Germany has just warned its citizens of an upcoming catastrophe and urged them to stockpile food, water and money for at least 10 days, to be autonomous and independent until the government has caught up putting the necessary public safety systems in place – in case of a ‘catastrophe’. There was no mention on the type of disaster awaiting them. A war, an economic and or monetary collapse, or both? – The warning was later downplayed as part of a ‘routine exercise’ in Germany’s new defense strategy.

On a related note, against many Members of Parliament and several ministers, the German Bundeswehr (army) has declared Russia as an enemy nation. This is akin to a declaration of war. The head of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Russian State Duma, Alexei Puschkow, has posted the Twitter message:

‘The decision of the German government declaring Russia to be an enemy shows Merkel’s subservience to the Obama administration.’

The idea of the German warning is to scare people. People who are afraid can be easily manipulated. While buying supermarkets’ shelves empty, they will ask for more police and military protection. That’s precisely what Washington and the EU want – a militarization of Europe. Germany, being Obama’s chief vassal, is the mouthpiece for the rest of Europe. At the same time, this scare tactic is an indirect warning of a threat of aggression from Russia. The past weeks of western lie-propaganda have shown Russia’s protection of Crimea with heavy maneuvers in the Black Sea, depicting them as a preparation of war towards the west. Never mind that Ukraine’s self-styled lord Poroshenko has threatened to take Crimea back, amassing troops and tanks at the border of this historic and strategic Russian peninsula.

Of course, things do not look good for the US-NATO led West with its EU stooges. Turkey’s President Erdogan has turned away from the notorious west to Mr. Putin and may be abandoning his alliance with Washington, Brussels – and NATO. Russia has asked Ankara to use its Incirlik airbase in the south, close to the Syrian border, currently mainly occupied by NATO, storing some 50 US nuclear warheads and uncountable US fighter jets and helicopters, plus housing at least 5,000 US-NATO troops. Turkey’s Prime Minister, Binali Yildirim, said last Saturday, that Russia could use the base, but denied that any such request has been made by Russia. In fact, according to EurActiv.com, “the Pentagon has initiated the transfer of 20 B61-type aviation bombs with nuclear warheads from the Turkish Incirlik air base to the Deveselu base in Romania currently hosting the US missile shield.” Although the Romanian Foreign Ministry has denied this news, it is nonetheless largely credible, says Valentin Vasilescu of Russia’s katehon.com.

Incidentally, Incirlik is the base from which the two Turkish fighters took off to shoot down the Russian fighter jet Su24 patrolling the Turkish-Syrian border last November. The two pilots, one of whom was the killer, were either CIA agents, or were acting on CIA orders. It is known that Incirlik is infested with dozens of CIA agents.

President Erdogan’s new alliance with Russia, his recently re-established relation with his old friend Bashar al-Assad, Turkey’s supposed closing of her borders to the Islamic State (IS-ISIS-Daesh) at the request of Russia, plus Iran putting her Hamadan base at Russia’s disposal, making Russia, Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and (perhaps) Turkey the new axis of stability and maybe peace in the Middle East, is not boding well for the West. It is more than a loss of prestige. The area contains an enormous wealth of hydrocarbons and other natural resources – and the new axis threatens to block the Zionist expansion towards a Greater Israel that would cover about a third of the current area called Middle East, including all of Palestine, Jordan, Syria, parts of Saudi Arabia and Iraq. This, and for achieving world hegemony, Full Spectrum Dominance, the overall objective of the ever ongoing PNAC (Plan for a New American Century), is what Washington is fighting for. No small matter. And not easy to let go.

——

It would not be surprising if some bold aggression – militarily, monetarily or both – by the West would rock the world. Indications to this effect are plentiful, other than the German appeal to her citizens to hoard food and money.

Could a fabricated incident, like a false flag event, in the Middle East trigger a Russia – US-NATO confrontation? For example, Syrian Government war planes a few days ago were bombing for the first time in the five-year Syrian ‘civil war’ Hasaka, a stronghold of the Kurdish YPG (People’s Protection Units), basically a group of mercenaries, supported and funded by the US and NATO. The leader of YPG is allegedly affiliated with Mossad. Syria’s attack was in response to the YPG’s killing of civilians and Syrian Army soldiers. Was this Syrian attack provoked by YPG? Syria has repeatedly said that any foreign and uninvited foreign intervention on her territory would not be tolerated and immediately fought back. The US instantly sent a warning to Syria that US-NATO war planes may retaliate against President Assad’s forces – which in turn are backed by Russia. Could that be an orchestrated reason for an imminent US-Russia clash? – Such a confrontation would have ramifications way beyond the Middle East and could escalate to WWIII.

It is hard to believe that Washington would risk a war with Russia, being well aware of Russia’s superiority in the air, as well as on and under the sea with latest generation technology and nuclear war heads. But the exceptional nation on a declining course, knows no scruples pulling the entire humanity into her self-made abyss.

Another scenario of a world-shaking catastrophe may be financial. Lord Jacob Rothschild of the ultra-rich Rothschild family, recently proclaimed that “the western central bankers are conducting the greatest experiment in monetary policy history with consequences impossible to predict.” He added that the world is in ‘uncharted waters’. Although he doesn’t precisely explain what he means, he refers to ‘unintended’ low interest rates with ‘30% of global government debt at negative yields’. He also talks about the almost unlimited ‘Quantitative Easing’ (QE – indiscriminate production of money) of western central banks. As a consequence, he says, the Rothschilds are shifting their money gradually away from the dollar into gold and other, presumably western ‘aligned’ currencies. He didn’t specify.

Why would a member of one of the most secretive and the globe’s richest families, the Rothschilds, come out in the open telling the world what he is doing with his investments? – Is there a purpose behind it? – Almost for sure. But how does it fit into what the FED-ECB-Wall Street may have concocted to happen next? – Is it a hint that the gold standard in one form or another may return? After all, maybe envisioning such an advent, Russia and China in the past 20 to 25 years, since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, have filled their coffers with gold. According to Sergey Glazyev, one of Russia’s top economists, Russia’s currency is covered twice with the value of gold. China’s Yuan is also fully gold-backed. Russia is the world’s second largest producer of gold. The US too has been amassing gold. Nobody knows exactly how much Russia, China and the US have accumulated.

——

A few months ago, talking about the disintegration of the EU and its currency, the euro, was taboo. Since BREXIT, the topic is increasingly on the agenda of most economic fora in Europe. It’s become ‘mainstream’, so to speak. When before the BREXIT vote people were afraid to touch the subject, today they dare happily voicing their anger and disagreements about the sick, inhuman European Union and its equally sick currency – and how it best would disappear. That’s good. Daring to talk and seeing the reality is healthy.

Washington is of course aware of this. US money circles know that BREXIT may have inspired a mass movement that cannot be stopped. Rather than letting the Europeans take the reins of dissolving their pathetic EU-Euro tandem, Washington, as usual, wants to call the shots – so that the dice fall in its favor. There are several plausible scenarios, all of which are sheer speculation at this point.

Returning to the gold standard – may involve a massive devaluation of the US dollar. It would bring down the economy of most countries dependent on the dollar and with large dollar reserves- which would partially go up in smoke. Also, dollar holdings, means holding US debt. At home in the United States it would mean debt would be eviscerated, while abroad assets held un US-dollar denominated securities would lose their value. This would apply to most developing countries still almost unconditionally tied to the dollar – especially Africa which holds by most accounts close to two thirds of the world’s remaining natural resources. Guess, who may appropriate these resources as payment against fake and fabricated debt? There is not much speculation about what would happen with those in-and-on-the-ground riches.

Worldwide dollar denominated reserves have dropped in the last 20 years from about 80% of all reserves to below 60% today and declining. Most European countries may still have dollar reserves, but also gold. Rather than speculating over the value of gold – which is almost entirely in the hands of the BIS (Bank for International Settlement – Basel, Switzerland), itself controlled by the Rothschilds, Rockefellers and a few other Wall Street magnates, they may decide to take back their sovereignty and return to their own currency, devalued or revalued as they see fit, also eviscerating their debt, ‘resetting’ their system, so to speak.

Brussels, the ECB (European Central Bank) and the IMF, would be mere onlookers – and later trying to become the arbiters on how these countries’ debt maybe converted into gold. We can just hope that ‘sovereignty’ would indeed mean ‘sovereignty’, and that listening to stooges such as the ECB and IMF would be a thing of the past.

Germany, the Obama vassal numero uno that calls out the warning to its people – and by extension to the rest of Europe – may have made a deal under which they would not lose. – In any case for a local or new currency to be launched, it may take half a year. Germany may have prepared for such a move and hopes in ten days after the disaster hits, it may be up to speed putting the new system with electronic tellers and all on stream.

Another scenario may be that some of the TBTF (too-big-to-fail) banks, in connivance with the FED, would call in their outstanding derivatives. Estimates on worldwide outstanding derivatives range from about 700 trillion dollars to more than a quadrillion. This is money not even made of thin air, it’s just invented. But it could break the necks of smaller banks, à la Lehman Brothers – remember September 2008? – That would bring down the western world’s financial system, all the while maintaining the dollar hegemony. All or most derivative denominations are in US dollars.

Whatever may emerge, it is not a pretty picture for the west. In July 2016, on the occasion of the 95^th Anniversary of China’s Communist Party, President Xi Jinping declared “The New World Order is Finished.” He also evoked the collapse of the US economy and the disintegration of the European Union. No western mainstream media covered the event.

What the West wants to ignore is that there is an alternative to the fraudulent western monetary system – a Russia-China based monetary scheme, totally delinked from the dollar-euro and the western privately owned FED-BIS-Wall Street manipulated system; a monetary structure built according to the value and strength of the member countries’ economies. Instead of illegal sanctions, blackmail, threats and outright financial wars for those ‘unwilling’ to submit to Washington, the eastern perspective offers a potential of equitable economic development, fairness in trade to a federation of sovereign nations.

It is high time for the freedom loving world to move out from under the boots of the empire; that we return to a multi-polar world of equals, that the international agencies we created to serve humanity are freed from the claws of their hijackers in Washington and those who command Washington, that the UN and its specialized agencies, as well as the International Criminal Court – even the Olympic Committee – may operate according to their peoples’ given mandates, that they may operate without the oppressive fist of Washington dictating them their terms. ‘Economics of Peace’ under a new egalitarian monetary system may lead humanity to freedom and prosperity for all.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He writes regularly for Global Research, ICH, RT, Sputnik, PressTV, The 4th Media, TeleSUR, The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.

In a move starkly pointing to the risk of all-out war between the major powers in the Middle East, the US military said yesterday that it had scrambled fighter jets Thursday against government bombers inside Syria to protect US Special Forces operating with Kurdish “rebel” militias.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime sent two Su-24 bombers to bomb Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) forces advancing on government-held positions in the city of Hasakah. The bombers nearly hit US Special Forces troops that are deployed illegally in Syria, embedded in the YPG. US officials tried to contact Syrian government and Russian forces operating in the region, and Russian officials replied that their bombers were not involved.

The US fighter planes arrived after the Syrian bombers had left the area, and no US soldiers were injured. Washington then stepped up its air patrols in the region. Yesterday, Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis warned of military action against any threat to US forces.

Washington, he said, would “take whatever action is necessary” to protect US Special Forces in Syria. “We will ensure their safety,” he continued, “and the Syrian regime would be well advised not to do things that place them at risk… We view instances that place the coalition at risk with utmost seriousness and we do have the inherent right of self defense.”

Davis also criticized the Assad government for suddenly attacking the YPG, which until recently served as its de facto ally against CIA-backed Islamist militias. “This is very unusual, we have not seen the regime take this type of action against YPG before,” he said.

Davis’ barely veiled threat that the Pentagon could attack Syrian government forces to protect its troops, which are operating in Syria in violation of the country’s sovereignty and without even the fig leaf of a UN mandate, points to the basic war aims of Washington and its European allies. Claims that their intervention is aimed at fighting Islamist terror groups, which evolved out of militias they supported against the Assad regime, are a political fraud. The imperialist powers’ goal was and remains regime-change.

As the CIA arms the Al Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front in Aleppo against Assad’s forces, the Pentagon is supporting the offensive of the YPG, which recently renamed itself the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) after absorbing a few smaller, ethnic-Arab militias.

Washington’s reckless threats to use force against Syrian government forces risk escalating the conflict into a catastrophic global war of the United States and its European allies against the major powers intervening in Syria to defend the regime: Iran, Russia and now China.

Tehran, Moscow and Beijing have all presented their operations in Syria as missions to fight Islamist terror groups alongside Washington. After Russia intervened in Syria militarily last year, Moscow and Washington developed channels of communications to prevent simultaneous US and Russian air strikes in Syria from accidentally leading to a military clash between the world’s two leading nuclear powers.

The façade of international unity built around agreements to bomb the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militia was, however, superficial and false. Washington and powerful forces in the European Union still aimed for regime-change, and deeply rooted conflicts persisted between the major powers. Moscow and Beijing fear the drive for hegemony in the Middle East mounted by Washington after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991—especially the regime-change policy applied in the illegal 2003 US invasion of Iraq, the 2011 NATO war in Libya, and then the Western-sponsored civil war in Syria.

As Washington stoked conflict with Russia after toppling a pro-Russian regime in Ukraine in 2014, and with China over the South China Sea and North Korea, Moscow and Beijing concluded that they could not allow yet another violent, US-led regime-change, this time in Syria. US threats have not succeeded in whipping Russia and China into line. Instead, Russia and China are escalating their involvement in Syria.

The near-confrontation between US and Syrian jets points to the danger that this situation will trigger a military clash—either with an accidental collision between US, Russian or allied forces in Syria or a deliberate attack intended as a signal to the opposing side—which could escalate into all-out war.

The Syrian government launched more air strikes against YPG forces near Hasakah yesterday. Fighting had broken out earlier this week between Kurdish forces and the pro-regime National Defense Forces (NDF) militia in Hasakah, and the Syrian army issued a statement declaring it had “responded appropriately” to Kurdish attempts to conquer the city.

Hasakah residents are reporting that both the US-backed YPG and pro-government forces are using heavy weaponry in the city.

“This is the first time the regime used warplanes to strike in Hasakah. The bombing is very strong. This is the first time the relationship between the two sides reaches this level,” Hasakah resident Lina al-Najjari told the Wall Street Journal. “We live in an area that is surrounded by the fighting. We have prepared our suitcases to leave once we get the chance. But we cannot leave our house at the moment. We cannot step outside.”

The Kremlin also launched large-scale air strikes on Islamist targets across Syria, in the north near Aleppo and in the northeast around Deir-ez-Zor. The strikes were mounted from warships in the Black Sea and by strategic bombers flying out of bases in Iran and Syria.

Meanwhile, Chinese officials continued to voice support for the Assad regime after Beijing took the unprecedented step earlier this week of sending a high-level military delegation to Damascus. Admiral Guan Youfei, the director of the Chinese military’s Office for International Military Cooperation, agreed with Syrian Defense Minister Fahad Jassim al-Freij to step up Chinese personnel training and aid for the Syrian army.

The Chinese army’s English-language China Military Online web site declared, “There are already Chinese military advisors in Syria, focusing on personnel training in weapons, since the Syrian government forces are buyers of Chinese weapons, including sniper rifles, rocket launchers and machine guns.” Moreover, it asserted that, while many Syrian-Chinese arms deals were suspended due to the war, now “there could be engagement again over these contracts.”

Citing Middle East Studies Professor Zhao Weiming of Shanghai International Studies University, the site also suggested that Beijing’s new Syria policy was retaliation for the US “pivot to Asia,” which seeks to isolate China. “Since the US has been interfering militarily in China’s backyard in the South China Sea, this could be push-back from the Chinese military into an area, the Middle East, that is usually considered a US sphere of military influence,” it reported.

A major factor in the sudden public intervention of China into the Syrian conflict, Chinese analysts explained, is last month’s failed US-backed coup in Turkey. “In developing a closer relationship with Syria, one has to take into account the changes at hand in Syria and the region, including the fast recovering relations between Turkey and Russia,” said Wang Lian of the School of International Studies at Peking University.

The Assad regime’s bombing of the YPG points to some of the geo-strategic concerns that underlay Washington’s decision to give at least tacit backing to the coup attempt.

Washington’s search for reliable proxies in Syria, and, in particular, the Pentagon’s choice of the Kurdish YPG as a suitable candidate, ultimately united a wide coalition of countries against it. Turkish officials were deeply concerned that YPG victories in Syria would stoke Kurdish separatist sentiment within Turkey itself. The Syrian regime, backed by Russia and China, was preparing an attack on the YPG to keep it from gaining too much influence and setting up a US-backed regime in northern Syria.

The failure of the coup in Turkey and the subsequent purge of pro-US Turkish officers suspected of sympathy for the coup only shifted Ankara closer to the Russian and Syrian regimes.

The main danger that arises is that, in order to salvage its intervention in Syria, the US government and its allies will mount an even more reckless military escalation.

Hillary Clinton has serious health problems.

She needs stools and pillows at hand constantly. She wants to debate Trump sitting down.

Ben Garrison

Last weekend, the situation in southwestern Aleppo was remaining tense. The Syrian Army, the National Defense Forces, Hezbollah, and other pro-government militias supported by the Russian Aerospace Forces, made a series to attempts to advance on the areas controlled by Jaish al-Fatah operation room but was not able to make significant gains against.

The pro-government forces failed to seize Tell Mahrouqat and Al-Qarassi village, but they seized the Alqara hill and Tal Syratel. The control of Alqara will allow the Syrian army to strengthen fire pressure on the Khan Touman-Ramouseh road. Nonetheless, this will not shift the balance in the area, significantly. The pro-government forces will need to expand control of the 1070 Project, the Technical College and the Hikma School if they want to take an upper hand in the ongoing positional warfare for Aleppo city.

The Syrian and Russian Air Forces conducted over 70 air strikes in and near Aleppo city. They were reported at the Ramouseh roundabout, the Ramouseh Artillery Academy, the Al-‘Amariyah neighborhood and the village of Al-Qarassi.

On August 21 evening, a ceasefire agreement was reportedly signed between the National Defense Forces loyal to the Syrian government and the Kurdish police, Asayish/the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in the city of Hasakah in eastern Syria. Reports said that agreement included transfer of captured areas and further talks on the situation in the city. There were also reports that Maj. Gen. Hassan Mohamad has replaced Maj. Gen. Mohamad Khaddour as commander of the Syrian army’s 17th Division and the eastern region of Syria. However, August 22 showed that the goal of setting up a ceasefire in the city likely failed again. Shellings and firefights resumed in various neighborhoods.

We remind, August 18th represented an unprecedented day in the Syrian conflict, with the Syrian air force launching bombardments on Kurdish positions after pro-government National Defense Forces (NDF) were engaged in clashes with Kurdish police, known as the ‘Asayish, ’ and their allies in the People’s Protection Units (YPG).’

In response to the Syrian air strikes, another first in the conflict occurred on August 19 when the US coalition scrambled fighters to counter the SU-24s. Pentagon threated to shoot down Syrian planes over Hasakah because they pose a threat to the US Special Forces servicemen deployed with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in the area. In turn, the Syrian government forces have deployed at least 2 surface-to-air missile systems to the area of Hasakah. Battles took place in the streets of Hasakah till August 21 morning with the both sides blaming each other in escalation.

The Israeli Air Force conducted up to 30 airstrikes over the Gaza Strip overnight on August 22 after a rocket struck the Israeli border-city of Sderot. A half dozen people were reportedly wounded in Gaza due to these the Israel Air Force’s air strikes. Reports say that Aknef Beit Al-Maqdis, a Palestinian militant group linked to Al-Qaeda, was responsible for the attack on Sderot. The organization responsible for the rocket attack in Sderot on Sunday was Aknef Beit Al-Maqdis, which is a Palestinian militant group with close ties to Al-Qaeda. Aknef Beit Al-Maqdis was recently involved in the Syrian war by attacking pro-government forces in the Yarmouk Camp District of southern Damascus.

No casualties were reported in the Israeli town. However, the recent air strikes on the Gaza Strip will likely further escalate the already complicated situation in the region amid the ongoing tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, another side directly involved into the Syrian war, in southern Lebanon.

On August 18, Hezbollah warned Israel against the ongoing construction of a two-kilometer-long road in the Shebaa Farms in Israeli-occupied Lebanese territory. A day later, a Lebanese flag was raised in Shebaa Farms by people from southern Lebanon as a protest against the construction of the road. The UN forces, stationed in the area to monitor a ceasefire, the Lebanese and Israeli military forces went on high alert as the protesters entered into the occupied territory. About 500 Israeli troops were deployed in area about three kilometers away from the demonstrators. Israeli snipers also were spotted in the area of increased probability of starting a new armed conflict.

Secretary of State visits Kenya with initiatives on South Sudan and Somalia

Secretary of State John Kerry landed in Nairobi, Kenya on August 22 for meetings with President Uhuru Kenyatta and foreign ministers from several regional countries in East Africa.

Washington’s top envoy focused attention on the fractious political situation in neighboring South Sudan and Somalia.

In the Republic of South Sudan a split between President Salva Kiir and former Vice-President Riek Machar in December 2013 was never fully resolved. The agreement brokered by the regional Inter-governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) sought to create a coalition aimed at the re-integration of military forces from the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) headed by Kiir and the SPLM/A in Opposition (SPLM/A-IO) led by Machar.

US Secretary of State John Kerry with Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta

The former Vice-President Machar returned to the capital of Juba in April under the presumption that he would be placed back into his position held prior to the December 2013 fighting which took on the dimensions of an ethnic conflict between the Dinka and Nuer groups. The fighting over the last two-and-a-half years has worsened the humanitarian crisis inside South Sudan with reports of atrocities committed by the military forces of both factions and the displacement of two million people impacted by the conflict.

Despite the agreement for a coalition government, clashes erupted during mid-July after which Kiir appointed another Vice-President Taban Deng Gai prompting Machar to flee the capital and the country. Deng, a former negotiator for the SPLM/A-IO, has apparently broken ranks with Machar.

Deng had served as the minister of mines in the government prior to the fracturing of the SPLM. He is the previous governor of Unity state.

In recent weeks, the U.S. sponsored a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for the deployment of an additional 4,000 troops as part of a so-called “protection force.” Kerry’s visit in part is designed to encourage acceptance of the plan and to create the appearance of concern from the White House which played a pivotal role in the partition of the Republic of Sudan in 2011, once Africa’s largest geographic nation-state.

The immediate response from the government in Juba was to reject the UN resolution. At present it appears as if President Kiir is prepared to accept the protection force on the condition that the government in Juba can negotiate the size and terms of the deployment. There are already 12,000 UN troops stationed in South Sudan under the UN Mission (UNMISS) to the oil-rich country.

Machar was reported to have been in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on August 17 in an area on the border with South Sudan under the care of the government of President Joseph Kabila in Kinshasa. UN forces have been stationed in the DRC for many years in an attempt to maintain some semblance of stability particularly in the Eastern region of the vast Central African state which is the size of all of Western Europe.

Farhan Haq, a UN spokesman, said on August 18 that: “We were aware yesterday of the presence of Riek Machar in DRC. At that point the UN Mission contacted the authorities in the DRC who in turn requested MONUSCO [UN’s mission in the DRC] to facilitate his extraction and his transfer to the care of the DRC. We have undergone an extraction operation and so he is currently in the care of the authorities in the DRC.”

Nonetheless, some media accounts have reported that the DRC government was not officially in charge of Machar’s security. “They said they are aware that he is in one of the border areas of DRC but they have no official information of Machar being under their care, which is contradictory to the statement of the UN,” according to Al Jazeera’s Hiba Morgan, reporting from Juba. (Aug. 18)

A spokesman for Machar reportedly said that he wants to travel to Ethiopia very soon. Additional reports from the SPLA-IO said that there had been an assassination attempt against Machar and he was in need of medical attention.

Abayomi Azikiwe on press TV on Kenya, April 5, 2015

Somalia: The Failure of U.S. Foreign Policy in the Horn of Africa

In addition to the crisis in South Sudan, Kerry was in Nairobi to discuss the ongoing war in Somalia where a U.S. and European Union (EU) supported regime in Mogadishu has not been able to subdue and eradicate the Al-Shabaab Islamic organization which has waged a struggle against the fragile government over the last several years.

At present there are 22,000 African troops from the African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM) occupying the Horn of Africa state. AMISOM was established in 2007 in the aftermath of the intervention of neighboring Ethiopia in a bid to oust the Union of Islamic Courts (ICU) which had drawn the ire of Washington under the previous administration of President George W. Bush, Jr.

Since 2007, the U.S. has launched numerous bombing operations in Somalia against the Islamists who now are largely represented by Al-Shabaab after an agreement with the leadership of the ICU to join the Somalian Federal government in early 2009. Al-Shabaab is demanding the withdrawal of all foreign troops from the country.

The war has spread into Kenya after Nairobi intervened in the South of Somalia in 2011 at the aegis of the U.S. There have been numerous incursions by Al-Shabaab into Kenya resulting in the deaths of military personnel and civilians.

In recent months several participating states in the AMISOM project have become weary of its viability. A drawing down of forces in Somalia by 2018 has created the potential for an even larger political vacuum in the region.

Abdiwahab Abdisamad Abdisamad, who is described in a Voice of America (VOA) report as a Horn of Africa security analyst, suggested that the restructuring of the Somali National Army is the only way to bring lasting security and stability in the country.

“So many people are asking themselves how 22,000 AMISOM troops, 10,000 Somali troops, the alpha group unit trained by the U.S. government, plus other Somali regional administrations’ troops which total over 100,000 troops,” Abdisamad said cannot bring peace and security. “All those forces are struggling to contain 5,000 militants. Therefore, this proves that this project is a failure and it is clear that a reformation of Somali military is better.”

Kerry said that the U.S. is allocating an additional “$117 million to support refugees, returnees and drought victims in Somalia. He said another $29 million will be donated to the U.N. refugee agency for the safe and voluntary return of Somali refugees in Kenya, primarily from the sprawling Dadaab camp.” (VOA, Aug. 22)

Washington to Maintain Imperialist Posture in the Region

Kerry weighed in on the electoral politics in Kenya commenting on recent dismissals from the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission. Washington did not support the election of President Kenyatta in 2013, backing his rival and former Prime Minister Raila Odinga who is perceived as being more pro-U.S.

“I am pleased to see that progress is being made in reforming the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission and I urge in the most emphatic terms that disagreements about policy and process be resolved through peaceful means,” said Kerry. “Kenya has come a long way since the elections of 2007. It is up to leaders on all sides that the violence that took place in the aftermath of that election is never repeated.” (VOA, Aug. 22)

U.S. Secretary of State Kerry is also scheduled to visit the West African state of Nigeria as well as Saudi Arabia during his tour. The foreign policy of the Obama administration has fostered greater instability on the continent with the destruction of Libya, the partitioning of Sudan, the expansion of sanctions against Zimbabwe and threats to exclude the Republic of South Africa from the American-sponsored Africa Growth and Opportunities Act (AGOA).

Official Washington’s disdain for international law – when it’s doing the lawbreaking – was underscored by ex-CIA acting director Morell voicing plans for murdering Iranians and maybe Russians in Syria, ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern says.

On Aug. 17, TV interviewer Charlie Rose gave former acting CIA Director Michael Morell a “mulligan” for an earlier wayward drive on Aug. 8 that sliced deep into the rough and even stirred up some nonviolent animals by advocating the murder of Russians and Iranians. But, alas, Morell duffed the second drive, too.

Morell did so despite Rose’s efforts to tee up the questions as favorably as possible, trying to help Morell explain what he meant about “killing” Russians and Iranians in Syria and bombing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad into submission.

Former CIA deputy director Michael Morell.

In the earlier interview, Morell said he wanted to “make the Iranians pay a price in Syria. … make the Russians pay a price in Syria.”

Rose: “We make them pay the price by killing Russians?”

Morell: “Yeah.”

Rose: “And killing Iranians?”

Morell: “Yes … You don’t tell the world about it. … But you make sure they know it in Moscow and Tehran.”

In the follow-up interview, some of Rose’s fretful comments made it clear that there are still some American non-neocons around who were withholding applause for Morell’s belligerent suggestion.

Rose apparently has some viewers who oppose all terrorism, including the state-sponsored variety that would involve a few assassinations to send a message, and the notion that U.S. bombing Syria to “scare” Assad is somehow okay (as long as the perpetrator is the sole “indispensable” nation in the world).

Rose helped Morell ‘splain that he really did not want to have U.S. Special Forces kill Russians and Iranians. No, he would be satisfied if the U.S.-sponsored “moderate opposition” in Syria did that particular killing. But Morell would not back away from his advocacy of the U.S. Air Force bombing Syrian government targets. That would be “an okay thing” in Morell’s lexicon.

The FBI defines terrorism as “the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.” That would seem to cover Morell’s plan.

But Morell seems oblivious to international law and to the vast human suffering already inflicted in Syria over the past five years by government forces, rebels, terrorists and outside nations trying to advance one geopolitical goal or another.

What is needed is a serious commitment to peace talks without unacceptable preconditions, such as outside demands for “regime change.” Instead, the focus should be on creating conditions for Syrians to make that choice themselves through elections or power-sharing negotiations.

Morell prefers to think that a few more U.S.-directed murders and some more aerial-inflicted mayhem should do the trick. Perhaps he thinks that’s the sort of tough-guy/gal talk that will impress a prospective President Hillary Clinton.

A Slight Imprecision?

Charlie Rose begins the “mulligan” segment with the suggestion that Morell might have slightly misspoken: “Tell me what you wanted to say so we understand it … Tell me what you meant to say … perhaps you did not speak as precisely as you should have or I didn’t ask the right questions.”

TV interviewer Charlie Rose.

Morell responded, “No, no, Charlie, you always ask the right questions,” and then he presented his killing plan as a route to peace, albeit one in which the United States dictates “regime change” in Syria: “So there’s not a military solution to this, there is only a political solution. … And that political solution is, in my view, a transition of power from Assad to a, a, a transitional government that represents all of the Syrian people.

That is only going to happen if Assad wants it to happen, if Russia wants it to happen, if Iran wants it to happen.  So … we need to increase our leverage over those … three people and countries, in order to get them more interested in having a conversation about a transition to a new government.

And sometimes you use military force for military ends. Sometimes you use military force to give you political leverage. … So what I tried to say was, Look, we need to find some ways to put some pressure on Assad, or put some pressure on Russia, and put some pressure on Iran. Now, with regard to Russia and Iran, what I said was, what I wanted to say was: Look, the moderate opposition, which the United States is supporting (everybody knows that, right?), the moderate opposition is already fighting the Syrian government, and they’re already fighting Russians and Iranians. …

So … the Syrian military, supported by Russia and the Iranians, is fighting the moderate opposition. And the moderate opposition is already killing Iranians and Syrians. What, what I said is that’s an okay thing, right, because it puts pressure on Iran and Russia to try to see some value in ending this thing politically. And what I said is that we should encourage the moderate opposition to continue to do that and perhaps get a lot more aggressive.” (Emphasis added)

Rose: “You weren’t suggesting that the United States should do that, but the moderate forces on the ground.”

Morell: “And I think I came across as saying U.S. Special Forces should go in there and start killing Iranians and Russians. I did not say that. …

So that’s Russia and Iran. Now, Assad. How do you put some pressure on Assad, right? And here I did argue, Charlie, that the U.S. military itself should take some action, and what I would see as valuable is limited, very, very, very limited U.S. airstrikes against those assets that are extremely important to Assad personally. So, in the middle of the night you destroy one of his offices; you don’t kill anybody, right, zero collateral. … You do this with the same rules of engagement we use against terrorists. … (Emphasis added)

You take out his presidential aircraft, his presidential helicopters, in the middle of the night, right, just to send him a message and get his attention that, that maybe your days are numbered here, just to put some pressure on him to think about maybe, maybe the need to think about a way out of this.

Now these issues that I’m talking about here, right, are talked about in the sit room. They’re talked about in national security circles all the time, right. These are debates that people have, and I certainly understand that there are people on the other side of the argument from me, right. But I wasn’t talking about the U.S. starting a major war with Iran and Russia, and I think that was the way people interpreted it.

Acts of Illegal War

Not to put too fine a point on this, but everything that Morell is advocating here violates international law, the rules that – in other circumstances, i.e. when another government is involved – the U.S. government condemns as “aggression” or as an “invasion” or as “terrorism.”

Video of the Russian SU-24 exploding in flames inside Syrian territory after it was shot down by Turkish air-to-air missiles on Nov. 24, 2015.

Video of the Russian SU-24 exploding in flames inside Syrian territory after it was shot down by Turkish air-to-air missiles on Nov. 24, 2015.

Remember, after the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in February 2014, when Russia intervened to allow Crimea to hold a referendum on splitting away from the new regime in Kiev and rejoining Russia, the U.S. government insisted that there was no excuse for President Vladimir Putin not respecting the sovereignty of the coup regime even if it had illegally ousted an elected president.

However, regarding Syria, the United States and its various “allies,” including Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel, have intervened directly and indirectly in supporting various armed groups, including Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front, seeking the violent overthrow of Syria’s government.

Without any legal authorization from the United Nations, President Barack Obama has ordered the arming and training of anti-government rebels (including some who have fought under Nusra’s command structure), has carried out airstrikes inside Syria (aimed at Islamic State militants), and has deployed U.S. Special Forces inside Syria with Kurdish rebels.

Now, a former senior U.S. intelligence official is publicly urging bombing of Syrian government targets and the killing of Iranians and Russians who are legally inside Syria at the invitation of the internationally recognized government. In other words, not only does the U.S. government operate with breathtaking hypocrisy in the Syrian crisis, but it functions completely outside international law.

And, Morell says that in attacking Syrian government targets — supposedly without causing any deaths — the United States would employ “the same rules of engagement we use against terrorists,” except those rules of engagement explicitly seek to kill targeted individuals. So, what kind of dangerously muddled thinking do we have here?

One can only imagine the reaction if some Russian version of Morell went on Moscow TV and urged the murder of U.S. military trainers operating inside Ukraine – to send a message to Washington. And then, the Russian Morell would advocate Russia bombing Ukrainian government targets in Kiev with the supposed goal of forcing the U.S.-backed government to accept a “regime change” acceptable to Moscow.

A Fawning Audition

Rather than calls for him to be locked up or at least decisively repudiated, the American Morell was allowed to continue his fawning audition for a possible job in a Hillary Clinton administration by extolling her trustworthiness and “humanity.”

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressing the AIPAC conference in Washington D.C. on March 21, 2016. (Photo credit: AIPAC)

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressing the AIPAC conference in Washington D.C. on March 21, 2016. (Photo credit: AIPAC)

Morell offered a heartwarming story about how compassionate Clinton was as Secretary of State when he lost out to John Brennan to be the fulltime CIA Director. After he was un-picked for the job, Morell said he was in the White House Situation Room and Clinton, “sat down next to me, put her hand on my shoulder, and she simply said, ‘Are you okay?’ There is humanity there, and I think the public needs to know.”

And, Clinton was a straight-shooter, too, Morell explained: “You know, it’s interesting, Charlie, I worked with her for four years. Leon Panetta, David Petraeus worked with her for four years. We trusted her word; we trusted her judgment. You know, [CIA] Director Panetta, [CIA] Director Petraeus, I provided her with some of the most sensitive information that the CIA collects and she never gave us one reason to doubt how she was handling that. You know, she spoke to us forthrightly. … I trust her word and I trust her judgment.”

Can Morell be unaware that Clinton repeatedly put highly sensitive intelligence on her very vulnerable private email server along with other data that later investigations determined should have been marked SECRET, TOP SECRET, CODEWORD, and/or SPECIAL ACCESS PROGRAMS?

FBI Director James Comey, in announcing that he would not recommend prosecuting Clinton for compromising these secrets, called her behavior “extremely careless.”

For his part, Charlie Rose offered a lament about how hard it is for Clinton to convey her “humanity” and how deserving she is of trust. He riffed on the Biblical passage about those who can be trusted in small matters (like sitting down next to Morell, putting her hand on his shoulder, and asking him if he is okay) can be trusted on big matters, too.

My Travails With Charlie

Twelve years ago, I was interviewed by Charlie Rose, with the other interviewee (who participated remotely) James Woolsey, former head of the CIA (1993-95), arch-neocon, and self-described “anchor the Presbyterian wing of JINSA” (the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs).

The occasion was the New York premier of Robert Greenwald’s full-length film version of his documentary, “Uncovered: the Whole Truth About the Iraq War,” in which I had a small part and which described the many falsehoods that had been used by President George W. Bush and his neocon advisers, to justify invading Iraq. Woolsey did not like the film, and Greenwald asked me to take the Rose invitation that had originally been extended to him.

True to form, Charlie Rose knew on which side his bread was buttered, and it wasn’t mine. He was his usual solicitous self when dealing with an “important” personage, such as Woolsey. I was going to count the minutes apportioned to me and compare them with those given to Woolsey, but I decided to spare myself the trouble.

The last time I checked the Aug. 20, 2004 video is available for purchase but I refuse to pay for it. Fortunately, a friend taped and uploaded the audio onto YouTube. It might be worth a listen on a slow summer day 12 years after my travails with Charlie.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990 and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Related to the “Wounded Boy In Orange Seat” stunt here is a little item that only increases my distrust of the truthfulness of the whole tale.

On Friday August 19 Middle East Correspondent Raf Sanchez and Said Ghazali of the BritishTelegraph reported of an interview with the father of the allegedly wounded boy in the orange seat:

Abu Ali, the father of the child whose haunted face now peers out from newspaper pages across the world, described his family’s final night of normalcy in an interview with a Syrian activist on behalf of The Telegraph.
…
Contrary to the reports of the Aleppo doctors who treated Omran, the little boy is only three years old and not five. Omran has been released from the hospital along with his four siblings and all the children are quietly recovering, his father said.

Confirming the above the Syria Campaign, a part of the mostly U.S. financed anti-Syrian propaganda apparatus, had published this on August 18:

Thank god all Omran’s family are safe. His mother had some bad injuries in her legs. His father suffered a minor head injury. His 7 year old sister went through a surgical operation this afternoon and she is doing well.

Note that there is no mentioning of an injured boy.

On Saturday The Telegraph’s Middle East correspondent Raf Sanchez reported a quite different story than the one he himself had told just a day earlier:

It emerged Saturday that Omran Daqneesh’s older brother Ali had succumbed to injuries suffered in the same airstrike that propelled his sibling onto television screens across the planet.Ali, 10, was out on the street when a Russian or Syrian regime bomb fell on his family’s building in Aleppo’s Qaterji neighbourhood on Wednesday.

While the rest of his family suffered minor injuries as their flat collapsed around them, Ali appears to have been more fully exposed to the bomb blast and died in hospital.
…
Omran’s father, who asked to be identified only by the nickname Abu Ali, meaning “father of Ali”, received mourners at the family’s temporary home on Saturday. Omran, three, and his three surviving siblings stayed inside the house as Abu Ali accepted condolences on the street.

The BBC noted:

The elder brother of Omran Daqneesh, the Syrian boy whose dazed and bloodied image shocked the world, has died of wounds sustained when the family home in Aleppo was bombed, activists say.The Syria Solidarity Campaign said 10-year-old Ali “passed away today due to his injuries from the bombing of his house by Russia/Assad”.

The second Telegraph piece is accompanied by the picture of a boy with what looks like a minor bloody (but completely uncleaned and not disinfected(!)) scratch on the upper left cheek. The eyes are closed and two tubes hang loosely from his mouth. A cardiogram sensor is fixed on the chest below his shoulder. The caption to that pic says “Ali (left) was killed in the blast …”. Is he really dead?

One day we learn from the father and others, that:

• all children, including Ali, are fine
• all are recovering
• all had left the hospital

The next day we learn that:

• Ali was severely injured
• Ali died of these injuries
• in a hospital (which ignores basic trauma care) that he apparently never left.

The Telegraph’s stenographer, who wrote both stories, ignores these large contradictions between the two tales.

I for one believe that both stories are false and that the whole bombing and rescue incident never really happened but was staged. The “rescue” was a stunt and all stories around it, like the “dead Ali”, are mere fairy-tales of various “activists” paid by this or that “western” propaganda campaign.

There was a time when newspapers like The Telegraph and other media employed journalists who followed up on stories and verified the claims made to them. For many media outlets that is obviously no longer the case. Today any “activist” can skype the stenographer from anywhere, tell a fantasy story of a bombing in east-Aleppo and have it printed. A day later he can call again with a totally different version of that fantasy story and have that printed too. No questions asked.

Is it any wonder that readers and viewers shun such media?

The dirty war on Syria will be settled on the battlefield.  International law is broken.

Powerful nations continue to enjoy impunity for their crimes, and they have no reason to expect that they will be prosecuted.

The credibly accused war criminals responsible for war crimes against countries that include Iraq, Libya, and now Syria, will not be prosecuted.

International law is selective, and the powerful nations know this. They are repeat offenders, and their impunity emboldens them.

If a just peace, and respect for international law, was the desired outcome in Syria, then the West, including Canada, would reverse course.

The United States Peace Council (USPC) offers simple steps that are immediately attainable. Peace would be achieved if the West and its allies were to:

• Stop bombing Syrian economic infrastructure in the name of fighting ISIS. 
• Stop injecting foreign fighters into Syria.
• Stop funding, organizing and arming the combatants in Syria.
• Lift all sanctions on Syria.
• Provide humanitarian aid to the Syrian people.
• Help the Syrian refugees settle wherever they want — including back in Syria.

Confusion-mongers would have us believe that it isn’t simple, only because they are allied with the terrorists invading Syria, and their interests are not peace.

NATO does not want peace, neither do Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, apartheid Israel, or the Persian Gulf Monarchies/dictatorships.

The case for peace is strong, and encoded in laws, conventions, and charters.  Article 51 of the UN Charter states that,

Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.”Mercenary terrorists –proxies for the West and its allies—have been criminally assaulting UN member Syria for years now, while Syria has been legally defending itself.

Syria and its allies respect the rule of law, unlike those countries – including Canada – which oppose international law, as evidenced by their failed attempts to impose illegal regime change.

UN Resolution 2254 is also very clear.  The author writes in “Canada Supports The ISIS and Every Other Terrorist Group which is Trying to Destroy Syria”  that Canada

categorically rejects international law as well as UN Security Council Resolution 2254, which states that the war on Syria demands a ‘Syrian-led, Syria-owned political transition to end the conflict.’

Video: UNSC Session on Syria

The West’s on-going violations against Syria share common elements with the West’s violations against Nicaragua during the 1980s, so there is a legal precedent.  The International Court at the Hague ruled, on June 26, 1986 as follows:

         Decision of the International Court at the Hague

 Decides that the United States of America, by training, arming, equipping, financing and supplying the ‘contra’ forces or otherwise encouraging, supporting and aiding military and paramilitary activities in and against Nicaragua, has acted, against the Republic of Nicaragua, in breach of its obligation under customary international law not to intervene in the affairs of another State.

Ample evidence demonstrates, and has demonstrated for years, that the West and its allies are committing the same crimes against Syria. We are training, arming, financing, supplying, and protecting all of the mercenary terrorists invading Syria.  They are our proxy soldiers.

Furthermore, all of this Western orchestrated death and destruction continues to be waged without a declaration of war.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-laws-of-war-air-tasking-order-from-the-pentagon-and-the-un-security-council/5541899

In light of recent events, and US threats against Syria, Olaf Brescia explains in “The Laws of War: Air Tasking Order from the Pentagon and the UN Security Council” that

because the United States and its coalition partners have neither been invited into Syria nor has war been declared against Syria or its partners, all aircraft in Syrian airspace other than those of the:

1.    Syrian Arab Air Force

2.    Russian Air Force

3.    Iraqi Air Force

4.    Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force

are prohibited from carrying air-to-air missiles over Syrian airspace.

Daesh (ISIL/ISIS) has no air force in Syria; therefore air-to-air missiles carried by US-coalition aircraft have no legitimate purpose except to employ them against ‘1’ through ‘4.’

US-coalition aircraft may only retain an internal gun and flare/chaff dispensers for self-defense. All air-to-air weapons are prohibited.

Violators will be photographed, national origin and tail number recorded, and escorted out of Syrian airspace.

Repeat offenders could be shot down and its aircrew returned to nation of origin.

Aircraft that can carry air-to-air missile rounds in internal weapon bays – are prohibited.”

The on-going and accelerating lawlessness of the West and its allies is unfolding within a framework of unprecedented state-sponsored terrorism. According to a plausible study by a German think tank, the “Firil Centre For Studies”, about 360,000 foreign terrorist mercenaries fought in Syria, against the legitimate government of Syria, between April 10, 2011 and January 31, 2016.

And the dirty war continues, as Western citizens remain lulled by sophisticated mainstream media (MSM) propaganda, the effectiveness of which far exceeds any propaganda that North Korea might be able to project on its citizens.

Humanity’s hopes for a better future are being suppressed by broken laws, by impunity, and by engineered political passivity.

Neocons and Clintonites have launched a major campaign with the goal of direct US military intervention and aggression against Syria, potentially leading to war with Iran and Russia. An early indication emerged as soon as it was clear the Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic Party nominee.  Following the California primary, the NY Times reported on State Department diplomats issuing an internal memo “urging the United States to carry out military strikes against the government of President Bashar al Assad.”

In early August Dennis Ross and Andrew Tabler opined in the NY Times about “The Case for (Finally) Bombing Assad”. Dennis Ross is a favorite Clintonite.  In her book “Hard Choices”, Clinton described how she asked Dennis Ross to come to the State Department to “work on Iran and regional issues”.

NY Times regular Nicholas Kristof made his pitch for war against Syria. According to the self-styled humanitarian, we need “safe zones” as proposed by Clintonite Madeline Albright and retired General James Cartwright.  That is risky but “the risks of doing nothing in Syria are even greater”.

PBS broadcast a story titled “Repeatedly targeted by airstrikes, Syrian doctors feel abandoned.” The story features video from the “White Helmets” along with photos from the reported April bombing of Al Quds Hospital.

Currently there is a huge media campaign around the situation in Aleppo. Syrian American doctor Zaher Sahloul, of the Syrian American Medical Society, has been interviewed extensively on mainstream media as well as Democracy Now with widespread promotion in Truthout and other sites.

There has been lots of publicity around a letter to President Obama, supposedly written by 15 doctors in East Aleppo. The letter ends “We need your action.” The flow and wording of the letter suggests it may have been composed by a marketing company and there has been no verification of the doctors who supposedly signed it.

An online Change petition asks German Chancellor Merkel and President Obama to “save the people of Aleppo”.

The publicly funded Holocaust Memorial Museum has promoted the video #SaveSyria. One of the producers of the video is The Syria Campaign which is the marketing organization which branded the pervasive “White Helmets” as documented in “Seven Steps of Highly Effective Manipulators”.

In parallel with this media campaign, the House Foreign Affairs Committee has introduced HR5732 the “Caesar Syrian Civilian Protection Act of 2016”. The resolution calls for escalating economic/financial pressure on Syria and “Assessment of potential effectiveness of and requirements for the establishment of safe zones or a no fly zone in Syria”.

Dr. Sahloul, the Syrian American Medical Society doctor / spokesperson says that Obama’s legacy will be defined by whether or not he attacks Syria to impose a “no fly zone”.  It seems unlikely that Obama would do that at the end of his term.  Instead, the goal is to prepare the public for the new war to begin after Hillary Clinton becomes President.

Falsehoods and Lies of Omission 

In his article ““The media are misleading the public on Syria” author Stephen Kinzer recently wrote “Coverage of the Syrian war will be remembered as one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the American press. Reporting about carnage in the ancient city of Aleppo is the latest reason why.”

Here a few facts about Aleppo which contradict the msm narrative:

* At least 85% of Aleppo’s population is in government controlled area.

* The estimate of 300K civilians in rebel/terrorist controlled east Aleppo is likely a gross exaggeration. In Spring 2015 Martin Chulov of the Guardian visited the area and estimated there were 40K.

* While there are very few doctors serving in the opposition controlled Aleppo, there are thousands of doctors working in the government controlled area.

* The dominant rebel terrorist group in Aleppo is the Syrian version of Al Qaeda.

* The armed groups who invaded Aleppo have been unpopular from the beginning. In the Fall of 2012 James Foley wrote:

“Aleppo, a city of about 3 million people, was once the financial heart of Syria. As it continues to deteriorate, many civilians here are losing patience with the increasingly violent and unrecognizable opposition — one that is hampered by infighting and a lack of structure, and deeply infiltrated by both foreign fighters and terrorist groups.”

* The rebel-terrorists launch dozens and sometimes hundreds of mortars daily into the government controlled areas causing huge casualties. Western media ignores this destruction and loss of life.

* The much publicized April bombing of the supposed MSF supported “Al Quds Hospital” in Aleppo was full of contradictions and discrepancies. These were highlighted in an Open Letter to MSF. To this date, MSF has not provided corroborating information.

* Much of the video purporting to show bombing effects in Aleppo are stamped with the “White Helmets” logo. White Helmets is a creation of the US and UK and primarily a propaganda tool. The claims they are Syrian, independent and non-partisan are all false.

* Much of the information about Syria comes from “activists” trained and paid by the USA.  In her book  “Hard Choices” Secretary Clinton speaks says the US provided “training for more than a thousand (Syrian) activists, students, and independent journalists” (p464, hardback version). Obviously they are not independent and their reports should be carefully checked.

* In contrast with the ambiguous situation at “Al Quds Hospital”, consider what happened to Aleppo’s “Al Kindi Hospital”.  Take three minutes to view the suicide suicide bombing of Al Kindi Hospital. Take two minutes to view what the “rebels” did to Syrian soldiers who had been guarding the hospital.

* Like Richard Engels fake kidnapping, the contrived CNN reports by “Syrian Danny”, the August 21 chemical attack in Ghouta effectively shown to be a staged event intended to force US attack because of the supposedly crossed red line.

* The letter to President Obama was likely written by a paid Syria War propagandist or Washington lobby firm.  Read the letter here and judge for yourself. For contrast watch this interview with a real Syrian doctor not mouthing propaganda from K Street Washington DC.

* The latest propaganda tool being used to promote US aggression against Syria is the photograph of little Omran in the orange ambulance seat. The video comes from the Aleppo Media Center “AMC”.  Like the White Helmets, AMC is a US creation. The photo of Omran has been widely accepted without scrutiny. The insightful Moon of Alabama, has raised serious questions about the media sensation.  Brad Hoff has documented that the main photographer, Mahmoud Raslan, is an ally of the Nour al Din al Zenki rebel terrorists who beheaded a young Palestinian Syrian a few weeks ago. This is confirmed step by step in this  short video. Another good short video exposing the propaganda around #Syrianboy is here.

Why the Burst of Propaganda and Calls for US Attack Now?

The Syrian crisis is at a critical point and there is prospect of the collapse of the rebel-terrorists.  If they crushed or expelled, it would allow hundreds of thousands of displaced Aleppans to return home as soon as services are restored.  This would also allow the Syrian army and allies to focus on attacking ISIS in the east and terrorist groups remaining in Idlib, Hama, the outskirts of Damascus and the south.

The tide is running against the rebel terrorist factions and their supporters. Up until the last year, fanatics and mercenaries were traveling from all parts of the globe into Syria via Turkey. Tens of thousands went to Syria from SE Asia, China, Russia, North Africa, Europe and North America.  They were given carte blanche to depart their home countries, arrive in Turkey and be guided into Syria. For example, young Canadians such as Damien Clairmont went and died in Syria. His mother has courageously exposed the fact that Canadian Security Intelligence Services (CSIS) knew about his plans yet did nothing to stop him. Progressive Muslim leaders demanded the government identify and start dealing with the radical recruiters.  It was evidently the policy of the cynically named “Friends of Syria” to “look the other way” as their citizens were being brainwashed then recruited to become terrorists attacking Syria.

Now, with terrorist blowback, these same “Friends” are feeling some consequences from their policies. Terror attacks in Britain, France, Belgium and the USA have ended the policy of collusion with wahabi terrorists. In the last year, security services have started arresting recruiters and new recruits. In Britain, a long time promoter of ISIS has been convicted.  In Belgium, the court has approved the extradition of a suspected French terrorist. Previously Belgium was the Western country with the highest per capita number of citizens joining the terrorist fight in Syria. And now Turkey has started arresting people en route to join ISIS in Syria.

Since the rebel terrorists invaded Aleppo in 2012, they have had a constant pipeline bringing weapons, fighters and supplies into the city. For the past few months the Syrian army has been on the verge of encircling and closing the access routes into rebel terrorist sections of east Aleppo.  Western media and governments which support the rebel terrorists are doing all they can to delay or prevent this closure. They are trying to stall or prevent a Syrian victory until someone more hawkish than Barack Obama is in the White House.

Who is Driving the Conflict?

Regional forces supporting the war on Syria include Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey. Israel has always been deeply involved, contrary to the faulty analysis of some observers.  Israel has provided medical and military support to Nusra/Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups operating near the Golan Heights.  Former Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren was explicit:  “Israel has wanted Assad ousted since Syria war began” .

The USA and western powers are also deeply involved. Working with Saudi Arabia and through Turkey, the US has supplied huge quantities of weapons to the rebel terrorists.  Sophisticated weaponry totaling 994 TONS was provided last winter as documented here.

On the other side, Iran and Hezbollah are committed to defending the existing Syrian government.  They know that if the Syrian government falls, they will be the next ones under attack.  Russia also sees this as a crucial conflict. The USA has expanded NATO up to the Russian eastern border, promoted the 2014 Ukraine coup, and insisted on economic sanctions against Russia. Syria is Russia’s only Arab ally and hosts Russia’s only foreign naval base. Russia probably sees this conflict as a crucial for its own future. In another sign of resistance to US global hegemony, China has indicated it wishes to expand military cooperation with Syria.

Following the US lead, Canada, Australia and West European countries have supported the regime change effort despite it being in clear violation of the UN Charter and international law.

What is at Stake?

Despite five years of tragedy and destruction, the U.S. continues trying to overthrow or destroy the Syrian government. This is not a new US objective.  In 2005, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour interviewed Syrian President Assad and said to him “Mr. President, you know the rhetoric of regime change is headed towards you from the United States….They’re talking about isolating you diplomatically and, perhaps, a coup d’etat or your regime crumbling. What are you thinking about that?” Amanpour is not only the CNN host, she is the wife of neocon Clintonite James Rubin.

In 2010 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pressed Syria to stop its support of the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah, “loosen” its alliance with Iran and sign a treaty with Israel. Significantly, these are Israel’s demands and of much higher importance to the Zionist state than the USA.

The war in Syria is bringing numerous conflicts to a head: sectarian wahabism vs secular Islam; the “new american century” with one superpower vs a multilateral world;  zionist dominance and occupation vs Lebanese and Palestinian resistance.

Hillary Clinton is on record criticizing the decision to not bomb Syria in the Fall of 2013. She has continued to promote the idea of a “no fly zone”. She is an avowed zionist who has said she wants to take the US-Israeli relationship to the ‘next level’.

Zionist Israel is deeply worried by the prospect of a strengthened Syria and Lebanese resistance. In addition,  there are many Palestinian refugees and their descendants in Syria and Lebanon. They retain their wish to return home in keeping with international law.  Just as Zionist Israeli interests were a major factor in the invasion of Iraq, so they are in continuing the conflict in Syria. In addition, neocons have not given up their goal of a “new American century”.

What Has been the role of the Western Left?

The left has been weak in responding and opposing the aggression against Syria. Major factors have included:

– Saudi and US State Dept funded Muslim groups which support the aggression against Syria. This includes the recently famous Dr Zaher Sahloul and the Syrian American Medical Society. SAMS and Zahloul are aligned with Saudi Arabia and receive substantial State Dept funding.

– deluded leftist groups who support a fantasy “revolution” in Syria just as they did in Libya.

– the flooding of social media and the internet by “activists” and Syrian “civil society” groups who are actually paid and trained agents of the west. This is confirmed by Clinton herself in her book “Hard Choices”.

– uncritical acceptance of major NGOs who are predominately funded by billionaires. These organizations need to be considered with some skepticism. For example, in 1990, Amnesty International mistakenly corroborated the accuracy of the false claim that Iraqi soldiers were stealing incubators from Kuwait, leaving babies to die on the cold floor. In the runup to the 2003 invasion of Syria, Human Rights Watch did not oppose the invasion and implicitly accepted it by only criticizing the lack of preparation.  Physicians for Human Rights, another Soros project, has issued grossly misleading reports on Syria.

– alternative media which is progressive on many issues but echoes NPR and mainstream media on critical foreign policy issues including the Syrian conflict.

Some groups including Arab Americans for Syria, Syrian American Forum, Black Agenda Report, Syria Solidarity Movement, Answer and Workers World Party have actively challenged the disinformation but their budgets and influence are relatively small in comparison with the heavily funded organizations pushing for regime change.

Veterans for Peace, one of the most influential and respected peace organizations, has recently sharpened its understanding and position.  Following a recent visit to Syria, the Vice President of Veterans for Peace, Jerry Condon, has said, “Everything we read about Syria in the US media is wrong. The reality is that the U.S. government is supporting armed extremist groups who are terrorizing the Syrian people and trying to destroy Syria’s secular state. In order to hide that ugly reality and push violent regime change the U.S. is conducting a psychological warfare campaign to demonize Syria’s president, Bashar al Assad. This is a classic tactic that veterans have seen over and over. It is shocking, however, to realize how willingly the media repeat this propaganda, and how many people believe it to be true.”

What Needs to Happen

Neoconservatives including Clintonites are pushing hard for a direct US attack on Syria to prevent the collapse of their regime change project. Claiming that the US and NATO can bring a ‘safe zone’ and ‘protect civilians’ is a grotesque falsehood. If the US tries to impose a “no fly zone” it will result in vastly more deaths and risk escalation into direct conflict between Syria, Russia, Iran and Israel.

Former Acting CIA director Mike Morell recently suggested the killing of Russians and Iranians in Syria to make them “pay a price”. He has endorsed Hillary Clinton as President. This is how dangerous, ignorant and arrogant Washington has become.

There is a clear solution to the Syrian tragedy: the countries who have been supplying tons of weapons and paying tens of thousands of mercenary terrorists should stop.  The conflict would soon end. The foreigners would depart with much less fanaticism than what they came with.  Many Syrian rebel terrorists would accept reconciliation.

There needs to be a global campaign but there is much responsibility in the US since our government is the greatest threat to peace. Following are specific ideas which are realistic and could help significantly.

1. Bernie Sanders raised expectations when he talked about the need stop the ‘regime change’ foreign policy. Now is when he needs to be clear and unequivocal: US military aggression against Syria will make things worse not better and must not happen. Sanders proved that a progressive policy is popular.  If Sanders abandons his core foreign policy position and does not speak out strongly against the drive for aggression, it will be a huge disappointment and failure. He must not be allowed to betray his own message and end up as a porter for Hillary Clinton and the war machine.

2. DemocracyNow and other leading alternative media need to start including different analyses. To a sad extent, their coverage of Syria has echoed NPR and CNN.  If DemocracyNow is truly an “Exception to the Rulers”, it needs to start including more critical examinations. DN producers should be studying publications such as Consortiumnews, Global Research, AntiWar, MoonOfAlabama, Al Masdar News, Al Mayadeen, Counterpunch, DissidentVoice, American Herald Tribune, 21stCenturyWire, Black Agenda Report, the Canary, RT, PressTV and TruePublica (not corporate ProPublica).  They should be bringing the observations and analysis of journalists such as Sharmine Narwani, Edward Dark, Eva Bartlett, Brad Hoff, Vanessa Beeley, Stephen Sahiounie to name just a few. Syrian academics such as Issa Chaer (UK) and Nour al Kadri (Canada) could be interviewed. Followers of DN have heard Hillary Clinton as Secy of State and other US officials speaking about Syria countless times. Why have Amy and Juan not interviewed the Syrian Ambassador to the UN?

3. This is an opportunity and challenge for Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka of the Green Party. They are clear on this issue. If they can get a mass audience to hear their message, it could be crucial to their winning support and prompting crucial national debate.  At the moment there is almost no debate on the life and death issue of war in the Middle East. Instead, the media is filled with propaganda using a boy’s photo to promote more war. The Green Party could play a hugely important role exposing the danger and duplicity of Clinton and Trump. They could play a key role in blocking the Clintonite march to a new war.

4. Veterans for Peace will hopefully play a leading role in changing the perception and ending the demobilization of the US peace movement. There is a lot at stake.

Rick Sterling is an investigative journalist and member of Syria Solidarity Movement.

He can be contacted at [email protected]

Middle East (Syria) – Security Council, 7757th meeting

Lies of the UN Undersecretary for Humanitarian Affairs following by the Syria Envoy to the UN

http://webtv.un.org/meetings-events/watch/middle-east-syria-security-council-7757th-meeting/5094372774001

Video: Scroll forward to hear Syrian Envoy: Why is there a humanitarian crisis in my country, approx. 1.49. See the quotation from Professor Tim Anderson’s book entiled the “Dirty War on Syria”, published by Global Research. Dr Bashar’s speech begins at about 1.49.00. Prof Anderson’s book is quoted from 2.09.30.

“In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the People.” (Eugene Victor Debs, 1855-1926.)

Oh dear, as the fantasy of Vladimir Putin as “Vlad the Terrible” ratchets up in the US-UK-NATO driven new Cold War, the Independent runs a piece headed: “What lies behind the new Russian threat to Ukraine”, (1) the sub-heading is:

“Vladimir Putin, his opponents repeatedly point out, has form on this. The war between Russia and Georgia took place in 2008 at the time of the Beijing Olympics”

Trying to find the “Russian threat to the Ukraine” is, as ever, a hard task. It was of course the US which organized the February 2014 coup which replaced the legitimate government and reduced yet another country to chaos. Russia however also appears the victim in a recent incident which triggered the Independent article which Katehon (2) describes with admirably clarity:

“A Ukrainian group of saboteurs was arrested last week (10^th August) by Russia’s secret service, the FSB. It was revealed that the Ukrainians had intended to organize terrorist attacks in Russian Crimea. During the arrest, two Russian citizens from the Federal Security Service and military of the Armed Forces were killed. This tragic incident has provoked tensions between Ukraine and Russia. The Ukrainian regime has begun to move its troops towards the border with Russia and the republics of Donbass, preparing for an invasion.”

Thus Ukrainian forces are thus encroaching on Russia, not the other way round. Moreover, according to The Telegraph (10^th August): “Russian security agencies said on Wednesday that two Russians were killed as they thwarted Ukrainian commando raids into Crimea over the weekend.” (Emphasis added.) The paper expands:

“The FSB said the agent who died was killed during an overnight operation on Saturday and Sunday, when officers smashed a ‘terrorist’ group and seized an arms cache including twenty homemade explosive devices. The Agency claimed Ukrainian forces tried to ‘break through’ twice more on Sunday night and Monday morning, killing a Russian soldier.”

Katehon further comments:

“Obviously, this hostile activity is coordinated with the United States and NATO, which want to unleash a new war on the border with Russia. At the same time, the US leadership believes that Russia will not inflict a crushing defeat on Ukraine and thereby objectively lower its status in the geopolitical confrontation by trying to solve an insolvable conflict. At the same time, the United States wants to show ‘Russia’s aggressiveness’ to Europe.”

Faithfully toeing the West’s misteaching mantra, the Independent article dropped in: “Crimea has not experienced serious military action since it was annexed from Ukraine by the Kremlin in the chaotic aftermath of the Maidan protests.”

Crimea of course, was not “annexed” by a marauding Russia as is implicated.

Only two years ago the paper wrote (3) of the referendum (16^th March 2014( held in Crimea – arranged by Crimea, not Russia – in which over 95% of voters made their feelings clear over the US engineered coup:

“Fireworks exploded and Russian flags fluttered above jubilant crowds on Sunday after residents in Crimea voted overwhelmingly to secede from Ukraine and join Russia … after the polls closed late on Sunday, crowds of ethnic Russians in the regional Crimean capital of Simferopol erupted with jubilant chants in the main square, overjoyed at the prospect of once again becoming part of Russia.” The referendum was monitored by 135 international observers from 23 countries.*

Russia thus had not aggressively “annexed” Crimea, the people had voted to secede. Definition of referendum: “A general vote by the electorate on a single political question which has been referred to them for a direct decision.” (Oxford Dictionary.) At the time of the referendum Russia anyway had a lease on Crimea until 2042 under the Kharkiv Pact.

On the day of the referendum the White House released a statement ending, apparently without irony:

“In this century, we are long past the days when the international community will stand quietly by while one country forcibly seizes the territory of another.  We call on all members of the international community to continue to condemn such actions, to take concrete steps to impose costs, and to stand together …” Breathtaking.

This from a country that has, since the end of World War 11, “forcibly seized”, invaded, interfered in or decimated thirty three countries to 2011 (4) – not counting Syria and Ukraine subsequently.

As for:

“The war between Russia and Georgia took place in 2008 at the time of the Beijing Olympics”, in the Independent’s epic bit of Russia bashing:

“Leaked State Department documents provide further evidence that United States authorities knew that the ex-Soviet republic of Georgia, a key ally of Washington in the Caucasus region, initiated the August 2008 war with Russia.

“Cables from US diplomats in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, were released through the whistleblower website WikiLeaks. They show that Washington was well aware that the Georgian government was intensifying its military build-up near the breakaway province of South Ossetia in the weeks before the outbreak of full-scale hostilities.” (5)

Further:

“A cable records that US embassy observers witnessed 30 government buses ‘carrying uniformed men heading north’ towards South Ossetia the day of the Georgian attack.

“The Georgian assault on South Ossetia, launched August 7, involved the shelling of the main city of Tskhinvali followed by a ground invasion by 1,500 troops. The operation destroyed hundreds of civilian properties and claimed the lives of an estimated 160 South Ossetians and 48 Russian military personnel.

“Despite this knowledge of Georgian military preparations, once the war began, US ambassador John Tefft simply relayed the claims of Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili that Russia was the aggressor.”

The pretext for the attack was US ally Georgia’s allegation of an imminent Russian attack.

The subsequent investigation into the invasion and destruction, held under Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini, found that: “None of the explanations given by the Georgian authorities in order to provide some form of legal justification for the attack”, were valid.

“In particular, there was no massive Russian military invasion under way, which had to be stopped by Georgian military forces,” Tagliavini confirmed.

“There is the question of whether the force by Georgia during the night of 7/8 August was justifiable under international law. It was not …”, the investigators found.

It was:

“The shelling of Tskhinvali by the Georgian armed forces during the night of 7 to 8 August 2008” which “marked the beginning of the large-scale armed conflict in Georgia”, the Report stated. Thus Georgia’s belligerence triggered Russia’s response in defence of an allied country, Russia’s own military personnel and Russia’s three military bases there.

The parallels between the Georgia and Crimea disinformation are stark, whether orchestrated by political Western Cold Warriors, or media ones.

Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov has said relating to the Crimea insurgents:

“We really don’t conceal what is known, we show people who were detained, stores with weapons and munitions, which were detected in the Crimea. Of course we cannot show everything on TV, but we have irrefutable evidence that it was sabotage, which had been masterminded by the main directorate of intelligence of the Ukrainian Defence Ministry and aimed to destabilize the Russian Crimea.” (6)

He added:

“Russia is open for provision of additional facts … to our Western partners, who are seriously interested in avoidance (of a repeat) of what happened in the future. For that to happen, one should influence Kiev”, he added pointedly.

So why the Independent’s strange interpretation of above events and creating a fantasy of Russia planning an Olympic timed war? Heaven forbid it would be anything to do with their owner, Russian billionaire and former KGB agent (7) Alexander Lebedev, who bought the ailing newspaper for just a £1 in March 2010, pledging major financial backing.

The Independent, built a name on foreign policy expertise, but this year has been forced to shut down the main daily print version and the Independent on Sunday. Whilst the Independent is still on line, the only hard copy in it’s stable is the good, but more limited daily “I.”

Billionaire backers are rare in these straightened times. Mr Lebedev is a Putin critic. The cynic might say there could be a connection given the slant of the Crimea story. However with titles Alexander Lebedev has backed (8) at home and abroad, he has always vowed never to interfere with editorial policy, so many would surely regard such thoughts as conspiratorial rubbish.

Notes 

1.         http://www.independent.co.uk/ voices/the-rio-olympics-are-a- distraction-russia-is- positioning-itself-for- further-action-against- ukraine-a7186736.html

2.         http://katehon.com/agenda/ europe-worried-prospect-war

3.         http://www.independent.co.uk/ news/world/europe/crimea- referendum-how-why-and-where- next-for-soon-to-be-divided- ukraine-9195310.html

4.         http://www.globalresearch.ca/ list-of-countries-the-usa-has- bombed-since-the-end-of-world- war-ii/24626

5.         https://www.wsws.org/en/ articles/2010/12/geor-d06.html

6.         http://www.pravdareport.com/ video/16-08-2016/135337- crimea-0/

7.         https://www.theguardian.com/ media/2010/mar/05/lebedev- buys-independent-newspapers

8.         http://www.washingtonpost.com/ wp-dyn/content/article/2006/ 06/07/AR2006060701166_pf.html

* For minute detail on Ukraine complexities also see: 

http://www.globalresearch.ca/ what-the-western-media-wont- tell-you-crimean-tatars-and- ukrainians-also-voted-to-join- russia/5373989

While Obama works on his golf game, this is the “Peace Making Air Tasking Order” from the Pentagon and the UN Security Council – that should be issued immediately:

Because the United States and its coalition partners have neither been invited into Syria nor has war been declared against Syria or its partners, all aircraft in Syrian airspace other than those of the:

1.    Syrian Arab Air Force

2.    Russian Air Force

3.    Iraqi Air Force

4.    Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force

are prohibited from carrying air-to-air missiles over Syrian airspace.

Daesh (ISIL/ISIS) has no air force in Syria; therefore air-to-air missiles carried by US-coalition aircraft have no legitimate purpose except to employ them against ‘1’ through ‘4.’

US-coalition aircraft may only retain an internal gun and flare/chaff dispensers for self-defense. All air-to-air weapons are prohibited.

Violators will be photographed, national origin and tail number recorded, and escorted out of Syrian airspace.

Repeat offenders could be shot down and its aircrew returned to nation of origin.

Aircraft that can carry air-to-air missile rounds in internal weapon bays – are prohibited.”

Unconfirmed reports regarding the US moving nuclear weapons it reportedly maintains at Incirlik Airbase, Turkey to Romania (a NATO member since 2004) made the rounds last week. It is just one of many stories surrounding the apparent fallout between the United States and its stalwart ally and fellow NATO member, Turkey.

Following a failed coup in July, Turkey has accused the US openly of orchestrating the attempted overthrow of the government. Despite this, US forces continue operating from Turkish territory, and according to official reports, American nuclear weapons remain in Turkey.

But what if they were being moved? And if not to Romania as Romanian officials insist, to another NATO members state, what would this mean? And if they are not being moved, who started this rumor and why?

NATO Nuclear Sharing 

The US currently maintains nuclear weapons in a number of NATO countries (Turkey, Belgium, Italy, German and the Netherlands) under a “nuclear sharing” program that dates back to the Cold War. The impact of joining this program is politically and strategically significant. There are risks and responsibilities involved with hosting US nuclear weapons, and those nations that seek to opt out once in the program can struggle for years before these weapons are finally removed from their territory.

A 2009 Der Spiegel article titled, “Yankee Bombs Go Home: Foreign Minister Wants US Nukes out of Germany,” highlights just how difficult this can be, especially considering that as of 2016, US nuclear weapons remain in Germany, and as Deutsche Welle points out, new weapons may even be on their way.

According to a 2010 paper by The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) titled, “NATO’s Tactical Nuclear Dilemma” (PDF), part of the reasoning of maintaining nuclear weapons in Europe and Turkey is to give the NATO alliance “credibility” as well as discourage nuclear proliferation both within NATO and beyond it.

The paper postulated that the removal of nuclear weapons from Turkey could unbalance the region strategically and spur nuclear proliferation from Iran to Saudi Arabia and perhaps even force Turkey itself to seek its own nuclear weapons. In regards to Turkey, the paper concluded that maintaining US nuclear weapons there was desirable both for Turkey and for NATO.

Possible Reasons for the Rumors

Considering what were perceived to be the consequences of removing nuclear weapons from Turkey in 2010,  the transferring of US nuclear weapons to Romania now would be serious indeed. Thus, floating rumors of the weapons being moved could have been aimed at pressuring Ankara to make concessions regarding any number of current US projects in the region, the most prominent of which would be its ongoing proxy war against Syria, Russia and Iran.

Another possibility may have been to simply add credibility to claims that US and Turkish ties are strained, even unraveling. This might be perceived as necessary considering the lack of actual, quantifiable fallout seen on the ground in Turkey in regards to a continued US presence within its territory, as well as on the ground along the Turkish-Syrian border.

This geopolitical subterfuge might be aimed at Russia and Syria as a means of drawing them in before an inevitable betrayal.

US nuclear weapons stationed in Turkey and throughout Europe have always been somewhat secretive. In the RUSI paper words such as “reportedly” are used in reference to the number and location of US nuclear weapons across the region. This secrecy makes rumors regarding US nuclear weapons and their potential movement from Turkey to Romania particularly attractive in terms of extorting geopolitical concessions and manipulating public perception as they are difficult to confirm or deny.

Rumors Vs. Reality 

However, the perceived implications of the move have already been placed in the minds of many.

But regardless of these rumors, the reality of US-Turkish ties remains to be seen on the ground, in Turkey, at Incirlik Airbase, at America’s sprawling complex in Ankara where a variety of diplomatic, political and military activities are organized from and along the Turkish-Syrian border where US forces and various armed proxies are still operating.

When Ankara begins taking concrete steps toward truly ending the war in Syria, such as cutting off supply lines that have fed US, European, and Persian Gulf-backed militants for years, resulting in the collapse of militant forces particularly in Idlib and around Aleppo, there may be proper impetus to make the prospect of transferring US nuclear weapons out of Turkey more believable.

Likewise, should Turkey begin incrementally removing the large presence of US military and diplomatic personnel from its territory to levels more proportionate to those seen in non-NATO member states, the idea of the US moving its nuclear weapons out of the country will not seem so far fetched.

However, even if Turkey wanted to take all of these steps, it would not be easy to immediately implement them. Much of what constitutes current US-Turkish ties has been in the making for decades, forged during the Cold War and tempered further in its aftermath. And if these decidedly smaller steps are difficult to initiate, larger steps like transferring nuclear weapons and altering the geopolitical and strategic lay of an entire region are even more so.

With this in mind, we should consider these rumors as possibly coercive in nature, and even more so, possibly meant to manipulate public perception into believing the fallout between Turkey and the US is greater than it really is. Regardless, when really put into perspective, the possibility of the US transferring nuclear weapons from Turkey to Romania is still just that, rumors.

Ulson Gunnar, a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

The top Anglo-American elite appears very, very worried that the Neocons (Bush/Clinton) will fail again in stopping, or even slowing down, Russia. They are more and more weary of the impotent Rambo war-cries of the left and right Neocons who are hysterically perched around Hillary Clinton. The Anglo-American elite is trying to find a way out and, oblivious of showing their desperation, is trying to resurrect their loyal lackey Henry Kissinger. Instead of the ineffective threats of the Clintonites  (see Ashton Carter, John Allen, Leon Panetta, Michael Morell, etc. ), this elites try to go back to the soft spider poison strategy used by Kissinger in the 70s. Kissinger, in their eyes, has achieved three great successes with his “friendly” detente method:

1) weakening and undermining, progressively but surely, Russia,

2) splitting Russia and China

3) neutralizing the influence of Russia in the Middle East

The Neocons’ ferocious and deranged aggressive policy managed to nullify all three Kissingerian geostrategic achievements. In a sense, it has been a fortune for humanity, a proof of the diplomatic ability of Vladimir Putin and a clear indication of the rapacious stupidity of the Clinton/Bush establishment. For a profit, they did sell to Russia the rope to be used to hang them.   But now the Anglo-American elite realizes that the group, the mafia, the establishment  to whom they gave the car keys, have created a situation of existential danger for their domination. The real economy of the US has been thoroughly weakened by the escalating financial looting, to the point that also their war-waging ability has been jeopardized. And the Elite realizes that Russia and its allies are not going to surrender to the ferocious but hysterical and ineffective assault conceived by the moronic Neocon war criminals. This time will not be a fake coward war like the one against Iraq, or Libya. This time will be a real, nuclear, war. And the Anglo-American elite is ready to start any war against an enemy unable to defend itself, while they are scared to death of a real war in which they could LOOSE.

They realize also that, despite the military adventures and the present expenses allocated for the military, the US is being progressively isolated. They realize that, despite the investments in goebbelsian propaganda, NATO is not the magic bullet they dreamed of. While the real economy of the host country is being bled, The NATO structure is not able any more to fulfill its mission. Its mission being: “Keep the Russian out, the Americans in, and the Europeans down”.

The recent developments in Turkey has shown, for the first time,  that a NATO/US sponsored coup d’état did NOT succeed.  Now, Turkey is entering  a new political trajectory and a new geostrategic realm. Though it’s difficult to foresee with perfect accuracy what is going to happen, it is clear that a process of progressive disintegration of the anglaomerican control and domination apparatus has started. It could progress very fast and very dramatically. The possibility of Turkey leaving NATO, de jure or simply de facto, is being contemplated by many of the most competent observers. An informal military relation with Russia, China (and Iran!) is already a fact. The notorious US  network of influence nominally run by Fetullah Gulen is being dismantled not only in Turkey, but in Azerbaijan  and, it is expected to be weakened and neutralized in all the Turkic areas, i.e. the Southern Flank of the ex Soviet Union. These areas were supposed to be the bastion of the “West” against Russia. They are rapidly becoming the opposite.

The Turkish lesson is being studied very carefully by a large number of countries. Starting with the Bulgaria leadership who cowardly preferred an economic suicide when was told by Hillary Clinton’s darling, Victoria Nuland to cancel the gigantic Southern Stream pipeline from Russia.  The Turkish lesson is being studied all over the Balkans, the Middle East, North Africa, and of course, Continental Europe. The British Brexit decision, though clearly dictated by clever, realpolitik considerations of surviving “to fight another day,” is part of these lessons learned and probably, was an incentive to the Turkish military and elite to make the Gulen coup fail.

And so the decrepit Kissinger is again presented on the public scene by the elite who hope he can do the “detente” trick again. We seriously doubt that Russia will fall for that for even a second. Despite the many “friends” of Russia who are vociferously telling Putin: Look, look how good is Kissinger. He represents the good faction in the West. Sign a deal with him and everything will be good and fine. Most likely Russia will treat the “messenger boy” with extreme formal respect, will even  go to the motion of discussing and negotiating in some form. BUT it will never let its strategy be conditioned by the promise and the good word of the Detente man. There will not be another Gorbachev, there will not a be an Yeltsin. Quite the contrary. Maybe there will not even be a Medvedev in the future of Russia.

Last February 4, Kissinger was in Moscow giving a speech at the Gorchakov Fund explaining why he represented  the alternative to a confrontation and presenting his plan to go back to the good old days  i.e. when Russia was… royally undermined. See the complete speech to believe (see transcript of speech below).

<http://gorchakovfund.ru/en/news/18352/ >

On Aug 19, The Doctor comes back with the same music in an interview  to Jacob Heilbrunn for the National Interest magazine. It is very telling of the  uneasy situation the Masters of Kissinger are at this point. <http://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-interview-henry-kissinger-13615 >

On one side, the old factotum of Wall Street has to say words that, he believes, will be well received in Moscow (criticism of the  anti Russia attitude of the Neocons), on the other he cannot by explain frankly that his Detente strategy in the 1970s, and his “nice words” in 2016 have the same purpose: Smash Russia!  He is asked: “détente played a critical role in bringing down the Soviet Union, didn’t it?” Kissinger’s answer: “That is my view. We viewed détente as a strategy for conducting the conflict with the Soviet Union.”

See the following exchange:

Heilbrunn: I’d forgotten that he’d managed that feat. In the end, though, détente played a critical role in bringing down the Soviet Union, didn’t it?

Kissinger: That is my view. We viewed détente as a strategy for conducting the conflict with the Soviet Union.

Heilbrunn: I’m amazed that this doesn’t get more attention—in Europe, this is the common view, that détente was essential toward softening up Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and getting over the memory of World War II, whereas in the United States we have a triumphalist view.

Kissinger: Well, you have the view that Reagan started the process with his Evil Empire speech, which, in my opinion, occurred at the point when the Soviet Union was already well on the way to defeat. We were engaged in a long-term struggle, generating many competing analyses. I was on the hard-line side of the analysis. But I stressed also the diplomatic and psychological dimensions. We needed to wage the Cold War from a posture in which we would not be isolated, and in which we would have the best possible basis for conducting unavoidable conflicts. Finally, we had a special obligation to find a way to avoid nuclear conflict, since that risked civilization. We sought a position to be ready to use force when necessary but always in the context of making it clearly demonstrable as a last resort. The neoconservatives took a more absolutist view. Reagan used the span of time that was available to him with considerable tactical skill, although I’m not sure that all of it was preconceived. But its effect was extremely impressive. I think the détente period was an indispensable prelude.

Heilbrunn: The other monumental accomplishment was obviously the opening to China. Do you feel today that—

Kissinger: —Reducing the Soviet role in the Middle East. That was not minor.

Heilbrunn: That’s correct, and saving Israel in the ’73 war with the arms supply.

Kissinger: The two were related.

Heilbrunn: Is China the new Wilhelmine Germany today? Richard Nixon, shortly before he died, told William Safire that it was necessary to create the opening to China, but we may have created a Frankenstein.

Kissinger: A country that has had three thousand years of dominating its region can be said to have an inherent reality. The alternative would have been to keep China permanently subdued in collusion with the Soviet Union, and therefore making the Soviet Union—already an advanced nuclear country—the dominant country of Eurasia with American connivance. But China inherently presents a fundamental challenge to American strategy.

See:
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-interview-henry-kissinger-13615
The Interview: Henry Kissinger

See:
http://www.fort-russ.com/2015/08/kissinger-goal-of-us-is-break-up-of.html
Kissinger: The goal of the US is a break up of Russia

See:
http://gorchakovfund.ru/en/news/18352/
Primakov Lecture by Henry A. Kissinger at the Gorchakov Fund in Moscow

ANNEX

Primakov Lecture by Henry A. Kissinger at the Gorchakov Fund in Moscow

February 4, 2016

From 2007 into 2009, Evgeny Primakov and I chaired a group composed of retired senior ministers, high officials, and military leaders from Russia and the United States, including some of you present here today. Its purpose was to ease the adversarial aspects of the U.S.-Russian relationship and to consider opportunities for cooperative approaches. In America, it was described as a Track II group, which meant it was bipartisan and encouraged by the White House to explore but not negotiate on its behalf. We alternated meetings in each other’s country. President Putin received the group in Moscow in 2007, and President Medvedev in 2009. In 2008, President George W. Bush assembled most of his National Security team in the Cabinet Room for a dialogue with our guests.

All the participants had held responsible positions during the Cold War. During periods of tension, they had asserted the national interest of their country as they understood it. But they had also learned through experience the perils of a technology threatening civilized life and evolving in a direction which, in crisis, might disrupt any organized human activity. Upheavals were looming around the globe, magnified in part by different cultural identities and clashing ideologies. The goal of the Track II effort was to overcome crises and explore common principles of world order.

Evgeny Primakov was an indispensable partner in this effort. His sharp analytical mind combined with a wide grasp of global trends acquired in years close to and ultimately at the center of power, and his great devotion to his country refined our thinking and helped in the quest for a common vision. We did not always agree, but we always respected each other. He is missed by all of us and by me personally as a colleague and a friend.

I do not need to tell you that our relations today are much worse than they were a decade ago. Indeed, they are probably the worst they have been since before the end of the Cold War. Mutual trust has been dissipated on both sides. Confrontation has replaced cooperation. I know that in his last months, Evgeny Primakov looked for ways to overcome this disturbing state of affairs. We would honor his memory by making that effort our own.

At the end of the Cold War, both Russians and Americans had a vision of strategic partnership shaped by their recent experiences. Americans were expecting that a period of reduced tensions would lead to productive cooperation on global issues. Russian pride in their role in modernizing their society was tempered by discomfort at the transformation of their borders and recognition of the monumental tasks ahead in reconstruction and redefinition. Many on both sides understood that the fates of Russia and the U.S. remained tightly intertwined. Maintaining strategic stability and preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction became a growing necessity, as did the building of a security system for Eurasia, especially along Russia’s long periphery. New vistas opened up in trade and investment; cooperation in the field of energy topped the list.

Regrettably, the momentum of global upheaval has outstripped the capacities of statesmanship. Evgeny Primakov’s decision as Prime Minister, on a flight over the Atlantic to Washington, to order his plane to turn around and return to Moscow to protest the start of NATO military operations in Yugoslavia was symbolic. The initial hopes that the close cooperation in the early phases of the campaign against al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan might lead to partnership on a broader range of issues weakened in the vortex of disputes over Middle East policy, and then collapsed with the Russian military moves in the Caucasus in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014. The more recent efforts to find common ground in the Syria conflict and to defuse the tension over Ukraine have done little to change the mounting sense of estrangement.

The prevailing narrative in each country places full blame on the other side, and in each country there is a tendency to demonize, if not the other country, then its leaders. As national security issues dominate the dialogue, some of the mistrust and suspicions from the bitter Cold-War struggle have reemerged. These feelings have been exacerbated in Russia by the memory of the first post-Soviet decade when Russia suffered a staggering socio-economic and political crisis, while the United States enjoyed its longest period of uninterrupted economic expansion. All this caused policy differences over the Balkans, the former Soviet territory, the Middle East, NATO expansion, missile defense, and arms sales to overwhelm prospects for cooperation.

Perhaps most important has been a fundamental gap in historical conception. For the United States, the end of the Cold War seemed like a vindication of its traditional faith in inevitable democratic revolution. It visualized the expansion of an international system governed by essentially legal rules. But Russia’s historical experience is more complicated. To a country across which foreign armies have marched for centuries from both East and West, security will always need to have a geopolitical, as well as a legal, foundation. When its security border moves from the Elbe 1,000 miles east towards Moscow, Russia’s perception of world order will contain an inevitable strategic component. The challenge of our period is to merge the two perspectives—the legal and the geopolitical—in a coherent concept.

In this way, paradoxically, we find ourselves confronting anew an essentially philosophical problem. How does the United States work together with Russia, a country which does not share all its values but is an indispensable component of the international order? How does Russia exercise its security interests without raising alarms around its periphery and accumulating adversaries? Can Russia gain a respected place in global affairs with which the United States is comfortable? Can the United States pursue its values without being perceived as threatening to impose them? I will not attempt to propose answers to all these questions. My purpose is to encourage an effort to explore them.

Many commentators, both Russian and American, have rejected the possibility of the U.S. and Russia working cooperatively on a new international order. In their view, the United States and Russia have entered a new Cold War.

The danger today is less a return to military confrontation than the consolidation of a self-fulfilling prophecy in both countries. The long-term interests of both countries call for a world that transforms the contemporary turbulence and flux into a new equilibrium which is increasingly multipolar and globalized.

The nature of the turmoil is in itself unprecedented. Until quite recently, global international threats were identified with the accumulation of power by a dominating state. Today threats more frequently arise from the disintegration of state power and the growing number of ungoverned territories. This spreading power vacuum cannot be dealt with by any state, no matter how powerful on an exclusively national basis. It requires sustained cooperation between the United States and Russia, and other major powers. Therefore the elements of competition, in dealing with the traditional conflicts in the interstate system, must be constrained so that the competition remains within bounds and creates conditions which prevent a recurrence.

There are, as we know, a number of divisive issues before us, Ukraine or Syria as the most immediate. For the past few years, our countries have engaged in episodic discussions of such matters without much notable progress. This is not surprising, because the discussions have taken place outside an agreed strategic framework. Each of the specific issues is an expression of a larger strategic one. Ukraine needs to be embedded in the structure of European and international security architecture in such a way that it serves as a bridge between Russia and the West, rather than as an outpost of either side. Regarding Syria, it is clear that the local and regional factions cannot find a solution on their own. Compatible U.S.-Russian efforts coordinated with other major powers could create a pattern for peaceful solutions in the Middle East and perhaps elsewhere.

Any effort to improve relations must include a dialogue about the emerging world order. What are the trends that are eroding the old order and shaping the new one? What challenges do the changes pose to both Russian and American national interests? What role does each country want to play in shaping that order, and what position can it reasonably and ultimately hope to occupy in that new order? How do we reconcile the very different concepts of world order that have evolved in Russia and the United States—and in other major powers—on the basis of historical experience? The goal should be to develop a strategic concept for U.S.-Russian relations within which the points of contention may be managed.

In the 1960’s and 1970’s, I perceived international relations as an essentially adversarial relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. With the evolution of technology, a conception of strategic stability developed that the two countries could implement, even as their rivalry continued in other areas. The world has changed dramatically since then. In particular, in the emerging multipolar order, Russia should be perceived as an essential element of any new global equilibrium, not primarily as a threat to the United States.

I have spent the greater part of the past seventy years engaged in one way or another in U.S.-Russian relations. I have been at decision centers when alert levels have been raised, and at joint celebrations of diplomatic achievement. Our countries and the peoples of the world need a more durable prospect.

I am here to argue for the possibility of a dialogue that seeks to merge our futures rather than elaborate our conflicts. This requires respect by both sides of the vital values and interest of the other. These goals cannot be completed in what remains of the current administration. But neither should their pursuits be postponed for American domestic politics. It will only come with a willingness in both Washington and Moscow, in the White House and the Kremlin, to move beyond the grievances and sense of victimization to confront the larger challenges that face both of our countries in the years ahead.

“The establishment of a normal working-day is the result of struggle between capitalist and labour.” — Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Ch 10

Lengthy hours of work are never a good recipe for feeding the productivity machine.  In Calvinist notions of hard work, the harder such toil is engaged in, the greater the prospects of gain. Combined with industrial rapacity, this doctrine produced terrible results for the toilers of the Industrial Revolution.  Men, women and children were drawn into the machine and ruined to the sound of rising capital. What, however, of actual productivity?

Karl Marx, ever the historical digger, was onto the point in Chapter 10 of Das Kapital: lengthier working days do not a more productive worker make.  Taking aim at his ever familiar target of capital, “the labourer is nothing else, his whole life through, than labour-power, that therefore all his disposable time is by nature and law labour-time, to be devoted to the self-expansion of capital.”[1]

Those things such as time spent for education and intellectual development; or social intercourse and “the free play of … bodily and mental activity, even the rest time on Sunday” would be mere “moonshine”.  Capital, having a “were-wolf hunger for surplus-labour” usurps “the time for growth, development, and healthy maintenance of the body.”

Sweden has been in the news of late for attempting to take the Marxist spirit to heart, with employers seeking to maximise the value of labour from the shorter work time offered.  The latest reduction will take the form of a six-hour working day, though trials were already taking place last year.

Some work places in Sweden will not find the moves particularly novel – the Toyota centres in Gothenburg have been engaging in the practice for 13 years. Staff have registered levels of high satisfaction, which has been rewarded with low turnover rates and, shockingly to those across the Atlantic, high profits.

Linus Feldt, CEO of the Stockholm-based app developer Filimundus, has had his reservations of the eight-hour day for years.  “To stay focused on a specific work task for eight hours is a huge challenge.”  His strategy entails using pauses, improving the work mix “to make the work day more endurable.”[2]

Sweden’s more than mere flirtation with this idea has its roots in a broader historical debate.  The balance between work and leisure, along with the ever increasing rise of capital, has been the battle of industrialised societies, typified by the rise of organised labour.

Australasia, in its pugnacious infancy, tended to be strides ahead of the pack in accepting that more leisure, better working conditions, and importantly, less work hours, would be productive to company profit and physical health.  Chartist men such as James Stephens, a Welsh-born agitating mason derided by the Melbourne Daily Herald as a “stupid mischievous blockhead”, saw organised unionism as a weapon to blunt the broader ravages of unaccountable capital.

On April 21, 1856, stonemasons working on the site of the University of Melbourne made their point in marching on Parliament House, largely at Stephens insistence.  The result of their pluckiness?   The 48-hour week.

Some of their views were sensibly observant, and the working movement in the antipodes took heed of the stresses inflicted by the environment on the working body for lengthy periods of time.  As the Victorian Operative Mason’s Society Report (11 June, 1884) observed, “the period of labour under the relaxing influence of an Australian climate, cannot extend to the length of daily toil in the mother country [Britain], without sacrificing health, and shortening the duration of human life.”

In the manner that now sounds like textbook socialism, the mind of such working folk would also be deemed important.  This entailed, as the same report noted, “The self-cultivation… of the ‘adult man’.”  Give the worker time to read and study, “and to progress in knowledge and virtue.”

Airing and feeding the mind, while providing more leisure, would also have a lasting effect on family life and engender in a citizen the values of civic understanding. The “natural flow of the animal spirits” needed to be unleashed, and in so doing would come “self-respect, and respect for other, for law, order, and forms so essential to freedom, domestic virtues and good citizenship.”

Other states have made the shorter work week famous in the last few decades.  France’s 35-hour working week was introduced in 2000 by a socialist government as a threshold measure “above which overtime or rest days start to kick in.”[3] With a certain bitter irony, it is the current socialist government that is having severe reservations about it.

The vigilantes of productivity always saw little merit in cutting back such hours.  The 35-hour week entailed higher labour costs while tying French hands in the global market place.  “Labour reforms” have been touted as necessary to unclog the disincentives.

As Prime Minister Manuel Valls explained in January, “Exemptions to the legal duration of working time at 35 hours are no longer a violation of the law.”[4]  Economy minister Emmanuel Macron preferred to be even blunter, suggesting that legal requirements to pay overtime rates of at least 10 percent more than the standard rate should be abolished altogether.

Even in Sweden, there are those sceptics who insist that less work risks becoming a matter of idleness.  The mining town of Kiruna, for instance, saw a trial that ran for 16 years examining the shorter work day.  It was abandoned amidst political acrimony and a lack of reliable data.

For all that, it is still comforting to note that cultural changes in environment, given the appropriate nudge along, do help. While the six-hour day, like any such work programs, can become a caricature, they are very much part of a social welfare sentiment distinctly absent in US or Japanese workplaces.  The rationale is hard to fault: the happier the employee, the greater the productivity.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  Email: [email protected]

“The spirit of Black August moves through centuries of Black, Indian and multi-cultural resistance. It is an emblem of the spirit of freedom.” — Mumia Abu Jamal

Neoliberal capitalism is carrying out a vicious assault on public education, health care, public transportation, social housing, regulation of corporations, trade union rights and other essential programmes that benefit the labouring classes in the Americas. In the same vein, there has been a corresponding expansion of the repressive policing, judicial and imprisonment capacity of the state. The criminal justice system across the region is being used to police and regulate the effects of social, economic and political inequalities along the lines of gender, race and class, especially for people of African descent.

It is in the above context that Black August should be embraced across the Americas as a commemorative month that focuses on the history and present-day resistance against the violence of the state and capital as well as the liberation agenda being pursued. Black August had its origin in the penal colonies of California in the early 1970s. It started in prison as a way to acknowledge the political and militant struggles of politicized New Afrikan or African American prisoners and those who were martyred in the process of fighting the prison system.

Black August was used to mark the death of revolutionaries such George Jackson, William Christmas, James McClain, Jonathon Jackson and Khatari Gaulden who were killed in prison or during the armed attempt at liberating African prisoners at the Marin County courthouse. This commemorative month was used to politicize fellow prisoners and build their capacity to engage in the struggle for emancipation. These politically conscious prisoners represented the prison front of the Black Liberation Movement (BLM).

In 1979, the BLM adopted and institutionalized Black August as a fixture on the movement’s annual calendar of events. In this broader context, Black August serves as a month-long period to bring attention to significant or momentous Black Radical Tradition events that occurred in August. The month of August is linked to many important and defining moments in the liberation struggle of Africans in the United States and elsewhere in the Americas.

However, given the internationalist and Pan-Africanist character of the Black Radical Tradition, it is not surprising that the liberation forces in the BLM referenced the start of the Haitian Revolution and Marcus Garvey’s birthday as important moments within the Black August tradition. However, the radical forces in the United States need to actually centre, highlight and celebrate August-related events such the Haitian Revolution, Emancipation Day in the Anglophone Caribbean, and the Martinique rebellion of 1789.

Black August is very important to the global African struggle for liberation. It is positively affirming the necessity of a politics that is all about ending oppressive relations in society and the use of all available means, including armed struggle, to create the just society. Black August is unapologetically committed to the emancipation of those who are marginalized in society and it could not be any other way. Black August was born in prison but it could have been below deck on a ship in the Middle Passage or in a shack during plantation slavery.

It is critically important to highlight the commonality of the African working-class experience with the repressive actions of the state’s police, courts and prisons as well as the structural violence of poverty, inadequate education, homelessness, unemployment and limited access to healthcare. The violence of the state and capital is used to keep the African masses in their unequal and marginalized status. Black August provides a focal point for the sharing of strategy and tactics and the promotion of mutual aid through anti-imperialist, anti-racist and feminist transnational networks.

Given the heightened attention being given to violence by the state and its agents against Africans in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Jamaica, Colombia and elsewhere, it is the opportune time for radical and revolutionary forces to use the Pan-African commemorative month of Black August to bring a higher level of ideological consistency and clarity, coordination, self-criticism, unity and cooperation to the African Diasporic struggles in the Americas.

Now more than ever, the case for strategic and operational unity within the ranks of Africans and organizations that favour revolutionary transformation of society could not be more compelling. At this moment of rising opposition of Africans to their oppressive conditions across the region, it is troubling that capitalism’s central role in this domination is not mentioned in the same breath as racism and patriarchy or sexism.

Black August is inseparably linked to the legacy and memory of the assassinated prison leader, revolutionary, Marxist and Black Panther Party Field Marshal George Jackson.

In Jackson’s celebrated book Blood in My Eye, he states that “Revolution within a modern capitalist industrial society can only mean the overthrow of all existing property relations and the destruction of all institutions that directly or indirectly support existing property relations. It must include the total suppression of all classes and individuals who endorse the present state of property relations or who stand to gain from it. Anything less is reform.” Black August is the perfect antidote to any African social movement resistance that is not overtly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist.

The United Nations-declared International Decade for People of African Descent provides an ideal opportunity for radical and revolutionary Africans to promote and institutionalize Black August across the Americas. The promoters of the region-wide observance of Black August should use this UN decade to educate and organize the people around the revolutionary tradition and programme of African liberation that is personified by this commemorative month.

The institutionalizing of Black August across the Americas must come with an emphasis on the organizing approach to African liberation. The organizing approach to movement-building elevates the following tendencies:

• mandate activists to join or create mass organizations or cadre organizations in order to consistently organize with and among the labouring classes;
• establishment of programmes, projects and institutions as the instruments through which the people wage struggle against the systems of oppression on a 24/7 basis;
• develop a self-emancipation or self-organization culture wherein the members of organizations are the source of decision-making power and leadership, and embody the ethos of the International Workingmen’s Association that asserts that “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves”; and
• emphasize building the capacity of the people to self-organize by way of systematically equipping them with the requisite knowledge, skills and attitude to do so.

Mumia Abu Jamal is on point when he asserts that “Black August has many markers throughout the long history of resistance in the Americas.” The significance of Mumia’s assertion is connected to the expectation that oppressed peoples who are not Africans ought to embrace and promote Black August. This commemorative month is in alignment with the thrust of the Black Radical Tradition that is anti-racist, internationalist, feminist, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist.

Black August is a rising tide that lifts all boats. After all, the Haitian Revolution enabled South America’s independence and signalled the death of slavery throughout the Americas and the rest of the world.

Ajamu Nangwaya, Ph.D., is an educator, organizer and writer.

In the early morning hours of January 26, 1987, federal agents across Los Angeles charged into the homes of seven men and one woman and led them away in handcuffs. More than 100 law enforcement officers—city, state and federal—were involved. “War on Terrorism Hits LA,” read the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner.

For the first hour, the men discussed the mission their superiors had given them: How to make INS a high-functioning weapon in the Reagan administration’s new war on terror. At the conference table in the Chester Arthur building, much of the fortnightly meetings were spent explaining definitions and concepts. Little time was devoted to discussing the merits of internment.

The memo begins with its summary recommendation: Banning incoming aliens from countries compromised by terrorism; deporting non-immigrant aliens through a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act relating to destruction of government property; rushing through new changes to the Code of Federal Regulations, and circumventing the typical rulemaking procedure to do so; expanding the legal definitions of international terrorism; and calling for intelligence-sharing to facilitate the deportations.

The INS’ multi-pronged proposals left little to the imagination, offering two options: a “general registry” and “limited targeting.” In its general registry scenario, the State Department would “invalidate the visas of all nonimmigrants” of the targeted nationalities, “using that as the first step to initiate a wholesale registry and processing procedure.” In its limited targeting scenario, the Investigations Division imagined a series of eight steps to expedite the deportation of the targeted nationalities. One was an executive order, requiring the FBI and CIA to share data with INS to locate alien undesirables and suspected terrorists. Another expanded the legal definition of international terrorism as a deportable offense; to speed the process, the measure would circumvent “proposed rule-making procedures, as a matter of national security.” The INS recommended holding aliens without bond, excluding the public from the deportation proceedings and convincing immigration judges to agree to those terms by referencing classified evidence.

A final note detailed “other program recommendations.” They included “summary exclusion” in the form of an executive order, imagining a president who suspended entry to “any class of aliens whose presence … was deemed detrimental to the public safety.” And it recommended a holding facility in Oakdale, Louisiana, a camp that could “house and isolate” up to 5,000 aliens.

It requested $2 million to develop the 100 grassy acres adjacent to the Oakdale facility with tents and fence materials, which would allow the site to be active on four weeks’ notice. “Community is receptive and has agreed to the location,” the section notes.

Toward the end of the document, an enigmatic military plan makes an appearance, punctuating the clipped prose and smeared typeface with a conspicuous ellipse: “Upon identification and activation of a military location,” it reads, “most of the various components of the South Florida Plan would then be operative.”

The South Florida Plan, according to intelligence officials and sources interviewed by Politico Magazine, was a little-known contingency plan for an emergency scenario inspired the 1980 Mariel Boatlift, when 125,000 Cubans fled the island in a months-long flotilla. From April through October, Cuban refugees, many of them felons and mentally ill prisoners, poured onto the beaches of southern Florida and the Gulf states. The immigration system groaned under the weight of a mass migration crisis, as prisons swelled and the INS was plunged into chaos.

The chaos in South Florida gave officials at the Department of Justice pause. Mariel had jettisoned a sliver of Cuban society. What would happen if the Castro regime collapsed? According to officials at the Justice and Defense Departments, to handle that exodus would require converting some of the largest military installations in the South into mass alien detainment centers, at least until the influx could be stemmed.

Willingly or not, Group IV of the ABC was now contemplating triggering the South Florida Plan. The ABC memo is never clear on the exact number of people targeted for internment and deportation: A Border Patrol preface identifies a target number “considerably less” than 10,000, while the Oakdale facility’s upper limit is proposed at 5,000. But buried in the memo, without preface or explanation, is a page that tallies 230,000 alien U.S. residents from eight targeted countries in the Middle East and North Africa. If internment and deportation proceedings were going to approach anything on that scale, the South Florida Plan was a viable option.

Dan Cadman remembers groaning at the sight of Walters’ memo in November 1986, when the ABC Committee first met. In Walters’ retelling, he simply delivered the memo he was instructed to. Through the group’s four meetings during November, December and January, little disagreement was aired.

“Our thought in [Investigations] was that once the other members had a chance to read the whole thing and come back together, collectively the group could kick that appendix to the curb in going forward with a final document,” Cadman told Politico Magazine in an email. “That didn’t happen because someone in the group—probably equally dismayed at the appendix—leaked the document.”

None of the men would discover the source of the leak—who at the table had sent the manila envelope to Weinglass. Usually, at the end of each meeting, the men would discuss the date they would reconvene. But at the last meeting, days before the leak, Cadman said the meeting time was TBD.

“Nobody called back,” says Walters.

***

As he looked over the leaked document in Los Angeles, Marc Van Der Hout was stunned.

The memo’s language lacks the circumspection of policy, barreling through one legal recommendation after another in a blaze of technocratic procedure. Yet at times, a glint of recognition shines through, moments in which the memo seems possessed of an awareness of its own transgressions. The memo notes that an attempt to register en masse lawful aliens of mostly Arab countries is “replete with problems in that it indiscriminately lumps together individuals of widely differing political opinions solely on the basis of nationality.” It quickly corrects: “There are, however, some advantages to the initiation of a registry”—one of which was the “benefit of being tested in administrative tribunals.”

Van Der Hout and a co-counsel, David Cole, now a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, became convinced that the memo was an uncanny outline of the government’s position and plan to deport the LA Eight—the “test case” which the document seemed to imply.

“They picked for arrest and deportation eight people who were essentially alien activists,” remembers Cole. “They sought to use classified evidence to detain them. [The memo] felt like a kind of blueprint for the case against our clients.”

The attorneys for the LA Eight were not the only ones to receive the leaked document. So did Stephen Engelberg, a reporter for the New York Times. His story on February 1, 1987, brought intense pressure on the INS. Beset by reporters at a news conference, William Odencrantz, a regional counsel for INS, was asked about the similarities between the case and the strategies described in the memo, and the seemingly political nature of the charges. “To use a football analogy,” Odencrantz told them, “we don’t care how we score our touchdown, by pass or run. We just want to get them out of the country.”

It was an astonishing confession. Cole, Weinglass and Van Der Hout launched a legal counterattack with the help of the ACLU. If they could prove the government had targeted their clients for their political beliefs and not due to ostensible unlawful behavior, they might get the case dismissed. Bringing their case to a district court, they won—though the decision would be overturned by the Supreme Court in 1998.

But the battle over the document roared on in the court of public opinion. And in Los Angeles, the leak of a federal plan to target legal U.S. residents based on their nationality caught the attention of another group: The Japanese American Citizens League.

The organization, whose members carried the memory of the internment camps, came to the public aid of the LA Eight, attending press conferences and distributing flyers in their defense. That is likely how the ABC memo passed into the possession of Norman Mineta, a California Democrat who represented the San Jose/Silicon Valley region in the U.S. House.

Mineta, now 84, can’t remember who first handed him the document. But he remembers the shock of reading it, a somber recognition.

In 1942, as a 6-year-old, Mineta and his family joined the roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans who were detained and forced from their homes and behind the barbed wire of internment camps hundreds of miles away. Mineta’s family was held at the Heart Mountain internment camp in Cody, Wyoming. Nationally, roughly two-thirds of those interned were citizens. The rest were aliens legally residing in the U.S.

At the time he received a copy of the ABC memo early in 1987, Congressman Mineta had been leading a charge for the Civil Liberties Act of 1987. The proposal would grant federal reparations to the survivors and families of those Japanese Americans interned during the 1940s. Speaking before a House subcommittee in April of that year, Mineta introduced the ABC memo into the Congressional Record, where Politico Magazine first found it.

Speaking from his living room in Annapolis, Mineta described reading the memo for the first time. He skimmed past the disembodied tone and reams of raw figures. His eyes then stopped on a single detail: the plan’s specification for the number of cots. “All I could think of was in 1942, having been forcibly evacuated and interned, we had to make our own mattresses,” Mineta says. “When we got off the train, the first thing we had to do was get this mattress ticking with hay and straw. And I’m reading this report, thousands of mattresses, cots, to be able to accommodate the people they had apprehended.”

Mineta’s testimony drove the final stake into the heart of the ABC.

“I believe it is vital to bring to the subcommittee’s attention that in recent months, a Department of Justice task force has proposed as legal and appropriate the mass round-up and incarceration of certain nationalities for vague national security reasons,” Mineta told the House subcommittee in his prepared statement. He quoted Solicitor General Charles Fried, who had told the Supreme Court earlier that year that the Japanese internment camps represented a “racial caste which was our shame.” “So this bill is not just about the past,” Mineta continued, referring to the reparations legislation. “It is about today and the future as well.”

Between 1987, when he entered the plan into the Congressional Record and preserved it for history, and when we spoke last month, Mineta says he hadn’t thought about the ABC memo—with one exception.

During the September 11th attacks, Mineta, then the Secretary of Transportation, ordered the FAA to ground every air carrier in the country. As a cabinet member in the line of presidential succession, he spent much of the next two days in a bunker. On the morning of September 13, the air in New York, Arlington, and Shanksville, Penn., still thick with smoke and ash, Mineta joined President Bush for a summit with the leadership of the House and Senate.

Toward the end of the meeting, Mineta recalls, House Democratic Whip David Bonior of Michigan expressed a fear to Bush: Our Muslim population in metro Detroit, Bonior told the president, is worried about rumors of targeting and round-ups. “David, you’re absolutely correct,” Bush replied. “We’re equally concerned about all that rhetoric.” The president extended a plaintive hand toward Mineta. “We don’t want to have happen today what happened to Norm in 1942.”

***

Fifteen years after President Bush implored the country not to relent to vengeful rhetoric, the country finds itself in familiar waters. The public debate is rife with talk of immigration bans, loyalty tests, intensified surveillance, deportations. Such ancillary ideas revive the one that never really disappears; it returns, it seems, every 30 or 40 years—from the Palmer Raids of 1919 to the camps of World War II, from the anxiety of the mid-1980s to the fear inherent in the 2016 race. But the pernicious resilience of mass internment became more clear when speaking to the men whose meetings and memos kept it alive.

In interviews over the past several months with Politico Magazine, former members of the ABC Committee struck a note of indignant stoicism about the 1986 memo—a brittle shell, earned from years toiling in the most political branch of federal policy. Didn’t I know anything about immigration, the men asked me. Didn’t I know how complex a time this was?

Walters, for his part, exuded an equanimity and glow in his post-retirement, despite the scrutiny he sensed a story about the document would bring him. I asked whether he thought the emotion from immigrant activist groups was warranted.

“I understand the view of the civil libertarian types on this, and they had some legitimate concerns,” Walters told me. But, he seemed to suggest, the group that was under siege was the INS. “The immigration service at the time, especially at the Border Patrol side, was feeling pretty overwhelmed and under-supported,” Walters said. A fantastical government agenda, handed down from on-high, was the last thing the Border Patrol wanted. But the the government gets the contingency plans it asks for.

One retired ABC member, who spoke to Politico Magazine on the condition of anonymity, came close to insisting the document wasn’t far off base. We met over lunch at an Italian chain restaurant in Virginia, where I propped the document astride his veal parmesan.

“Let’s be realistic,” he said. “If I’ve been told to watch out for bad Iranians or whatever—I do some work and quickly determine there’s 3,000 of these people in my county. So I’m going to go out and I’m going to follow 3,000 people? Oh, so I’ll start alphabetically?”

“Believe it or not, everything is not roses,” he said. “And ultimately, it takes force in order to enforce the laws.”

When I asked him about Mineta’s comments about the internment camps, he cocked his head and shot me a plaintive smirk. “Don’t you think that’s a bit hyperbolic?” he said. “If you really want to see genocide in the United States, go back and look to see what happened to the American Indian in California. That’s 1849.” He blinked, considering this for a moment. “Now, the Japanese were rounded up on the entire West coast. You don’t know. You’ve just been attacked—Hawaii! If the Japanese had sent troops, they would have had Hawaii.” He shakes his head, trailing off in a murmur. “We were wiped out. Very few ships got out.”

Most former ABC Committee members made some gesture toward disavowal, an important recognition that the document was not good policy. At the heart of this angst was the I-word: “It smacks of the dark period of U.S. history involving internment of Japanese Americans,” Cadman, the ABC chairman, wrote in an email. “What I regret is that because the project was killed and the group was disbanded, we didn’t get the chance to see the appendix officially disavowed as the work of the group progressed, however slowly that work was going.”

Still, the men of ABC retain a sense of common cause. They agree, for instance, that other branches of government—and civilians—simply don’t understand the tribulations of enforcing immigration law. In most of our conversations, there was a palpable nostalgia for some of the more benign proposals that the document laid out—a registration system, for instance; a way to track outgoing alien departures, not just entries; and, especially, a deportation process unmolested by the maneuverings of finicky defense counselors.

The LA Eight have been free for nine years, but Cole, their lawyer, takes little comfort. “This pattern repeats itself every time we face a crisis that creates fear,” he admonishes. “It’s easier to introduce these things if they’re targeted at foreign nationals than when they’re targeted at Americans. The government can say, ‘we’re talking away their liberties for your security.’”

As for the members of the ABC Committee, some would not rule out voting for Trump; they widely viewed his statements on immigration as flamboyant rhetoric, easy to be misinterpreted by a public that doesn’t understand hard truths, like their memo.

Like other Bernie Sanders delegates in Philadelphia a few weeks ago, I kept hearing about the crucial need to close ranks behind Hillary Clinton. “Unity” was the watchword. But Clinton has reaffirmed her unity with corporate America.

Rhetoric aside, Clinton is showing her solidarity with the nemesis of the Sanders campaign — Wall Street. The trend continued last week with the announcement that Clinton has tapped former senator and Interior secretary Ken Salazar to chair her transition team.

After many months of asserting that her support for the “gold standard” Trans-Pacific Partnership was a thing of the past — and after declaring that she wants restrictions on fracking so stringent that it could scarcely continue — Clinton has now selected a vehement advocate for the TPP and for fracking, to coordinate the process of staffing the top of her administration.

But wait, there’s more — much more than Salazar’s record — to tell us where the planning for the Hillary Clinton presidency is headed.

On the surface, it might seem like mere inside baseball to read about the transition team’s four co-chairs, described by Politico as “veteran Clinton aides Maggie Williams and Neera Tanden” along with “former National Security Adviser Tom Donilon and former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm.” But the leaders of the transition team — including Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, who is also president of the Clinton-Kaine Transition Project — will wield enormous power.

“The transition team is one of the absolute most important things in the world for a new administration,” says William K. Black, who has held key positions at several major regulatory agencies such as the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. Along with “deciding what are we actually going to make our policy priorities,” the transition team will handle key questions: “Who will the top people be? Who are we going to vet, to hold all of the cabinet positions, and many non-cabinet positions, as well? The whole staffing of the senior leadership of the White House.”

Black’s assessment of Salazar, Podesta and the transition team’s four co-chairs is withering. “These aren’t just DNC regulars, Democratic National Committee regulars,” he said in an interview with The Real News Network. “What you’re seeing is complete domination by what used to be the Democratic Leadership Council. So this was a group we talked about in the past. Very, very, very right-wing on foreign policy, what they called a muscular foreign policy, which was a euphemism for invading places. And very, very tough on crime — this was that era of mass incarceration that Bill Clinton pushed, and it’s when Hillary was talking about black ‘superpredators,’ this myth, this so dangerous myth.”

Black added: “And on the economic side, they were all in favor of austerity. All in favor of privatization. Tried to do a deal with Newt Gingrich to privatize Social Security. And of course, were all in favor of things like NAFTA.”

As for Hillary Clinton’s widely heralded “move to the left” in recent months, Black said that it “was purely calculated for political purposes. And all of the team that’s going to hire all the key people and vet the key people for the most senior positions for at least the first several years of what increasingly looks likely to be a Clinton administration are going to be picked by these people, who are the opposite of progressive.”

In that light, Salazar is a grotesquely perfect choice to chair the transition team. After all of Clinton’s efforts to present herself as a foe of the big-money doors that revolve between influence peddlers and government officials in Washington, her choice of Salazar — a partner at the lobbying powerhouse WilmerHale since 2013 — belies her smooth words. That choice means the oil and gas industry just hit a political gusher.

On both sides of the revolving doors, the industry has been ably served by Salazar, whose work included arguing for the Keystone XL pipeline. His support for fracking has been so ardent that it led him two years ago to make a notably fanciful claim: “We know that, from everything we’ve seen, there’s not a single case where hydraulic fracking has created an environmental problem for anyone.”

Salazar is part of a clear pattern. Clinton’s selection of Tim Kaine for vice president underscored why so many progressives distrust her. Kaine was among just one-quarter of Democrats in the Senate who voted last year to fast track the TPP. When he was Virginia’s governor, Kaine said that “I strongly support” a so-called right-to-work law that is anathema to organized labor. A few years ago he faulted fellow Democrats who sought to increase taxes for millionaires.

Clinton announced the Kaine pick while surely knowing that many progressives would find it abhorrent. A week beforehand, the Bernie Delegates Network released the results of a survey of Sanders delegates showing that 88 percent said they would find selection of Kaine “unacceptable.” Only 3 percent of the several hundred respondents said it would be “acceptable.”

The first big post-election showdown will be over the TPP in the lame-duck session of Congress. Clinton’s spokesman Brian Fallon reiterated a week ago that “she is against the TPP before the election and after the election.” But her choices for running mate and transition team have sent a very different message. And it’s likely that she is laying groundwork to convey anemic “opposition” that will be understood on Capitol Hill as a wink-and-nod from a president-elect who wouldn’t mind “aye” votes for the TPP.

Blessed with an unhinged and widely deplored Republican opponent, Hillary Clinton may be able to defeat him without doing much to mend fences with alienated Sanders voters. But Clinton’s smooth rhetoric should not change the fact that — on a vast array of issues — basic principles will require progressives to fight against her actual policy goals, every step of the way.

Norman Solomon, national coordinator of the Bernie Delegates Network, is co-founder of the online activist group RootsAction.org. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” He is the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

On Thursday, the U.S. State Department approved the sale of more military equipment, valued at around $1.15 billion USD, to the oil-rich kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This sounds like a lot of money to most of us, but the most frightening aspect of the sale is that it represents a continuation of an arms-dealing relationship between Washington and the Saudi regime, which has been worth over $50 billion USD in arms sales to date.

It is not an understatement to say Obama’s tears over gun violence are disingenuous considering his administration has enacted a policy of systematically arming the entire world with all manner of warcraft. According to the Department of Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA), during his first six years in office, the Obama administration entered into agreements to sell more than $190 billion USD in weaponry worldwide. As the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, William D. Hartung, states, this figure is higher than any U.S. administration since World War II. Perhaps that is why the Nobel secretary has voiced serious regrets about awarding the Peace Prize to the president.

While there are a number of companies who are making an absolute killing from these sales — like Lockheed Martin and Boeing —  the fact remains that the U.S. government actively facilitates this industry in more ways than one.

In 2013, the Obama administration loosened controls over military exports so military equipment could be sent to almost any country in the world with little oversight. U.S. companies began to enjoy fewer checksthan they had in the past. For example, thanks to the Obama administration, weapons manufacturers can now send military parts to most regions of the world without a license, which makes it easier for companies to extend their market — even to countries that are on the U.N. arms embargo list. This is because, according to Colby Goodman, an arms-control expert with the Open Society Policy Center, once an item is approved for that exemption, there may no longer be any ongoing, country-specific human rights review as had been conducted previously.

As Mr. Hartung observed, all of this raises a number of issues when dealing with global security:

“36 US allies—from Argentina and Bulgaria to Romania and Turkey—will no longer need licenses from the State Department to import weapons and weapons parts from the United States. This will make it far easier for smuggling networks to set up front companies in such countries and get US arms and arms components that they can then pass on to third parties like Iran or China. Already a common practice, it will only increase under the new regulations.”

The expansion of this industry is already well under way, and the U.S. is at the helm. According to Vice News, as of February of this year, the U.S. had sold weapons to nearly half of the countries in the world. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found American exports reportedly made up a third of the global trade. A congressional report found that for 2014 alone, the U.S. made $36.2 billion in arms sales.

The Middle East region, hardly known for its peace and security, accounts for approximately 40 percent of U.S. weapons exports. Nearly ten percent of U.S. arms exports between 2011-2015 were sent to Saudi Arabia, and a further 9.1 percent went to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), who are primarily responsible for the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Yemen. But Obama is not merely turning a blind eye to the atrocities in Yemen — his policies are enabling its destruction.

The Obama administration is also doling out weapons elsewhere. In May of this year, the White House lifted its arms embargo against Vietnam — a country once ravaged by the United States — and is set to become a rising recipient of U.S. weaponry. The target of the move is China, as Vietnam has been one of the countries participating in a stand-off with China over tensions in the South China sea.

The current U.S. arms industry is worth more than $70 billion a year but no major news outlet is talking about it. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are not talking about it, except as far as to state how much more fantastically militaristic they can make the U.S. government.

In spite of politicians’ and weapons companies’ enthusiasm for an arms industry that generates over $70 billion per year, the glut of sales has not provided the world with security. As CNN has reported, the State Department’s 2017 budget request is likely to include more funding for African armies in places like Mali, Somalia, and Nigeria. The U.S. already has a long history of meddling in these nations — and actually helped create the very terror threat they supposedly want to fight there.

Where will this end?

Providing countries with arms so they can confront a nuclear power like China is not going to provide the world with security. There are many who paint China to be the aggressor in the region, however, even if that is the case, provoking these conflicts and making billions of dollars in the process only benefits a select few — none of whom will ever have to feel the pain they inflict on the rest of the world.

This isn’t a case of companies making a profit because the government has little to no say in regulating what goes on. In any given arms sale, the U.S. government is involved in the entire process. Yet this is the same government that claims to passionately care about gun violence domestically while enabling chaos and destruction around the world.

They can hardly be said to be leading by example with their current track record.

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, April 16, 1963

When Martin Luther King wrote of the white moderate, he wrote of the enemy of progress, the foe of social justice, the obstacle to the defining social movement of his time. He understood, perhaps better than many of his contemporaries, that the white moderate was the single most pernicious influence in the broader sociopolitical landscape. For it was the white moderate who opposed the essential and necessary radicalism, who blocked attempts at widening the Civil Rights Movement, who enjoined that demands be tempered, grievances be blunted; all while posing as a friend of the movement, a defender of the marginalized and oppressed.

Such was the essence of the white moderate in King’s day. Such is the essence of the white liberal today. For it is the white liberal who finds any excuse to slander and attack radical people of color who challenge the ruling class; who justifies support for white supremacy, imperialism, and neocolonialism; and who does so with the palliative opiate of self-satisfaction – the genuine, though entirely wrongheaded, belief in his/her own essential goodness.

This phenomenon has been on full display in the ongoing attacks on Green Party Vice Presidential candidate Ajamu Baraka, a man who has dedicated more than four decades to resistance against racism and oppression of African-Americans and other African diaspora communities. To watch accusations and implications of racism and bigotry lobbed at him like so many arrows from the crossbowmen of corporate media is to receive a crash course in white liberal racism – that undeniable phenomenon whose name must not be spoken.

Perhaps the best example of this sickening tactic came on CNN’s Town Hall with Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka. The host, CNN anchor Chris Cuomo – brother of Democratic New York governor Andrew Cuomo – deliberately decontextualized Baraka’s use of the phrase “Uncle Tom” to describe President Obama. An obvious smear intended to discredit the Green Party ticket in the eyes of Black (and liberal white) voters, Cuomo smugly implied that Baraka’s usage of Uncle Tom was, in itself, racist.

But even a cursory analysis of the term, the context in which it was used, and Cuomo’s intent in raising the issue, not only vindicates Baraka’s usage of Uncle Tom, it reveals the deep-seated racism of Democratic party shills, and American liberals in general.

Interrogating Uncle Tom

The term itself is generally accepted to mean a person, usually a black man, who is overly eager to please white people, and is quick to betray his own race in pursuit of acceptance among whites. Thus the term is less a superficial racial epithet than it is a psychological and sociological critique, particularly when used by a black man against a fellow black man. To be sure, racially charged language takes on varying levels of meaning and emotional gravitas depending on who uses it. In this case, however, a black leftist uses it to deconstruct the mythology surrounding the first black president.

Does anyone doubt that, from a purely objective perspective, President Obama has indeed abdicated his responsibility to improve the political, economic, and social lives of Black Americans? A quick look at the statistics for Black America reveals that, if anything, the lives of black people have gotten considerably worse under Obama: life expectancy, per capita wealth, employment levels, infant mortality, children in poverty, etc. all point to a deterioration of the living conditions for Blacks under Obama. Do these facts constitute betrayal of black people in the pursuit of serving the white establishment? Certainly, Ajamu Baraka argued that they do. It is hard to counter his assertion.

And how about Obama’s merciless slaughter of black and brown people around the world? From the lynchings, rapes, and murders of black Libyans carried out by Obama’s proxy terrorist forces during the regime change operation against the Libyan Government of Muammar Gaddafi, to the drone bombings of black and brown people all over the world, to the continued militarization of the African continent under the auspices of Obama’s AFRICOM: Do these policies and actions taken by the first black president constitute a betrayal of people of color in the service of the white ruling class and the Empire? Baraka has argued that they do.

So the question then becomes: Is Baraka’s use of the term Uncle Tom truly unwarranted? Or is it rather that liberals, especially white liberals, choose to ignore the material reality of Obama’s presidency in favor of the mythos of the kind-hearted and cool black president with the big smile swooping down on the wings of hope and change like an angel come down from heaven? Perhaps Ajamu Baraka has simply intruded into the dream and, like temperamental children, white liberals shed their crocodile tears in hopes of crying themselves back to sleep.

Liberal White Supremacy

But there is another, even more insidious, aspect to this CNN Uncle Tom moment that must be reckoned with; namely, what the subtext of the question tells us about the pathology of 21st Century American liberalism.

When the white liberal Cuomo implied that the black radical Baraka was somehow engaging in racism or bigotry by referring to Obama as “Uncle Tom,” Cuomo was actually betraying the deeply rooted, almost unconscious, racism at the heart of American liberalism. For, you see, a white man can accuse a black man of racism when said black man critiques another black man who has been anointed by the white establishment. In other words, it’s not Obama’s skin color that makes Baraka’s use of the term unacceptable to Cuomo, it is Obama’s position.

Cuomo here plays the role of sentinel of the establishment, guarding the gates of discourse, dictating to blacks and whites alike what is or is not appropriate when it comes to critiquing the first black president.

Obama is the right kind of black man, while Baraka is the wrong kind. Obama the liberal is deserving of respect, while Baraka the radical is deserving of scorn. Sorry Ajamu, you’re just not the right kind of black man.

And while black men are murdered seemingly every single day by law enforcement, Obama pens op-ed piecesarguing that “Every day, [police] confront danger so it does not find our families … We recognize it, we respect it, we appreciate it, and we depend on you.” This is the right kind of black man, one who is passive and subservient in the face of ongoing, brutal oppression and violence. Baraka on the other hand, a man who has repeatedly lent his vocal support to the Movement for Black Lives among many other pro-black social movements, is caricatured as a bigot and racist.

The white liberal sees no contradiction here. He/she is blind to the irony of utilizing anti-racist verbiage to uphold an inherently racist and white supremacist argument which stealthily justifies the institutions of oppression and coercion while demeaning and slandering those who seek to dismantle them.

This is the white moderate to which Dr. King referred: the liberal more devoted to “order” than to justice. This is the cultural pathology of liberalism, an ideological disease which afflicts millions of people who, in their own self-deception, see themselves as healthy and righteous.

But diseased they remain, in utter denial of their own mental illness. And, instead, they choose to scapegoat those few men and women of the radical cloth who attempt to minister to the sick, to nurse them back to health. For you see, it is not the disease that must be fought, but rather the foul-tasting medicine. That is why Ajamu Baraka is made into the villain while Barack Obama is the cure. Such is the upside-down reality of the liberal.

White supremacy and racism are not mere discursive constructs to be woven into elaborate, but mostly empty, rhetorical flourishes. They are real phenomena existing in the real world of political life. And they are not simply the collective hatred expressed by hooded klansmen or bareheaded neo-nazis, but rather are the underlying assumptions, ideas, and values at the root of American political, economic, and social life – expressed by the police officer, the politician, and the news anchor in the finely tailored suit.

But to say it, and to do so publicly, is to transgress against the social norm. And to do so when speaking of the first black president is to commit the gravest sin against the god of liberalism.

Ajamu Baraka is not vilified for calling Obama an Uncle Tom. He is vilified for refusing not to.

News services abroad ask me if President Erdogan of Turkey will, as a result of the coup attempt, realign Turkey with Russia. At this time, there is not enough information for me to answer. Speculation in advance of information is not my forte.

Moreover, I do not know if it is true that Moscow warned the President of Turkey of the coup, and I do not know if Washington was behind the coup. Therefore, I do not know how to weigh the scales.  As I see it, whether Turkey stays with Washington or realigns with Moscow depends first of all on whether or not Moscow warned Turkey and whether or not Washington was behind the coup.  If this is what Erdogan believes, whether true or false, Erdogan is likely to align with Russia.  However, other factors will also influence Erdogan’s decision.  For example, Erdogan’s belief about how resolute Putin is to standing up to Washington.

Erdogan will not want to align with Russia if he thinks Russia is not up to Washington’s challenge.  Erdogan sees Putin endlessly asking for Washington’s cooperation, and Erdogan understands that Washington sees this as a sign of Russian weakness.  Washington slaps Putin in the face, and Putin replies by asking for cooperation against ISIS.  I understand why Putin responds this way.  He wants to avoid a war between US/NATO and Russia that neither side can win.  Putin is a man of peace and accepts affronts in order to save life. This is admirable.  But that might not be the way Erdogan sees it.  Erdogan might see it like Washington sees it: weakness.

The second consideration is whether Washington or Moscow offers Erdogan the best deal. Washington most certainly does not want the breakup of NATO and will strive to keep Turkey in NATO at all costs. Washington, for example, might deliver Gulen to Erdogan, and Washington might put one billion dollars in a bank account for Erdogan.  This is easy for Washington to do, as Washington can print all of the world’s reserve currency it wishes to print.  It is impossible for Moscow to deliver Gulen, and because Yeltsin accepted US advice conveyed through the IMF, the Russian ruble is not a substitute for the US dollar.

The world is accustomed to seeing Washington prevail, because Washington relies on force. Except for Putin’s response to the Georgian attack on South Ossetia, the world is accustomed to seeing Putin rely on diplomacy.  As Mao said, power comes out of the barrel of a gun, and so the world believes.  Putin seemed to be decisive when he accepted the Crimean vote and reunited the Crimea with Russia,  But Putin turned down the requests of the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk to rejoin Russia, and this made Russia look weak. It also prolonged the conflict and the death and destruction continues.

In my opinion this strategic failure by Putin is the result of advice from the Russian “Atlanticist Integrationists”—the people who think that Russia does not count unless it is part of the West.  In every sense, these pro-Western members of the Russian government are de facto members of the Treason Party. Yet they serve as a constraint on Russian decisiveness. The absence of Russian decisiveness provokes more pressure from Washington. It is a losing game for the Russian government to invite pressure from the West.

Washington sees that Putin is unable to break away from the influence of the Atlanticist Integrationists, which includes the Russian economic establishment led by the independent central bank. Therefore, Washington continues to make Washington’s cooperation with Russia in Syria dependent on Putin’s agreement that “Assad must go.”  Putin wants to get rid of ISIS, because ISIS can infect Muslim areas of the Russian Federation. But if he agrees to get rid of Assad, chaos will prevail in Syria just as chaos prevails in Iraq and Libya, and Russia will have accepted Washington’s overlordship. Russia will become another vassal country added to Washington’s collection.

The real danger for Russia lies in Russia’s desire for Western acceptance.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.

We must not promise what we ought not, lest we be called on to perform what we cannot. ~Abraham Lincoln 

When I worked on Capitol Hill for a U.S. Senator, the Congress enacted a pay raise for federal employees that was to take effect in January of the following year. Astute observers noticed that in November, vendors of all kinds throughout the area around the District of Columbia began raising the prices of most of what they sold. By the time the pay raise went into effect in January, a large portion of the raise the federal workers received went directly to vendors for purchases of exactly what was being purchased all along but now at higher prices. The workers received the raise but the vendors got the money.

What happened taught me things about American economic practices that most people don’t seem to recognize. Vendors have a legal, built in, mechanism for commandeering any increases in income wage earners receive without giving back anything whatsoever in return. Vendors can take the money any time they want to. Merchants can keep consumers impoverished just by raining prices regularly. Rather than an economy that promotes prosperity, America has one that prolongs poverty.

In an unregulated market, a so called “free” market, prices cannot be controlled. Controlling them would destroy the market’s “freedom.” So in any free market, vendors have an unlimited means of taking any increase in income wage earners receive from them. All vendors have to do is raise prices. The freedom vendors have of setting the prices of what they sell is what ultimately controls the wealth of wage earning consumers. This freedom of vendors is nothing but legalized theft.

Economists sanitize, launder, the practice by giving it a neutral name. The practice is called inflation and is universally approved of by free market economists. Central bankers even set “targets” for it. The Fed’s current target for inflation is two percent. What this means is that if the target is reached, any pay raise a wage earner gets that is less than or equal to the target goes to vendors even though it nominally is given to wage earners. Wage earners have their pockets picked by inflation. If inflation exceeds the target, the theft is even greater.

No free market group of business practices can ever work for the benefit of all people. People are told, for example, that thrift is good for consumers but bad for economic growth which is measured by increases in consumer spending. So what’s good for consumers is bad for vendors. People are also told the opposite: What is good for vendors is bad for consumers because it means they spend more of their incomes on consumption and save less. It follows from both of these claims that the free market, the unregulated market, cannot work for both consumers and vendors at the same time. The practices that work for vendors impoverish wage earners. A free market works well only for marketers. No battle in a free market’s war on poverty has or will ever be won. Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty was not lost; it was never fought because fighting it was impossible.

Yet on June 22, 2016, Hillary Clinton said,

“The measure of our success will be how much incomes rise for hardworking families. How many children are lifted out of poverty. How many Americans can find good jobs that support a middle class life—and not only that, jobs that provide a sense of dignity and pride. That’s what it means to have an economy that works for everyone, not just those at the top. That’s the mission. . . .”

But this mission is impossible to achieve. Any attempt to raise wages only raises the profits of vendors and allows governments to take credit for generating economic growth without showing that any real growth has taken place. Being forced to pay more for the same stuff is not equivalent to buying more of it. Gross Domestic Product is not thereby enhanced.

All of this should be known by Hillary Clinton, other astute politicians, and economists. But what Americans don’t know about America is legion. Even those who pass as “highly educated” are found in this ignorant group. Many are highly successful; many are elected office holders. Hillary Clinton, for example, is a graduate of Wellesley College and Yale Law School. She has been both a U.S. Senator and Secretary of State. Yet she does not seem to even know how the economy works. But she knows how government works. She has promises to break, And years to go before she weeps.

The free market puts a drain in the pockets of every wage earner that is routed to the slimy, green sewer that empties into the pockets of the rich. So in free market economies, an underclass always exists that can never earn a gainful wage. The economy never works for the people in that class. They are constantly robbed by the free market.

Promises made to induce people to support immoral economic practices, especially free market capitalism, are slimy green lies. The more vicious the promise, the slimier the lie. Political campaigns in America consists of making such promises.

Instead of building a shining city on a hill, America’s Founding Fathers created a slum in a slimy sewer of immorality and ignorance. What’s worse, people the world over allow this government to guide their own actions. Nothing good can come of it!

John Kozy is a retired professor of philosophy and logic who writes on social, political, and economic issues. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he spent 20 years as a university professor and another 20 years working as a writer. He has published a textbook in formal logic commercially, in academic journals and a small number of commercial magazines, and has written a number of guest editorials for newspapers. His on-line pieces can be found on http://www.jkozy.com/ and he can be emailed from that site’s homepage. 

Tensions amid Syria’s conflict has escalated with warnings by the United States that it would use force against Syrian aircraft operating over their own territory. The US claims to have aircraft operating over Syrian territory and ground forces below, mainly in and around northeastern Syria near the city of Al-Hasakah. 

CNN in its article, “Top US commander warns Russia, Syria,” would report that:

In the most direct public warning to Moscow and Damascus to date, the new US commander of American troops in Iraq and Syria is vowing to defend US special operations forces in northern Syria if regime warplanes and artillery again attack in areas where troops are located.

Unlike Russian and Iranian forces operating in Syria, US forces have not been authorised by Damascus to enter Syrian territory. US operations in Syria violate Syria’s territorial integrity and constitutes as violation of international law.

And while US military and political leaders attempt to portray this most recent confrontation as a matter of US self defence, in reality it is the fulfilment of longstanding US policy papers that have called for the establishment of so-called safe havens and no-fly-zones (NFZs) over parts of Syria as an intermediary step toward regime change, the stated objective of the US government in Syria.

In 2012, the following year of the Syrian conflict’s beginning, a Brookings Institution paper titled, “Assessing Options for Regime Change,” would state:

An alternative is for diplomatic efforts to focus first on how to end the violence and how to gain humanitarian access, as is being done under [Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s] leadership. This may lead to the creation of safe-havens and humanitarian corridors, which would have to be backed by limited military power. This would, of course, fall short of U.S. goals for Syria and could preserve Asad in power. From that starting point, however, it is possible that a broad coalition with the appropriate international mandate could add further coercive action to its efforts.

Here, US policymakers are admitting that the use of “humanitarian” concerns is a cynical steppingstone toward more direct military intervention. The unfortunately reality of this strategy, as seen in Libya, is that US “humanitarian wars” end up costing a vastly larger toll in innocent human life than the alleged abuses cited to initiate the war in the first place.

This plan of using humanitarian concerns to incrementally establish a foothold in Syrian territory through safe-havens and NFZs would constantly evolve, be updated and revisited throughout the entire duration of the Syrian conflict.

America’s True Intentions in Syria 

More recently, The Brookings Institution’s “Order From Chaos” blog published a post titled, “What to do when containing the Syrian crisis has failed.” Brookings policymakers discuss in it once again the prospects of establishing what would effectively be NFZs:

We must also be clever about employing various options for no-fly zones: We cannot shoot down an airplane without knowing if it’s Russian or Syrian, but we can identify those aircraft after the fact and destroy Syrian planes on the ground if they were found to have barrel-bombed a neighborhood, for example. These kinds of operations are complicated, no doubt, and especially with Russian aircraft in the area—but I think we have made a mistake in tying ourselves in knots over the issue, since there are options we can pursue.

Brookings  policymakers also revisit the notion of establishing “safe-havens” claiming:

…we should push the debate about what creating safe havens really means. I don’t think we should start declaring safe havens, but rather try to help them emerge. The Kurds are making gains in Syria’s northeast, for instance, as are some forces on the southern front—so, if the United States, in cooperation with its allies, accelerates and intensifies its involvement on the ground in those areas, safe havens can essentially emerge. An important advantage of this approach is that it doesn’t require putting American credibility on the line, but does help local allies build up and reinforces successes on the ground.

Here, Brookings specifically mentions Syria’s northeast. It should be noted that none of this is being discussed by US policymakers in the context of fighting terrorist organisations like the self-titled Islamic State or listed terrorist organisation Jubhat Al-Nusra. Instead, it is clearly within the context of seizing Syrian territory toward the end goal of regime change, with the Islamic State and Al-Nusra merely pretexts for US forces entering and operating within Syrian territory.

Similar attempts to create such safe-havens are in motion in Syria’s south, with British special forces now allegedly operating on the ground to incrementally “accelerate and intensify” Western involvement on the ground.

It is the literal fulfilment of the plans recently laid out by Brookings policymakers.

Displacing US Forces from the Game Board 

With US-supported militants being pushed back in and around Syria’s northern city of Aleppo and prospects of Western-backed militants succeeding elsewhere throughout the country increasingly unlikely, the creation of safe-havens and NFZs over parts of Syria directly by Western forces remains a last but desperate option.

Displacing US and British forces on the battlefield with an expansion of forces from among Syria’s allies could finally see these last game pieces in play by the West pushed off the board entirely.

Diplomatic efforts appear to be underway with Syria’s Kurds in particular to encourage them away from what will be a self-destructive geopolitical move made only to Washington’s benefit. Providing alternatives to Western training and support for Kurds and other local forces in the northeast in a genuine fight against the Islamic State and other foreign-backed militant groups operating in Syria could also help eliminate clashes the US may use to cynically escalate the conflict into a direct confrontation with either Syria or Russia (or both).

US strategy in Syria is based on 5 year old plans that even 5 years ago were difficult if not impossible to implement, fraught with risk and even should they succeed, left a long and difficult road ahead of US ambitions in Syria and throughout the region. 5 years later, however, these difficulties and risks have only increased. That the US is still exploring this last and poorest option indicates a bankrupt foreign policy wielded by an increasingly unbalanced world power.

Careful diplomacy and expert strategic manoeuvring by Syria and its allies will be required to avert Syria’s conflict from plunging deeper into tragedy, and ironically, may also help the US from tilting over further out of balance.

The New Atlas is a media platform providing geopolitical analysis and op-eds. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter. 

Japan is planning to deploy a new type of missile to the East China Sea, where Tokyo is engaged in a tense territorial dispute with Beijing. The decision marks a significant milestone in the drive by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to remilitarize Japan. The planned missile system will be designed locally, by the country’s expanding defence industry, rather than being supplied by the United States or another ally.

Russia leaves the Dollar based monetary system and adopts a system of Sovereign Currency. The implications are phenomenal! “In 1990 the first priority of Washington and the IMF was to pressure Yeltsin and the Duma to “privatize” the State Bank of Russia, under a Constitutional amendment that mandated the new Central Bank of Russia, like the Federal Reserve or European Central Bank, be a purely monetarist entity whose only mandate is to control inflation and stabilize the Ruble. In effect, money creation in Russia was removed from state sovereignty and tied to the US dollar.”

Here’s an excerpt from yet another recently published article (translated from Russian) describing how the ruble may now evolve (here).

We must nationalize the ruble. What does it mean? It means that we must separate the internal markets from the external ones.

… Thus, the first step for Russia is secession from the IMF and others similar institutions designed to keep the entire world in bondage. The dollar noose must be cut.

Now the amount of printed rubles will not be determined by how many dollars we have but by the actual needs of our economy.

… We have absolutely no need in the central bank in its current form, but we do need a financial regular. Under any regime, it was the Treasury that performed this function. Let it remain the same now regardless of the official name. It may continue to be called the Central Bank. If the essence is changed, there is no need in changing plaques.

You can also see an article (here) that goes into this issue more deeply and claims that Putin has in mind backing a portion of the ruble with gold as well. (We should note there are claims the  ruble is backed by gold already.)

The dramatic – historical – Russian currency changes (if these articles are accurate) seem a little difficult to discern in full at this moment, but obviously things are changing fast. And they are changing for China’s “money” as well. In fact, some have speculated China and Russia could launch a joint, gold-backed currency (here, see bottom of article).

At the beginning of October, the yuan joins the IMF’s SDR  basket (here). This means that major international institutions can issue bonds payable in yuan (actually RMB, the Chinese external currency).

And that is just what has happened already. The World Bank is issuing a large yuan/RMB tranche and this will be the first of many (here).

Investors who want to place funds in RMB rather than dollars will use the new yuan/RMB-based instruments. The US will continue to print dollars but those dollars may not find a home abroad so easily. Instead they may circulate back into the US economy creating significant price inflation.

The US was able to do so much damage domestically and abroad because of its virtually unlimited spending power. It’s been able to prosecute endless, horrible wars and imprison up to five percent of its adult population at any one time.

Now things are changing. Between the Russian announcement and yuan/RMB convertibility, the US will gradually have more trouble printing money at will. Perhaps the corrupt military-industrial complex will be impelled to shrink and large-scale social programs like the wretched Obamacare will have more difficulty with funding as well.

As a libertarian publication, we should rejoice over the upcoming starvation of the US fedgov.

But we will not. We are well aware that the same banking influences that created the monstrous, modern state is ruining US and the West generally in order to build up a more febrile internationalism.

The BRICs, invented by Goldman Sachs are part of it. So is this reconfiguration of reserve currencies.

It seems natural, of course, as “directed history”always does. But it is not natural in the slightest. From what we can tell, it is pre-planned.

Remember both the IMF and the World Bank are controlled by the US. And yet it is these two organizations that are facilitating the rise of the yuan/RMB.

Also, please pay attention to how Russia will issue rubles into the economic system (from the same translated article we quoted previously):

How can we calculate [how many rubles Russia needs]? In exactly the same way as the United States calculates the amount of dollars needed for its economy. Just as the European Union does the same.

The best justification would be that from now on Russia issues rubles based on the value (in rubles) of all natural resources explored on its territory. It is quite amusing that subsequent steps are no rocket science; they are dictated by common sense itself. Since we are breaking down the disadvantageous system,

Putin may be taking a big step, but by circumventing his central bank (initially imposed by the West) he can be seen as moving toward more state control of Russian currency.

And for years, we have debated heatedly with people like Ellen Brown (here) who believe that federal governments can do a much better job of printing money than quasi-independent central banks.

Good Lord! What’s wrong with a little monetary freedom?

All Putin has to do if he wants a healthy currency is declare that the new ruble will be backed by gold and that its issuance will be a private or regional matter.

Let a thousand gold mines bloom. Let the circulation of gold and its related paper notes travel up or down depending on quantity and demand – not the determinations of yet another shadowy, elite clique.

This is the way the US ran before the Civil War and created one of the world’s most prosperous and freest cultures. Those in the US live yet on the dregs of that “golden” period.

But this is not well understood. As time goes on the often-illiterate alternative media may join in hosannas for Putin’s upcoming currency shift. But, again, just because “Russia” will now control its currency instead of a central bank reporting to the IMF, doesn’t necessarily create a better system.

Of course, the argument will be made this sort of system is what Hitler installed in Nazi Germany in order to create the German “miracle” of the 1930s (which we are supposedly not able to talk about). But that system might have destroyed itself over time. Surely it would have.

To begin with, such systems may work very well. But since the “money” is being created by human deciders rather than the competitive market, distortions are inevitable. Price-fixing, which is what it is, never works.

And while we are making the point that this newfound ruble freedom may not be so profound as advertised, let us note that the advent of a currency war is being accompanied by military tension as well.

Conclusion: Whether such tensions are legitimate or dramatized is difficult to say. But given elite banking control of so much around the world, we would not be surprised if we are simply being exposed to a gigantic performance of sorts directed from the top down.Ironically, despite apparent “setbacks,” London’s City surely leads the way.

A lot rides on defeating US imperialism in Syria. The fate of the region and beyond hangs in the balance.

If Syria goes, Iran is next, a war if initiated by Washington far more potentially consequential and devastating.

Iran’s population alone makes it an important regional country – four times the size of Syria at around 80 million. Imagine the possible war-related death, injury and displacement toll.

Transforming the Islamic Republic into a US vassal state would give America and Israel unchallenged Middle East dominance.

Russian and Chinese regional influence would wane or be eliminated. The loss of Syrian and Iranian sovereignty would greatly aid the scourge of US imperialism worldwide – Moscow and Beijing the key independent powers standing in the way of its global dominance.

Nuclear war would be more likely with the aim of letting America colonize planet earth unopposed if triumphant, provided nuclear devastation and radiation poisoning didn’t kill us all – why nuclear confrontation is so crucial to prevent. The potential consequences should terrify everyone.

Vladimir Putin is committed to defeating the scourge of US-supported terrorism in Syria, mainly concerned about preventing its spread to Russia’s heartland – at the same time wanting the Syrian Arab Republic’s sovereignty and territorial integrity preserved.

During an August 15 meeting with his German counterpart, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said “(w)e believe that it is still necessary not to allow international terrorist entities to prevail here, and to ensure the beginning of genuine and true negotiations between all Syrian sides.”

It’s alarming that many so-called (US-supported) moderate (sic) (anti-government combatants) more often coordinate their actions with” Security Council-designated terrorist groups.

China intends offering Syria humanitarian aid and enhanced military help. On Tuesday, People’s Liberation Army Admiral/high-ranking Defense Ministry official Guan Youfei met with Syrian Defense Minister Fahad Jasssim al-Freij and an unnamed Russian general in Damascus.

Following their meeting, he issued a statement, saying “(t)he Chinese and Syrian militaries traditionally have a friendly relationship, and the Chinese military is willing to keep strengthening exchanges and cooperation with the Syrian military.

How far Beijing intends going militarily remains to be seen. It has its own terrorist problem. It’s threatened by US regional provocations, notably in the South China Sea.

Its government reportedly sent dozens of military advisors to Syria last year to aid in the fight against terrorism, stopping short of committing warplanes and/or ground forces.

Does Guan’s Tuesday visit signify Beijing intending more direct military involvement than already? Will greater East/West confrontation follow?

Flashpoint conditions in Syria could become more serious than currently. Neocon Hillary Clinton likely succeeding Obama next year could threaten world peace and stability by escalating conflict into something more dangerous than now.

A lot depends on the Syrian, Russian, Iranian, Chinese alliance against the scourge of US imperialism – maybe humanity’s fate.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

In a move starkly pointing to the risk of all-out war between the major powers in the Middle East, the US military said yesterday that it had scrambled fighter jets Thursday against government bombers inside Syria to protect US Special Forces operating with Kurdish “rebel” militias.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime sent two Su-24 bombers to bomb Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) forces advancing on government-held positions in the city of Hasakah. The bombers nearly hit US Special Forces troops that are deployed illegally in Syria, embedded in the YPG. US officials tried to contact Syrian government and Russian forces operating in the region, and Russian officials replied that their bombers were not involved.

The US fighter planes arrived after the Syrian bombers had left the area, and no US soldiers were injured. Washington then stepped up its air patrols in the region. Yesterday, Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis warned of military action against any threat to US forces.

Washington, he said, would “take whatever action is necessary” to protect US Special Forces in Syria. “We will ensure their safety,” he continued, “and the Syrian regime would be well advised not to do things that place them at risk… We view instances that place the coalition at risk with utmost seriousness and we do have the inherent right of self defense.”

Davis also criticized the Assad government for suddenly attacking the YPG, which until recently served as its de facto ally against CIA-backed Islamist militias. “This is very unusual, we have not seen the regime take this type of action against YPG before,” he said.

Davis’ barely veiled threat that the Pentagon could attack Syrian government forces to protect its troops, which are operating in Syria in violation of the country’s sovereignty and without even the fig leaf of a UN mandate, points to the basic war aims of Washington and its European allies. Claims that their intervention is aimed at fighting Islamist terror groups, which evolved out of militias they supported against the Assad regime, are a political fraud. The imperialist powers’ goal was and remains regime-change.

As the CIA arms the Al Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front in Aleppo against Assad’s forces, the Pentagon is supporting the offensive of the YPG, which recently renamed itself the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) after absorbing a few smaller, ethnic-Arab militias.

Washington’s reckless threats to use force against Syrian government forces risk escalating the conflict into a catastrophic global war of the United States and its European allies against the major powers intervening in Syria to defend the regime: Iran, Russia and now China.

Tehran, Moscow and Beijing have all presented their operations in Syria as missions to fight Islamist terror groups alongside Washington. After Russia intervened in Syria militarily last year, Moscow and Washington developed channels of communications to prevent simultaneous US and Russian air strikes in Syria from accidentally leading to a military clash between the world’s two leading nuclear powers.

The façade of international unity built around agreements to bomb the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militia was, however, superficial and false. Washington and powerful forces in the European Union still aimed for regime-change, and deeply rooted conflicts persisted between the major powers. Moscow and Beijing fear the drive for hegemony in the Middle East mounted by Washington after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991—especially the regime-change policy applied in the illegal 2003 US invasion of Iraq, the 2011 NATO war in Libya, and then the Western-sponsored civil war in Syria.

As Washington stoked conflict with Russia after toppling a pro-Russian regime in Ukraine in 2014, and with China over the South China Sea and North Korea, Moscow and Beijing concluded that they could not allow yet another violent, US-led regime-change, this time in Syria. US threats have not succeeded in whipping Russia and China into line. Instead, Russia and China are escalating their involvement in Syria.

The near-confrontation between US and Syrian jets points to the danger that this situation will trigger a military clash—either with an accidental collision between US, Russian or allied forces in Syria or a deliberate attack intended as a signal to the opposing side—which could escalate into all-out war.

The Syrian government launched more air strikes against YPG forces near Hasakah yesterday. Fighting had broken out earlier this week between Kurdish forces and the pro-regime National Defense Forces (NDF) militia in Hasakah, and the Syrian army issued a statement declaring it had “responded appropriately” to Kurdish attempts to conquer the city.

Hasakah residents are reporting that both the US-backed YPG and pro-government forces are using heavy weaponry in the city.

“This is the first time the regime used warplanes to strike in Hasakah. The bombing is very strong. This is the first time the relationship between the two sides reaches this level,” Hasakah resident Lina al-Najjari told the Wall Street Journal. “We live in an area that is surrounded by the fighting. We have prepared our suitcases to leave once we get the chance. But we cannot leave our house at the moment. We cannot step outside.”

The Kremlin also launched large-scale air strikes on Islamist targets across Syria, in the north near Aleppo and in the northeast around Deir-ez-Zor. The strikes were mounted from warships in the Black Sea and by strategic bombers flying out of bases in Iran and Syria.

Meanwhile, Chinese officials continued to voice support for the Assad regime after Beijing took the unprecedented step earlier this week of sending a high-level military delegation to Damascus. Admiral Guan Youfei, the director of the Chinese military’s Office for International Military Cooperation, agreed with Syrian Defense Minister Fahad Jassim al-Freij to step up Chinese personnel training and aid for the Syrian army.

The Chinese army’s English-language China Military Online web site declared, “There are already Chinese military advisors in Syria, focusing on personnel training in weapons, since the Syrian government forces are buyers of Chinese weapons, including sniper rifles, rocket launchers and machine guns.” Moreover, it asserted that, while many Syrian-Chinese arms deals were suspended due to the war, now “there could be engagement again over these contracts.”

Citing Middle East Studies Professor Zhao Weiming of Shanghai International Studies University, the site also suggested that Beijing’s new Syria policy was retaliation for the US “pivot to Asia,” which seeks to isolate China. “Since the US has been interfering militarily in China’s backyard in the South China Sea, this could be push-back from the Chinese military into an area, the Middle East, that is usually considered a US sphere of military influence,” it reported.

A major factor in the sudden public intervention of China into the Syrian conflict, Chinese analysts explained, is last month’s failed US-backed coup in Turkey. “In developing a closer relationship with Syria, one has to take into account the changes at hand in Syria and the region, including the fast recovering relations between Turkey and Russia,” said Wang Lian of the School of International Studies at Peking University.

The Assad regime’s bombing of the YPG points to some of the geo-strategic concerns that underlay Washington’s decision to give at least tacit backing to the coup attempt.

Washington’s search for reliable proxies in Syria, and, in particular, the Pentagon’s choice of the Kurdish YPG as a suitable candidate, ultimately united a wide coalition of countries against it. Turkish officials were deeply concerned that YPG victories in Syria would stoke Kurdish separatist sentiment within Turkey itself. The Syrian regime, backed by Russia and China, was preparing an attack on the YPG to keep it from gaining too much influence and setting up a US-backed regime in northern Syria.

The failure of the coup in Turkey and the subsequent purge of pro-US Turkish officers suspected of sympathy for the coup only shifted Ankara closer to the Russian and Syrian regimes.

The main danger that arises is that, in order to salvage its intervention in Syria, the US government and its allies will mount an even more reckless military escalation.

Eric Zuesse, updated from his original post at strategic-culture.org

On August 18th, the terrific “Moon of Alabama” blogger posted his brilliant exposé of an operation that the U.S. and its allies support and are lobbying to win the Nobel Peace Prize, but that’s really just a group of people who help Syria’s anti-Assad jihadists by medicating their injured jihadists, and by carrying off and disposing of the jihadists’ victims’ corpses. The headline is “The ‘Wounded Boy In Orange Seat’ — Another Staged ‘White Helmets’ Stunt”. This story concerns staged (faked) photos by that Western-funded-and-backed jihadist organization — photos which have prominently been spread in Western ‘news’ media (and here’s an example of that Western propaganda on August 20th, from NPR’s Scott Simon, quoting the New York Times’s and Nick Kristof) .

It’s all being done in order to fool Western publics to support their governments’ financial and military assistance to (actually) the jihadists who have been imported by the U.S. and allied governments into Syria to overthrow Assad, who is supported by the majority of Syrians, while the United States and the jihadists it backs are despised by 82% of Syrians.

They’re imported to conquer land there, and to help bring down the Assad government and to replace the existing secular Syrian government with a ‘pro-Western’ government run by ‘our’ jihadists, who (unlike the secular government of Bashar al-Assad) will allow the fundamentalist-Islamic royal families who own Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to pipeline through Syria into the European Union, their oil and gas, so as to supplant Russia’s oil and gas in Europe — the biggest-of-all energy-market.

Here, then, was my earlier report on the White Helmets — these U.S.-backed hoaxters and assistants to jihadists:

A four-minute video that was posted to youtube on April 29th documents that the U.S. government has been lying about an organization, the White Helmets, the U.S. government hires to assist Syria’s Al Qaeda, called “Al Nusra,” to dispose of corpses of persons Al Nusra executes. Nusra kills Syrian government soldiers; and, according to Seymour Hersh and other investigative journalists, has, throughout the Syrian war, been supplied guns and other weapons by the governments of U.S., Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, for that purpose. This is part of America’s operation to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, whom even Western polling shows to be popular amongst the Syrian general population. That same polling shows Nusra and other jihadist organizations (and the U.S. government, which arms them) to be extremely unpopular in Syria.

On April 19th, the U.S. State Department had blocked entrance into the United States by Raed Saleh, the head of the White Helmets, and refused to say why. Saleh had been invited to receive in NYC an award by USAID and NGOs that the U.S. government finances, but he was barred at the airport, apparently because the FBI had placed him onto its no-fly list as a known terrorist.

The White Helmets claim to receive no funds from any government, but the four-minute video shows a State Department official admitting “we supply through USAID about twenty three million dollars in assistance to them” (which might be annually, but that question wasn’t addressed in the video). The White Helmets’ founder, James Lemesurier, is himself funded by the governments of UK, Japan, Denmark and Netherlands, all of which are likewise trying to overthrow Assad.

Thus, U.S. and other Western taxpayers are funding this allegedly ‘non-partisan’ and ‘humanitarian’ but actually jihadist, organization, whose leader was, on April 19th, prevented from receiving in the U.S., a ‘humanitarian’ award, for processing corpses that Nusra — which the U.S. government also supports — is producing. The White Helmets also rescue jihadists (and their inevitable civilian hostages), who have been injured by Syrian government forces. That’s their ‘humanitarian’ work. This video shows jihadists cheering White Helmets. The anti-Assad ‘charities’ that were wanting to award Raed Saleh in the U.S., have said they’ll instead do it in Turkey, which is a U.S. ally — even a member of NATO.

As regards what the Syrian public think, it’s highly favorable toward Assad and highly unfavorable toward the jihadist organizations that now infest their country from abroad, and also against the United States, which they view as being the main source of this ‘civil war’ (which is instead actually a foreign invasion of their country).

The video also shows the British agent (and Britain is yet another U.S. ally) who founded and organized the ‘non-partisan humanitarian organization’, White Helmets, Mr. Lemesurier.

The Syrian government is an ally of Russia, and America’s policy is to overthrow and replace the leader of any nation who is friendly toward Russia, such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Manuel Zelaya,Viktor Yanukovych, or Bashar al-Assad. These governments then become failed states. When Zelaya was replaced in 2009, the country he led, Honduras, became a narco-state and has since had the world’s highest murder-rate. Jihadists weren’t even needed in the Honduran case. The U.S. government didn’t perpetrate that particular coup, but only helped it succeed and enabled the installed new regime to remain in power. The Honduran coup was actually perpetrated by agents of that country’s twelve aristocratic families, who own almost all of the country. However, normally, the U.S. government itself overthrows the leaders it doesn’t like, and doesn’t merely aid the regimes that a coup by the local aristocracy has already installed. Hillary Clinton, the U.S. Presidential candidate, was the key person in the Obama Administration who worked, behind the scenes, to keep in power the coup regime that took over in Honduras on 28 June 2009. Without her assistance to the Honduran coup-regime, Zelaya, whom virtually all other governments supported as being still the legal leader of Honduras, would have been restored to power; the coup-regime would have had to bow out. By contrast, her — and President Obama’s — efforts to replace Syria’s secular but nominally Shiite President Assad, by using Saudi-funded foreign-imported Sunni jihadists, haven’t been nearly so successful, unless creating the highest degree of misery among the residents in any country in the world, is viewed by Obama and Clinton as ‘success’.

As I had reported on April 16th, headlining, “Why Obama Prioritizes Ousting Assad Over Defeating Syria’s Jihadists”:

The “2016 Global Emotions Report” by Gallup, surveying over a thousand people in each one of 140 different nations, found that, by far, the people in Syria had “the lowest positive experiences worldwide,” the people there were far more miserable than in any other nation. The score was 36 (on a scale to 100). Second and third worst were tied at 51: Turkey because of the tightening dictatorship there as Turkey has become one of Obama’s key allies in toppling Assad; Nepal, on account of the earthquake.

So: America certainly doesn’t give a damn about the sufferings of the Syrians, and of the Iraqis, sufferings that the U.S. itself caused and which invasions by us (and by the jihadists we and our Saudi and other ‘friends’ have armed and assisted to get into Syria through our ‘friend’ Turkey) have produced the two nations with the most misery on this planet. Our Presidents mouth platitudes of ‘caring’, but, to judge by their actions, are merely lying psychopaths. But whatever they are, they’re causing the most misery of anyone. How much coverage of that fact is there in the American press? Hasn’t America’s press actually been complicit in this, all along?

So, this is the reason why the U.S. government refuses entry to a terrorist it hires to create hell for the people in Syria: it doesn’t want individuals such as Raed Saleh inside the United States. America’s leaders know that, if something like this happens, and if word of it becomes well known, the American public could become even less supportive of their leaders than they already are. It’s not what America’s aristocracy want. They might not care about the American public, but they care very much about staying in power, regardless whether under the “Democratic” or under the “Republican” label.

Back on 26 June 2015, Raed Saleh had somehow been allowed into the United States, to address an “Arria” briefing (named after the far-right aristocratic military Venezuelan diplomat and member of the U.S. aristocratic Council on Foreign Relations, Diego Arria) to the U.N. Security Council, where Saleh announced in his opening paragraph that his focus would be “to convey the message of the search and rescue teams in Syria about the suffering of the Syrian people due to the regime’s bombing with indiscriminate weapons, particularly barrel bombs.” Those were the cheap, even amateurish, improvised bombs that the Syrian Army were using to kill as many of the jihadists as they could, but which also inevitably killed and maimed also many Syrian civilians in the occupied areas of the country — there’s no way to avoid it. Saleh’s speech didn’t mention any of the many foreign jihadist groups such as Nusra and ISIS that were and are killing far more of everybody than Assad’s forces were. His focus was instead totally against Assad and the government’s forces, not at all against the jihadist mercenaries who had entered the country and made hell there; and, Saleh said, “The Syrian people who are being killed every day, Ladies and Gentlemen, hold you responsible” for not helping those jihadists eliminate the existing Syrian government. He said this without at all referring to whateven Western polling of Syrians had consistently shown to be the case, which was the exact opposite: they hold the U.S. to blame and they loathe the jihadists and support the government. So, clearly, the United States did the correct thing when finally placing this jihadist of theirs onto America’s no-fly list. To the exact contrary of the U.S. government’s propaganda which says that he’s a hero and that he and his organization are ‘nonpartisan’ and that he is, as he calls himself, “the head of Syrian Civil Defense,” that appellation for him is like calling Hitler’s medics during his invasion of, say, France, “French Civil Defense.” George Orwell’s allegorical novel 1984 has clearly been surpassed in today’s reality. The extent to which Western publics accept the arrant lies they’re fed is exceeding, perhaps, even Orwell’s expectations.

So: one typical piece of Republican propaganda about the White Helmets is the May 1st article in the Wall Street Journal, “White Helmets Are White Knights for Desperate Syrians”, while a typical piece of Democratic propaganda about them is the New York Times eleven days earlier, onApril 20th, which headlined “Leader of Syria Rescue Group, Arriving in U.S. for Award, Is Refused Entry”, and it reported there that “Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma at Norman, called the denial of entry ‘a scandal.’ ‘The White Helmets are one of the few organizations in Syria that have been above reproach,’ he said. ‘They have tried to observe strict neutrality in order to facilitate their humanitarian work and save lives. To do this they have worked along side all sorts of militias in order to get to victims of the fighting.’” He didn’t say that the “militias” are overwhelmingly foreign jihadist groups paid by America’s fundamentalist-Sunni allies the Sauds, and Qatar’s royal family the Thanis, to overthrow the secular Shiite Assad. But, after all, it’s only propaganda, anyway. Right?

Furthermore, the Syrian public might view that conception of ‘strict neutrality’ much the way Jews in Hitler’s concentration camps viewed the conception of ‘strict neutrality’ as between themselves and their oppressors, or the way Chinese in the Nanjing Massacre viewed that ‘strict neutrality’ between themselves and the Japanese invaders. And, polls in Syria do show they view the U.S. and its allies as the invaders. Instead of ‘strict neutrality,’ the U.S. and its allies are the foreign invaders, and not at all ‘neutral’. And, to state this documented fact (documented here by the links) isn’t propaganda at all; it’s news-reporting, in an entirely verified historical context (which is very different from propaganda).

What that four-minute video shows is news-reporting, in exactly this sense. That’s why it’s presented here: it brings all of this together, succinctly; and what I’ve done here is to document some of its important historical context, to help people who are skeptical of it (and, in such a lying world, everything should be viewed with a scientist’s skepticism) understand and evaluate it, at a deeper level than a mere four minutes can possibly present, even in a video.

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

Judicial Watch proved it. Under a Freedom of Information Act request, Judicial Watch was able to obtain a (heavily redacted) copy of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) directive that initiated the creation of ISIS in 2012. the DIA report states, 

THE WEST, GULF COUNTRIES, AND TURKEY [WHO] SUPPORT THE [SYRIAN] OPPOSITION . . . [SUPPORT] ESTABLISHING A DECLARED OR UNDECLARED SALAFIST PRINCIPALITY IN EASTERN SYRIA . . . IN ORDER TO ISOLATE THE SYRIAN REGIME . . .

Not even Judicial Watch seems to have appreciated the significance of this document, where its press release focused on the Benghazi attack. Recent releases of Hillary’s emails, moreover, confirm that taking out Assad has nothing to do with his alleged abuse of the Syrian people but because it will help Israel.

Just in case it has slipped anyone’s mind, Hillary was Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013. Barack was inaugurated in 2008 and steps down in 2016. It happened on their watch. It could not have happened without their approval. They really did create ISIS!

The chemical attacks on Syrian citizens on 21 August 2013 was meant to justify lobbing cruise missiles into Syria. Obama was ready, but Americans were not. And when the ploy was debunked by a 50-page dossier the Russians provided to the UN, they resorted to “Plan B”, which was the creation of ISIS by the DIA.

The chemical weapons are widely believed to have been provided to the “rebels” by Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, to whom the Bush family refers as “Bandar Bush”. But recent releases of Hillary’s emails suggest that she was directing the transfer of weapons from Libya to Syria and chemical weapons may have been among them.

The Benghazi attack appears to have been initiated because Ambassador Christ Stevens was concerned that some of the weapons being sent to Syria could be used against the civilian population. The Obama administration has stonewalled inquiries as to whether Benghazi had anything to do with transferring weapons to the rebels. That means “Yes!”

The signs have been there right along the way, but the media has not been reporting them. Here are some of the facts reported in a recent study about ISIS:

* On 23 February 2015, *FARS* reported that the (much maligned) Iraqi Army had downed 2 UK cargo planes carrying weapons for ISIS, which was among the first signs that things were not as the world was being told by Western—and especially US—news sources.

* On 1 March 2015, *FARS* reported that Iraqi popular forces are known as “Al-Hashad Al-Shabi” shot down a US helicopter carrying weapons for ISIL in Al-Anbar province of which they had photographs.

* On 10 April 2015, *Press TV* reported that, in response to a request by Syria that ISIL be named a terrorist organization, the US, Britain, France, and Jordan refused, which was rather baffling on its face.

* Photographs were appearing contemporaneously showing ISIS members sporting “US Army” tattoos, which the American media has yet to acknowledge. Confirm this for yourself by searching for “ISIS members sporting US Army tattoos” online.

* On 19 May 2015, Brad Hoof of  levantreport.com, “2012 Defense intelligence Agency document: West will facilitate rise of Islamic State ‘in order to isolate the Syrian regime”, based upon the release of a selection of formerly classified documents obtained by Judicial Watch from the US Department of Defense and Department of State.

* On 22 June 2015, ex-CIA contractor, Steven Kelley, explained the US “created ISIL for sake of Israel” and to have a “never-ending war” in the Middle East, which would make the countries there “unable to stand up to Israel” and to provide “the constant flow of orders for weapons from the military-industrial complex at home, which is feeding a lot of money to the senators pushing for these wars”.

There’s more–a lot more, including photographs of Sen. John McCain with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. You can find dozens of them on the internet. In Washington, ISIS is widely known as “John McCain’s army”. So what’s wrong with a candidate for president making the point that his opponent and her most prominent support actually created ISIS?  Trump is right.

Roger Stone is a former Republican political consultant specializing in opposition research. He is author of The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ; Nixon’s Secrets: The Rise, Fall and Untold Truth about the President, Watergate, and the Pardon; The Clintons’ War on Women; and his latest book Jeb and the Bush Crime Family. 

Reference:

http://www.iranreview.org/cont ent/Documents/How-We-Know-ISIS -Was-MADE-IN-THE-USA-.htm

International tensions have in recent years often led to conflicts between nations, leaving countries to face complicated choices. The world is under constant change, and the most direct results are political instability over vast areas of the globe combined with economic, cultural and often military confrontations. The economic priorities of cooperation and development are increasingly being sacrificed on the altar of protection of geopolitical interests. It is a return to the past where strategic interests prevailed over the economic model prescribed by modern capitalism.

Nations like Russia, China and Iran have in recent years accelerated their rise on the global arena, expanding vital aspects of this in such areas as energy supply, transit of goods, the type of currency used in trade, defense of national borders, the granting of use of airspace, military–industrial cooperation with other nations, the joint fight against terrorism, and a general defense of the principle of national sovereignty. Washington has tried in every way to prevent this growing multipolarity, desperately trying to prolong its two-decade-old unipolar world.

It is in this general climate that Beijing, Moscow and Tehran have had to engage with Western economic reactions in the process of defending their strategic interests. As a result, we have increasingly witnessed in recent years a conflict between economic convenience and politically driven policy decisions. The most difficult challenge faced by these challengers of the status quo lies increasingly in the complicated question of how to manage a situation where geopolitical interests have to fit into a global financial system largely managed and manipulated by Europeans and Americans.

Currently the international financial system, as I have written many times before, is an American affair. The dollar stands as the dominant currency in relation to other financial institutions, and the whole global economic system is mainly conducted through the American currency. But the paradigm is changing, especially in recent years, thanks to supra-national entities like the AIIB and BRICS. Inevitably the IMF’s currency basket will have to incorporate the yuan, starting the process of the slow erosion of the dollar’s dominance.

The IMF, after years of wasting time trying to delay this event, will welcome from the October 1st, 2016, Beijing as an integral part of the reserve-currency system. Of course one of the most critical aspects is still the private banking sector and how the SWIFT payment system will work, given that it currently lies within the Euro-American orbit. Altogether this blend of public and private sector produces a situation where it is easy to see that the global economic system and its rules are often decided in Washington (IMF, World Bank), New York (Wall Street, FED), London (LSE), Basel (BIS) and Frankfurt (ECB), excluding all the other nations. The financial system is dominated by central banks, international bodies and the huge conglomerate of private banks, all strictly of a North Atlantic orientation.

It is easy to understand that nations not aligned with Western interests suffer retaliation, threats and damage from a financial system that is controlled by Euro-American interests.

The pressure imposed on nations like Iran, Russia and China in recent years has increased significantly, jeopardizing global stability. The real possibility of proposing an alternative economic system that is not so easily manipulable by the West has allowed not only Beijing, but especially Moscow and Tehran, to respond in a very effective manner to Western geopolitical intimidation. The Western reaction to the development of the Iranian nuclear program, as well as the Crimean issue, demonstrated clearly the consequences that come with defending strategic interests.

Initially it was Iran. With the acquired nuclear capability, Israel poses a direct strategic threat to the existence of the Islamic Republic. Tehran has decided to give priority to its own national interests by developing its own nuclear program. The objective is the production of a nuclear device to use as a deterrent, effectively creating a balance of power. Of course the decision sparked a vehement response from the West, and once the military option was discarded, an economic strangulation of the country commenced. Iran’s expulsion from the global banking system (SWIFT), as well as international sanctions, especially in 2007-2013, have had serious repercussions for the Iranian state in terms of profits from imports and exports, especially in the area of oil and gas.

The economic burden has been high, the country facing difficulties financing internal growth. This pushed Tehran to try and change the situation to their advantage by bypassing impediments and penalties. This decision forged important partnerships, especially with Russia, China and India, and strongly contributed to the implementation of an alternative economic channel. Tehran’s move was strongly appreciated in the region by small countries seeking opportunities for mutual gains. Important Chinese and Indian investments in the Islamic Republic, Moscow’s constant military exports to Iran, and the selling and buying of gas and oil in different currencies rather than the dollar created a context in which, for the first time, the international economic pressure fueled by Washington was not able to change the course of events.

Iran, thanks to the assistance and financial support of its main allies, managed to render irrelevant the sanctions and banking restrictions imposed on it. It is this aspect more than any other that led to the nuclear negotiation process initiated by the West. Iran was found in the revolutionary situation of being able to pursue its strategic objectives (nuclear weapons as a deterrent to a nuclear Israel) without succumbing to economic pressure. The importance of this outcome can never be stressed enough. For the first time in a long time, a nation not aligned with Western wishes was able to defend its strategic interests without suffering the negative effects of an adverse international system, with its arsenal of speculation, penalties, or simply illegal actions like the removal from the SWIFT system.

When confronting geopolitical and economic interests, it is hard not to mention the two giants such as China and Russia. Both countries, as global superpowers, necessarily need to constantly balance strategic objectives, often geopolitical, with international economic cooperation. The Ukrainian coup, with the reunification of Crimea, or the construction on the “Spratly Islands” in the South China Sea, are two forward-looking examples of how geopolitical interests have become a main priority for Beijing and Moscow. The power that China has accumulated in economic terms gives it a great advantage: Western nations are unable to apply economic aggression. This leaves China free to pursue its main political objectives, such as establishing security on its maritime boundaries, enforcing national integrity, and expanding its influence and commercial facilities across the continent, without fear of incurring economic punishment. The West is already unable to sanction China let alone apply any vetoes from the private banking sector, or even worse, a possible embargo. China is the factory of the world, and any economic pressure would end up producing unacceptable losses for the West.

After years of disagreements over Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea, all that Washington managed to do was obtain an irrelevant judgment from an international tribunal thousands of miles away from the disputed area. China pursues its claims without much caring for the actions and rhetoric of the West, focusing instead on ensuring its strategic focal points.

The coup in Ukraine, and the subsequent reunification of Crimea, showed unequivocally how Russia’s nuclear weapons deter American aggression. The possibility of NATO actively participating in the war Kiev started against the east of the country amounted to zero, due to the conventional military power of the Russian Federation. Nevertheless in such a scenario, we cannot overlook the effect of sanctions, and the attempts of international isolation, that Russia is subjected to. Moscow, during the Ukrainian crisis, took the difficult but necessary decision to preserve its geopolitical interests at the expense of its economic interests. The stakes were too high to be able to give preference to financial calculations. Sevastopol and the Black Sea Fleet are fully part of the strategic deterrent that has saved the world from a possible confrontation between NATO and Russia in Ukraine. In such a scenario, even the collapse in oil prices has not affected Moscow’s decisions even as it is damaging to the Russian economy.

Like with Iran, for Russia the choice to defend at all costs its national interests has forced a policy of “looking towards the east”. The multiple, all-encompassing agreements with Beijing have proven that Western economic power is increasingly frail and can be ignored.

The events involving Iran, China and Russia are an epilogue in international relations. They convey an uplifting message to countries with less capacity to resist Western military aggression or withstand financial aggression. It is still too early to appreciate the effects of this change on small nations and their policies, since they are still reliant on assistance from their strong allies. In scenarios like this, the economic impact is not negligible and is often the decisive factor in balancing priorities. It is difficult to imagine a country that places geopolitical interest ahead of the nation’s economy.

Some recent examples of this Western arrogance can be seen in energy transit through pipelines. The Middle East suffered untold death and destruction in Iraq and Syria because of plans to disrupt the construction of a pipeline connecting Iran and Europe that passed through Syria and Iraq. A similar situation was seen in the discussed links between South Stream, North Stream or Turkish Stream. In this case all the transit countries (Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Serbia and Slovenia) had enormous problems fulfilling their agreements. Unfortunately, it is in such circumstances that Western economic blackmail reaches its peak, often managing to block or slow down such strategically important gas or oil corridors. Smaller countries are forced to give up important sources of development in order to avoid running the gamut of economic restrictions or even international sanctions.

One way to resist international finance is through a national economic system that is in many respects highly independent. This is how the world should view the alternative international systems of the likes of the BRICS Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). In the near future, countries vulnerable to international speculative attacks will be able to embark on politically favorable projects through the AIIB or BRICS Bank. The multipolar future is not just for superpowers like China and Russia but also represents a huge opportunity to raise Third World countries up from unacceptable levels of poverty. The aim of Sino-Russian relations is nothing less than providing the necessary tools to other nations to resist international pressures from traditional financial channels (World Bank, IMF). Allowing these nations to pursue their own national strategic interests opens possibilities that only a multipolar world can offer.

The transition from a unipolar to a multipolar reality has already changed many aspects of international relations. Military options for superpowers against one another have become a less viable option thanks to economic ties and the nuclear balance. Some of the ultimate tools to influence events, namely manipulation and financial terrorism, have less and less effect on superpowers and tend to actually favor the creation of an alternative economic system.

The evolution of these events is easily predictable. With more integration of the world’s nations, the dollar’s influence will gradually be reduced, but the decline of the United States’ unipolar moment will accelerate. The effects will be increasing international cooperation and a transformation that will guide our world toward a full multipolar age.

A revolution that will change everything like nothing in recent history is taking place, forever altering the delicate balance upon which international relations hitherto rested.

Out of all the individuals in the political sphere today, no one stirs controversy and divides opinion more than Donald Trump. For months now, Trump’s flamboyant personality and demagogic rhetoric has dominated the media landscape, turning the presidential race into the biggest entertainment event of the year. Hailed as the saviour of America by some, and as a train wreck waiting to happen by others; Trump still remains somewhat of an enigma.

There is no doubt that his straight-talking style has resonated with many Americans who are tired of career politicians more concerned with political correctness than confronting real issues. Many Americans are also encouraged by some of Trump’s stances on certain issues – including his comments on improving relations with Russia, and his seeming opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – yet his constant flip-flopping on issues makes it impossible to decipher what his actual policies will be if elected.

Trump’s chances are emboldened by the fact that his major competitor in the race is so hated by every thinking person in the world, that many Americans may support Trump purely as the lesser of two evils. With Hillary at the helm, the American people know exactly what they are going to get: more war, more corruption and more policies that will only benefit special interests.

Trump: The Anti-Establishment Candidate?

Trump supporters are often very vocal in their belief that the real estate magnate is an anti-establishment outsider. In many of his speeches and comments, Trump plays up to this (probably carefully constructed) persona. Judging by the nature of people advising the presidential candidate however, Trump’s anti-establishment populism looks anything but genuine.

In addition to the establishment heavyweights Trump has already met with – including the former US Secretary of State and member of the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Henry Kissinger, and the former Director of Policy Planning at the State Department and current head of the CFR, Richard Hass – Trump’s official advisory teams on both foreign and economic policy reveal some troublesome connections to the neocons, Wall Street, Soros and the CFR.

A Foreign Policy Ran by Blackwater and the Neocons

Trump’s official foreign policy team includes a minimum of two neocons, with Joseph E. Schmitz the clear winner of the award for the worst foreign policy adviser in Trump’s selection. Schmitz, a lawyer by trade, is the former Inspector General of the Department of Defense in addition to being a former executive at none other than Blackwater Worldwide. Blackwater, which rebranded itself as Academi in 2011 due to its atrocious reputation (similar to what Jabhat Al-Nusra just done), is the notorious military contractor that has been involved in various controversies.

It is probably most infamous for the horrific incident in 2007, when Blackwater guards killed 17 Iraqi civilians and injured a further 20 after opening fire at a traffic junction in Baghdad. Other Blackwater enterprises include making a fortune of pretending to fight the booming opium trade in Afghanistan (which so ‘curiously’ skyrocketed following the US-led invasion of the country in 2001), in addition to fighting alongside the Western-backed terrorists in Syria who are trying to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad.

Schmitz is also connected to the Center for Security Policy (CSP), a neocon think tank whose publications fuel the anti-Islamic hysteria that is so prevalent in the US today. As Professor Michel Chossudovsky of Global Research has documented, CSP is an organization that has received funding by corporate powers who are promoting Islamophobia in America. CSP is also reportedly financed by numerous giants of the military-industrial complex, including Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.

Economic Advisers Connected to Wall Street and the CFR

At the beginning of August, Trump officially announced his economic advisory council. Considering that Trump has criticised Hillary Clinton for her overt Wall Street connections, you would think that Trump would pick a council devoid of any Wall Street titans. Well think again; Trump’s economic team is largely comprised of bankers, hedge fund managers and Wall Street insiders, who do not in any way represent the interests of the average American voter.

Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s National Finance Chairman and a major economic adviser, could not be more in bed with Wall Street and the establishment. Mnuchin is a former partner at Goldman Sachs, spending a total of 17 years at the financial powerhouse, according to Bloomberg. In addition to working for Goldman for close to two decades, Mnuchin also worked at Soros Fund Management, a firm founded by the billionaire and regime change extraordinaire, George Soros.

Another prominent economic adviser to Trump is John Paulson, the billionaire and hedge fund manager who founded Paulson & Co in 1994. Paulson, who formerly worked at Bear Stearns, is famous forshorting the housing market in the run up to the financial crisis of 2007-08, earning approximately $4 billion from the trade. The billionaire is also a member of the CFR, in addition to previously backing Mitt Romney in his failed 2012 presidential bid.

In addition to Mnuchin and Paulson, Trump’s economic advisers include Stephen Feinberg, the CEO of the private investment firm, Cerberus Capital Management; Stephen Calk, the founder of the Federal Savings Bank who has previously worked for Chase Manhattan Mortgage Corp and Bank of America; and Wilbur Ross, the billionaire who spent 25 years running Rothschild Inc’s bankruptcy practice. Trump has also reshuffled his campaign team recently, appointing Stephen Bannon, a former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, as his new campaign CEO.

It is clear that Clinton is the pick of the establishment, which explains the largely negative coverage of Trump in the mainstream media. But considering the nature of the advisers surrounding Trump, the establishment has pulled its usual trick of ensuring that it controls both major candidates in the presidential race.

Steven MacMillan is a freelance writer and editor of  The Analyst Report. 

Wikileaks has released what may be the most underreported story of the year in a year full of them, Hillary Clinton’s uncanny fulfillment of Oded Yinon‘s plan for the Middle East according to Israel 30 years ago. This was summed up in Yinon’s “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties.” Yinon, an influential right-wing Israeli strategist, envisioned a Middle East riven with conflict between Arab tribes and religious denominations, unable to oppose Israeli ambitions for regional dominance. Yinon wrote:

Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel’s targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel…Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon.

Syrian Boy

When former presidential candidate General Wes Clark shockingly proclaimed in 2011 that he had seen a memo emanating from the Bush defense department which revealed that the invasion of Iraq was only the beginning of a much more extensive program of “regime change” across the Middle East, one could not help but recall Yinon’s desire to provoke “inter-Arab confrontation.” Recalling a conversation with a Pentagon staffer before the invasion of Iraq, Clark told an audience:

I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”

In a recently released email from the Clinton Archives, which run from June 30, 2010 to August 12, 2014 while she was Secretary of State, Clinton wrote from the standpoint of not US interests, but Israeli. She said:

Bringing down Assad would not only be a massive boon to Israel’s security, it would also ease Israel’s understandable fear of losing its nuclear monopoly. Then, Israel and the United States might be able to develop a common view of when the Iranian program is so dangerous that military action could be warranted.

The unabashedly hawkish exchange, which seems to telegraph the intent to overcome obstacles to “common view” which would justify an attack on Iran, shows that Hillary is of a like mind with Yinon, who held that toppling stable Arab regimes and uncorking fratricidal civil wars, which may go on for decades, is in Israel’s interest.

General Wes Clark, “Seven Countries in Five Years”

Oded Yinon

With the world freshly shocked at an image seen in Syria and Libya every day, wounded children, it might help to remember the most exuberant advocate, as Secretary of State, for the military actions which unloosed the horrors seen today in these war zones. The photo of the boy is but one fairly tame example. The true carnage is unpublishable.

In a piece at Huffington Post, “Hillary Clinton and the Syrian Bloodbath,”Harvard’s Professor Jeffrey Sachs writes:

Clinton has been much more than a bit player in the Syrian crisis. Her diplomat Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi was killed as he was running a CIA operation to ship Libyan heavy weapons to Syria. Clinton herself took the lead role in organizing the so-called “Friends of Syria” to back the CIA-led insurgency.

Sachs is outraged at Hillary’s portraying herself as a “negotiator” who helped conclude ceasefires, writing:

This is the kind of compulsive misrepresentation that makes Clinton unfit to be President. Clinton’s role in Syria has been to help instigate and prolong the Syrian bloodbath, not to bring it to a close.

As for Libya, not only was Hillary the Obama administration’s most ardent supporter of military action to overthrow Gaddafi. It now comes out that the entire pretense for NATO intervention – stopping a massacre of civilians by Gaddafi, was pure fiction. Human Rights Watch, as reported in the Boston Globe:

released data on Misurata, the next-biggest city in Libya and scene of protracted fighting, revealing that Moammar Khadafy is not deliberately massacring civilians but rather narrowly targeting the armed rebels who fight against his government.

Charles Kubic at the National Interest writes in “Hillary’s Huge Libyan Disaster”:

Despite valid ceasefire opportunities to prevent “bloodshed in Benghazi” at the onset of hostilities, Secretary Clinton intervened and quickly pushed her foreign policy in support of a revolution led by the Muslim Brotherhood and known terrorists in the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.

Ongoing casualties of the Libyan Civil War are now in the hundreds of thousands, with just the latest UN report documenting 49 this month of June.

These are the dogs of war unleashed, in no small part, by Hillary. A disturbing glimpse of the cavalier attitude held by Clinton toward the chaos fomented by her policies was given when, told the news of Gaddafi’s torture and death, quipped and laughed: “We came, we saw, he died.”

Clinton Upon Learning of Death of Gaddafi

Combined with her boosterism for the Iraq War while a US senator from New York, which included repeating now thoroughly debunked Bush lies about weapons of mass destruction, and with Hillary already talking of escalation of the US military role in Syria, it behooves those frightened by Donald Trump to say how any candidate could be any scarier, from a been-there-done-that perspective, than Hillary. She has in the past threatened to “obliterate” Iran with nuclear weapons, and once cackled maniacally with James Baker III at the thought of finally attacking Iran.

Summing it up best, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein once observed wryly:

Trump says very scary things—deporting immigrants, massive militarism and ignoring the climate. Hillary, unfortunately, has a track record for doing all of those things,

Hillary Laughs With James Baker III About War With Iran

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history. ~ George Orwell.

The media furore surrounding the now viral image of wounded Syrian child, Omran Daqneesh, in terrorist-held eastern Aleppo, Syria is still raging, while the push back against the tide of western-sponsored anti-Syrian State propaganda reveals itself to be strengthening with each new spike in pro-terrorist hyperbole designed to provoke a knee-jerk foreign policy response that is either advocating a “No Fly Zone”, or some form of escalation foreign military intervention inside of Syria.

Today I had the honour to meet with Dr Bouthaina Shaaban, political and media advisor to Syrian President Bashar al Assad. We discussed many issues including this most recent heart wrenching image that is appearing across all main stream media channels. As we opened the discussion, Dr Shaaban said immediately:

We are paying for this propaganda with our blood.

Dr Shaaban went on to describe how the “corporate media is distorting reality in Syria“, while also explaining why she was reluctant at the beginning of the NATO member and allies war on Syria, to speak to western mainstream media:

They came here with accusatory questions, they didn’t come here to know what is going on. They came here to ask me why are you working with a man who is ‘killing his own people.’ What an ugly start for an interview.  I said there is no point, they come here to gain credibility but only to re-confirm their own story rather than to find out what is really going on.  I didn’t want to be used to ‘re-confirm’ their own story or to give them credibility.

Dr Shaaban believes that there is a need to ensure voices like hers that resonate with passion for her country and its people, which should be heard across a far wider range of media platforms to counter what might be described as a vast Zionist and Gulf State (GCC) funded media network that is driving the propaganda train though the US and Europe.  Dr Shaaban mentioned a weekly column that she is writing in Arabic and suggested that perhaps she should translate it for English media.

What follows is the transcript of Dr Shaaban’s statements on various subjects:

Why is our country being destroyed?

I wrote that really we are going through a third world war, without naming it a third world war but this time it’s a global war between two projects and two ways of thinking – between western concepts that they want to promote: their own way of life, their own ideology, their own way of thinking even at the expense of other lives and the innocence of our countries while the old civilisations like the Chinese, the Indian, the Arab civilisation are struggling to keep their identity and to pass this identity to their children and grand-children

Personally I no longer believe that the way the system is working in the west has any ‘democracy’ for us, or has any ‘human rights’ for us, or that there is any ‘free press’ for us in their official media system.  If  you know how we feel now you would be really surprised.

I have two daughters and a son. One daughter is doing a PhD in architecture in London and the other is doing a PhD in the US in international relations and politics. The one in London has a three year old girl, the one in the States has a four year old boy. They have been here for a month, every time they go to the Old City, they come back crying. They say, is it possible that our children cannot live the way we lived, cannot know the Syria we knew, cannot enjoy the Syria we enjoyed? Why?

Why are we being prevented from passing on our experience, our culture, our livelihood to our children? Why are our families being destroyed? Why is our country being destroyed? This is a daily struggle for our children. My children take their children and show them everything because they are afraid that tomorrow this will not be here anymore. 

This is a terrible thing to happen to any country, to any people on earth. We have the right to live the way we think, to live our own culture. You might find Paris exciting, I find Damascus the most beautiful place on earth.  This is us, this is who we are. I was asked many times to leave as an Ambassador but I cannot leave Damascus, can you believe it? I do not want to live one year out of Damascus, I can never get enough of this city.

So, leave us alone – that is really our message and unfortunately the calculus of politics in the west has no consideration whatsoever for the way people feel or for their aspirations.

Western Exceptionalism

The problem with the western system is that they think they are superior and they think that they want to “civilize” us and they want us to come up to their “standards”, and I hate when I hear Obama or any US official talking about American exceptionalism.  What do they mean American exceptionalism?

God created us as people. We belong to the same humanity, we belong to the same world.  In the Quran God spoke about the differences between us and we should understand that we should celebrate and cherish these differences. This idea of supremacy is basically rooted in racism because it believes in the supremacy of one sect, colour or nationality over another.

I feel it is bad for the west too because racism is now producing bad results for western countries especially as there are so many different religions living everywhere in the world.  The only salvation for all of us is to say there is one world, one humanity and to apply this rule to everybody. We must truly believe in that not only talk about it in the media and then practice racism in the law.  There is a huge area for dialogue but we need people who believe in similar values.

We are fighting a war on the ground but it is also a clash of values.

Reshaping our world and the problems we face.

The Gulf States are a huge problem.  With the petro dollar they are feeding the arms industry in the US, UK and France and prolonging this conflict. It is going to be a long process, we are living through a transitional stage in world history.  It is going to be a long process in order to reshape our world.  That is why we all have the obligation to be active so our new world is based on better values, better ethics, better ways of dealing with each other.

To achieve this new world, co-operation between east and west is crucial.

Where are the leaders in the US, or even in Europe, who are visionary and who are thinking about their countries for the next fifty years and who are doing the right thing for the people from an historical perspective?  So perhaps we are living through a crisis of leadership.

The Destruction of the Middle East is to protect Israel. NATO is trying to impose an Islamist extremist state onto Syria’s secular state.

I think there are two explanations for that. First the west should be embarrassed to be supporting countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar against Syria, Iraq or Sudan.  We were the secular republics who produced books, scientists, intellectuals etc.  I think there is a reason for that.  The reason for what the west is doing, in my opinion as an Arab woman, could be summed up by the Arab-Israeli conflict. I feel that the western support for Israel against the Palestinian people and the destruction of a whole people and their identity by Israel shows that what the west cares about is for Israel to be the powerful state in the region for the next fifty or a hundred years. In order for Israel to be the prevailing force in the Middle East it is necessary to destroy Arabic culture.

Unfortunately, now I can see a union of evil between the Gulf States and Israel and western systems. I use the word systems to divorce this evil from the western people.

I respond as an Arab woman, who grew up knowing that my country was part of Bilad al-Sham, Greater Syria.  I do not say this in an aggressive tone, but in a loving tone because Syria was Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan and I can’t understand why as a Syrian woman, I cannot visit Al Aqsa.  Its very close geographically, yet its impossible for me to get there because Israel has been planted in the Middle East.

Israel is a major focus for western countries and all these wars against Arab countries and what they call the ‘Arab Spring’ is to destroy Arab armies and to prevent any Arab country being able to resist Israel in the future. They do not want us to be able to liberate our Golan Heights, or Palestine, or to simply assure the rights of the Arab people.

By the way, there are at least 50 UN resolutions that give the Palestinians at least half of Palestine and the world is doing nothing about that – on the contrary the US used 37 vetoes in order to prevent the Palestinians getting their rights. Western hypocrisy is amazing.

That is where the supremacy in the west is turned against Arabs because it is the Zionist media that tells the west that the Arabs are ‘backwards’ or primitive. People are persuaded by this propaganda and they treat us as the Zionists wish us to be treated.  This is racism against Arabs and emanates from the Zionists. 

Hillary Clinton has spoken about working with the Muslim Brotherhood.  It is extensively documented that the Muslim Brotherhood has had connections to the CIA since they were created. Even if we read nothing but we apply the western proverb, “who is the beneficiary” – you will find Israel is the beneficiary from all this destruction.

You can see that the army and our intellectuals are the major targets for Israel.  They dont want any intellectuals or any army left in our country. They destroyed the Iraqi army. There is a war of attrition against the Syrian army, against the Libyan army, the Sudanese, the Lebanese.

Unfortunately some who call themselves Arab in the Gulf use the petro-dollar in order to serve this project against our culture and our civilization because as a Syrian woman I feel the Gulf has no culture, no history. This is Bilad al-Sham continually inhabited for ten thousand years. The Gulf is forty years old and therefore they have no right to speak in the name of the Arabs

We are the Arabs, we are history, we are civilization.

What they are doing is against our civilization, against our history and against our future but I feel this is a very dangerous project that reminds me of how the American Indians were treated. They have destroyed Palmyra, they have destroyed our history and our culture.

Khaled al Assad. Photo:Screenshot

Khaled al-Assad is the only archaeologist in the world who was writing about who was here in the past, in Palmyra. He was proving that the Zionists were never here. They killed him, they burned his library, they burned his books so we have nothing left of his work.  From an observers’ perspective, they are focusing on history, material history, cultural history, identity, army.  Any power that keeps you as an entire state, or any statesman that represents strength or unity will be demonized and destroyed.

Even Ramadan al Bouti a Sunni scholar who was speaking sense was murdered because they want to destroy anybody who speaks the truth or who is influential and can gather people around him.

What is the significance of President Assad? He is credible, people believe in him, Arab people believe in him.  They do not want anybody like that to have influence. I feel there is a huge plan against all of us.

They operate by buying people, Arab people, people in powerful positions who serve the Zionist project against our culture and identity because they can be bought by money.

I am talking to you from experience, I was subjected to a huge amount of pressure by many countries to be bought by money and all the temptations you can think of were offered to me but I am somebody who cannot be bought by money.  I am somebody who believes in my country and in my people. Even if I die, I can die for a cause.  If I can’t live for it I can die for it.

Most of the defections that happened in Syria were driven by money.  None of them has a cause or an ideology or any credibility with our people.

As you said quite rightly, the western people do not see any of this, they only see the shadow.  Those people bought by money, they are the shadow state.

Nobody wants to know who we really are.

The reason nobody knows the real Syria and the real Syrians, is because the western media has routinely lied and deceived us from the very beginning of the war against Syria – led by the US, NATO members and funded by the Gulf states, supported and encouraged by Israel who, as Dr Shaaban states, stands to benefit most from the perpetual chaos being maintained inside their strongest enemy in the region.

The image of Omran is another example of the NATO members and their media counterparts who see children as tools (an example of geopolitical child abuse) to achieve their own “regime change” agenda in Syria. It is another example of the wanton exploitation of the misery NATO members are imposing upon a sovereign nation via the crippling economic sanctions and an invasion of Syria by a foreign proxy army of criminals, mass murderers and suicide bombers they have consistently persuaded us to be legitimate “opposition forces.”

Children are being weaponized to achieve military escalation, the lethal no-fly-zone, and to enablefurther crowd funding for terrorism under the guise of the NATO first responders, the Syria White Helmets who are nothing more than terrorists masquerading as humanitarians.

Nobody is listening to the real Syria but they are prepared to nominate Al Qaeda for the Nobel Peace Prize.

To know the White Helmets better and to understand their role inside Syria please read 21st Century Wire’s article: Who Are Syria’s White Helmets.

Please get to know the “real Syria” before its too late.

Hearkening back to the Japanese interment camps of WWII, some Americans are now calling for Muslims to be placed in camps or even openly calling for genocide against the 1.6 billion practitioners of the faith.

It may never be possible to know the true death toll of the modern Western wars on the Middle East, but that figure could be 4 million or higher. Since the vast majority of those killed were of Arab descent, and mostly Muslim, when would it be fair to accuse the United States and its allies of genocide?

A March report by Physicians for Social Responsibility calculates the body count of the Iraq War at around 1.3 million, and possibly as many as 2 million. However, the numbers of those killed in Middle Eastern wars could be much higher. In April, investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed argued that the actual death toll could reach as high as 4 million if one includes not just those killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the victims of the sanctions against Iraq, which left about 1.7 million more dead, half of them children, according to figures from the United Nations.

Raphael Lemkin and the definition of genocide

The term “genocide” did not exist prior to 1943, when it was coined by a Polish-Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin. Lemkin created the word by combining the Greek root “geno,” which means people or tribe, with “-cide,” derived from the Latin word for killing.

The Nuremberg trials, in which top Nazi officials were prosecuted for crimes against humanity, began in 1945 and were based around Lemkin’s idea of genocide. By the following year, it was becoming international law,according to United to End Genocide:

In 1946, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution that ‘affirmed’ that genocide was a crime under international law, but did not provide a legal definition of the crime.

With support from representatives of the U.S., Lemkin presented the first draft of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide to the United Nations. The General Assembly adopted the convention in 1948, although it would take three more years for enough countries to sign the convention, allowing it to be ratified.

According to this convention, genocide is defined as:

…any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as:

• (a) Killing members of the group;

• (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

• (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

• (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

• (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Under the convention, genocide is not merely defined as a deliberate act of killing, but can include a broad range of other harmful activities:

Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to destroy a group includes the deliberate deprivation of resources needed for the group’s physical survival, such as clean water, food, clothing, shelter or medical services. Deprivation of the means to sustain life can be imposed through confiscation of harvests, blockade of foodstuffs, detention in camps, forcible relocation or expulsion into deserts.

It can also include forced sterilization, forced abortion, prevention of marriage or the transfer of children out of their families. In 2008, the U.N. expanded the definition to acknowledge that “rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity or a constitutive act with respect to genocide.

A Middle Eastern genocide

A key phrase in the convention on genocide is “acts committed with intent to destroy.” While the facts back up a massive death toll in Arab and Muslim lives, it might be more difficult to argue that the actions were carried out with the deliberate intent to destroy “a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”

The authors of the convention were aware, however, that few of those who commit genocide are so bold as to put their policies in writing as brazenly as the Nazis did. Yet, as Genocide Watch noted in 2002: “Intent can be proven directly from statements or orders. But more often, it must be inferred from a systematic pattern of coordinated acts.”

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush employed a curious and controversial choice of words in one of his first speeches. He alarmed some by referencing historic, religious conflicts, as The Wall Street Journal staff writers Peter Waldman and Hugh Pope noted:

President Bush vowed … to ‘rid the world of evil-doers,’ then cautioned: ‘This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.’

Crusade? In strict usage, the word describes the Christian military expeditions a millennium ago to capture the Holy Land from Muslims. But in much of the Islamic world, where history and religion suffuse daily life in ways unfathomable to most Americans, it is shorthand for something else: a cultural and economic Western invasion that, Muslims fear, could subjugate them and desecrate Islam.

In the wars that followed in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. not only killed millions, but systematically destroyed the infrastructure necessary for healthy, prosperous life in those countries, then used rebuilding efforts as opportunities for profit, rather than to benefit the occupied populations. To further add to the genocidal pattern of behavior, there is ample evidence of torture and persistent rumors of sexual assault from the aftermath of Iraq’s fall. It appears likely the U.S. has contributed to further destabilization and death in the region by supporting the rise of the self-declared Islamic State of Iraq and Syria by arming rebel groups on all sides of the conflict.

After 9/11, the U.S. declared a global “War on Terror,” ensuring an endless cycle of destabilization and wars in the Middle East in the process. The vast majority of the victims of these wars, and of ISIS, are Muslims. And, as extremist terrorists created by the unrest increase tensions with their attacks on the West, some Americans are embracing Bush’s controversial language of religious warfare, calling for Muslims to be placed in camps or even openly calling for genocide.

Kit O’Connell. A gonzo journalist from Austin, Texas and Staff Writer for MintPress News, Kit O’Connell’s writing has also appeared at Truthout, the Texas Observer, and The Establishment. 

And if I laugh at any mortal thing,

‘Tis that I may not weep.”

 (Lord Byron, 1788-1824.)

Back in “I cannot believe what I am reading” land, the Daily Telegraph reports (1) that the US has warned Syrian Air Force ‘planes flying over Hasakah – capital city of Al-Hasakah Governorate in the far north east of the country, eighty km south of the Turkish border – “against any new strikes that might endanger its military advisers …”

Said “advisors” are illegally in the country to aid the US-backed Kurdish forces as well as the varying Al-Qaeda spawned, organ eating head choppers who change names and allegiances near too often to catch up with.

The Telegraph reminds that:

Deadly clashes erupted between pro-government militia and the US-backed Kurdish forces on Wednesday. The following day, the regime launched its first ever air strikes against the Kurds.

Interesting to note that reality has been again turned upside down, with the Syrian government forces becoming “militia” and the US- backed Kurdish “rebels” becoming “forces.”

“The unprecedented strikes against six Kurdish positions in the northeastern city prompted the US-led coalition to scramble aircraft to protect US special operations forces advisers deployed with the Kurdish forces.

It was the first time the coalition had confirmed deploying warplanes against the Syrian Air Force.

At least the US has finally admitted what has been know for years about its 2006 plot hatched up in the US Embassy in Damascus (2) to overthrow the country’s legitimate and popular President by funding and fermenting internal strife.

In a further statement of jaw dropping arrogance: ‘Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis, warned that: “the Syrian regime would be well advised not to do things that place them (the US backed ‘coalition forces’ and their US illegal immigrant advisers) at risk.”

The heading of the Telegraph article is: “Syria deploys warplanes over Hasakah despite US warning …”

Article 51 of the UN Charter is specific: “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.”

Whilst it is inconceivable that the UN Security Council would censure its quasi boss the US, Article 51 and numerous other international laws on nations’ right to self defence still stand and much of the world is increasingly incandescent at the flagrant abuse of all painstakingly fashioned legalities aimed at preventing naked aggressions of sovereignty and nation states.

In the meantime, the US warns Syria to back off and allow them to continue to bomb and invade their country and destroy their armed forces.

More proof of this astonishing mind numbing arrogance has just appeared in The Aviationist (3): “Two Syrian Su-24 Fencer attempting to fly over a Kurdish-held area in northeastern Syria where U.S. SOF (Special Operations Forces) are operating, get intercepted by U.S. F-22 and encouraged to depart the airspace.

Twice in the last few days, Syrian jets performing air strikes close to where U.S. SOF are operating in northeastern Syria caused coalition aircraft to scramble.

On Aug. 18, U.S. jets were dispatched to intercept the Syrian attack planes that were attacking targets near Hasakah supporting (Syria’s national army) fighting the Syrian Kurdish forces. About 300 U.S. military operate in the same area … (Emphasis added.)

Following the first ‘close encounter’ the Pentagon warned Assad regime to not fly or conduct raids in the area where the American SOF are operating. However, on Aug. 19, two Su-24 Fencers, attempted again to penetrate the airspace near Hasakah …

This time, the two Syrian Arab Air Force attack planes were met by American F-22 Raptors (most probably already operating in the same area providing Combat Air Patrol) …

This is not the first time the F-22 presence deters foreign military aircraft from harassing U.S. forces.

So now US fighter jets, operating entirely illegally in Syrian airspace, decimating the Syrian people, towns, cities, villages, archeological sites, hospitals, schools, factories and infrastructure accuse the Syrian Air Force of being “foreign military aircraft.”

One can only conclude the US Administration, Pentagon and the entire State apparatus have collectively lost every last shred of sanity.

 Notes

1. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/20/syria-deploys-warplanes-over-hasakah-despite-us-warning-over-str/
2. http://www.globalresearch.ca/syria-and-conspiracy-theories-it-is-a-conspiracy/29596
3. https://theaviationist.com/2016/08/20/syrian-su-24s-attempting-to-fly-close-to-u-s-special-forces-in-syria-get-intercepted-and-encouraged-to-leave-by-f-22-raptors/

Let me remind you all that an intelligence agency aspires for maximum output with minimal input, and that often times they don’t even have to ‘organize a provocation’, they just encourage it or allow it to go on without any interference. That’s likely what happened in balochistan; whether india knew about it in advance or not, it ultimately ended up supporting new delhi’s interests.

Last week Pakistan was rocked by a carefully plotted suicide attack which killed dozens of lawyers and drew international attention to the province of Balochistan. The details of the attack prove that this was a premeditated assault against a particular class of victims in the most vulnerable geostrategic location in all of Pakistan, and this makes one wonder exactly what the terrorists’ long-term objectives are in doing this. To put everything into context, Balochistan is the largest province of Pakistan and it has an up-and-down history within the country, sometimes being the scene of insurgent revolts and terrorism – not always the same thing, mind you, but nowadays overlapping – and other times being the peaceful peripheral location that it’s otherwise known for. The reason why I mention Balochistan’s separatist inclinations isn’t because this group of fighters was responsible for the terrorist attack, but because the terrorists wanted to spark a militant reaction from them which would create more complications for Islamabad and possibly embroil the Pakistani Armed Forces in yet another internal conflict alongside the one they’re periodically fighting in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA.

Whoever the terrorists really were who did this atrocious act, they knew precisely what they were doing, and it’s to manipulate all sides through a horrifically disruptive terrorist attack in order to plunge the province into violence. The reason isn’t just to spread the Pakistani military far and thin, though that’s part of it. Balochistan is preordained as the scene of future externally provoked violence because its historical situation predisposes it to easily exploitable tendencies, but the timing of the latest attacks is clearly due to its present geostrategic significance to China. Beijing is investing $46 billion in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor that will terminate in Gwadar port and provide the People’s Republic with its first-ever reliable non-Malacca trade route to the Indian Ocean, and thenceforth to the EU, Mideast, and African marketplaces. CPEC, as it’s called, transits through Balochistan Province, there’s no going around this fact because that’s where Gwadar is located, so this is why it’s being targeted. It’s part of the indirect Hybrid War on China’s global infrastructure interests, using the proxy forces of international terrorism and perhaps one day soon even Balochi separatists again to achieve this goal.

And let’s not forget that Pakistan arrested an Indian intelligence agent from the Research and Analysis Wing, or RAW, India’s version of the CIA, in Balochistan earlier this year, who admitted that he was sent by New Delhi to destabilize the province. I’m not saying that India carried out this despicable terrorist attack or was directly linked to it, but we clearly see that New Delhi has an interest in destabilizing Pakistan and particularly Balochistan in order to get back at China for CPEC and Pakistan for Kashimr, just as the US doesn’t mind terrorism in Thailand so long as it destabilizes the military government and China’s ASEAN Silk Road. In both cases, it doesn’t mean that an Indian or American ‘agent’ was on the ground planting bombs, carrying out suicide bombings, or ordered someone else to do it on their behalf. No, that’s not what I mean, and people who sarcastically throw that out are purposely trying to discredit real arguments here. Let me remind you all that an intelligence agency aspires for maximum output with minimal input, and that often times they don’t even have to ‘organize a provocation’, they just encourage it or allow it to go on without any interference. That’s likely what happened here; whether India knew about it in advance or not, it ultimately ended up supporting New Delhi’s interests.

Always remember guys, there’s no such thing as morals, ethics, or principles in geopolitics, just pure, raw (“RAW”) power.

Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Serbia was intended to send a message that the US stood by its policies, essentially promoting Hillary Clinton’s campaign. All it managed to do, however, was dredge up the bitter memories of the 1999 NATO invasion.

Before jetting off to Belgrade on August 16, Biden gave a fiery speech in support of Hillary Clinton in his home town in Pennsylvania.

Within minutes of landing, Biden committed his first faux pas by failing to bow to the Serbian flag – a gesture neither China’s Xi Jinping nor Russia’s Vladimir Putin found onerous during their visits. It was all downhill from there.

Biden’s praise of Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic for having a “positive vision for the future of Croatia” – referring to Serbia’s implacably hostile neighbor to the West, a recent addition to the EU and NATO, and a US protégé in the Balkans Wars of the 1990s – was nervously laughed off as a slip-up. It might not have been; since he came to power in 2012, Vucic has de facto governed Serbia in the best interests of Croatia, or its overseas sponsor, to be exact.

Then, Vucic declared Biden “a friend of Serbia and my personal friend.” That comment beggars belief, given Biden’s public record as a vocal advocate of US military intervention against the Serbs in the 1990s, or his not-infrequent comparisons of Serbs to Nazis. The supine Serbian press didn’t question it, however. According to them, Biden merely came to say hello and didn’t make any demands or ultimatums. That would be a first, for a Western official.

Yet after the VP departed, President Tomislav Nikolic said, apropos of nothing, that Serbia had no intention of imposing sanctions against Russia – suggesting the possibility that the subject may have come up during the visit.

The White House merely issued a fact sheet about “progress through partnership” that was just flush with wonderful things the US has done for Serbia since 2001 or so – after Washington installed a compliant regime, that is. Their vision of “partnership” is Serbia doing what it’s told, obviously. Even if the $900 million or so in US aid or investments had actually helped Serbia, is still less than the damages wrought by the 1999 war.

Americans may not remember that war very well, or at all, but the Serbs do. The unprovoked aggression, the vicious lies told to justify it before the world, the wanton destruction of civilian infrastructure and the subsequent occupation of Kosovo by NATO “peacekeepers” who basically delivered the Serbian heartland to the Albanian separatists – culminating in the 2008 declaration of independence – have all added up to make the general populace in Serbia disdain the US government, if not the American people in general.

The fact that Hillary Clinton, who has stores in Albanian-held Kosovo named after her and a monument in Albania proper, called the Kosovo War a “personal matter” for her family explains why the nationalist opposition so vocally supports Donald Trump.

While in Belgrade, Biden expressed condolences to the families of “those whose lives were lost as the result of the NATO campaign.” The non-apology, with the responsibility-dodging passive voice and euphemisms, failed to impress. And then he was on to Kosovo, to open a stretch of highway the Albanians named after his late son Beau. It was another reminder of how Biden is personally intertwined with the 1990s legacy of the Clintons,

Much has changed in the world, and even in Serbia, since Biden’s first vice-presidential visit to Belgrade in 2009. Back then, he was signaling that the policymakers who “midwifed” the Balkans tragedy of the 1990s were back in the White House and determined to “finish the job.” This time, the gaffe-prone vice-president was basically trying to show that Washington was still the absolute master of events, and that Serbia belonged firmly at (or under) its feet.

When all is said and done, Biden appeared to be attempting to assure himself and everyone around him that the train (of US hegemony) was fine, that Hillary Clinton will soon take over and keep things – that are going just splendidly! – just as they are, forever.

But if any of that were actually true, would he need to be trying so hard?

Although Hillary Clinton selected Tim Kaine as her Vice President in this campaign, her true running mate might very well be her vagina. Indeed, while Clinton’s support continues to be among the lowest for any Democratic nominee in recent memory, she has managed to position her gender as a focal point of her campaign, a move intended to capture the women’s vote among liberals and conservatives alike. And, considering her opponent is Donald Trump, a man seen by millions of women as a misogynistic loudmouth, she has done this quite successfully.

But beyond the political window-dressing and empty rhetoric, Clinton’s record on women and families should not only lose her the support of American women, it should qualify her as one of the most anti-woman candidates in history. For while modest progress has been made toward some semblance of gender equality, it is the actions of Clinton herself that have done more than any other single individual to harm women and families. Slick public relations aside, Hillary Clinton may very well be the most anti-woman candidate in generations.

Hillary’s Relentless Attack on Women and Families

“I believe that the rights of women and girls is the unfinished business of the 21st Century.” So said Hillary Clinton in a 2011 interview with Newsweek. And this quote, among many others, has been trumpeted by Clinton supporters as the revelation of the angel of feminism, the gospel according to Saint Hillary. But in probing a little more deeply, some disturbing questions emerge which seem to cast doubt on her commitment to the rights of women and girls, both in the 21st Century, as well as at the end of the 20th Century.

As First Lady, Hillary Clinton, along with her then President husband Bill Clinton, did more than anyone to make the lives of poor and working class women and girls all the more precarious. Perhaps no single action taken by the Clintons did more to harm women and families than the evisceration of welfare. As part of a deeply cynical, and unconscionably reckless, strategy to win over racist white voters, the Clintons set their sights on Black and Latino women and children, portraying them as parasitical exploiters of hard-working whites.

After having supported her husband’s goal of “ending welfare as we know it,” Clinton was instrumental in ginning up support for the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA). This bill, passed with the support of a right wing Republican Congress, effectively ended welfare programs designed to provide real assistance to women and children in desperate need. And, despite countless experts denouncing the law, including a close friend and former assistant secretary of social services at the Department of Health of Human Services, Hillary continued to defend it. Speaking of the destruction of welfare, Clinton told the Gettysburg Times in 2002, “Now that we’ve said these people are no longer deadbeats – they’re actually out there being productive – how do we keep them there?”

Such callous disregard for the reality of poverty and the difficult circumstances in which millions of women and children live demonstrates precisely what sort of “feminist” Hillary Clinton is: a neoliberal corporate exploiter without a penis. For Clinton, what matters is not the material reality of women’s lives, but rather how best to exploit them for political gain. As feminist scholars Alejandra Marchevsky and Jeanne Theoharis noted:

[PRWORA’s] legacy still ripples through the country, where families remain as poor as—or, in many cases, poorer than—before, but with one crucial difference: Today, the “reformed” welfare system provides little safety net, and no hand-up. Instead, it traps poor mothers into exploitative, poverty-wage jobs and dangerous personal situations, deters them from college, and contributes to the growing trend of poor mothers who can neither find a job nor access public assistance. It is our failed social policy—not simply the recession—that is responsible for crisis-level poverty in the United States.

Of course, such painful realities are taboo subjects for the devout adherents of the Gospel According to Hillary, where the sacred scriptures tell of a crusading archangel come to Earth to protect the downtrodden women from the oppression of patriarchy. Perhaps church dogma will need to be updated to account for the fact that Clinton’s welfare “reform” reduced the percentage of households eligible for assistance from 68 percent to 26 percent, while the value of a Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) check has dropped by 20 percent. Of course, the Church of Latter Day Corporate Feminists will ignore these, and myriad other, statistics which demonstrate that rather than a champion of poor women and families, Hillary has been one of their main antagonists.

But Hillary’s vicious assault on women and families goes far beyond just the gutting of welfare. Indeed, the development of the mass incarceration state and prison-industrial complex is intimately tied to the policies of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Hillary was the leading edge of the campaign to pass her husband’s infamous 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (aka the “Crime Bill”) which disproportionately targeted people of color and led to the rise of the mass incarceration state or, as Michelle Alexander famously dubbed it, “The New Jim Crow.” Writing inThe Nation in 2016, Alexander explained that the Clinton Crime Bill was responsible for:

• the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history
• the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity for crack versus powder cocaine, which produced staggering racial injustice in sentencing and boosted funding for drug-law enforcement
• the idea of a federal “three strikes” law
• a $30 billion crime bill that created dozens of new federal capital crimes
• the mandating of life sentences for some three-time offenders
• authorizing more than $16 billion for state prison grants and the expansion of police forces
• African Americans constituting 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison, even though they’re no more likely than whites to use or sell illegal drugs
• A 50% increase in African American incarceration by the year 2000

While Alexander was highlighting the racial disparities and continued oppression of Black America thanks to the Clintons, embedded in that very same analysis is the obvious fact that Clinton’s Crime Bill devastated Black and Latino families, locking up millions of fathers (and mothers), breaking apart families, displacing children, and doing irreparable harm harm to a generation of minority women and children. And, as if the social impacts weren’t enough, Clinton was quick to refer to the children of these families as “superpredators,” a remarkable two-for-one comment which demonstrated both Hillary’s racism and anti-minority family outlook.

Perhaps real women and children don’t fit into Hillary’s conception of “feminism”? Or, better still, perhaps the real question should be: feminism for whom? Clinton’s domestic track record demonstrates that it is affluent white women who truly are the focus of her brand of corporate neoliberal feminism.

For Clinton, the great triumph of feminist action is not the empowerment of working class and poor women and families, but rather the entry of elite white women into the ruling class. One might call it Feminism for the 1%.

No wonder Madeleine “500,000 dead Iraqi children was worth it” Albright remarked in February 2016 that there was “a special place in hell” for women who don’t support Hillary Clinton. Albright may very well be projecting here as, if there is a hell, her seat at the VIP table is undoubtedly already reserved. Maybe she’ll keep Hillary’s seat warm for her.

Imperial Feminism: Hillary’s Bloody Hands

Clinton hasn’t only built her “feminist” credentials on the oppression and suffering of women and families in the US; her foreign policy achievements have managed to kill, maim, and otherwise destroy the lives of millions of women and children around the world. Such is the record of the corporate imperialist Clinton.

During her husband’s presidency, Hillary was a vocal advocate for the barbaric sanctions regime, as well as the No-Fly Zone and other belligerent actions taken by her husband against the Iraqi Government of Saddam Hussein. In fact, many experts have noted that the Clinton Iraq policy essentially laid the groundwork for George W. Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. In particular, Hillary was a leading proponent of the sanctions which, according to the UN, killed roughly 500,000 children.

And, of course, there’s Hillary’s infamous support for Bush’s Iraq War when she was a Senator from New York. Clinton explained to the Council on Foreign Relations in December 2003, “I was one who supported giving President Bush the authority, if necessary, to use force against Saddam Hussein. I believe that that was the right vote….I stand by the vote.” Of course this was in the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Iraq and subsequent capture of Saddam Hussein, a time when one could still justify support for a war that, just a few years later, proved to be politically unpalatable, to say nothing of it being an egregious war crime, as we all knew from the beginning.

And Hillary was not perturbed in the slightest at the hundreds of thousands of women and children whose lives were irrevocably destroyed by the war and its aftermath, one which is still being reckoned with today.

Hillary and Bill – the power couple tag team of Washington – also led the charge to bomb Serbia in 1999. During the 78 days of “Operation Allied Force” more than 2,000 civilians were killed, including 88 children. Naturally, this was of little consequence to the great feminist heroine Hillary who, according to biographer Gail Sheehy, proudly proclaimed “I urged [Bill Clinton] to bomb [Serbia].” The barbarism and sheer viciousness of someone who gleefully takes credit for the deaths of scores of children and countless thousands of women should give anyone who believes in the Hillary the feminist mythos serious pause.

Who could forget Libya? In the war championed by Hillary Clinton, who is regarded by experts as being the loudest voice in favor of regime change against Gaddafi and the destruction of the country, tens of thousands of women were raped, lynched, and murdered by the glorious “rebels” (read terrorists) backed by Clinton and her imperial coterie. Perhaps the great feminist hero could speak to the children of Misrata, Sirte, and Bani Walid who have now grown up without their mothers and fathers, and explain to them just how “worth it” the war was. Maybe Clinton could look mothers in the eyes and tell them how the deaths of their children from war, disease, and terrorism is a small price to pay for the foreign policy objectives of Washington.

And let us not forget about Honduras, the country suffering under a right wing dictatorship helped into office by then Secretary Clinton. Hillary brazenly, and rather despicably, took credit for her handiwork in her autobiography Hard Choices where she explained that, “In the subsequent days [after the coup] I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere, including Secretary [Patricia] Espinosa in Mexico… We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of [elected President Manuel] Zelaya moot.”

Indeed, Clinton was instrumental in bringing the right wing coup government to power. And that government today carries out systematic oppression of women and indigenous communities throughout the country. In a high profile assassination, renowned indigenous activist and feminist Berta Cáceres was gunned down by assailants tied to the government installed by Clinton. In fact, Cáceres herself called out Hillary Clinton prior to her death. In a 2014 interview, Cáceres said:

We’re coming out of a coup that we can’t put behind us. We can’t reverse it. It just kept going. And after, there was the issue of the elections. The same Hillary Clinton, in her book, ‘Hard Choices,’ practically said what was going to happen in Honduras. This demonstrates the meddling of North Americans in our country. The return of the president, Mel Zelaya, became a secondary issue. There were going to be elections in Honduras. And here she [Clinton] recognized that they didn’t permit Mel Zelaya’s return to the presidency.

It would be impossible to catalog all of Hillary’s crimes against women and children in this short piece. One should remember the children of Haiti living in inhumane conditions thanks in no small part to the continued exploitation of their country by the likes of Bill, Hillary, and the Clinton Global Initiative. One should remember the children of Afghanistan living with what peace activist and frequent visitor to Afghanistan, Kathy Kelly, describes as permanent post-traumatic stress disorder. One should remember the women and children of Sudan who died after Bill Clinton deliberately bombed a pharmaceutical factory in that country, thereby depriving women and children of much needed medicines. And Syria. And Venezuela. And Pakistan. And Iran. And Russia. And Ukraine. The list goes on and on.

And let’s recall also Hillary’s support for the Obama Administration’s policy of child deportations. What a champion of the rights of children. Do you wonder if Hillary loses any sleep over the fates of thousands of children from Honduras, El Salvador and elsewhere in Central America, knowing that she is directly responsible for their suffering? And how about Hillary’s cozy relationship with Saudi Arabia, the world’s most oppressive country for women?

Far from being a feminist, Hillary Clinton is a serial exploiter, and serial killer, of women and children; her track record speaks for itself. The ongoing economic oppression and suffering of women and children in poverty can be directly traced to Hillary’s “pioneering work” as an advocate for the welfare reform now almost universally seen as a disaster for poor women and children. Clinton’s record on children in other countries is equally disturbing.

In short, Clinton is no feminist, at least not in the real sense. She is not interested in true empowerment of women, only in the empowerment of herself. And she cares not a whit how many women and children will be trampled along the way.

Corporate imperialism is not feminism, even when done by a woman. Hopefully more American women will realize that before it’s too late. Needless to say, Hillary’s betting that they won’t.

A proposed oil pipeline is set to begin construction on tribal lands in North Dakota. Members of various Native American reservations gathered Monday to try to stop it.

Last week, the federal government gave final approval to the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which will run for 1,172 miles to transport crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken oilfields to Patoka, Illinois.

Hundreds of protesters, primarily Lakota and Dakota from Native American reservations within a several-hundred-mile radius, convened over the weekend at the edge of the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota to voice their anger.

The pipeline would travel through lands sacred to the Lakota people, and cross under the Missouri, Mississippi, and Big Sioux rivers.

A possible spill, which can occur with pipelines, would mean contaminating farmland and drinking water for millions.

After a series of tense interactions with North Dakota state police on Monday, the protesters succeeded in temporarily halting the beginning stages of construction.

Riders from the Standing Rock, Rosebud, and Lower Brule Lakota reservations came together on horseback to push back a police line that had formed between a group of protesters and the entrance to the Dakota Access Pipeline construction site. Daniella Zalcman

Protesters stand at the front barricades of the protest zone, holding signs that read “Water is sacred” and “Mni Wiconi” (“Water is life” in Lakota). Daniella Zalcman

Horses and riders from the Rosebud reservation arrive to support the Standing Rock community. The horses are in traditional Lakota regalia. Daniella Zalcman

Protesters congregate next to a construction site for the Dakota Access Pipeline on Monday morning, as a crew arrives with machinery and materials to begin cutting a work road into the hillside. The flag in the foreground belongs to the American Indian Movement. Daniella Zalcman

North Dakota state police form a line between the protesters and the entrance to the construction site as a tank truck turns into the property. Daniella Zalcman

A protester is arrested for standing on the outer layer of barricades that separate the protest site from the police line and construction zone on Monday morning. Daniella Zalcman

A protester is arrested for standing on the outer layer of barricades that separate the protest site from the police line and construction zone on Monday morning. Daniella Zalcman

Two young Lakota boys watch as construction machinery drives onto the Dakota Access Pipeline construction site, just over a mile from the banks of the Missouri River. Daniella Zalcman

After the protesters disrupted the construction site and shut down work for the day, a group marched up to the main gates. Daniella Zalcman

Children play in the Missouri River, a mile from the proposed construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Daniella Zalcman

Canada is one of the world’s centres of the mining and extractive sector. Toronto is the centre of the trade in mining stocks and in financing mining operations. Canadian mining capital operates in more than 100 countries and is among the top five world producers of potash, uranium, nickel, gold, platinum, aluminum, diamonds and steel-making coal.

The Canadian state supports the accumulation of the mining industry at home and abroad. Indeed, it is impossible to separate out the history of Canadian colonialism and the building capitalism in Canada from the mining sector, from the original mining of fish and furs by Europeans to the modern mining of the tar sands, forests, precious metals, and many other sectors. The extractive sector remains at the centre of the Canadian state’s colonial – and often coercive, and extra-legal – relationship with the First Nations, and the ecological destructiveness of the Canadian developmental model.

Relations with workers and unions in the mining sector remain turbulent and chaotic – extract the resources and labour-power, and the devil of the consequences for the workers, communities, and environment. Both the Harper and Trudeau governments have pursued strategies to help mining companies expand their exploration and extraction activities around the world.

The Canadian provinces share the same agenda, whatever the political complexion of the government in power. In pursuing international trade and investment treaties, Canadian governments have had the protection of the extractive sector at the core of their bargaining. Signing investor protection deals with foreign countries and pushing consulates and embassies to promote Canadian mining projects are two of the main modalities by which Canadian imperialism operates. Canadian royalty regimes are, perhaps, the most generous in the world among large countries for mining capital.

Confronting Canadian capitalism necessarily means a confrontation with the Canadian mining sector. Solidarity with First Nations people requires support for struggles with the mining corporations. Ecologically-responsible production can only occur with democratic and social control of the mining sector.

More information:

• “The Mining Issue: Taking on the Canadian Goliath,” Canadian Dimension, Nov/Dec 2013.
• “The Battle for Canada’s North,” Canadian Dimension, May/Jun 2013.
• “Canadian mining companies invade the global south,” Canadian Dimension, Jan/Feb 2011.
• “Democracy in the Pits,” DeSmog Canada, 16 April 2014.
• “No Silver Medal,” The Bullet, 27 August 2012.
• “Military Coups are Good for Canadian Business,” The Bullet, 3 March 2011.
• “Canadian Mining and Popular Resistance in Honduras,” The Bullet, 29 January 2010.
• “Mining in Conflict, an Interactive Map.”

Today, on its French-language web site CBC Radio-Canada published an article announcing the United Nations’ decision not to compensate the victims of the cholera bacterium its soldiers had introduced to Haiti since October 2010. The UN-caused epidemic has so far claimed over 8000 lives.

Radio-Canada’ s French article is accessible via the link provided below:

This is an English translation of the comment I entered, now awaiting moderator green light :

Adding ” which hit Haiti after the earthquake in 2010″ in the subtitle of your article is superfluous and feeds unnecessary confusion.

Several scientific studies have now unequivocally clarified this point. There is no link whatsoever between the earthquake and the cholera epidemic. It was UN Soldiers who infected the Haitian population with cholera by dropping their defecation into the river Mielle.

The UN is evading its legal and moral responsibility in this situation as it has also done in the face of multiple documented cases of rape, killings and brutality conducted by its  illegally deployed “peacekeepers” who are in Haiti for geopolitical reasons having nothing to do with the welfare of Haitians.

The victims of these foreign troops are considered too impoverished and too African to enjoy fundamental rights in a world ruled by unscrupulous multinational bandits.

Important references on the Cholera epidemic: No public outcry

http://www.radio-canada.ca/nouvelles/International/2013/02/21/005-haiti-onu-cholera.shtml

L’ONU rejette une demande d’indemnisation de victimes du choléra en Haïti

L’ONU décline toute responsabilité dans l’épidémie de choléra qui a frappé Haïti après le tremblement de terre en 2010.

See also:

UN rejects damage claim for Haiti cholera victims

By EDITH M. LEDERER | Associated Press

http://news.yahoo.com/un-rejects-damage-claim-haiti-cholera-victims-203706299.html

The word of Science

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/08/whole-genome-study-nails-haiti-n.html

FLAGRANT DÉLIT (Caught in the Act)

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton made the following statement regarding U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan’s decision granting Judicial Watch permission to submit interrogatories to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and to depose the former Director of Information Resource Management of the Executive Secretariat (“S/ES-IRM”) John Bentel:

We are pleased that this federal court ordered Hillary Clinton to provide written answers under oath to some key questions about her email scandal,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.  “We will move quickly to get these answers. The decision is a reminder that Hillary Clinton is not above the law.

The court order reads:

[T] the State Department shall release all remaining documents responsive to Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act request by no later than September 30, 2016; and it is FURTHER ORDERED that, consistent with Rule 33 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Judicial Watch may serve interrogatories on Secretary Clinton by no later than October 14, 2016 … Secretary Clinton’s responses are due by no later than thirty days thereafter … Judicial Watch may depose Mr. Bentel by no later than October 31, 2016.

In his opinion Judge Sullivan writes:

The Court is persuaded that Secretary Clinton’s testimony is necessary to enable her to explain on the record the purpose for the creation and operation of the clintonemail.com system for State Department business.

On July 8 Judicial Watch submitted a request for permission to depose Clinton; the Director of Office of Correspondence and Records of the Executive Secretariat (“S/ES-CRM”) Clarence Finney; and Bentel.  The request arises in a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit before Judge Sullivan that seeks records about the controversial employment status of Huma Abedin, former Deputy Chief of Staff to Clinton.  The lawsuit was reopened because of revelations about the clintonemail.com system. (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:13-cv-01363)).

Critics have often blamed President Rouhani of Iran for blindly following the neoclassical-neoliberal model of capitalism. The critical problem with Mr. Rouhani’s economic policies, however, is more than just following the dominant economic model of neoliberalism; more gravely, it is following the worst aspects of that model.

One such disturbing aspect is the unregulated and out-of-control financialization of Iran’s economy: the banking/financial sector is given a free rein to engage in all kinds of parasitic, speculative activities. As this practice has robbed the manufacturing sector of the economy of the productively-investible finance capital, it has thereby led to a severe economic stagnation and high rates of unemployment.

It is now common knowledge that the 2008 financial crisis in the U.S., which has since spread to other parts of the capitalist world, was precipitated largely by a disproportionately high degree of financialization, that is, by an unsustainable financial bubble on top of a much narrower base of real values. It is equally well-known that systematic deregulation of the financial sector in the U.S., especially of the dismantlement of the Glass-Steagall Act (in 1998), which had fairly well regulated the financial sector in the aftermath of the Great Depression, was a major contributing factor to the creation of the financial bubble that burst in 2008.

Regrettably, President Rouhani and his economic team seem to be altogether oblivious to the bitter experiences of the financialization disaster in the U.S. and other core capitalist countries around the world. This blatant inattention to the devastating consequences of a bloated financial sector at the expense of a cash-strapped real sector, combined with a trade policy which has effectively replaced domestic products with foreign products through a policy of unhindered importation of foreign goods and services, has greatly contributed to Iran’s economic stagnation.

While the real/manufacturing sector of the country’s economy is in dire need of investment funds, its financial sector enjoys an abundance of liquidity that, according to Iran’s Central Bank, amounts to nearly 900,000 billion tumans, or almost $260 billion dollars ($1 = 3500 toomans), which is approximately equal to 65% of its 2015 GDP of barely $400 billion [1]. Unfortunately, the major bulk of this plethora of liquidity is used for speculation purposes instead of lending to manufacturers for productive investment.

The fact that the financial sector prefers the more lucrative speculation to real production is not surprising—it is simply in the nature of a profit-driven economic system. What is surprising is a total lack of an economic policy that would channel the nation’s financial resource away from speculation to production.

The abundance of domestic liquidity belies President Rouhani’s frequent pleading with foreign investors on the grounds that Iran’s economy is suffering from illiquidity, and that foreign direct investment could serve as a panacea to Iran’s ailing economy. It also shows why foreign investors tend to be skeptical of the president’s pleas, and continue to be reluctant to invest in Iran’s manufacturing sector. After all, why would foreign manufacturers invest in a country where its market is saturated by unhindered imports of foreign products, and its own manufacturers are thereby driven out of market?

The persistent economic stagnation in Iran is largely due to a dire lack of an effective macroeconomic policy. Lack of economic policy is, in turn, mostly due to President Rouhani’s and his economic advisors’ blind faith in an economic model that is unfeasible in the real world; a model that, while simple and even elegant, is dangerously misleading. It is misleading because it maintains that if the government abstains from making macroeconomic policies and leaves all economic matters to microeconomic activities of private individuals and businesses, the invisible hand of the market mechanism would in a magical fashion lead to efficiency, development and prosperity.

According to this doctrine, called supply-side or neoliberal economics, solutions to economic stagnation, poverty and under-development lie in unhindered market mechanism and unreserved integration into world capitalist system. Recessions, joblessness and economic hardship in many less-developed countries are not so much due to economic mismanagement or the nature of global capitalism as they are because of government intervention and/or exclusion from world capitalist markets [2].

Unimpeded importation of foreign products into Iran’s open-door market, unregulated and out-of-control financialization of its markets, and devastating stagnation of its economy are mainly due this misguided economic doctrine.

It is now widely acknowledged that the disproportionate growth of the financial sector has been a major contributing factor to the ongoing financial turbulence and economic stagnation in many core capitalist countries. What is relatively less known outside of Iran is that the parasitic growth of the financial sector in that country is among the highest in the world: per capital number of banks, shadow banks and other financial institutions (called moasesaat-e atebaari) is certainly the highest in the world. Parasitic activities of the financial players include speculation in foreign exchange or foreign currency market, in gold and other precious metals market, in all kinds of imports (both legal and illegal), in real estate, and the like [3].

Returns to speculative activities in the financial sector are so high that a number of major manufacturing corporations such as Iran Khodrow (the country’s largest auto manufacturer) have established their own banks in order to partake in the lucrative financial sector by diverting funds from their manufacturing operations to this sector. Likewise, many civil, military, and governmental organizations (such as municipalities), as well as pension funds and charity foundations (such as Bonyad-e Mostazafan) have also created their own banks in pursuit of a share in the lucrative financial sector.

The perils of the commercial banks’ and other financial institutions’ speculative activities are dangerously magnified by their ability to create money! Following the Anglo-Saxon model of fractional reserve banking (explained below), which is today practiced in most capitalist countries, the power of money creation in Iran rests not so much with the government as it does with commercial banks. When commercial banks make loans or extend credit to their clients they, in effect, create money, which is called debt/credit money, or bank money, as opposed to sovereign or real money created by the government. Although in essence bank money is not real money, in practice it functions just as real money.

The ability of the commercial banking system to create money explains why the all-important power of controlling or manipulating money supply, of financing and, therefore, of influencing or controlling national economies in most capitalist countries has increasingly come to rest with commercial banks, often mediated by central banks and treasury departments that are frequently headed by the proxies of the financial oligarchy.

In theory, the ability of the banking system to create credit or debt money is determined or limited by two factors: (a) the savings/deposits by households and businesses, and (b) the central bank policy that determine reserve requirements and the money supply—the so-called fractional reserve banking. Fractional reserve banking means that, for the sake of financial safety and stability, commercial banks ought to always keep a legally-determined fraction of their deposits (for example, 20%) on hand, either in their own coffers or in their accounts with the central bank. This fraction of bank deposits is called required reserves, or capital requirement/base. Only the rest (80% in our example), which is called excess reserves, can be loaned out.

In practice, however, the ability of the banking system to create credit, or bank money, is not much constrained by the amount of savings/deposits they receive or by central bank regulation of money supply through fractional reserve banking. Fractional reserve banking implies that, based on the amount of their loanable deposits, or excess reserves, as determined by reserve requirements, the commercial banks first determine their lending capacity and then go around for customers. In the real world, however, they often behave the other way around: they first extend credit and look for reserves later. In one way or another, central banks would accommodate them. This explains why the actual bank reserves, or capital requirement, are often much smaller than required reserves, especially during optimistic periods of asset price inflation, or expanding financial bubbles.

What has made the ability of the commercial banking system to create money—of course, debt money—especially more dangerous in recent years is that, as the financial sector has systematically freed itself from traditional rules and regulations, most of the debt money they now create is increasingly geared towards speculation, not production. This explains the exponential growth of parasitic finance in most capitalist countries. As noted, parasitic growth of the financial sector in Iran represents an extreme case of this ominous development—a developments that has made the country’s economy/market akin to a nationwide casino, more or less.

What is to be done?

It follows from this brief discussion that the inordinate financialization of Iran’s economy is largely due to two major factors: (1) the ability and/or freedom of commercial banks and other financial institutions to create money, and (2) their ability and/or freedom to engage in non-banking activities, including speculation in commodities market, especially in precious metals, in foreign currency market, in real estate market, in imports market, and the like.

Policy implications of this diagnosis are unmistakable: to cleanse Iran’s economy of the poisonous effects of parasitic finance requires (1) ending the commercial banks’ and other financial institutions’ ability to engage in non-banking activities, and (2) ending their ability to create money.

Aside from destabilizing and destructive economic effects, private banks’ ability to create money is also problematic on legal and/or constitutional grounds. As a most, or perhaps the most, important economic decision or policy of any nation, money creation is logically a sovereign prerogative or national right; it belongs to the public, not private, domain. The right of creating money ought to exclusively be granted to the publicly-owned central bank as the monetary authority of the state. This would replace sovereign money system for the currently corrupt bank or debt money system based on fractional reserve banking.

It must be pointed out that the formal or nominal ownership of a central bank by the state does not necessarily or automatically replace the sovereign money system for debt/bank money system. Currently a number of central banks, including Iran’s Central Bank, are formally owned by the state, but their ability to control national money supply is undermined by the prevalence of the fractional reserve banking. This means that the ability of a publicly-owned central bank to control the stock of national money requires effective curtailment of the power of commercial banks to create money.

Commercial banks would still be free to finance businesses’ and consumers’ borrowing needs, but not with debt money based on the fractional reserve system. In other words, they cannot lend money without having actually received it first, that is, without having taken it before (from depositors, from other banks, from money or capital markets, or, under certain circumstances, from the central bank). This requires replacing the present fractional reserve system of banking with the 100% reserve system. The 100% reserve system means that when “people make deposits and thus think they have money in the bank,” argues William Hixson, “they would actually have legal tender money in the bank, not 94 percent (more or less) of their money loaned by the banker” [4]. Writing in support of the 100% reserve plan, Professor John Hotson at Ontario’s University of Waterloo notes:

The 100 percent reserve plan . . . would end the debt-money. . . . Government money [legal tender money] . . . is “Good Money” because it can be spent into circulation interest and debt free, and ever after perform the useful functions of money for the minor cost of replacing worn out bills and coins. . . . Money produced by commercial banks is “Bad Money” because it must be lent into circulation at interest, and it only remains in existence so long as someone is willing to pay interest and the banks are willing to continue to lend” [5].

Under sovereign money system, additions to the stock of money supply, or creation of new money, will be issued by the central bank and transferred to the treasury. The treasury will then spend, not lend, the new money into circulation. This will represent genuine seigniorage, which is akin to the historical prerogative of coinage, free of interest and redemption, and thus debt-free. (The central bank may occasionally and for the smaller part lend some of the new money to commercial banks, if required. This creates interest-borne seigniorage.) The profit from seigniorage, or the issuance of new money, will no longer go to the pockets of the privately-owned central banks, or the commercial banking system. Instead, it will go to the public purse and benefit taxpayers.

How should the central bank decide on and keep control of the right or optimal quantity of money in circulation so that there would be neither too much nor too little of it? The answer is that the stock of money in circulations should be based on the volume of national output, or gross national product (GNP), or its money equivalent gross national income (GNI).

Specifically, the quantity of money in circulation (M) would be determined by this simple equation: MV = GNI, where V is the velocity of money circulation, or the number of times that, on the average, a dollar changes hands during a fiscal year. For example, if GNI is equal to $100 billion, and V is equal to one, then M also needs to be $100 billion in order to be sufficient to circulate the $100 billion worth of goods and services. But if V is equal to five, then the amount of M needed to circulate the $100 billion of GNI would be only $20 billion. And if V is 10, then the required M would be only $10 billion—and so on.

Based on this simple equation, injections of new money into circulation (or, more generally, changes in M one way or the other) would also be determined by changes in GNI and in V. If, for instance, GNI goes up by five percent and V remains constant, then M needs to go up by five percent as well. But if at the same time that GNI goes up by five percent, V also goes up by five percent, then M should remain constant—and so on.

By creating the money they need interest-free, instead of borrowing it from commercial banks and other private financial entities interest-borne, governments can strengthen their budgets and save taxpayers huge sums of money. For example, evidence shows that the U.S. federal government paid in 2011 a sum of $454 billion in interest on its debt—the third highest budget item after the military and Social Security outlays. This figure amounted to nearly one-third of the total personal income taxes ($1, 100 billion) collected that year. This means that if the federal government created the money it needed, instead of borrowing it at interest, personal income taxes could have been cut by a third [6]. Alternatively, the savings could be invested in social infrastructure, both human and physical, thereby drastically augmenting the productive capacity of the nation, creating millions of jobs and elevating the standard of living for all.

In brief, there is no shortage of finance capital in Iran. The problem is that it is used largely for speculation, not production, purposes. To divert its financial resources from speculation to production, Iran needs to (a) prevent the commercial banks from engaging in non-banking activities; (b) prevent the commercial banking system from creating debt money, based on fractional reserve system; (c) confer the prerogative of creating real, sovereign money solely to the state-owned central bank; and (d) mandate that the real, tender money thus created is spent into the economy/circulation through its outlays on social, developmental, infrastructural, and other vital national projects. Only through such a drastic overhaul of money and banking policies, along with a vigorous support for its manufacturers through an effective policy of import-substitution, can Iran rekindle its dormant economy and chart a new path of industrialization, development and real independence.

Ismael Hossein-zadeh is Professor Emeritus of Economics (Drake University). He is the author of Beyond Mainstream Explanations of the Financial Crisis (Routledge 2014), The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (Palgrave–Macmillan 2007), and the Soviet Non-capitalist Development: The Case of Nasser’s Egypt (Praeger Publishers 1989). He is also a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion.

References:

[1] World Bank, http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/iran/overview.

[2] For a fairly detailed discussion of this point please see: “Why President Rouhani’s ‘Economic Package’ is Empty”.

[3] See, for example, Dr. Mohammad Soleimani,

تولید همچنان در رکود؛ اما بازدهی برخی بانک ها در بورس به 80 درصد رسیده است

[4] William F. Hixson, A Matter of Interest: Reexamining Money, Debt, and Real Economic Growth, New York: Praeger, 1991, p. 242.

[5] John Hotson, “Ending the Debt Money System”, Challenge, March-April 1985, pp. 48-50.

[6] Ellen Brown, It’s the Interest, Stupid! Why Bankers Rule the World.

Photographs and video of five-year-old Omran Daqneesh have rapidly become ubiquitous in the media in the US and Western Europe after being distributed by a group aligned with the CIA-backed Islamist “rebels” in Syria.

The toddler is shown sitting somewhat dazed in the orange seat of a new and well-equipped ambulance, his face covered in dust and tinged with what appears to be dried blood from what was reportedly a cut to his scalp. Video shows him waiting unattended as a number of photographers and videographers record his image to be broadcast around the world. Clearly, those in charge sensed that the boy, with a mop of hair covering his brow and a cartoon t-shirt, provided a marketable image.

CNN proclaimed the child “the face of Syria’s civil war,” while the anchor-woman theatrically burst into tears recounting his story. The New York Timescalled him “a symbol of Aleppo’s suffering,” while USA Today published a short editor’s note reading, “This Syrian boy is Omran. Will you pay attention now?”

More direct in its approach was the British daily Telegraph, which headlined an article: “For the sake of Aleppo’s children, we must try again to impose a no-fly zone in Syria.”

Among the most obscene pieces was one penned, predictably, by Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, who conflated the plight of Syria’s children with the death of his family dog. He went on to invoke a statement by Secretary of State John Kerry that ISIS is engaged in genocide as a rationale for the US to launch cruise missile attacks on the Syrian government, which is fighting ISIS. The effort to obliterate rational thought in the name of human rights is stunning.

What we are witnessing is a carefully orchestrated war propaganda campaign, designed to appeal to the humanitarian sentiments of the population in order to corral it behind a new escalation of imperialist violence in the Middle East. Whether the incident with Omran was itself staged by the “rebels” and their CIA handlers, or Washington and the corporate media are cynically exploiting the real suffering of an innocent child, is an open question.

What is indisputable is that the feigned concern over this one child is being foisted upon the public with very definite and undeclared political and geo-strategic motives that have nothing to do with protecting the lives of innocent children. They have died by the hundreds of thousands over the last quarter century of US-led invasions, bombings and proxy wars throughout the region.

The image of Omran was chosen because it comes from the eastern sector of Aleppo, where roughly one-sixth of the northern Syrian city’s population lives under the domination of US-backed Islamist militias. The most important of these is the Fateh al-Sham Front, which, until last month, called itself the al-Nusra Front and was Al Qaeda’s designated affiliate in Syria.

Syrian children killed by the Al Qaeda militia’s “hell cannons,” fired indiscriminately into the government-controlled neighborhoods of western Aleppo, do not have the same effect on the tear ducts of newspaper editorialists and media talking heads. Nor, for that matter, do the imagescoming out of Yemen of children slaughtered by Saudi airstrikes carried out with US-supplied bombs and the Pentagon’s indispensable logistical support. The horrific video of US-backed “moderate” Syrian “rebels” sawing off the head of a ten-year-old Palestinian boy likewise provoked no significant outrage.

The driving forces underlying the renewed propaganda campaign are two-fold. In the first and most immediate instance, the “rebel” offensive—armed and funded by the US and its regional allies—to break the government siege of eastern Aleppo and intensify the war against the civilian population in the west of the city has stalled, and the Syrian army, backed by Russian air power, is again making significant gains on the ground. Hence the renewed demands for an immediate ceasefire.

More far-reaching in its implications is the development of closer collaboration between Russia, Iran, China and Turkey in relation to the five-year-old war for regime-change in Syria. Iran has over the past week allowed Russia to use Iranian bases to attack Syrian targets, while Beijing has announced an increase in military aid to Damascus. Meanwhile, in the wake of last month’s abortive US-backed military coup, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has sought a rapprochement with both Moscow and Tehran.

Washington views this potential alliance with increasing disquiet, seeing it as an impediment to its military drive to assert US hegemony over the Middle East and its vast energy reserves. It cannot accept such a challenge and will, inevitably, prepare a military response. It is to this end that the “humanitarian” propaganda campaign to “save the children” of Syria—and rescue Washington’s Al Qaeda-linked proxies in the bargain—has been mounted.

The methods employed in this campaign are well-worn to say the least. Twenty-five years ago, the first Gulf War against Iraq was prepared with a chilling tale, told to the US Congress, of invading Iraqi troops stealing incubators from Kuwaiti hospitals and leaving babies to die. The supposed eyewitness to this atrocity, a woman identified as a nurse, was subsequently exposed as the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador and a member of the emirate’s royal family. The entire story was a propaganda hoax.

In the years that followed, the US imposed punishing sanctions on Iraq that claimed the lives of half a million Iraqi children, about which then-US ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright infamously declared, “The price was worth it.” Subsequent US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria have killed hundreds of thousands more.

In reviewing these 25 years of violence and bloodshed, the newly published book A Quarter Century of War: The US Drive for Global Hegemony, 1990-2016 by David North states:

The scope of military operations continuously widened. New wars were started while the old ones continued. The cynical invocation of human rights was used to wage war against Libya and overthrow the regime of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. The same hypocritical pretext was employed to organize a proxy war in Syria. The consequences of these crimes, in terms of human lives and suffering, are incalculable.

The last quarter century of US-instigated wars must be studied as a chain of interconnected events. The strategic logic of the US drive for global hegemony extends beyond the neocolonial operations in the Middle East and Africa. The ongoing regional wars are component elements of the rapidly escalating confrontation of the United States with Russia and China.

The flood of war propaganda presaging an imminent escalation of the US intervention in Syria threatens to hasten such a confrontation, and with it, the real danger of a global nuclear war.

Jean-Guy Allard, oriundo de Shawinigan, Quebec, falleció en  La Habana, amada ciudad que adoptó como suya, el 16 de agosto, a la edad de 68 años, a raíz de una enfermedad.

Yo, al igual que sus demás amigos y colegas de Quebec, lo visité en varias ocasiones, tanto a él como a su hijo, en su modesto hogar de La Habana. De hecho, no se trataba de meras visitas informales, sino de una especie de peregrinaje secular. Se enorgullecía en particular del objeto enmarcado en su pared: uno de los escritos de Fidel Castro, en el que el líder cubano resaltaba la obra de Jean-Guy. Espero que Jean-Guy haya tenido la oportunidad de ver en la televisión las actividades organizadas en Cuba en ocasión del 90 aniversario del natalicio de Fidel el 13 de agosto.

Nuestras visitas a la casa de Jean-Guy siempre eran ocasiones solemnes para nosotros, tal era el impacto que nos causaba su integridad ante la supuesta libertad de prensa en Quebecor. Este último, como es bien sabido de todo habitante de Quebec, es un monopolio enorme que controla el periódico  Journal de Québec para el cual Jean-Guy trabajaba.

Jean-Guy no escondía, como se desprende de las entrevistas, el control férreo que ejercía la prensa capitalista sobre sus puntos de vista políticos y sus valores periodísticos. Por supuesto que él se resistía a tal presión en la medida de sus posibilidades. No es de sorprenderse que haya decidido dedicar su jubilación y su pensión de jubilado a la causa de Cuba y América Latina. Por lo tanto es un ejemplo para los periodistas que viven y laboran dentro del sistema capitalista. Nos muestra que los principios siempre deben primar sobre la carrera.

Además de esta cualidad que nos ha legado, hay otra que quisiera mencionar. Jean-Guy fue un opositor acérrimo del imperialismo estadounidense y sobre todo de su injerencia desenfrenada y terrorismo en Cuba y América Latina. No se hacía ilusiones para nada sobre los círculos dirigentes estadounidenses y sus intenciones a largo plazo. Parecía vivir y escribir en función de este rechazo intransigente. Lo animaba y nos sigue animando. La oposición al imperialismo estadounidense en el mundo, que se puede ver en lugares tales como Quebec o Canadá, a menudo es algo que no se comprende muy bien en el Sur. La vida y la obra de Jean-Guy son testimonio de esta tradición que muchos de nosotros honramos.

Tanto sus principios periodísticos como su aversión al imperialismo estadounidense constituyen un ejemplo que perdurará para siempre.

Arnold August, Montreal, agosto 17, 2016

On August 15 in Seongju, North Gyeongsang Province, 908 people sat in rows of chairs and waited for their heads to be shaved as an act of protest against the U.S.-South Korean decision to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system in their hometown. Even Confucian scholars, who regard all parts of the human body as a gift from one’s parents and their hair as precious as their lives, sat stoically, willing to join the symbolic act against the deployment of the controversial weapons system. As the ceremony began and clumps of hair fell to the ground, onlookers gasped and even dabbed tears from their cheeks.

But the moment of anguish was brief. As soon as the ceremony concluded, everyone quietly tied their headbands behinds their heads and shouted “No THAAD!” as they headed to a demonstration.

Petition to White House Surpasses 100,000

Since a U.S. and South Korean joint working group announced the small agricultural town of Seongju as the designated site for THAAD deployment on July 13, the people of Seongju, mostly melon farmers, have become the front line in the fight against missile defense in Korea. And in just a few weeks, they have organized themselves into a force to be reckoned with.

The online “We the People” petition against THAAD deployment surpassed its goal of 100,000 signatures on August 10. The Seongju residents gathered for their 29th nightly candlelight vigil that evening were beaming with joy. The emcee shouted, “What day is today?” and the residents shouted back in unison, “The day we reached 100,000!” According to the White House petition website, any petition that garners 100,000 signatures in 30 days triggers an official response from the White House within 60 days of the date that the goal is reached.

To be sure, waging an online petition campaign in Seongju was no easy task. Most residents don’t have computers nor read English. The petition requires an email verification step, but most didn’t have email accounts. College students set up booths at the nightly candlelight vigils and patiently helped older residents through the process, starting with opening an email account.

The residents made clear that they are not appealing for sympathy from the White House. The petition campaign was a process of organizing the entire country beyond Seongju to demand that the United States rescind its THAAD decision and exert pressure on the White House.

“Until when do we hold the rain ceremony?” asked Lee Jae-dong, the chair of the Seongju branch of the Korean Peasants League and the emcee of the nightly candlelight vigils.  “Until it rains!” replied the crowd. “Until when do we fight THAAD deployment?” he asked. “Until it’s rescinded!” replied Seongju residents in unison.

Defending Seongju for Future Generations

Defense Minister Han Min-koo must not have read the Seongju residents’ resolution released on August 15. Had he read it, he would have known better than to try to appease the Seongju residents with offers to discuss a new site for the THAAD deployment. In the collective declaration, the Seongju residents remembered the struggle of their ancestors against Japanese occupation and vowed to pass down a land of peace to their next generation –

In 1905, the Japanese colonizers opened the Seoul-Busan railway. Colonial Japan used the railway as a transport line to expropriate materials from Joseon, and wherever the railway passed, traditional  societies collapsed. With the same sense of urgency as we feel today, countless Seongju residents, including Confucian scholars, stood up and ultimately defended their hometown from foreign imperialists.

Today, the residents of Seongju face yet another challenge from foreigners. The foreign power that our ancestors faced was not easier than what we face today. Our forebears did not kneel or retreat  in the face of the terrifying might of the foreign power and defended their hometown. We are the residents of that land that our forbears defended and their proud descendants. We have a duty to defend this precious land and pass it down to our future generations.

We cannot give Seongsan, the sacred land of Seongju, to be forever used as a military base by foreigners. Nor can we pass down the disgraceful THAAD to our children. Just as our forebears did, we will defend Seongsan and Seongju even if it means putting our lives on the line. We will stop the THAAD deployment, make Seongsan a symbol of peace and proudly pass it down to our future generations.

THAAD Fight Calls into Question US-ROK Alliance

As the THAAD fight wages on, scholars and lawmakers are openly raising questions about the uneven nature of the U.S.-South Korean alliance.  At a forum at Yonsei University on August 18, Professor Lee Nam-ju of Sungkonghoe University warned that a regional arms race and military confrontation could become unavoidable if China considers South Korea the key cause of a strategic threat.

“Pointing to the so-called Iranian threat, the United States tried to construct missile defense in Eastern Europe, and this became the cause of marked deterioration in relations between Europe and Russia. That should be a lesson to us,” Lee said. “The attitude that we have no choice but to accept all the negative side-effects of the THAAD deployment decision in the interest of the US-ROK alliance is the ultimate obstacle in the THAAD fight,” he added, “The THAAD issue begs the question – should the US-ROK alliance always be considered unconditional?”

Representative Seol Hun of the Minjoo Party agreed. “Until now, anything carried out in the name of the US-ROK alliance was given an automatic green light,” he said, “But the THAAD issue clearly demonstrates that U.S. and South Korean interests are not always aligned.”

The scholars and lawmakers at the forum also agreed that the decision to deploy the THAAD system in Korea should go through a ratification process in the National Assembly.

Professor Song Gi-chun of the North Jeolla University School of Law denounced the Park Geun-hye administration for railroading a unilateral decision without the consent of the National Assembly and refuted the administration’s argument that the Mutual Defense Treaty between the United States and South Korea gave it the right to do so. Song referenced article 60 of the South Korean constitution, which states that the National Assembly has the right to “consent to the conclusion and ratification of treaties pertaining to mutual assistance or mutual security” and “treaties which would incur grave financial burden on the state or people,” and argued that the THAAD deployment decision needs to be ratified by the National Assembly.

“The THAAD deployment decision is an agreement between two countries that would significantly transform the security environment of South Korea,” Song noted,  “It goes beyond the framework of the Mutual Defense Treaty and is an agreement of serious import that will cause fissures in the balance of military powers in the Northeast Asian region. An agreement that goes beyond the framework of the existing treaty and outlines new rights and responsibilities between countries should, of course, be approved by the National Assembly.”

People’s Party Representative Choi Gyeong-hwan, who served as the last secretary to the late President Kim Dae-jung, agreed. “Through a ratification process in the National Assembly, we have to empower the Assembly to oversee military matters,” he said and committed to do all he can in the National Assembly to oppose the THAAD deployment, including calling for a ratification process and the impeachment of the Defense Minister, as well as creating a special committee of all opposition parties.

Seongju is Korea and Korea is Seongju

As the fight against THAAD enters its sixth week, Seongju residents are appealing for candlelight vigils around the country to oppose the THAAD deployment.  “You don’t have to come to Seongju to give us support,” said Park Su-gyu, the publicity coordinator for the Seongju Task Force, “We, the residents of Seongju, will defend Seongju.  You can raise your candles wherever you are. Whether it’s three people or five people, raise your candles.  That way, we can be unified in the fight to stop the THAAD system from being deployed anywhere in Korea.”

145 civil society organizations came together on August 18 to form the National Action to Oppose THAAD Deployment in Korea and announced plans to answer Seongju’s call. It plans to hold simultaneous candlelight vigils in 50 cities around the country on August 26, which marks the 50th nightly candlelight vigil in Seongju, then 100 cities on October 20, the 100th candlelight vigil in Seongju. The newly formed coalition embraced the slogan that has become the battle cry of the anti-THAAD struggle – “Seongju is Korea and Korea is Seongju.”

The Kurdish police, Asayish, loyal to the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and the National Defense Forces (NDF) loyal to the Syrian government are engaged in intense clashes for control of Hasakah city in eastern Syria. A series of street clashes with usage of small arms, that started on Wednesday has turned into full-scale clashes, with usage of heavy military equipment and artillery. The People’s Protection Units (YPG), which are also linked with the PYD and the core of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces), are supporting the Asayish attempts to advance on the pro-government forces. In turn, the Syrian Arab Forces have launched a series of air strikes on YPG and Asayish military sites and HQs over the province. By August 19 morning, all attempts to implement a ceasefire agreement has failed.

The pro-PYD forces have been implementing a long-standing strategy of putting pressure on the predominantly Arab NDF in order to push pro-government militias from Hasakah province. However, the situation has gone out of control this week when the pressure turned into firefights and then into intense clashes. Furthermore, a significant part of Arab, Christian, Assyrian and other fighters defected from the US-backed SDF to the NDF as result of this escalation, expanding the breach between PYD-linked Kurdish fighters and the non-Kurds in the area.

The main reason of these tensions is the PYD’s will to set an independent state in the whole northern Syria. The move is not supported by majority of Syrian population. Furthermore, the ethnic composition in northern Syria, that includes major non-Kurdish populated areas, sets the ground for constant conflicts between the PYD and other local groups of influence. The proclamation of the “Northern Syria Federation” by the PYD (without any consideration with the Syrian government) has not contributed to stability of the situation.

It’s clear that the solution of the so-called “Kurdish issue” with peaceful means can be found only via diplomatic negotiations on the international level. BUT the PYD main sponsor, the United States, along with Turkey is blocking the involvement of the Kurds in the international negotiations on the Syrian crisis. An important fact is that the statements of Russian Ministry of Foreign affairs that the PYD should be involved in the negotiations remain ignored in Washington.

Such a situation paves the way for further escalations between the Syrian government forces and the US-backed PYD. This contributes to the US interests in the region because will allow Washington to turn its public image from “the state that supports terrorists against the Assad government” to “the state that supports the ‘democratic’ Kurdish forces against the Assad government.” The problem is that such developments will not contribute to the long-awaited peace in Syria, for sure.

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Washington’s media presstitutes are using the image of the child to bring pressure on Russia to stop the Syrian army from retaking Alleppo. http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/17/world/syria-little-boy-airstrike-victim/ 

Washington wants its so-called moderate rebels to retain Aleppo so that Washington can split Syria in two, thereby keeping a permanent pressure against President Assad.

As for the little boy in the propaganda picture, he does not seem to be badly injured. Let us not forget the tens of thousands of children that Washington’s wars and bombings of 7 Muslim countries have killed without any tears shed by CNN anchors, and let us not forget the 500,000 Iraqi children that the United Nations concluded died as a result of US sanctions against Iraq, children’s deaths that Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said were worth it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omnskeu-puE

Let us not forget that Washington’s determination to overthrow the Syrian government has brought many deaths to Syrians of all age groups. Washington alone is responsible for the deaths. The evil Obama regime has stated over and over that “Assad must go” and is prepared to destroy the country and much of the population in order to get rid of him.

According to the Obama regime, Assad must go because he is a dictator. Washington tells this lie despite the fact that Assad was elected and re-elected and has far higher support among Syrians that Obama has among Americans. Moreover, whatever Washington accuses Assad of doing to Syrians is nothing compared to the death and destruction that Washington brought to Syria.

Perhaps the tragedy of Aleppo could have been avoided if the Russian government had not prematurely declared “mission accomplished” in Syria and withdrawn only to have to rush back after the Russian government was again deceived by Washington.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.

The current state of American politics must make us question whether any of our leaders in the Beltway can be described as “grown-ups”, i.e., fully mature and sane individuals. Between the endless war crimes, corporate corruption, lobbyists who bribe congressmen and write legislation, and the ineptitude of federal entities who are supposed to protect our health such as the FDA, EPA, and CDC, it would appear that leaders in all three branches of government, as well as the leaders of the corporate world, are either insane, suffer from various psychological disorders, as well as suffering from a type of collective hallucination, the common denominator being an utter lack of empathy for others humans, or respect for the Earth.

Further, we must at least question whether collectively, we the citizenry, are as susceptible to mass delusions as our psychopathic leaders are. Our society can be effectively generalized as forming what Paulo Freire calls a culture of silence, many of whom see no problems with exploiting and despoiling other countries, looting wealth, and killing millions; and many more that are simply afraid to speak out against the indignity of the US empire, in fear of socio-cultural reprisals. This culture of silence, which we are taught at a young age, indoctrinates and effectively eliminates the ability of people to form critiques of our rotten political and economic systems. This is who Richard Nixon was really referring to, when he spoke of the “Silent Majority”: citizens too naïve, dumb, childlike, and afraid to confront the injustices inherent to our system were exactly who Tricky Dick was appealing to.

While many of us pretend that something as silly as “American exceptionalism” exists, and fall victim to the myth of rugged individualism that permeates all aspects of civic life and economics, the sad truth is that we’ve become a nation of petulant children. While we fantasize about Jeffersonian notions of small businesses and republicanism guiding our way of life, transnational conglomerates control our agricultural output (killing us slowly with GMOs and pesticides) and our media landscape (brainwashing us with neoliberalism and black propaganda).

Marx and Engels tuned us into the ideological war imposed by capitalism, which distorts and confuses workers’ belief systems, alienates workers from themselves and their work, and attempts by subterfuge to shift the blame of ruthless exploitation away from the ruling class. This was called false consciousness, and later, Sartre used the term mauvaise foi (“bad faith”). Gramsci defined the ideological control of capitalists over the socioeconomic system as cultural hegemony. Many readers are intimately familiar with these ideas. So why does this critique of the left from John Steinbeck still ring so true:

I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.

As Paul Goodman explained so lucidly, we’ve all been Growing Up Absurd for generations, trapping many in the chrysalis of adolescence for their entire lives. As he pointed out:

The accumulation of the missed and compromised revolutions of modern times, with their consequent ambiguities and social imbalances, has fallen, and must fall, most heavily on the young, making it hard to grow up.

There is no mystery why Goodman entitles his chapter on missed revolutions in the fields of the physical environment, the socioeconomic model, political and constitutional reform, morality, and reforms dealing with children and youth, “The Missing Community”. For youth today, just as in his day, have few responsible role models, a repressive and prison-like atmosphere in schools, with consumerism and technology determining every aspect of a child’s search for joy and wonder, and now, the artificial edifices of social media and “augmented reality” is replacing genuine interaction. Indoctrinated to fit into a system of war, corporate monopolies, vapid pop culture, and not encouraged to think critical about their country or world cultures, children become jaded as soon as they realize that the notions of freedom, equality, and sharing that their parents and teachers taught them were based on lies. We must reverse this tide, lest we forget Walter Benjamin’s saying that:

Behind every fascism, there is a failed revolution.

As Derrick Jensen says, our society suffers from a form of complex PTSD:

PTSD is an embodied response to extreme trauma, to extreme terror, to the loss of control, connection, and meaning…Faced with any emotionally threatening situation, these people may freeze, failing to resist even when resistance becomes feasible or necessary. (1)

This condition permeates every aspect of society, and reinforces our deepest ideological confusions: the line between personal property and coercive private property is purposely blurred by the bourgeoisie, fulfillment is replaced by “fun”, civic duty is replaced by retreating into the shell of private life, and diplomacy is usurped by war. Brought up in such a totality of fear and violence, it is no surprise that many never progress psychically beyond the stage of the child, or to seek out fulfillment instead of base entertainment.

The wit of the novelist Trevanian is instructive when addressing the Western symptoms of ennui and anomie:

It’s not Americans I find annoying, its Americanism: a social disease of the post-industrial world that must inevitably infect each of the mercantile nations in turn, and is called ‘American’ only because your nation is the most advanced case of the malady, much as one speaks of Spanish flu…Its symptoms are a loss of work ethic, a shrinking of inner resources, and a constant need for external stimulation, followed by spiritual decay and moral narcosis. You can recognize the victim by his constant efforts to get in touch with himself, to believe his spiritual feebleness is an interesting psychological warp, to construe his fleeing from responsibility as evidence that he and his life are uniquely open to new experience. In the latter stages, the sufferer is reduced to seeking that most trivial of activities: fun. (2)

This is corroborated by Jean Liedloff, whose experiences with the Yequana and Sanema tribes of Venezuela allows her to contrast their indigenous traditions and child-rearing with the failure of civilized parents, and the resulting insipid, infantile behavior of Western adults and general culture:

Novelty…is so much a part of the present phase in our culture that our natural resistance to change has been distorted…Nothing is ever allowed to be good enough, nothing ever satisfactory. Our underlying discontent is channeled into desire for the latest things…Among the things high on the list are those that save labor…When success as a passive baby has not been experienced, there is a penchant for button-pushing, for labor-saving, as an assurance that everything is being done for, and nothing expected of, the subject…The impulse to work, necessarily a strong one in a healthy continuum, is stunted…Work becomes what it is to most of us: a resented necessity. And the labor-saving gadget gleams with a promise of lost comfort. In the meantime, a solution to the discrepancy between the adult desire to utilize one’s abilities and the infantile desire to be useless is often found in something aptly called recreation. (3)

The implications are clear: our culture does not allow us to grow up, because to do so would invoke a critical response and a revolution against the forces of tyranny. Recently, Henry Giroux asked:

Where are the agents of democracy and the public spaces that offer hope in such dark times? What role will progressives play at a time when the very ability of the public’s ability to translate private troubles into broader systemic issues is disappearing? How might politics itself be rethought in order to address the pedagogical and structural conditions that contribute to the growing intensification of violence in all spheres of American society? What role should intellectuals, cultural workers, artists, writers, journalists, and others play as part of a broader struggle to reclaim a democratic imaginary and exercise a collective sense of civic courage?

First, we must accept the fact that each of us is an agent of democracy, and we must reclaim the public spaces, and smack down the harmful myth regarding “The Tragedy of the Commons”. The answers to Giroux’s plea lie in our ability to raise healthy, strong children who are not seduced by the siren calls of capitalism and patriotic-approved state violence. This should be supplemented by alternative education programs for children and adults, and basic life and practical lessons passed down from parents, grandparents, etc.  This doesn’t mean each parent has to teach their kid trigonometry. It means each town has to model itself to promote a viable village atmosphere, and foster a sense of community, with renewable energy, grassroots arts and music, and small to medium scale organic agriculture. It will mean embracing the truth that industrial civilization is destroying the world, and rather than wallowing in self-pity at having our illusions destroyed, rising up and embracing a culture based on ecology, enlightenment, and virtuous edification of our youth.

William Hawes is a writer specializing in politics and environmental issues. His articles have appeared online at Global Research, Countercurrents, Dissident Voice, The World Financial Review, Gods & Radicals, and Counterpunch. He is author of the ebook Planetary Vision: Essays on Freedom and Empire. You can reach him at [email protected]

Notes:

1.) Jensen, Derrick. Endgame: The Problem of Civilization, Vol. 1. Seven Stories Press, 2006. p. 69-70.

2.) Trevanian. Shibumi. Three Rivers Press, 1979. p. 306

3.) Liedloff, Jean. The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost. Da Capo Press, 1975. p. 114-115.

Things have not been going well for the US government’s (and friends’) 5-year-long attempt to use proxy terror forces to overthrow the Assad government. The first death-knell came last September when the Russian air force entered the fray to great effect (and applause from all sensible people). The shoot-down of the Russia bomber in November by some NATO fifth-columnist was the Empire’s response to the Russian intervention and was designed to destroy Turkish-Russian relations, making Russia’s air war against Washington’s terrorists more difficult. But Erdogan and Co. were disinclined to ‘take one for the team’ in that way (especially since Turkey was never really allowed to be part of the team) and eventually conceded to Russian demands for a public apology over the shoot-down and restitution to the families. 

Faced with such an insolent and uncooperative reality, the State Department pulled out what they thought was their trump card: an old-fashioned coup d’etat in Turkey in mid-July. But that back-fired in a spectacular way, and now looks set to achieve exactly the opposite of what the Empire wanted: hard-wired (or piped) ties between not just Russia and Turkey, but Iran and China too.

In response to these painful setbacks, the Empire seems to be out of ideas, and when they’re out of ideas, they usually fall back on what they do best: telling lies and manipulating public opinion against their chosen enemy. In the most recent example of an ‘iconic image’ being used to further demonize both the Assad government and Russian actions in Syria, a cameraman from the ‘Aleppo Media Center’ was on the scene after a bomb hit an apartment building in Aleppo. He filmed the now ‘iconic’ image of a boy – Omran Daqneesh – as he was rescued from the rubble and placed in an ambulance.

Recognizing a propaganda opportunity when they see one, within hours most Western media outlets had headlined the image along with emotionally-manipulative screeds penned by media hacks who couldn’t care less about Omran or Syria. When the US military killed 73 civilians in Syria last month, images of the carnage, like the one below, didn’t make the cut, for some strange reason.

But the Omran video was gold, because it could be exploited to falsely demonize Russia and Assad. This is how CNN capitalized on young Omran’s brush with death:

The truth is that the image you see today is repeated every day in Aleppo,” said Mustafa al Sarouq, a cameraman with the Aleppo Media Center, who filmed the video. He spoke to CNN’s Nima Elbagir via Skype.” Every day we cover these massacres and these war crimes in Aleppo. When we go to the places that have been bombed, regime planes circle around and bomb it again to kill rescue workers that are helping civilians. They kill these people who are trying to rescue people.

Activists blame the Syrian regime and Russia for the bombings. [The] footage shared on Aug. 17 by the Aleppo Media Center, reportedly show[s] the immediate aftermath of an apparent Syrian government or Russian airstrike in a rebel-held.

So there ya have it: Russia (or Assad) is responsible for doing that to Omran, and for making you feel so sad, helpless and angry. And according to the “activists” behind the Aleppo Media Center, Russia and Assad are also responsible foreverything bad that happens in Syria (and most other places too). So now that you’ve got that message, with the face of Omran imprinted on your mind for good measure (Time magazine says “it cannot be unseen”), it’s time for you, Western reader, to support your government in sorting out the mess in Syria by funneling more of your tax dollars to your government’s foreign terrorist proxy army in Syria.

Alternatively, you could do just a little research, and a little critical thinking. You could, for example consider the source of this image and the claim that Russia or Assad is to blame: the Aleppo Media Center. The Aleppo Media Center is a project of the Syrian Expatriates Organization (SEO). The SEO is what it sounds like, a group of American citizens of Syrian extraction who have their offices on K Street in Washington, D.C., a street that is famous for being the center of the American political lobbying industry, with numerous think tanks, lobbyists, and advocacy groups based there. The SEO received generous funding over the past few years (to the tune of $4-500,000) from unknown donors, although government agencies like USAID and NED are likely sources. The SEO appears to have played a prominent role in fostering the carnage in Syria from the outset. On their website they list ‘Freedom Messages’ (sort of like ‘Freedom Cookies’) as one of their operations that debuted in 2011:

This was one of SEO’s very first projects. SEO created the “Freedom Message” campaign to inform the Syrian citizens who lived in the areas that were not yet involved in the civic movement at that time, mainly concentrated in the two largest cities of Damascus and Aleppo.

SMS campaigns send in tens of thousands were sent to the cellphone numbers talking about the revolution and its unifying purpose of freedom and prosperity to all Syrians. mainly concentrated in the two largest cities of Damascus and Aleppo. Text message and robo call campaigns reaches about 100,000 people each.

“Robo calls” was where residents of the inactive cities received a call from a local activist or a parent of one of the child victims asking for their support and encouraging them join the public movement against the tyrant regime. Abdulbaset Al Sarout, Dani Abduldayem, the mother of the young victim Hakam Drak, and the activist known for imitating the voice Bashar Al-Asad, Songa Yonga, were all featured on our robo call campaigns.

In June 2012 SEO succeeded in sending 400,000 messages supporting the uprising and a general strike organized in Damascus and Aleppo.

In short, from their cozy offices in Washington, D.C., this gang of quislings did everything they could to whip as many Syrians in Syria as possible into a revolutionary fervor against their elected government. And after 5 years of carnage, they still think this is a good idea. Syria has a population of about 20 million, or 16 times less than the USA. Imagine if a group in Syria were to do the same thing, sending 6.5 million text messages to Americans encouraging them to take to the streets in rebellion, and then encouraging the descent into war by flooding the country with armed groups from abroad. That’s exactly what this group, and many other like it in league with the US government, did. Of course, the US does not allow foreign organizations to exert influence on politics in the USA, but a bunch of what are effectively foreigners are allowed to live in the USA and exert political influence in other countries, as long as it’s in line with the US’ foreign policy objective of total world domination.

Back in 2012, representatives of the “main Syrian opposition organizations”, including the SEO, and members of the so-called Assembly of the Cuban Resistance (CRA) of Miami, signed an “agreement to coordinate their efforts” to undermine the democratically-elected governments of both Cuba and Syria in what was clearly a US State Department/CIA-funded seminar in Miami. “This offers an extraordinary opportunity: a united front bringing the peoples of Syria and Cuba together to fight for freedom and democracy,” said Silvia Iriondo, the “president” of Mothers and Women Against Repression, an organization funded by USAID. Iriondo’s real name is Silvia Goudie and she is the daughter of a mercenary who took part in the failed CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion (old habits often stay in the family).

But the SEO is just one of five similar Syrian ex-pat quisling warmonger groups in the USA collectively called The Coalition for a Democratic Syria.

The Coalition for a Democratic Syria is a group of five Syrian-American non-profit organizations working together in Washington, DC to bring about a swift end to the conflict in Syria and support the establishment of a free and democratic Syria. The Coalition for a Democratic Syria is a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional, andnon-partisan organization that includes the Syrian American Council, the Syrian Emergency Task Force, United for Free Syria, Syrian American Alliance, and Syrian Expatriates Organization.

The Wikipedia page for the above-mentioned Syrian Emergency Task Force says:

The Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF) is a United States-based organization that advocates for the armed overthrow of the government of Syria.

SETF is indirectly funded by the U.S. State Department through contracting firms including Chemonics International and Creative Associates International

Chemonics International is a private “international development” company that works for bilateral and multilateral donors and the private sector to “manage projects in developing countries.” Of course, if there aren’t enough “developing countries”, the US government can always bomb them back to the “developing country” stage. The organization bids primarily on contracts from USAID and “manages projects” (read: gets a foothold in the target country for Western corporations) that cover a variety of technical sectors, including “health”. Perhaps now it makes sense why the board of the Syrian Expatriates Organization is made up of US medical doctors. Perhaps they plan on opening a few for-profit hospitals in Syria once the dust settles on the war they helped to start there. For sure there’ll be plenty of patients available. But let’s take a closer look at SEO’s sister organization, the Syrian Emergency Task Force.

SETF’s executive-director, Mouaz Moustafa, is a former field organizer for the U.S. Democratic National Committee and previously served as executive-director of the Libyan Council of North America. The Libyan Council of North America is one of several US lobby groups that were set up to do exactly what the SETF, SEO, etc., are doing in Syria. So Moustafa comes with some experience. In fact, he’s pretty well connected. I trust that most readers have stumbled across this image at some point:
Friends in low places: Moustafa, jihadis and McCain

That’s Moustafa on the right, with some jihadis behind John McCain on his May 2013 visit to Syria, which was organized by Moustafa and Elizabeth O’Bagy, who also works for the SETF.

Elizabeth O’Bagy, political director for the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a U.S.-based nonprofit providing support to the opposition, said in a phone interview from Turkey that McCain’s office approached the task force two weeks ago about visiting with rebel leaders.

Elizabeth O’Bagy: professional liar

While warmongering for SETF, O’Bagy was also a senior analyst a the Institute for the Study of War, which was founded by Kimberly Kagan, wife of Frederick Kagan, who is the brother of Robert Kagan, the husband of Victoria Nuland. If you don’t know who these people are, you need to look them up (or just watch this documentary). Like many other similar ‘institutes’, the Institute for the Study of War is funded by grants and contributions from large defense war contractors, including Raytheon, General Dynamics, DynCorp and others. So it’s no surprise that the people who establish and work for such institutes are tasked with making the ideological case for war, or are directly involved in inciting wars; they’re being paid directly by weapons manufacturers.

Anyway, O’Bagy was eventually dumped from the Institute for the Creation Study of War because she claimed she had a PhD when she did not. While lying comes easily to such people and could be said to be a sought-after skill by such warmongering ‘think-tanks’, appearances still have to maintained, and there’s no hard feelings. Commenting on her dismissal, Kimberly Kagan stressed that the termination was not related to O’Bagy’s affiliation with SETF. “I had no problem with her affiliation, I approved it.” No doubt. Two weeks after her dismissal from the Institute for the Study of War, O’Bagy was hired as a legislative assistant by John McCain.

Just before her dismissal, O’Bagy’s testimony was used by John McCain and John Kerry as they testified before Congress in September 2013, in an attempt to gain approval to wage all-out war on Syria and Lebanon’s Hizb’allah, the latter at the specific request of the “Syrian rebels”, who must have been paid by the Israelis to include that stipulation. Readers may remember that this was the tense period just before Russia intervened and brokered the deal to destroy Syria’s “chemical weapons” that the US had falsely accused the Assad government of using against civilians (it turned out to be McCain’s rebels who were – and still are – using them).

I’ve just scratched the surface of this den of vipers masquerading as ‘freedom and democracy’ groups, but it gives you an idea of the complex nature of the ramified networks of psychopathic individuals that exist in the USA to promote war on foreign nations. The methods used are many and varied, but they clearly include the use of ‘iconic’ images of dead or injured children to lie to and manipulate Western public so that they will support the continued warmongering that gave rise to the ‘iconic images’ in the first place. It’s a self-perpetuating system, run by psychopaths, fueled by greed and greased by the blood of dead children in foreign nations.

For those interested in objective reports about what is really going on on the ground in Syria, you might like to keep up with Eva Bartlett’s regular dispatches for SOTT.net.

Joe Quinn is the co-author of 9/11: The Ultimate Truth (with Laura Knight-Jadczyk, 2006) and Manufactured Terror: The Boston Marathon Bombings, Sandy Hook, Aurora Shooting and Other False Flag Terror Attacks (with Niall Bradley, 2014), and the host of Sott.net’s The Sott Report Videos and co-host of the ‘Behind the Headlines’ radio show on the Sott Radio Network.

An established web-based essayist and print author, Quinn has been writing incisive editorials for Sott.net for over 10 years. His articles have appeared on many alternative news sites and he has been interviewed on several internet radio shows and has also appeared on Iranian Press TV. His articles can also be found on his personal blog JoeQuinn.net.

“We are not the old Left. It is more than clear if you look at our faces, our age, the way we speak and our new way of making politics”. In ultra-conservative Poland, something is moving. We meet some of the founders of Razem (“Together”) a new political party emerging from social movements and strongly inspired by the experience of Podemos in Spain. We discuss their project and the Polish scenario: from the surprising social policies of the current authoritarian government to the liberal opposition defending freedom of information but forgetting about inequalities. And the meaning of launching  a new party from the bottom-up today.

Why a new party in Poland? Why did you make the shift from social movements to party politics?

There was no real left party in Poland. There is the so-called Socialist or post-Communist party, which is just bureaucrats of the late Communist government that became the new establishment after the transition – basically neoliberal, socially conservative, not leftist at all, but they took the place of the left in the country and our objective was to re-open that space. Nobody trusts parties anymore here, and this is why we were very sceptical regarding the success of this operation. But if parties are in distress, social movements are not in a better situation: small, fragmented groups, incapable of having a strong impact, chronically divided.

And so you thought a solution would be to have all this forces come together to form a single political group?

We wrote an open letter to all movements. We received two thousand signatures in a few days, almost all of them – and this was the real surprise – from people we didn’t know and who never took part in organised mobilisations. We really wanted to know who they were! We met them, and to our surprise we learnt they were not interested in traditional left-wing organisations or movements. They reputed those political forms to be old and useless.

This is a story we’ve heard before. When talking with Podemos’ founders they say that to launch a new political project they had to leave the world of organised movements, who at the beginning were even against them, in order to intercept the energy coming from the 15M and only after that, they could go back and include organised movements. Is it something like that?

Exactly. The organised left has been in conflict with us since the beginning. But now many left the traditional movements or organisations and decided to join Razem instead, to come out of their small bubble. We decided to be part of the trail of the new European left, moving from the base.

At last elections there was a coalition of the United Left, post-communists, Greens, left-liberal… Why didn’t you join it but decided to run by yourself?

We have our own agenda and a new way to conceive politics itself together with its organisation. The old way of doing politics is dead and is represented by the same names and the same politicians and power groups that, election after election, try to found a new coalition, a new alliance, just to win again their seat in Parliament. We are talking about the political class as a whole. It simply doesn’t work anymore and it isn’t what we want to do. Moreover, these parties, when elected, passed laws permitting evictions, perfectly fitting in the mainstream “there is no alternative” narrative.

And they eclipsed. The post-communist party was at 40% and now is not even in Parliament. But what makes your model work? What are your flagship methods or policies?

Our program is somehow not so radical, we could define it as social democratic. But this, in Poland, is something new. Nobody ever talked about progressive taxation, redistribution… And now, when statements concerning workers or poverty are needed by the media, they come to us. The same happens with social issues: we are the ones asking for the decriminalisation of abortion, still an illegal practice in Poland. And when the government tried to pass an even more restrictive law, making abortion illegal even in case of rape, we organised a rally in Warsaw, with more than 10 thousand people. The biggest demonstration ever on this matter in Poland.

Talking about social policies, the current government – led by Kaczyński’s party Law and Justice – is quite an interesting case. It is for sure an authoritarian, xenophobic, illiberal government, on a collision course with the EU. But it is, nevertheless, passing some measures that could be seen as traditionally leftist: reduction of the retirement age, maternity allowance, social housing. What do you think about it? Is this a new kind of nationalist socialism?

We must say we are surprised as well. We thought the social agenda mentioned during the political campaign would be forgotten once elected, as it had happened when the same party had the chance to govern previously. But now they are really doing it! They are way more nationalistic and authoritarian than the first time, but they are also way more social. For the first time we have assisted to a growth, rather than to a reduction in welfare provisions. The new maternity law will drastically reduce child poverty from 28% to 10%, an issue closely linked to large families here in Poland. And for the first time, the most of public spending will go to the poorest: 6 billion szloty to the poorest 10% of the country, only 300million to the richest 10%.

So, for the first time there are redistributive policies.

And we will not be the ones criticising them. A social housing program was launched, not giving resources to banks or big building companies, but giving resources for controlled rents. And there is more: the taxation system is undergoing a modification that will make it more progressive, flat tax is being abandoned together with regressive taxes for the richest. But at the same time, the government is extremely authoritarian. A militia with semi-automatic weapons is about to be created, mostly made by components of far-right groups. A bill against terrorism is about to pass, creating a permanent state of emergency. Not to mention the gag that has been put on the press or all attacks to the independence of the Constitutional Court. It is quite frightening.

And it is against this authoritarianism that we have seen so many demonstrations in Poland. But you have chosen not to join KOD, the organising platform. Why is that?

Well, the governing party is in fact terrible, but this demonstrations are mostly organised by previous governments’ élite [Civic Platform, the party of today’s President of the European Council, Donald Tusk – Ed].

They demonstrate for freedom of speech, but then attack the government’s social policies reputing them a way to “buy” votes. They don’t understand that this money is incredibly important for many people. They tell the poor they should go out in the streets, fighting to save our constitutional system and at the same time that by accepting 500 zsloty per month as maternity benefit they are selling themselves. And all this while a majority of the low-middle class only earns 2.000 zsloty per month! They are completely out of touch with reality. And this is how in Hungary Viktor Orban obtained an absolute majority in Parliament, by having only one opposition representing only the élite.

We want to kick out this government, but to do it we believe that just to gather liberals in big cities is not enough. You have to reach out to those people who now vote for Law and Justice [the governing party – Ed]. If no one has the courage to create a social agenda, then the space is open for authoritarian forces.

What is the social base of the governing party?

They have a cross-cutting base. Many vote them as they are thought to be against the establishment and the people had enough of the previous government. A government that chose to ignore completely all social issues. Civic Platform talks about those Poles who had to emigrate as “lucky” people who had the opportunity to have a working experience abroad. They didn’t realise how much suffering was brought by family separations nor that 2 million people couldn’t find a job in their own country. These oppositions – KOD, Civic Platform – are part of the post-transition elites that now would love to just go back to previous business as usual. All without realising inequality levels are way higher in Poland than the European average.

You just received considerable public funding because of your result in the last elections. You have three more years until the next one: what now? What will be your next steps?

We are trying to open 25 social spaces all around Poland. They won’t be just normal party offices, but community places where everyone can come and utilise the space, organise a dance lesson, classes for children, legal assistance and so on. This is something the socialist party of Poland used to do before WWII. We do have a strong tradition of  political parties as social entities, working with cooperatives, unions, even sport clubs, way more than just an election to election machine. We didn’t call ourselves “something-left”, as nobody here know what left is anymore. We called ourselves Razem, “Together”. But our origins are clear, and we want to start anew from there.

Find out more about leftist political circles in Poland

Copyright European Alternatives 2016

Translated from Chinese

August 15 marked the 71st anniversary of Japan’s unconditional surrender during World War II. However, on this special day when Japan should spend time reflecting on its history of militaristic aggression, its Prime Minister Shinzo Abe sent a ritual offering to the notorious Yasukuni Shrine.

The Yasukuni Shrine, which honors 14 Class-A convicted war criminals among 2.5 million Japanese war dead from WWII, is regarded as a symbol of past Japanese militarism.

The honoring of war criminals, no matter what form it takes, only serves to further hurt those Asian neighbors that Japan once invaded. Such perverse acts to whitewash its crimes of military aggression runs contrary to the pursuit of peace in Asia and the world at large.

It’s common knowledge that the Yasukuni Shrine is a source of spiritual inspiration for Japan to start another war of aggression. Yet, the country’s new Defense Minister Tomomi Inada has tried to associate such a notorious place with the mourning of soldiers belonging to Japan’s Self-Defense Forces.

She claimed at a recent seminar that “the Yasukuni Shirine is not the place to vow not to fight. It needs to become a place where we vow to desperately fight when our Motherland is at risk.” Her words shocked even the Kyodo News.

The 71-year-peace after WWII was hard-won. Born from the victory over fascism, this peace has been the foundation for post-war international order. This conclusion is not something that can be ignored, denied or overturned by any country.

World peace and the post-war order, which came at the cost of the blood and lives of the peoples of Allied countries, is closely tied to justice.

Last year, the world commemorated the 70th anniversary of the end of the World Anti-Fascist War, but some countries, looking out for their own interests, have turned a blind eye to the wrongdoings of Japan and have even urged Japan to abandon its pacifist constitution. The world today is witnessing the negative impact brought about by this short-sighted strategy.

By erasing its invasion history, Japan is on one hand attempting to lock away memories of the war and on the other hand setting the stage for future action. In the House of Councillors election in July, lawmakers pushing for Constitution amendments won more than two-thirds of seats. This has led to forward-thinking people in Japan to also begin worrying about the “return of war.”

In order to strengthen military power and shake off the post-war order, the Abe administration usually uses the so-called “China threat” as an excuse to deceive the Japanese public and other parts of the world.

After Japan adopted its new security laws that lifted a decades-old ban on collective self-defense, the Abe administration has been making every effort to contain China by instigating disputes between China and other countries.

On the day when the so-called arbitral decision on the South China Sea dispute was announced in July, Japan, a non-party in the issue, immediately pressured China to accept the arbitration. At the following 11^th Asia-Europe Summit and foreign ministers’ meetings on East-Asia cooperation held in last month, Japan reiterated its stance again and again.

In the country’s annual defense white paper issued in early August, Japan pointed fingers at China over the South China Sea issue once again. The paper also made irresponsible remarks concerning China’s armament, military expense and transparency. These actions by the Abe administration has triggered alarm and concern throughout the international community.

Japan’s tribute at the Yasukuni Shrine on Monday once again reminds us that world peace is not that should be taken for granted, it demands continual justice and also the capability to defend it.

So many would like this to happen – to see Turkey go, to leave NATO, to break its psychological, political and economic dependency on the West. Now that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his allies are quarreling with the United States and the EU, there is suddenly great hope that Turkey may thoroughly re-think its position in the world, strengthen its ties with Russia and China, renew the historic friendship with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, improve its relationship with Iran, and join the increasingly powerful anti-imperialist alliance.

Could this be really happening, so suddenly and so unexpectedly? If only Turkey were to join BRICS, if it decided to leave NATO and wrestle itself out of that deadly embrace of the West, the entire world would change!

Many people around me are already celebrating. But I am not joining them. I’m still waiting. I know Turkey well. I have worked closely with Turkish people for more than 20 years. Five of my books were translated and published there, and in Istanbul, I have appeared on countless television talk shows.

And honestly: the more I know Turkey, the less I understand it!

It is one of the most complex countries on Earth. Turkey is unpredictable, full of contradictions and shifting alliances. Nothing is really what it appears to be on the surface. And even under the surface, the currents are often merging, separating, and even reversing their course.

To write about Turkey, to write fairly and in-depth, requires jogging through a minefield. In the end, you always get it wrong! You make a huge amount of Turkish people unhappy, no matter what you say. It is mainly because there seems to be no simple, objective truth. And various ‘camps’ disagree with each other, fundamentally and passionately.

That is why I am surprised how many foreign analysts are suddenly daring to pass (often patronizing) judgments on the recent events in Turkey. How certain many of them sound!

Many of people who don’t know Turkey well are now indeed celebrating. Everything seems to be clear to them: ‘The Turkish President changed his course and decided to apologize to Russia for downing its jet near the Syrian/Turkish border. Then the West orchestrated a deadly military coup. Erdoğan said: “Enough is enough,” exposed the plot and went to St. Petersburg to embrace President Putin and Russia.’

I wish it were that simple. I wish I could be now joining in the celebration!

Instead, I am sitting down in front of my computer and writing this essay about Turkey, a country which I love, but for so many years have failed to comprehend.

*

I met Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at the Istanbul headquarters of his (then) party – Refah Partisi, RP – when he was the Mayor of this the largest Turkish city. It was the end of the 90’s and in that period I was busy trying not to get killed while covering the ‘Yugoslav War’, moving between Sarajevo, Pale, Belgrade and the frontlines. While most of my comrades-journalists would travel by train to Vienna (there were no flights and foreigners were not allowed to drive) to get a break, I always opted for Istanbul, taking slow trains through Bulgaria and Edirne. I felt that I had to learn about and get to understand the Ottoman Empire, if I truly wanted to comprehend the Balkans.

In those days, Mr. Erdoğan managed to horrify many of the middle and upper class pro-Western and secular dwellers of Istanbul. He belonged to an Islamist party in a city that was always looking towards Europe. But in the end, he introduced some sweeping social reforms and dramatically improved its infrastructure, from the garbage recycling system, to transportation. UN-HABITAT gave him a double thumbs-up. I wanted to talk to him, to hear what he had to say. And he agreed.

Instead of a religious fanatic, I found a self-centered, highly driven and pragmatic politician, a populist.

“Do you speak Turkish?” he asked me instead of greeting.

“Not well,” I replied. “Just a few words.”

“You see!” he shouted, triumphantly. “Your Turkish sucks, but you can pronounce the name of my party, Refah Partisi, perfectly, without any accent! Isn’t that already proof of how important, how indispensable we are?”

I wasn’t sure about that… I was trying to comprehend, to follow his logic. I have to admit that I felt more comfortable in a trench in Yugoslavia, than being there, in Istanbul, facing this overpowering man who was obviously on his great ego trip.

But he kept ‘delivering’. And the Turkish people, many of them, kept voting for him, until in 2003 he became the Prime Minister, and in 2014, Turkey’s President.

*

Islamist or not, and since 2003, Erdoğan has not been rejected by the West; he was the de facto leader of the country which has been a staunch and unapologetic member of the mightiest Western alliance – NATO. And he made no attempts to break the ties.

Periodically, Turkey had some minor quarrels with the West, its partners and ‘client’ states, but nothing that would really jeopardize the alliance. After the 2010 deadly raid on a Turkish ship headed for Gaza, Erdoğan confronted Israel, but mainly just verbally. The military ties were not severed: for instance, Turkey did not stop training Israeli combat pilots at its military airport outside Konya.

Were there too many contradictions? Most definitely!

*

In Turkey, it is actually extremely difficult to figure out ‘who is who?’ Allegiances are shifting and the positions of individuals and organizations keep changing.

During one of her visits to Turkey as Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton allegedly asked the Turkish government to shut down Aydinlik Gazetesi, this important socialist and nationalist newspaper. On several occasions, Aydinlik interviewed me. I also interviewed its Chief Editor and other staff members. I worked closely with its affiliated television station, Ulusal Kanal, the home base to one of the most prolific Turkish documentary filmmakers (and my friend) Serkan Koc.

Serkan and his comrades helped greatly during the filming of my documentary for the South American television station TeleSUR: on the 2013 Gezi Park uprising in Istanbul, and on ISIS being trained and supported in the ‘refugee’ camps and in the border area with Syria, around the city of Hatay.

I was explained to how the terrorists were trained at Apaydin refugee camp, as well as at a notorious NATO facility right outside the city of Adana – the Incirlik Air Base. On three occasions, I managed to film and photograph both facilities, often risking my life.

But ask the hard-core left in Turkey, particularly Communists, about both Aydinlik and Ulusal Kanal, and the answers you will get would be very far from being unanimous!

And ask the Aydinlik people about the plight of the Kurdish people and about the PKK, and you would get some derogatory, or at least extremely critical declarations.

Of course most of the Kemalists, and almost all nationalists, are against the Kurdish struggle for independence or even for some sort of autonomy. They believe that there should be one strong, secular Turkish state, full stop, and that the PKK is just a terrorist group.

On the other hand, many Turkish Communists have embraced the Kurdish plight, and are very critical of the nationalists and their media.

But where does the PKK really stand, politically? Well, it all depends on who you ask! Some say that it is the Kurdish nationalist movement, and that it is indisputably ‘left wing’. Others strongly disagree, openly defining it as the ‘fifth-column’, and even as a CIA implant.

But the “Kurdish Issue” is not the only one on which almost no one in Turkey seems to agree. Ask about the Armenian genocide, and you will soon realize that you have just parachuted yourself right into the middle of (already mentioned above) a minefield. Even most of the Turkish left wing will decisively reject the “genocide” definition. You may lose most of your friends by just bringing the Kurdish and Armenian “issues” into the conversation, in one single night.

Confusing? Not yet, it gets much worse. If you were to drive, before 2014, to Silviri Prison, some 80 kilometers from Istanbul, on the European side, you’d understand what real confusion is! This high-security facility used to hold hundreds of Turkish high-level military generals and officers, as well as some intellectuals and activists. All of them were there because of the so-called Operation Sledgehammer (in Turkish: Balyoz Harekâtı), an alleged failed military secularist coup dating back to 2003.

But who were the generals, and what was really behind their arrest? I met the families of some of them, and I filmed their testimonies. Several of them were strongly opposed to Mr. Erdoğan and his AKP Party. Some believed in Turkish “Eurasianism”, while others (although very few and not always openly) were opposed to Turkey’s membership in NATO.

Whatever it was, the government found the generals and their allies ‘uncomfortable’, even dangerous. The case against them was most likely fabricated and was heavily criticized at home and abroad. But it had a strong backer, the Cemaat movement, which is an Islamist movement led by the exiled cleric and (then) AKP’s close ally, Fethullah Gülen!

Not surprisingly, after AKP and Gülen had fallen out with each other in 2014, the accused were released from prison, and on 31 March 2015 all 236 suspects were acquitted.

And now President Erdoğan accuses Fethullah Gülen of being behind the latest, aborted bloody coup, demanding his extradition from the United States back to Turkey! How quickly, how fundamentally things change in this country!

To make it all even more complicated, my left wing Turkish colleagues  – investigative journalists – asked me as early as in 2012 to help them to investigate the activities of Cemaat Movement in general and of Fethullah Gülen in particular, in Africa (where I was then based), mainly in connection with them building schools and spreading all sorts of dangerous forms of an extremist religious teaching. In those days, Fethullah Gülen was still seen in Turkey as a close ally of both the United States and AKP!

At some point, AKPs’ ‘New Ottomanism’ went a ‘bit out of control’, as far as the West was concerned, but overall Turkey stayed on course, supporting the West and its imperialist policy in the region. And in the recent past, the main ally of the AKP (although its arch-enemy now), Fethullah Gülen, was part of that ‘good course’.

My friend, Yiğit Günay, an author, historian and journalist educated in Cuba, explained several months before the latest coup:

“The policy was called the Neo-Ottoman-ism. The idea was that the AKP government, or Turkey itself, would work as a sub-contractor of the Western imperialism in the region, and as a sub-contractor it would expand its own zone of influence, in those regions that you had just defined. In those days there was also the Gülen movement based in the United States. Right now the government and they are enemies, but back then they were allied. The Gülen movement was particularly active in Africa, because their main claim to fame is opening schools and universities. And they have a huge amount of money. I read a report that in 2013, the movement had some 130 “chartered schools”, in the United Sates alone… And if you have chartered schools, you get millions of dollars paid to you by the US tax payers. They are also very well organized; they have huge companies; they are wealthy. And they use this wealth to increase their influence.

Practically, when the Arab Spring began, the current president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the AKP were very skeptical. They didn’t understand what really was going on, until the Americans told them…

“Don’t worry: it is us who are doing it…”

There was a point when the NATO jets began bombing Libya, and Erdoğan made a speech, basically saying: “What the fuck is NATO doing, bombing Libya?” And two days later, Turkey became part of the mission. The Americans told him “Are you stupid? Don’t you see what’s going on?” And he promptly changed his mind.

But the main idea behind all this was: The Arab Spring was basically pro-AKP. It was what is called the “regime change”, all over the region. The new regimes were predominantly Islamist, and so the AKP had a chance to gain influence inside them.”

All that I have written above is just to illustrate the complexity of the Turkish political labyrinth.

There is almost nothing constant here; shifting sands come to mind as the most suitable metaphor.

*

Now where is Turkey actually heading?

Is it really possible that it may finally turn east?

Of course there are great hopes! Of course such hopes could at least, partially, be justified. But I am cautious, and not yet ready to celebrate.

The West is perfectly aware that “losing Turkey” would be a mighty blow to its geopolitical interests, read: to its totalitarian imperialist designs. It is highly unlikely that it would let this enormous country with one of the most strategic geographical locations on Earth, go easily and peacefully.

If the Turkish President does not yield to the West, if he decisively pulls his country out of NATO, if he shuts down the Incirlik Air Base (with its 50 or so nuclear warheads), and especially if he then shares Turkish military facilities with the Russians, the West will definitely act forcefully, even brutally. What would be on the ‘menu’ this time: an assassination attempt, another military coup or some externally provoked unrest? We don’t know, but we can guess: there would be appalling bloodshed.

And where, on what side would the Turkish intellectuals stand: all those renowned journalists, artists and academics? They are often very brave (Chomsky and I called them, in our recent book, ‘some of the most courageous on Earth’), but where are their real political allegiances? Some of them are pure socialists, even Marxists, but definitely not all. Many are actually looking straight towards the West: Paris, London, New York and Berlin.

One of my Turkish publishers and a friend, now deceased, the internationally renowned Turkish physical chemist and molecular biophysicist Oktay Sinanoğlu (often called the “Turkish Einstein”), was one of the most outspoken critics of Western imperialism. But he was also, for many years, a professor at Yale University, and his last years were spent mainly at his beachfront property in Florida. His love for Turkey was, for my taste, too ‘long distance”, too “platonic”.

Turkish intellectuals cannot even agree which writers to admire. Two most famous contemporary Turkish novelists, a Nobel Prize for Literature laureate Orhan Pamuk, and Elif Shafak, are seen by many as just two mediocre literati who totally sold out to the West, portraying Turkey as has been expected from them by their foreign publishers and public.

Many young and educated Turks have lately been heading to Latin America, to learn about the new revolutionary trends, governments and movements there. Others are travelling to Asia. For instance, Istanbul-based intellectuals are much more cosmopolitan than their shockingly Euro-centric and provincial counterparts in Athens. But European secularism and liberalism are still the main reference point and even the goal for most of the urban Turks.

They may be ‘against NATO’ and ‘against US foreign policy’, but it’s often uncertain what are they actually for.

Would they support the government, if it were to decide to kick out NATO and embrace Russia and China instead? Would they want Turkey to join BRICS?

Mr. Erdoğan is a shrewd, pragmatic politician. He knows all about trading and ‘bargaining chips’. He knows what his country is worth – to the West and its imperialism, and to those who are opposing it!

His popularity at home is soaring, reaching almost 70%. He has a clear ‘moral mandate’ when criticizing the West for either supporting (or even triggering) the recent coup, or at least for doing nothing to protect the Turkish ‘legitimate government’ in a time of great crisis.

And the West is now taking his threats seriously, for the first time!

Based on past experience, Erdoğan may now begin extremely hard bargaining with Washington, Berlin and other Western capitals. The recent ‘shifting towards the East’ could just be an extremely effective bluff.

Both Obama and Putin know that. That is why US officials are not really ‘concerned’ about the nukes stored in Turkey. That is why Putin was very polite, while meeting Erdoğan in St. Petersburg; polite but not much more.

Everyone is waiting for Turkey’s next move. And Mr. Erdoğan may take his time to actually make one. Time is on his side. He may now play both – imperialist and anti-imperialist – camps against each other. Whatever works!

Russia and China (apart of being on the right side of history) can offer a lot, practically: The new Silk Road all the way from the Pacific Ocean to Istanbul, complete with high-speed rail links, IT corridors, pipelines, as well as the total revamp of the troubled Turkish energy sector, just to mention some of the ‘goodies’.

Turkey would expect the West to offer more, much more, to match and to beat what is on the offer from the East.

Unfortunately, it seems that all this has nothing to do with ideology, or even with simple ‘right and wrong’, it is just some cold pragmatism and practical calculations.

But as I wrote at the beginning of this essay: I still don’t feel that I really understand Turkey! And even some of my Turkish comrades are now writing to me, telling me that ‘they cannot understand it, either!’

Anything can change there. People can change. The pragmatic father of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was a true Turkish nationalist, but strongly influenced by the ‘secular West’. Furthermore, in order to keep his nation strong, united, and independent, he had to fight the Western powers, and accept a great amount of military and economic help from the Soviet Union.

The President of Turkey is now holding the future of the region and the world in his hands. He is well aware of it. He can make history with a single stroke of the pen.

Just in case he makes a good decision, I am keeping a bottle of good champagne in my fridge. It is well chilled and ready to be popped open, at any moment. I hope; I truly hope that soon there will be an occasion for the cork to hit the ceiling!

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His latest books are: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and  “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”.  Discussion with Noam Chomsky: On Western Terrorism. Point of No Return is his critically acclaimed political novel. Oceania – a book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about Indonesia: “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Press TV. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and the Middle East. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter.

Hillary Clinton, Queen of Chaos, Queen of War, Golden Goldman Girl, for all practical purposes is by now the official bipartisan candidate of US neocons and neoliberalcons alike.

This pic is making the rounds in “western” media together with a tearful story from “activists” in a neighborhood in al-Qaeda occupied east-Aleppo.

A boy, seemingly wounded, sits quietly in a brand new, very well equipped ambulance. At a point he touches what looks like a wound on his left temple. He shows no reaction to that touch.

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The two minute video (also here), from which the pic is taken, shows the boy being handed from the dark above to some person in a rescue jacket and carried into the ambulance. There he sits quietly, unattended, while several people take videos and pictures of him. One other kids, not obviously wounded, is then carried to the ambulance.

As the story is told:

Mahmoud Raslan, a photojournalist who captured the image, told the Associated Press that emergency workers and journalists tried to help the child, identified as 5-year-old Omran Daqneesh, along with his parents and his three siblings, who are 1, 6 and 11 years old.”We were passing them from one balcony to the other,” Raslan said, adding: “We sent the younger children immediately to the ambulance, but the 11-year-old girl waited for her mother to be rescued. Her ankle was pinned beneath the rubble.”

An internet search for “Mahmoud Raslan”, the claimed “photojournalist”, finds no other pictures or videos attributed to that name.

There are about 15 men standing around the scene and doing nothing. (Next to a “just bombed” site in a warzone? No fear of a double-tap strike?) At least two more men, besides the videographer, are taking pictures or videos.

Another kid is carried into the ambulance. In the background there is someone with a white helmet wearing a shirt of the U.S./UK financed “White Helmets” propaganda group.

An animated wounded man is walked towards the ambulance.

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Like the boy, the man seems to have a wound at the upper head. But like the boy he is not bleeding at all. There is some red colored substance on his face but no blood is flowing. That is astonishing. When I rode ambulances as a first-responder, people with head wounds always bled like stuck pigs (they often messed up the car which I then had to clean). As WebMD notes:

Minor cuts on the head often bleed heavily because the face and scalp have many blood vessels close to the surface of the skin. Although this amount of bleeding may be alarming, many times the injury is not severe …

The amount of red colored substance on the boy and the man do not correspond to the amount one would expect from even a minor head wound. There are also no bandages applied or anything else that could have been used to stop an actual head wound from bleeding.

Compare the above to this recent picture from a boy in west-Aleppo. (No “western” media showed this boy and his suffering. He is not on “our side”.) The boy suffered a head wound after an improvised missile from al-Qaeda and its associates hit his neighborhood. He is in care, the bleeding has been stopped. The amount of blood on his body and soaked into his cloth is a multiple of that seen in the above pictures. The blood is also mixed with the other dirt on his face, not painted over. This looks like those patients in my ambulance. This looks real.

All attributes of the “boy on orange seat” scene and of the video are the same that can be found in dozens of “White Helmets” videos. It is the same theme that occurs over and over again in our picture collection Dramatic Rescue! Man With Kid Runs Towards Camera!.

I am inclined to believe that the video above is just as staged as the other “White Helmets” videos and pictures. The look of the boy’s wound is a bit more realistic than usual but the lack of bleeding, that no one attends to the boy, his non-reaction to touching the “wound” and the general setting of the video scene lets me believe that it is staged.

This new, widely distributed propaganda item comes again at a moment where al-Qaeda and its associates in Syria are in trouble. The Russian air force is hitting them in the rear area of their attack on west-Aleppo and it is hurting them badly. A “humanitarian ceasefire”, which can then be used to reorganize and resupply, is urgently needed. The propaganda helps to increase the pressure for such a demand.

Some of its sponsors want the “White Helmets” nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The organization itself lobbies for it on its website. Has anyone else ever done such?

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Have they no shame asking themselves for the prize? This right above another version of their main corporate brand attribute, a “Dramatic Rescue! Man With Kid Runs Towards Camera!” picture. Asking for a Nobel right above another staged scene?

But why not? Obama was nothing more than a marketed product when was handed the Peace Nobel. He then bombed people in seven Muslim dominated countries to dust. There is no good reason then to not give that prize to yet another propaganda tool which also wants more war.

Then again, I find a nomination for the Academy Awards, maybe in the category of “Best Marketed Fakes”, more appropriate.

Several developments this week mark an increase of activity from Syria’s allies, Russia, Iran and now China.

These include a Russian-Iranian agreement to use Iranian territory to position Russian Tupolev Tu-22M strategic bombers as well as Iranian and Iraqi airspace for both the bombers and Russian cruise missiles to pass through on their way to militant targets in Syria.

It also includes China’s recent pledge to provide humanitarian assistance to the Syrian people as well as military support for Syrian government troops in their fight to restore order nationwide.

The Details

The BBC would report in its article, “Syrian conflict: Russian bombers use Iran base for air strikes,” that:

Russia’s defence ministry says it has used a base in western Iran to carry out air strikes in Syria.

Tupolev-22M3 long-range bombers and Sukhoi-34 strike fighters took off from Hamedan on Tuesday, a statement said.

Targets were hit in Aleppo, Idlib and Deir al-Zour provinces, it added.

The BBC would also report:

Last week, Russia asked Iran and Iraq to allow Russian cruise missiles to fly through their airspace for attacks on terrorist targets in Syria.

It should be noted that Russian Tu-22Ms have already been used during Russia’s operations in Syria, however they have been based in southern Russia. Moving them forward west of Tehran, allows for shorter and more frequent missions, saving fuel and time. This further strengthening of Russian-Iranian ties come amid the delivery of Russian S-300 anti-air defense systems to Iran as part of an $800 million contract signed in 2007.

In addition to this, Reuters would report in its article, “China says seeks closer military ties with Syria,” that:

“China and Syria’s militaries have a traditionally friendly relationship, and China’s military is willing to keep strengthening exchanges and cooperation with Syria’s military,” the news agency paraphrased Guan [Guan Youfei, director of the Office for International Military Cooperation of China’s Central Military Commission] as saying.

Both also talked about personnel training and “reached a consensus” on the Chinese military providing humanitarian aid, Xinhua added, without elaborating.

Reuters would also make mention of Uyghur militants operating in Syria alongside other Western-backed militant groups, suggesting this as a possible motive for China’s interest in the conflict.

The Implications

The presence of Uyghur militants operating in Syria helps illustrate the wider implications of the Syrian conflict. While characterised as a “civil war” by the Western media, it is in fact a proxy war waged against Syria and its allies by a US-led multinational coalition.

Should this coalition succeed in replicating the scenario that unfolded in Libya in 2011, Western-backed militants would have a staging ground significantly closer to Iran, southern Russia and western China. The presence of large, well-funded and armed militant groups in Syria has already helped bolster peripheral networks in North Africa and Central Asia.

Should this coalition fail in the face of joint Syrian-Russian-Iranian-Chinese efforts, these militant groups can be exposed and liquidated and joint efforts in turn shifted to eliminate peripheral networks beyond Syria’s battlefields.

China and Iran’s increased involvement in the Syrian conflict raise pressure on the US-led coalition and its ongoing proxy war, making it increasingly unlikely that Western ambitions will be realized. The growing concentration of forces in and around Syria may eventually pose a danger to many of the coalition members working with the US in the region.

With Russian forces staged in Iran, Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states are now at a greater disadvantage vis-a-vis Tehran. Should China be forced deeper into the conflict, this may compound the already tenuous position of US allies in the region even further.

Ulson Gunnar, a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Poor Haiti. 

It is not enough to be the poorest country in the world and to be in the sphere of corruption from the Clinton Foundation after suffering a devastating earthquake in 2010, now the UN has admitted that its peacekeeping troops literally imported cholera bacteria in its efforts to help the nation.  

The only problem is those efforts have now cost the country thousands of deaths throughout the last six years.

According to the New York Times,

“the office of Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has acknowledged that the United Nations played a role in the initial outbreak and that a “significant new set of U.N. actions” will be needed to respond to the crisis.”

Great. So after admitting that your help efforts actually were detrimental, you offer more of the same help. As a reminder, cholera victims suffer from dehydration caused by severe diarrhea or vomiting.

The NYT continues by stating,

“The statement comes on the heels of a confidential report sent to Mr. Ban by a longtime United Nations adviser on Aug. 8. Written by Philip Alston, a New York University law professor who serves as one of a few dozen experts, known as special rapporteurs, who advise the organization on human rights issues, the draft language stated plainly that the epidemic “would not have broken out but for the actions of the United Nations…

But it represents a significant shift after more than five years of high-level denial of any involvement or responsibility of the United Nations in the outbreak, which has killed at least 10,000 people and sickened hundreds of thousands.”

Perhaps it is time for more Clinton crony capitalism and intervention in the name of saving lives.

The cost, as we now know, is about 10,000 bodies every six years.