that NORWAC regretted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ decision to halt support to the hospital, as “this could have an impact on the Syrian civilians who use the hospital.”
It is incredible that NORWAC was willing to keep supporting an ISIS-controlled hospital, and it is further beyond credibility that NORWAC was not aware that the two organizations—Khayr and WATAN—which they supported in al-Qaeda occupied eastern Aleppo, were actually working with, and perhaps included, terrorists.
When journalist Vanessa Beeley visited the premises in late December 2016, she documented the same intact state of the building, fortified with sandbagging around doors and windows, just as terrorists’ military headquarters had been.
Watch Vanessa Beeley’s footage of the purportedly destroyed Quds hospital in Aleppo:
Ambulance boy, saved by White Helmets after airstrike?
Mohammed Daqneesh displays a photo of his 11 year old son who died due to injuries sustained the same day that Omran, known as the Aleppo boy) was mildly wounded, a fact the much of the media missed. Aleppo, Syria, June 6, 2017 (Photo: Danny Makki/MintPress News
In August 2016, the face of Omran Daqneesh was splashed across corporate media, which vilified Syria and Russia for his presumed grave injuries.
In June 2017, I met the boy and his father, who gave me an account very different from that which Western media had spun. Omran was only lightly injured, his father Mohammad said, and not by an airstrike. The father never authorized the famous photo of the boy to be taken and refused any further exploitation of his son.
The White Helmets, Mohammad Daqneesh said, had not ‘rescued’ his son, they had taken him for a photo op, exploited his image and name, and harassed Mohammad himself with attempted bribes and then threats.
Seven-year-old girl tweeting for peace?
7 year-old Bana Alabed has amassed 359,000 social media followers. With her exceptional use of English and intriciate knowledge of social media, many observers believe Bana is being used a tool to garner support for the Syrian opposition. (Photo: Twitter screenshot)
In July 2017, Syrian journalist Khaled Iskef broke the real story on the most famous 7-year-old girl on Twitter, Bana al-Abed, who tweets in perfect English but could barely put a sentence in English together during interviews. Visiting her neighborhood and indeed her home, Iskef revealed that Bana’s father Ghassan was a terrorist and military trainer of the Sawfa Brigade faction; that he was a judge in the terrorist’s Shariah Council in the same Eye Hospital about which western media reported so misleadingly; and that the family lives surrounded by the hub of al-Qaeda headquarters — about which they never spoke.
Although Iskef, whom I met in Aleppo this June, has published a number of videos on his investigations, and willingly replied to my follow-up questions regarding Bana, none of the Western journalists who were so fervently endorsing the Bana narrative has bothered to contact Iskef about his on-the-ground revelations.
Based on his documentation and our follow-up conversations, I wrote:
“Ghassan’s father, Mohammed al-Abed, was a known arms dealer and had a weapons maintenance shop in Sha’ar, servicing light to heavy weapons for terrorist factions. The al-Abed weapons shop was opposite a school-turned-headquarters for al-Nusra.”
Something all of those corporate journalists crying over the Bana stories might have been interested in, no?
In his second video, Iskef revealed that in the exploitation of Bana al-Abed, the girl was made to speak in a video made just meters from the main al-Qaeda headquarters in Aleppo, near which ordinary civilians were forbidden from filming, much less hanging around.
“They are criminals, terrorists”
The owner of small hardware shop in eastern district Bab al-Hadid, The shop owner, who wished to remain anonymous, said he fled life under the rule of Syria’s rebels groups, returning only the government restored the rule of law in the area. (Eva Bartlett/MintPress News)
When in the eastern district Bab al-Hadid in June 2017, I interviewed a man in his small hardware shop who spoke of what the West deemed “rebels”:
“They are criminals! They call themselves ‘rebels’, but actually they are all terrorists, with no exceptions. They’re all the same but with different names. ISIS is like Nusra, Nusra are like the FSA, the FSA are like ISIS.”
When armed groups arrived in his area, the man stayed for one month, then left, taking his family to the government-secured area of Hamdaniya, which he described as “one of the most dangerous areas. We were targeted the most with missiles, mortars and Hell Cannons.”
Following the liberation of Aleppo, like so many others, he came home.
“Wherever the army is, there is safety,” he told me. “Life is back, we’re safe again. We used to fear for the safety of our children when they were going to school or going to relatives.”
Down the street from the small shop, in the courtyard outside of a mosque, a group of Aleppo youths were preparing Ramadan meals for the district’s poorest, part of the Saaed Association’s “Break the Hunger” campaign which began in Damascus years ago.
One volunteer explained to me that they chose to cook and serve the food in the Bab al-Hadid district of Aleppo, “an area that was filled with fear and destruction,” to say that there is still life and hope there.
An August 11 press release by the International Organization For Migration (IOM) noted that over 602,000 displaced Syrians had returned home in 2017. The IOM press release reported that “half of all returns in 2016 were to Aleppo Governorate,” with the city of Aleppo receiving the most returnees.
There is still time for the countless corporate media journalists who lied and propagandized to apologize and admit their guilt, or perhaps pretend innocence but at least admit being wrong — even to go to Aleppo anew (or for the first time) and listen to the living witnesses of the events they falsely reported. But they won’t. Those stories are old, and now these same journalists are busy propagating or fabricating new ones. In doing so, they are guilty of some of the worst war propaganda in history.
Part Two will examine the realities of the Madaya and al-Waer occupations and return to security when the “moderate rebels” were evacuated or granted amnesty through the reconciliation process.
August 24th, 2017 by Center For Biological Diversity
Featured image: Greater Sage Grouse (Source: Bureau of Land Management via Wikimedia Commons)
The Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club lodged formal comments with the federal government Monday opposing a massive gas fracking project that spans 220 square miles of public land in Wyoming south of Yellowstone National Park.
The Normally Pressured Lance gas field would destroy wildlife habitat and worsen ozone pollution, a major cause of childhood asthma, in areas already suffering from extreme air pollution.
“This enormous project will be a disaster for wildlife, people and the planet,” said Diana Dascalu-Joffe, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. “It will decimate habitat for animals that are already struggling and further foul the air in communities already suffering with pollution from drilling and fracking. And it locks us into decades more fossil fuel dependence, which will only worsen the climate crisis.”
In their comments to the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Monday, the groups said the project would destroy key wildlife habitat for greater sage grouse, pronghorn and mule deer by allowing 3,500 new gas wells, roads and other infrastructure. If approved by BLM, drilling in the 140,000-acre gas field could begin next year.
Fracking in sagebrush habitats will reduce already dwindling mule deer populations in the region. Mule deer avoid gas wells and infrastructure, which fragments and shrinks their habitat. Research shows that development of the Pinedale fracking field decimated migration routes and winter habitat, reducing mule deer populations by more than a third.
“This massive drilling project could well be the final nail in the coffin for Wyoming’s historic migrations of pronghorn and mule deer, and it puts some of the largest sage grouse concentration areas in the West in serious jeopardy if it moves forward,” said Bonnie Rice, senior representative with Sierra Club’s Our Wild America campaign. “Drilling thousands of new wells will not only have devastating impacts on wildlife, but on local communities which already have serious air quality problems from existing oil and gas development.”
Jonah Energy’s plan would also drill extensively in winter habitat critical for the survival of greater sage grouse populations. That’s despite substantial evidence that shows drilling within 1.75 miles of winter habitat will cause sage grouse to abandon the area.
Drilling would worsen ozone pollution in the upper Green River basin, where winter ozone levels already exceed federal health standards. The project would produce up to 440 million tons of equivalent carbon dioxide pollution. This would account for more than 1 percent of the entire remaining U.S. carbon budget needed to have a 50 percent chance of returning global average temperature rise to 1.5°C by 2100.
August 24th, 2017 by Colin Todhunter
In their rush to readily promote neoliberal dogma and corporate-inspired PR, many government officials, scientists and journalists take as given that profit-driven transnational corporations have a legitimate claim to be custodians of natural assets. There is the premise that water, food, soil and agriculture should be handed over to powerful and wholly corrupt transnational corporations to milk for profit, under the pretence these entities are somehow serving the needs of humanity.
These natural assets (‘the commons’) belong to everyone and any stewardship should be carried out in the common interest by local people assisted by public institutions and governments acting on their behalf, not by private transnational corporations driven by self interest and the maximization of profit by any means possible.
Concerns about what is in the public interest or what is best for the environment lie beyond the scope of hard-headed commercial interests and should ideally be the remit of elected governments and civil organisations. However, the best-case scenario for private corporations is to have supine, co-opted agencies or governments. And if the current litigation cases in the US and the ‘Monsanto Papers’ court documents tell us anything, this is exactly what they set out to create.
Of course, we have known how corporations like Monsanto (and Bayer) have operated for many years, whether it is by bribery, smear campaigns, faking data, co-opting agencies and key figures, subverting science or any of the other actions or human rights abuses that the Monsanto Tribunal has shed light on.
Behind the public relations spin of helping to feed the world is the roll-out of an unsustainable model of agriculture based on highly profitable (GM) corporate seeds and massive money-spinning health- and environment-damaging proprietary chemical inputs that we now know lacked proper regulatory scrutiny and should never have been commercialised in the first place. In effect, transnational agribusiness companies have sought to marginalise alternative approaches to farming and create dependency on their products.
Localisation and traditional methods of food production have given way to globalised supply chains dominated by transnational companies policies and actions which have resulted in the destruction of habitat and livelihoods and the imposition of corporate-controlled, chemical-intensive (monocrop) agriculture that weds farmers and regions to a wholly exploitative system of neoliberal globalization. Whether it involves the undermining or destruction of what were once largely self-sufficient agrarian economies in Africa or the devastating impacts of soy cultivation in Argentina or palm oil production in Indonesia, transnational agribusiness and capitalism cannot be greenwashed.
Soil on a doughnut diet
One of the greatest natural assets that humankind has is soil. It can take 500 years to generate an inch of soil yet just a few generations to destroy. When you drench soil with proprietary synthetic chemicals, introduce company-patented genetically tampered crops or continuously monocrop as part of a corporate-controlled industrial farming system, you kill essential microbes, upset soil balance and end up feeding soil a limited “doughnut diet” of unhealthy inputs (and you also undermine soil’s unique capacity for carbon storage and its potential role in combatting climate change).
Armed with their synthetic biocides, this is what the transnational agritech companies do. In their arrogance (and ignorance), these companies claim to know what they are doing and attempt to get the public and various agencies to bow before the altar of corporate ‘science’ and its scientific priesthood.
But in reality, they have no real idea about the long-term impacts their actions have had on soil and its complex networks of microbes and microbiological processes. Soil microbiologists are themselves still trying to comprehend it all.
That much is clear in this article, where Brian Barth discusses a report by the American Society of Microbiologists (ASM). Acknowledging that farmers will need to produce 70 to 100 per cent more food to feed a projected nine billion humans by 2050, the introduction to the report states:
“Producing more food with fewer resources may seem too good to be true, but the world’s farmers have trillions of potential partners that can help achieve that ambitious goal. Those partners are microbes.”
Linda Kinkel of the University of Minnesota’s Department of Plant Pathology is reported by Barth as saying:
“We understand only a fraction of what microbes do to aid in plant growth.”
Microbes can help plants better tolerate extreme temperature fluctuations, saline soils and other challenges associated with climate change. For instance, Barth reports that microbiologists have learned to propagate a fungus that colonizes cassava plants and increases yields by up to 20 per cent. Its tiny tentacles extend far beyond the roots of the cassava to unlock phosphorus, nitrogen and sulphur in the soil and siphon it back to their host.
According to the article, a group of microbiologists have challenged themselves to bring about a 20 per cent increase in global food production and a 20 per cent decrease in fertilizer and pesticide use over the next 20 years – without all the snake oil-vending agribusiness interests in the middle.
Feeding the world?
These microbiologists are correct. What is required is a shift away from what is increasingly regarded as discredited ‘green revolution’ ideology. The chemical-intensive green revolution has helped the drive towards greater monocropping and has resulted in less diverse diets and less nutritious foods. Its long-term impact has led to soil degradation and mineral imbalances, which in turn have adversely affected human health (see this report on India by botanist Stuart Newton – p.9 onward).
Adding weight to this argument, the authors of this paper from the International Journal of Environmental and Rural Development state (references in article):
“Cropping systems promoted by the green revolution have increased the food production but also resulted in reduced food-crop diversity and decreased availability of micronutrients. Micronutrient malnutrition is causing increased rates of chronic diseases (cancer, heart diseases, stroke, diabetes and osteoporosis) in many developing nations; more than 3 billion people are directly affected by the micronutrient deficiencies. Unbalanced use of mineral fertilizers and a decrease in the use of organic manure are the main causes of the nutrient deficiency in the regions where the cropping intensity is high.”
(Note: we should adopt a cautious approach when attributing increases in food production to the green revolution technology/practices).
The authors imply that the link between micronutrient deficiency in soil and human nutrition is increasingly regarded as important:
“Moreover, agricultural intensification requires an increased nutrient flow towards and greater uptake of nutrients by crops. Until now, micronutrient deficiency has mostly been addressed as a soil and, to a smaller extent, plant problem. Currently, it is being addressed as a human nutrition problem as well. Increasingly, soils and food systems are affected by micronutrients disorders, leading to reduced crop production and malnutrition and diseases in humans and plants. Conventionally, agriculture is taken as a food-production discipline and was considered a source of human nutrition; hence, in recent years many efforts have been made to improve the quality of food for the growing world population, particularly in the developing nations.”
Referring to India, Stuart Newton states:
“The answers to Indian agricultural productivity is not that of embracing the international, monopolistic, corporate-conglomerate promotion of chemically-dependent GM crops… India has to restore and nurture her depleted, abused soils and not harm them any further, with dubious chemical overload, which are endangering human and animal health.” (p24).
Newton provides insight into the importance of soils and their mineral compositions and links their depletion to the green revolution. In turn, these depleted soils cannot help but lead to mass malnourishment. This is quite revealing given that proponents of the green revolution claim it helped reduced malnutrition.
And Newton has a valid point. India is losing 5,334 million tonnes of soil every year due to soil erosion, much of which is attributed to the indiscreet and excessive use of fertilisers, insecticides and pesticides. The Indian Council of Agricultural Research reports that soil is become deficient in nutrients and fertility.
The US has possibly 60 years of farming left due to soil degradation. The UK has possibly 100 harvests left in its soils.
We can carry on down the route of chemical-intensive (and soil-suffocating, nutritionally inferior GM crops), poisonous agriculture, where our health, soil and the wider environment from Punjab to the Gulf of Mexico continue to be sacrificed on the altar of corporate profit. Or we can shift to organic farming and agroecology and investment in indigenous models of agriculture as advocated by various high-level agencies and reports.
The increasingly globalised industrial food system that transnational agribusiness promotes is not feeding the world and is also responsible for some of the planet’s most pressing political, social and environmental crises – not least hunger and poverty. This system, the capitalism underpinning it and the corporations that fuel and profit from it are illegitimate and destructive.
These companies quite naturally roll-out their endless spin that we can’t afford to live without them. But we can no longer afford to live with them. As the UN’s special rapporteur on the right to food Hilal Elver says:
“The power of the corporations over governments and over the scientific community is extremely important. If you want to deal with pesticides, you have to deal with the companies.”
As we currently see, part of ‘dealing’ with these corporations (and hopefully eventually their board members and those who masquerade as public servants but who act on their behalf) should involve the law courts.
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