Note: This article was originally published in 2014.
The following infographic shows us how profitable the US prison industry is. “Between 1980 and 1994, profits went up from $392 million to $1.31 billion” dollars. As reported in The Prison Industry in the United States: Big Business or a New Form of Slavery?, inmates, mostly Blacks and Hispanics, are also being exploited by various industries:
“For the tycoons who have invested in the prison industry, it has been like finding a pot of gold
They don’t have to worry about strikes or paying unemployment insurance, vacations or comp time. All of their workers are full-time, and never arrive late or are absent because of family problems; moreover, if they don’t like the pay of 25 cents an hour and refuse to work, they are locked up in isolation cells.”
Privatization of the US Prison System. An Infographic from ArrestRecords.com
Numerosos movimientos han sido creados para impulsar estas revueltas: Otpor (“Resistencia”) en Serbia, Kmara En Georgia, Pora (“Ya es hora”) en Ucrania y Kelkel ((“¡Basta!”) “Renacimiento”) en Kirguistán. El primero de ellos, Otpor, provocó la caída del régimen serbio de Slobodan Milosevic. Después de este éxito, Popovic (uno de los fundadores de Otpor) ha creado CANVAS con la ayuda de activistas del movimiento serbio, que ha asistido, asesorado y capacitado a todos los otros movimientos posteriores. CANVAS entrenó a disidentes en todo el mundo, particularmente en el mundo árabe, en la aplicación de la resistencia individual no violenta, la ideología teorizada por el filósofo y politólogo estadounidense Gene Sharp, cuyo libro “De la Dictadura a la Democracia ” fue la base para todas las revoluciones de colores y” primaveras” árabes.
En 2011, en plena efervescencia sobre la plaza Tahrir, fue entrevistado Srdja Popovic sobre actividades de formación de revolucionarios en el centro CANVAS (Centro para estrategias de aplicación no violenta) que él dirigía en Belgrado. Se apresuró a contestar, con un toque de orgullo: “Trabajamos con 37 países. Después de la revolución de Serbia, teníamos cinco años de éxito: “Georgia, Ucrania, Líbano y Maldivas. En su prisa, se había olvidado de mencionar el quinto país: Kirguistán. No se priva de agregar: “Y ahora, Egipto, Túnez y la lista crecerá. No tenemos idea del número de países en los que se utilizó el puño de Otpor, probablemente una docena … “[1]. Esta declaración no es trivial. Expresa la relación obvia entre las diversas revoluciones de colores y protestas que azotaron el Medio Oriente, la mal llamada “primavera” árabe.
Documental: The Business Revolución
(La Declaración de Srdja Popovic es a las 4:20)
Las revoluciones de colores
Estas revoluciones, que deben su nombre a los colores con que fueron bautizados (rosa, naranja, tulipán, etc.) son las revueltas que sacudieron algunos países del Este o de las ex repúblicas soviéticas a principios del siglo 21. Este es el caso de Serbia (2000), Georgia (2003), Ucrania (2004) y Kirguistán (2005).
Varios movimientos se han creado para impulsar estas revueltas: Otpor (“Resistencia”) en Serbia, Kmara En Georgia, Pora (“Ya es hora”) en Ucrania y Kelkel ((“¡Basta!”) “Renacimiento”) en Kirguistán. El primero de ellos, Otpor, es la que provocó la caída del régimen serbio de Slobodan Milosevic. Después de este éxito, Popovic (uno de los fundadores de Otpor) ha creado CANVAS con la ayuda de activistas del movimiento serbio. Según lo indicado por Popovic, el centro ha asistido, asesorado y capacitado a todos los demás movimientos posteriores. CANVAS entrenó en disidentes en todo el mundo, particularmente en el mundo árabe, en la aplicación de la resistencia individual no violenta, la ideología teorizada por el filósofo y politólogo estadounidense Gene Sharp, cuyo libro “De la Dictadura a la Democracia “(De la dictadura a la democracia) fue la base para todas las revoluciones de colores y “primaveras” árabes [2].
CANVAS, así como los diversos movimientos disidentes en los países del Este o ex repúblicas soviéticas se han beneficiado de la ayuda de muchas organizaciones estadounidenses de “exportación” de la democracia, como la USAID (Agencia de los Estados Unidos para el Desarrollo Internacional) la NED(National Endowment for Democracy), IRI (Instituto Republicano Internacional), el NDI (Instituto Nacional Demócrata para Asuntos Internacionales), Freedom House y OSI (Open Society Institute). Estas organizaciones son financiadas tanto por el presupuesto de Estados Unidos como por capital privado. Por ejemplo, la NED es financiado por un presupuesto aprobado por el Congreso y los fondos son gestionados por un consejo de administración con la representación del Partido Republicano, el Partido Demócrata, la Cámara de Comercio de los Estados Unidos y la Unión Federación Americana del Trabajo-Congreso de Organizaciones Industriales (AFL-CIO), mientras que OSI es parte de la Fundación Soros, el nombre de su fundador, George Soros, el multimillonario estadounidense, ilustre especulador financiero. [3]
Se ha demostrado que estas mismas agencias asisten y entrenan redes de disidentes árabes involucrados en la famosa “primavera” que se extendió por sus países. [4] También encontramos las “huellas” de estos organismos en los acontecimientos en Teherán (la Revolución Verde – 2009) [5], el euromaidán (Ucrania – 2013/2014) [6] y, algo más recientemente, Hong Kong ( revolución paraguas – 2014) [7].
La Revolución de los Cedros
Según algunos, el mayor exito de CANVAS en la región MENA (Oriente Medio y Norte de África) es sin duda el Líbano (Revolución de los Cedros – 2005) y su mayor fracaso, Irán [8]. Esta es la razón por la cual Popovic había mencionado con orgullo el Líbano como un trofeo en su panel de trofeos de caza “revolucionario” y “ni mu” ninguna palabra sobre Irán.
La Revolución de los Cedros fue el preludio de la “primavera” árabe y así el primer país árabe en conocer esta estación fue el Líbano. Esta serie de eventos orquestado muy bien a principios de 2005 alegando, entre otras cosas, la retirada de las tropas sirias tras el asesinato, el 14 de febrero de 2005, del primer ministro libanés, en ese momento, Rafiq Hariri.
Sin embargo, Sharmine Narwani explica en un artículo detallado sobre el tema, que esta “revolución” había sido planeado alrededor de un año antes de la muerte de Hariri. La decisión incluye un núcleo de la célula de activistas formados por un trío de amigos: Eli Khoury, un experto en comunicación y marketing de Quantum y Saatchi & Saatchi, Samir Kassir, ensayista que encabezó el Movimiento de Izquierda Democrática (MGD) formado en septiembre de 2004 y el periodista Samir Franyieh. [9]
Añádase a esto los nombres de otros activistas que han jugado un papel importante: Nora Jumblatt (la esposa del líder druso, Walid Jumblatt), Asma Andraous (miembros 05AMAM del grupo, creado después del 14 de febrero de 2005), Gebran Tueni (en el tiempo, director del diario An-Nahar) y Michel Elefteriades (músico, productor y empresario griego-libanesa).
Eli Khoury
Samir Kassir
Samir Frangieh
Nora Joumblatt
Asma Andraous
Michel Elefteriades
A menudo se ha mencionado la estrecha relación entre los activistas de la Revolución del Cedro y organizaciones estadounidenses que promueven la democracia.
De hecho, el New York Post informó (en 2005) que, según fuentes de inteligencia estadounidenses, la CIA y otros servicios de inteligencia europeos han proporcionado dinero y apoyo logístico a los organizadores de las protestas anti-sirias para aumentar la presión sobre el presidente sirio Bashar al-Assad y obligarlo a abandonar el Líbano por completo. Según estas fuentes, este programa secreto fue similar a los que la CIA había configurado previamente para ayudar a los movimientos pro-democráticos en Georgia y Ucrania y también ha dado lugar a impresionantes manifestaciones pacíficas. [10]
Algunos activistas, como Bassem Chit (murió en 2014), admitió haber sido contactado por Freedom House para “financiar grupos de jóvenes para ayudar al proceso de democratización”. Según Bassem Chit, Jeffrey Feltman, el embajador de Estados Unidos en el momento, invitó a varios líderes del movimiento anti-sirio a cenas durante la Revolución de los Cedros. También dice que la Embajada de Estados Unidos participó directamente en el fomento de las protestas anti-sirias. [11]
Sharmine Narwani dice en su artículo antes citado que Gebran Tueni estaba en contacto con Frances Abouzeid, Directora de Freedom House en Amman (Jordania). Fue en su consejo de que Tueni trajo los instructores de CANVAS a Beirut. Es importante señalar que Freedom House es el principal financiador de la academia serbia.
Los serbios de CANVAS han formado a los activistas libaneses utilizando los locales del periódico An-Nahar. Ivan Marovic, el cofundador de CANVAS, había asegurado él mismo cursos de formación en la resistencia no violenta.
Michel Elefteriades se reunió con Ivan Marovic y sus colegas antes del 14 de marzo de 2005: “Gebran Tueni me llamó y me dijo que debería darle una mano a un grupo de serbios que vino a ayudarnos. Tenían aire super-profesional en comparación con lo que querían hacer. Pude ver su influencia en todo lo que estaba sucediendo. Eran especialistas de revoluciones de color”. Y agregó: “Entonces empezaron a decirnos qué hacer o no. Lo acompañé a las reuniones con los medios de comunicación – nada más que medios internacionales – y estaban coordinando cosas con ellos. Todos se conocían muy bien entre sí […]. Nos dieron una lista de slogans que iban a ser transmitidos por la televisión occidental. Nos dijeron, para nosotros y para los periodistas occidentales, dónde colocar las banderas, cuando ondean en el aire, e incluso el tamaño que deben tener. Por ejemplo, le preguntaron los periodistas, para prevenir los desajustes, los horarios en que iban a pasar, y luego nos dijeron que había que ajustar nuestros relojes y blandir nuestras pancartas justo a las 15.05 horas, en función del momento en que los canales de televisión retransmitían en directo desde Beirut. Fue una puesta en escena total »[12].
Por su parte, Asma Andraous dice que “todas las organizaciones de Estados Unidos para la democracia estaban allí. Enseñaron a los jóvenes a participar, cómo mantener ocupados a los activistas, estaban muy entusiasmados “[13].
Algunos activistas informan alejarse o han mantenido su distancia con las agencias de Estados Unidos o de promoción a favor de la democracia estadounidense. Este es el caso de Michel Elefteriades que se negó a seguir trabajando con instructores Lienzo Bassem Chit o que han disminuido las generosas ofertas de Freedom House. Otros han tratado de minimizar el papel de estas agencias o fingir que intervino tardíamente [14].
Sin embargo, el modus operandi de la Revolución de los Cedros sigue meticulosamente el procedimiento de revoluciones de colores orquestado por CANVAS. Entre los 199 métodos de las acciones no violentas que figuran en el manual de la CANVAS (distribuido gratuitamente en Internet) incluyen, por ejemplo, lo que es N ° 33: “La confraternización con el enemigo”, que analiza campo a través de la distribución de flores a la policía (generalmente a través de las chicas jóvenes y bonitas). [15] Este método se encuentra en todas las revoluciones de colores en los países árabes “printanisés” y en Hong Kong las calles durante la revolución [16] de los paraguas.
Chica de entrega flores a las fuerzas del orden libanesas (febrero de 2005)
Serbia (2000)
Ucraina (2004)
Tunisia (2011)
Egytto (2011)
Ofrecimiento de flores a la policía, de acuerdo al método de acción no violenta nº 33 de CANVAS
Por otra parte, Aleksandar Maric, ex activista de Otpor e instructor de CANVAS no ha dicho que su organización había establecido contactos con los disidentes libaneses y ello antes de la Revolución de los Cedros [17 ]? Esta precisión tiene el mérito de corroborar las declaraciones de Sharmine Narwani sobre la planificación de la “revolución” antes del asesinato de Hariri.
Además, todo el mundo se han dado cuenta de que el “Movimiento del 14 de marzo” coalición de fuerzas que se oponen a Siria creado tras el asesinato del primer ministro libanés, elegido como el logotipo de Otpor puño ligeramente modificado por la adición de una rama verde.
Recordemos que el puño de Otpor fue ampliamente utilizado durante las diversas revoluciones de colores y protestas que acompañaron a la “primavera” árabe [18].
Logo del movimiento “14 de Marzo” libanes
Algunos ejemplos de uso del puño cerrado de Otpor de Serbia (Otpor), Egipto (Movimiento del 6 de abril) , Georgia (Kmara)
Es curioso que la “Revolución del Cedro” no es el nombre que se utilizó originalmente por activistas libaneses. Los manifestantes habían optado por la “Intifada de la independencia”, “Intifada del Cedro”, “La primavera libanesa” y “Primavera del Cedro”.
Michel Elefteriades dijo que la palabra “intifada”, que alude a los levantamientos palestinos, no agradó a los especialistas de CANVAS: “Desde el primer día, me dijeron que no hay que llamar a nuestro movimiento ‘intifada Cedar “porque no nos gusta la palabra intifada en Occidente. Dijeron que la opinión árabe no era importante, lo que importaba era la opinión occidental. Así que le dijeron a los periodistas a no utilizar la palabra intifada “[19].
De hecho, el término “Revolución del Cedro” era más agradable a los oídos de la administración Bush. Según el periodista Jefferson Morley del Washington Post, este nombre fue inventado por Paula J. Dobriansky, la subsecretaria de Estado para Democracia y Asuntos internacionales (desde 2001 hasta 2009), bajo el gobierno de Bush hijo. Promocionando la política exterior del presidente Bush durante una conferencia de prensa 28 de febrero 2005, dijo: “En el Líbano, vemos creciente impulso para una Revolución de los Cedros unificación de los ciudadanos de ese país a la causa de verdadera democracia y la libertad de la influencia extranjera. Signos esperanzadores abarcan todo el mundo y no debe haber ninguna duda de que los próximos años van a ser muy bueno para la causa de la libertad “. [20]
Esta similitud entre la evaluación de CANVAS y la de la administración de Estados Unidos demuestra (una vez más) un consenso claro de como el centro de formación de Serbia está financiado principalmente por organizaciones estadounidenses de “exportación” de la democracia en especialmente Freedom House, el IRI y OSI [21].
Cabe señalar que Paula J. Dobriansky, no sólo es un miembro de Freedom House CA sino también titular de la Cátedra Nacional de Seguridad en los EE.UU. Academia Naval. Ella también es miembro fundador del think tank neoconservador (neocon) “Proyecto para el Nuevo Siglo Americano” (PNAC), que tuvo una considerable influencia en el gobierno de Bush hijo. Su nombre es uno de los 75 firmantes de una carta enviada en agosto de 2013 para el presidente Obama, instándolo a atacar a la Siria de “Bashar” e instándole a “responder con decisión al imponer medidas que tengan efectos significativos sobre el régimen de Assad “[22].
Nos encontramos con el nombre de Eli Khoury en la lista de invitados a una conferencia internacional sobre “Democracia y Seguridad”, celebrado en Praga (República Checa), el 5 y 6 de junio de 2007. Este encuentro reunió a muchos celebridades en los campos de la disidencia, el espionaje, la política y la esfera académica. Citamos al el ex presidente checo Vaclav Havel, ex Primer Ministro de España, José María Aznar, el senador estadounidense Joseph Lieberman, el ex director de Freedom House, Peter Ackerman, la cara de la Revolución Naranja, y el ex primer ministro de Ucrania, Yulia Tymoshenko, o el ‘neocon’ Joshua Muravchik, también miembro del PNAC. [23] En esta conferencia, Khoury también ha contactado al activista egipcio Saad Eddin Ibrahim, el disidente soviético (hoy Israelí), sionista y anticomunista Natan Sharansky y al opositor ruso Garri Kasparov.
Paula J. Dobriansky
Joshua Muravchik
Saad Eddin Ibrahim es el fundador de la “Ibn Jaldún Centro de Estudios para el Desarrollo,” ONG generosamente financiadas por la NED. Honrado por Freedom House, un ex profesor de la Universidad Americana de El Cairo ha sido miembro del consejo asesor del “Proyecto Democracia sobre Oriente Medio” (Pomed), una organización estadounidense que trabaja con Freedom House y está apoyado financieramente por NED. [24]
Pero lo que llama la atención en esta lista es el gran número de participantes prominentes de Israel cuyo embajador de este estado en la República Checa Arie Arazi y su homóloga Checa Zantovsky Michael, jefe de Asuntos Económicos de la Embajada de Israel en los Estados Unidos, Ron Dermer y muchos académicos israelíes.
Sin embargo, lo más destacado de la conferencia fue, sin duda, la presencia del presidente Bush, quien aprovechó la oportunidad para hacer un discurso sobre la libertad, la democracia, la disidencia y el activismo político. [25]
Discurso del Presidente Bush (Czernin Palace, Praga, 5 de junio de 2007)
La conferencia fue organizada por el “Instituto de Estudios de Seguridad de Praga” (PSSI) y “Instituto Adelson de Estudios Estratégicos”. [26] Financiada, entre otros, por la OSI, la PSSI cuenta en su Consejo Asesor con James Woolsey, ex director de la CIA (y ex presidente de Freedom House CA) y Madeleine Albright, la secretaria de Estado y, dicho sea de paso, 64a Presidente CA del NDI [27].
El “Instituto Adelson de Estudios Estratégicos” es un instituto de investigación establecido por una generosa donación de la “Fundación Adelson Family” (Miriam y Sheldon G. Adelson). Es dedicado “a la exploración de los desafíos globales que Israel y la cara Oeste” y el estudio de temas tales como los relacionados con el avance de la libertad y la democracia en el Medio Oriente [28 ]. Cabe mencionar que Sheldon G. Adelson es un multimillonario origen judío ucraniano Americana (como Natan Sharansky). Considerado uno de los mayores clientes del Estado de Israel, que financia, con millones de dólares, a los Judios para viajar a Israel con el fin de fortalecer los lazos entre Israel y la Diáspora. [29]
De hecho, la misión principal de su fundación lleva a cabo en una sola línea:. “Fortalecimiento del Estado de Israel y el pueblo judío” [30] Según el periodista Nathan Guttman, la ideología de Sheldon Adelson G. es una mezcla de apoyo al primer ministro de Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, simpatía por el movimiento de los colonos y la hostilidad a la Autoridad Palestina. [31]
El millonario sionista Sheldon G. Adelson y su “gran ” amigo Benjamin Netanyahu (Jerusalén , 12 agosto 2007)
¿Cómo es que Eli Khoury se encuentra en una conferencia tan prestigiosa, que reúne a presidentes, primeros ministros, embajadores, halcones “neoconservadores” ilustres disidentes y un club selecto de funcionarios israelíes? ¿Podría ser para darle las gracias por su papel proactivo en la revolución de cedro?
De hecho, Eli Khoury no es un extraño a la administración estadounidense. Un cable de Wikileaks “06Beirut1544_a” nos dice que alrededor de un año antes de esta conferencia, fue invitado a una cena ofrecida por el embajador de Estados Unidos con motivo de la visita de Kristen Silverberg, secretario de Estado adjunto para organizaciones internacionales. Jeffrey Feltman identifica Khoury como CEO de Saatchi & Saatchi (empresa de publicidad) y se describe como “una publicidad de estratega y experto creativa” que han contribuido a la “marca” de la Revolución de los Cedros. [32] En realidad, el papel de esta empresa era tan importante, que algunos no dudan en llamar la Revolución del Cedro de la “revolución Saatchi” [33], o incluso, teniendo en cuenta la participación de las organizaciones estadounidenses “revolución patrocinado por la USAID y Saatchi & Saatchi “. [34]
Y eso no es todo. Eli Khoury es co-fundador de la “Fundación Líbano Renacimiento” (LRF), una organización no gubernamental fundada en Washington en 2007, que se define como “una organización educativa independiente, no gubernamental y no-sectaria cuyos fundadores han participado a través de sus propias actividades profesionales en la promoción de la práctica de la no violencia y el activismo democrático “. [35] Encontramos así, en esta descripción, los claros términos de los “profetas” de las revoluciones de color, Srdja Popovic y Gene Sharp.
Esta fundación es una “organización que recibe una parte sustancial de su apoyo de una unidad gubernamental [estadounidense] o el público en general”. [36] ] Después de los fondos del gobierno de Estados Unidos esencialmente recibidas, las finanzas, a su vez, diferentes programas u organizaciones ubicadas en el Líbano. Los ejemplos incluyen el “Centro Sostenible democracia” libanesa ONG que fue financiado (entre otros) por la USAID y la NED (2003 y 2005)[37], o la ONG MARCH, que también recibe directa o indirectamente subvenciones de varias organizaciones pro-democracia americanas (NED, USAID, etc.). se darán más detalles de ambas ONGs libanesas en la siguiente sección.
De acuerdo con su declaración de impuestos de 2013 [38], LRF ha financiado la “Defensa libanés y Aviso Legal Center” (LALAC), una agencia de lucha contra la corrupción, que también recibe fondos del “Centro Internacional para la Empresa Privada” (CIPE) [39], uno de los cuatro satélites de la NED. [40] Tenga en cuenta que el centro es una iniciativa de LALAC “libanesa Asociación Transparencia” (LTA), una ONG libanesa fundada en 1999 y subvencionada por el CIPE, el NDI, MEPI y OSI [41]. MEPI (Iniciativa de Asociación del Medio Oriente) es un programa que depende directamente del Departamento de Estado de Estados Unidos, a través de la Oficina de Asuntos del Cercano Oriente. [42]
Por último, es importante mencionar que Samir Kassir y Gebran Tueni, lamentablemente, no han tenido la oportunidad de asistir a la cena el embajador Feltman, ni a la conferencia internacional sobre “Democracia y Seguridad”: fueron asesinados respectivamente el 2 de junio de 2005 y 12 de diciembre del 2005.
Beirut y la “Liga Árabe del Net”
Al igual que en el caso de Ucrania después de la Revolución Naranja [43], las organizaciones de los Estados Unidos de exportación de la democracia no han dejado Líbano después de la Revolución de los Cedros, por el contrario. Informes NED muestran que entre 2005 y 2014, esta organización ha distribuido más de $ 7 millones a las ONG libanesas. Entre 2005 y 2012, el NDI ha recibido por su cuenta más de $ 2 millones para financiar sus operaciones en el Líbano.
Formación y conexión en red de ciberactivistas árabes llevaron a la creación de lo que el periodista francés Pierre Boisselet nombrada la “Liga Árabe la Red” [44]. Se celebraron numerosas reuniones entre blogueros árabes activistas antes y después de la “primavera” árabe. Los dos primeros “Encuentro de Bloggers Árabes” tuvo lugar en Beirut. La primera (del 22 al 24 agosto de 2008) reunió a 29 bloggers de nueve países árabes (Líbano, Egipto, Túnez, Marruecos, Arabia Saudita, Bahrein, Palestina, Irak y Siria). [45] En la segunda reunión, que se celebraba del 8 al 12 de diciembre de 2009 el número de ciber-árabes superó 60 [46]. Se conocieron allí las “estrellas” de la Red Árabe: los tunecinos Sami Ben Gharbia, Delgado Ammamou y Lina Ben Mhenni, los egipcios Alaa Abdelfattah y Wael Abbas, el mauritano Nasser Weddady, el bahreiní Ali Abdulemam, el marroquí Hisham Almiraat (alias Khribchi), de Sudán, Amir Ahmad Nasr, el sirio Razan Ghazzaoui, etc. [47].
Slim Amamou y Lina Ben Mhenni ( 3er Encuentro de Bloggers Árabes , Túnez 2011)
Razan Ghazzaoui y Alaa Abdelfattah Ali Abdulemam (Budapest 2008 )
Sami Ben Gharbia
Alaa Abdelfattah
Wael Abbas
Ali Abdulemam
Hisham AlMiraat
Amir Ahmad Nasr
Razan Ghazzaoui y Nasser Weddady
Aunque las dos reuniones fueron organizadas por la “Heinrich Böll Stiftung” [48] el OSI de Soros cofinanció la segunda. [49] Tenga en cuenta la participación interesante en talleres de capacitación de los “shows” Jacob Appelbaum en la segunda edición (2009). Su presentación se ocupó de derivación, la seguridad y el anonimato en línea. [50] Para los no iniciados, Jacob Appelbaum es un “hacktivista” que representa la cara pública de la compañía estadounidense que desarrolla software digital que permite la navegación anónima en Internet, lo que facilita la acción de eludir la vigilancia estatal y la censura. Appelbaum viajó durante todo el año para reunirse con los disidentes de todo el mundo y mostrarles cómo utilizar el producto digital gratuito. Para tener una idea del uso del programa digital, usted debe saber que ha sido descargado más de 36 millones de veces solamente durante el año 2010[51].
Jacob Appelbaum (3er Encuentro de Bloggers Árabes, Túnez 2011)
La revolución de las”basuras”
La serie de eventos que tuvieron lugar en el Líbano en el verano de 2015 fue llamada “crisis de la basura” por algunos, la revolución “basura” o “basura” por otros. Se desencadenó después de un problema y la gestión de la basura recogida, pero las exigencias de los manifestantes pronto se convirtió en un desafío para el gobierno y la corrupción exponer y fracaso del Estado.
Manifestantes del movimiento “apestas!” preparan pancartas (Beirut 29 de agosto de 2015) Tenga en cuenta que Gandhi fue también el “mentor” de activistas de Otpor e inspirador de Gene Sharp
El grupo ciudadano creado a raíz de estos acontecimientos fue bautizado como “Tú apestas!” (Tal3at Rihatkom en árabe). Este nombre corto y potente coincide a la perfección con los métodos recomendados por CANVAS. Es en la misma línea que el “Otpor” Serbio (Resistencia), el “Kmara” georgiana (¡Basta!) O “Pora” de Ucrania (Es tiempo).
Entre las mayoría de los líderes de alto perfil del movimiento de protesta se incluyen Imad Bazzi, Marwan Maalouf, Assaad Thebian y Lucien Bourjeilly.
Imad Bazzi es un ciberactivista libanesa muy involucrado en la blogosfera árabe. Según el investigador Nicolas Dot-Pouillard, Bazzi estaba cerca activistas de Otpor y un firme partidario de la retirada siria en 2005 [52]. También forman parte de la “Liga Árabe la Red”, que reconoce haber trabajado en estrecha colaboración con los disidentes sirios. “Es normal que alguien quiere ayudar a Siria a alguien en Egipto, Túnez y alguien quiere ayudar a alguien en Yemen”, dijo. “Compartimos los mismos problemas que todos sufrimos corrupción local, la ausencia del imperio de la ley y la falta de democracia”. [53]
Bazzi ha participado en varias conferencias dedicadas al hacktivismo. En uno de ellos (2010), que bordeó los activistas egipcios cibernéticos del “Movimiento 06 de abril”, que jugó un papel innegable en la caída del presidente Mubarak (Bassem Samir, Israa Abdel Fattah, ..) y cuyo actividades fueron financiadas por muchas organizaciones estadounidenses que promueven la democracia. [54] La conferencia fue co-patrocinado por Google y Freedom House. [55]
En 2011, la Universidad Americana de Beirut organizó la conferencia anual 16 de la “Asociación Árabe-estadounidense de Educadores de Comunicación” (AUSACE). [56] En este encuentro, financiado por Soros OSI, Imad Bazzi fue emparejado con Sami Ben Gharbia en el mismo panel. Recordemos que Sami Ben Gharbia, co-fundador del sitio Nawaat, es un ciberactivista tunecina líder que estaba muy involucrado en el “printanisation” de Túnez. [57]
Imad Bazzi también tomó nota era “programa Fellow” Freedom House [58] y gerente del proyecto del “Centro para la Democracia Sostenible” se mencionó anteriormente. [59]
El 5 de septiembre de 2011, pocos meses después de la caída de Mubarak, Bazzi fue arrestado por la policía egipcia en el aeropuerto de El Cairo. Dijo que la fundación “Maharat” (una ONG libanesa financiado por la NED que hace campaña por los derechos de los periodistas [60]) que fue allí a trabajar como consultor para una institución. Estuvo recluido durante más de diez horas fue interrogado sobre su relación con los ciberactivistas egipcios como Wael Abbas. Posteriormente fue deportado a Beirut. [61]
Para completar el cuadro, tenga en cuenta Imad Bazzi es miembro del foro “fikra”, un foro creado por el lobby de Estados Unidos a favor de Israel. Entre los participantes, hay muchos activistas en línea árabes, Bassem Samir, Israa Abdel Fattah y Saad Eddin Ibrahim y disidentes Radwan Ziadeh y sirios Ausama Monajed (antiguos miembros del Consejo Nacional Sirio – NSC). No hace falta decir que todos estos “colaboradores” son financiados por agencias de Estados Unidos a la democracia “exportación”. [62]. También incluye los nombres de los halcones “neoconservadores” como Joshua Muravchik (viejos colegas Paula J. Dobriansky) e incluso que los del Dr. Josef Olmert, hermano del ex primer ministro israelí, Ehud Olmert. [63]
1- Bassem Samir ; 2- Sherif Mansour ( Freedom House ) ; 3- Saad Eddin Ibrahim ; 4- Dalia Ziada ( egipcia ciber-activista, miembro de Fikra ) ; 5- Israa Abdel Fattah
Marwan Maalouf es un líder del movimiento “Tú apestas! “. Según varios observadores, participó en 2005 a las manifestaciones de la Revolución de los Cedros en un movimiento estudiantil [64]. A partir de entonces, su carrera ha estado llena de activismo “hecho en EE.UU.”.
De hecho, de 2008 a 2011, fue director del programa de Freedom House en Washington, responsable de la región MENA, en particular de Siria, Túnez y Argelia. Luego se trasladó a Túnez (2012 hasta 2013) para dirigir el “Instituto para la Guerra y la Paz” (IWPR). [65] Este instituto, que “apoya a los periodistas locales, periodistas ciudadanos y activistas de la sociedad civil” y que contribuye “a la paz y el buen gobierno mediante el fortalecimiento de la capacidad de los medios de comunicación y la sociedad civil para hablar” [66] es financiado por varias organizaciones, entre ellas la NED, la USAID y el Departamento de Estado (a través de la Embajada de Estados Unidos en Túnez y el programa MEPI) [67].
Marwan Maalouf, tras ser dispersado junto a sus seguidores después de intentar asaltar la sede del Ministerio de Medio Ambiente ( Beirut , 01 de septiembre 2015 )
Marwan Maalouf co-fundó el instituto de investigación ” Menapolis ” especializado en la gestión pública y el desarrollo en la región MENA . Entre sus “expertos ” figura el nombre de Imad Bazzi y entre sus clientes se encuentran (por supuesto) IWPR , Freedom House y la MEPI . [68]
Según Martin Armstrong , periodista británico con sede en Beirut , Assaad Thebian es co-fundador y portavoz del movimiento “Tú apestas ! ” Y el principal organizador de los acontecimientos actuales. [69]
Assaad Thebian (Beirut, 28 Agosto, 2015)
El perfil “LinkedIn” de Assaad Thebian muestra que es parte del grupo (privado) “ex” MEPI (Capítulo Líbano) [70]. En la descripción de este grupo, se lee: “MEPI, un programa del Departamento de Estado [de Estados Unidos], está activa en toda la región. La red de ex alumnos incluye más de 128 participantes en los programas de MEPI. La red proporciona una vía para que los alumnos continúen sus esfuerzos para fortalecer la sociedad libanesa. MEPI se centra en cuatro áreas distintas o “pilares”: la democracia, la educación, la economía y el empoderamiento de las mujeres. El capítulo libanés de la red de antiguos alumnos incluye a personas de diversos orígenes que participaron en una serie de programas en las cuatro áreas. […] Con el lanzamiento del capítulo libanés de la red de antiguos alumnos, diferentes habilidades que los individuos han adquirido pueden ser utilizados para la participación continua en el Líbano “. [71]
El 29 de enero de 2014, la asociación libanesa de “ex” MEPI ha organizado un evento en Beirut, en la presencia del embajador de EEUU en Líbano, David Hale. Fue con motivo del décimo aniversario de MEPI, a “honrar logros sobresalientes” del “viejo” capítulo libanés. Obviamente Thebian Assaad era parte del grupo. [72] Como tal, un trofeo en el escritorio, habló para lanzar algunas flechas al gobierno libanés, entre los aplausos del señor Hale. [73] Un preludio de la revolución “basura”?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2D2G_edbYk
Discurso Assaad Thebian en el décimo aniversario de la MEPI
(El Real Dbayeh, Beirut, 29 de Enero, 2014)
Desde 2011 hasta hoy, Thebian trabaja como consultor en medios digitales y de comunicación. Sus clientes incluyen numerosas organizaciones no gubernamentales como la “Asociación Libanesa para la Democracia Electoral” (LADE) y “Campaña Civil por la Reforma Electoral” (CCER). [74] Una breve mirada al sitio NDI permite ver que esta organización para “exportar” la democracia tiene una asociación de 17 años con LADE y trabaja en estrecha colaboración con la CCER. [75]
A diferencia de otros líderes del movimiento “Tú apestas! “Lucien Bourjeily es un hombre de arte. El escritor y director, que fue elegido en 2012 por CNN como uno de los 8 más importantes figuras de la cultura del Líbano. [76]
En 2013, desafió al gobierno libanés con una obra que critica duramente la censura estatal. La pieza titulada “Aw Ma Bto2ta3 Bto2ta3” (literalmente, “se corta o sin cortes?”) Se le prohibió la exhibición pública por la oficina de la censura, lo que le valió inmensa publicidad. En 2014, Bourjeily todavía tenía problemas con las autoridades libanesas por una historia de renovación de pasaporte, incidente que agitó la blogosfera. [77]
Lucien Bourjeilly después de conseguir su pasaporte libanés (23 de mayo de 2014)
La obra de teatro en cuestión fue producido por la ONG “MARCH” (mencionado anteriormente en relación con Eli Khoury), cuya misión es “educar, motivar y capacitar a los ciudadanos para reconocer y luchar por sus derechos civiles básicos, llevando a una sociedad libanesa abierta y tolerante con el fin de promover la diversidad y la igualdad y lograr una verdadera reconciliación entre las diferentes comunidades “. Esta organización es financiada conjuntamente por la NED [78], la USAID y Maharat SKeyes Medios. [79]
El informe anual 2014 de la NED se refiere claramente a cual es el objetivo de MARCH “montar una producción de” Aw Ma Bto2ta3 Bto2ta3 “y documentar los esfuerzos para obtener la aprobación de una parte vis-à-vis de la censura” [80]. Misión cumplida:. La prohibición de la pieza fue levantada el 25 de septiembre 2014 y la noticia fue muy difundido [81]
SKeyes es el acrónimo estilizado de “Samir Kassir Eyes” (Los ojos de Samir Kassir, el líder de la Revolución de los Cedros). Este centro fue fundado en Beirut en noviembre de 2007, tras el asesinato de Samir Kassir. De acuerdo con lo que se menciona en su página web “, el centro tiene como objetivo la vigilancia de las violaciones de la libertad de prensa y la cultura; también busca defender los derechos de los periodistas e intelectuales, así como su libertad de expresión “. [82] Muchos documentos muestran que SKeyes está financiado por la NED y el NDI. [83] Además, antes de ser Director Ejecutivo SKeyes (desde 2011), el Sr. Ayman Mhanna había trabajado en NDI como Oficial Superior de Programa (2007-2011). [84]
Un pequeño inciso: Lucien e Imad Bazzi Bourjeily son ambos miembros de la Junta Asesora de MARCH [85].
Los activistas que se han discutido anteriormente son parte de las figuras de los medios de la revolución “basura”, pero la lista está lejos de ser exhaustiva. Sin embargo, el disidente que hizo la conexión entre la Revolución del Cedro y la “basura” es, sin duda Michel Elefteriades, una especie de “eslabón perdido” de la revolución de color del Líbano. Una década más tarde, quien asistió a los especialistas de la resistencia no violenta CANVAS-back al centro del escenario de la protesta popular.
Y el uso de la lengua “profana” de ingenua apariencia, explicando la revolución “basura”: “Es una especie de revolución popular, una mezcla de muchos movimientos – cierta anarquía en el sentido filosófico adecuado como negativa de la centralización del poder – es realmente un movimiento popular, así que no creo que vaya a parar “, dijo.
Y se contradice un poco más adelante: “Hay intelectuales y líderes de opinión que vigilan (las protestas). Estamos allí para vigilar si no hay un infiltrado o un hacker que dirigen los acontecimientos en otra dirección “. [86]
En el impulso de la revolución “basura” Michel Elefteriades fundó “El Harakat Girfanine” (movimiento de protesta) [87]. La prueba de que no ha olvidado las lecciones de la CANVAS. De hecho, el logotipo de este movimiento no es otro que el puño de Otpor y su nombre es similar a la de los disidentes sudaneses “Girifna” (que asco) [88].
Michel Elefteriades con su “Movimiento disgustado”
Aunque las múltiples demandas del movimiento “Apestas!” Expresan una verdadera exasperación de la población libanesa, debemos enfrentar el hecho de que la relación inextricable entre los líderes de la revolución “basura” y las diversas organizaciones estadounidenses de “exportación” de la democracia no son inocuos. Estos son el resultado de un trabajo en profundidad de connivencia latente que precedió a la Revolución de los Cedros, que ha continuado hasta nuestros días y que sin duda continuará en el futuro. Al igual que en otros países árabes, la situación socio-política en el Líbano es una tierra tan fértil para cualquier pequeña semilla de disputa puede generar un caos indescriptible. La “primavera” árabe es el ejemplo perfecto.
Sobre todo porque el Líbano es un país clave en la ecuación de Oriente Medio por su proximidad a Israel, su relación geopolítica con el derramamiento de sangre Siria y la presencia de un irritante importante para los occidentales: Hezbolá.
Por último, es interesante hacer un paralelo entre el Líbano y Ucrania. En unos diez años de diferencia, estos dos países han sido testigos de dos revoluciones “infiltradas”; sus poblaciones no muestran uniformidad de la nacional (étnicas, lingüísticas o de culto); están geográficamente cerca de los países de gran importancia política para Occidente (Israel / Siria en un lado y Rusia por el otro) para que puedan ser utilizados como caballos de Troya para el logro de los objetivos geoestratégicos.
La revolución naranja (2004) y del cedro (2005) estuvieron entre los mayores éxitos de CANVAS. La implicación planificada de violentos grupos neonazis en el euromaidán (2013-2014) ha engendrado dramáticos cambios en Ucrania.
En el Líbano, vapores coloreados exhalan de las montañas de basuras que ensucian las calles. Y surge la pregunta: ¿quien va a “parir” la revolución “basura”?
Despite the reports for the last several years that significant declines in poverty have taken place in sub-Saharan Africa, a recently-released World Bank study indicates that despite “growth” the actual number of people living in poverty on the continent has increased by 100 million over the last fifteen years.
In an attempt to reiterate and reinforce the view related to poverty decline in Africa, other figures are presented indicating that the proportion of people living in severe economic deprivation has declined, although with rising populations those who are in distress numerically are in fact increasing.
The World Bank presented this report on “End Poverty Day” in Ghana, the first country south of the Sahara which gained its national independence from Britain in 1957. In the recent period Ghana is often championed by many western financial publications as a “success story” within the broader effort to ameliorate poverty and underdevelopment in Africa.
In a press release issued by the World Bank announcing the study entitled “Poverty in a Rising Africa”, it says
“The report finds that progress in ending poverty in all its forms has varied greatly across countries and population groups, with the levels of achievement remaining challengingly low. Africa posted the slowest rate of poverty reduction of all major developing regions, with the share of people living in extreme poverty (less than US$1.90 a day) declining only slightly, from 56% in 1990 to 43% in 2012. But since 2012, extreme poverty fell to a projected 35 percent in 2015 in the region, based on the World Bank’s new poverty line of $1.90 a day. Globally, according to Bank estimates released earlier this month, the percentage of people living in extreme poverty will likely fall to under 10 percent for the first time, to 9.6 percent this year.” (Oct. 16)
These figures related to the percentage of Africans living in poverty are plagued by conjecture due to the lack of credible measurement tools and moreover the acquisition of reliable data on these subjects. In rural areas the number of people living without adequate supplies of water, fuel, food and communications technology often go overlooked.
The report itself acknowledges this fact by saying “Gauging Africa’s human well-being remains tremendously difficult. The report shows that in 2012, just 25 of the region’s 48 countries had conducted at least two household surveys over the past decade to track poverty. The authors urge action across Africa in improving the availability and access to regular and reliable data on income poverty and other dimensions of well-being. They also stress that national support for adhering to methodological and operational standards is essential.”
How is Growth and Development Measured in Africa?
This World Bank report reveals the contradictions between foreign direct investment (FDI) growth and the actual levels of incomes, quality of life improvements and socio-economic development. Setting a $1.90 level for assessing whether individuals and households are living below an extreme poverty level is problematic.
Many of the advances made in Africa take into consideration the availability of mobile phones and other consumer goods. These goods have enhanced the standard of living in many states by facilitating communications and therefore economic, political and social interactions. Nonetheless, these products come at a price whether they are manufactured outside the country, as is the case more often than not, or domestically.
Consequently, the cost of living is also going up and with that the need to spend the rising household income that is generated through increased production and trade. Recent strikes in Ghana among private, public and educational workers have largely centered on the decline in the value of the cedi (national currency) requiring larger amounts of money to cover expenses.
In Nigeria, which was proclaimed in 2014 by the western-based financial publications as having the largest economy in Africa, many of the strikes as well involve workers who are more skilled and have higher incomes. Work stoppages in the medical, educational and oil sectors and industries demand not only higher wages and better conditions of employment, but that employees actually receive their salaries on a regular basis.
In various state governments in Nigeria, public sector workers have gone months without salaries. This has also been a major issue in Ghana as well among junior physicians and educators.
Most importantly the distribution of national wealth is an important factor in determining actual development. Africa has produced billionaires in Nigeria, South Africa and other states. However, the existence of abject poverty remains. Class structures inherited from colonialism have not been eliminated where those who are in a position to benefit from the continuing integration of Africa into the world capitalist and imperialist system stand to advance their social positions within society.
In Nigeria and South Africa, the largest and most advanced states on the continent, both labor unions and community organizations have demanded that the mining and other extractive multi-national corporations re-invest in the environmental and social well-being of the areas where they derive their wealth. Although the workers may earn more than people living and confined to the rural areas, if resources are not re-invested into creating schools, improving education, cleaning up chemical and industrial waste along with constructing roads and healthcare facilities, it is not possible to define such a set of circumstances as genuine development.
Wealth Must Be Equitably Distributed to Foster Development
The issues of wealth distribution and relations of production must be addressed before there is real qualitative development in Africa and other geo-political regions internationally. Of course the World Bank cannot address these issues due to the inherent class bias of its approach to economic growth.
Both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were founded by the United States capitalist class at the conclusion of World War II in order to facilitate its dominant positions within the imperialist world. In the earlier phase, tremendous resources were poured into Western Europe to rebuild industry and infrastructure destroyed during 1939-1945.
However, after the emergence of independent African states during the 1950s and 1960s, the IMF-World Bank officials came in to restructure the post-colonial political economy emphasizing a neo-liberal approach to development by shrinking the size of the public sectors and lowering the value of currencies. Rather than establish import-substitution industries, a path to growth was engineered to emphasize western foreign investment.
With the fluctuations of energy and commodity prices such a set of international relations leaves the post-colonial states dependent upon the strength of the economies within the former colonial and still existing imperialist countries. This vulnerability of the oppressed nations largely located within Africa, the Asia-Pacific and Latin America, stifles and even obliterates the capacity to engage in long-term planning for the benefit of the broad populations within these states.
These constraints placed on making major advancements in agricultural, industrial, educational and social service industries and sectors requires alternative approaches. Socialist economic planning would necessitate the channeling of earnings from worker productivity and trade into these aspects of the economy that could reproduce the outcomes that are most desired.
Internal conflict is cited in the World Bank report as a major factor in preventing economic growth. However, the imperialist destabilization of Africa through military operations and covert activity cannot be acknowledged by the World Bank since it would directly challenge the foreign policy imperatives of the ruling classes within North America and Western Europe.
Among Palestinians and Israelis, the recent upsurge in violence has been variously described as the children’s, lone-wolf, Jerusalem and smartphone intifadas. Each describes a distinguishing feature of this round of clashes.
The steady erosion of Fatah and Hamas’ authority during the post-Oslo years, as the Palestinian factions proved incapable of protecting their people from the structural violence of the occupation, has driven Palestine’s orphaned children to the streets, armed with stones.
The growing hopelessness and sense of abandonment have led a few so-called “lone wolves” to vent their fury on Israelis with improvised weapons such as knives, screwdrivers and cars. These attacks have attracted the most publicity, becoming the equivalent of the second intifada’s suicide bomber. But they serve chiefly as a barometer of Palestinian despair.
Jerusalem is the centre of events, with the Palestinians’ only unifying symbol, Al Aqsa mosque, at its heart. For Palestinians, the incremental takeover of the compound – and the West’s indifference – is like watching the mass dispossession of 1948 play out again in slow motion.
In addition, Jerusalem is the main fault line. Israel’s illegal annexation of the city has left Palestinians there in an extreme form of isolation – indefinitely stateless and supremely vulnerable.
And finally, the smartphone camera has allowed Palestinians to document their suffering and witness unmediated their compatriots’ personal acts of resistance and self-sacrifice.
Futile knife attacks may appal outsiders, but for many Palestinians they are the moment when an individual briefly reclaims his or her agency and fights back on behalf of a collectively subjugated and humiliated people.
The need for so many different labels for these events reveals another important facet of the current Palestinian struggle: its disorganised nature.
Israel has almost completed the division and enclosure of Palestinians into disconnected enclaves. As they hear the sound of the prison doors closing, Palestinian youths are lashing out at the guards closest to hand.
Because the divisions between Palestinian populations have become so entrenched geographically, and their leaders politically, it is hard for Palestinians to find any unifying vision or organising principle. Do they fight first against their occupiers or their spent leadership?
But the lack of planning and discipline has exposed Israel’s own limitations too.
Israel has little but stopgap measures to defend against the protests. Its intelligence agencies cannot predict the lone wolf, its guns cannot deter the knife, its military might cannot subdue the craving for justice and dignity.
Strangely, in the face of all this, there are signs of a parallel breakdown of order and leadership on the Israeli side.
Lynch mobs of Jews patrol Jerusalem and Israeli cities, calling out “Death to the Arabs!” A jittery soldier causes pandemonium by firing his rifle in a train carriage after a bogus terror alert. An Israeli Jew stabs another because he looks “Arab”.
Meanwhile, politicians and police commanders stoke the fear. They call for citizens to take the law into their own hands. Palestinian workers are banned from Jewish towns. Israeli supermarkets remove knives from shelves, while 8,000 Israelis queue up for guns in the first 24 hours after permit rules are eased.
Some of this reflects a hysteria, a heightened sense of victimhood among Israelis, fuelled by the knife attack videos. But the mood dates to before the current upheavals.
It is also a sign of the gradual leaching of the settler’s lawlessness into the mainstream. A popular slogan from the past weeks is: “The army’s hands are tied.” Israeli civilians presumably believe they must take up arms instead.
After six uninterrupted years of the extreme right in power, Israelis don’t blame their government’s policy of relentless force for the backlash. They demand yet more force against the Palestinians.
Polls show Avigdor Lieberman, the former Moldovan bouncer who became the hard man of the Israeli right, is most favoured to lead the nation out of the crisis.
Solutions are being applied most savagely in East Jerusalem, where Palestinians are being locked even more tightly into neighbourhood ghettoes. Israel’s “eternal, unified capital” is being carved up by roadblocks. Palestinian residents are made to endure daily searches and insults that will sow the seeds of yet more fury and resistance.
As Israel tries to slam shut the door of one prison cell in Jerusalem, the inmates threaten to break open the door of another, in Gaza. Israel’s leadership has watched uneasily the repeated breaches of Gaza’s fence over the past week by youths enraged by their own misery and what they see happening in the other prison wings.
The current unrest may recede, but more waves of protest of ever greater intensity are surely not far behind.
Jafar Farah, a Palestinian leader in Israel, has warned of it heading slowly from a national conflict into a civil war, one defined by the kind of debased one-state solution Israel is imposing.
The chaotic violence of the past weeks looks like a warning from the future – a future Israel is hurtling towards.
While the Israeli government has to date escaped serious accountability for repeated human rights violations, “citizen journalism”—in which excessive acts of force are caught on camera—now is making it more difficult for the acts to be obscured or brushed aside, says the report.
“Thanks to the courageous acts of activists, family members and bystanders, Euro-Med has collected video footage and eyewitness testimonies documenting numerous, egregious abuses by Israeli soldiers during the last few weeks, which we believe is only the tip of the iceberg,” says Daniela Dönges. “In our report, we name eight of them, because they are not just numbers. They are human beings with stories that must be told.”
The eight cases called out in the report are:
Thirteen-year-old Ahmed Manasra, who was run over by a car and beaten with sticks and metal pipes, then deprived of any medical care for 25 minutes. The Israelis claimed he tried to attack their soldiers, but video recordings show otherwise. Instead, he is seen lying on the ground, bleeding and calling for help.
Sixteen-year-old Marah Bakri also was accused of trying to stab an Israeli soldier, but widely circulated photos calls that claim into serious question. In one, nine soldiers pointing guns surround the young girl, covered in blood on the ground. The authorities refused to produce its evidence of a crime.
Israa Abed, 29, is another alleged knife-wielding attacker. Surveillance video footage shows only a terrified young woman who panicked when ordered to remove her hijab, a sign of her religion. She refused, but threw up her hands. Abed was shot by four bullets.
Fadi Samir Mustafa Alloun, 19, another accused stabber, was actually chased by a group of enraged Israeli settlers. The police came to protect the settlers, not Fadi. Video recordings shared on Israeli websites show the settlers before the police shot him.
Hadil Alhashlamoun, 18, was passing through a checkpoint when she set off a metal detector alarm. There are conflicting witness accounts regarding whether the girl had a knife, but photographic evidence and eyewitness testimony is clear that she posed no risk. While she was lying on the ground, two soldiers shot bullets into both knees, her right thigh, her pelvis, her abdomen, both forearms and her chest.
Twenty-five-year-old Muhammed Bassam Amsha, also was passing through a checkpoint when he was killed. Soldiers claimed they had photos showing the young man had a knife, but refused to produce them.
Tha’er Abughazaleh,19, did indeed stab a soldier in rage and frustration. But instead of then running away from police, leading them to shoot, photographic evidence suggest he was unnecessarily shot point blank in the head.
Falah Hamdi Zamel Abumaria, 53, was shot and killed in his home when the Israeli military came to seize his son. Despite the official story that the Israelis were attaced by the older man, eyewitnesses tell the truth, that Abumaria was trying to defend his son—with a pottery vase. For that, he was shot three times in the chest.
“No thinking person with a heart can hear this list and not feel horrified and aghast,” says Dönges. “Yet up until now, Israel has escaped any kind of serious accounting beyond some talk. The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor calls on the Israeli authorities to conduct a transparent investigation into these thinly veiled outright murders. However, because we lack any confidence they will do so, we also call on the UN special rapporteurs for extra-judicial killings and the Palestinian territories to visit the region to do their own investigation.”
There was a time in America — and not so long ago — when there was no “grid,” at least for those who lived outside of urban centers. To live self-sufficiently in rural areas was the rule, rather than the exception.
People knew how to survive without electricity, running water, sewage systems or any other services provided by municipalities or power companies. They used wood for heat and kerosene for light; they dug wells, built outhouses, raised cows and chickens, grew their own food.
That style of living may seem far in the past for most of us, but a growing number of people have realized that off-the-grid living may not only represent a happier and healthier existence — it may also be the key to survival when disaster strikes.
The idea of off-grid living, however, seems a threat to some people. Power companies and others who have a vested interest in keeping folks dependent and plugged in are doing their best to make it difficult, if not impossible, to return to a self-reliant way of life.
In fact, in many places, off-grid living has been all but criminalized. Take, for instance, Costilla County, Colorado, one of the least populated counties in the state and an area where hundreds of people have been purchasing land and attempting to successfully live off-grid. Off-grid homesteaders are facing harassment from county authorities who make things difficult for anyone who dares to pursue a self-reliant lifestyle.
The county is now proposing new land use regulations that will require electricity, water and sewer systems to be installed before landowners can obtain a building permit.
Should it be illegal to camp on your own property?
Already, the county has passed rules that require permits for those who want to camp on their land while building their homes, and lately it has refused to issue camping permits as well, effectively making it illegal for people to live on their own property.
County officials and some of the established residents claim that problems are being caused by the new residents, who came to the area seeking cheap land and the chance to do exactly what the county is now doing its best to prevent: living simply off-grid.
Indicative of the attitude of the local authorities, Costilla County’s land-use administrator, Matthew Valdez, said:
“A lot of time we find families living in run-down sheds or in RVs, or some actually in tents. We tell them they cannot live in these conditions.”
Should it be the job of county authorities to tell people whether they can live in a shed, tent or RV while they build permanent homes? Should people be forced to obtain permits to camp on their own land?
The issues being faced by the Costilla County off-grid residents are not unique to the area. Throughout the country, state and local regulations are making life difficult for those who choose to live in a self-sufficient manner.
While many bemoan the fact that America is no longer the nation it once was, the authorities are preventing people from returning to the kind of lifestyles that made this country great in the first place.
Are we willing to let our elected officials on the local, state and national level dictate our way of life? Is this what is called freedom?
It’s time to let the authorities know that traditional American values include being able to live in a self-reliant fashion. We are not owned by the power companies or the powers that be.
Police in Chicago kidnapped and imprisoned more than 7,000 people between 2004 and 2015 at the secret interrogation warehouse now known publicly as Homan Square, according to new reporting by the Guardian.
Nearly 6,000 of the disappeared were black, which is proportionately more than double the city’s black population and 82.2 percent of the 7,185 total individuals sent to the facility. An additional 11.8 percent were Hispanic and 5.5 percent were white.
Only 68 people—less than one percent—held at the ‘domestic black site’ were allowed access to lawyers or to tell others where they were. As Common Dreamspreviously reported, the imprisonments and interrogations at Homan Square happened off the books, without detainees’ names being entered into official law enforcement databases, which would have made them easier to find.
“The reality is, no one knows where that person is at Homan Square,” University of Chicago Law School professor Craig Futterman said. “They’re disappeared at that point.”
The latest disclosures in the Guardian‘s series on the site, the result of an ongoing transparency lawsuit and investigation, reveal that police officers kept detainees at Homan Square for hours and even days and pressured them to become informants as part of the department’s anti-gang operations.
Spencer Ackerman reports:
The police portrayals contrast sharply with those of Homan Square detainees and their lawyers, who insist that “if this could happen to someone, it could happen to anyone”. A 30-year-old man named Jose, for example, was one of the few detainees with an attorney present when he surrendered to police. He said officers at the warehouse questioned him even after his lawyer specifically told them he would not speak.
“The Fillmore and Homan boys,” Jose said, referring to police and the facility’s cross streets, “don’t play by the rules.”
“Not much shakes me in this business—baby murder, sex assault, I’ve done it all,” one attorney, David Gaeger, told the Guardian. “That place was and is scary. It’s a scary place. There’s nothing about it that resembles a police station. It comes from a Bond movie or something.” Gaeger’s client was sent to Homan Square in 2011 for a marijuana arrest.
In fact, the majority of those sent to the facility were arrested for drug charges, rather than violent crime.
Many others were never even charged.
Meanwhile, police accounts have varied widely from those of the disappeared. In many cases, officers stated that detainees were given access to attorneys when they were not, or the visits proved too short to be useful. One woman, identified as Chevoughn, said she was kept for eight to ten hours at Homan Square over theft allegations, where she was questioned in a “cage” and denied access to a lawyer until she went to central booking after her kidnapping.
Cook County commissioner Richard Boykin and U.S. Representative Danny Davis in Marchdemanded that the Department of Justice investigate the activities that took place at Homan Square.
The Liberal Party, which has long been Canadian big business’s preferred party of national government, will be returning to power for the first time in a decade after winning a sweeping victory in yesterday’s federal election.
Little more than four years after suffering their worst ever electoral defeat, the Liberals polled about 40 percent of the popular vote, more than double their vote-share in 2011. This was enough to catapult them from a distant third-place to a parliamentary majority of a dozen or more seats in the 338-seat House of Commons.
Final seat and popular vote figures were not available at the time of writing. But under Justin Trudeau, the son of former Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, the Liberals made major gains in virtually all parts of the country, including the Atlantic provinces, Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, and British Columbia.
Yesterday’s vote was a massive repudiation of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his decade-old Conservative government. The Conservatives lost more than 60 seats, with many cabinet ministers, including Finance Minister Joe Oliver, going down to personal defeat.
Harper announced he was stepping aside as Conservative leader even before giving his concession speech.
The Liberals were the entirely undeserved beneficiaries of mass opposition to the Conservative government, which imposed sweeping austerity measures, further integrated Canada into the military-strategic offensives of US imperialism, and attacked democratic and workers’ rights.
The Liberals’ ability to portray themselves as the agents of “real” and “progressive” change was entirely due to the right-wing politics of the trade unions and the social-democratic New Democratic Party (NDP).
For years the unions and NDP have been working for the replacement of Harper by a “progressive” government in which the Liberals would play a leading role.
Since last fall, the unions have been spearheading an “Anybody but Harper” campaign, pouring millions of dollars into third-party anti-Conservative ad and protest campaigns.
Furthermore, the NDP, in the hope of convincing big business that it should be entrusted with the reins of power, mounted a “Harper lite” election campaign. This included pledging four years of balanced budgets, no increases in the taxes of the rich and super-rich, further corporate tax cuts, and increased military spending.
As the result of the combined efforts of the unions and NDP, the Liberals were able to pass themselves off as opponents of austerity. This from the party that when it last formed Canada’s government implemented the largest social spending cuts in Canadian history and handed tens of billions in savings to big business and the financial elite through massive corporate, capital-gains and personal-income tax cuts.
The NDP fittingly suffered an electoral debacle. The official opposition in the last parliament, the NDP was the frontrunner when the election campaign began 11 weeks ago. But its pro-austerity stance, coupled with its promotion, along with the unions, of the Liberals as a fellow “progressive” party and prospective coalition partner, led large numbers of working people to rally round the Liberals.
The NDP’s parliamentary representation was more than halved to about 40 seats. Its share of the popular vote shrunk by more than a third to less than 20 percent.
NDP losses were especially large in Quebec. There the NDP lost seats not only to the Liberals, but also to the Conservatives and the pro-Quebec independence Bloc Quebecois (BQ), whose sister party at the provincial level, the Parti Quebecois, has long enjoyed the support of the union bureaucracy. During the election campaign, the Conservatives and BQ effectively worked in tandem. They made joint reactionary and Islamophobic appeals, demanding that restrictions be imposed on the wearing of the niqab and championing Canada’s role in the latest US war in the Middle East.
Trudeau and his Liberals will use their majority to enforce the dictates of the capitalist elite. Under conditions of a deepening economic crisis in Canada, driven by the sharp fall in oil and commodity prices and anemic growth internationally, as well as mounting tensions between the major powers, the Liberal government will be called upon to step up the assault on workers’ rights at home and to more aggressively assert Canadian imperialism’s predatory interests abroad. This will include adoption of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, a central component of the United States’ drive to strategically isolate and militarily encircle China.
During the course of the campaign, it became clear that important sections of the ruling class were rallying round the Liberals. Endorsements for a Trudeau government came from La Presse, Canada’s most important French-language daily, and even from Conrad Black, the founder of the neo-conservativeNational Post and a key backer of the 2004 fusing of Harper’s Canadian Alliance with the remnants of the Progressive Conservative Party.
The ruling elites calculate that after nine years of Conservative rule, the installation of an ostensibly “progressive” government will better enable them to continue to ruthlessly enforce their interests while keeping a lid on mounting social anger.
Moreover, they know full well that the Liberals have a very long record of making “progressive appeals during election campaigns, only to impose the policy prescriptions of their avowedly more right-wing opponents when they take office. In 1993, the Liberals swept to power under Jean Chretien after nine years of Progressive Conservative rule. Chretien ran a “progressive” campaign, pledging to end the Conservatives’ “fixation” on the deficit so as to focus on “jobs, jobs, jobs” and to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). His government went on to spearhead the dismantling of public services and unemployment insurance, making savage cuts that are still held up by the IMF as an austerity model for governments around the world.
This time around, the Liberals are committed to upholding Bill C-51, the police state law the Conservatives adopted with Liberal support last spring. It gives the national security apparatus unlimited access to all government information on individual Canadians, enhances their powers of “preventive” detention, and empowers the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) to break virtually any law when “disrupting” vaguely defined threats to national and economic security.
Trudeau has vowed to increase the number of Canadian Special Forces deployed to Iraq to train local proxy troops to combat ISIS within the framework of the US-led war coalition. He has also pledged to strengthen Ottawa’s relationship with Washington and to hike military spending, so as to better equip the Canadian Armed Forces to intervene alongside the US military around the globe.
As for the Liberals’ much vaunted promise to oppose austerity, their own financial plan calls for them to find $6 billion per year in annual savings by their fourth year in government.
“If for eight years this group has flouted other equally precious rules of the democratic game, aren’t we rash to assume that this same group will see a transparent, fair election as sacrosanct?…History and current events around the world – Nigeria, Turkey, Ukraine, the Phillipines – show many examples of leaders in weak or weakening democracies who were able to “coordinate” the civil bureaucracy with their cronies; they then tamper with the vote, and sully the outcome of elections.” -Naomi Wolf, from The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot [1]
As this entry is being written, Canadians are on their way to the polls to register their choice to lead their country.
The current standing in the polls suggests that the Opposition Liberal Party under fledgling leader Justin Trudeau is poised to take power. [2]
However, polls have been known to be inaccurate. More to the point, polls do not account for the possibility of voters not making it to the polling station. Or other forms of electoral interference.
On the morning of October 19, Canada’s Election Day, reports are coming in of pre-marked ballots, delays and some confusion. [3]
During the advance polling period two weekends previous, several pre-marked ballots appeared with marks appearing next to the names of Conservative and Green Party candidates. When brought to the attention of Elections Canada, the ballots were listed as ‘spoiled’ and discarded.
If Canadians had chosen to vote with these ballots, would their vote have been discarded?
Elections Canada is on record as saying these marked ballots were a result of ‘printing errors’ and that no malfeasance was intended. But should Canadians receiving these ballots use them to vote with, will their ballots be discarded as ‘spoiled’?
Could these flawed ballots turn out to be the ‘hanging chads‘ of the 2015 Canadian election campaign?
This is all supposition at this point, but notable in light of documented electoral interference in previous election campaigns.
Michael Keefer is an Emeritus Professor of Literary Studies from the University of Guelph. He has been researching and analyzing electoral interference in the 2011 Canadian Federal election and in a multi-part essay posted at Rabble.ca, he establishes that between telephone fraud and under-investigation by Elections Canada and the RCMP, a State Crime Against Democracy may well have taken place. Professor Keefer joined us in the second half hour to elaborate on what he has uncovered and implications for the state of democracy in Canada.
A further concern with regard to the integrity of Canadian elections is the phenomenon of candidate ejection. A number of candidates have been ejected on the heels of problematic past statements emerging at late stages of the campaign. This is what happened to journalist, and columnist Lesley Hughes when she ran as a candidate in the 2008 election. She is the author of an upcoming memoir, The Naked Canadian: A Dead Candidate’s Report. In the first half hour of the program, Lesley Hughes shares her thoughts about how these candidate dismissals, in conjunction with the amplifying power of social media can ultimately serve to subvert democracy.
Burnaby Radio Station CJSF out of Simon Fraser University. 90.1FM to most of Greater Vancouver, from Langley to Point Grey and from the North Shore to the US Border. It is also available on 93.9 FM cable in the communities of SFU, Burnaby, New Westminister, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Surrey and Delta, in British Columbia Canada. – Tune in every Saturday at 6am.
Notes:
Naomi Wolf, 2007; p. 143, The End of America:Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot; Chelsea Green Publishing Company
Mislead: “to give false or misleading information to” (Collins Dictionary.)
In what The Mail on Sunday (1) has described as a “bombshell White House memo”, leaked classified correspondence from then Secretary of State General Colin Powell to President George W. Bush, of 28th March 2002, alleges that Tony Blair had done what the newspaper calls “a deal in blood” with Bush to support him, come what may, in the attack on Iraq – a full year before the invasion.
Blair at the time was claiming to be seeking a diplomatic solution in the Iraq crisis. “We’re not proposing military action”, he told the public, as he prepared: “to act as spin doctor for Bush”, states the Mail which also reveals Powell’s affirmation that: “the UK will follow our lead.”
Blair continued to claim to have made no decision regarding military action for most of 2002, a diplomatic solution was being be pursued he stated. Since there was no US or UK Embassy in Baghdad and UK Ministers and their US counterparts refused to travel there or engage with the Iraqi government, his assertions never rang even vaguely true. Powell’s memo proves the lie. Headed: “Memorandum to the President; Subject: Your Meeting with United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair, April 5-7, 2002, Crawford, Texas”, he states:
“Blair continues to stand by you and the US as we move forward on the war on terrorism and on Iraq. He will present to you the strategic, tactical and public affairs lines that he believes will strengthen global support for our common cause.”
The paragraph confirms Blair’s integral part in the planning and all round strategy of the illegal invasion, whilst telling both Parliament and the public something quite else.
It should also be noted that whilst the line to Parliament and the public had been to tie Saddam’s government to the events of 11th September 2001, in the Powell, Bush, Blair circle they seems to be entirely separated, note: “the war on terrorism and on Iraq.” No mention of their numerous public allegations of Iraq and international terrorism being inter-linked.
Powell confirms: “On Iraq, Blair will be with us should military actions be necessary.”
Pointing out that Blair was not quite unfettered in his entirely illegal plans, Powell writes: “Aside from his foreign and defence secretaries (sic – no capital letters) however, Blair’s Cabinet shows signs of division, and the Labour Party and the British public are unconvinced that military action is warranted now.”
However: “Blair may suggest ideas on how to make a credible public case on current Iraqi threats to international peace” and how to handle demands for any action to be sanctioned by the UN Security Council.” Thus there was full awareness by the Bush and Blair regimes of the lawlessness of attacking a sovereign nation posing them no threat, and whose “sovereignty and territorial integrity” was guaranteed by the UN.
Also notable is that so keen was Tony Blair to ally George W. Bush in invasion plotting that he left the UK during the ten days national mourning for Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. The longest living member of the Royal family had died on 30th March 2002. Queues lined to pay their last respects as she lay in state in Westminster Abbey, the Monarchy grieved and Her Majesty’s Prime Minister, Blair, boarded a ‘plane to the US.
In September that year Blair claimed that Saddam Hussein’s government could release weapons of mass destruction on the West “within forty five minutes”, which Colin Powell used in his Iraq war speech to the UN the following February.
Blair would also: “demonstrate that we have thought through ‘the day after’ “, states the communication. Not only had “the day after” not been “thought through”, but the weeks, months, years as Iraq continues to implode and Iraqis continue to die in their uncounted thousands. Even Iraq Body Count – whose estimates of Iraqi deaths are so sanguine and understated that they are used by the US and UK governments – released a Report early this year (2) stating Iraqi deaths from violence are doubling year on year.
Blair, wrote Powell: “ … is sharply criticized by the media for being too pro-US, too arrogant and ‘presidential’ (not a compliment in the British context) and too inattentive on issues of concern to voters.”
“Blair knows he may have to pay a political price for supporting us on Iraq and want to minimize it. Nonetheless he will stick with us on the big issues. His voters will look for signs that Britain and America are truly equal partners in the special relationship.”
Powell had not been paying attention. The majority of British voters wanted no “equal partnership” and nothing to do with the Iraq assault or general US global belligerence.
After George W. Bush left office and Barack Obama was elected with such (now dashed) hopes, numerous Americans living in the UK interviewed in the media repeated similar phrases, that they had tried to keep silent on public transport and in public places, ashamed of their American accent, so strong was the anti-American feeling over the treatment of and further threats to Iraq.
Today’s revelations have not come at a good time for Blair, scrutiny of whose hands in Iraq’s tragedy has only grown over the years. Currently circulating is a petition to Britain’s Parliament demanding his impeachment (3) and a poll asking: “Should Tony Blair Stand Trial for War Crimes?” (4) the affirmative in the latter ranges between 95 and 96%.
Further, it seems Mr Blair also was not entirely truthful with the £10 million, six year long Chilcot Inquiry in to the Iraq invasion – publication still awaited. (5) Sir John Chilcot has given varying reasons for the delay, including 2002 correspondence between Bush and Blair which has been withheld from the Inquiry. It will not be published for another year. He surely has now all he needs to know. Also according the Mail on Sunday:
“During his appearance before the Chilcot inquiry in January 2010, Blair denied that he had struck a secret deal with Bush at Crawford to overthrow Saddam. Blair said the two men had agreed on the need to confront the Iraqi dictator, but insisted they did not get into ‘specifics’.”
In the real world, was he not a long time associate of Blair, that should surely get Sir John going. British MP David Davis, a former Shadow Home Secretary is clearly stunned at the memo, writing (6):
“This is one of the most astonishing documents I have ever read.“It proves in explicit terms what many of us have believed all along: Tony Blair effectively agreed to act as a front man for American foreign policy in advance of any decision by the House of Commons or the British Cabinet.“He was happy to launder George Bush’s policy on Iraq and sub-contract British foreign policy to another country without having the remotest ability to have any real influence over it.”
He adds:
“Judging from this memorandum, Blair signed up for the Iraq War even before the Americans themselves did. It beggars belief.“Blair was telling MPs and voters back home that he was still pursuing a diplomatic solution while Colin Powell was telling President Bush: ‘Don’t worry, George, Tony is signed up for the war come what may – he’ll handle the PR for you, just make him look big in return.’ “
Further:
“What is truly shocking is the casualness of it all, such as the reference in the memo to ‘the day after’ – meaning the day after Saddam would be toppled.”
Davis concludes by linking the terrorism scourging Iraq and the Middle East directly to the actions in which Blair had such an integral part:
“We saw the catastrophic so-called ‘de-Baathification’ of Iraq, with the country’s entire civil and military structure dismantled, leading to years of bloodshed and chaos. It has infected surrounding countries to this day and created the vacuum into which Islamic State has stepped.“This may well be the Iraq ‘smoking gun’ we have all been looking for.”
Anthony Charles Lynton Blair’s final untruths before the invasion were an address to Parliament on 18th March 2003. They included:
“And now the world has to learn the lesson all over again that weakness in the face of a threat from a tyrant, is the surest way not to peace but to war.”And: “The real problem is that, underneath, people dispute that Iraq is a threat; dispute the link between terrorism and WMD; dispute the whole basis of our assertion that the two together constitute a fundamental assault on our way of life.”Should the UK not enjoin the attack: “And then, when the threat returns from Iraq or elsewhere, who will believe us? What price our credibility …”“To retreat now, I believe, would put at hazard all that we hold dearest … stifle the first steps of progress in the Middle East …”“This is the time for (Parliament) not just this government or indeed this Prime Minister, but for this House to give a lead, to show that we will stand up for what we know to be right, to show that we will confront the tyrannies and dictatorships and terrorists who put our way of life at risk, to show at the moment of decision that we have the courage to do the right thing.”
How wrong, devious and duplicitous can one man be? For how long can he now avoid justice?
Having read the above, ask yourself the question is Tony Blair a War Criminal? Click image below to sign petition
The distinguished and knowledgeable international commentator William Engdahl, in a superb statement, has expressed the view I gave you that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech on September 28 at the 70th anniversary of the United Nations changed the balance of power in the world.
Washington so-called war on ISIS is a complete fabrication. Russia’s is the real thing. Its effectiveness is why Obama won’t cooperate with Putin – even though both leaders claim they share the same goal.
October 20, marks the four-year anniversary of the US-backed assassination of Libya’s former leader, Muammar Gaddafi, and the decline into chaos of one of Africa’s greatest nations.
Revealed by the British media are the details “of the ‘deal in blood’ forged between George W. Bush and Tony Blair over the Iraq War.” The meetings took place in Crawford, Texas a year prior to the onslaught of the US-UK led invasion of Iraq.
More than 34,000 pesticides derived from about 600 basic ingredients are currently registered for use in the United States by the EPA. Industrial agriculture (meaning about 75% of all land used in the U.S. to grow food or raise animals) relies on these chemicals to grow food. Where, exactly has this gotten us?
More than 34,000 pesticides derived from about 600 basic ingredients are currently registered for use in the United States by the EPA. Industrial agriculture (meaning about 75% of all land used in the U.S. to grow food or raise animals) relies on these chemicals to grow food. Where, exactly has this gotten us? [1]
Billions of pounds of pesticides and herbicides used has resulted in:
Pesticide exposure causes farm-workers to suffer more chemical-related injuries and illnesses than other work-forces. This has led farmers to suffer from organ damage and cancer, leading to numerous lawsuits against biotechnology and pesticide-creating companies like Monsanto.
About 95% of the country relies on groundwater for drinking water, yet it is often contaminated by pesticides, especially in agricultural areas.
Pesticide ‘drift’ is common now. This means that in places like California, you can’t take a deep breathe without inhaling pesticide chemicals.
UC Berkeley has found that children are being exposed to pesticides even before they eat their first apple or munch on their first carrot. That’s because the chemicals are so prevalently used, they show up in breast milk of mothers.
General population illnesses are on the rise, including asthma, autism and learning disabilities, birth defects and reproductive dysfunction, diabetes, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, and several types of cancer. Their connection to pesticide exposure becomes more evident with every new study conducted.
Genetically engineered crops developed and marketed to withstand copious herbicide and pesticide spraying are causing millions of acres of super weeds to grow, as well as causing super bugs which are resistant to the very chemicals which were created to destroy them.
Pollinating insects which help to make sure we have a tremendous variety of foods have been absolutely decimated by chemical herbicides and pesticides. Bees, butterflies, and other pollinating insects are dying at an unprecedented rate.
Even our ocean life is being contaminated by pesticide run off. Fish, crab, seals, and even micro-algae have been affected by the amount of chemicals we use to ‘grow food.’
Agricultural practices that rely on this type of chemical addiction are stripping the soil of nutrients with remarkable implications. They are devastating the nutritional value of crops, making dramatic changes at an alarming rate — in less than a lifetime, to be specific. As an example, there has been a 41.1 to 100% decrease in vitamin A in 6 foods: apple, banana, broccoli, onion, potato, and tomato. Of them, both onion and potato saw a 100% loss of vitamin A in a 48-year span from, 1951-1999.
Despite these myriad concerns, the US Environmental Protection Agency gives the green light to a new concoction of health-harming chemicals used by Big Ag companies seemingly every month.
If 34,000 registered pesticides haven’t been enough to grow food for the world, certainly, new and more dangerous combinations of these chemicals will not magically solve the problem. Is it any wonder people are turning to organic farming practices and demanding organic, pesticide-free food?
En Quebec, Canadá, más de 10 mil personas salieron a las calles en el marco de la Marcha Mundial de las Mujeres.
La Cuarta Marcha Mundial de las Mujeres se realizó en la ciudad de Trois-Rivières, en Quebec. Miles de personas se movilizaron contra las políticas de austeridad, la destrucción medioambiental, la militarización y en favor de los derechos de los pueblos indígenas.
Una acción simbólica se realizó para denunciar los más de 1180 casos de mujeres indígenas asesinadas y desaparecidas en los últimos 30 años en Canadá. Una Comisión Nacional de Investigación sobre estos casos fue exigida una vez más al Gobierno federal.
Los manifestantes condenaron también los importantes recortes aplicados por el actual Gobierno quebequense en los programas sociales y empleos de la función pública que afectan directamente a las mujeres.
Esta iniciativa creada en el año 2000 por la Federación de Mujeres de Quebec, tiene como objetivo principal eliminar la desigualdad de género.
It is critical to vote Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his ruling Conservative Party out of office on Monday. Canada is in a crisis of epic proportions and if Canadians don’t take action soon, the damage could soon be irreversible.
Harper has become a triple threat to social peace and well-being in Canada which threatens the collective futures of Canadians and Indigenous peoples alike. In the name of empire building and his desire to become an economic powerhouse, Harper’s plan has focused almost exclusively on the extraction and sale of natural resources backed up by an aggressive law and order agenda to quell dissent. The results have been disastrous. Indigenous peoples, the environment and basic human rights and freedoms have all been sacrificed on the altar of economic growth.
Canada has lost its way. Canada is not a country made up of two founding Nations (English and French). Canada is a territory made up of many Indigenous Nations upon whose original sovereignty the state of Canada is entirely dependent. But equally as important is the fact that this territory is an eco-system upon which all human, animal, and plant life depends. Climate change, brought about by human activity concentrated in industrialized countries like Canada, represents the single greatest threat to both Canada and the planet. Our collective futures depend on how our leaders address this global crisis, yet Canadians have been distracted by a great deal of propaganda and misinformation making them believe all is well. The result has been a clear path for corporate-sponsored political parties and politicians to pursue their aggressive wealth accumulation agenda, which has benefitted primarily politicians and corporations at the expense of our future.
The multiple, overlapping crises in Indigenous Nations, the environment and the rapid decline of human rights and freedoms have been largely absent from the election debates. Harper’s Conservatives have been able to distract Canadians from these critical issues with red herrings like the niqab. Harper has everyone, including his political opponents, tricked into talking about whether or not a Muslim woman should be able to wear a niqab at a citizenship ceremony; instead of the thousands of Indigenous women and girls that have been murdered or gone missing in Canada. His party has the media focused on the alleged corruption of Indigenous leaders to distract from federal and United Nations reports that condemn the federal government for forcing First Nations to live in fourth world conditions without basics like clean water. While Harper’s party stacks up the largest number of political and criminal scandals in Canadian history, he distracts Canadians with threats of terrorism from Muslims and “rogue” First Nation leaders who are “threats to national security.”
It’s long past time to cut through the distraction and noise. Canada is killing our people and if we do not act now, more people will die. Since 1980, more than 1,200 Indigenous women and little girls have gone murdered and missing. Despite being only 4 percent of the Canadian population, Indigenous children make up 50 percent of all kids in foster care. Indigenous peoples are incarcerated at rates 10 times higher than the Canadian population. Under Harper’s regime, in the last decade the Indigenous federal inmate population has increased by 56 percent. Indigenous peoples live anywhere from 7 to 20 years less than Canadians. Many First Nations live without clean water and sanitation, access to adequate health care and education, and/or live in overcrowded housing or are homeless in the cities. The United Nations has called this “abysmal poverty” a crisis requiring Canada’s immediate action. In fact, they have said there is no greater issue facing Canada today than its continued human rights violations against Indigenous peoples.
Canada’s treatment of the environment is not much better. The single greatest environmental disaster in Canada has been Stephen Harper. In the last decade, he killed the Kyoto Accord, which was an important international agreement to reduce emissions that contribute to climate change. He enacted Bill C-38, which essentially gutted environmental assessments and empowered Cabinet to overrule any decisions. With Bill C-45, he left most of our lakes and rivers unprotected for the express purpose of removing red tape for industry. As a result, the tar sands pollute the rivers, cause rare cancers in local First Nations and is the fastest growing source of emissions in Canada. The ice is melting in the arctic causing starving polar bears, fish stocks could disappear in the next 35 years, bee colonies have been reduced by 30 percent (and 70 percent of world’s food depends on bee pollination) and most of the cutting done in our forests is still clear-cutting killing fish habitat and reducing our ability to breath clean air.
But none of this could be happening either to Indigenous peoples or the environment unless Harper had, at the same time, not introduced a rigid law and order regime meant to not only silence dissent, but criminalize dissent as an act of terror. Bill C-10 includes mandatory minimum sentences, which run counter to the Gladue decision of the Supreme Court of Canada which instructed courts to find alternatives to incarceration for Indigenous peoples. Harper’s plan to build more jails seemed to contemplate increases in incarceration rates and sent a chill throughout Canada. The RCMP and/or their local provincial police forces were called out every time Indigenous peoples staged peaceful rallies to protect their lands and waters from environmental destruction. This heavy-handed intimidation tactic was supplemented by the extensive and some argue, illegal surveillance of Indigenous peoples, environmentalists, student protestors, and civil society groups. Harper’s greatest fear – that Canadians and Indigenous peoples would come together and stand up for our collective futures – materialized in the Idle No More movement. Far from being the violent, nightmare scenario his advisors had predicted, Idle No More showed Harper that we care about well-being and justice for First Nations, the health of the environment and the protection of basic democratic rights and freedoms. Ironically, it was because of this peaceful social movement that Harper enacted Bill C-51 to criminalize dissent and make it an act of terror to interfere with infrastructure, sovereignty, territorial integrity, and the economy.
The fact that these issues were largely absent from the election debates show how disconnected political parties are from Canadians and First Nations. It doesn’t bode well for whichever party is elected on Monday. However, it is clear that irreversible damage will be done to Indigenous peoples, the environment and basic democratic rights and freedoms if Harper is not finally removed from office. It is therefore extremely important for Canadians to vote and get rid of the most destructive, aggressive and blatantly racist government this country has seen in recent years.
But the work doesn’t stop there.
Canadians have been educated to believe that their civic duty lies entirely in voting. In fact, voting is the very least effort a citizen can make. A democratic government is supposed to be a government of the people. It’s time the people took their power back and fixed Canada. The most important date in Canada’s future is not Oct. 19, but October 20 and the days that follow. Will Canadians stand beside First Nations and demand justice for our people? Will Canadians demand that environmental laws, processes, and protections be restored and enhanced with the assistance of scientists who are no longer muzzled? Will Canadians stand up for their own Charter of Rights and Freedoms and demand that basic democratic rights and liberties be restored?
We don’t need new solutions – the original Nation to Nation relationship envisioned a multi-national territory that would be shared by all – both the benefits and the obligations to protect it. This original treaty vision based on mutual respect, benefit, and protection could help refocus our priorities and shift our time, energy and resources to addressing the crises facing the plants, animals, and people who share this territory.
We have an obligation to honor the sacrifices of our ancestors and protect our future generations by acting in this generation before it’s too late.
Dr. Pamela D. Palmater is a Mi’kmaw lawyer and member of the Eel River Bar First Nation in New Brunswick. She teaches Indigenous law, politics and governance at Ryerson University and heads their Centre for Indigenous Governance.
Why is the economy still in the doldrums after 6 years of zero rates and three rounds of Quantitative Easing?
It’s because consumers aren’t consuming and there’s too much debt. You see, despite the Fed’s wacko theories about pumping liquidity into the financial system to make investors feel wealthier, people actually have to buy things to generate growth. And the truth is, consumers have reduced their spending because wages are flat, incomes are falling and many of them are still hanging on by the skin of their teeth. So consumption has been unusually weak. Economist Stephen Roach made a good point in an article at Project Syndicate. He said, “In the 22 quarters since early 2008, real personal-consumption expenditure, which accounts for about 70% of US GDP, has grown at an average annual rate of just 1.1%, easily the weakest period of consumer demand in the post-World War II era.” (It’s also a) “massive slowdown from the pre-crisis pace of 3.6% annual real consumption growth from 1996 to 2007.” (“Occupy QE“, Stephen S. Roach, Project Syndicate)
So how is the economy supposed to grow if people aren’t buying things?
It can’t.
Now according to the Fed, the best way to fix the problem is to make money cheaper (so more people borrow and spend) and to pump $4 trillion in liquidity into the financial system so stock prices soar. The point of this crazy experiment is to further enrich big time speculators so they spend more money and, thus, rev up the economy. It’s called the “wealth effect” and the Fed actually believes this trickle down nonsense will work if given enough time. But, the fact is, QE hasn’t worked, doesn’t work, and won’t work. Because it doesn’t address the fundamental problem: How to get more money to the people who will spend it and grow the economy. That’s the issue.
Zero rates can help because they lower the cost of borrowing. But lower rates don’t work if there’s no demand for funds, that is, if no one is borrowing. And what economists have found out is that, after a major financial crash, where households have seen much of their wealth vanish overnight, people are not as eager to borrow as they were before. This is easy to understand. If you’re in a hole, you stop digging. The average Joe can’t operate like a Wall Street banker who thinks, “I’ll just keep borrowing until I get out of debt.” No. Ordinary working people can’t do that. They have to reduce their spending until they get their heads above water again.
This is why the credit expansion has been so weak since the recession ended in 2009. Yes, there have been exceptions, like subprime auto loans and student loans which have skyrocketed in the last few years, (and many of which are headed for default) but as a whole the demand for credit has remained weak.
Once again, this is entirely predictable. When people find themselves deep in the red, (like after a financial meltdown) they don’t borrow as much. It’s that simple. So it doesn’t matter if rates are low or not, the demand for credit is going to remain weak until household balance sheets are repaired and consumers feel comfortable borrowing again.
So if low rates don’t lead to a credit expansion, then what good are they?
Not much good at all, in fact, they’re extremely damaging. Time and time again we’ve seen how low rates encourage all kinds of risky behavior, because when money is cheap and easily available, it fuels massive speculation that creates asset bubbles. For example, the stock buyback craze is entirely attributable to the Fed’s zero rates, and it’s precipitated a huge bubble in stock prices. Get a load of this from Zero Hedge:
“In 2014, the constituents of the S&P 500 on a net basis bought back ~$430Bn worth of common stock and spent a further ~$375Bn on dividend payouts. The total capital returned to shareholders was only slightly less than the annual earnings reported. On the fixed income front, the investment grade corporate bond market saw a record $577Bn of net issuance in 2014. While the equity and bond universes don’t overlap 100%, we think these numbers convey a simple yet important story. US corporations have essentially been issuing record levels of debt and using a significant chunk of their earnings and cash reserves to buy back record levels of common stock.” (“Buyback Bonanza, Margin Madness Behind US Equity Rally”, Zero Hedge)
What does this mean in English? It means the giant corporations aren’t even thinking about the future of their companies any more. They’re not building more capacity or hiring more workers or expanding R&D. They’re taking every dime they can get their greasy mitts on and goosing stock prices so they can stuff their pockets full of cabbage and walk away like King Charlie. This is the effect of low rates. This is what happens when speculators get hold of cheap money. It throws the whole system out-of-whack.
Consider this: If the Fed sets rates at zero, and the rate of inflation is 1.5 percent; then for every dollar the Fed lends out, they get $.98 cents back in return. Does that sound like a good deal to you, dear reader?
Zero rates mean that the Fed is subsiding bubblemaking and inducing speculators to take risks that are inherently destructive to the system. This isn’t a reasonable way to spur growth or stimulate the economy. It’s the well-worn path to financial crisis.
Keep in mind, the Fed’s policies come at a high price too. As we said earlier, the Fed’s balance sheet has ballooned to over $4 trillion dollars. So ask yourself this: How do the service payments on that $4 trillion debt impact economic growth?
Obviously, the service payments drain resources away from the real economy. Let’s use an example: Joe Blow decides he doesn’t want to live in his ramshackle $500 per month basement hovel on Capital Hill anymore, so he moves to a beautiful two bedroom apartment in Madison Park overlooking Lake Washington for a whopping $2,200 per month. So, now Mr. Blow has $1,700 less per month to spend on nights-on-the-town or exotic LARPing adventures in Port Orchard with his computer-geek friends. What impact will Joe’s new arrangement have on the economy?
It will hurt the economy because less spending means less growth. And that same rule applies to the corporations that borrowed money to repurchase their own shares. The billions in debt servicing will be diverted away from the real economy where it would have done some good. This is why the big Wall Street banks should have been euthanized following the Crash of ’08, so their debts could have been wiped out instead of transferred to the Fed’s balance sheet where they are a constant drag on growth.
The global economy faces so many headwinds at present that it’s hard to know where to begin. China’s real estate bubble has popped, capital flight has put emerging markets into a nosedive, commodities prices have plunged triggering fears of deflation, the economic data is increasingly bleak, and the Fed’s plan to “normalize” rates has sent stocks gyrating like never before.
Even so, economic policy should focus on the things that increase growth, boost demand and lead to a more evenly-shared prosperity. Full employment and solid wages gains should be on top of the list. Those are the foundation blocks for a strong economy that can withstand the ups-and-downs of an erratic business cycle or the periodic battering of financial crises.
General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, flew to Tel Aviv Sunday to discuss a 10-year military aid package worth some $3.7 billion a year. The pledge of increased American military support came in the midst of an increasingly brutal Israeli crackdown on Palestinians within both the occupied territories and Israel itself.
In his first overseas visit since assuming the post of joint chiefs chairman at the beginning of October, Dunford sought to play down the frosty relations in recent months between the Obama administration and Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. Underscoring Washington’s support for the Israeli regime and its repression of the Palestinian masses, he said that “the military-to-military relationship had remained strong,” adding, “The challenges that we face, we face together.”
The Obama administration announced it would step up US military aid to Israel following the signing of the nuclear deal with Iran over the bitter opposition of Netanyahu, who directly campaigned for the US Congress to block implementation of the agreement.
US and Israeli officials have indicated that the size of the military package could well rise above $3.7 billion per year. Tel Aviv is pushing for more aid, claiming that Iran is likely to use sanctions relief to finance forces hostile to Israel, a reference to Iran’s support for the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon is due to follow up Dunford’s visit with talks in Washington later this month, and Netanyahu will meet with President Barack Obama in the White House on November 9.
Dunford’s visit coincided with the launching of a joint US-Israeli air force drill in the southern Negev, set to last two weeks. The exercise, known as “Blue Flag,” is held twice a year and simulates a large-scale multinational air operation.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio also arrived in Israel for a three-day “solidarity mission at a difficult time.” The Democratic politician, who presents himself as a left-leaning “progressive,” wasted no time in lining up behind the Israeli government. He said Palestinian attacks on Israelis “must end” and called them “unconscionable and unacceptable” acts of violence. De Blasio is not scheduled to meet any Palestinian leaders. It is his first visit to Israel as mayor of New York.
US Secretary of State John Kerry is to meet Netanyahu in Germany before going on to a meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Jordan’s King Abdullah in a bid to restore calm. Netanyahu had been due to visit Berlin on October 8 for an annual joint cabinet meeting and talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel, but postponed the trip due to the violent clashes between Palestinians, Israeli security forces and Jewish settlers.
Kerry has been at pains not to blame Israel or the Palestinians for the recent wave of violence, saying, “I am not going to point fingers [at the culprits] from afar.” His public caution reflects concerns within the Obama administration that the escalating violence could ignite protests throughout the Arab world, potentially disrupting Israel’s relations with its Arab and Muslim neighbours, with whom it has been covertly working in support of the US-backed war to topple the Assad regime.
Recent incidences of individual attacks by Palestinians on Israelis, mainly in East Jerusalem, are the outcome of relentless repression on the part of Israeli authorities combined with pervasive poverty and unemployment. Three quarters of the population in Arab East Jerusalem live below the official Israeli poverty line. Protests in the enclave have increased sharply since Jewish extremists kidnapped 16-year-old Muhammad Abu Khdeir from the Shuafat neighbourhood, poured gasoline down his throat and set him afire. That atrocity occurred just days before Israel launched a 49-day war that killed over 2,300 Gazans and wounded another 10,900, mainly civilians.
Last week, Israel denounced a Palestinian call at the United Nations for an international force to protect Palestinian worshippers at the al-Aqsa mosque compound, also known as Temple Mount, in Jerusalem’s Old City. The al-Aqsa mosque has been at the centre of the escalating violence, amid fears that the government plans to open the site to Jewish prayer in contravention of the 1994 Peace Treaty with Jordan, which retains ultimate control over religious affairs at the compound.
The new Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, told reporters on Friday, “Israel will not agree to any international presence on the Temple Mount. … Any such intervention would violate the decades-long status quo.”
Yesterday, Netanyahu rejected a French proposal for international observers at the mosque. He said, “Israel cannot accept the French draft resolution at the United Nations Security Council,” adding, “It doesn’t mention Palestinian incitement; it doesn’t mention Palestinian terrorism; and it calls for the internationalisation of the Temple Mount.”
Jordan, Washington’s client, has also opposed the deployment of an international force. Its ambassador to the UN, Dina Kawar, said she was not pushing for an international force, although she called for Israeli security forces to stay away from al-Aqsa.
Over the weekend, Israeli security forces shot and killed at least five more Palestinians. This brings to at least 56 the number of Palestinians killed by security forces this month, including 18 alleged assailants who were shot on the spot. Most of the victims were killed in clashes in the West Bank or along the Gaza border. A pregnant woman and her 2-year-old daughter were killed by Israeli air strikes on Gaza.
In the southern city of Beersheba, an assailant shot and killed an Israeli soldier, took his gun, and shot and wounded 10 others, including four police officers, at the central bus station. Israeli police said they killed one attacker who they thought was a Palestinian and critically wounded another, who is now believed not to be a second attacker, but an Eritrean migrant. This brings the total number of Israelis killed in attacks by lone Palestinians to eight this month.
Last week, nine Israeli human rights organisations issued a statement, based on videos and photographs taken on bystanders’ cameras, challenging the accuracy of Israeli accounts of the shootings and killings by security forces. The organisations said the videos provided clear evidence that police were carrying out a “quick to shoot to kill” policy, rather than arresting Palestinians in Jerusalem and Israel they suspected of attacking Israeli Jews. They also noted that the Palestinians had been shot despite posing no physical threat to security forces.
Adalah, a legal centre for Israeli Palestinians, and Addameer, a Palestinian NGO defending prisoners’ rights, say Israeli officials are blocking any investigation of one of the filmed shootings—of Fadi Alloun on October 4. Videos show a police officer shooting the 19-year-old Alloun even though he posed no threat. Alloun had been chased by a mob of Israeli Jews accusing him of a stabbing that had occurred earlier and demanding his execution.
The government has authorised the use of live ammunition against Palestinians who throw stones in Israel and East Jerusalem, thereby bringing the practice of extra-judicial executions from the West Bank to Israel itself. While the Palestinians in the West Bank live under military rule, Palestinians in Israel, including East Jerusalem, which Israel illegally annexed after the 1967 war, are subject to civil law.
On Saturday night, some 1,500 Jewish and Palestinian Israelis rallied in Jerusalem to call for an end to the weeks of violence and a resumption of negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders. Meretz party leader and legislator Zahava Gal-On called on Netanyahu to accept the French proposal to deploy international observers to the Temple Mount. In Beersheba, some 150 Palestinian and Jewish activists formed a human chain in support of peace.
Democrats have no new ideas for peace other than more war.
None of the Democratic candidates in the October 13 debate had anything very useful to say about ending the carnage in Syria and the rest of the Middle East. The most belligerent was Hillary Clinton, wanting to stand up to Vladimir Putin’s “bullying” and establish a no-fly zone over Syria. The rest wanted more restraint on continued military action, and everyone vaguely supported “diplomacy,” with no suggestion how to get there. Additionally, Jim Webb called for confronting China over the South China Sea (the suggestion was ignored).
Bernie Sanders called the Syrian situation a “quagmire in a quagmire” and left it at that. Unfortunately, that was the most detailed analysis from any of the candidates, none of whom demonstrated any willingness to think outside the box, or even to admit they were all thinking within a very old box that had served no one well. After decades of disastrous American bloodletting in the Middle East, the best the Democrats can offer is to maybe slow it down a little.
Certainly that’s better than Republicans, who are all gung-ho to watch the arms and legs fly and figure out whose body parts are whose later. The expansion of Russian military action in northwestern Syria has pushed Republican jingoism to the frothing stage, as if another war to end war is a mistake we need to make again.
Republican senators don’t quite have the honesty to say they’re calling for war with Russia over Syria, they just complain that President Obama isn’t doing anything to stop President Putin, as if there were some way to accomplish that short of military confrontation up to and including all-out war. John McCain may be a former presidential nominee and Bob Corker may be the current chair of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, but by berating the president for not leading the US into war against the Russians in Syria, they demonstrate once again, if demonstration were needed, that they are not serious people with the best interests of the country or the world among their priorities.
What use is a debate that avoids details and consequences?
Cautious only by comparison, Clinton’s call for a no-fly zone is just a euphemistic way of calling for going head-to-head with the Russians. Unless Clinton somehow imagines the Russians will stop flying, and will also persuade their Syrian ally to stop flying, how does Clinton expect to enforce a no-fly zone without US planes and missiles shooting down Russian and Syrian warplanes? A no-fly zone sounds bland enough, but on reflection it is clearly a stupid, ill-defined, unachievable tactic designed to give the impression of sophisticated toughness where there is none. It is a sad measure of the quality of American presidential debates that there was no follow-up question from the moderator or any candidate as to how a no-fly-zone could be achieved, how long it would take to put in place, how long it would last, how much it would cost, or what risks it entailed.
Publicly at least, the leadership consensus in the US these days among Republicans, Democrats, Congress and the White House is that the US “has to do something” about Syria and the Middle East. What with overthrowing governments and supporting dictatorships from Iran to Libya, what with nurturing the mujahedeen in Afghanistan to bait the Russians, has the US not already done enough? Or way, way too much?
When people insist that the US “has to do something,” the first question from others, from the media, from the self-replicating governing intelligentsia, from almost everyone — the first question is the wrong question, because the first question is usually, “What?” “What,” they ask, reflexively, without stopping to reflect: “What should we do?”
“What should we do now in the Middle East?” is the wrong question
The right question is “Why?” Why should we do anything? What is there about the past 65 years to persuade anyone that the US has played a positive, peaceful role in any of the countries we have devastated? The time is long past when we might have first done no harm. Not that widespread destruction of ancient cultures is all our fault. It’s not. The US was a late arrival to supporting carnage and corruption in the Middle East, but the US has done more than its share to destroy the possibility of human happiness in too many places to be held blameless ever. We know what doesn’t work, measured clearly by the millions of people displaced, disabled, or dead.
And then there’s Tunisia.
Tunisia, despite having many of the same handicaps as other Middle East countries, has somehow managed to survive its inherent cultural and political tensions with a collaborative effort that won the Nobel Prize for Peace this year. Suffice it to say that the Nobel Committee’s award to the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet honors a phenomenon unlike any in the US for decades. The Arab Spring that started in Tunisia in 2010 spread to many other countries, as the Nobel Committee noted, but:
“In many of these countries, the struggle for democracy and fundamental rights has come to a standstill or suffered setbacks. Tunisia, however, has seen a democratic transition based on a vibrant civil society with demands for respect for basic human rights.
“An essential factor for the culmination of the revolution in Tunisia in peaceful, democratic elections last autumn was the effort made by the Quartet to support the work of the constituent assembly and to secure approval of the constitutional process among the Tunisian population at large…. The broad-based national dialogue that the Quartet succeeded in establishing countered the spread of violence in Tunisia and its function is therefore comparable to that of the peace congresses to which Alfred Nobel refers in his will.”
Tunisians achieved this without significant help or interference from the US. The single national success story in the region came about without meaningful involvement by the so-called (by itself) “essential, exceptional, indispensible” nation. Everywhere else that the US has engaged in the Middle East mayhem is the norm. Where the US was absent, in Tunisia, there is, for the present, a maturing, peaceful democracy.
Can you say it’s an option to do nothing? Always! First, do no harm.
Here’s the thing about US policy in Syria: having failed to find the imaginary “moderate opposition” to support, now the US is metaphorically reduced to choosing between supporting either the Kurds or the tooth fairy. Neither option promises any better results than previous efforts since 2011. And supporting the tooth fairy would at least allow the US to avoid the contradictions inherent in supporting the Kurds, who are the enemy of US NATO ally Turkey, which has once again been bombing Kurds in Turkey, Syria, and maybe Iraq and Iran for months now.
When bombs went off in Ankara October 10, killing and wounding hundreds of people, the victims were mostly Kurdish peace activists. Who carried out the bombings? Not yet known. Who benefitted from the bombings? The Turkish government benefitted from blowing up political opponents. The Islamic State (ISIS) benefitted from blowing up military enemies who are the most effective fighters against ISIS. The Kurds, who control a large swath of northwestern Syria along the southern Turkish border, have been driving ISIS slowly southward.
ISIS and other jihadi groups benefit from years of support from other supposed US allies like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. These Sunni states find it in their interest to maintain a steady flow of money and arms to jihadi elements of all sorts in a proxy struggle against the Shiite elements associated with Iran as well as the Alawites who make up the core of support for Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
For no apparent rational reason, US policy in the region in the past few years has come down to a single, largely unexamined goal: Assad must go. That’s it. The US doesn’t even have the remotest idea of any kind of successor government, or even if any would be possible, short of a US occupation, which no one in the governing consensus is calling for. For a president who once wisely articulated a foreign policy principle of “don’t do stupid things,” it’s hard to imagine the US finding itself in a more stupid position than having a non-negotiable goal that it knows is unachievable by any means it is willing to employ.
What harm would come from US military de-escalation?
Militarily the US has been in a quagmire in Afghanistan since 2001, a quagmire in Iraq since 2003, and a quagmire in Syria since 2011. The conventional wisdom articulated by President Obama and others on down is that there is no military solution to Syria or anywhere else. That said, no one in authority proposes anything but more military measures.
Bernie Sanders doesn’t recommend any policy that follows the logic of his own observation that Syria in the Middle East is a “quagmire in a quagmire.” Why? No one disputed this characterization. And no one embraced it. The five Democrats gave the impression other leaders give, that they really don’t want to think about a problem to which there may be no active solution. Why take a stand when there’s no place to put your feet? When you have no good alternatives, why choose any of them?
Sanders called, as he has before, for an Arab coalition to take the lead in Syria and the Middle East generally. An American president can’t make that happen, an American president can only wait for that to happen. Meanwhile the US can stop bombing people, the US can disengage from the Saudis’ criminal war in Yemen, and the US can focus on the multilateral negotiations all the Democratic candidates said they support.
The best thing to do when you’re in a quagmire is to get out of the quagmire. Leave it to the Turks, the Saudis, the Russians, the Israelis, and all the other people who lack the courage and the wisdom to act like Tunisians.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
The frontline in Europe’s refugee movement is shifting. In some cases, there is more of the same: the Hungarian approach entailing closures, followed by a brief easing and more closures. Closing the border with Croatia saw an inevitable movement towards Slovenia, whose government has now announced restrictions of 2,500 people a day.
Now, the next stage of the refugee problem is coming to the fore: their use as bargaining chips on the European political stage. While Germany cannot be blamed for trying to find some measure of easing the enormous numbers even as other states fudge their obligations, the “keep them away” approach had to come sooner or later. In the absence of any unified policy on refugees in Europe, it is each country to its selfish own.
Even German authorities are hardening in their approach, though it is not a stance favoured by the Merkel government. Police union chief Rainer Wendt expressed his rather forward views in the Welt am Sonntag that Germany should get busy building a fence along its border with Austria. “I we close borders this way, Austria will also close its borders with Slovenia, and that’s exactly the effect we need.” State solidarity, in other words, in the face of refugee desperation.
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s approach may well have resisted an approach closing borders – so far. Instead, in the face of considerable disquiet within her own ranks, she has hit upon another approach: keeping the problem closer to the source by bribing Turkey.
This, it would seem, is Ankara’s moment: a key figure in the European security stakes; an eager participant in talks gaining accession to the European Union; and a meddler in the Syrian conflict keen in removing the Assad regime.
Merkel’s suggestion is that Turkey’s integration into the EU can be speeded up, using refugee management as a bargaining chip. “How can we organise the accession process more dynamically?” she posed at a press conference in Istanbul. “Germany is ready to open chapter 17 this year, and to make preparations for [chapters] 23 and 24. We can talk about the details.”
Turkey’s Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu is certainly keen on driving a hard bargain on this one, pressing for a resolution to the Syrian conflict even as EU talks are set to take place. On Sunday, he stressed the urgency of the talks, given another round of potential refugees stemming from Aleppo. “It is our priority that steps will be taken to prevent an increase of refugees from Aleppo due to the offensive [there] by Iranian militia, Isis and Russian attacks.” So far, Ankara’s insistence on a northern Syrian “safe zone” has not gotten serious traction.
There are other sweeteners layering the offer. These, for Turkey, had to come, after the initial rejection coming from its foreign minister, Feridun Sinirlioğlu. On Friday, the words were uncompromising on the scope and value of what was offered. “There is a financial package proposed by the EU and we told them it is unacceptable.”[1]
The tune changed over the weekend, both in terms of the amount offered, and in various other structural adjustments to Turkey’s engagement with Europe. Germany would be insisting on pushing for visa-free travel for Turkish nationals, bringing the timetable forward by a year to July 2016. This argument on mobility is hardly surprising, given Turkey’s own efforts to reform its immigration system to bring it more into line with EU standards.
This has, according to the Migration Policy Institute, “limited Turkish authorities’ capacity to manage the Syrian inflows, and, as a result, management of the crisis was left largely in the hands of national organisations working on the ground, in camps, without larger policy guidance.”[2]
As Merkel revealed over the weekend,
“A working group between Turkey and Germany is carrying out talks on these matters and this group will convene again in the coming days. We can facilitate some of these matters by holding bilateral talks.”[3]
The message from Ankara: expect us to keep refugees in tow, and maintain the current population – but at a substantial price. Turkey has its own staggering refugee presence, with more than 2 million Syrian refugees costing in the order of $7.5bn since the crisis unfolded. Much of this accrued because of a gamble, that the conflict in Syria would have been resolved over a matter of a few years. Now, with its prolongation, the German offer here will entail $3.4 bn to assist footing the bill to keep the refugees put.
Andrew Garner, whose research portfolio at Amnesty International comprises Turkey, finds the whole talks unpalatable. “Talks between the EU and Turkey on ‘migration management’ risk putting the rights of refugees a distant second behind border control measures designed to prevent refugees from reaching the EU.”
The picture here remains, as it has been from the start, not one of rights but infringements, not one of duties to assist within international law covenants, but sovereign obligations to protect states from being swamped. And wealthy states bribing not so wealthy ones has become a stock-standard response that reduces refugee problems to matters of financial distribution and bean counting.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: [email protected]
October 19th, 2015 by Corporate Europe Observatory
EU trade deals with Canada and the US could endanger citizens’ rights to basic services like water and health, as negotiators are doing the work of some of the EU’s most powerful corporate lobby groups in pushing an aggressive market opening agenda in the public sector.
Public services in the European Union (EU) are under threat from international trade negotiations that endanger governments’ ability to regulate and citizens’ rights to access basic services like water, health, and energy, for the sake of corporate profits. The EU’s CETA (Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement) agreement with Canada, the ratification of which could begin in 2016, and the TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) treaty under negotiation with the United States are the latest culmination in such efforts. In a worst case scenario, they could lock in public services into a commercialisation from which they will not recover – no matter how damaging to welfare the results may be.
A new report released today by an international group of NGOs and trade unions (“Public services under attack“) sheds some light on the secretive collusion between big business and trade negotiators in the making of the EU’s international trade deals. It shows the aggressive agenda of services corporations with regards to TTIP and CETA, pushing for far-reaching market opening in areas such as health, cultural and postal services, and water, which would allow them to enter and dominate the markets. And it shows how those in charge of EU trade negotiations are rolling out the red carpet for the services industry, with both the consolidated CETA agreement published in September 2014, as well as drafts of TTIP chapters and internal negotiation documents that reflect the wishlists of corporate lobbyists.
Key findings of the report:
TTIP and CETA show clear hallmarks of being influenced by the same corporate lobby groups working in the area of services that have been built over the past decades during previous trade talks, such as the EU’s most powerful corporate lobby group BusinessEurope and the European Services Forum, a lobby outfit banding together business associations as well as major companies such as British Telecommunications and Deutsche Bank.
The relationship between industry and the European Commission is bi-directional, with the Commission actively stimulating business lob- bying around its trade negotiations. This has been characterised as ‘reverse lobbying’, ie “the public authority lobbies business to lobby itself”. Pierre Defraigne, former Deputy Director-General of the European Commission’s trade department, speaks of a “systemic collusion between the Commission and business circles”.
The business lobby has achieved a huge success as CETA is set to become the first EU agreement with the ‘negative list’ approach for services commitments. This means that all services are subject to liberalisation unless an explicit exception is made. It marks a radical departure from the positive lists used so far in EU trade deals which contain only those services which governments have agreed to liberalise, leaving other sectors unaffected. The negative list approach dramatically expands the scope of a trade agreement as governments make commitments in areas they might not even be aware of, such as new services emerging in the future. The same could happen in TTIP where the Commission is pressuring EU member states to accept the same, risky approach, meeting the demands of the business lobby.
Big business has successfully lobbied against the exemption of public services from CETA and TTIP as both agreements apply to virtually all services. A very limited general exemption only exists for services “supplied in the exercise of governmental authority”. But to qualify for this exemption, a service has to be carried out “neither on a commercial basis nor in competition with one or more economic operators”. Yet nowadays, in virtually all traditional public sectors, private companies exist alongside public suppliers – often resulting in fierce competition between the two. This effectively limits the governmental authority exemption to a few core sovereign functions such as law enforcement, the judiciary, or the services of a central bank. Similar problems apply to the so-called ‘public utilities’ exemption, which only reserves EU member states’ right to subject certain services to public monopolies or to exclusive rights: it contains so many loopholes that it cannot award adequate protection for public services either.
Probably the biggest threat to public services comes from the far-reaching investment protection provisions enshrined in CETA and also foreseen for TTIP. Under a system called investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), thousands of US and Canadian cor- porations (as well as EU-headquartered multinationals structuring their investments through subsidiaries on the other side of the Atlantic) could sue the EU and its member states over regulatory changes in the services sector diminishing corporate profits, potentially leading to multi-billion euro payouts in compensation. Policies regulating public services – from capping the price for water to reversed privatisations – have already been targets of ISDS claims.
The different reservations and exemptions in CETA and TTIP are inadequate to effectively protect the public sector and democratic decision-making over how to organise it. This is particularly true as the exceptions generally do not apply to the most dangerous investment protection standards and ISDS, making regulations in sensitive public service sectors such as education, water, health, social welfare, and pensions prone to all kinds of investor attacks.
The European Commission follows industry demands to lock in present and future liberalisations and privatisations of public services, for instance, via the dangerous ‘standstill’ and ‘ratchet’ mechanisms – even when past decisions have turned out as failures. This could threaten the growing trend of remunicipalisation of water services (in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and Hungary), energy grids (in Germany and Finland), and transport services (in the UK and France). A roll-back of some of the failed privatisations of the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) to strengthen non-profit healthcare providers might be seen as violations of CETA/TTIP – as might nationalisations and re-regulations in the financial sector such as those seen during the economic crisis.
Giving in to corporate demands for unfettered access to government procurement could restrict governments’ ability to support local and not-for-profit providers and foster the outsourcing of public sector jobs to private firms, where staff are often forced to do the same work with worse pay and working conditions. In CETA, governments have already signed up several sectors to mandatory transatlantic competitive tendering when they want to purchase supplies and services – an effective means for privatisation by gradually transferring public services to for-profit providers. US lobby groups such as the Alliance for Healthcare Competitiveness (AHC) and the US government want to drastically lower the thresholds for transatlantic tendering in TTIP.
Both CETA and TTIP threaten to liberalise health and social care, making it difficult to adopt new regulations in the sector. The UK’s TTIP services offer explicitly includes hospital services. In the CETA text and recent TTIP drafts no less than 11 EU member States liberalise long-term care such as residential care for the elderly (Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and the UK). This could stand in the way of measures protecting the long-term care sector against asset-stripping strategies of financial investors like those that lead to the Southern Cross collapse in the UK.
The EU’s most recent draft TTIP services text severely restricts the use of universal service obligations (USOs) and curbs competition by public postal operators, mirroring the wishes of big courier companies such as UPS or FedEx. USOs such as daily delivery of mail to remote areas without extra charges aim at guaranteeing universal access to basic services at affordable prices.
TTIP and CETA threaten to limit the freedom of public utilities to produce and distribute energy according to public interest goals, for example, by supporting renewables to combat climate change. Very few EU member states have explicitly reserved their right to adopt certain measures with regard to the production of electricity (only Belgium, Portugal, and Slovakia) and local energy distribution networks (amongst them Belgium, Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia) in the trade deals.
The US is eyeing the opening up of the education market via TTIP – from management training, and language courses, to high school ad- mission tests. US education firms on the European market such as Laureate Education, the Apollo Group, and the Kaplan Group could benefit as much as German media conglomerate Bertelsmann, which has recently bought a stake in US-based online education provider Udacity. The European Commission has asked EU member states for their “potential flexibilities” on the US request relating to education services.
The US film industry wants TTIP to remove European content quotas and other support schemes for the local film industry (for example, in Poland, France, Spain, and Italy). Lobby groups like the Motion Picture Association of America (MPPA) and the US government have therefore opposed the exclusion of audiovisual services from the EU’s TTIP mandate, fought for by the French Government. They are now trying to limit the exception as much as possible, for example, by excluding broadcasting from the concept of audiovisual services – seemingly with the support of EU industry groups like BusinessEurope and the European Commission.
Financial investors such as BlackRock engaged in European public services could use TTIP and CETA provisions on financial services and investment protection to defend their interests against ‘burdensome’ regulations, for example, to improve working conditions in the long term care sector. Lobby groups like TheCityUK, representing the financial services industry based in the UK, are pushing heavily for a “comprehensive” TTIP, which “should cover all aspects of the transatlantic economy”.
US services companies are also lobbying for TTIP to tackle ‘trade barriers’ such as labour regulations. For example, US company Home Instead, a leading provider of home care services for seniors operating franchises in several EU member states, wants TTIP to address “inflexible labour laws” which oblige the firm to offer its part-time employees “extensive benefits including paid vacations” which it claims “unnecessarily inflate the costs of home care”.
What is at stake in trade agreements such as TTIP and CETA is our right to vital services, and more, it is about our ability to steer services of all kinds to the benefit of society at large. If left to their own course, trade negotiations will eventually make it impossible to implement decisions for the common good.
One measure to effectively protect public services from the great trade attack would be a full and unequivocal exclusion of all public services from any EU trade agreements and negotiations. But such an exclusion would certainly not be sufficient to undo the manifold other threats posed by CETA and TTIP as many more provisions endanger democracy and the well-being of citizens. As long as TTIP and CETA do not protect the ability to regulate in the public inter- est, they have to be rejected.
Canadian Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau digs for votes by attacking students who support Palestinian rights. (Adam Scotti/Flickr)
A vote on divestment taking place today [March 15] at Montreal’s McGill University has attracted national attention in Canada after Liberal Party leader and would-be prime minister Justin Trudeau attacked student organizers and questioned their right to free speech.
The BDS movement, like Israeli Apartheid Week, has no place on Canadian campuses. As a @McGillU alum, I’m disappointed. #EnoughIsEnough
Trudeau added the hashtag “#EnoughIsEnough” in his tweet, signaling support for asimilarly headlined Montreal Gazette op-ed which alleges that the divestment resolution would “marginalize Jewish students.”
Campaigners for the campus vote are hitting back in defense of their freedom of conscience and expression.
“Freedom of speech is a core Canadian value that has been enshrined in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and perhaps much to politicians’ dismay, that does not only mean the protection of popular speech,” Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights McGill (SPHR McGill) said in a statement emailed to The Electronic Intifada. “Once again, Israel is being singled out with unconditional support from government officials.”
“The only way that we will be able to remove the intentional suppression of discussion around Palestine that scares spineless politicians such as Trudeau and others is to refuse to be sidelined by their attempts to harass students at one of Canada’s foremost universities,” the statement adds.
Rex Brynen, a professor of political science at McGill, also responded that he is “disappointed” that Trudeau “apparently opposes free speech rights of Canadian students.”
The Liberal Party has governed Canada for much of its history, but lost power to the Conservative Party in 2006. In 2011, the Liberals suffered their worst defeat in decades, collapsing to just 34 seats in Canada’s 308-seat House of Commons.
The party has pinned its hopes on Trudeau to lead it back into government at national elections in October.
Trudeau’s most significant achievement to date is being the son of Canada’s legendary late prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
While no one accuses Trudeau of having his father’s political acumen, charisma or wit, supporters hope that name recognition and nostalgia will carry the Liberals to victory.
SPHR McGill asks: “why would Justin Trudeau even bat an eye at campus politics? Because the work we are doing is impactful enough to scare privileged authoritarian centrists who cater to a demographic not fully representative of Canadian citizens.”
Outside backing
The student organizers also charge that opponents of the divestment resolution have failed to win support on campus and have thus turned to the “voices of external mayors and government officials to interfere with campus politics.”
On its Facebook page, the “No” campaign – urging students to vote against divestment – boasts of support from Trudeau, the mayors of two Quebec towns, and from Montreal member of parliament Irwin Cotler.
The SPHR McGill resolution – similar to many others that have been put before student bodies in North America – calls on the university to “divest and refrain from investing in companies that pose social injury by contributing to the continuation and profitability of the illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories.”
In fairness, Trudeau is not the first Liberal Party leader to attack Palestine solidarity activism on campus for political opportunism and expediency.
In 2010, then Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff issued a statement calling on Canadians “to join with us in condemning Israeli Apartheid Week.”
But as critics noted, Ignatieff was engaging in the ultimate hypocrisy.
A few years earlier Ignatieff had written in The Guardian about a helicopter tour he had taken over Palestine.
“When I looked down at the West Bank, at the settlements like Crusader forts occupying the high ground, at the Israeli security cordon along the Jordan river closing off the Palestinian lands from Jordan,” Ignatieff wrote, “I knew I was not looking down at a state or the beginnings of one, but at a Bantustan, one of those pseudo-states created in the dying years of apartheid to keep the African population under control.”
SPHR McGill notes that “McGill took a stand and divested from South African apartheid in 1986 against the will of those in positions similar to that of Trudeau’s. This motion is no different.”
This post will be updated with the results of the vote, which is underway.
Voting underway for whether to vote by secret ballot, due to some students feeling uncomfortable voting openly pic.twitter.com/Ayxxt1rR6o — SPHR_McGill (@Sphr_McGill) March 15, 2015
Update The divestment motion was defeated by a vote of 276-212.
212 for, 276 against. Very close margin. This is an uphill battle, thank you to all who came out. Definitely more to come. — SPHR_McGill (@Sphr_McGill) March 15, 2015
Soooo proud of the @Sphr_McGill#divestment committee! The motion may not have passed this time around but you made a crucial impact #ssmuGA — Marina (@emmcupido) March 15, 2015
Full statement from SPHR McGill
We are unfortunately not surprised to see that leaders in our government have spoken out against the right of free speech that their “liberal” rhetoric advocates for. Freedom of speech is a core Canadian value that has been enshrined in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and perhaps much to politicians’ dismay, that does not only mean the protection of popular speech.
As a pro-Palestinian student group in Canada, it seems that our voices do not matter, even if we are advocating against injustices and violations of human rights that have already been condemned internationally.
Once again, Israel is being singled out with unconditional support from government officials. So why would Justin Trudeau even bat an eye at campus politics? Because the work we are doing is impactful enough to scare privileged authoritarian centrists who cater to a demographic not fully representative of Canadian citizens. And while we put in relentless effort to network with students and student groups by advocating inalienable human rights and speaking out against oppression and apartheid, the opposition has failed to win over students and has privileged the voices of external mayors and government officials to interfere with campus politics. This motion was drafted by a grassroots student organization with integrity and perseverance in dorm rooms and cafes, and will not be silenced by the opposition’s external endorsements and endowments. We will stand up for what is right. McGill took a stand and divested from South African apartheid in 1986 against the will of those in positions similar to that of Trudeau’s. This motion is no different.
The only way that we will be able to remove the intentional suppression of discussion around Palestine that scares spineless politicians such as Trudeau and others is to refuse to be sidelined by their attempts to harass students at one of Canada’s foremost universities.
Revealed by the British media are the details “of the ‘deal in blood’ forged between George W. Bush and Tony Blair over the Iraq War.”
The meetings took place in Crawford, Texas a year prior to the onslaught of the US-UK led invasion of Iraq. According to the Daily Mail:
The damning memo, from secretary of state Colin Powell to president George Bush, was written on March 28, 2002, a week before Bush’s famous summit with Blair at his Crawford ranch in Texas.
The Powell document, headed ‘Secret… Memorandum for the President’, lifts the lid on how Blair and Bush secretly plotted the war behind closed doors at Crawford.
In it, Powell tells Bush that Blair ‘will be with us’ on military action. Powell assures the president: ‘The UK will follow our lead’.
The classified document also discloses that Blair agreed to act as a glorified spin doctor for the president by presenting ‘public affairs lines’ to convince a skeptical public that Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction – when none existed.
In return, the president would flatter Blair’s ego and give the impression that Britain was not America’s poodle but an equal partner in the ‘special relationship’. (Mail on Sunday, October 18, 2015)
The leaked documents reveal unequivocally that Tony Blair had agreed to waging war on Iraq, one year before the invasion of March 2003:
The sensational leak shows that Blair had given an unqualified pledge to sign up to the conflict a year before the invasion started.
It flies in the face of the UK Prime Minister’s public claims at the time that he was seeking a diplomatic solution to the crisis.
He told voters: ‘We’re not proposing military action’ – in direct contrast to what the secret email now reveals.
The disclosure is certain to lead for calls for Sir John Chilcot to reopen his inquiry into the Iraq War if, as is believed, he has not seen the Powell memo.
A second explosive memo from the same cache also reveals how Bush used ‘spies’ in the Labour Party to help him to manipulate British public opinion in favor of the war.
The documents, obtained by The Mail on Sunday, are part of a batch of secret emails held on the private server of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton which U.S. courts have forced her to reveal. (Mail on Sunday, October 18, 2015)
Part two: This second, explosive memo, drafted by the U.S. Embassy in London, reveals how Bush used Labour ‘spies’ to manipulate British public opinion
Having read the above, ask yourself the question is Tony Blair a War Criminal?
On 16 July 1964, at the San Francisco Republican Convention—where Ms Clinton began her career of political opportunism—Senator Barry Goldwater accepted his nomination for the presidency by declaring:
I would remind you that extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.[1]
This was his defence of the political faction who defended him against “moderate” Republicans—like Nelson Rockefeller—so that Goldwater – Miller could be a “choice, not an echo” in the campaign against Kennedy successor Lyndon Johnson. Goldwater lost and “moderation” won. Instead of atomic bombs, the US dropped conventional explosives on Indochina for the next ten years.
Across the sea in one of the temples of the Anglo-American elite, the Oxford Union, this very claim was being defended by among others Scottish Nationalist Hugh MacDiarmid and Malcolm X—though certainly not in the manner of Goldwater. Malcolm chose an example that is as current today as it was 51 years ago:
But most people usually think [laughs to himself], in terms of extremism, as something that is relative, related to someone they know or something that they’ve heard of, I don’t think they look upon extremism by itself, or all alone. They apply it to something. A good example – and one of the reasons that this can’t be too well understood today – many people who have been in positions of power in the past don’t realize that the power, the centres of power, are changing. When you’re in a position of power for a long time you get used to using your yardstick, and you take it for granted that because you’ve forced your yardstick on others, that everyone is still using the same yardstick. So that your definition of extremism usually applies to everyone, but nowadays times are changing, and the centre of power is changing. People in the past who weren’t in a position to have a yardstick or use a yardstick of their own are using their own yardstick now. You use one and they use another. In the past when the oppressor had one stick and the oppressed used that same stick, today the oppressed are sort of shaking the shackles and getting yardsticks of their own, so when they say extremism they don’t mean what you do, and when you say extremism you don’t mean what they do. There are entirely two different meanings. And when this is understood I think you can better understand why those who are using methods of extremism are being driven to them.
A good example is the Congo. When the people who are in power want to, again, create an image to justify something that’s bad, they use the press. And they’ll use the press to create a humanitarian image, for a devil, or a devil image for a humanitarian. They’ll take a person who’s a victim of the crime, and make it appear he’s the criminal, and they’ll take the criminal and make it appear that he’s the victim of the crime. And the Congo situation is one of the best examples that I can cite right now to point this out. The Congo situation is a nasty example of how a country because it is in power, can take its press and make the world accept something that’s absolutely criminal. They take pilots that they say are American trained, and this automatically lends respectability to them [laughter], and then they will call them anti-Castro Cubans, and that’s supposed to add to their respectability [laughter], and eliminate that fact that they’re dropping bombs on villages where they have no defence whatsoever against such planes, blowing to bits black women, Congolese women, Congolese children, Congolese babies, this is extremism, but it is never referred to as extremism because it is endorsed by the west, it is financed by America, it’s made respectable by America, and that kind of extremism is never labelled as extremism. Because it’s not extremism in defence of liberty, and if it is extremism in defence of liberty as this type just pointed out, it is extremism in defence of liberty for the wrong type of people [applause].
I am not advocating that kind of extremism, that’s cold-blooded murder. But the press is used to make that cold-blooded murder appear as an act of humanitarianism. They take it one step farther and get a man named Tshombe, who is a murderer, they refer to him as the premier, or prime minister of the Congo, to lend respectability to him, he’s actually the murderer of the rightful Prime Minister of the Congo, they never mention this [applause].
I’m not for extremism in defence of that kind of liberty, or that kind of activity. They take this man, who’s a murderer, and the world recognizes him as a murderer, but they make him the prime minister, he becomes a paid murderer, a paid killer, who is propped up by American dollars. And to show the degree to which he is a paid killer the first thing he does is go to South Africa and hire more killers and bring them into the Congo. They give them the glorious name of mercenary, which means a hired killer, not someone that is killing for some kind of patriotism or some kind of ideal, but a man who is a paid killer, a hired killer. And one of the leaders of them is right from this country here, and he’s glorified as a soldier of fortune when he’s shooting down little black women, and black babies, and black children. I’m not for that kind of extremism, I’m for the kind of extremism that those who are being destroyed by those bombs and destroyed by those hired killers, are able to put forth to thwart it. They will risk their lives at any cost; they will sacrifice their lives at any cost, against that kind of criminal activity. I am for the kind of extremism that the freedom fighters in the Stanleyville regime are able to display against these hired killers, who are actually using some of my tax dollars which I have to pay up in the United States, to finance that operation over there. We’re not for that kind of extremism. [2]
Almost nobody in Europe or the United States, let alone their propaganda (advertising) instruments, is discussing the unending slaughter in the Congo today. Yet for a score and six years the defence of the Empire has meant persuading “whites” that any deviation from the corporate imperial form conceived in 1949 and consummated in 1989 is extremism per se. Such omnipresent extremism has served to maintain the illusion that its supposed opposite, the status quo, is moderation incarnate.
Hence in every US election what I have previously called orthodox and reform liberals have insisted that they are opposed to anything that could be called extreme while fanatically defending the mythical moderate or middle.[3] The epitome of this fanatical moderation is the absurd definition of the majority of America’s population as “middle class”. In fact just a primitive survey of the distribution of income and assets in the US, especially since the 1970s, reveals that the term “middle class” is an ideological fiction, albeit in a hermetically sealed environment such as the USA a very persuasive one.
In this “middle class” managed by an ideology of fanatical moderation, the vast majority of the racially dominant caste finds both reassurance and perpetual anxiety. This moderation is best exhibited in a passion for euphemism and an uncritical adoption of regime (corporate) jargon. This language is inherently pretentious since it is consumed and regurgitated in an environment of almost total ignorance of the regime’s power structure or the exercise of US power in the world.
Some fifty years after Malcolm X defended “extremism in the cause of liberty, for human beings”, we are witnessing, albeit from safe havens in Europe and North America, what must fairly be called the resurrection of the extremist moderation that resulted in the murder of Patrice Lumumba and the permanent destruction of the Congo. That moderation is the smug acceptance of the destruction of the very last remains of anti-colonialism, which it was then—as now—the mission of the US Empire to crush. Fifty years ago, mercenaries from the white settler regime in South Africa together with anti-Castro mercenaries trained by the US combined with the collusion of a US-dominated United Nations force and Belgian colonial troops were deployed to destroy the Republic of the Congo and deliver it to the administration of a paid agent of the principal instrument of US foreign policy, the CIA. After the destruction of Yugoslavia and the destruction of Libya by the very same means, we are forced to watch the demolition of Syria. This war against an Arab state, against a socialist state, is not a moderate war. It is not a new war. It is the continuation of a persistent war the origins of which are identical to those which led the United States and its vassals to crush Congolese independence.
What is the difference between 1964 and 2015? In 1961 after betrayal by Belgium, betrayal by the US, collaboration in that betrayal by the United Nations, Patrice Lumumba called reluctantly and at great risk to his country’s reputation in the world, the Soviet Union for assistance in defending his country from those mercenaries—from those hired murderers armed by the West. Africa was far away and the Soviet Union was still struggling to rebuild what the West had destroyed in World War II, overtly with the Wehrmacht and covertly with continuous aid by US corporations. The Soviet Union was unable to support Lumumba.
Two weeks ago, Russia, far closer to Syria and after a strenuous recovery from the brigandry of the US-instigated Yeltsin regime, after exhausting all available diplomatic means, accepted the request of the government of Syria to assist it in defending the country’s people and their sovereignty from the massed mercenary armies armed and supported by an apartheid regime to the South and the governments of the former colonial masters of the region. Russia has done for Syria what the Soviet Union was unable to do for Lumumba’s Congo.
What is the same? While ostensibly deploring the racist settler-colonial regime (although rarely ever criticised with such uncompromising vocabulary), the combined forces of the world’s greatest mercenary state and its equally mercenary mass media corporations, have been waging and continue to wage war against independent people organised in their own sovereign country. Then as now, that great mercenary state—and by mercenary I mean a state whose very roots have been nurtured by the blood of slaves and indigenous peoples shed by the hands of people who wittingly or unwittingly bought their supposed freedoms with that slavery and bloodshed—aims to conquer the Middle East as they conquered Africa. We should make no mistake. That state, which like the European states from which it was born, claiming a Christian heritage also claims that peculiarly Christian legacy inherited from the Crusaders who terrorised the region a millennia ago.
Now that Russia has entered the battlefield, we find the voices of moderation from throughout that empire demanding, pleading for Russia to withhold its support to the Syrian state. With what reason one may ask? The arguments can be found in many shades and hues. After Russia’s president Vladimir Putin announced to the United Nations convened in general assembly that the so-called “war against terror” declared unilaterally after events one September was not being fought in any earnest in the Middle East except by the government of Syria, led by President Assad, there was no response from the crusaders in Washington or London. Shortly thereafter Mr Putin announced that his government would send to Syria the support it requested and to which it was obliged by treaty dating from 1956. Yet before any military action had taken place, the mercenary media of the West announced that Russia had bombed “moderate” opponents of the Syrian government, trained and funded by the United States. Even the absurdity of this allegation, which rapidly saturated all the public media outlets, caused no embarrassment among “moderates” in the West.
When within a week it was reported that Russian bombardment and Syrian army action had forced the retreat of thousands of those mercenaries, the only reply was that Russia was bombing the “wrong” terrorists—the terrorists trained and funded by the United States. Yet when the Russian foreign minister offered to consider actions that might ameliorate that damage—without admitting the validity of such a distinction—the US regime was unable or unwilling to identify such “wrong” or “moderate” terrorists. A reasonable observer must conclude either that the US regime itself makes no distinction or that it simply is unable to make one. If it makes no distinction than the US accusation is nonsense. If such a distinction is impossible then it is also impossible for the US regime to know which terrorists are in fact the “wrong” or “moderate” ones.
One plausible explanation for the function of so-called “moderate” terrorists trained and armed by the US is that these “moderates” are merely a conduit for weapons to the ISIL corporate group. It was (and presumably is) a standing practice of the US to send its National Guard units to selected Latin American countries (e.g. Honduras during the US war against Nicaragua) for training.[4] National Guard inventories are not posted in the US military budget in the same way that regular army equipment or defence military assistance supplies are. When the Guard returned to the US, they left their weaponry, which was then booked as used, lost, or destroyed while it was in fact transferred to local agents of US power—official and unofficial. The US’s so-called “moderate” terrorist programs mirror this strategy for concealing the flow of weapons and ammunition to the local subsidiary of capitalism’s invisible army—ISIL.
However it lies in the nature of moderate extremism that there are no facts that a reasonable person is capable of discerning. Moreover it is the extremist moderate who is incapable of recognising facts in any context—historical or logical—that would lead to humane, let alone just evaluation of the circumstances at issue.
In this sense we find precisely the situation and the condition that prevailed in 1964. It is a condition that has characterised the entirety of the era benignly called the “American Century”—a century in which the United States, beginning with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has been the leading purveyor of violence on this planet.[5] In fact for saying this in the land of the free and the genocide of the “braves”, that both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were murdered.
We must ask why this has been the condition of the American Century? Why have the country and the regime which rules it been able to commit such uninterrupted atrocities, despite the values to which it has laid sole claim since its founding nearly three centuries ago?
The answers to these questions are not complex although they are not without contradictions. There have been moments in the history of the United States when its destiny was not solely in the hands of the small band of psychopathic adventurers who have perpetuated the myths upon which this new Eden was based. In the interest of brevity I shall confine myself to a phenomenon, which C. Wright Mills called “the conservative mood”.
Given the state of mass society, we should not expect anything else. Most of its members are distracted by status, by the disclosures of pettier immortalities and by that Machiavellianism-for-the-little-man that is the death of political insurgency. Perhaps it might be different were the intellectual community not so full of the conservative mood, not so comfortably timid, not so absorbed by the new gentility of many of its members. But given these conditions of mass society and intellectual community, we can readily understand why the power elite of America has no ideology and feels the need of none, why its rule is naked of ideas, its manipulation without attempted justification. It is this mindlessness of the powerful that is the true higher immorality of our time; for with it, there is associated the organised irresponsibility that is today the most important characteristic of the American system of corporate power. [6]
The “conservative mood” is a gentle name for the historical processes that turned the settler-colonial state founded by the UDI of 1776 into the archangel of settler-colonialism throughout the world.[7] The overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon elite that formed and still dominates the US shared the ideals or better said obsessions, which underlay Winston Churchill’s History of the English-speaking Peoples.[8] Its fundamental acceptance and promotion of racism as a means of state-formation did not originate on the shores of North America.[9] It merely found the least resistance. This culture and political praxis induced the US regime to cripple the Haitian Revolution, to steal vast tracts of land from independent Mexico (and to force that country’s people to work for US corporations rather than the benefit of their own society), to deprive the Philippines and Cuba of the independence from Spain for which those countries had fought; to support the apartheid regime in South Africa; to conquer Korea after Japan’s surrender. The list is even longer but these examples are horrid enough.[10]
Not least of which the United States has, even more than its predecessor Great Britain, helped to create and maintain the State of Israel, a settler-colonial regime formed first by white Europeans with the connivance of the British Empire and ripened to a level of monstrosity that even a former US President felt compelled to condemn.[11]
How is it that a regime that financed the National Socialist regime for the benefit of its greatest corporations and tacitly accepted the industrial slavery with its millions of dead as a means of corporate profit and war against the hated Soviet Union earn the status of “defender” of Israel? Is it because the regime has ever had any interest in the fate of Jews? Had that been the case then the executives of Ford, Standard Oil, IBM and its major banks would have shared the dock with Hermann Goering. Is it because the regime has sought to promote the rights of peoples to national self-determination? Had that been the case, Haiti would be a prosperous independent state today instead of a North American slaveholding.
No, the reason why the United States is the self-appointed protector of the Jewish state in Palestine is because Israel occupies the same plot of ground its ancient Christian mercenary ancestors seized in the Crusades. More importantly, through the state with its capitals in Tel Aviv and Washington the regime supports white rule in the region. However unlike the days of slavery or Jim Crow, unlike the days before the US regime joined the United Nations by agreement in Yalta (only to highjack the organisation in San Francisco), the US regime is compelled to moderation. It can no longer stridently assert the superiority of its European Christian cultural heritage. In fact once the Soviet Union and China broke the US atomic monopoly, it had to moderate its threats to annihilate unwilling peoples of colour.
After US Forces were nearly driven out of Korea after its invasion in 1951—by “yellow” soldiers armed with Russian tanks and after humiliating defeat at the hands of “yellow” soldiers and irregulars in Vietnam, it had to moderate the language of conquest and exploitation. The necessity of drafting and recruiting most of its land forces from its “coloured” population made it moderate its official abuse, although this only applied to the federal level.[12]
The US regime was forced—at least until the mid-1970s—to improve its treatment (and control) of non-whites within its borders. Only by these acts of moderation was it possible to enhance the violence done by its corporations and mercenaries beyond its borders—in Latin America, Africa, and especially the Middle East.
Elsewhere I have analysed the ways in which the language of deception, developed by the regime’s political warfare institutions, has channelled and manipulated domestic opinion as well as the public opinion in Europe.[13] However here I feel compelled to take exception to a recent article published in the pages of a widely read online journal of American progressivism.[14] As Malcolm X said in his Oxford address, I do not select this article because of the particular author but because of the “type” of author and article that it represents.
Arguing that Russia is now in the best position to alleviate the situation in Syria today and that it is incumbent upon Russia to act if there is to be a solution to the present crisis there, Trent University (Canada) professor emeritus Michael Neumann wrote:
“It’s extraordinary how so much analysis is devoted to Syria, yet so little to the reasons Russia is there. Russia is in some ways the key to the catastrophe. Yes, the West could do more, but only Russia could put an end to the fighting without expense or risk. Russia could from one day to the next stop direct support of the Syrian régime and pressure Iran to do the same. Russia could drop its Security Council support for the régime, unleashing vastly increased Western pressure on Assad. Iran on its own would know Assad was a lost cause, and he would fall. All this would cost Russia not one penny, not one life. Given this is more like common knowledge than a secret, why doesn’t it attract more attention?
I submit it’s because Russia’s atrocious, unforgivable role in Syria has much to do with perfectly legitimate concerns about the West.“[15]
It defies historical fact and reason to suggest that “Russia is in some ways key to the catastrophe”, when it is a matter of record—even in Washington—that the US war against Syria is decades old. Moreover the apparent concession that Russia has “perfectly legitimate concerns about the West” is disingenuous. The reasons Neumann admits might motivate Russia are themselves caricatured and trivialised. One has to wonder why his country’s government should not be compelled to alter its behaviour, thus allaying such legitimate concerns.[16] Reading the first paragraph strains patient efforts at understanding what a professor of ethics might mean here.
If one reads further Professor Neumann explains:
Since Russia’s motives for pretty much anything are shrouded in an absurd fog of propaganda redolent of the crudest 1950s fanaticism, let’s get some things out of the way.
In fact, the Russian president explained in plain terms to the entire General Assembly the motives for Russian support of the Syrian government.
Russia has consistently opposed terrorism in all its forms. Today, we provide military-technical assistance to Iraq, Syria and other regional countries fighting terrorist groups. We think it’s a big mistake to refuse to cooperate with the Syrian authorities and government forces who valiantly fight terrorists on the ground.
We should finally admit that President Assad’s government forces and the Kurdish militia are the only forces really fighting terrorists in Syria. Yes, we are aware of all the problems and conflicts in the region, but we definitely have to consider the actual situation on the ground. [17]
After conceding that the West has pursued a policy of encirclement and that “the West wants Russia at his mercy”, Professor Neumann reaches for the most startling comparisons.
And there lies perhaps the only faint hope for a minimally acceptable end to the Syrian catastrophe. Russia is a great power with a huge nuclear arsenal. It will never be held accountable for its crimes, any more than any other nuclear power – any more than the US will pay for what it did in Southeast Asia, or Israel will pay for what it does to Palestinians. Russia’s criminal support for Assad will end when the world makes it worth Russia’s while to end it. What would that involve? [18]
His faint hope for a minimally acceptable end—moderation—is Russian withdrawal of its military support to Syria. Now we are told that Russia, like any other nuclear power “will never be held accountable for its crimes”. What crimes Russia has committed in Syria or anywhere else for that matter has not been stated. Since when is the compliance with a mutual assistance pact by invitation of a recognised and in terms of international law legitimate government (state-party to such pact) per se criminal? In contrast US and Israeli airstrikes in violation of Syria’s sovereign air space do constitute crimes against the peace in terms of the UN Charter. Instead Russia has been compared with the US in Vietnam or Israel’s unending war against the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine (not to mention the rest of the region that it bombs at will). The honest might infer that Neumann acknowledges that Israel is also a nuclear power and hence will not pay for crimes everyone knows it is committing as I write.
Still reading patiently to find the virtue of such moderation, one finds Professor Neumann asserting:
The example of Guantanamo shows that a major military base, particularly with convenient air and sea access, can easily survive in hostile territory. The US and NATO can make its survival a certainty.
Here we come even closer to the root of the matter. Indeed Guantanamo is a base imposed on the Cuban people after independence and despite continuous demands by the sovereign government of Cuba that the US vacate Cuban territory, remains. Guantanamo is not only the US Gibraltar but also the site of its most notorious torture and psychological warfare centre. Since 1956 Russia has had a base in a country with which it has maintained friendly relations for over half a century. Neumann proposes outrageously that Russia join the US Empire in destroying Syria in return for the privilege of a hostile military base—hostile here can only mean hostile to the US.
Returning to moderation, Neumann continues,
Does this sound cynical? Not at all; it is a matter of ending horror. The fantasies of a liberal future for Syria, or one ruled by squeaky-clean pro-American groups, or bringing the Russian scoundrels to the International Court of Justice …these are self-indulgent daydreams that push an end to the conflict ever further away. And it is not a matter of what ‘the world’ ‘must demand’, as if there was such an entity in any position to demand anything. A part of the world, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Gulf States, might take steps toward the solution. The US, weak, feckless, and happy to be done with the Middle East, might go along. But this can happen only when it is understood that Russia, however evil its Syrian strategy, is beyond the reach of justice, yet far from beyond the reach of remedy.
It is striking that Professor Neumann proceeds cavalierly with his assessment of the relations between the states in the region, the role of the US and its vassals, and the utterly compromised International Court of Justice. How the slaveholder states in the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula—whose fiefdoms are operated almost entirely with Filipino, Bangladeshi and other Southeast Asian leased chattel—earn a place in Neumann’s diplomatic pantheon is too absurd to contemplate. Although he asks the reader rhetorically whether his appraisal and recommendations are cynical, they almost sound sarcastic. An examination of his other writing on Syria more than suggests that he is very serious indeed.[19]
Why does Professor Neumann have this view of Syria and the Middle East? Why did he write elsewhere this appraisal of Assad and other national leaders?
Whatever his ultimate agenda, Milosevic was fighting to preserve Yugoslavia, which in retrospect looks like a paradise compared to the results of its Western-backed breakup. Assad achieved nothing of the sort either internationally or domestically. So he is not in the same league as these ‘devils’, let alone the likes of Fidel Castro or Ho Chi Minh. [20]
His references suggest that he has not been utterly blind to the pursuit of national independence in countries historically colonised and pillaged by the US and European states. Can it be that his sense of moderation leads him to such skewed comparisons?
In his book The Case Against Israel, Neumann wrote:
The mere fact that, say, the United States is founded on genocide, massacre, and exploitation is not sufficient reason to destroy the United States. This is because the cure of destruction is worse than the disease of illegitimate existence. In practise, wiping out a powerful state like Israel or the US would cause even more suffering than letting it survive. More important, attacks on these states would almost certainly be unsuccessful and merely add to the evil of illegitimate existence the much more serious evil of catastrophic warfare. [21]
Why does Professor Neumann believe that in the case of Israel or the US, illegitimate existence should have no consequences when he is clearly convinced that the destruction of Syria would be beneficial? Israel for instance is a state ruling a population of some 8 million. Syria—at least before the US-operated terror campaign to depopulate began—had some 22 million inhabitants. The destruction of a nation of 22 million can be expected to cause objectively more suffering than that incurred by the much smaller state ruling Palestine. Neumann does not say that it would be wrong to destroy the US or Israel or if they were to vanish, but that the consequences would be much worse than if their de facto power were acknowledged as their de jure right to exist.
It is Neumann’s moderation that argues for the necessity of accepting the right of powerful (especially atomic-armed) states to exist. Yet such moderation does not extend to the less powerful states that assert their legitimacy and the support of their inhabitants. One has to ask the question whether Neumann would be so moderate were he Syrian or Libyan or Haitian or Congolese?
Professor Neumann—like Wright’s liberals of “conservative mood”—is a Pangloss who believes that the US is the best of all possible worlds. Syrians for Neumann are like the people of Lisbon whom Pangloss said were there so that the earthquake could destroy them.
This is really all reducible to white supremacy. He can imagine Syria or some other country being abolished because in the last instance, Syrians are not really white. It is not that Neumann even knows he thinks like this, it is structural racism. It is really painful to consider all the racism one has consumed as a “white”, all the “nigger jokes” all the strangeness one feels when meeting “mixed” groups– whether couples or families or social gatherings. It goes right to the bone. It gets better only if one confronts it and withdraws in part at least from its most noxious habitats.
Although the world has been tortured by Christianity for over 500 hundred years and over a thousand if one includes (especially Eastern) Europe, it is virtually impossible for whites to consider more than a few marginal Christian groups “fanatical”. But Islam (Muslims) is either abhorred because it means non-white or because the Euro-Americans have done their best to cultivate the most reactionary forms available (no doubt inventing a few along the way).[22]
The term sovereignty is incomprehensible to Americans because their entire history is based on the denial of sovereignty to non-whites.
Neumann is caught in this trap like most whites. Although he agrees that Israel is not a “Jewish” state any more than the US is a Christian state– it is first and foremost a white supremacist state with an ideology concocted in Jewish religious jargon. The US is also a white supremacist state concocted with Christian religious jargon. In both cases the purpose of jargon is to sustain ideological control– it is advertising language. To say this at cocktail parties (although most people today those are passé) or at Starbucks would be considered rude at best.
To discuss the quantity of suffering an empire’s destruction might cause as “more than the cost of its survival” would certainly have met with considerable wonder in India before 1947. What his type does not see is that the United States is not just the territory and inhabitants of North America and Hawaii. Israel is not just a state settled in Palestine, accommodating the good Jews and terrorising the Palestinian population. The United States was born as an empire. Had it remained within those boundaries established by the eradication of the indigenous peoples and expulsion of Mexicans by the end of the 19th century, that empire would probably have remained as relatively benign in the world as the Brazilian Empire which has confined itself largely to the exploitation of its own internal boundaries. It is reasonable to say that there was an admittedly very short period when despite the European “invasion” that produced Israel, its legitimacy could have been established. In fact, the German Empire was destroyed without destroying Germany.
However, like the massive expansion of the US Empire after the defeat of Spain, the post-war European garrison in Palestine was inseparably linked to the denial of Arab, Persian, and African independence after 1945. Together with the Anglo-American outpost in Riyadh and the Gulf satellites, the State of Israel chose the mantle of the medieval crusaders rather than that of anti-colonialism.
The problem presented by the US is that its empire is non-contiguous with its State. The US Empire is the empire of the “open door”, the empire of the burglar and rapist—not the classical permanent conqueror. The US Empire is based on an insidious eroticism developed in its vast consumer culture and insatiable quest for control of populations in the form of “markets”. While the moderate beneficiary of US Empire praises his regime’s virtue in only temporarily occupying Afghanistan or Iraq and never doing more than ejaculating with Marine Expeditionary Forces, he or she swoons in social media at such crooners as Pussy Riot.[23] “White” Americans cannot conceive of the destruction of the US Empire because—to the extent they are honest—this means surrender of corporate power projection whether in the form of “smart phones”, Starbucks, or the rest of its synthetic culture. The adoration of US Empire by the moderate classes cannot be stilled because its constituting values of profit and success are deeply religious. The religious ecstasy of universal consumerism poses an enormous barrier to the reduction of corporate power, to shrinking the empire within its original territorial borders.
If a powerful country like the US or Israel—both armed with atomic weapons—has a right to exist because to destroy it would cause more suffering than its survival, then how much suffering can an American—especially a white American—impose on weaker countries before such suffering equals that which would justify putting an end to the cause?
What if, for instance, people like Neumann were to take seriously the assertion, which I believe to be accurate, that the US regime not only collaborated actively in creating the NS regime and supporting its war against the Soviet Union but was as willing to close it eyes to the deportation of Jews as it was to annihilate the Native Americans whose land Neumann also inhabits?
One of the conditions that make Professor Neumann’s type of argument possible is that just like the many who immigrated to Britain under the Empire, the hundreds of thousands driven to the US from the wreckage of its empire, have to pay a price for survival– an ideological price, a moral sacrifice. That moral sacrifice consists in forgetting, disregarding or minimalizing the wanton destruction, shameless greed, and vicious racism that devastated their countries of origin and induced them to immigrate. Many pay that price to put the trauma of US or UK violence behind them. Others pay it for privilege. White folks pay it because it keeps them white.
Can anyone truly believe that the suffering caused by the continuation of the US Empire—the political manifestation of its corporate power elite—justifiably continues? The destruction of that empire—which is not the destruction of the United States itself—might well mean the beginning of an end to the suffering in Africa, which the US Empire perpetuated in 1964. It might well mean an end to the suffering in the Middle East or South Central Asia or for the inhabitants of the largest Muslim country in the world, Indonesia. However if the violation and destruction of sovereignty for the weaker nations, like Yugoslavia, Libya, Iraq and ultimately Syria continues, who and with what will the non-white peoples of the world begin to rebuild or create those modest claims for liberty and justice that moderation by the white people of the world have denied them for the past 500 years?
[4] The US regime waged a mercenary war against Nicaragua, governed by the FSLN (Sandinista Liberation Front) from 1979-1990 ostensibly to install what could only be called a neo-Samosa regime (the Contras). Much of this was covert since the US Congress briefly forbade weapons supplies to CIA mercenaries (although never rejected as US policy). On the contrary, then President Ronald Reagan called the Nicaraguan mercenaries managed by the CIA “the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers”. Reagan’s statement caused considerable embarrassment, although it was only mild hyperbole.
[5] Martin Luther King, A Time to Break Silence, delivered at Riverside Church, New York City on 4 April 1967. A year later he was dead.
[6] C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1959, p. 342.
[7] UDI – “unilateral declaration of independence” is a term first used commonly when Ian Smith proclaimed the independence of white-ruled Rhodesia, using the format of the declaration adopted by landowners and merchants in Philadelphia in 1776. Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776, also reviewed by this author.
[8] Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-speaking Peoples, 4 vols. (1956-58)
[9] Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race, 2 vols. (1994/ 1996)
[10] William Blum has provided a more exhaustive list in Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (2004)
[11] Former US President Jimmy Carter called the system of rule in Israel an “apartheid” state, Palestine Peace not Apartheid (2007). The United Nations had already condemned apartheid as a fundamental violation of the UN Charter (and a threat to international peace and security) years ago, UN GA Resolution 1761 (1962).
[12] As has been repeatedly reported elsewhere, non-whites constitute a vast disproportion of the US prison population and those murdered by police.
[14] In the US “progressive” is a moderate term for those people who dissent in one way or another from the official doctrine and dogma of the US regime. Without disparaging the motives or opinions of individuals who identify themselves as such it should not be confused with the antique or anachronistic term “Left”.
[15] Michael Neumann, “Russia’s Price for Peace in Syria”, Counterpunch, 14 October 2014.
[16] I have argued elsewhere that the US regime (principally through the CIA) aims to create a Kosovo-type permanent gangster state in the form of ISIL both to terrorise the region and to expand the drug and contraband trade. The ISIL will also be a leech with which oil, gas and water resources can be stolen from the region’s inhabitants with impunity—since ISIL is a pseudo-Islamic corporation and not a real state potentially accountable to a citizenry. The British actually innovated this model in the region with the creation of Kuwait and the Emirates.
[17] Vladimir Putin, Address to the 70th General Assembly of the United Nations, 28 September 2015.
[18] Michael Neumann, op. cit.
[19] http://insufficientrespect.blogspot.fr/ Here for example Neumann indicates his moderate understanding of US power in the world and in the Middle East in particular.
“As for the remote possibilities, absolutely, major idiots might gain control of the American government, and who knows what they might get up to. But if you consider the remote possibilities, you also have to consider the remote chance of positive outcomes. Maybe the US will get tired of idiocy. Maybe other nations will be strong enough and assertive enough to contain US ambitions. Maybe the US will suffer further decline, making it incapable of doing anything much anywhere. The remote future offers no basis for preferring the certainty of stopping Assad’s atrocities to the very uncertain benefits of leaving him alone. The West, having watched impotently for over a year, will gain little credit for supporting Assad. It will gain little power; Syria is no economic or strategic gem. Intervention will not make the US any more or less likely to commit mayhem in the future. Anti-US sentiment, however justified, cannot justify leaving Assad in power.”
[20] See Michael Neumann at the same weblog.
[21] Michael Neumann, The Case Against Israel (2005), p. 90.
[23] In 2011 the synthetic girl band Pussy Riot appeared in Russia providing the pretext for a wave of attacks on the Russian government for supposed interference with “freedom of expression”. Western media outlets portrayed Pussy Riot as a victim of human rights violations, while icons of US consumer imperialism like Madonna enhanced the anti-Russian campaign, although the acts for which they had been charged in Russia would have been actionable in many Western countries, e.g. trespassing in churches to perform massive disruption of worshippers while engaging in religious services. After strong allegations of covert Western funding appeared, there was a marked decline in media attention.
Israeli settlements are permitted to freely terrorize defenseless Palestinians including young children, committing daily acts of violence and vandalism, at times cold-blooded murder with impunity.
Israeli authorities do nothing to stop them, de facto encouragement to rampage freely, often protected by soldiers and police – notably when they disruptively enter the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound where they don’t belong, commit vigilante attacks against young children, farmers in their fields, holy places or homes by settling them ablaze.
Yesh Din Volunteers for Human Rights receive daily complaints from abused Palestinians, notably during recent weeks of Israeli instigated violence, settlers attacking them at home, in vehicles, in village areas, in fields, virtually anywhere in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Attacks happen so often, it’s hard keeping track of how many or making accurate damage assessments. Israeli soldiers and police, as well as PA security forces do nothing to protect defenseless victims.
Maan News said over 200 radicalized settlers attacked Wad al-Haseen and Wad al-Nasara villages overnight Saturday – throwing stones and “firebombs” at Palestinian homes.
At least three injuries were reported, including two children, one wounded seriously when a firebomb struck him in the chest.
Residents saw Israeli soldiers protecting their rampage, letting them attack Palestinians freely. Homes were set ablaze. Villagers fled to mosques for safety, warned others about what was happening.
When other Palestinians arrived to help, soldiers attacked them with live fire, rubber-coated steel bullets and toxic tear gas.
Radicalized settlers rampage freely. Soldiers attack Palestinian victims. Israeli forces killed at least 44 Palestinians since October 1, including 11 children.
Scores of arrests are made daily, many hundreds detained and brutalized, over 500 wounded by live fire, around 5,000 harmed by toxic tear gas inhalation.
On Saturday morning, a radicalized settler dressed in white, holding two guns, murdered 18-year-old Fadel al-Qawasmi. Video footage showed the incident’s aftermath.
The settler directed soldiers to the body of the youth he murdered, unarmed, threatening no one. Soldiers failed to disarm a killer or arrest him, free to kill again, allowed to do it unaccountably.
Paramedics were denied access to the dying youth, left to bleed to death unattended, his body then whisked away to an unknown location, his family denied access to it.
Soldiers lethally shot another Palestinian youth and a young woman threatening no one. Since October 1, most victims were young children or youths.
Only two Israelis died over the same period, both lethally shot, none by so-called knife-wielding Palestinians. The Big Lie about them terrorizing Israelis continues unabated.
Most people believe it because hard truths are suppressed. One-sided support for Israeli state terror ignores longstanding Palestinian suffering and the horrors they’re experiencing now.
BDS activists called for worldwide solidarity with courageous Palestinian resisters. “Boycott Israel now,” they urged!
“A new generation of Palestinians is marching on the footsteps of previous generations, rising up against Israel’s brutal, decades-old system of occupation, settler colonialism and apartheid,” they explained.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians have joined demonstrations taking place in dozens of cities across historic Palestine and in refugee camps in neighbouring Arab countries.
A “wave of action” is underway in solidarity with their struggle – in “in response to Israel’s intensifying ethnic cleansing and (brutal) oppression…”
Since July alone, Israeli security forces and settler attacks left over 1,000 Palestinian children and youths either disabled or faced with life-altering injuries – victims of brutal state terror, supported by Washington, other Western regimes and despotic regional ones.
Global solidarity is needed to fight back. Boycotts, divestments and sanctions are essential.
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.”
October 20, marks the four-year anniversary of the US-backed assassination of Libya’s former leader, Muammar Gaddafi, and the decline into chaos of one of Africa’s greatest nations.
In 1967 Colonel Gaddafi inherited one of the poorest nations in Africa; by the time he was assassinated, he had transformed Libya into Africa’s richest nation. Prior to the US-led bombing campaign in 2011, Libya had the highest Human Development Index, the lowest infant mortality and the highest life expectancy in all of Africa.
Today, Libya is a failed state. Western military intervention has caused all of the worst-scenarios: Western embassies have all left, the South of the country has become a haven for ISIS terrorists, and the Northern coast a center of migrant trafficking. Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia have all closed their borders with Libya. This all occurs amidst a backdrop of widespread rape, assassinations and torture that complete the picture of a state that is failed to the bone.
Libya currently has two competing governments, two parliaments, two sets of rivaling claims to control over the central bank and the national oil company, no functioning national police or army, and the United States now believes that ISIS is running training camps across large swathes of the country.
On one side, in the West of the nation, Islamist-allied militias took over control of the capital Tripoli and other key cities and set up their own government, chasing away a parliament that was previously elected.
On the other side, in the East of the nation, the “legitimate” government dominated by anti-Islamist politicians, exiled 1,200 kilometers away in Tobruk, no longer governs anything. The democracy which Libyans were promised by Western governments after the fall of Colonel Gaddafi has all but vanished.
Contrary to popular belief, Libya, which western media routinely described as “Gaddafi’s military dictatorship” was in actual fact one of the world’s most democratic States.
Under Gaddafi’s unique system of direct democracy, traditional institutions of government were disbanded and abolished, and power belonged to the people directly through various committees and congresses.
Far from control being in the hands of one man, Libya was highly decentralized and divided into several small communities that were essentially “mini-autonomous States” within a State. These autonomous States had control over their districts and could make a range of decisions including how to allocate oil revenue and budgetary funds. Within these mini autonomous States, the three main bodies of Libya’s democracy were Local Committees, Basic People’s Congresses and Executive Revolutionary Councils.
The Basic People’s Congress (BPC), or Mu’tamar shaʿbi asāsi was essentially Libya’s functional equivalent of the House of Commons in the United Kingdom or the House of Representatives in the United States. However, Libya’s People’s Congress was not comprised merely of elected representatives who discussed and proposed legislation on behalf of the people; rather, the Congress allowed all Libyans to directly participate in this process. Eight hundred People’s Congresses were set up across the country and all Libyans were free to attend and shape national policy and make decisions over all major issues including budgets, education, industry, and the economy.
In 2009, Gaddafi invited the New York Times to Libya to spend two weeks observing the nation’s direct democracy. The New York Times, that has traditionally been highly critical of Colonel Gaddafi’s democratic experiment, conceded that in Libya, the intention was that
“everyone is involved in every decision…Tens of thousands of people take part in local committee meetings to discuss issues and vote on everything from foreign treaties to building schools.”
The fundamental difference between western democratic systems and the Libyan Jamahiriya’s direct democracy is that in Libya all citizens were allowed to voice their views directly – not in one parliament of only a few hundred wealthy politicians – but in hundreds of committees attended by tens of thousands of ordinary citizens. Far from being a military dictatorship, Libya under Mr. Gaddafi was Africa’s most prosperous democracy.
On numerous occasions Mr. Gaddafi’s proposals were rejected by popular vote during Congresses and the opposite was approved and enacted as legislation.
For instance, on many occasions Mr. Gaddafi proposed the abolition of capital punishment and he pushed for home schooling over traditional schools. However, the People’s Congresses wanted to maintain the death penalty and classic schools, and the will of the People’s Congresses prevailed. Similarly, in 2009, Colonel Gaddafi put forward a proposal to essentially abolish the central government altogether and give all the oil proceeds directly to each family. The People’s Congresses rejected this idea too.
For over four decades, Gaddafi promoted economic democracy and used the nationalized oil wealth to sustain progressive social welfare programs for all Libyans. Under Gaddafi’s rule, Libyans enjoyed not only free health-care and free education, but also free electricity and interest-free loans. Now thanks to NATO’s intervention the health-care sector is on the verge of collapse as thousands of Filipino health workers flee the country, institutions of higher education across the East of the country are shut down, and black outs are a common occurrence in once thriving Tripoli.
Unlike in the West, Libyans did not vote once every four years for a President and an invariably wealthy local parliamentarian who would then make all decisions for them. Ordinary Libyans made decisions regarding foreign, domestic and economic policy themselves.
America’s bombing campaign of 2011 has not only destroyed the infrastructure of Libya’s democracy, America has also actively promoted ISIS terror group leader Abdelhakim Belhadj whose organization is making the establishment of Libyan democracy impossible.
The fact that the United States has a long and torrid history of backing terrorist groups in North Africa and the Middle East will surprise only those who watch the news and ignore history.
The CIA first aligned itself with extremist Islam during the Cold War era. Back then, America saw the world in rather simple terms: on one side the Soviet Union and Third World nationalism, which America regarded as a Soviet tool; on the other side Western nations and extremist political Islam, which America considered an ally in the struggle against the Soviet Union.
Since then America has used the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt against Soviet expansion, the Sarekat Islam against Sukarno in Indonesia and the Jamaat-e-Islami terror group against Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan. Last but certainly not least there is Al-Qaeda.
Al Qaeda: The CIA’s Computer Data Base
Lest we forget, the CIA gave birth to Osama Bin Laden and breastfed his organization throughout the 1980’s. Former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that Al Qaeda was unquestionably a product of western intelligence agencies. Robin Cook explained that Al Qaeda, which literally means “the base” in Arabic, was originally the computer database of the thousands of Islamist extremists who were trained by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) used to have a different name: Al Qaeda in Iraq.
ISIS is metastasizing at an alarming rate in Libya, under the leadership of one Abdelhakim Belhadj. Fox News recently admitted that Mr. Belhadj “was once courted by the Obama administration and members of Congress” and he was a staunch ally of the United States in the quest to topple Gaddafi. In 2011, the United States and Senator McCain hailed Belhadj as a “heroic freedom fighter” and Washington gave his organization arms and logistical support. Now Senator McCain has called Belhadj’s organization ISIS, “probably the biggest threat to America and everything we stand for.”
Under Gaddafi, Islamic terrorism was virtually non existent and in 2009 the US State Department called Libya “an important ally in the war on terrorism”.
Today, after US intervention, Libya is home to the world’s largest loose arms cache, and its porous borders are routinely transited by a host of heavily armed non-state actors including Tuareg separatists, jihadists who forced Mali’s national military from Timbuktu and increasingly ISIS militiamen led by former US ally Abdelhakim Belhadj.
Clearly, Gaddafi’s system of economic and direct democracy was one of the 21st century’s most profound democratic experiments and NATO’s bombardment of Libya may indeed go down in history as one of the greatest military failures of the 21st century.
Garikai Chengu is a scholar at Harvard University. Contact him on [email protected]
A new analysis of the Obama-proposed TTIP ‘trade’ treaty, which the U.S. would have with Europe, finds that it was initiated and shaped by large international corporations, which will, also according to the only independent economic analysis that has thus far been done of TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership), be the only beneficiaries of the proposed Treaty — all at the expense of the publics in each one of the participating countries.
This new study is titled «Public Services Under Attack», but it’s about more than just the proposed treaty’s impacts upon replacing «Public Services» by private services.
Corporate Europe headlined about this study on October 12th, «Public services under attack through TTIP and CETA», and listed 15 of what they consider to be the report’s highlights. The following will instead quote extensively from the study itself, so that this summary will come mainly from the report itself:
The study is »Published by Association Internationale de Techniciens, Experts et Chercheurs (AITEC), Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), European Federation of Public Services Unions (EPSU), Instytut Globalnej Odpowiedzialności (IGO), Transnational Institute (TNI), Vienna Chamber of Labour (AK Vienna), and War on Want». So: it reflects a concern for workers, and for the poor, not mainly for corporate owners — the latter being the proposed Treaty’s sole sponsors and beneficiaries.
This new study opens by defining (page 8) «Public Service»: «Public services are those provided by a government to its population, usually based around the social consensus that certain services should be available to all regardless of income». Another way of stating this is that a «public service» is one provided to citizens as a right, available to all equally, instead of as a privilege, available only upon the basis of ability-to-pay. The «social consensus that certain services should be available to all regardless of income» is repudiated in treaties like this, because they reflect instead a «libertarian» (to use the U.S. term) or «liberal» (to use the European term) viewpoint, that a person’s wealth reflects that person’s contribution to society, so that no poor person possesses any rights at all. (Supporting this viewpoint, Adam Smith, in his 1762 Glasgow Lectures on Jurisprudence, said: «Till there be property there can be no government, the very end of which is to secure wealth, and to defend the rich from the poor».
He wrote this in a society and age in which virtually all wealth – or else poverty – was inherited from one’s parents, not earned. He portrayed the poor as being the enemies. Their rights were no more than their wealth, in his view. He retained that aristocratic view throughout his life.) This viewpoint is also often referred to as being «conservatism», because it conserves the existing power-structure, with the richest (the aristocracy) being the most powerful in the future, as they have been in the past. Consequently, in the West at least, the ideological polarity is between «liberalism» versus «conservatism», both of which are fundamentally the same. Progressivism hardly even has a name, as of yet. (In other words: the ideological ‘debate’ is bogus, and is shaped on ‘both’ sides by the aristocracy.)
Therefore, proponents of Obama’s proposed ‘trade’ treaties call themselves, variously, «liberals», «libertarians», and «conservatives»; but only the terminology varies, because the reality does not.
The same section of the study says: «With free trade treaties like CETA and TTIP, governments will lose policy space to organise public services according to societies’ preferences by locking in liberalisation and privatisation. This is raising great concerns about whether profit will distort the ability of these services to be run in the public interest. Moreover, government attempts to regulate them could be deemed ‘barriers to trade’ and overturned».
The report’s Table of Contents is also something of a summary of the report:
Executive summary…3
1. Introduction…6
2. Dangerous liaisons: business, services, and trade…9
2.1 A brief history of services lobbying: the birth of GATS and ESF…10
2.2 Brothers in arms: the EU negotiators soliciting corporate lobbying…10
2.3 Systemic collusion: DG Trade’s calls for support…12
3. Business wish-list for Europe‘s public services…14
3.1 Public services: everything must go!…15
3.2 Dismantling public health…16
3.3 Competitive tendering: bidding for health contracts…17
3.4 Financial industry: a major player in services liberalisation…19
3.5 Procurement: attack on public utilities…20
3.6 Public Private Partnerships: profiting from austerity…20
3.7 Post: eroding universal service…21
3.8 Hollywood: fighting the cultural exception…22
3.9 Future proofing TTIP: digital trade in public services…23
4. Rolling out the red carpet: how the EU bows to corporate demands…26
4.1 An ESF win: privatising everything but the kitchen sink?…27
4.2 Pleasing BusinessEurope: negotiating PPPs…30
4.3 Standstill: no backtracking from postal services liberalisation…31
4.4 Water utilities unprotected…32
4.5 Energy services: blocking policy space…33
4.6 On the rise: privately funded services…33
4.7 TNCs and the commodification of education…34
4.8 NHS: the sell-off of public health…37
4.9 Audiovisual services: nixing an exemption…39
4.10 Cashing in: the financialisation of social services…40
4.11 ISDS: defending a corporate privilege…42
4.12 Private tribunals adjudicating on public services…43
5. Conclusion: democracy and social justice, not trade deals threatening public services…45
Here is the opening of:
3.1 Public services: everything must go
To ensure maximum coverage of services in TTIP, the powerhouse lobby groups on both sides of the Atlantic, ESF and CSI, recommended a particular negotiation strategy known as a ‘negative list’ which means that all public services are subject to liberalisation unless an explicit exception is made.
This ‘list it or lose it’ approach dramatically expands the scope of a trade agreement as governments make commitments in areas they might not even be aware of, such as new services emerging in the future (see box 7 on page 28). It marks a departure from the positive lists used so far in EU trade agreements containing only those services which governments have agreed to liberalising.
At the same time, transatlantic lobby groups are trying to prevent negotiators from exempting any public services from the trade agreement. Their alarm bells started to ring in February 2015 when the European Parliament’s Committee on International Trade (INTA) drafted a TTIP resolution asking for «an adequate carve-out of sensitive services such as public services and public utilities (including water, health, social security systems, and education) allowing national and local authorities enough room for manoeuvre to legislate in the public interest».21 …
Then, there is:
3.2 Dismantling public health
The public health sector is one of the main targets of business lobbyists advocating for TTIP, hoping to capitalize on increasing health expenditure driven by aging populations in both the EU and the US, while public health sectors continue to suffer from fiscal pressures and harsh austerity measures. For instance, the powerful Washington-based Alliance for Healthcare Competitiveness (AHC) assembles companies and associations representing service providers, hospital operators, insurers, producers of pharmaceuticals and medical devices, as well as IT and logistics companies (including Abbott, Johnson & Johnson, Medtronic, UPS, Intel, United Health Group, CSI, PhRMA, and USCIB). It prides itself on being «the only coalition advocating for the freer flow of health goods and services at the healthcare sector level». 26
AHC complains that «today’s world of health care services is highly restricted and fragmented», but an «open trading world for these services would create a large new flow of revenue into the United States [to executives and major stockholders of those companies]». …
Then, there is:
3.10 Locking in privatisation
Beyond prising open services markets, one of the central features of free trade agreements such as TTIP and CETA is their capacity to effectively lock in previous and future liberalisations and privatisations – regardless of any government that gets voted in or what its mandate or policies might be.
Apart from ‘standstill’ clauses irreversibly binding existing policies, business groups further demand the inclusion of a so-called ‘ratchet’ provision which would effectively lock in future deregulations. …
Then, there is:
3.11 Protecting investment – endangering welfare
Business lobbyists are united in their call to have a broad investment protection chapter in TTIP, including the highly controversial Investor-State Dispute Settlement mechanism (ISDS), granting foreign investors the exclusive right to bypass international tribunals. One of the overarching corporate aims is to prevent governments from any regulatory changes limiting private profits.
Then, there is:
4.1 An ESF win: privatising everything but the kitchen sink?
Heeding the demands of the business lobby, CETA and TTIP apply to virtually all public services … at best excluding some core sovereign functions such as law enforcement, the judiciary, or the services of a central bank.84 [In common parlance, as Grover Norquist has phrased the matter, «reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.»]
Then, there are sections indicating that postal services and also the water utility are to be privatized so as to be available only only on a for-profit basis: excluding or else prohibitively charging regions where those services are unprofitable:
4.3 Standstill: no backtracking from postal services liberalisation
4.4 Water utilities unprotected
Education gets treated similarly. Then, there is:
4.8 NHS: the sell-off of public health
TTIP and CETA will allow investors domiciled in North America to exploit liberalisations already undertaken in Europe’s public health sectors to force through further market openings and to lock in past privatisations. The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is an important case in point. …
Then, there are several sections devoted to such things as:
Regulatory changes, such as new laws or taxes diminishing private profits, may be seen as breaches of an investor’s «legitimate expectations» justifying multi-billion euro payouts in compensation [to companies that have been prohibited from activities by regulations, or even to the violating companies that have been fined].
and,
Thus, «indirect expropriation» lends itself to an extremely broad range of interpretation. For example, tribunals have already denounced many public interest regulations as measures «tantamount» or «equivalent» to expropriation – and ordered states to pay multimillions of euros in compensation.
THE STUDY’S MAJOR FAILINGS
A major failing of this study is that it ignores such things as: Locking in food, drug, automobile-safety, and other existing regulations, so that, for example, when new scientific studies or else newly developed technologies indicate that an updating of a regulation would save lives or otherwise help the public, the regulation under TTIP and similar treaties cannot be updated (except by subjecting the government to potentially crippling lawsuits), which crippling of government will produce ever-increasing numbers of diseases and deaths as government is frozen even while science and technology continue to advance.
U.S. President Barack Obama was elected to office in 2008 with the promise and public expectation that he opposed anti-democratic, pro-aristocratic, initiatives such as this. The fact that he now goes even far beyond the extremists Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in them, is virtual proof that the United States is no longer a democracy. (At least those candidates were honest about their conservatism.) Is the EU at all a democracy? Or will they accept Obama’s global-aristocratic monstrosity, and push for the aristocracy against the public, like the U.S. government does? The hypocrisy is mind-boggling.
Anyone who wants to know the mechanisms by which Obama’s mega ‘trade’ treaties — TTIP, TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), and TiSA (Trade in Services Agreement) — will operate, can find that machinery (the means to enslave the public to the aristocrats) described here.
Legitimate opposition parties are banned from participating in Egypt’s first parliamentary elections since junta authority seized power by coup d’etat – complicit with Washington in ousting President Mohamed Morsi, now imprisoned on trumped up charges.
Strongman ruler Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is a US War College graduate, taught to crush all opposition to junta rule, undisguised despotism, governing by state terror. Democracy is strictly forbidden.
Elections underway are farcical by any standard, proceeding in two phases for 596 parliamentary seats (568 elected ones, the others Sisi-appointed) onOctober 18 and 19 in 14 governorates, then in 13 remaining ones on November 22 and 23.
Run-offs will be held in districts with no clear winner. Final results are expected in December.
Junta supporting candidates alone are participating. Legitimate regime opponents risk imprisonment or execution, one way or another excluded from the political process.
Sisi urged Egyptians to “(l)ine up in front of polling stations and plant with your votes the hope for a brighttomorrow for our new Egypt” – impossible with him in charge. Despotism isn’t democracy.
Junta power rules ruthlessly. Fundamental freedoms don’t exist. Tens of thousands of regime opponents languish in gulag hell – guilty of challenging tyranny.
Journalist Khaled Dawoud said “(t)here are no big issues being discussed…(I)t’s not an election of ideas. (Candidates) are competing over who will be” Sisi stooges.
“You don’t join parliament to oppose the government.” Membership means being part of a privileged club, everyone reading from the same page.
Sisi’s 2014 decree neutralized political parties – 75% of seats reserved for unaffiliated candidates to give junta power brokers a clear advantage.
Sisi arranged things to solidify his grip on power, assuring a rubber-stamp parliament once the political process is completed, a meaningless exercise in junta rule, legitimizing the illegitimate.
Press censorship is rife, government criticism strictly forbidden. Offenders can expect harsh treatment. No one against Hosni Mubarak is running for office. Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood party was banned, officially designated a terrorist group, their members when apprehended are imprisoned.
Many pro-democracy supporters went underground or live abroad in exile. Democracy International monitors elections. On Friday, it said it’s unable to “conduct the comprehensive observation mission earlier envisioned” because junta officials refused to issue visas for some members of its team.
Reuters reported low turnout and “little enthusiasm” by late afternoon local time, saying most Sisi political opponents and critics are “behind bars.”
Most voters showing up are privileged Egyptians and elderly Sisi supporters. The new chamber will rubber-stamp his rule.
A monitor at a working-class Cairo polling station said only around 10% of eligible voters showed up. Most other locations had more security force presence than voters. Final turnout will be very low, no matter the official count, likely way inflated when announced.
Muslim Brotherhood member Wafaa Hefney called the election “a farce. I don’t think anyone in Egypt is taking it seriously. All the candidates are” junta approved.
Egypt has had no parliament since June 2012 – when a court arbitrarily dissolved a body dominated by Muslim Brotherhood members.
Reuters said Egypt’s constitution may be amended post-election to concentrate power solely in Sisi’s hands – to “legitimize” his despotic rule, officially making parliament a rubber-stamp body only, delegitimizing it before established if reports are accurate.
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.”
Washington so-called war on ISIS is a complete fabrication. Russia’s is the real thing. Its effectiveness is why Obama won’t cooperate with Putin – even though both leaders claim they share the same goal.
In over a year of daily Syria bombing, America’s vaunted military destroyed zero ISIS targets, nor those of other terrorist groups.
On Friday, Russia’s General Staff said its warplanes destroyed 456 ISIS targets since September 30, striking them with pinpoint accuracy. Its Main Operations Directorate chief Colonel-General Andrei Kartapolov said:
Most armed formations are demoralized. There is growing discontent with field commanders, and there is evidence of disobedience. Desertion is becoming widespread.-
Intelligence shows about 100 terrorists enter Turkey from Syria daily. They’re leaving front line positions through refugee routes, fleeing for their lives.
Kartapolov said Russian “aircraft carry out strikes against the militants infrastructure based on data provided through several intelligence channels as well as intel supplied by the information center in Baghdad. We only attack targets held by internationally-recognized terrorist groups.”
Washington’s campaign targets Syrian infrastructure sites, not ISIS or other terrorist groups, falsely claiming otherwise, willfully deceiving the US public.
“It is against our principles to advise our colleagues which targets to strike,” said Kartapolov. “However, on October 11, a power plant and an electrical substation were destroyed by coalition warplanes in the vicinity of Tell-Ala.”
US and allied warplanes are “deliberately destroying the civilian infrastructure in population centers making them unfit for habitation. Because of that civilians are fleeing these towns and contribute to the flow of refugees to Europe.”
Washington refuses to share intelligence data on ISIS and other terrorist groups’ locations. “So we went ahead and created a comprehensive map of areas controlled by ISIL, based on our intel and on data provided by the information center in Baghdad, Kartapolov explained.
In Beijing at the 6th Xiangshan Security Forum, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov addressed what Putin repeatedly stresses.
Russia seeks cooperative relations with all nations. Washington rejects it, especially Moscow’s outreach to coordinate efforts on each nation’s Syrian operations.
“We are constantly in touch with the Syrian army,” Antonov explained. “All of our strikes are surgical and delivered with precision, exclusively against Islamic State infrastructures. We have not hit any other military or civilian facilities, let alone communities and mosques, contrary to what some western media have been claiming.”
“We cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that individual countries (notably America, Britain, France and Israel) help terrorist groups, counting on achieving their own selfish national objectives” – while duplicitously claiming otherwise.
Russia’s righteous campaign has Washington flummoxed, on its back foot, its regional imperial strategy taking a major body blow, its imported anti-Assad death squads getting pummelled.
Syrian ground and air forces killed hundreds of ISIS and other terrorists since their major offensive began days earlier – a sustained effort to regain lost territory, liberating one village after another, reversing past setbacks, US proxies taking heavy losses.
No wonder Washington rejects cooperating with Russia. Putin’s righteous mission means its Middle East agenda is no longer unchallenged – maybe prologue for contesting it on a broader scale.
America’s dark side reflects pure evil, humanity’s greatest ever threat, its survival literally up for grabs.
Paul Craig Roberts calls Washington’s criminal agenda “unmatched anywhere on earth or in history.” Its rage for world dominance may kill us all.
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.”
The distinguished and knowledgeable international commentator William Engdahl, in a superb statement, has expressed the view I gave you that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech on September 28 at the 70th anniversary of the United Nations changed the balance of power in the world. Until Putin’s speech the world was intimidated by the Washington Bully. Resistance to Washington brought swift retribution. In the Middle East and Africa it brought economic sanctions and military invasions that destroyed entire countries. In France and other US vassal states it brought multi-billion dollar confiscations of bank net worth as the price of not following Washington’s policies toward other countries.
Other countries felt powerless in the face of the arrogant hegemonic Unipower, which from time to time replied to noncompliance with threats, such as US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage delivered to Pakistan, to bomb noncompliant countries “back to the stone age.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/5369198.stm
President Putin of Russia brought all that to end on September 28. He stood up before the world in the presence of the overflowing hubris of the hegemon and belled the cat.
Putin denounced Washington’s threat to the sovereignty, and thereby the freedom, of peoples and countries. He denounced the heartless criminality of Washington’s destruction of the lives of millions of peoples on the basis of nothing other than Washington’s own arrogance. He denounced the illegality of Washington’s assaults on the sovereignty of other peoples, and declared that Russia can no longer tolerate this state of affairs in the world.
Two days later he took over the war in Syria and began exterminating the Washington financed and equipped Islamic State. Cruise missiles launched from the Caspian Sea hit ISIL targets with pinpoint accuracy and showed Washington’s EU vassals that Washington’s ABM system could not protect them if Europe permitted Washington to force Europe into conflict with Russia.
Washington’s response was more lies: “the missiles hit Iran,” said the idiots in Washington. The entire world laughed at the lie. Washington, some said, is whistling past its empire’s own graveyard.
Putin’s declaration of multi-polarity was seconded by the President of China, who said in his understated mild way that every country must participate in shaping the future and not just follow the leadership of one.
The hegemonic Unipower ceased to exist on September 28.
This is a sea change. It will affect the behavior of every government. Even some of the craven vassals states, whose “leaders” are bought-and-paid-for, will move toward a more independent foreign policy.
The remaining danger is the crazed American neoconservatives. I know many of them. They are completely insane ideologues. This inhuman filth has controlled the foreign policy of every US government since Clinton’s second term. They are a danger to all life on earth. Look at the destruction they have wreaked in the former Yugoslavia, in Ukraine, in Georgia and South Ossetia, in Africa, in Afghanistan and the Middle East. The American people were too brainwashed by lies and by political impotence to do anything about it, and Washington’s vassals in Europe, UK, Canada, Australia, and Japan had to pretend that this policy of international murder was “bringing freedom and democracy.”
The crazed filth that controls US foreign policy is capable of defending US hegemony with nuclear weapons. The neoconservatives must be removed from power, arrested, and put on international trial for their horrendous war crimes before they defend their hegemony with Armageddon.
Neoconservatives and their allies in the military/security complex make audacious use of false flag attacks. These evil people are capable of orchestrating a false flag attack that propels the US and Russia to war.
The neocons are also capable of plotting Putin’s assassination. The crazed John McCain, whom idiotic Arizonians keep returning to the US Senate, has publicly called for Putin’s death, as have other former federal officials, such as former CIA official Herbert E. Meyer, who publicly called for Putin’s removal “with a bullet hole in the back of his head.” I am confident that the neoconservatives are plotting Putin’s assassination with their Chechen terrorist friends. Unlike the US president, Putin often presents himself in open situations.
Russia and its President, Vladimir Putin, a little more than a year ago, in July 2014 were the focus of attention in Europe and North America, accused, without a shred of forensic evidence, of shooting down an unarmed civilian Malaysian airliner over eastern Ukraine. The Russians were deemed out to restore the Soviet Union with their agreement to the popular referendum of Crimean citizens to annex into the Russian Federation and not Ukraine. Western sanctions were being thrown at Russia by both Washington and the EU. People spoke of a new Cold War. Today the picture is changing, and profoundly. It is Washington that is on the defensive, exposed for the criminal actions it has been doing in Syria and across the Middle East, including creating the recent asylum crisis in Germany and large parts of the EU.
As a student of international politics and economics for most of my adult life, I must say the emotional restraint that Vladimir Putin and the Russian government have shown against tasteless ad hominem attacks, from people such as Hillary Clinton who likened Putin to Adolf Hitler, is remarkable. But more than restraint is required to bring our world from the brink or some might say, the onset of a World War III. Brilliant and directed action is essential. Here something extraordinary has taken place in the very few days since President Vladimir Putin’s September 28, UNGA speech in New York.
What he said . . .
What Putin said to the UN General Assembly must be noted to put what he and Russia did in the days immediately following into clear focus. First of all he made clear what the international law behind the UN Charter means and that Russia is scrupulously abiding by the Charter in actions in Syria. Russia, unlike the US, has been formally asked by the legitimate Syrian government to aid its war against terror.
To the UN delegates and heads of state Putin stated,
“The decisions debated within the UN are either taken in the form of resolutions or not. As diplomats say, they either pass or they don’t. Any action taken by circumventing this procedure is illegitimate and constitutes a violation of the UN Charter and contemporary international law.”
He continued,
“We all know that after the end of the Cold War the world was left with one center of dominance, and those who found themselves at the top of the pyramid were tempted to think that, since they are so powerful and exceptional, they know best what needs to be done and thus they don’t need to reckon with the UN, which, instead of rubber-stamping the decisions they need, often stands in their way.”
Putin followed this with a clear message to Washington and NATO governments on the subject of national sovereignty, something anathema to many who embrace the Nirvana supposed to come from globalization, homogenization of all to one level: “What is the meaning of state sovereignty, the term which has been mentioned by our colleagues here?” Putin rhetorically asked.
“It basically means freedom, every person and every state being free to choose their future. By the way, this brings us to the issue of the so-called legitimacy of state authorities. You shouldn’t play with words and manipulate them. In international law, international affairs, every term has to be clearly defined, transparent and interpreted the same way by one and all.”
Putin added, “We are all different, and we should respect that. Nations shouldn’t be forced to all conform to the same development model that somebody has declared the only appropriate one. We should all remember the lessons of the past. For example, we remember examples from our Soviet past, when the Soviet Union exported social experiments, pushing for changes in other countries for ideological reasons, and this often led to tragic consequences and caused degradation instead of progress.”
Those few words succinctly point to what is fundamentally wrong in the international order today. Nations, above all the one proclaiming herself Sole Superpower, Infallible Hegemon, the USA, have arrogantly moved after the collapse of the main adversary, the Soviet Union in 1990, to create what can only be called a global totalitarian empire, what G.H.W. Bush in his September 11, 1991 address to Congress called a New World Order. I believe with conviction that borders do matter, that respect for different cultures, different historical experiences is essential in a world of peace. That is as much true with nations as with individual human beings. We seem to have forgotten that simple notion amid all the wars of the past decades. Vladimir Putin reminds us.
Then the Russian president goes to the heart of the matter. He lays bare the true activities of the Obama Administration in Syria and the Middle East in arming and training “moderate” Islamist terrorists to attack Washington’s bête noire, Syria’s duly-elected and recently re-elected President, Bashar al Assad.
Putin states,
“instead of learning from other people’s mistakes, some prefer to repeat them and continue to export revolutions, only now these are “democratic” revolutions. Just look at the situation in the Middle East and Northern Africa…problems have been piling up for a long time in this region, and people there wanted change. But what was the actual outcome? Instead of bringing about reforms, aggressive intervention rashly destroyed government institutions and the local way of life. Instead of democracy and progress, there is now violence, poverty, social disasters and total disregard for human rights, including even the right to life.”
Then in a remark addressed to Washington and their NGO Color Revolutions known as the Arab Spring, Putin pointedly asks, “I’m urged to ask those who created this situation: do you at least realize now what you’ve done?“
Putin, without naming it, addresses the US and NATO role in creating ISIS, noting with precision the curious anomaly that the sophisticated new US Treasury unit to conduct financial sanctions against terrorist organizations, has utterly ignored the funding sources of ISIS, their oil sales facilitated by the Turkish President’s own family to name just one. The Russian President stated,
“the Islamic State itself did not come out of nowhere. It was initially developed as a weapon against undesirable secular regimes. Having established control over parts of Syria and Iraq, Islamic State now aggressively expands into other regions. It seeks dominance in the Muslim world and beyond…The situation is extremely dangerous. In these circumstances, it is hypocritical and irresponsible to make declarations about the threat of terrorism and at the same time turn a blind eye to the channels used to finance and support terrorists, including revenues from drug trafficking, the illegal oil trade and the arms trade.\
And what Putin is doing . . .
Russia in the last weeks has completely out-maneuvered the diabolical, and they are diabolical, agenda of the Obama Administration not only in Syria but also in the entire Middle East and now in the EU with unleashing the flood of refugees. He openly reached out to invite Obama in their New York September 30 meeting to cooperate together in defeating ISIS. Obama stubbornly insisted that first Assad must go, despite the fact that Christine Wormuth, the Pentagon Undersecretary responsible for the Syrian war, confirmed Russian statements about Assad’s essential role today in any defeat of ISIS. She told the US Senate that Assad’s military “still has considerable strength,”adding, “it’s still the most powerful military force on the ground. The assessment right now is the regime is not in imminent danger of falling.”
Now come the howls of protest from neo-con warhawks, like the ever-ready-for-war Senator John McCain, chairman of the NGO International Republican Institute of the democratic revolution exporting US-backed NGO, National Endowment for Democracy. Or we hear flaccid protests from President Obama. This is because Washington finds itself deeply exposed to the light of world scrutiny for backing terrorists in Syria against a duly-elected state leader and government. The US warhawks accuse Russia of hitting “the moderate opposition” or civilians.
Emperor’s New Clothes . . .
Russia’s Putin is playing the role ever so elegantly, even gracefully, of the small boy in the Hans Christian Anderson classic fairy tale from 1837, The Emperor’s New Clothes. The boy stands with his mother amid thousands of other villagers in the crowd outside the vain Emperor’s palace balcony, where the disassociated king struts around the balcony naked, thinking he is wearing a magnificent new suit of clothes. The boy shouts, to the embarrassment of all servile citizens who pretend his clothes are magnificent, “Mother, look the Emperor has no clothes!”
What do I mean? In the first four days of precision bombing of select sites in Syria Russian advanced fighter jets firing Kh-29L air-to-surface laser-guided missiles that strike targets with a precision less than two meters, managed to destroy key ISIS command centers, munitions depots and vital infrastructure. According to the Russian Defense Ministry official reports, with photos, Su-34 bombers attacked an ISIS special training camp and munition depot near Al-Tabqa, Ar-Raqqah province,” a critical ISIS outpost captured in August, 2014 after bitter battles. “As a result of explosion of the munition depot, the terrorist training camp was completely destroyed,” the Russian Defense Ministry spokesman stated. Russian Su-25 jets have also attacked training camp of the Islamic State in the Syrian Idlib, destroying a workshop for explosive belt production.
Moscow states its air force has “engaged 3 munition, fuel and armament depots of the illegal armed groups. KAB-500 aviation bombs detonated the munition and armament,” and they used BETAB-500 concrete-piercing bombs to destroy four command posts of the ISIS armed groups. The facilities with terrorists are completely destroyed,” the Moscow spokesman added. Russia’s aviation conducted 20 flights and carried out 10 airstrikes against facilities of the Islamic State (ISIL) terrorist group in the past 24 hours. Then Moscow announced they had also hit key outposts of other terror groups such as the Al Qaeda-franchise, Al Nusra Front.
These are the so-called “moderates” that McCain and the Washington warhawks are weeping over. Washington has been creating what it calls the “New” Syrian Forces (NSF), which they claim is composed of “moderate” terrorists, euphemistically referred to as “rebels.” Imagine how recruitment talks go: CIA recruiter, “Mohammed, are you a moderate Islamist? Why yes, my dear CIA trainer. Please take me, train me and arm me in the fight against the ruthless dictator Assad and against ISIS. I’m on your side. You can trust me…”
In late September it was reported that Major Anas Obaid a.k.a. Abu Zayd, on completing his CIA training in Turkey, defected from the train-and-equip program to join Jabhat al-Nusra (Al Qaeda in Syria) immediately on entering Syria. Incredibly, US officials admit that Washington does not track or exercise command-and-control of its Jihadist proxies once they enter Syria. Abu Zayd’s defection after being trained in advanced warfare techniques by the US, is typical. Other elements of the New Syrian Forces directly handed all their weapons to Nusra upon entering Syrian territory at the town of Atareb at the end of September.
These latest “moderate” defections to join Al Qaeda’s Al-Nusra Front affiliate in Syria come less than two weeks after Gen. Lloyd Austin III, head of the US “war against ISIS,” during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Syria, admitted that the US military program that intended produce 5,400 trained fighters a year has so far only resulted in “four or five” who still remain on the ground and active in combat. The rest have all joined ISIS or Al Nusra Front of Al Qaeda, the US-backed “moderate opposition” to ISIL.
What the successful Russian precision airstrikes have done is expose in all its ugly nakedness the Emperor’s New Clothes. For more than one year, the Obama Administration claims it has committed the most awesome airpower on the planet allegedly to destroy ISIS, which has been described as a “ragtag band of militants running around the desert in basketball shoes.”
Curiously, until last week, ISIS has only expanded its web of power in Syria and Iraq under US bombings. Now, within 72 hours, the Russian military, launching only 60 bombing runs in 72 hours, hitting more than 50 ISIS targets, has brought the ISIS combatants into what the Russian Defense Ministry spokesman described as a state of “panic” where more than 600 have deserted. And, according to Moscow, the fight is only beginning, expected, they say to last three to four months.
The Obama Administration has been training terrorists of Al Qaeda/Al Nusra, allegedly to fight ISIS, much like the disgraced General David Petraeus did in Iraq and Afghanistan along with Obama’s special ISIS coordinator, the just-resigned General John Allen. The US-trained “moderate” terrorists were being readied, it’s now clear to all the world, in reality, to battle Assad and open the way for a Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Syria and a real plunge into darkness for the world if that were to succeed.
Now, with the truth in the open, exposed by the remarkable successes of a handful of Russian fighter jets in four days against ISIS, accomplishing more than the US “anti-ISIS coalition” in more than one year, it is clear to the world Washington has been playing a dirty double game.
Now that hypocritical Obama Administration mask has been blown off with the precision hit of a Russian laser-guided Kh-29L missile. As German and other EU governments have admitted, much to the strong objection of Washington, Putin has demonstrated that Russia is the essential part of any peaceful resolution of the Syria war. That in turn has a huge bearing on the current asylum-seeker crisis in Germany and other parts of the EU. It also has a huge bearing on prospects for world peace. The Norwegian Parliament’s Nobel Peace Prize Committee, rather than consider John Kerry, might consider Vladimir Putin and Russian Defense Minister, Sergey Shoygu, for the prize.
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
Fair-and-balanced Fox News reported on Wednesday that “Cuban military operatives reportedly have been spotted in Syria, where sources believe they are advising President Bashar al-Assad’s soldiers and may be preparing to man Russian-made tanks to aid Damascus in fighting rebel forces backed by the U.S.”
Fox’s claim of an imaginary enemy alliance relies on two sources: the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies and an anonymous U.S. official.
The source at the Miami Institute indicated that
“An Arab military officer at the Damascus airport reportedly witnessed two Russian planes arrive there with Cuban military personnel on board. When the officer questioned the Cubans, they told him they were there to assist Assad because they are experts at operating Russian tanks.”
It is unclear what nationality the “Arab” officer was. Perhaps, said Arab determined the people aboard the Russian plane were Cubans because he saw them smoking cigars and drinking mojitos. The Cuban soldiers then volunteered – supposedly – they were “there to assist Assad” because of their expertise manning Russian tanks. However improbable this may seem to an unbiased observer, the source from the Miami Institute said that “it doesn’t surprise me.”
The supposed U.S. official – who Fox grants anonymity to without giving a reason why – related “evidence” from “intelligence reports” that Cuban troops “may” have trained in Russia and “may have” come to Syria in Russian planes. Sounds legit.
Despite the thinness of the report’s sourcing and the improbability of its content, other news organizations were quick to parrot its claims. Spanish newspaper ABC noted the next day that media from Germany to Argentina to the Middle East had echoed the Fox News report, while ABC did the same themselves.
By Friday, the story had gained enough traction that it was raised at a White House briefing. In a response that should have been enough to put the story to rest, the White House Press Secretary said “we’ve seen no evidence to indicate that those reports are true.”
But a few hours later, the Daily Beast had definitively declared in a headline that: “Cuba Is Intervening in Syria to Help Russia. It’s Not the First Time Havana’s Assisted Moscow.”
Progressive concern troll James Bloodworth turned Fox’s rumors into fact and wrote that
“Not for the first time Cuban forces are doing Russia’s dirty work, this time in Syria… Obama has been holding his hand out in a gesture of goodwill to America’s adversaries only for them to blow him a raspberry back in his face – while standing atop a pile of Syrian corpses.”
In reality, Obama’s “gesture of goodwill” is little more than behaving less overtly hostile after decades of American aggression against Cuba and Iran. If you are choking someone unprovoked and you loosen you’re grip, it is far from a gesture of goodwill.
Bloodworth also tries to make a historical argument that Cuba’s (imaginary) military actions in Syria are consistent with their “bloody” interventions elsewhere. He decries “Cuban terror in Ethiopia” that resulted in hundreds of thousands of people being killed.
“The tragedy was largely a consequence of the policies pursued by the Communist dictatorship that ruled Ethiopia at the time – a regime propped up by Cuba and the Soviet Union.”
In 1977, Somalia had invaded Ethiopia in an attack that “had been encouraged by ambivalent signals from Washington,” according to historian Piero Gleijeses in his book Visions of Freedom. Initially reluctant to become involved, Fidel Castro finally agreed to Ethiopian requests to send troops to repel the Somali invasion.
Gleijeses found in his extensive review of formerly classified military documents that Cuba’s motives in aiding Ethiopia were sincere:
With hindsight, we know that Mengistu’s policies resulted in disaster, but this was not clear in 1977: though the process was undeniably bloody, the Ethiopian junta had decreed a radical agrarian reform and taken unprecedented steps to foster the cultural rights of the non-Amhara population… The evidence indicates that the Cubans intervened because they believed, as Cuban intelligence stated in March 1977, that ‘the social and economic measures adopted by Ethiopia’s leadership are the most progressive we have seen in any underdeveloped country since the triumph of the Cuban revolution.’ [2]
In addition to correcting the record on Ethiopia, Gleijeses’ study also serves to set the record straight on Cuba’s historical modus operandi in its military interventions abroad. Cuba did maintain a large military presence in Angola for nearly 15 years, starting in 1975.
Castro first sent troops in November 1975 after Angolan President Agostinho Neto warned of a South African invasion of the country already underway which would inevitably topple the nascent government without outside support. Cuba agreed to send soldiers to Angola right away. Several months later, they would repel the apartheid army back to Pretoria. They remained in Angola at Neto’s bequest to prevent further incursions from the racist South African army into the country’s sovereign territory.
At the same time, there was an ongoing civil war between Neto’s MPLA, the largest and most popular of the guerilla groups, and the South African and American-backed UNITA guerillas led by former Portuguese collaborator Jonas Savimbi.
Castro was adamant that Cuban troops would be responsible for preventing a South African invasion, while Angolan troops should deal with their own internal conflict. In meetings with Neto, Castro “kept hammering away on the need to fight the bandits … He explained to us that the fight against the bandits was necessarily and without question the responsibility of the Angolans, that we could not wage this war, that it was their war.” [3]
Cuba’s position during the Angolan conflict is consistent with the diplomatic approach they have repeatedly espoused in Syria, that the Syrian conflict is a domestic problem for the Syrian people and government to resolve themselves, while the international community works to achieve a peaceful solution.
“Cuba reiterates that international cooperation, based on the principles of objectivity, impartiality and non-selectivity, is the only way to effectively promote and protect all human rights,” Cuban representative to the UN Human Rights Council Rodolfo Reyes said at a meeting in Switzerland. He added that “Cuba is confident of the capacity of the Syrian people and government to solve their domestic problems without foreign interference.”
Unreliable Sources
That the Fox News could cause such a stir is a testament to the refusal of mainstream news organizations to verify sources. In all of the iterations of the “Cuban troops in Syria” fantasy, there are no new sources cited. The original Fox News report cites one anonymous U.S. official who may, or may not, even exist. The only source on record with their incredulous claims is someone from the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies (ICCAS) at the University of Miami.
ICCAS is notorious for its reactionary, anti-Communist politics revered among the fanatically right-wing Cuban and Cuban-American population in Miami. Their academic research includes a conspiracy theory that appears to implicate Fidel Castro in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Another ICCAS report claims “the often-repeated view in many countries that the United States is an evil power, guilty for much of the problems and sufferings of the developing world, is owed in great part to the propaganda efforts of Fidel Castro” – not, rather, to decades of direct U.S. military intervention; profligate support to fascist military dictatorships; and predatory, neo-colonial lending policies that demand neoliberal structural adjustment programs which funnel public assets and resources to creditor interests, at the expense of the employment, health and well-being of the vast majority of local populations.
ICCAS is also home to the Cuba Transition Project whose mission is “to study and make recommendations for the reconstruction of Cuba once the post-Castro transition begins in earnest.” CTP acknowledges on its Web site that “the project was established in 2002 and supported by grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) until 2010.” It’s funding indicates it is at least indirectly an arm of the U.S. government’s destabilization and subversion efforts dedicated to regime change of the politically and economically independent Cuban government.
Cuban Prensa Latina reporter in Syria Miguel Fernández noted that ICCAS has reported six or seven times since 2006 that Fidel Castro has died. He suggested reports such as those originating with ICCAS about Cuban troops in Syria were part of the campaigns of reactionary groups opposed to normalization to tarnish the new relations between Cuba and the United States.
The Cuban Embassy in Damascus reportedly “laughed” at the report of Cuban troops in Syria, and told Sputnik News: “It’s pure lunacy. It is as if they were claiming that Russia had sent its troops to Madagascar to protect lemurs.”
Despite claims of Cuban troops in Syria contradicting Cuba’s stated policy and historical modus operandi, and the fact that now four days have passed without a single piece of corroborating evidence to the laughable Fox News report, the imaginary Cuban troops in Syria are likely to morph into more outrageous fantasies of media who have shown themselves primarily interested in fabricating tales of intrigue about America’s evil enemies rather than reporting actual verifiable facts.
Matt Peppe writes about politics, U.S. foreign policy and Latin America on his blog. You can follow him on twitter.
Notes
[1] Gleijeses, Piero. Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976-1991. The University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Kindle edition.
If the invaders lost the war in Afghanistan with the presence of hundreds of thousands of troops, their hopes of reversing the tide with five thousand troops are also misguided. Taliban statement, Voice of Jihad, Oct 16, 2015
However anything scribbled about the Taliban’s durability is titled, the substance is the same: Afghanistan, whatever or whoever the resistance might be, remains a reliquary of failed imperial projects. Super powers have gone there to bleed and wither; social projects have been implemented only to perish in barren soil. Counter-insurgency scholars and specialists have been shown up time and time again as retained charlatans.
This is not the message the Obama administration wishes to give. In the last legs of his administration, the president is keen to make sure that the US will not leave the Afghanistan with a bloodied nose.
The reality on the ground suggests that the US-led presence is one of boxing in the wind, a series of futile gestures that merely seek to prolong the inevitable. The Taliban’s “footprint”, as analyst like to call it with euphemistic restraint, has proven so difficult to remove, their presence has been normalised. Their footprints, in fact, are conspicuous across the country, getting bigger and more pronounced over time.
Bill Roggio of The Long War Journal has shown that one-fifth of the country is either under Taliban control or contested by the group, a figure he admits is an under estimation of worth. Extrapolating this further, Roggio suggests that the Taliban, in actual fact, “probably either control or heavily influence about a half of the country.”[1]
According to the LWJ editors, the data “understates the Taliban’s influence in areas of Afghanistan, particularly in the east and south, as we are using open source reports to determine a district’s status.”[2]
The stuttered, and one might even say ineffectual, US presence has been further confused by a revised timetable for lengthier withdrawal. Currently, the garrison numbers 9,800 troops, a presence that was deemed inadequate to mount a viable, prolonged counter-insurgency strategy. The fall of Kunduz for two weeks to the Taliban last month, along with dozens of other districts has certainly made a mockery of the US role. It has also terrified US-sponsored satraps.
On October 15, Obama decided to retain 5,500 troops to the end of his term, stationed at Kabul, Bagram, Nangarhar and Kandahar using language suggesting permanent occupation. “I will not allow Afghanistan to be used as safe haven for terrorists to attack our nation again.” They will continue to bolster the dysfunctional, precariously positioned government of Ashraf Ghani, which appears to be a model of anti-governance and institutionalised theft.
Retired general Atiquallah Amarkhil could only express relief about the announcement, calling it “an important boost to the Afghan army morale [showing] that the world is not leaving them alone.” But the very sponsorship of such an entity adds succour to the Taliban cause. A fanatic’s certainty might be troubling, but in some cases reassuring when weighed against disingenuous colonialists and self-serving police officials.
Given that the Ghani-Abdullah “unity” government was only ever a bandaid solution designed to avert total chaos till the grand assembly (loya jirga) ironed out a better option, the entire operation reeks of borrowed time.
Such a situation leads to two options. Either the US gives up the ghost – actually, truly, meaningfully – and beats a retreat from an area it has shown no capacity to police let alone occupy; or embrace the colonising devil with full conviction.
Even conservative commentators of the war mongering inclination are sceptical that Washington’s imperial credentials are up to the task. Staying power, argues Niall Ferguson, has always been a US problem when it comes to imperial projects. Its brand of democracy tends to spoil on route, as does its messianic mission. It is hardly coincidental to see that US administration too often becomes a matter of drone strikes and judicial assassination rather than durable governance. The former is so much easier.
The LWJ crew, on the other hand, simply resort to the game of numbers and garrisons – the more, the merrier. Living up to the name of their publication, the long war should simply be made longer, with greater numbers of personnel. “We argue that this force [of 5,500] is insufficient to halt the Taliban’s advance.”
The Taliban statement conveyed through the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan on its Voice of Jihad has a far more coherent, and convincing line. It even mocks the Pentagon’s own projections of worth, being dismissive of the 5,500 number. “Insisting upon war and occupation will further reduce the support America enjoys around the world and with the American people themselves.”
Then, a fateful reminder. “America will get entangled in the war inside Afghanistan all by herself such that her fate shall be similar to that of the Soviet Union.”[3] While it is unlikely that the US will unravel and suffer an internal implosion because of its Afghanistan misadventure, the Jihadists may be entitled to gloat just a tad. While they do so, they will be witnessing a factionalised Afghan government that has been appropriately dismissed as being one of “one truck, two drivers.”
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: [email protected]
UNESCO has approved Italy’s proposal to send UN peacekeepers to protect heritage sites around the world from various threats, primarily from terrorist attacks and destruction by militants.
“UNESCO has said yes to the Cultural Blue Helmets,” Italian culture minister, Dario Franceschini, said adding that 53 countries alongside UN Security Council members supported the suggestion in the light of the destruction of cultural sites, including Syria’s Palmyra, by Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) militants.
“Faced with IS terrorist attacks and the terrible images of Palmyra, the international community cannot stand back and watch,” Franceschini stressed as quoted by AFP.
According to the minister, potential new UN peacekeeping mission would aim to protect “important sites at risk from terrorist attacks, or in war zones, or zones hit by natural disasters, where the international community will be able to send Cultural Blue Helmets to … defend them before they can be destroyed.”
Franceschini also called on the United Nations to “immediately define the operational aspects of this international task force.”
Italy has been calling for the formation of a “blue helmets of culture” group since late March. At that time, Franceschini said that protecting world’s cultural heritage could not be left to an individual state, stressing that “an international rapid response force” was needed “to defend monuments and archaeological sites in conflict zones.”
In April, UNESCO Director-General, Irina Bokova, urged the Security Council to add the protection of cultural sites to the list of tasks for UN peacekeeping forces.
International concern over the fate of cultural sites, artifacts and monuments has been heightened by Islamic State’s sustained destruction campaign against monuments that the terrorist group has been waging in Syria and Iraq.
The jihadists destroyed and looted the 13th-century Assyrian city of Nimrud, the ancient ruins at Hatra and Khorsabad, an ancient Assyrian capital, as well as several other ancient sites in northern Iraq. They also released videos demonstrating ISIS militants smashing priceless artifacts and relics dating back to the 7th century BC in the central museum of Mosul.
After seizing Palmyra in Syria in May, Islamic State jihadists have been consistently destroying the ancient city which is included on the UNESCO World Heritage list demolishing some of its most prized sites.
In August, UNESCO Director-General denounced the destruction of the ancient Roman temple of Baal Shamin as a war crime and called it “immense loss for the Syrian people and for humanity.”
However, the threat to cultural sites comes not only from Islamic State but also from other conflicts around the world. On Friday, Irina Bokova expressed her concern over the escalation of violence against cultural and religious heritage in the Middle East and condemned the arson committed against Joseph’s Tomb in West Bank.
“Cultural and religious heritage embodies values that transcend the lines of culture and faith. Nothing can justify their violation,” she said in an official statement.
In a recent interview with RT, the UNESCO chief called the “cultural cleansing” of the Middle East conducted by Islamic State “a human tragedy.”
When someone “persecutes people on the basis of their ethnicity or religion, destroys their monuments, their temples, deprives them of their intangible heritage, attacks their identities – they stop being humane,” she said.
She also stressed that protecting cultural site was “not only about monuments, they are linked to human lives; it is part of the people’s identities.”
This incisive article by Tyler Durden was first published by Zero Hedge in February 2015
While the markets are still debating whether the price of oil is more impacted by the excess pumping of crude here, or the lack of demand there, or if it is all just a mechanical squeeze by momentum-chasing HFT algos who also know to buy in the milliseconds before 2:30pm, we bring readers’ attention back to what several months ago was debunked as a deep conspiracy theory.
Back then we wrote about a certain visit by John Kerry to Saudi Arabia, on September 11 of all days, to negotiate a secret deal with the now late King Abdullah so as to get a “green light” in order “to launch its airstrikes against ISIS, or rather, parts of Iraq and Syria. And, not surprising, it is once again Assad whose fate was the bargaining chip to get the Saudis on the US’ side, because in order to launch the incursion into Syrian sovereign territory, it
“took months of behind-the-scenes work by the U.S. and Arab leaders, who agreed on the need to cooperate against Islamic State, but not how or when. The process gave the Saudis leverage to extract a fresh U.S. commitment to beef up training for rebels fighting Mr. Assad, whose demise the Saudis still see as a top priority.“
We concluded:
Said otherwise, the pound of flesh demanded by Saudi Arabia to “bless” US airstrikes and make them appear as an act of some coalition, is the removal of the Assad regime. Why? So that, as we also explained last year, the holdings of the great Qatar natural gas fields can finally make their way onward to Europe, which incidentally is also America’s desire – what better way to punish Putin for his recent actions than by crushing the main leverage the Kremlin has over Europe?
… while we understand if Saudi Arabia is employing a dumping strategy to punish the Kremlin as per the “deal” with Obama’s White House, very soon there will be a very vocal, very insolvent and very domestic shale community demanding answers from the Obama administration, as once again the “costs” meant to punish Russia end up crippling the only truly viable industry under the current presidency.
As a reminder, the last time Obama threatened Russia with “costs”, he sent Europe into a triple-dip recession.
It would truly be the crowning achievement of Obama’s career if, amazingly, he manages to bankrupt the US shale “miracle” next.
Of course, all of the above was purely in the realm of the conspiratorial, because the last thing the administration would admit is that the tradeoff to its bargain with Saudi Arabia to implement a (largely failed) foreign policy regarding ISIS (which has grown in size since the coalition campaign) was to put at risk the entire US shale miracle, a miracle which is evaporating in front of everyone’s eyes. And all thanks to that “closest” of US allies in the middle east: Saudi Arabia.
It was conspiratorial, that is, until today, when thanks to the far less “tinfoil” NYT one more conspiracy theory becomes conspiracy fact, following a report that “Saudi Arabia has been trying to pressure President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to abandon his support for President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, using its dominance of the global oil markets at a time when the Russian government is reeling from the effects of plummeting oil prices.”
From the NYT:
Saudi Arabia and Russia have had numerous discussions over the past several months that have yet to produce a significant breakthrough, according to American and Saudi officials. It is unclear how explicitly Saudi officials have linked oil to the issue of Syria during the talks, but Saudi officials say — and they have told the United States — that they think they have some leverage over Mr. Putin because of their ability to reduce the supply of oil and possibly drive up prices.”
As we predicted, correctly, in September: it was all about Syria:
“If oil can serve to bring peace in Syria, I don’t see how Saudi Arabia would back away from trying to reach a deal,” a Saudi diplomat said. An array of diplomatic, intelligence and political officials from the United States and Middle East spoke on the condition of anonymity to adhere to protocols of diplomacy.
So what would it take for the price of oil to finally jump? Not much: Putin’s announcement that Syria’s leader Bashar is no longer a strategic ally of Russia.
Any weakening of Russian support for Mr. Assad could be one of the first signs that the recent tumult in the oil market is having an impact on global statecraft. Saudi officials have said publicly that the price of oil reflects only global supply and demand, and they have insisted that Saudi Arabia will not let geopolitics drive its economic agenda. But they believe that there could be ancillary diplomatic benefits to the country’s current strategy of allowing oil prices to stay low — including a chance to negotiate an exit for Mr. Assad.
…
“Russia has been one of the Syrian president’s most steadfast supporters, selling military equipment to the government for years to bolster Mr. Assad’s forces in their battle against rebel groups, including the Islamic State, and supplying everything from spare parts and specialty fuels to sniper training and helicopter maintenance.”
Will Putin relent?
Mr. Putin, however, has frequently demonstrated that he would rather accept economic hardship than buckle to outside pressures to change his policies. Sanctions imposed by the United States and European countries have not prompted Moscow to end its military involvement in Ukraine, and Mr. Putin has remained steadfast in his support for Mr. Assad, whom he sees as a bulwark in a region made increasingly volatile by Islamic extremism.
Actually that’s not it: Syria, as we have been explaining for nearly two years is the critical transit zone of a proposed natural gas pipeline, originating in Qatar, and one which would terminate somewhere in central Europe. The same Qatar which was the “mystery sponsor of weapons and money to Syrian mercenary rebels” who eventually became ISIS. The same Qatar which is now directly funding ISIS. Of course, if Putin were to handover Syria to the Saudi princes (and to Qatar), he would effectively shoot himself in the foot by ending any leverage Gazprom has over Europe.
This too is very well known to Putin. For now he has shown that he has no intention of abdicating Syria, and losing critical leverage when it comes to being the provider of last resort of European gas:
The Saudis have offered economic enticements to Russian leaders in return for concessions on regional issues like Syria before, but never with oil prices so low. It is unclear what effect, if any, the discussions are having. While the United States would support initiatives to end Russian backing for Mr. Assad, any success by the Saudis to cut production and raise global oil prices could hurt many parts of the American economy.
After the meeting in Moscow in November between Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, and Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, Mr. Lavrov rejected the idea that international politics should play a role in setting oil prices.
“We see eye to eye with our Saudi colleagues in that we believe the oil market should be based on the balance of supply and demand,” Mr. Lavrov said, “and that it should be free of any attempts to influence it for political or geopolitical purposes.”
Which, in retrospect puts the Ukraine conflict, and the western isolation of Russia in a very simple spotlight – the whole point is to inflict as much pain as possible, so Putin has no choice but to hand over Syria.
Russia is feeling financial pain and diplomatic isolation because of international sanctions stemming from its incursion into Crimea and eastern Ukraine, American officials said. But Mr. Putin still wants to be viewed as a pivotal player in the Middle East. The Russians hosted a conference last week in Moscow between the Assad government and some of Syria’s opposition groups, though few analysts believe the talks will amount to much, especially since many of the opposition groups boycotted them. Some Russia experts expressed skepticism that Mr. Putin would be amenable to any deal that involved removing support for Mr. Assad.
Saudi Arabia’s leverage depends on how seriously Moscow views its declining oil revenues. “If they are hurting so bad that they need the oil deal right away, the Saudis are in a good position to make them pay a geopolitical price as well,” said F. Gregory Gause III, a Middle East specialist at Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government and Public Service.
As for Assad, the Syrian president “has shown no inclination to step aside. He said in a recent interview with Foreign Affairs magazine that the true threat in Syria comes from the Islamic State and Qaeda-affiliated groups that, in his words, make up the “majority” of rebellion. American and Arab officials said that even if Russia were to abandon Mr. Assad, the Syrian president would still have his most generous benefactor, Iran. Iranian aid to the Syrian government has been one of the principal reasons that Mr. Assad has been able to hold power as other autocrats in the Middle East have been deposed.
And as a major oil producer, Iran would benefit if Saudi Arabia helped push up oil prices as part of a bargain with Russia.
“You are going to strengthen your enemy whether you like it or not, and the Iranians are not showing any flexibility here,” said Mustafa Alani, an analyst at the Gulf Research Center who is close to the Saudi royal family.
But the military aid that Russia provides to Syria is different enough from what Damascus receives from Iran, its other major supplier, that if “Russia withdrew all military support, I don’t think the Syrian Army could function,” a senior Obama administration official said.
The conclusion:
A number of Arab nations have been pushing for the Saudis and Russians — polar extremes in their positions toward Mr. Assad — to find common ground on the matter as a step toward ending the carnage of Syria’s civil war, now almost four years old. But, as one Arab diplomat put it, “This decision is ultimately in Putin’s hands.”
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what the great oil collapse of 2014/2015 is all about. For those who want to know when to buy oil, the answer is simple: just after (or ideally before) Putin announces he will no longer support the Assad regime. If, that is, he ever does because that act will effectively destroy all leverage Putin may ever have over Europe, and in the process, also end – quite prematurely – his career.
Until then, every single HFT-induced spike in oil is one to be ultimately faded, because as the past few months have shown, it is the Saudis who set the price, and they will not take no for an answer, even if it means crippling the entire US shale, and energy, industry in the process.
John Kiriakou is an American patriot who informed us of the criminal behavior of illegal and immoral US “cloak and dagger” operations that were bringing dishonor to our country. His reward was to be called a “traitor” by the idiot conservative Republicans and sentenced to prison by the corrupt US government.
Manning revealed US war crimes and after years of illegal pre-trial prison abuse was sentenced to 35 years in prison for keeping the vow to the US Constitution. Some of the idiot conservative Republicans thought the sentence was too light.
Tom Drake was ruined, and he kept his complaints about NSA illegality within the chain of command.
Julian Assange is confined by the US and UK governments in violation of international law to the Ecuadoran Embassy in London for doing his job and publishing leaked documents revealing the mendacity, immorality, and illegality of Washingtonn’s policies.
Edward Snowden is protected by Russia against Washington’s retribution for revealing that Washington’s illegal and unconstitutional spying is universal and includes the personal communications of all of the leaders of Washington’s own vassal states.
The American people accept the persecution of truth-tellers, because they have been brainwashed into believing that patriotism means defense of the government no matter what. As truth is so unfavorable to Washington, Americans believe that it must not be revealed, and if revealed, covered up, and those who reveal truth must be punished.
A country with such a population as this is a police state, not a free country.
It is an irony of history that a government and a population that believes truth must be covered up at all cost parades around the world acting as if Washington is the history’s agent for “bringing freedom and democracy to the world.”
If Belgrade joins the EU in its policy of anti-Russian sanctions, it would mean that Serbia has lost its independence and turned into a colony, said Sandra Raskovic-Ivic, the president of the Democratic Party of Serbia.
The government of Serbia wants to join the EU, but it has repeatedly stated in the past that Serbia won’t join EU-wide sanctions against Russia.However, one of the essential conditions for Serbia to get closer with the EU would be to join the sanctions, Serbian newspaper Blic said, citing diplomatic sources in Belgrade.For Serbia it would be the equivalent of a political suicide. The desire of certain Serbian politicians to get EU membership is over-obsessive and can be characterized as “Euro-fanatism,” Raskovic-Ivic said, adding that the pro-EU ideals aren’t popular among ordinary Serbs.
“We believe it’s necessary to organize a referendum as soon as possible, so that the citizens of Serbia could decide whether or not we should continue the process of Eurointegration,” the president of the Democratic Party of Serbia told Radio Sputnik.
The Serbian politician added that if things continue as they are, Serbia will become a colony that wouldn’t have its own national interests and would simply follow orders from Brussels. One of them would be the forced inclusion of Serbia into the anti-Russian rhetoric of the EU, the politician said.Joining anti-Russian sanctions would be a political suicide for Serbia, Raskovic-Ivic said, adding that Serbia benefits both politically [Russia doesn’t recognize Kosovo’s independence] and economically [Moscow and Belgrade signed a free trade agreement] from friendly relations with Moscow.
“Russia never took territories from us, never bombed us. But now we’re trying to please those who did it and continue to humiliate us to this day. As a psychiatrist, I’d say that this is the behavior of a psychopath,” said Raskovic-Ivic, who holds a PhD in psychiatry and is the author of many scholarly papers on psychiatry and psychotherapy.
A Resolution on “ending the economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed by the United States of America against Cuba” will once again be presented to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on 27 October 2015.
There is a special significance about bringing the Resolution, overwhelmingly endorsed by the UNGA for 23 consecutive years, to the attention of the world body this time. It is happening after the US restored diplomatic relations with Cuba on 17 December 2014.
The announcement on the restoration of diplomatic relations was followed by the return of three Cuban anti-terrorist fighters who had been unjustly imprisoned in the US for years. President Barack Obama also informed the US Congress that he was removing Cuba from the list of States “sponsoring international terrorism” — a list which should never have included Cuba in the first instance since Cuba had been a victim of US engineered terrorism for decades, dramatized by the bombing of one of its civilian aircraft in 1976 that killed a large number of schoolchildren. Obama has also urged the Congress to put an end to the US blockade against Cuba.
Some restrictions pertaining to travel to Cuba, telecommunications and remittances have been relaxed. But the blockade remains.
Any entity that engages in any financial, commercial or other economic activities with Cuba continues to be penalized. A huge fine for instance was imposed upon a German bank in March 2015 just as an American company was subjected to a severe penalty for allegedly violating the blockade. In the last eight years or so, 42 fines have been imposed upon US and foreign entities amounting to more than 13 billion US dollars.
The US blockade, needless to say, impacts adversely upon every sector of Cuban society, from food and health care to education and sports. If Cuba could buy goods and products from the US market — rather than from some faraway country — it could have saved billions and billions of dollars. In fact, it has been calculated that the 54 year old blockade has cost the Cuban economy more than 1.1 trillion dollars. This money could have been used to raise the standard of living of the Cuban people.
It is because the blockade continues to impede Cuban development that many governments and civil society organizations in various parts of the world have called for its elimination since it was first introduced in 1961. The calls have become louder and louder over the decades. Last year when the UNGA voted on the Resolution to end the blockade, 188 member states supported the Resolution while only two opposed it and three abstained. The two opposing votes came from the US and Israel and the three states that abstained were Micronesia, Marshall Islands and Palau.
Since Obama restored diplomatic relations with Cuba, many US civic leaders, Church figures and former public officials have openly demanded that the unjust, inhuman, immoral blockade be terminated immediately. Even current leaders have spoken up. In early October 2015, nine US State Governors sent a letter to the leadership of the US Senate and House of Representatives urging an end to the blockade and emphasizing the benefits of such a move to US’s agricultural industries. More significantly, a Pew Research Center poll conducted in July 2015 showed that 72% of the US population wants an end to the blockade, up from 66% in January 2015.
The only remaining major obstacle now is the US Congress. Both the House of Representatives and the Senate are controlled by the Republicans and Republicans as a whole (there are a number of exceptions) are ideologically more averse to a socialist state like Cuba than the Democrats. Besides, there is a small but influential Cuban-American caucus in both the House of Representatives and Senate that is as antagonistic as ever to the Castro government in Havana. Both the outgoing House Speaker, John Boehner, and the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, are against normalization of ties with Cuba.
This is why after the October 27 vote in the UN General Assembly — expected to be almost unanimous in favor of the lifting of the blockade — a multi-national panel comprising representatives of governments that would have endorsed the Cuban position should seek a formal meeting with the House Speaker and the Senate Majority Leader to convey to them the feelings of the people of the world about the decades old suffocating embargo against a small nation of eleven million whose only wish is to preserve its independence, its sovereignty and its dignity. The leaders and members of the US Congress should be told in no uncertain terms that they cannot continue to ignore the voice of the international community, and indeed, the voice of their own people. If they fail to end the blockade now, if they fail to act out of a sense of justice and fairness, they will be damned forever and consigned to the rubbish heap of history.
Dr. Chandra Muzaffar is President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST)
In blatant violation of international law, warplanes of the US-led alliance violated Syrian airspace and attacked a power plant that feeds Aleppo city, causing a blackout in the city.
A military source told SANA that warplanes of the Washington alliance violated Syrian airspace and attacked civilian infrastructure in Mare’a, Tal Sha’er, and al-Bab in Aleppo countryside on Sunday.
The source added that the warplanes attacked the biggest electric power plant that feeds Aleppo city, which resulted in cutting off power from most neighborhoods in Aleppo city.
This transgression comes only 8 days after two F-16 warplanes belonging to the alliance targeted two power plants in al-Radwaniye area east of Aleppo city, cutting off power from the area.
The complexity and history behind the current tensions in Asia Pacific are belied by simplistic narratives underpinned by superficial nationalism. China’s portrayal across the Western media as a regional “bully” versus its victims across Southeast Asia is dividing the general public down two sides of a predictable line.
On one side are those who welcome the rise of China as a counterbalance for longstanding Western hegemony across Asia Pacific, on the other are those that fear China will simply replace a “benevolent” Western hegemony with its own brand of regional domination.
Somewhere in the middle lies the truth, but to arrive there, one must understand the true nature of the unfolding, and very unnecessary tensions in the South China Sea.
Enduring Imperialism
The Pacific, and in particular much of China and Southeast Asia, was under the control of colonial European powers with Britain controlling Malaysia, Myanmar (then called Burma), and parts of China, and France controlling Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos.
Through British “gunboat diplomacy,” the empire wrestled concessions resembling what would today pass as a highly unpopular “free trade agreement” from Thailand (then called Siam), as well as from China, including the seizure of Hong Kong. There is literally a street in Hong Kong still named “Possession Street” marking the site where the British first surveyed their newly seized lands, beginning a century and a half of occupation.
Hong Kong was seized during the Opium Wars, so called because they were fought amid attempts by China to shut down the highly destructive opium trade the British were carrying out in their territory.
The World Wars saw a significant reduction of Western power and influence across Asia Pacific. While the United States would retain hegemony over Japan and the Philippines, many other nations first ejected their colonial occupiers, then established independent nations.
Modern Western Hegemony
The Vietnam War fought between the 1950’s and 1970’s was not only an attempt to maintain Western hegemony over Indochina, but admittedly an attempt to ultimately encircle and contain China. Within the so-called “Pentagon Papers” released in 1969, it was revealed that the conflict was one part of a greater strategy aimed at containing and controlling China.
…the February decision to bomb North Vietnam and the July approval of Phase I deployments make sense only if they are in support of a long-run United States policy to contain China.
It also claims:
China—like Germany in 1917, like Germany in the West and Japan in the East in the late 30′s, and like the USSR in 1947—looms as a major power threatening to undercut our importance and effectiveness in the world and, more remotely but more menacingly, to organize all of Asia against us.
Finally, it outlines the immense regional theater the US was engaged in against China at the time by stating:
…there are three fronts to a long-run effort to contain China (realizing that the USSR “contains” China on the north and northwest): (a) the Japan-Korea front; (b) the India-Pakistan front; and (c) the Southeast Asia front.
The Pentagon Papers in fact provide for us today the context with which to properly view current tensions in Asia Pacific.
The US still to this day maintains its “Japan-Korea front” against China, with US troops literally stationed in both nations.
Across Southeast Asia, the United States through covert subversion has attempted to string together a supranational bloc constructed by obedient client regimes. These efforts can be best seen with US support through an extensive network of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) of Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar, Anwar Ibrahim in Malaysia, and the Shinawatra dynasty in Thailand. The Philippines have remained subservient to the will of Wall Street and Washington more or less for over a century, while Vietnam has been witnessing a steady increase in US-backed destabilization.
While the US, through its “pivot toward Asia,” claims American exceptionalism is necessary to maintain peace and stability thousands of miles from its own borders for the people of Asia, it is clear that much of the chaos unfolding across Asia is the work of the United States itself. It is the proverbial “windshield repair shop” breaking car windows at night, then making a fortune fixing them by day.
China Strikes Back
China’s journey toward becoming a regional power broker has been different than that of the Anglo-Americans. It has not invaded its neighbors nor erected a massive, region-wide network of subversive NGOs to topple governments under the guise of “popular revolutions.” Instead, it has gained power and influence through economic and industrial power.
It trades and deals throughout the region, as well as invests and builds infrastructure. It is also is building up its ability to eventually oust the West altogether from the region. Corporate think-tank RAND recently published a piece titled, “China’s Airfield Construction at Fiery Cross Reef in Context: Catch-Up or Coercion?” In it, it’s argued that China’s construction and expansion of islands throughout the South China Sea is tantamount to bullying.
In reality, China is constructing defensive capabilities that will render Western fleets moot. An island cannot be sunk or interdicted by US ships. Once constructed, manned, and operational, it is a permanent strategic fixture that is for all intents and purposes incontestable save for a full-scale invasion amid total war.
Further, the bases give Chinese ships an operational edge over American vessels, providing logistical support in the South China Sea where the US has none. It is displacing the US both operationally and strategically, and if Beijing plays its cards right, displacing it diplomatically as well.
Should China steer away from attempts to snare it in a regional confrontation, and use its new capabilities to maintain safety, peace, and stability in every real sense as the US claims to, the entire purpose of Western meddling in Asia Pacific will be undermined and eventually collapse. The West will be resigned to playing a role proportional to its proximity to the region – or in other words – a negligible role.
Southeast Asia’s Real Challenge
China’s rising power is not entirely benign. Even for proponents of a rising China, it must be realized that power always has the potential to be abused, and most likely will be if a regional military and economic balance is not struck.
The real challenge facing Southeast Asia is how to strike that balance without sacrificing its sovereignty to foreign interests like the United States. The maintenance of formidable armies and navies throughout Southeast Asia, along with the preservation of national identities will prevent significant conflicts before they start. National economies throughout Asia that are not overly dependent on imports or exports either to China or the West can better defend their own socioeconomic and regional interests.
Above all, there needs to be a reluctance to allow the United States to pit the nations of Southeast Asia either against themselves or against China in yet another elementary example of imperial divide and conquer. And while this challenge is that of the nations of Southeast Asia, who dangerously gravitate toward a EU-style system (ASEAN) apparently indifferent to the monumental failure the EU itself has become, Beijing itself must recognize and defuse the tensions the United States is fanning the flames of.
China’s patient, systematic displacement of the United States from the region will inevitably pay off. Those in the region who believe depending on the United States is a viable strategy in keeping China in check are setting themselves and the region up for failure.
Those that hold the best interests of each nation in Asia at heart are those nations themselves and they alone. Neither through supranational interdependent blocs, nor through foreign interests transforming regions into defacto protectorates, can Asia search for its future. Despite the rhetoric underpinning America’s “pivot toward Asia,” only through a multipolar world where nations pursue their own national sovereignty and respect those of others – maintained through military and socioeconomic balance – can true peace and stability be found and maintained.
Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine“New Eastern Outlook”.
The complexity and history behind the current tensions in Asia Pacific are belied by simplistic narratives underpinned by superficial nationalism. China’s portrayal across the Western media as a regional “bully” versus its victims across Southeast Asia is dividing the general public down two sides of a predictable line.
On one side are those who welcome the rise of China as a counterbalance for longstanding Western hegemony across Asia Pacific, on the other are those that fear China will simply replace a “benevolent” Western hegemony with its own brand of regional domination.
Somewhere in the middle lies the truth, but to arrive there, one must understand the true nature of the unfolding, and very unnecessary tensions in the South China Sea.
Enduring Imperialism
The Pacific, and in particular much of China and Southeast Asia, was under the control of colonial European powers with Britain controlling Malaysia, Myanmar (then called Burma), and parts of China, and France controlling Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos.
Through British “gunboat diplomacy,” the empire wrestled concessions resembling what would today pass as a highly unpopular “free trade agreement” from Thailand (then called Siam), as well as from China, including the seizure of Hong Kong. There is literally a street in Hong Kong still named “Possession Street” marking the site where the British first surveyed their newly seized lands, beginning a century and a half of occupation.
Hong Kong was seized during the Opium Wars, so called because they were fought amid attempts by China to shut down the highly destructive opium trade the British were carrying out in their territory.
The World Wars saw a significant reduction of Western power and influence across Asia Pacific. While the United States would retain hegemony over Japan and the Philippines, many other nations first ejected their colonial occupiers, then established independent nations.
Modern Western Hegemony
The Vietnam War fought between the 1950’s and 1970’s was not only an attempt to maintain Western hegemony over Indochina, but admittedly an attempt to ultimately encircle and contain China. Within the so-called “Pentagon Papers” released in 1969, it was revealed that the conflict was one part of a greater strategy aimed at containing and controlling China.
…the February decision to bomb North Vietnam and the July approval of Phase I deployments make sense only if they are in support of a long-run United States policy to contain China.
It also claims:
China—like Germany in 1917, like Germany in the West and Japan in the East in the late 30′s, and like the USSR in 1947—looms as a major power threatening to undercut our importance and effectiveness in the world and, more remotely but more menacingly, to organize all of Asia against us.
Finally, it outlines the immense regional theater the US was engaged in against China at the time by stating:
…there are three fronts to a long-run effort to contain China (realizing that the USSR “contains” China on the north and northwest): (a) the Japan-Korea front; (b) the India-Pakistan front; and (c) the Southeast Asia front.
The Pentagon Papers in fact provide for us today the context with which to properly view current tensions in Asia Pacific.
The US still to this day maintains its “Japan-Korea front” against China, with US troops literally stationed in both nations.
Across Southeast Asia, the United States through covert subversion has attempted to string together a supranational bloc constructed by obedient client regimes. These efforts can be best seen with US support through an extensive network of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) of Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar, Anwar Ibrahim in Malaysia, and the Shinawatra dynasty in Thailand. The Philippines have remained subservient to the will of Wall Street and Washington more or less for over a century, while Vietnam has been witnessing a steady increase in US-backed destabilization.
While the US, through its “pivot toward Asia,” claims American exceptionalism is necessary to maintain peace and stability thousands of miles from its own borders for the people of Asia, it is clear that much of the chaos unfolding across Asia is the work of the United States itself. It is the proverbial “windshield repair shop” breaking car windows at night, then making a fortune fixing them by day.
China Strikes Back
China’s journey toward becoming a regional power broker has been different than that of the Anglo-Americans. It has not invaded its neighbors nor erected a massive, region-wide network of subversive NGOs to topple governments under the guise of “popular revolutions.” Instead, it has gained power and influence through economic and industrial power.
It trades and deals throughout the region, as well as invests and builds infrastructure. It is also is building up its ability to eventually oust the West altogether from the region. Corporate think-tank RAND recently published a piece titled, “China’s Airfield Construction at Fiery Cross Reef in Context: Catch-Up or Coercion?” In it, it’s argued that China’s construction and expansion of islands throughout the South China Sea is tantamount to bullying.
In reality, China is constructing defensive capabilities that will render Western fleets moot. An island cannot be sunk or interdicted by US ships. Once constructed, manned, and operational, it is a permanent strategic fixture that is for all intents and purposes incontestable save for a full-scale invasion amid total war.
Further, the bases give Chinese ships an operational edge over American vessels, providing logistical support in the South China Sea where the US has none. It is displacing the US both operationally and strategically, and if Beijing plays its cards right, displacing it diplomatically as well.
Should China steer away from attempts to snare it in a regional confrontation, and use its new capabilities to maintain safety, peace, and stability in every real sense as the US claims to, the entire purpose of Western meddling in Asia Pacific will be undermined and eventually collapse. The West will be resigned to playing a role proportional to its proximity to the region – or in other words – a negligible role.
Southeast Asia’s Real Challenge
China’s rising power is not entirely benign. Even for proponents of a rising China, it must be realized that power always has the potential to be abused, and most likely will be if a regional military and economic balance is not struck.
The real challenge facing Southeast Asia is how to strike that balance without sacrificing its sovereignty to foreign interests like the United States. The maintenance of formidable armies and navies throughout Southeast Asia, along with the preservation of national identities will prevent significant conflicts before they start. National economies throughout Asia that are not overly dependent on imports or exports either to China or the West can better defend their own socioeconomic and regional interests.
Above all, there needs to be a reluctance to allow the United States to pit the nations of Southeast Asia either against themselves or against China in yet another elementary example of imperial divide and conquer. And while this challenge is that of the nations of Southeast Asia, who dangerously gravitate toward a EU-style system (ASEAN) apparently indifferent to the monumental failure the EU itself has become, Beijing itself must recognize and defuse the tensions the United States is fanning the flames of.
China’s patient, systematic displacement of the United States from the region will inevitably pay off. Those in the region who believe depending on the United States is a viable strategy in keeping China in check are setting themselves and the region up for failure.
Those that hold the best interests of each nation in Asia at heart are those nations themselves and they alone. Neither through supranational interdependent blocs, nor through foreign interests transforming regions into defacto protectorates, can Asia search for its future. Despite the rhetoric underpinning America’s “pivot toward Asia,” only through a multipolar world where nations pursue their own national sovereignty and respect those of others – maintained through military and socioeconomic balance – can true peace and stability be found and maintained.
Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine“New Eastern Outlook”.
The richest person in the world isn’t anyone in the Forbes list, which excludes calculations for any heads-of-state, but is instead King Salman of Saudi Arabia, whose net worth is in the trillions of dollars. He virtually owns the Saudi Government, which owns the world’s largest oil company, Aramco, among other assets.
Two weeks of Russian airstrikes against ISIS and other terrorist targets already had a devastating impact on their operations, turning the tide of battle so far, enabling Syrian ground forces to recapture lost territory.
Israel accused of blocking investigations as films suggest security forces quick on trigger with Palestinian suspects. It has been called the “smartphone intifada”. After a sharp escalation in violence between Palestinians and Israelis in recent weeks, shocking scenes captured on video have spread across social media.
The evidence presented in this article first published by GR on July 31, 2014 (updated in September 2014) contradicts the recently released report of the Dutch Safety Board.
Vietnam has gone full circle: From a neo-colony ruled by puppet dictators backed by an American occupation army involving 500,000 troops from 1955-1975, to its current ‘Communist’ rulers who have turned-over its markets, industries, ports, resources and labor to the 500 largest Western and Asian multi-national corporations.
In 1975 the people of Vietnam successfully ended one of the longest and bloodiest anti-colonial wars in world-history – defeating the US, the world’s biggest imperial power, after 20 years of struggle.
Barely forty years later the Vietnamese regime signed off on the US-Japanese dominated Trans-Pacific Free Trade Agreement (TPFTA), which essentially converted Vietnam into a vassal state.
Vietnam has gone full circle: From a neo-colony ruled by puppet dictators backed by an American occupation army involving 500,000 troops from 1955-1975, to its current ‘Communist’ rulers who have turned-over its markets, industries, ports, resources and labor to the 500 largest Western and Asian multi-national corporations.
Contrasting Historical Moments: 1975 and 2015
In 1975, the revolutionary government closed all US military bases and expelled all US military personnel. Today the Vietnam ‘vassal regime’ allows US naval visits and signs military agreements to tighten the imperialist military encirclement of China.
In 1975, the revolutionary leaders promised to end imperial exploitation of plantation and factory labor; today the vassal rulers offer the imperial states cheap labor, at wages less than half that paid to Chinese workers to ‘entice’ multi-nationals.
In 1975, the government intervened in favor of workers, taking over plantations and factories; today the vassal state savagely represses striking workers and outlaws class-based unions.
In 1975, the revolutionary government declared its solidarity with workers’ and peasants’ struggles around the world; today the vassals declare their unconditional support of all of the major imperial organizations – from the World Trade Organization to the Trans-Pacific Treaty organization.
What explains this total reversal of politics and allegiances? What accounts for the transformation from revolutionary vanguard to submissive vassal of imperial powers? What factors led to the degeneration and decay of a revolutionary movement of millions and the ascendancy of a corrupt and servile political and socio-economic elite? Why did this counter-revolution occur without any major mass popular upheaval?
Stages and Circumstances of Vietnam’s Degeneration
Liberated Vietnam facing Military Siege
Internal and external events and forces played a major role in undermining the promise of social transformation proclaimed by the Vietnamese revolutionaries.
Beginning with the US destruction of the economy and Washington’s subsequent refusal to pay reparations and vindictive policy of post-war boycott and sanctions, the Vietnamese faced monumental tasks with few financial resources.
The US ground and air war devastated the infrastructure and productive enterprises of the country. Napalm and chemical warfare (Agent Orange) devastated villages and poisoned the rice fields, water and soil. Millions of cluster bombs maimed scores of thousands of peasants.
The US secretly supported the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian terror regime, in its war on liberated Vietnam. This further damaged Vietnam’s shattered economy and diverted scarce resources needed for peacetime reconstruction to military operations.
China launched a border war on Vietnam’s northern frontier, increasing the burden on the depleted resources of the Vietnamese state.
The Difficult Transition
The Vietnamese revolutionary government, during the first decade of its existence, struggled to make the transition from a war to a peace economy.
Given the scarcity of resources, skilled manpower and revenues, and under stress to protect its borders, the Vietnamese government attempted to ‘socialize’ the economy with few personnel and limited external support from the Soviet Union and its allies.
Power was concentrated, political militants and loyalists took command, although many lacked experience or expertise in economic development. Economic recovery was understandably dictated by political and military priorities. Politics was in command – trained orthodox economists were in retreat. The choice was ‘red’ over ‘expert’.
After decades of deprivation and sacrifice, many cadres sought and obtained access to scarce resources. A privileged elite emerged, especially in South Vietnam, where the US military occupation had spawned a huge black-market economy, and a large stratum of wealthy ‘middlemen’ who acted as ‘brokers’ with wealthy overseas Chinese businesspeople, especially in Hong Kong and beyond.
The Vietnamese defeated the Pol Pot terrorist regime at a heavy cost and backed a friendly client regime.
By 1980, China began its transition to capitalism and showed no interest in providing aid or investment to hasten Vietnam’s socialist reconstruction. By the mid 1980’s, with the ascendance of Gorbachev, Russia cut off its economic assistance to Vietnamese state enterprises, denigrated socialist planning and backed ‘market solutions’.
External ‘Allies’ Promote Internal Enemies
In sum, Vietnam’s external allies were moving in a direction, which favored Vietnamese technocrats and ‘capitalist holdovers’ from the colonial and neo-colonial period.
The ‘new rich’, including privileged sectors of the revolutionary regime, took advantage of the ‘shortage of capital flows’ and the years of shortages and sacrifices to advocate an ‘opening to the market’ and to promote the entry of foreign capital. This was accompanied by the privatization of public enterprises (dubbed ‘joint ventures’) and ‘incentives’ (high profits) to manufacturers, especially from Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan.
Internal Factions and the Victory of the Capitalist Technocrats
By the late 1980’s, four tendencies competed for influence in the Communist Party:
(1) A revolutionary faction, including some of the historic leaders of the Liberation struggle.
(2) A centrist or reformist faction of privileged officials who sought to protect and promote state enterprises – a source of their own enrichment. They supported the “partnership” with foreign private capital supposedly as a supplement to the so-called “socialist sector”’
(3) A third faction of technocrats, who favored the gradual conversion to a private capitalist economy, except in some ill-defined ‘strategic sectors’.
(4) A fourth faction, composed of Western educated and connected economists, who sought and secured submission to overseas capitalist and international financial institutions. They joined forces with the technocrats and privileged, corrupt Party elite and became the eventual rulers of Vietnam.
The Counter-revolutionary ‘Unholy’ Alliance
In the course of the following decade, an alliance of technocrats, corrupt and enriched officials (with their families), who had become business partners, and pre-revolutionary elites took control of the economy. By the middle of the 1990’s, Vietnam could no longer ‘balance’ between the USSR and China on the one-hand and Western capitalists on the other. The USSR had disappeared. Russia was in chaos. China was in headlong pursuit of capitalist growth at any cost, through any means, especially via the privatization of major enterprises and stripping workers of all labor and welfare rights.
The Vietnam revolutionaries were ‘retired’ or relegated to the historical museum as respected but impotent figureheads. They were trotted out on special ‘national’ occasions.
The ‘statists’-the Party CEOs fought rearguard struggles trying to retain lucrative fiefdoms in public enterprises, but lacked any strategic allies abroad or internally. They had immobilized the working class and had themselves embraced the privileges of power, luxury and corruption – (with few notable exceptions).
By the turn of the millennium, the technocrats and capitalist ideologues had taken full command of economic decision-making. They embraced the politics and economics of ‘globalization’ and the insertion of Vietnam into the World Trade Organization (WTO). They cited Vietnam’s rapid growth, lauding its abundant disciplined, cheap labor, kept in line by the centralized Party. Communist Party leaders exhibited all the features of the authoritarian personality: arrogant and abusive to the workers under them, submissive and servile to the foreign investors above them.
The Party had become the instrument for repressing outbreaks of industrial strikes, rural protests and public disaffection.
Many of the corrupt officials embraced the ‘free market’ to legitimate their corrupt appropriation of public goods and the laundering of illicit earning.
The ideology “getting rich is good” pervaded the top and middle echelons of the Party, which was ‘Communist’ in name only.
The party-state lost its legitimacy along with its revolutionary legacy. The former colonial enemies, Japan, the US and their allies were eagerly courted as the Vietnamese elite’s new ‘partners’ and mentors for the upwardly mobile technocrats and economists who served them.
With the signing of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), US imperialism easily secured in luxury conference rooms what they had failed to achieve in twenty years on the battlefield: Total access to all of Vietnam’s major economic sectors, a captive labor force without rights or protection and a ruling elite willing to serve as an accomplice to its militarist policy of encircling China.
Imperial Dominance by Invitation
The US political-economic conquest of Vietnam was accomplished by the invitation and complicity of the Vietnamese ruling Communist Party and not by the force of arms, not by a puppet ruler or a bought and bound ‘Generalissimo’.
The main beneficiaries of its vassalage are the Vietnamese collaborators, intermediaries, importers, exporters and labor contractors, who receive legal and illicit commissions for selling out the nation’s wealth. This includes a small army of ‘service operators’, embedded in IT start-ups, Chinese-Vietnamese business associates of Hong Kong sweatshop manufacturers, new university graduates turned business consultants and public officials who ‘sign-off’ on tax exemptions,and fabricate compliance with labor and environmental protection laws. These are the ones who grow rich in the new ‘market economy’.
As the major US, Japanese and overseas Chinese corporations take control of Vietnam’s manufacturing, banking, retail and wholesale sectors and local and overseas trade, small-scale local businesspeople will go bankrupt. State enterprise will be sold or closed. Small farmers and peasants will a lose access to credit while cheap imported rice will flood the market and bankrupt local farmers.
Vietnamese workers and peasants, once heralded as the vanguard of the liberation struggle, will be savagely exploited by the Communist – capitalist ‘partnership’. They are now among the poorest of the poor in all of Asia.
Conclusion
The ascendancy of a pro-imperialist collaborator elite in Vietnam was not inevitable; it was a relatively gradual process, in which the negative external environment gradually eroded the will and capacity of Vietnam’s heroic and historic leaders to combine the revolutionary reconstruction with popular democratic institutions following the defeat of the US military. In a repeat of the Imperial Roman scorched and salted earth policy, the US took revenge for its humiliating defeat by leaving a devastated country, refusing reparations and imposing vindictive economic sanctions on the Vietnamese people and nation. The demise of the USSR and China’s turn to capitalism forced Vietnam to look for alternative sources of external finance.
Added to these harsh external conditions, difficult internal problems complicated the transition: Vietnam’s revolutionary leaders, who were magnificent and victorious strategists of politico-military struggle, were mediocre economic strategists. They turned to the pre-revolutionary Chinese-Vietnamese business elite, linked to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland business families, to navigate the economy.
The young, educated post-revolutionary generation was drawn heavily from privileged families, especially from Saigon; they inexorably adapted and imposed their neo-liberal ideology on the regime.
The marriage of corrupt repressive statist officials to the traditional privileged clans and classes brought the new post-revolutionary educated technocrats to power.
The authoritarian Party elite ensured the de-radicalization of the workers and peasants, the exclusion and repression of leftwing activists and the unhindered application of neo-liberal, pro-imperial economic policies.
The Vietnam experience provides us with several important historical lessons:
The first lesson is the importance of democratizing and socializing production, distribution and culture following national liberation to check against the post-revolutionary seizure of power by Party and military leaders and to limit the advance of the old privileged classes.
Secondly, the educated classes must serve the interests of the revolutionary masses, and admission to institutes of higher education should favor the sons and daughters of the working class, not the children of the traditional comprador elite.
University students should be integrated into democratic class organization to further and deepen their links to the past and present revolutionary heritage
Public resources should be concentrated on economic and social programs that improve the lives of wage and salaried workers and local producers. The presence of private, local and foreign investors should be rigorously controlled via time- bound agreements.
The administration and decision-making in cooperative, self-managed and local enterprises should be decentralized.
Political education should be based on egalitarian ethics. Anti-corruption, disciplinary committees, elected by workers, peasants, employees, accountants, consumers and environmentalists should be established throughout the economy.
State expenditures on social and private consumption should be balanced with emphasis on public transport, health, education and leisure facilities.
Solidarity and support for on-going liberation struggles around the world should be the rule. Social practice in everyday life should be combined with individual and collective learning of technical, historical, social and literary subjects, which enrich and deepen understanding of the revolutionary roots of contemporary society.
The state should combat the tendency of organized local ethnic groups to serve as agents loyal to foreign regimes. Material and symbolic rewards for excellence should be combined and lifetime accomplishments recognized. Those guilty of illicit economic and social activities, especially those related to nepotism or kin/clan enrichment, should be marginalized and punished.
The post-liberation defeat and reversal of Vietnam’s revolutionary gains was not inevitable. Negative lessons should be studied and serve as guidelines for future revolutions. There are grounds to believe that the Vietnamese revolutionary legacy is not dead. The revolutionary grandparents in ‘retirement’ can and will transmit their vision and experience of an alternative class struggle to their grandchildren, who are going to suffer savage exploitation, dispossession and de-nationalization following Vietnam’s entry into the imperialist Transpacific Partnership Agreement.
Leaders, who have grown rich from the TPP, will face anger and revolt by the Vietnamese masses who are destined to pay heavily for their leaders’ sell-out.
The Vietnam’s leaders have embraced the aggressive US-Japanese militarist policy against China; this betrayal of the people’s struggle will have long-lasting negative consequences.
Once against external and domestic developments will converge – hopefully, this time ushering in a new phase of revolutionary change.
In 1975 the people of Vietnam successfully ended one of the longest and bloodiest anti-colonial wars in world-history – defeating the US, the world’s biggest imperial power, after 20 years of struggle.
Barely forty years later the Vietnamese regime signed off on the US-Japanese dominated Trans-Pacific Free Trade Agreement (TPFTA), which essentially converted Vietnam into a vassal state.
Vietnam has gone full circle: From a neo-colony ruled by puppet dictators backed by an American occupation army involving 500,000 troops from 1955-1975, to its current ‘Communist’ rulers who have turned-over its markets, industries, ports, resources and labor to the 500 largest Western and Asian multi-national corporations.
Contrasting Historical Moments: 1975 and 2015
In 1975, the revolutionary government closed all US military bases and expelled all US military personnel. Today the Vietnam ‘vassal regime’ allows US naval visits and signs military agreements to tighten the imperialist military encirclement of China.
In 1975, the revolutionary leaders promised to end imperial exploitation of plantation and factory labor; today the vassal rulers offer the imperial states cheap labor, at wages less than half that paid to Chinese workers to ‘entice’ multi-nationals.
In 1975, the government intervened in favor of workers, taking over plantations and factories; today the vassal state savagely represses striking workers and outlaws class-based unions.
In 1975, the revolutionary government declared its solidarity with workers’ and peasants’ struggles around the world; today the vassals declare their unconditional support of all of the major imperial organizations – from the World Trade Organization to the Trans-Pacific Treaty organization.
What explains this total reversal of politics and allegiances? What accounts for the transformation from revolutionary vanguard to submissive vassal of imperial powers? What factors led to the degeneration and decay of a revolutionary movement of millions and the ascendancy of a corrupt and servile political and socio-economic elite? Why did this counter-revolution occur without any major mass popular upheaval?
Stages and Circumstances of Vietnam’s Degeneration
Liberated Vietnam facing Military Siege
Internal and external events and forces played a major role in undermining the promise of social transformation proclaimed by the Vietnamese revolutionaries.
Beginning with the US destruction of the economy and Washington’s subsequent refusal to pay reparations and vindictive policy of post-war boycott and sanctions, the Vietnamese faced monumental tasks with few financial resources.
The US ground and air war devastated the infrastructure and productive enterprises of the country. Napalm and chemical warfare (Agent Orange) devastated villages and poisoned the rice fields, water and soil. Millions of cluster bombs maimed scores of thousands of peasants.
The US secretly supported the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian terror regime, in its war on liberated Vietnam. This further damaged Vietnam’s shattered economy and diverted scarce resources needed for peacetime reconstruction to military operations.
China launched a border war on Vietnam’s northern frontier, increasing the burden on the depleted resources of the Vietnamese state.
The Difficult Transition
The Vietnamese revolutionary government, during the first decade of its existence, struggled to make the transition from a war to a peace economy.
Given the scarcity of resources, skilled manpower and revenues, and under stress to protect its borders, the Vietnamese government attempted to ‘socialize’ the economy with few personnel and limited external support from the Soviet Union and its allies.
Power was concentrated, political militants and loyalists took command, although many lacked experience or expertise in economic development. Economic recovery was understandably dictated by political and military priorities. Politics was in command – trained orthodox economists were in retreat. The choice was ‘red’ over ‘expert’.
After decades of deprivation and sacrifice, many cadres sought and obtained access to scarce resources. A privileged elite emerged, especially in South Vietnam, where the US military occupation had spawned a huge black-market economy, and a large stratum of wealthy ‘middlemen’ who acted as ‘brokers’ with wealthy overseas Chinese businesspeople, especially in Hong Kong and beyond.
The Vietnamese defeated the Pol Pot terrorist regime at a heavy cost and backed a friendly client regime.
By 1980, China began its transition to capitalism and showed no interest in providing aid or investment to hasten Vietnam’s socialist reconstruction. By the mid 1980’s, with the ascendance of Gorbachev, Russia cut off its economic assistance to Vietnamese state enterprises, denigrated socialist planning and backed ‘market solutions’.
External ‘Allies’ Promote Internal Enemies
In sum, Vietnam’s external allies were moving in a direction, which favored Vietnamese technocrats and ‘capitalist holdovers’ from the colonial and neo-colonial period.
The ‘new rich’, including privileged sectors of the revolutionary regime, took advantage of the ‘shortage of capital flows’ and the years of shortages and sacrifices to advocate an ‘opening to the market’ and to promote the entry of foreign capital. This was accompanied by the privatization of public enterprises (dubbed ‘joint ventures’) and ‘incentives’ (high profits) to manufacturers, especially from Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan.
Internal Factions and the Victory of the Capitalist Technocrats
By the late 1980’s, four tendencies competed for influence in the Communist Party:
(1) A revolutionary faction, including some of the historic leaders of the Liberation struggle.
(2) A centrist or reformist faction of privileged officials who sought to protect and promote state enterprises – a source of their own enrichment. They supported the “partnership” with foreign private capital supposedly as a supplement to the so-called “socialist sector”’
(3) A third faction of technocrats, who favored the gradual conversion to a private capitalist economy, except in some ill-defined ‘strategic sectors’.
(4) A fourth faction, composed of Western educated and connected economists, who sought and secured submission to overseas capitalist and international financial institutions. They joined forces with the technocrats and privileged, corrupt Party elite and became the eventual rulers of Vietnam.
The Counter-revolutionary ‘Unholy’ Alliance
In the course of the following decade, an alliance of technocrats, corrupt and enriched officials (with their families), who had become business partners, and pre-revolutionary elites took control of the economy. By the middle of the 1990’s, Vietnam could no longer ‘balance’ between the USSR and China on the one-hand and Western capitalists on the other. The USSR had disappeared. Russia was in chaos. China was in headlong pursuit of capitalist growth at any cost, through any means, especially via the privatization of major enterprises and stripping workers of all labor and welfare rights.
The Vietnam revolutionaries were ‘retired’ or relegated to the historical museum as respected but impotent figureheads. They were trotted out on special ‘national’ occasions.
The ‘statists’-the Party CEOs fought rearguard struggles trying to retain lucrative fiefdoms in public enterprises, but lacked any strategic allies abroad or internally. They had immobilized the working class and had themselves embraced the privileges of power, luxury and corruption – (with few notable exceptions).
By the turn of the millennium, the technocrats and capitalist ideologues had taken full command of economic decision-making. They embraced the politics and economics of ‘globalization’ and the insertion of Vietnam into the World Trade Organization (WTO). They cited Vietnam’s rapid growth, lauding its abundant disciplined, cheap labor, kept in line by the centralized Party. Communist Party leaders exhibited all the features of the authoritarian personality: arrogant and abusive to the workers under them, submissive and servile to the foreign investors above them.
The Party had become the instrument for repressing outbreaks of industrial strikes, rural protests and public disaffection.
Many of the corrupt officials embraced the ‘free market’ to legitimate their corrupt appropriation of public goods and the laundering of illicit earning.
The ideology “getting rich is good” pervaded the top and middle echelons of the Party, which was ‘Communist’ in name only.
The party-state lost its legitimacy along with its revolutionary legacy. The former colonial enemies, Japan, the US and their allies were eagerly courted as the Vietnamese elite’s new ‘partners’ and mentors for the upwardly mobile technocrats and economists who served them.
With the signing of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), US imperialism easily secured in luxury conference rooms what they had failed to achieve in twenty years on the battlefield: Total access to all of Vietnam’s major economic sectors, a captive labor force without rights or protection and a ruling elite willing to serve as an accomplice to its militarist policy of encircling China.
Imperial Dominance by Invitation
The US political-economic conquest of Vietnam was accomplished by the invitation and complicity of the Vietnamese ruling Communist Party and not by the force of arms, not by a puppet ruler or a bought and bound ‘Generalissimo’.
The main beneficiaries of its vassalage are the Vietnamese collaborators, intermediaries, importers, exporters and labor contractors, who receive legal and illicit commissions for selling out the nation’s wealth. This includes a small army of ‘service operators’, embedded in IT start-ups, Chinese-Vietnamese business associates of Hong Kong sweatshop manufacturers, new university graduates turned business consultants and public officials who ‘sign-off’ on tax exemptions,and fabricate compliance with labor and environmental protection laws. These are the ones who grow rich in the new ‘market economy’.
As the major US, Japanese and overseas Chinese corporations take control of Vietnam’s manufacturing, banking, retail and wholesale sectors and local and overseas trade, small-scale local businesspeople will go bankrupt. State enterprise will be sold or closed. Small farmers and peasants will a lose access to credit while cheap imported rice will flood the market and bankrupt local farmers.
Vietnamese workers and peasants, once heralded as the vanguard of the liberation struggle, will be savagely exploited by the Communist – capitalist ‘partnership’. They are now among the poorest of the poor in all of Asia.
Conclusion
The ascendancy of a pro-imperialist collaborator elite in Vietnam was not inevitable; it was a relatively gradual process, in which the negative external environment gradually eroded the will and capacity of Vietnam’s heroic and historic leaders to combine the revolutionary reconstruction with popular democratic institutions following the defeat of the US military. In a repeat of the Imperial Roman scorched and salted earth policy, the US took revenge for its humiliating defeat by leaving a devastated country, refusing reparations and imposing vindictive economic sanctions on the Vietnamese people and nation. The demise of the USSR and China’s turn to capitalism forced Vietnam to look for alternative sources of external finance.
Added to these harsh external conditions, difficult internal problems complicated the transition: Vietnam’s revolutionary leaders, who were magnificent and victorious strategists of politico-military struggle, were mediocre economic strategists. They turned to the pre-revolutionary Chinese-Vietnamese business elite, linked to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland business families, to navigate the economy.
The young, educated post-revolutionary generation was drawn heavily from privileged families, especially from Saigon; they inexorably adapted and imposed their neo-liberal ideology on the regime.
The marriage of corrupt repressive statist officials to the traditional privileged clans and classes brought the new post-revolutionary educated technocrats to power.
The authoritarian Party elite ensured the de-radicalization of the workers and peasants, the exclusion and repression of leftwing activists and the unhindered application of neo-liberal, pro-imperial economic policies.
The Vietnam experience provides us with several important historical lessons:
The first lesson is the importance of democratizing and socializing production, distribution and culture following national liberation to check against the post-revolutionary seizure of power by Party and military leaders and to limit the advance of the old privileged classes.
Secondly, the educated classes must serve the interests of the revolutionary masses, and admission to institutes of higher education should favor the sons and daughters of the working class, not the children of the traditional comprador elite.
University students should be integrated into democratic class organization to further and deepen their links to the past and present revolutionary heritage
Public resources should be concentrated on economic and social programs that improve the lives of wage and salaried workers and local producers. The presence of private, local and foreign investors should be rigorously controlled via time- bound agreements.
The administration and decision-making in cooperative, self-managed and local enterprises should be decentralized.
Political education should be based on egalitarian ethics. Anti-corruption, disciplinary committees, elected by workers, peasants, employees, accountants, consumers and environmentalists should be established throughout the economy.
State expenditures on social and private consumption should be balanced with emphasis on public transport, health, education and leisure facilities.
Solidarity and support for on-going liberation struggles around the world should be the rule. Social practice in everyday life should be combined with individual and collective learning of technical, historical, social and literary subjects, which enrich and deepen understanding of the revolutionary roots of contemporary society.
The state should combat the tendency of organized local ethnic groups to serve as agents loyal to foreign regimes. Material and symbolic rewards for excellence should be combined and lifetime accomplishments recognized. Those guilty of illicit economic and social activities, especially those related to nepotism or kin/clan enrichment, should be marginalized and punished.
The post-liberation defeat and reversal of Vietnam’s revolutionary gains was not inevitable. Negative lessons should be studied and serve as guidelines for future revolutions. There are grounds to believe that the Vietnamese revolutionary legacy is not dead. The revolutionary grandparents in ‘retirement’ can and will transmit their vision and experience of an alternative class struggle to their grandchildren, who are going to suffer savage exploitation, dispossession and de-nationalization following Vietnam’s entry into the imperialist Transpacific Partnership Agreement.
Leaders, who have grown rich from the TPP, will face anger and revolt by the Vietnamese masses who are destined to pay heavily for their leaders’ sell-out.
The Vietnam’s leaders have embraced the aggressive US-Japanese militarist policy against China; this betrayal of the people’s struggle will have long-lasting negative consequences.
Once against external and domestic developments will converge – hopefully, this time ushering in a new phase of revolutionary change.
Serbian users of Twitter Social Network launched a counter campaign on the initiative of the self-proclaimed Kosovo’s admission to UNESCO, placing a series of photographs and documents that testify the destruction of Serbian cultural heritage in Kosovo and Metohija.
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[GR editor’s Note: this cultural heritage of Serbia was also destroyed with the complicity of NATO (using the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) as its foot-soldiers), which in the course of the 1999 bombing campaign targeted numerous historical monuments and churches throughout Serbia. The KLA leadership with links to organized crime subsequently formed the post-1999 government of Kosovo ]
Two weeks of Russian airstrikes against ISIS and other terrorist targets already had a devastating impact on their operations, turning the tide of battle so far, enabling Syrian ground forces to recapture lost territory.
They’re on the move, advancing, taking the initiative, imported US-supported death squads on their heels, routed in some areas, in disarray, facing a formidable force against which they’re defenseless – no matter how many US weapons airdrops follow.
Russia will target and destroy them, along with Syrian ground forces, finding abandoned weapons caches as they advance.
Western leaders and supportive media tell a different story. So does the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), fronting for Western interests, well funded to distort truth.
Willful Big Lies and distortion claim Russia isn’t targeting ISIS, just so-called “moderates.” None exist. Virtually all anti-Assad forces are mercenary cutthroat killers, ISIS and others, imported from scores of countries – common knowledge suppressed in the West, Israel and anti-Assad rogue Arab states.
Regular SOHR reports claim Russian airstrikes kill civilians. Not a shred of evidence proves it. Moscow scrupulously avoids hitting civilian areas. Pentagon warplanes and ground forces target them indiscriminately – longstanding policy in all US wars throughout its history, notably homeland ones, as well as during and since WW II.
Since Russian airstrikes began on September 30, regular SOHR reports claim civilian deaths. A falsified October 16 account claimed “Russian warplanes kill 60, 30 of them were women and children…the number of the dead is likely to rise because of the serious injuries.”
Western media regularly cite SOHR as a legitimate source of front line information. Yet one man reports from London, paid by his imperial sponsors, distant and detached from ongoing conflict – his information entirely gotten from powers benefitting from his propaganda.
Friday headlines claim Turkey downed a Russian drone near its border – or one believed to be operated by its military forces, more fabricated information, part of the daily anti-Russian drumbeat. Some sample reports include:
New York Times, America’s leading disseminator of state propaganda: “Turkish Jets Shoot Down Drone Near Syria…Turkey…complain(ing) several times of incursions by Russian aircraft airspace” failing to explain only one accidental nonthreatening incident occurred.
Washington Post: “Turkey downs drone near Syrian border; Russia denies aircraft lost. (A) senior US defense official said the drone…appears to be Russian made.”
Wall Street Journal: “Turkish Military Downs Drone That Entered Airspace from Syria…NATO and Ankara accused Russia of twice crossing into Turkish airspace” earlier. Only one brief nonthreatening accidental incident occurred, as explained above.
Reuters: “Turkey shoots down drone near Syria, US suspects Russian origin”
UK owned and operated BBC: “Syria crisis: Turkey downs ‘drone’ on Syrian border…A US official (claimed it’s) of Russian origin.”
Washington, Israel, Turkey, Syria and Russia operate drones in the area. Fingers automatically point at Moscow – most often about things that never occurred.
It’s unknown if Turkey downed any aircraft. Tass, Sputnik News and RT International all debunked falsified reports about downing a Russian drone.
Russian General Staff Deputy Chief Andrey General-Lt. Kairtiapolov said Turkey’s report has nothing to do with Russia.
I am telling you with full authority that our unmanned aerial vehicles are either performing combat missions in the assigned areas or are staying at the air base. You can only guess or find out whom the unmanned aerial vehicle belonged to.
Defense Ministry spokesman General-Major Igor Konashenkov said “(a)ll the aircraft of the Russian combat group in the Syrian Arab Republic returned (safely) to the Hmeymim base after completing their mission(s).”
RT International said “Russian manufacturer St. Petersburg Technological Center issued a statement refuting claims that the downed drone was of their production after seeing its photos published on social media.”
“It’s definitely not an Orlan shown in the published photos,” it said. “Russia doesn’t make UAVs with such gliders,” calling the incident “a provocation.”
Russia-bashing continues relentlessly. Propaganda substitutes for hard facts. Believe nothing Western politicians claim – or supportive news sources proliferating their misinformation and Big Lies.
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.”
October 18th, 2015 by Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor
A new report, “ Israel’s Arbitrary Killings and its System of Structural Violence,” was released by the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor in a press conference in Geneva.
The report summarizes the results of Euro-Med’s investigations into recent Israeli human rights abuses in the occupied Palestinian Territories. Featured at the press conference were video footage and photos illustrating the harassment and killing of Palestinian civilians involved in political protests during the last two weeks.
While the Israeli government has to date escaped serious accountability for repeated human rights violations, “citizen journalism”—in which excessive acts of force are caught on camera—now is making it more difficult for the acts to be obscured or brushed aside, says the report.
“Thanks to the courageous acts of activists, family members and bystanders, Euro-Med has collected video footage and eyewitness testimonies documenting numerous, egregious abuses by Israeli soldiers during the last few weeks, which we believe is only the tip of the iceberg,” says Daniela Dönges. “In our report, we name eight of them, because they are not just numbers. They are human beings with stories that must be told.”
The eight cases called out in the report are:
Thirteen-year-old Ahmed Manasra, who was run over by a car and beaten with sticks and metal pipes, then deprived of any medical care for 25 minutes. The Israelis claimed he tried to attack their soldiers, but video recordings show otherwise. Instead, he is seen lying on the ground, bleeding and calling for help.
Sixteen-year-old Marah Bakri also was accused of trying to stab an Israeli soldier, but widely circulated photos calls that claim into serious question. In one, nine soldiers pointing guns surround the young girl, covered in blood on the ground. The authorities refused to produce its evidence of a crime.
Israa Abed, 29, is another alleged knife-wielding attacker. Surveillance video footage shows only a terrified young woman who panicked when ordered to remove her hijab, a sign of her religion. She refused, but threw up her hands. Abed was shot by four bullets.
Fadi Samir Mustafa Alloun, 19, another accused stabber, was actually chased by a group of enraged Israeli settlers. The police came to protect the settlers, not Fadi. Video recordings shared on Israeli websites show the settlers before the police shot him.
Hadil Alhashlamoun, 18, was passing through a checkpoint when she set off a metal detector alarm. There are conflicting witness accounts regarding whether the girl had a knife, but photographic evidence and eyewitness testimony is clear that she posed no risk. While she was lying on the ground, two soldiers shot bullets into both knees, her right thigh, her pelvis, her abdomen, both forearms and her chest.
Twenty-five-year-old Muhammed Bassam Amsha, also was passing through a checkpoint when he was killed. Soldiers claimed they had photos showing the young man had a knife, but refused to produce them.
Tha’er Abughazaleh,19, did indeed stab a soldier in rage and frustration. But instead of then running away from police, leading them to shoot, photographic evidence suggest he was unnecessarily shot point blank in the head.
Falah Hamdi Zamel Abumaria, 53, was shot and killed in his home when the Israeli military came to seize his son. Despite the official story that the Israelis were attaced by the older man, eyewitnesses tell the truth, that Abumaria was trying to defend his son—with a pottery vase. For that, he was shot three times in the chest.
“No thinking person with a heart can hear this list and not feel horrified and aghast,” says Dönges. “Yet up until now, Israel has escaped any kind of serious accounting beyond some talk. The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor calls on the Israeli authorities to conduct a transparent investigation into these thinly veiled outright murders. However, because we lack any confidence they will do so, we also call on the UN special rapporteurs for extra-judicial killings and the Palestinian territories to visit the region to do their own investigation.”
The last thing anyone wants when they buy a diamond to wear with pride and confidence as a symbol of love and commitment is for it to be tarnished by association with bloodshed and violence.
It’s no wonder then that the jewellery industry remains silent about the ongoing trade in diamonds that are a major source of funding ($1bn/yr) for the Israeli military which stands accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
In evidence to the London Session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine Israeli political economist, Shir Hever, stated:
Every time somebody buys a diamond that was exported from Israel some of that money ends up in the Israeli military. So the financial connection is quite clear.
With the pressure cooker of occupation and subjugation crushing Palestinian society the brutality of the Zionist project in occupied Palestine is being laid bare once again. Israel’s record of gross human rights violations has been documented over decades but never before has it seemed so up close, so personal and so primeval.
In the past few days and weeks gruesomely breathtaking pictures and videos of the inhumanity that is part and parcel of the expansionist Zionist project have flashed from our screens at a rate that both numbs and enrages in equal measure.
Some of the scenes are similar to what one might expect to see in a snuff film. Unarmed Palestinian children have been shot and killed even though they posed no danger to heavily armed soldiers and police. In one particularly harrowing scene, as a 13 year old child, Ahmed Saleh Mahayan (Manasra), lay seriously injured in a pool of blood after being deliberately run over by a police vehicle and denied medical assistance for minutes on end, he was kicked by a police officer and goaded and cursed by Israeli settlers who recorded the scene with their phones.
No one sought to reassure, comfort or assist him as he struggled for live.
At least one other cold-blooded execution was also recorded on video.
In another incident a 30 year old Palestinian woman with her hands raised in the air was gunned down in cold blood. Israeli authorities claimed afterwards that she tried to stab a soldier but they failed to produce a weapon of any sort. Witnesses denied she was armed or threatened the soldiers. A video of the scene shortly after she was shot showed a soldier kicking away a pair of sunglasses which she had in her hand.
In besieged Gaza seven unarmed Palestinian youths were shot and killed and scores more were wounded by snipers firing from the fortified safety of border posts inside Israel. Over thirty Palestinians and seven Israeli’s have been killed since this latest escalation of violence erupted at the end of August when occupation forces denied Muslims access to the Al Aqsa mosque and allowed right wing Jewish extremists enter the compound in occupied East Jerusalem.
The infrastructure for Israel’s full spectrum subjugation doesn’t come cheap. Soldiers, tanks, planes, nuclear weapons, ships, armoured vehicles, bombs and bullets all come at a price. In addition to the $3 billion received in US military aid it cost the Israeli economy about $17 billion each year. Any other economy of similar size would be crushed by such a burden. But the Israeli economy has a golden goose that keeps laying – a diamond industry that accounts for 30% of manufacturing exports which add $10 billion net to the economy each year.
Despite the fact that diamonds from Israel account for about 30% of the market in value terms, jewellers still claim diamonds are “ethically sourced” and “conflict free”. This is the equivalent of supermarket claiming that chicken fed on a diet laced with antibiotics and hormones is organic if the egg it hatched from came from an organic farm. Just because a rough diamond is conflict-free it doesn’t follow that the cut and polished stone isn’t a blood diamond.
If any other industry foisted such a deliberate and deceitful fraud on consumers it would sanctioned by regulatory authorities and sued in the courts by disgruntled customers – something that might still happen as more and more people learn about the deception at the heart of the diamond industry.
Publicly listed companies such as Anglo American, which owns De Beers and the Forevermark brand, Signet, Harry Winston, Sotheby’s and others involved in the diamond industry are covering up the trade in cut & polished blood diamonds which evade of the Kimberley Process regulations that only apply to rough diamonds.
As long as blood diamonds that fund rogue regimes guilty of the sort of human rights violations being witnessed daily in Palestine are allowed to contaminate the legitimate market, masquerading as conflict-free diamonds, all diamonds should be considered blood diamonds.
Israel accused of blocking investigations as films suggest security forces quick on trigger with Palestinian suspects
It has been called the “smartphone intifada”. After a sharp escalation in violence between Palestinians and Israelis in recent weeks, shocking scenes captured on video have spread across social media.
According to Israeli human rights organisations, several such videos challenge the accuracy of official Israeli accounts of the circumstances in which police have killed or injured Palestinians.
The footage, the nine groups said in a statement this week, provided concrete evidence that police were “quick to shoot to kill” rather than arrest Palestinians in Jerusalem and Israel who were suspected of involvement in attacks on Israelis Jews.
The shootings, they added, had occurred when the Palestinians posed no physical threat to security forces.
Lawyers have also accused the justice ministry of thwarting investigations, especially into the police killing of Fadi Alloun, a Palestinian from Jerusalem. Security camera footage of his shooting has been withheld and his family have been denied access to his body for an autopsy.
Israel and occupied East Jerusalem, which Israel has illegally annexed, are subject to Israeli civil law – unlike the West Bank, where Palestinians live under Israeli military rule.
Human rights groups have long complained that Israeli soldiers in the West Bank carry out “extra-judicial executions”.
The Israeli government recently announced it was authorising for the first time the use of live-fire against Palestinians, including children, who throw stones in Israel and Jerusalem.
Israel includes a population of 1.6 million Palestinians who have citizenship, while most of East Jerusalem’s 370,000 Palestinians have Israeli residency permits.
Adalah, a legal centre for Israel’s Palestinian citizens, said details of the government’s new live-fire regulations had yet to be divulged to them.
But it cited Israeli politicians and police commanders as openly calling for extra-judicial killings since the upswing in tensions.
‘Terrorists will not survive’
Jerusalem’s police chief, Moshe Edri, is reported to have said: “Anyone who stabs Jews or hurts innocent people is due to be killed.” Police minister Gilad Erdan similarly declared: “Every terrorist should know that he will not survive the attack he is about to commit.”
Adalah and Addameer, a Palestinian group defending prisoners’ rights, sent a letter to Israel’s attorney general this week highlighting three cases where video footage documented the unjustified shooting or abuse of Palestinian suspects.
Suhad Bishara, an Adalah lawyer, said the Israeli justice ministry had given no indication that its police investigations unit, Mahash, would investigate any of the incidents.
“What they are saying is the precise opposite: that these officers are heroes, that they behaved according to the law,” she said.
Mahash is already deeply mistrusted by Israel’s Palestinian minority, a fifth of the population, after it failed to identify any of the police officers responsible for killing 13 unarmed demonstrators inside Israel at the start of the second intifada in October 2000.
There have been 51 deaths of Palestinian citizens at the hands of the security forces since the October 2000 events, most in unexplained circumstances, compared to two Israeli Jews.
Bishara said: “We seem to have reached an even worse point than after the October 2000 events. Then Mahash conducted some investigations, even if they were deeply flawed. Now the need for investigations is simply being ignored.”
A spokeswoman for Mahash confirmed that a complaint from Adalah had been received but would make no further comment.
The urgent need for investigations was underscored late Thursday when the interior minister, Silvan Shalom, said he intended to strip Palestinian-Israeli “terror suspects” of their citizenship and those in Jerusalem of their residency permits.
According to international law, countries should not leave their citizens stateless.
Body kept from family
Adalah and Addameer are concerned that in the most prominent of the filmed shootings – of Alloun on 4 October – Israeli officials are putting up obstacles to block any investigation.
Videos on social media show a policeman shooting dead 19-year-old Alloun as he seeks protection from a mob of Israeli Jews chasing him and demanding that he be executed.
The crowd accuses him of a stabbing that occurred moments earlier close to the Old City. Even though the film suggests he posed no physical threat at the time, a police officer fired at him seven times. Alloun fell to the ground after the first shot.
Morad Jadalah, a lawyer with Addameer, said the authorities had refused to make available footage from security cameras in the area that might provide a clearer view of what happened.
They had also denied Alloun’s family access to his body, and the police had buried him without an autopsy being carried out.
Adalah and Addameer accused the police of seeking to “disrupt the investigation in advance” and “damage essential factual findings”.
Jadalah said: “If we can’t examine Alloun’s body to see how he was killed, we have no case against the police in court, whatever the videos reveal. The authorities are engaged in attempts to prevent justice from being done.”
In another case taken up by Adalah, from 9 October, Israa Abed, a 30-year-old mother of three from Nazareth, is filmed surrounded by soldiers and police at a bus station in northern Israel. As she stands almost immobile before them, several shots are fired, wounding her.
Although the security services have claimed there was a knife in her hand, she can be seen making no effort to attack them. Another video, taken shortly after she was shot, appears to show a pair of sunglasses, not a knife, next to her.
Doctors have said she was shot six times from the same gun.
Shalom named Abed, who survived the shooting, as one of two Palestinian citizens he wanted to strip of their citizenship.
Boy left to bleed
In the third case, 13-year-old Ahmed Manasra is filmed being kicked by police and denied medical treatment as he lies bleeding and severely injured on a road in a settlement in East Jerusalem on 12 October. Crowds of settlers curse him and shout “Die! Son of a bitch.”
He was rammed by a vehicle after he and an older cousin were suspected of stabbing two Israeli Jews, one a child his own age.
Physicians for Human Rights in Israel decried a video and photos released by the government on Thursday of Manasra recovering in an Israeli hospital. They said the images violated Israel’s juvenile and privacy laws, and the hospital’s involvement was a severe breach of medical ethics.
Suspicions have been raised too about the fatal shooting of Basel Sidr on 14 October. Footage shows police shooting the 20-year-old as he tried to attack them with a knife at the entrance to Jerusalem’s Old City.
However, B’Tselem, an Israeli organisation monitoring Israeli violations in the occupied territories, expressed “grave concern” that the officers continued to shoot at Sidr after he was wounded on the ground with no one near him.
Jadalah, of Addameer, said: “These videos are helping to fuel Palestinian rage. They reinforce the sense in Jerusalem that we are fighting for our lives and the city.”
Since the start of the month, 32 Palestinians have been killed and hundreds wounded. Attacks have left seven Israeli Jews dead.
On Wednesday thousands of soldiers and paramilitary Border Police were deployed in Jerusalem and major cities in Israel where Palestinians live. It is the first time in more than a decade soldiers have been used inside Israel.
8,000 gun permit requests
Meanwhile, Israeli media reports indicate that, since the unrest erupted, Israeli soldiers and police have had a light finger on the trigger and have rushed to conclusions about the threat posed by Palestinians unsupported by evidence.
On Thursday a soldier opened fire in a train near Haifa, causing minor injuries, after other soldiers wrongly shouted out a warning that someone was holding a knife.
Later the same day, police admitted that two Palestinians from East Jerusalem arrested on suspicion of planning an attack after a major manhunt in Tel Aviv were simply visiting the city.
Israeli politicians such as Jerusalem’s mayor Nir Barkat have called on Israeli civilians who own a firearm to carry it at all times. On Friday some 8,000 Jews were reported to have applied for a gun permit in the first 24 hours after the easing of licensing rules by the government.
“In the current atmosphere, the call by politicians for Israeli civilians to arm themselves constitutes incitement to kill Palestinians for no reason,” said Bishara, of Adalah. “It sends a message to the security forces and to Israeli civilians that Arab life is of no value.”
There has also been a spate of reports in the past week of Palestinian citizens being beaten or stabbed by Israeli Jews after they were identified as Arab. Mobs of Jews chanting “Death to Arabs” are now a familiar sight in Jerusalem.
In the southern town of Dimona last week, an Israeli Jew stabbed four Palestinians over the course of an hour.
Jadalah said: “When Israeli Jews carry out knife attacks, they are arrested, not killed. It seems the police can follow proper procedures when Jews are involved.”
Ahmed Tibi, a Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament, echoed Jadalah on Twitter: “Of course the Jewish stabber ended the spree [of stabbings] without a bullet or scratch.”
Rami Nasreddin, the director of Palvision, a youth empowerment programme in Jerusalem, said videos of violence by the security forces and of Jewish mobs had left many Palestinians in Jerusalem frightened to go out.
“Most of the schools are closed because parents are afraid to let their children on to the streets,” he said.
I have to admit I am scared myself. I know that if a settler shouts out that I have a knife or that I am a terrorist, the police are likely to shoot me without a second thought.
On the evening of October 22, 2014 I found myself in Toronto sitting alone in a restaurant watching a CNN news broadcast playing on a huge TV in the restaurant’s main room. The Ottawa shootings of the day were front and centre.
When the young waitress brought my bowl of chili I said to her,
“So we’re being attacked by terrorists now?”
“So they say,” she replied evenly.
“You know,” I said, “I have my doubts about this whole thing.”
“Of course,” she replied. “This is obviously meant to support Harper’s military intervention in the Middle East.”
My jaw dropped. Maybe my fellow Canadians were more inclined to skepticism than I thought?
The “war on terrorism” has been a tangle of deceptions, so there were plenty of reasons to greet this latest act of apparent terrorism with suspicion. For my part, I had just finished writing a book about the 2001 anthrax attacks in the US, so I was in a mood for questioning. The anthrax attacks had appeared to be a jihadi attack (“DEATH TO AMERICA…ALLAH IS GREAT,” said the letters) and they were used to justify invasions of other countries and the theft of civil rights in the US. But shortly after the Patriot Act was signed into law in October of 2001 by George W. Bush the jihadi story had collapsed. The anthrax spores in the deadly letters, including the letters to two key Democratic senators holding up passage of the Patriot Act, were revealed to have originated neither in an al-Qaeda lab nor an Iraqi lab, but in a US lab serving the military and intelligence communities. [1]
Here was a theme I would not forget: the very security and intelligence agencies that gain power from a bill intimidate the people’s elected representatives into passing the bill.
Such thoughts were in my mind as I sat in the restaurant in Toronto watching the events on Parliament Hill. Centre Block was, in those moments, still in lockdown. Canadian Members of Parliament, having been exposed to a barrage of gunfire right outside their caucus doors, were trapped, and definitely intimidated, while officers with guns went through the houses of Parliament.
Senator Céline Hervieux-Payette has recalled her experience in her Senate office:
At 2:30 p.m., to cries of “Police,” my assistant opens the office’s main door. He comes face to face with soldiers aiming their machine guns at him and ordering him to put his hands in the air. One by one, our doors are opened and the soldiers point their guns at my other assistants who exit their offices, hands in the air, as if they were criminals… The door we go through is destroyed; glass has exploded all over the floor. The door across the hallway has also been knocked in. Glass litters the hallway. There are more than 50 people crammed into four offices, everyone talking to one another…
I sit near the open window. I’m breathing but stunned: parliamentarians are under the command of the military. Parliament is in the hands of the armed forces. [2]
The people with guns who took control of Parliament were likely militarized police rather than the armed forces per se,but it was not easy to tell them apart. Police of different types swarmed the vicinity, some of them carrying heavy automatic weapons and dressed in helmets, boots and green fatigues.
I wondered on October 22, 2014 if we were witnessing a revised version of the 2001 US fraud—another intimidation of an elected legislature by internal security forces to facilitate a shift in power. Bill C-13, allowing increased surveillance of Canadian citizens, was before Parliament and C-44, further empowering Canada’s spy agency, CSIS, was to be introduced that very day, October 22. Soon we would learn that another bill was on the way. It turned out to be the infamous Bill C-51, now made law as the “Anti-terrorism Act, 2015,” one of Canada’s most repressive and dangerous pieces of legislation.
On October 23, 2014, Kevin Vickers, the sergeant-at-arms responsible for killing the Parliament shooter, got a standing ovation in Parliament. Unity in the legislature as all parties joined in celebrating their safety! Soon citizens were treated to images of the Prime Minister hugging the leaders of the opposing parties. More unity! But the hugs were familiar from the fall of 2001. The image of Democratic senate majority leader Tom Daschle embracing George W. Bush in the wake of the 9/11 attacks was fresh in my mind. This particular unity had enabled the passing of a bill permitting the use of armed force overseas, Authorization for Use of Military Force, 2001. The subsequent anthrax attacks had kept this unity intact long enough to enable the passing of the Patriot Act. [3]
There was another troubling development. Those parliamentarians who did not bow and scrape before the Prime Minister, and who resisted the use of the October 22 attacks to pass repressive legislation, tended to adopt a “lone nut” narrative. According to this story the suspect, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, was simply an unbalanced homeless man acting on his own—a case for social services rather than a sign of coordinated political violence. The problem was that this narrative did not accommodate all the available evidence.
There was evidence that Zehaf-Bibeau had planned his attack carefully and had had access to considerable resources; there was evidence that the October 22 attack was linked to an earlier October 20 attack in the province of Quebec; and there was a good deal of evidence that police knew well in advance that attacks such as those that took place that week were in the works. The story of the drug-addled loner seemed inadequate. Accordingly, I wrote a letter to a local Member of Parliament warning him not to invest all his credibility in this lone nut narrative. I suggested that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police would, at an opportune moment, display the video shot by the suspect just before his killing of a soldier at the War Memorial. The video would show Zehaf-Bibeau to have been cogent and as well as committed to some form of jihadi enterprise.
That, of course, is what happened. After keeping the video from the public for months RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson decided, during the hearings held in association with Bill C-51, that it was time for Canadians to see it. In fact, now we not only could see it, we really should see it. He asked that his showing of the video be televised live in Canada. Sure enough, the Zehaf-Bibeau we saw in that video did not look like an unbalanced homeless man. Clean, well groomed and rational, he appeared to know just what he was doing.
So, if he was not a lone nut, who and what was he? Was he acting with, or on behalf of, others? If so, what others? I did not know at the time, and I still do not know, the answers to these questions. But I do know that the usual two hypotheses—the lone nut and the member of an Islamic terrorist organization—do not exhaust the possibilities, and that a third possibility is being kept from the Canadian public. I also know that the police narrative is tattered, trailing a host of unanswered questions, and kept in place with the help of RCMP secrecy and deception.
As for the third hypothesis, the unspeakable hypothesis, it is merely necessary to recall that the majority of people who come before the courts in North America on charges related to violent terrorism have been aided and abetted by police and intelligence agencies.
This known fact was seldom part of the discourse in the heated discussions on television in the weeks and months after October 22, 2014. Police pretended to be unaware of the pattern. For example, in a CBC Radio interview on March 7, 2015, RCMP Commissioner Paulson stated that when he had first watched Zehaf-Bibeau’s jihad video, he had found it shocking. The clarity, the sense of purpose of this violent man! Mr. Paulson neglected to tell listeners that in the previous year the RCMP had taken a young man similar in many ways to Zehaf-Bibeau—impoverished, adrift in Vancouver, caught between drug addiction and his personal version of Islam—and had done their best over a period of months to turn him into a terrorist. RCMP moles had prompted this man, John Nuttall, and his common law wife to make videos taking responsibility for “violence in the name of Allah.” The moles had assisted in the jihadi video productions and “even provided the black Islamic flag the two used as a backdrop for a video message urging jihad.”
Were we really supposed to believe, then, that Mr. Paulson was shocked by Zehaf-Bibeau’s video? And, given the well established broad pattern of entrapment by police and intelligence agencies in North America, would it not be perverse for any thoughtful person to neglect the possibility that state agencies may have been complicit in the October 22 shootings? Yet avoidance of this possibility has been the rule in this year since the 2014 events, on the part of both the media and Members of Parliament.
We appear to be in the presence of yet another taboo in the Global War on Reason.
Determined that civil society researchers not allow themselves to be silenced by this taboo and determined as well not to allow information available in the early hours and days of this event to be swept down the memory hole, I decided to write a report on the October 22 shootings. My central aim was to see whether the questions many of us had in the wake of the events had been answered. My 25,000-word report, submitted to Canadian NGO, Democracy Probe International, is now available here:
The list of important, unanswered questions is a long one. For this reason I am calling for a federal public inquiry.
Why is a public inquiry necessary? First of all, police killed the suspect, putting 31 bullets in his body. There is no sign of further suspects and, therefore, no court case on the horizon. No court case usually means no serious effort to discover the truth. Secondly, several months ago a series of police reports was released but they added little to what we already knew. Redaction in these reports is heavy, methodology is poor, and the most serious questions have not even been asked. Thirdly, the media have not done their job. There were fierce promises on the day of October 22, 2014 that they would pursue the key questions, but for the most part these promises have been broken.
I hope readers who are disgusted when they see foreign military intervention defended, and repressive legislation passed, on the basis of obscure events shrouded in police secrecy will download this report, study it, build on it, and use it.
Graeme MacQueen was the founding director of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University and has been involved in peace-building projects in several war zones. His book The 2001 Anthrax Deception was published by Clarity Press in 2014.
Notes
With the exception of the few cases below, sources are given in the report referred to in the article: The October 22, 2014, Ottawa Shootings: Why Canadians Need a Public Inquiry.
[1] Céline Hervieux-Payette, October 22, 2014. The Day the Military Police Took Control of Parliament. Blog of Senator Hervieux-Payette.
The richest person in the world isn’t anyone in the Forbes list, which excludes calculations for any heads-of-state, but is instead King Salman of Saudi Arabia, whose net worth is in the trillions of dollars. He virtually owns the Saudi Government, which owns the world’s largest oil company, Aramco, among other assets.
It was a Rockefeller company then; but no one can say who controls it today. As of 2013 (see p. 56 there), the only two investors that owned more than 0.002 or .02% of Chevron, each owned around 6% of it: Blackrock, Inc., and State Street Corp., and they essentially jointly controlled that company, regarding anything on which the two agreed. But the controlling stockholder of Blackrock in 2013 was PNC Financial Services, at 20.8%. PNC is jointly controlled by Wellington Management, Blackrock and the Vanguard Group, each at more than 5%. Wellington, the main stockholder, is jointly controlled by Blackrock, Dimensional Fund Advisors, Royce & Associates, T. Rowe Price, and Wellington Management itself. Some companies, such as Wellington Management, simply hide their owners. All of this is called ‘democracy.’ (Or, at least, it’s “capitalism” of the fascist sort.)
However, King Salman’s ownership of the Saudi Government is relatively clear, since he controls the Government as his private fiefdom, and since his Government owns Aramco and other assets. Individuals such as Bill Gates, Carlos Slim, Warren Buffett, and Amancio Ortega, are each only around 1/20th to 1/50th as rich as is he.
The officially-given-out figure for Salman’s personal wealth is $18 billion, but Forbessimply omits including him at all. (Bloomberg’s billionaires-list does likewise.) They don’t want to offend the richest people in the world; and heads-of-state who have become enormously wealthy from heisting an entire country prefer to keep the actual size of their heists hidden. (Furthermore, in order to pretend that the basic capitalist myth is true — that accumulation of wealth reflects mainly one’s merit instead of one’s power — they need to play down wealth that’s been accumulated by crime, or by inheritance; and head-of-state wealth tends strongly to be the product of both.)
“The mother of a Saudi protester sentenced to death by beheading and crucifixion has begged Barack Obama to intervene to save her son’s life. In her first interview with foreign media, Nusra al-Ahmed, the mother of Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, whose case has made headlines around the world, described the intended punishment as savage and ‘backwards in the extreme’. … She said her son had been detained sometime after joining Shia demonstrators in the eastern coastal city of Qatif seeking equal religious rights in the Sunni-majority country. … Visiting after his arrest, she alleged he had been tortured. ‘When I visited my son for the first time I didn’t recognise him. I didn’t know whether this really was my son Ali or not. I could clearly see a wound on his forehead. Another wound in his nose. They disfigured it. …[When] I started talking to him [he told me that] during the interrogation [he was] being kicked, slapped, of course his teeth fell out … For a month he was peeing blood. He said he felt like a mass of pain, his body was no more.’”
This was/is his punishment for participating in a peaceful demonstration.
This is part of a global war between Sunni and Shiia political leaders. America and its vassal-states (including David Cameron’s Britain) are allied with Sunni-run nations, while Russia and its cooperating nations are allied with Shiia-run nations.
The Saudi royals are the world’s top Sunni force, and they have long been allied with the United States, against post-Shah (post-1979) Iran and all other Shiia-ruled countries, such as Syria, and such as the next-door Yemenese Shiite Houthis, who are being bombed incessantly by the hard-line Sunni Sauds using their U.S. weapons. According to the former bookkeeper of the Sunni organization Al Qaeda, the man who collected all of the financial donations to that organization, virtually all of Al Qaeda’s funding consisted of multimillion-dollar donations, mainly from the Saud family but also from other Sunni Arab royals; and their followers, the terrorists, were mercenaries in their pay, almost as much as they were true-believing fundamentalist Sunnis — they were being paid very well by their royal sponsors, to serve as a ‘volunteer’ army for jihad to bring a globalized version of the ancient Caliphate, or Sunni Empire. Such terrorism can be quite lucrative for a jihadist, even if the bigger payoff is promised to come in his afterlife.
The official religion of Saudi Arabia is the Wahhabist or Salafist fundamentalist Islamic sect of the Sunni version of Islam. It’s the version of Islam that seeks a return of the ancient Caliphate or Sunni Empire, but now on a global level (extending at least as far away from Arabia as Afghanistan and Pakistan) — and, of course, the Saud family (after all their ancient conquests) owns Mecca, in whose direction every Muslim (Sunni or not) is required (according to the standard understanding of the Quran, in Surah “The Cow” or “ Al Baqarah,” 142-143) to bow towards in prayer, every day. So: King Salman controls not only the estimated quarter-trillion-barrels of oil that Aramco has, but also the Mecca for all of Islam. And, of course, he also relies upon the decades-long military backing of the United States Government.
Today we are witnessing the largest global convergence of jihadists in history, as individuals from more than 100 countries have migrated to the conflict zone in Syria and Iraq since 2011. Some initially flew to the region to join opposition groups seeking to oust Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, but most are now joining the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), inspired to become a part of the group’s “caliphate” and to expand its repressive society. Over 25,000 foreign fighters have traveled to the battlefield to enlist with Islamist terrorist groups, including at least 4,500 Westerners. More than 250 individuals from the United States have also joined or attempted to fight with extremists in the conflict zone.
5,000 foreign Sunni jihadists in Syria came from Tunisia — it’s how Tunisia managed to get rid of enough of them to be able to establish something of a democracy in their own land. The second-biggest national contingent, 2,275, is from Saudi Arabia itself, the same country that supplied fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 terrorists. But the exodus of 2,275 jihadists from Saudi Arabia can’t enable democracy to emerge in Saudi Arabia, because the Saud family’s own Wahhab faith is based upon supporting jihad. Most of the Saudi population aren’t in favor of extending Wahhabism around the world, but the Sauds are. Conveniently, their war to spread Allah’s power happens to be also a war to spread the Sauds’ power. (It’s not spreading the power of the rest of the Saudi population.) The Sauds believe that Allah is on their family’s side. After all: God (and the pillaging that had enabled the Saud family to conquer the country) gave them 260 billion barrels of oil!
These warriors are all doing battle to oust Bashar al-Assad, the most secular (or non-sectarian) leader in the Middle East (far more secular, for example, than is America’s ally, Israel). The Syrian Constitution under his Ba’ath Party has always been non-Islamic, and not only non-jihadist. There is a strict separation of religion from politics. By contrast, in Saudi Arabia, “The Qur’an is declared to be the constitution of the country, which is governed on the basis of Islamic law (Shari’a).” Furthermore, “No political parties or national elections are permitted[2] and according to The Economist’s 2010 Democracy Index, the Saudi government was the seventh most authoritarian regime from among the 167 countries rated.” (Notice that euphemism ‘authoritarian.’ When we were fighting self-declared fascists in World War II, we used instead the honest term for them, “dictatorships.” The Sauds are dictators.) The Sauds are dictators.) TheEconomist rated Syria the fifth-most “authoritarian,” but theEconomist is allied with the Saudi royal family and wants Assad to be overthrown. And, at seventh-worst, Saudi Arabia was actually ranked far worse than any other of the magazine’s listed allies. (The Economist is hardly a trustworthy source, more a mouthpiece of the aristocracy.)
U.S. President Obama has consistently since 2011 argued that, “The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way. His calls for dialogue and reform have rung hollow while he is imprisoning, torturing, and slaughtering his own people. We have consistently said that President Assad must lead a democratic transition or get out of the way. He has not led. For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.” How wonderful to know that our President cares so much about “the Syrian people” as to bomb their government and try to replace it with one more like the Sauds’. The stars-and-stripes waves so proudly around the world. (Actually not — certainly not now.)
Obama said on 2 October 2015, “They’ve been propping up a regime that is rejected by an overwhelming majority of the Syrian population because they’ve seen that he has been willing to drop barrel bombs on children and on villages indiscriminately.” He blatantly lied.
That’s the type of orderly nation the United States can defend. The United States can also support the regime it had installed in a violent February 2014 coup in Ukraine that’sfirebombing the residents of the area that refused to accept the coup-government the U.S. had installed. (Firebombs areworse than barrel bombs.) For some reason, things like this are not what U.S. politicians and ‘news’ media talk about, with ‘our’ ‘free’ press. So, it’s easy for the U.S. public to be unaware of such realities about the ‘democracy’ that ‘they’ ‘elect.’ Out of sight is out of mind; ignorance is bliss. Under such circumstances as this, it’s more comfortable for the public to be ignorant, and America’s aristocrats want their public to be comfortable, at least enough so that the public will vote for the candidates they finance. Just as George W. Bush wanted his torture-operation to be done offshore, Barack Obama also wants the beheadings etc. to besmirch other countries such as Saudi Arabia, not the U.S., which keeps regimes like that in power while demanding that Syria, Libya, Russia, etc., must have “regime change,” in order, supposedly, to bring there the blessings of ‘democracy.’
What ‘blessings of ‘democracy’ has the United States recently brought to the people in Honduras, or in El Salvador, or in Guatemala? The results have been floods of refugees from there, just like the floods of refugees from U.S. bombing campaigns in Libya and in Syria. America and its allies and their ‘news’ media blame the refugees on the countries that America has destroyed. This, too, helps promote, among the public, the ‘bliss’ that is ignorance — or, worse yet, deception — in these ‘democracies’: blaming the U.S.-caused refugees for the refugees-problem (both in the U.S. and in Europe).
America’s rot in international affairs is pervasive. Take for example Obama’s drone-warfare program to kill some Saudi-inspired extremists; it too is full of lies. In a rare example of honest mainstream U.S. journalistic dissent, Jeremy Scahillat Huffington Post reported on October 15th that:
“The White House and Pentagon boast that the targeting killing program is precise and that civilian deaths are minimal. However, documents detailing a special operations campaign in northeastern Afghanistan, Operation Haymaker, show that between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets.” (Yet, even knowing this, Obama continues his drone program.)
Obama was mainly building support there for the Saudi-originated Taliban (they started out as being called the“Mujahideen” and were supplied weapons by the U.S.). Taliban gain support among villagers whose loss of innocent family-members on account of these U.S. drone-strikes drives them to favor the fight against the enemy that has been killing their loved-ones (i.e., against the U.S.). The Taliban are actually allies of the Sauds, who sometimes are even brought in to help persuade them to back off (and another example of that is here). In fact,
So, at the very same time that the U.S. Government tries to fool its public that the U.S. military are focused primarily against the threat from Islamic jihadists (not against Russia), U.S. policies are actually directed instead against the enemies of the Sauds (who are behind Islamic jihadists): that’s to say, against Iran, the leading Shiia power; and especially against Russia, the leading competitor to Saudi Arabia in the oil and gas markets — and the chief country that’s still holding out against takeover by the U.S. aristocracy.
Without continuing U.S. support, the Sauds would be treated by Saudis even worse than Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Nicholas II, and Benito Mussolini, were: they’d be treated the same way they themselves have treated anyone in Saudi Arabia who has protested their decades-long tyranny. Would the fanatic fundamentalist clergy that the Sauds have shared power with be treated any better? Even from the standpoint of moderating Islamism, the results of overthrowing the Sauds would likely be better than what America — the world-policeman for the imperial Saudi tyrants — has produced. But it would need to be done before the Sauds acquire nuclear weapons.
What needs to be changed first is the American government — its control by an aristocracy that’s firmly wedded to the Sauds. The American aristocracy (especially its three most powerful components: petrodollar Wall Street, oil-and-gas billionaires, and military-industrial-complex billionaires — all of whom benefit from alliance with the Sauds) needs to be defeated in America. The American people need to strip the U.S. aristocracy (at least those three elements of it) of their power over the U.S. Government. It can’t be done unless the news-media start informing the American people of reality. (For example, in neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party Presidential debates has this immense problem, and candidates’ positions regarding it, been even so much as mentioned. That can’t possibly reflect a democratic nation — an authentic democracy.)
Continued dishonesty will lead only to catastrophe. If honesty doesn’t start now, it probably won’t start until such a disaster can’t be avoided. Honesty needs to start now. It starts here, or it won’t start at all.
Note: Article originally published on our website in 2003
Which is the more remarkable — that the United States can openly announce to the world its determination to invade a sovereign nation and overthrow its government in the absence of any attack or threat of attack from the intended target? Or that for an entire year the world has been striving to figure out what the superpower’s real intentions are?
There are of course those who accept at face value Washington’s stated motivations of “liberating” the people of Iraq from a dictatorship and bestowing upon them a full measure of democracy, freedom and other eternal joys fit for American schoolbooks. In light of a century of well-documented US foreign policy which reveals a virtually complete absence of such motivations, along with repeated opposite consequences, we can dispense with this attempt by Washington to win hearts and mindless. Presented here are some reflections about several of the causes that make the hearts of the imperial mafia beat faster in regard to Iraq, which may be helpful in arguing the anti-war point of view:
Expansion of the American Empire: adding more military bases and communications listening stations to the Pentagon’s portfolio, setting up a command post from which to better monitor, control and intimidate the rest of the Middle East.
Idealism: remaking the world in what the true believers see as America’s image, with free enterprise and Judeo-Christianity as core elements; here is Michael Ledeen, former Reagan official, now at the American Enterprise Institute (one of the leading drum-beaters for attacking Iraq): “If we just let our own vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don’t try to be clever and piece together clever diplomatic solutions to this thing, but just wage a total war against these tyrants, I think we will do very well, and our children will sing great songs about us years from now.” Oil: the sine qua non of Middle East policy, yesterday, today and tomorrow; to be in full control of Iraq’s vast reserves, with Saudi oil and Iranian oil waiting defenselessly next door; OPEC will be stripped of its independence from Washington and will no longer think about replacing the dollar with the Euro as its official currency; oil-dependent Europe may think twice next time about being so uppity.
Globalization: Once relative security over the land, people and institutions has been established, the transnational corporations will march into Iraq ready to privatize everything at fire-sale prices, followed closely by the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organization and the rest of the international financial extortionists.
Arms industry: As with each of America’s endless wars, military manufacturers will rake in their exorbitant profits, then deliver their generous political contributions, inspiring Washington leaders to yet further warfare, each war also being the opportunity to test new weapons. Israel: The men driving Bush to war include long-time militant supporters of Israel, such as Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith, who, along with the rest of the powerful Israeli lobby, have advocated smashing Iraq for years. Israel has been playing a key role in the American military buildup to the war. Besides getting rid of its arch enemy, Israel could use the opportunity to carry out its final solution to the Palestinian question — transferring them to Jordan, (liberated) Iraq, and anywhere else that expanded US hegemony in the Middle East will allow. Iraq’s abundant water could be diverted to relieve a parched Israel.
The EU and Turkey have agreed on an “action plan” that might give Ankara up to €3 billion ($3.4bn) in aid, visa privileges and new talks on Turkey-EU membership in return for its help in stemming the flow of refugees to Europe.
The EU summit in Brussels stretched into the early hours of Thursday, and seems to have achieved some results. While no final deal has been inked, EU leaders and Ankara have managed to agree an “action plan”, European Council President Donald Tusk told reporters.
“Our intensified meetings with Turkish leaders … in the last couple of weeks were devoted to one goal: stemming the migratory flows that go via Turkey to the EU. The action plan is a major step in this direction,” said Tusk.
Yet he expressed “cautious optimism,” that the plan would succeed, but has welcomed the agreement of an EU-Turkey joint action plan to tackle the current migratory crisis.
In the summit’s spotlight was the ambitious deal, previously drafted between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.
The deal’s terms included three billion euros ($3.4 billlion) in aid, the easing of visa restrictions for EU travel for Turkish nationals, and resurrecting negotiations for EU membership. Turkey also wanted to be included on the list of “safe countries” for asylum.
In return, Turkey promised to strengthen its border controls, greater co-operation with Greece, being another first destination for refugees fleeing war, instability and poverty in the Middle East.
In exchange for visa-free access for its citizens, Ankara would agree for the previously drafted readmission deal, meaning that Turkey would take back those asylum seekers, who entered the EU from its territory.
“We will not sign the readmission agreement before steps are taken on the Schengen visa and thus a visa liberalization is secured for Turkish citizens,” Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said in an interview before the summit. According to Davutoglu, Turkey would like the deal by the first half of 2016.
While Turkey wants EU to show good will addressing the free-visa travel, European leaders want proof that Turkey will live up to its pledges, as part of the deal would see Turkey increase its crack down on people-smugglers.
“We need guarantees that Turkey’s response to our offer will be as concrete and as substantive as ours,” European Council President Donald Tusk said.
As for the 3 billion euros in aid for Turkey, the EU leaders agreed that the request was reasonable.
“We are declaring as ready and pulling to have a share the burden with Turkey because Turkey, on the very doorstep of the European Union, has to shoulder responsibility for more than two million refugees and it stands for a number of years already, so in this period of burden sharing, in this period of solidarity between neighbors, it is only right for the European Union to think how it can participate in this,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said.
To cement the potential deal Merkel is set to visit Istanbul on Sunday.
“There is still a huge amount to do,” Merkel said in a press conference. “But you cannot say that we’ve achieved nothing.”
The deal to pursue Ankara’s help stems from German Chancellor Angela’s Merkel calls to “secure the external borders” of the Union. Over 710,000 migrants have arrived to the EU’s border so far this year.
“We cannot organize or stem the refugee movements without working with Turkey,” said Merkel as the leaders of the 28 nation states arrived for the summit in Brussels.
Germany, which has taken on a hefty leading role in offering migrants a new home, is struggling to deliver on its promises. Many that arrive in Germany live on the streets, waiting for the bureaucratic machine to processes their paperwork.
Turkey on the other hand has enormous experience dealing with the influx of refugees that have flooded its borders mainly following the Syrian conflict that began in 2011.
The number of refugees in Turkey in 2015 is expected to rise to 1.9 million people, including 1.7 million Syrian migrants, UN Refugee Agency UNHCR says. With war-torn Syria just across the border, Turkey has set up 22 camps for refugees. Another two camp are under construction now. While the majority of refugees are Syrian, with half being children, others flock to the country from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Somalia.
Turkey has accommodated more than two million Syrian refugees, spending over €7 billion (nearly $8 billion). So far it has received only €1 billion ($1.1 billion) in external aid.
“The three billion euros can play a role in the sense that Turkey has already spent more than seven billion on the refugees and has received less than one billion. I think that in the future we have to share the burden, where we were left alone during the last three-four years,” the German Chancellor said.
A large portion of them continue on their outward journey to the EU, risking the rough sea conditions to reach the safety of European borders, where they are often neglected.
Just as EU leaders were discussing the migrant crisis, an Afghan man trying to make his way from Turkey into Bulgaria near the southeastern Bulgarian town of Sredets was shot and killed.
“A big group of illegal migrants attempted to enter Bulgaria from Turkey. One man suffered a gunshot wound in the incident and died on the way to hospital,” an interior ministry spokeswoman told AFP.
The incident marks the first time that an EU border guard has shot and killed a refugee crossing into the EU. Reacting to the news of the death after the summit, Tusk said that the incident has shown the need for external borders protection.
“For me its the next argument, how important our discussion was tonight. I mean the protection of our external borders is the main priority today,” Tusk said. “In fact, half of our discussion was today about how we can help in this very demanding process I mean rebuilding of control of our external borders. I think it’s the, this is the next, the next reason to continue this, this work.”
In addition to the shooting, a Lebanese family of five drowned while crossing the Mediterranean Sea from Turkey to Greece, bringing the toll of those drowned at sea to over 3,000 people.
1. The integration of Greece into the EU is the real cause of its catastrophic crisis
The almost complete destruction of the lower classes in Greece is not due to the causes usually attributed to it by the “Left”.[1] In fact, contrary to the misleading “explanations” provided by this Left and the Right alike, the actual cause is the full integration of the Greek economy into neoliberal globalization, through its accession into the EU. This has meant the complete transformation of Greece into an economic and political protectorate of the Transnational Elite.[2]
The catalyst for this crisis was Greece’s unofficial default, which, however, was merely the consequence of the destruction of its production structure, as a result of the opening, and liberalization of markets imposed the EU, following Greece’s entry in 1981. It is therefore no wonder that both the Left (apart from the Communist Left) and the Right––in fact, the entire Greek establishment––are fully united in not challenging the main cause of the present economic destruction: Greece’s membership in the EU.
In other words, contrary to the deceptive pre-election promises of SYRIZA, (which is an organic part of the Euro-left that has just chosen its leader, A. Tsipras, as its candidate for president of the EU Commission), there is no way that an EU/EMU Member State could refuse to apply the policies imposed by neoliberal globalization, as borne out by History with Mitterrand, Lafontaine, Hollande, et. al. It is equally disorienting to state, as SYRIZA does, that, if elected to power, it would revert the catastrophic legislation imposed by the well known ‘Troika’ (representing the IMF, the EU and the ECB) in the past three years or so.
The above deceptive promises are based on the myth that neoliberalism is some kind of a mistaken ideology or a doctrine[3] upheld by “bad” politicians such as Thatcher, Merkel, Blair, etc. However, neoliberal globalization is, in fact, a systemic phenomenon implying, also, that the EU members’ economic growth does not rely anymore mainly on the domestic market but on the international market (within the EU and without) and that it is the Trans-National Corporations (TNCs) that control world production and trade, and–– through the Transnational Elite[4]––the international political, military and cultural institutions.
So, only if the EU governments were taken over by the Euro-Left and they then forced the TNCs based in EU to operate solely within the EU area––imposing in the process strict social controls on the movement of capital and commodities from the other economic blocks (i.e. those of the Far East and America)––only then could the European economy be indifferent to its own level of competitiveness and live in the Euro-Left’s nirvana, happily ever after. In fact, however, EU is moving in exactly the opposite direction of further integration within the New World Order (NWO) defined by neoliberal globalization! This is clearly shown by the current negotiations between EU and US for a Transatlantic Free Trade Area.
2. Capitalist globalization can only be neoliberal
The Euro-elites simply cannot afford to lose more of their competitiveness. In fact, the real reason for the creation of EU and later of the Eurozone had nothing to do with the ideals of freedom, democracy, human values and the rest of its ideology, as EU’s history has clearly shown. It was the growing gap in competitiveness (in terms of EU’s share of world exports) during the 1980s, which led the Euro-elites to speed up the integration procedures, which were mostly dormant up to then. The EU economic failure was clearly due to the fact that the competitiveness of its commodities was increasing at much slower rates than those of is competitors, particularly in the low cost countries of the Far East.[5] As supporters of the EU and its integration were claiming at the time, only a market of continental dimensions could provide the security and the economies of scale that were necessary for the survival of the European capital in the hyper-competitive global market that was just emerging at the time.
However, despite the high degree of integration achieved by the ‘Single European Act’ in the 1990s, and even despite the creation of the Eurozone, its decline in competiveness continued. Thus, whereas the share of Euro-exports to world exports was 35.8% in 1990, ten years later, it has fallen to 29.7% and by 2010 it has fallen further to 26.3%![6] In other words, within two decades, the Eurozone countries have lost more than a quarter of their competitiveness, measured in terms of their share in world exports. Although the Euro-elites are well aware of the fact that a significant part of their ‘loss’ of exports is in fact due to their de-industrialization––because of the move of industrial capital by the TNCs (most of them based in the metropolitan countries including the Eurozone ones) towards the low-cost paradises of China, India and the rest–– this is obviously no consolation to their own workers (and electorates), which benefit very little (if at all!) by globalization!
The present EU policies therefore, are not the result of a conspiracy or a satanic plot of the elites to exploit further the European workers but simply of the fact that the opening and liberalization of markets required by globalization, so that TNCs could expand their activities further, inevitably led to the present neoliberal policies implemented by every country fully integrated into the New World Order. To put it simply, globalization in a capitalist world can only be neoliberal and the rest is mythology adopted by today’s bankrupt world “Left”––apart from the genuine (but diminishing) anti-systemic Left.
3. Competitiveness is the rule
If, therefore, we accept the premise that the Euro-elites have no other option but to improve their competitiveness within the globalized economy, the next question is how competitiveness can be improved. There are two main ways in which a country’s competitiveness could improve: either by changing relative prices, i.e. squeezing the prices of locally produced commodities with respect to those produced abroad by squeezing wages and salaries, or by improving productivity of locally produced commodities, which may lead to lower cost of production without reducing real wages and salaries or to better quality products, etc.
Changing relative prices in the former way is the easy solution, as it could be implemented, almost at a stroke, in case a country controls its own currency and Greece itself has repeatedly resorted to devaluation policies in the post-war period to improve, temporarily, its competitiveness. In case however a country does not control its currency, as is the case of Greece in the Eurozone, the only other option, given its historically low level of labor productivity because of the lack of investment in research and development, is the presently implemented policy of squeezing wages and salaries in the hope that the cost of production will fall accordingly. In fact, the level of Greek productivity of labor, for instance has always been historically much lower than that of the Eurozone (in 2006 it was just 77% of the average Eurozone one[7]), something which is not that much peculiar if we take into account the fact that the proportion of productive investments to the GNP is much higher in the European ‘North’ than in the ‘South’ in general and Greece in particular.
So, if we start with the premise that the uneven levels of competitiveness and productivity are unavoidable in an economic union like the EU, which consists of countries at highly different levels of development (as they have been historically formed within a very uneven development process like the capitalist one), then we may easily understand the causes of the crisis in countries like Greece. The fact, therefore, that a Eurozone country like Greece, facing a problem of low competitiveness, cannot devalue its currency (i.e. change its relative prices without the need for suppressing domestic wages and incomes) is not the cause of the crisis. This may be the cause of a similar competitiveness crisis of an advanced capitalist country like Germany but not of a country like Greece where low competitiveness is a development problem.
Particularly so, when the Greek entry to the EU and later to the Eurozone had itself significantly exacerbated the development problem by effectively dismantling the productive structure of the country, as its infant industry and agriculture were not capable to compete with the imported commodities, following the opening and liberalization of markets imposed by the Single Market. Under these conditions, even a Greek exit from the Euro and a devaluation of the drachma that will be re-introduced in its aftermath, could only have temporary effects on Greek competitiveness, unless mass investment in its productive structure takes place at the same time, which is far from guaranteed in an internationalized market economy.
4. The EU as a mechanism to transfer surplus from its “South” to its “North”
In other words, competitiveness at the core Euro countries, which are characterized by higher levels of labor productivity than in the South, mainly depends on keeping wages and prices under control, so that German commodities continue to be competitive (because of their higher quality and so on) compared to similar commodities produced in East Asia and beyond. On the other hand, compettiveness in the European periphery, which consist of countries with lower levels of labor productivity, like Greece, mainly depends on improving productivity through new investment on R&D. Therefore, the competitiveness problem in the South is mainly a development problem and refers to the need of creating a strong productive base, which will not be formed within the process of uneven capitalist development (as today), but within a process of social control of the economy to create a self-reliant economy.
Yet, despite the fundamental difference concerning the causes of low competitiveness between the “North” and the “South” of the EU, in the framework of the post-Maastricht Europe, a common policy was adopted for all member countries––a policy that was determined by the needs and the interests of the North. Thus, the Single Market, did not mean the unification of peoples, as the EU propaganda presented it, not even the unification of states, but simply the unification of free markets. ‘Free markets’, however mean not only open markets (i.e. the unhibited movement of commodities, capital and laboutr), but also flexible markets (i.e. the elimination of any obstacle in the free formation of prices and wages, as well the restriction of state role in the control of economic activity, which implies the drastic restriction of the element of ‘national economy’.
This was the essence of the neoliberal globalization characterizing the new institutional framework of the EU, i.e. that the state control of the domestic market of each member state (which was drastically restricted within the Single Market of 1992) was not replaced by a corresponding EU control of it, apart from some (mostly nuissance) regulations on uniformity, etc. In other words, the new institutions aimed at the maximization of the freedom of organized capital,, whose concentration was facilitated in any way possible, and the minimization of the freedom of organized labor, whose co-ordination was restricted in any way possible and mainly through the unemployment threat.
If Germany is indeed the country which was on the receiving end of the greatest benefits from joining EU and the Eurozone, whereas the countries of the European South received the least benefits out of it, this was far from accidental or due to the bad designing of the Eurozone as, post-Keynesians and other reformists (including the Euro-Left!) argue. When the Eurozone was institutionalized at the beginning of the new millennium Germany already enjoyed relatively high levels of labor productivity and competitiveness and the new currency essentially has ‘frozen’ the relative deviations between the advanced North of the Eurozone and the much less advanced South (parts of which were in fact underdeveloped).
Then, the Single Market itself, under conditions of a common currency, brought about a relative equalization of commodity prices and a certain increase in wages in the South, as workers were struggling to maintain the real value of wages and at the same time to narrow the gap in wages with Northern workers. On the other hand, German employers were in a much better position to suppress wage rises because of the difference in labor productivity they enjoyed due to advanced technology and investment in R&D, but also due to better relative prices. As Wolfgang Münchauput it, “Germany entered the Eurozone at an uncompetitive exchange rate and embarked on a long period of wage moderation.
Macroeconomists would say Germany benefited from a real devaluation against other members”.[8] If we add to this, that the countries in the South no longer had the power to devalue their currencies, whereas Germany did not have any need to devalue its currency as long as it could keep wage rises in pace with labor productivity increases, then we can understand why (and how) the Eurozone essentially functions as an economic mechanism to transfer economic surplus from the countries of the European South to those in the North and particularly Germany.
5. The disorienting role of the “Left”
The obvious conclusion is that it is impossible to take any radical measures to exit from the current economic (and not only!) disaster, without a unilateral exit from the EU along with a cancelation of the debt (for which the people were never asked anyway), as well as the discarding of all legislation imposed by the Troika and the adoption at the same time of the necessary geostrategic changes. Only this way, Greece could retrieve the minimum required economic and national sovereignty for a strategy for economic self-reliance, which is necessary for the permanent exit from the crisis, through building a new productive structure to meet its needs.
This means that the views that we could implement another policy even within the Eurozone, as SYRIZA suggests, or that it would suffice to exit from the Euro (without the parallel direct and unilateral exit from the EU) to implement a radically different economic strategy (as other Left organizations suggest), are completely misleading. This is because, as I tried to show above, the cause of the present economic catastrophe in Greece is neither the austerity policies of the Troika, as the supporters of the former view claim, nor the poor design (and implementation) of the Euro that led us to deficits and massive debt, as argued by the supporters of the latter view.[9]
Thus, supporters of the former view (Laskos and Tsakalotos), in fact, reproduce the myths of an obsolete internationalism according to which the struggle of the European proletariat within the EU will reverse the austerity policies, despite the fact that, after almost five years of economic crushing of the popular strata, there has not been even a single (“official” or unofficial) European strike against these policies! On the other hand, the supporters of the latter view (Flassbeck and Lapavitsas), acting as the “Plan B” of the Euro-elite––in case it is forced to expel (temporarily or permanently) Greece from the Eurozone––argue for a Greek exit from the Euro, but not from the EU. However, in both cases, the failure of the proposed policies can be taken for granted, although the consequences will not be identical.
Thus, in the first scenario of a SYRIZA-based government (which looks likely following the Euro elections that could well function as a catalyst for general elections) it is a matter of time for its failure to become evident, if it insists on its pro-EU and pro-Euro policy. Despite its present rhetoric, it would simply have to follow the same economic policies as the present government, perhaps with a minor relaxation of austerity policies (assuming that the Euro-elites will find a way to cancel part of the Debt to make the rest of it payable). As markets will remain open and liberalized under a Syriza government (the party never challenged this fundamental tenet of neoliberal globalization), labor markets will also continue to be flexible. However, open and liberalized markets mean:
wages and salaries will be kept at around their present minimum levels, or, at least, these levels will be the basis for any future increases strictly linked to productivity rises;
Public Health and Education will never recover from their present dismantling, as the government will have to continue implementing the present Eurozone strict fiscal policies to keep budget deficits under strict controls;
the selling out of the social wealth of Greece, following privatizations of essential services like electricity, water, transport, ports and airports, communications (and now even Greek islands!) will not be reversed, making the implementation of any effective social policy to protect the victims of globalization impossible;
Unemployment may marginally fall from the present almost 30% of the working population (and 60% of young people) only to the extent that foreign investors will be attracted by the present extremely low wages/salaries and the ‘political stability’ that SYRIZA might secure. However, given the strong competition on this front by other low-wage countries in the Balkans and beyond (East Asia), unemployment is bound to be stabilized at very high levels for any foreseeable future, with young Greeks having either to work in Greece’s “heavy industry” (as the establishment calls tourism) or emigrate.
Clearly, this Latin-Americanization (or Balkanization) of the Greek economy will become permanent under SYRIZA’s pro-EU policy, and in the elections to follow a (likely brief) period of SYRIZA in power, the party will probably have the fate of the social democratic party PASOK, which has effectively been demolished. In fact, this would simply be the belated end of the Euro-Left in Greece, following the similar end of this kind of “Left” in the rest of Europe, in the era of globalization. Yet, the International “Left” is unable to see all this and would be ready to celebrate the possible victory of SYRIZA in the next elections,[10] whereas Leo Panitch, is so enthusiastic about the new kind of ‘progressive’ reform SYRIZA represents that he became almost lyrical when reading that Tsipras “spoke in terms of the ‘historic opportunity’ that now exists for a left alternative to the current capitalist ‘European model’.[11] This, at the very moment when the same Tsipras is also indirectly praised by the New York Times, the leading organ of the Transnational Elite, presumably as a ‘serious’ Left politician worthy of its trust, compared to the ‘loony left’ they so despise:
Mr. Tsipras…has backed away from past rhetoric about abandoning the euro and said he does not want Greece to drop out of the 18-country zone that uses the currency. But he does want a fundamental reworking of the terms of Greece’s bailout funds, worth 240 billion euros, or about $328 billion.“Our intention is to change the framework, not smash the euro”, he said.[12]
On the other hand, in the case of the second scenario, i.e. of a Left government that decides a Greek exit from the Euro (but stays in the EU), the image would be much more blurred, as the reintroduction and significant devaluation of the reintroduced drachma would initially bring in some positive results. But, these would be completely temporary, unless they were accompanied by a parallel radical restructuring of the productive structure, based on social decisions and not left to the market forces, as both scenarios implicitly or explicitly assume. And this brings us back to the need for a strategy of self-reliance that presupposes a Greek exit from both the Euro and the EU.
The main reason why both approaches are not only wrong, but also completely misleading, is that they are not based on the fact that the current devastating crisis is due to structural reasons having everything to do with the uneven capitalist development process, which is further exacerbated in the era of neoliberal globalization and the consequent policies implemented by the EU, and very little to do with the broader financial crisis[13], austerity policies, or the debt itself and the ways to deal with it .
Thus, as far as austerity policies are concerned, it is obvious that they are a consequence and not the cause of the devastating crisis. The solution, therefore, to the “problem” is not just the redistribution of income at the expense of profits and in favor of wages, as (supposedly is the conclusion drawn by a “Marxist” kind of analysis), as this inequality is nothing new but an inherent characteristic of the capitalist system. Unsurprisingly, despite growing world inequality during the era of neoliberal globalization, the system has enjoyed a sustained period of expansion throughout this period, with world GDP rising at an average 2.9% in the 1990s and 3.2% in the period up to the beginning of the latest financial crisis (2000-08)[14]. Furthermore, the only case that a systematic redistribution of income against the rich took place in a capitalist system was when the tax burden was shifted to the rich during the social democratic period (approx. 1945-1975). However, this kind of redistribution is simply not feasible anymore in the NWO of Neoliberal Globalization, since Trans-national Corporations can easily move to tax havens like Ireland, India, etc. leaving massive unemployment and poverty behind them.
Yet, neither the deficits and the consequent debts were created by reckless fiscal policies nor, as more sophisticated variations on the same theme maintain, because of the fact that the German elite were suppressing wage rises at a time when the other elites in the Eurozone, and particularly the elites in the Euro periphery, were doing the exact opposite. This policy, according to the same argument had created an artificial competitive advantage and consequent Balance of Payments (BP) surpluses in Germany and, vice versa in the European South, i.e. low competitiveness and BP deficits. This, in turn, had led to excessive borrowing by the peripheral countries, (made easy by the fact that it was backed up by a strong currency, the Euro) up to the moment that the fiscal “bubble” burst, when the consequent shortage of liquidity made lending to these countries much tighter, leading to the well known debt crises in countries like Greece. Not surprisingly, the Euro-elite, has just decided to adopt an even tighter economic control of the Euro-members, through the Banking Union.[15]
6. Concluding remarks
The crucial, therefore, issue arising is the following one: can a small Euro-peripheral country like Greece afford not to implement the policies of neoliberal globalization today? Or, should, (as the present “Left” suggests), the millions of unemployed and poor wait for a radical change in the balance of forces in the EU and the Eurozone, so that a new pan-European Left government proceeds with the ‘progressive’ reforms suggested by its supporters? Alternatively, should they better wait for a new socialist revolution in order to proceed with genuine socialist policies, as suggested by the dwindling anti-capitalist Left? My sympathies would of course be (as have always been) for an anti-systemic Left, as it is the only one which struggles against its full integration into the system and the NWO. Yet, it is obvious to me that, today, this Left is no less millenarian than the integrated into the system “Left”, and as such is equally useless to the victims of globalization, who every day lose even more their hope for any better future, many of them increasingly resorting to suicide.
Under these conditions, it is clear to me that only if a country broke away from the internationalized market economy and pursued a policy of self-reliance, it could retrieve the necessary degree of economic and therefore national sovereignty, so that it is the people who will be determining the economic process, i.e. which economic and social needs are met and how, instead of leaving this life-and-death issue to ‘market forces’ and the Social Darwinism they inevitably imply. This, for a country like Greece would imply the need for the creation ‘from below’ of a Popular Front for Social and National Liberation[16] (instead of relying on the professional politicians of the “Left” or of the Right), which will formulate a program for the radical changes needed to achieve the short term aim of restoring full social control on all markets, unilaterally cancelling the Debt and all related legislation imposed by the Troika, as well as a unilateral exit from the EU. Although socialization of the banking system and of the de-nationalized industries, particularly those covering basic needs (energy, water, transport, communication, etc.) will be necessary even at this early stage, yet, the medium-term aim will have to be economic self-reliance, so that the basic needs of all citizens are met through the rebuilding of the economic structure according to social needs rather than according to market demand. On the other hand, the issue of the systemic change, i.e. whether Greece would be in the future a state-socialist society, an Inclusive Democracy,[17] or a radical kind of social democracy, will be determined by the people themselves at a later stage once the present crucial problems concerning their survival have been sorted out..
In fact, Greece will not be alone in such a struggle against the NWO and neoliberal globalization. Not only the peoples in other countries in the European periphery and beyond would follow its example when they realize that there is a way out of the present catastrophe, HERE and NOW, but also the peoples who already fight against neoliberal globalization would also join the common struggle against the New World Order of neoliberal globalization. In fact, this struggle is already intensifying from Latin America (Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, et. al.) up to the Eurasian peoples of the ex-USSR, and the peoples in the Arab countries (I do not of course mean the pseudo-revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt or the engineered insurrections in Libya and Syria),[18] who shed their blood everyday in the struggle for their national and social liberation.
Takis Fotopoulos is a political philosopher, editor of Society & Nature/Democracy and Nature/The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy. He has also been a columnist for the Athens Daily Eleftherotypia since 1990. He is also the author of numerous books in Greek on development; the Gulf War; the neo-liberal consensus; the New World Order; the drug culture; the New Order in the Balkans; the new irrationalism; globalization and the Left; the war against “terrorism”; His latest book in Greek is Greece as a protectorate of the transnational elite: The need for an immediate exit from the EU and for a self-reliant economy (Athens: Gordios, November 2010). He is also the author of over 1,000 articles in British, American and Greek theoretical journals, magazines and newspapers, several of which have beentranslated into over twenty languages. His latest book is :Subjugating the Middle East. Integration into the New World Order (Progressive Press, 2014)
Notes
[1] See e.g. the recent book by two members of the SYRIZA leadership, ( one of them a member of Parliament representing the party), Christos Laskos and Euclid Tsakalotos, Crucible of Resistance: Greece, the Eurozone and the World Economic Crisis, (Pluto Press, Sept. 2013).
[3] see e.g. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine:The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, (London: Penguin, 2008).
[4] see for the meaning and significance of the Transnational Elite in administering the NWO, Takis Fotopoulos, Subjugating the Middle East: Integration into the New World Order – Vol. 1: Pseudo-Democratization, (Progressive Press, 2014), Part I.
[5] Thus, whereas the EU share of world exports was stagnant between 1979 and 1989 , the US share increased by 3.5% and the Far Eastern share increased by a massive 48% ,(World Bank, World Deνelopment Report 1991, Table 14).
[6] World Bank, World Development Indicators 2002, (Table 4.5) & World Development Indicators 2012, (Table 4.4).
[7] World Bank, World Development Indicators 2008, Table 2.4.
[8]Wolfgang Münchau, “Germany’s rebound is no cause for cheer”, Financial Times, 29/8/2010.
and full version in “The systemic crisis of the euro – true causes and effective therapies”,http://www.rosalux.de/publication/39478.
[10] See e.g. Andreas Bieler, “Crucible of Resistance: Class Struggle Over Ways Out of the Crisis”, Socialist Project • E-Bulletin No. 926 January 10, 2014; Reproduced also in Global Research.
[11]Leo Panitch, “Europe’s left has seen how capitalism can bite back»” , The Guardian, 13/1/2014.
[12]Andrew Higgins, “Opposition Dissent Tempers Greek Attempts at Optimism”,
The New York Times, 12/1/2014.
[13] Takis Fotopoulos, “The myths about the economic crisis, the reformist Left and economic democracy”, The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY, Vol. 4, No. 4, (October 2008), http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/vol4/vol4_no4_takis_economic_crisis.htm
[14] World Bank, World Development Indicators 2010, Table 4.1.
[15] ‘Big step’ reached in rescue plan for eurozone banks, BBC News, 12/12/2013 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25348977>; See, also, Maria Snytkova, “European countries lose bank sovereignty”, English Pravda, 2012/2013 http://english.pravda.ru/world/europe/20-12-2013/126445-bank_sovereignty-0/
[16]see Takis Fotopoulos, “Neoliberal Globalization and the need for popular fronts for national and social liberation”, The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, Vol. 9, No. 1/2 (2013), (under publication).
[17]Takis Fotopoulos, Towards An Inclusive Democracy, (London/NY: Cassell /Continuum, 1997/1998).
[18] Takis Fotopoulos, Subjugating the Middle East: Integration into the New World Order – Vol. 2, Engineered Insurrections,(Progressive Press, 2014).
Israel is more killing machine than nation – a ruthless Arab-hating monster. On Friday, it continued murdering Palestinians in cold blood, another five lethally shot, the death toll now at 38 since October 1 alone, around 2,000 others injured, 300 on Friday alone, many thousands more from toxic tear gas.
The world’s refugee crisis in the 20th century started with Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian population in both 1948 and in the 1967 “Six Day War”. Given Israel’s continued ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian population and the UN’s responsibility for partitioning Palestine, the UN General Assembly mandated the UNRWA (The United Nations Relief and Works Agency) in 1949 to provide both relief and public works for Palestinian refugees.
Zionist rabbi Meir Kahane is the founder of the Arab-hating Jewish Defense League (JDL). Israel banned it in 1988, calling it a “threat to national security”…Its poisonous ideology persists in Israel.
The video of 13 year old Palestinian Ahmed Manasrah bleeding to death on the pavement of an East Jerusalem neighborhood has been described as “shocking,” “disturbing,” and “painful to watch.” The callous verbal abuse and insults from Israelis watching the child writhe in agony are variously characterized as “heartless” and “cruel”; and indeed they are. “Die you son of a whore. Die! Die!” the Israeli onlookers can be heard shouting in the video which has since gone viral on social media.
Israel’s hardline Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, is now politically isolated as he brings ordinary Israelis into personal danger by having refused to negotiate a peace agreement with the Palestinians and by having incited violence by continuing illegal settlements on Palestinian land, in a policy that has been condemned internationally.
Changing US explanations following the October 3 Kunduz hospital attack were all lies – willful deception, covering up a deliberate attack on a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) facility.
Pentagon officials knew it was a hospital, yet attacked it anyway – multiple times for over an hour, killing 24 doctors, other medical staff and patients, injuring 37 others.
Make no mistake! This was a deliberately planned war crime. An AP report said “US analysts knew (the) Afghan site was (a) hospital.”
They’d been gathering intelligence on it for days – the strike authorized on the phony pretext of it being used by “a Pakistani operative…coordinat(ing) (with) Taliban activity,” said AP.
MSF stressed doctors, other medical staff and patients alone were in the facility – no Taliban, Taliban supporters, or other US-installed Afghan puppet regime opponents.
According to AP,
US “special operations analysts had assembled a dossier that included maps with the hospital circled, along with indications that intelligence agencies were tracking the location of the Pakistani operative and activity reports based on overhead surveillance, according to a former intelligence official who is familiar with some of the documents describing the site.”
Claiming the “intelligence suggested the hospital was being used as a Taliban command and control center and may have housed heavy weapons” was a complete fabrication.
Nothing of the sort was there. It was solely a hospital, providing vital medical services for thousands of Afghan victims of US imperialism, now with nowhere to go because of Washington’s horrific war crime.
US General John Campbell in charge of Afghan operations lied, calling the strike a mistake, changing previous phony explanations, stopping short of saying who authorized it.
Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook compounded his Big Lie, claiming US forces
“would never intentionally target a protected medical facility. We have confidence that the ongoing investigations into this tragic incident will uncover exactly what happened and why this hospital was mistakenly struck.”
Ongoing US, NATO and Afghan investigations will all whitewash Washington’s willful war crime when released – exercises solely in coverup and denial of what’s obvious from what’s already known.
MSF needs approval from US and puppet Afghan authorities to proceed with the independent investigation it demands – unwilling to accept the results of phony ones now being conducted.
On October 15, it launched a petitions drive, urging worldwide support, saying:
MSF “today launched a petition urging citizens to call on President Obama and the United States to consent to an independent investigation into the bombing of MSF’s trauma hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, on October 3.”
MSF called for an independent investigation by the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission (IHFFC) into the repeated US airstrikes on the hospital…
MSF is calling for the United States and the Obama administration to consent to an investigation into the Kunduz hospital bombing. Consent is required before an impartial truth-seeking investigation can be launched.
Read the petition. Add your name. Demand US war criminals be held accountable for 14 years of naked aggression against a nation threatening no one – the Kunduz hospital attack the latest example of their contempt for human life and welfare.
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.”
The video of 13 year old Palestinian Ahmed Manasrah bleeding to death on the pavement of an East Jerusalem neighborhood has been described as “shocking,” “disturbing,” and “painful to watch.” The callous verbal abuse and insults from Israelis watching the child writhe in agony are variously characterized as “heartless” and “cruel”; and indeed they are. “Die you son of a whore. Die! Die!” the Israeli onlookers can be heard shouting in the video which has since gone viral on social media.
While there has been much discussion of this video, and other similar incidents involving the extrajudicial executions of Palestinian youths accused by Israel of having stabbed Israelis (the veracity of some of these claims is disputed), there is decidedly little examination of the sociological implications. Specifically, it has become taboo to interrogate just what sort of ideological and psychological conclusions can be drawn about Israelis society – a society where such behavior is not an outlier; where, rather than being an anomaly, it is indicative of a significant, if not mainstream, attitude. Such undeniably barbaric treatment is not simple hate, and cannot be explained away or justified. But that is precisely what the corporate media does.
Suffice to say that there are many political analysts, activists, and others who are timid about outright condemnations of Israeli society and Israeli attitudes. They are, with much justification, fearful of being demonized as anti-Semitic, terrified that rather than open dialogue and critical examination, they will have their arguments twisted and portrayed as hateful and racist. While such accusations are sometimes warranted – as in the case of fascist bigots and neo-Nazis for whom “Jew” is synonymous with “evil” – more often than not these are willfully deceptive deflections designed to shield Israeli society from the criticism that it so clearly deserves.
But those whose interest is in justice and speaking the truth cannot be silent, cannot allow themselves to become the victims of self-censorship induced by fear. For muted criticism of Israel is in fact a failure to properly defend oppressed people; it is an abdication of the responsibility to speak against injustice, the brutality of colonialism, and the inhumanity of contemporary Zionism. It is equally an abandonment of the duty to deconstruct dominant narratives in the interest of social justice, to challenge the propaganda of corporate media whose primary function is to shield power from the uncomfortable light of criticism. I cannot, and will not, be silent.
Media Propaganda and the Danger of False Equivalence
Reading the New York Times, Washington Post, and other allegedly liberal major media outlets, one could be forgiven for thinking that the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is tit-for-tat, that it is the product of an ongoing cause-effect-countereffect relationship. That is precisely how the conflict is portrayed in nearly all so-called ‘respectable’ papers.
Take, for instance, an article published in America’s “paper of record,” the New York Times, just hours after the incident with the headline Stabbings, and Deadly Responses, Add to Israel’s Security Challenge. In deconstructing the headline alone, it is clear where the bias and deception lies; the Times imbues the very headline of the article with a presumption of guilt on the part of the Palestinians. According to the syntactic logic of the headline’s construction, it is the “stabbings” (presented first) which are the root of the problem and, therefore, the “deadly responses” are just that, responses. The effect is to justify the murder of Palestinians by portraying them as simply responses to an external factor: violence against Israelis.
But of course anyone who has even a rudimentary understanding of the issues knows that the stabbings are themselves responses to the attacks by Israeli settlers and security forces on Palestinians, as well as the predictable outgrowth of seemingly endless brutality and occupation, poverty and despair. The history of colonialism is replete with such examples.
And yet Israelis, and the Israeli state itself, are presented as the victims. The headline frames the issue as being one of a “security challenge” for Israel, rather than, say, a colonialism problem, or a vicious occupation. So, taken in total then, the headline and accompanying article have the cumulative effect of making the victims into perpetrators, and perpetrators into victims, thereby inverting the oppressor/oppressed relationship. This inversion is absolutely necessary in order to whitewash Israel’s crimes, and absolve the state and its fanatical, fascist far right of guilt.
Even the allegedly even-handed treatment of the issue by a presumably moderate liberal outlet such as NBC News, belies a dishonest treatment of the conflict and the recent violence. In covering the incident, NBC News published a story about the Ahmed Manasrah shooting and subsequent taunting with the headline Viral Video of Shot Ahmed Manasrah Sums Up Israel-Palestinian Conflict. The article purports to present the issue fairly by presenting the events surrounding Ahmed’s heinous shooting as emblematic of the entire conflict. Essentially, NBC News here tries to present the competing narratives of Israeli and Palestinian sources as indicative of the broader struggle for public opinion, trying to convince readers that the ongoing allegations and counter-allegations are just more of the same, and that the truth is simply unknowable; after all, Israeli sources say X, Palestinian sources say Y. I guess we’ll never know.
The reader of the NBC article is left with the utterly dishonest, though politically very useful, conclusion that both sides are equally guilty, equally worthy of blame, and that the conflict itself is beyond critical analysis. Moreover, in presenting the issue in this way, the outlet, in this case NBC, is seen as fair, as having provided a balanced accounting. In reality however, it has simply obscured the true nature of the conflict: one between a colonial oppressor and its victims, displaced and dispossessed systematically for seven decades.
But false equivalence aside, by obscuring the truth of the issue, NBC News here inadvertently reveals something fundamentally true about the conflict; that, indeed, this incident very much “sums up the Israel-Palestine conflict.” Though they didn’t intend it this way, NBC News correctly exposes the fact that the behavior of the Israelis on camera is clearly emblematic of the broader society of Israel, one which sees Palestinian children as “dogs,” and “sons of whores” unfit to breathe, unworthy of living.
The Pathology of Israeli Fascism
What the Ahmed Manasrah video laid bare for the world to see is the inhumanity of Zionism, a Jewish supremacist ideology which necessarily places non-Jews in an inferior relation to Jews, which places less value on the life of the non-Jew. It is not simple hatred that motivated the disgusting comments from the onlookers, it is an ingrained, inter-generational sense of superiority bred of dehumanization of the Palestinian, and the Arab generally.
This fundamental fact is only very rarely discussed, but it lies at the heart of the Palestine conflict. By seeing Arabs as subhuman, many Israelis are able to justify, often on an unconscious level, all forms of brutality, violence, and oppression. It should be said here that there are some Israelis who fight against just such thinking (Gideon Levy is perhaps the most prominent and vocal opponent of such supremacist ideology), but sadly they are drowned out by the rabid barbarism of the Israeli right (and much of the center, it must be said).
And this phenomenon, quick to get you rhetorically tarred and feathered as an anti-Semite, is what underlies all Israeli policies, and the active or passive acceptance of those policies by the Israeli body politic. While Ahmed Manasrah bleeding to death amid a swirl of insults from Israelis may elicit a brief outpouring of shock on social media, it is merely one instance of such violence. Is it really that different from Israeli bulldozers demolishing countless Palestinian homes? Is it somehow more barbaric than the torching of Palestinian homes with babies sleeping inside?
Perhaps it would be best not to express shock and outrage at the video, but rather to see it as the logical outgrowth of the fascist, supremacist ideology espoused by the leaders of the Israeli state. For the Israelis on the video are merely following the example of leaders such as Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked who, at the height of Israel’s criminal war on Gaza in the summer of 2014, infamously wrote:
The Palestinian people has declared war on us, and we must respond with war. Not an operation, not a slow-moving one, not low-intensity, not controlled escalation, no destruction of terror infrastructure, no targeted killings. Enough with the oblique references. This is a war…It is not a war against terror, and not a war against extremists, and not even a war against the Palestinian Authority…This is a war between two people. Who is the enemy? The Palestinian people… What’s so horrifying about understanding that the entire Palestinian people is the enemy? Every war is between two peoples, and in every war the people who started the war, that whole people, is the enemy… Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs… They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.
Such rhetoric, with all the attendant dehumanization, is reminiscent of any number of fascist ideologies, from German Nazism of the 1930s to the contemporary Ukrainian politics of Right Sector and Azov Battalion. The notion of “total war” against an entire people, including non-combatant women and children, is really beyond simple war propaganda, it is the advocacy of genocide and ethnic cleansing.
And this is exactly the point: ethnic cleansing as both a concept and military objective has become the political currency of modern Israel. So why should it surprise anyone when young Israelis wish death upon a bleeding Palestinian, calling him a “son of a whore.” After all, isn’t Ahmed Manasrah just another “little snake”?
…And One More Thing
If past history is any indicator, what has been written above will undoubtedly elicit some negative reactions, condemnations, hate mail, and insults of every sort. “Anti-Semite,” “traitor,” and “self-hater” are some of the most common epithets I’ve heard countless times when I’ve written or spoken out about Israel, Zionism, Jewish supremacy, and such issues. Not only do such obloquies not deter me, they motivate me to further speak out because they are an indication that the words are striking a nerve, one that is raw, and desperately in need of exposure.
I equally recognize the privilege with which I write these lines. As an avowed atheist who rejects the ethno-nationalism and tribalism inherent in the political ideology of Zionism, my Jewish background provides me with a modicum of insulation from accusations of anti-Semitism (not that it stops them, of course). Not only does that allow me greater latitude to write and speak freely on these issues, it reminds me that I have a duty to do so.
For those who don’t righteously oppose the crimes of imperialism, colonialism, oppression, and genocide are undoubtedly complicit in them. I, for one, will not be.
After changing its story many times, the US now admits that it intentionally threw bombs, for more than an hour, at the now famous Doctors Without Borders hospital, proving accurate the assessment of DWB staffer Meinie Nicolai, who said the US attack was “a premeditated massacre.”
Since initial US claims that the protected DWB hospital was a “Taliban stronghold” and so forth have been debunked as stupid, the US now claims it targeted the hospital because one man, a “Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence spy”, was inside.
However, Glenn Greenwald points out that the US puppet government in Afghanistan has had it out for DWB for some time because they treat patients indiscriminately, whereas US allies like Israel, for example, discriminate between patients, treating Al Qaeda fighters while targeting members of the UN-recognized Syrian government: “Israel has opened its borders with Syria in order to provide medical treatment to Nusra Front and al-Qaida fighters wounded in the ongoing civil war, according to The Wall Street Journal.”
On October 14th, an “international panel” announced that it was “ready to investigate the deadly US [hospital] bombing”, but would need “assurances from Barack Obama and the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, that their governments [would] comply.”
The US rejected the initiative for the investigation, and instead, on October 15th, sent soldiers to smash up the bombed hospital with a tank, “destroy[ing] potential evidence” for the war crimes investigation.
To explain this, the US announced that the tank was carrying the US’s own “investigators”.
In the mean time, a whistle-blower has released classified documents on Obama’s global assassination ring that illustrate gross recklessness and confirm that almost one hundred percent of the people being killed are not actual targets – though targeting people and executing them is also criminal.
Robert Barsocchini focuses on force dynamics, national and global, and also writes professionally for the film industry. Contact on Twitter.
As certain NATO powers are exploiting the recent flood of refugees from the Middle East and Africa to push for more military action in Syria, it is essential to further illustrate the deceptive and nefarious nature of a previous war conducted by the military alliance, namely the 2011 war in Libya.
“We came, we saw, he died”
These are the repugnant words of the former US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, in an apparent reference to the famous words attributed to Julius Caesar: “I came, I saw, I conquered.” Clinton was gloating following the brutal murder of the Libyan leader,Muammar al-Qaddafi, by the Libyan rebels in October 2011.
NATO powers exploited the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 which established a “no fly zone” in the country to bomb Libyan government positions and force regime change. As Paul Joseph Watson succinctly summed it up, “a “no fly zone” is merely a euphemism for aerial bombardment and aggressive regime change.”
Supported by Western intelligence agencies – most notably the CIA and MI6 – the al-Qaeda affiliated Libyan rebels worked alongside NATO to overthrow the Libyan government, plunging the country into intolerable chaos which has never halted since 2011. Many fighters from Libya then travelled to fight alongside the Syrian rebels in the proxy war against Bashar al-Assad.
NATO’s intervention turned an advanced country which had the highest standard of living on the African continent, into a failed state devoid of leadership, cohesion and structure.
Inverted Narratives
In a policy brief written in September 2013 by Alan J. Kuperman, an Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, who also holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kuperman outlines that NATO’s only objective in Libya was to force regime change in the country. Despite the inverted narrative promulgated by the Western establishment that the war was a “humanitarian intervention”,
Kuperman details how NATO overthrew the Qaddafi regime even at the expense of civilian life.
The policy brief was based on an earlier article by Kuperman which was published in the summer 2013 issue of the International Security journal, titled: “A Model Humanitarian Intervention? Reassessing NATO’s Libya Campaign“, a project of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School.
Kuperman writes in his policy brief, Lessons from Libya: How not to Intervene, that NATO’s so called “humanitarian intervention” in the North African nation actually “exacerbated humanitarian suffering”:
NATO’s action magnified the conflict’s duration about sixfold, and its death toll at least sevenfold, while also exacerbating human rights abuses, humanitarian suffering, Islamic radicalism, and weapons proliferation in Libya and its neighbors. If Libya was a “model intervention,” then it was a model of failure.
The author continues to dispel the mainstream narratives on the war by documenting that the Libyan government did not “initiate Libya’s violence”, but instead “responded” to violence perpetuated by the protestors:
The conventional account of Libya’s conflict and NATO’s intervention is misleading in several key aspects. First, contrary to Western media reports, Qaddafi did not initiate Libya’s violence by targeting peaceful protesters. The United Nations and Amnesty International have documented that in all four Libyan cities initially consumed by civil conflict in mid-February 2011—Benghazi, Al Bayda, Tripoli, and Misurata—violence was actually initiated by the protesters. The government responded to the rebels militarily but never intentionally targeted civilians or resorted to “indiscriminate” force, as Western media claimed.
It was not just the media that was pushing this narrative however, US President Barack Obama asserted in a March 2011 speech that “Qaddafi began attacking his people”, and the US responded by assigning forces “to protect the Libyan people from immediate danger.”
Other assessments of what actually transpired in Libya starkly differ from the President’s words though, as Kuperman argues that NATO was belligerently attempting to force regime change in Libya at any cost, “even at the expense of increasing the harm to Libyans”:
The conventional wisdom is also wrong in asserting that NATO’s main goal in Libya was to protect civilians. Evidence reveals that NATO’s primary aim was to overthrow Qaddafi’s regime, even at the expense of increasing the harm to Libyans… NATO continued to aid the rebels even when they repeatedly rejected government cease-fire offers that could have ended the violence and spared civilians. Such military assistance included weapons, training, and covert deployment of hundreds of troops from Qatar, eventually enabling the rebels to capture and summarily execute Qaddafi and seize power in October 2011.
Kuperman also notes the potential “crimes against humanity” committed by the rebels after they had overthrown the Libyan regime:
The victorious rebels perpetrated scores of reprisal killings and expelled 30,000 mostly black residents of Tawerga on grounds that some had been “mercenaries” for Qaddafi. HRW reported in 2012 that such abuses “appear to be so widespread and systematic that they may amount to crimes against humanity.” Ironically, such racial or ethnic violence had never occurred in Qaddafi’s Libya.
Regime Change in Libya was a Premeditated Geostrategic Objective
Contrary to many mainstream news outlets, the overthrow of the Libyan regime was not a spontaneous decision by NATO powers in response to the Libyan government ‘savagely attacking their own people’. Instead, it was part of a much grander geostrategic plan by Western powers to destroy any nation-state that could resist Western hegemony.
In addition to being named on the neoconservatives hit list in 2000, Libya was targeted for regime change in a 2001 plan circulating around the Pentagon. The plan was revealed by retired four star general and former NATO commander, Wesley Clark, in a speech in 2007 at the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco. Clark recites a conversation he had with an official at the Pentagon in 2001, who had received a classified memo from the Secretary of Defense’s office:
I just got this memo from the Secretary of Defense’s office, it says we are going to attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years. We’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.”
In 2014, three years after the war in the country, Libya joined the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), an organisation which is a corporate member of one of the most preeminent organisations within the Western establishment – the Royal Institute of International Affairs (or Chatham House).
In the future, the EBRD will offer un-payable loans to the North African nation. This will result in Libya being in debt to an organisation that will ensure the country will be subservient to the interests of Western imperialism, whilst experiencing a sustained period of chaos induced by NATO’s war in 2011. This is 21st century imperialism par excellence.
It is clear that for many political leaders in Western capitals, humanitarianism is merely a euphemism for imperialism. Today’s Western elite unimaginatively use the same propaganda over and over again to justify perennial wars. David Cameron recently regurgitated the slogans we heard ad nauseam in 2011, when he claimed the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has “butchered his own people”.
Libya provides a window into Syria’s future if the West ousts Assad, as NATO strategists have no intention of stabilizing Syria if they succeed in ousting the government in Damascus. The Western overthrow of Assad will most probably result in Syria being balkanized into small autonomous regions whilst experiencing a sectarian bloodbath. We can be assured it won’t transition into a democratic utopia (but that doesn’t stop Western propaganda pushing this fairytale).
Thankfully however, Russia will not allow the West to butcher Syria in the same manner they butchered Libya.
Steven MacMillan is an independent writer, researcher, geopolitical analyst and editor of The Analyst Report, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
Zionist rabbi Meir Kahane is the founder of the Arab-hating Jewish Defense League (JDL). Israel banned it in 1988, calling it a “threat to national security.”
Even the Islamophobic Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said its membership includes only “thugs and hooligans” – dedicated to hate-mongering and violence against Palestinians.
Its poisonous ideology persists in Israel. Hate-mongering rabbis responded to questions including: “Am I allowed to kick the insurgent, hit him or shoot him in order to kill him after he has been arrested or is this prohibited?”
Rabbi Rabbi Rav Benzion Mutzafi said
“(i)t is not only desirable to do so, but it is a religious duty that you hold his head down to the ground and hit him until his last breath.”
City of Safed chief rabbi Shmeul Eliyahu said it’s
“prohibited to keep (Palestinian ‘vandals’) alive after (their arrest), because if (they’re) left alive, there is a fear that (they’d) be released and (be able to) kill others.”
Since October 1, Israel arrested around 700 Palestinians, many held uncharged, others accused of stone-throwing and/or threatening public security.
The Palestinian Prisoners Club said half of those detained are children, denied contact with family and legal counsel, subjected to brutal torture, forced to confess to whatever charges Israel concocts.
Other children are being lethally shot. Defense for Children International-Palestine’s Accountability Program director Ayed Abu Eqtaish said:
It’s now a matter of when the next Palestinian child fatality will occur and not if it will take place. The complete disregard for human life that Israeli soldiers exhibit suggests that the use of lethal force is their standard operating procedure whatever the circumstance.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad called for Palestinian solidarity against Israeli repression and occupation. They saluted brave martyrs, sacrificing their lives for freedom.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) called on Palestinians to condemn US support for Israeli viciousness. Be wary of John Kerry’s upcoming visit, it stressed – aimed only at ending resistance against repressive occupation, issuing a statement, saying:
The United States presents a strong barrier in front of our people and our rights in all international forums, and uses the veto as a weapon wielded dozens of times to prevent our people from exercising their right to self-determination.
The United States was and still is the head of the snake which spreads poison and sectarian wars to the Arab nation.
On Friday, John Kerry’s spokesman issued a statement saying, he
“strong(ly) condemn(ed) (Palestinian) terror attacks against innocent civilians, and (expressed) support for Israel’s right to defend its citizens.”
An Islamophobic Wall Street Journal editorial accused Palestinians of being knife-wielding terrorists – calling their heroic self-defense “terrorism in its most exact and repulsive form.”
Journal editors endorsed Israeli state terror, saying if its “critics…think they could do better under similar circumstances, they ought to explain how” – ignoring Netanyahu-ordered provocations, then unleashing violence, Israel’s usual tactic, brutalizing defenseless civilians.
The following statement was issued by human rights groups listed below:
Since the beginning of the current wave of violence, there has been a worrying trend to use firearms to kill Palestinians who have attacked Israelis or are suspected of such attacks.
Several incidents have been documented and reported, raising concern that the chosen response to such persons is the harshest possible, with lethal or – at the very least – unnecessary consequences.
In instances when Jews have been suspected of attacks, none of the suspects has been shot. Politicians and senior police officers have not only failed to act to calm the public climate of incitement, but on the contrary have openly called for the extrajudicial killing of suspects.
They have also urged civilians to carry weapons. For example, Jerusalem District Police Commander Moshe Edri was quoted as saying: ‘Anyone who stabs Jews or hurts innocent people is due to be killed.’
Interior Security Minister Gilad Arden declared that ‘every terrorist should know that he will not survive the attack he is about to commit.’ MK Yair Lapid stated that ‘you have to shoot to kill anyone who pulls out a knife or screwdriver.’
Much of the media joined in and encouraged a similar approach. The bodies responsible for supervising police operations – the State Attorney’s Office and the Department for the Investigation of Police – remained silent in the face of these comments.
No-one disputes the serious nature of the events of recent days, nor the need to protect the public against stabbing and other attacks.
However, it seems that too often, instead of acting in a manner consistent with the nature of each incident, police officers and soldiers are quick to shoot to kill. The political and public support for such actions endorses the killing Palestinians in the Territories and in Israel.
Rather than imposing collective punishment on Palestinians in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip, the Israeli government should act to end the reality of ongoing and daily oppression faced by some four million people who live without hope of any change in the situation, without any horizon for the end of occupation, and without prospects for a life of liberty and dignity.
Signed by:
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel
Amnesty International-Israel Branch
B’Tselem
The Gisha Legal Center for Freedom of Movement
The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel
HaMoked Center for the Defence of the Individual
Yesh Din Volunteers for Human Rights
Adalah – The Legal Center for the Rights of the Arab Minority in Israel
Physician for Human Rights-Israel
A Final Comment
Maan News said an Israeli settler lethally shot a Palestinian teenager around midday on Saturday – near the Beit Haddassah outpost.
Area resident Mufeed Sharabati said “paramedics of the Palestinian Red Crescent (Society) arrived, but Israeli soldiers didn’t allow them to access the (victim).”
“The soldiers then covered (his) face and took him in an ambulance to (an) unknown destination.” Settlers celebrated his death by “distributing candies.”
Witnesses saw Israeli soldiers place a knife by his lifeless body – to be able to claim he attempted to stab his assailant.
The incident came shortly before soldiers lethally shot another Palestinian teenager in Jerusalem. As of midday Saturday local time, the Palestinian death toll stands at 40 since October 1.
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.”
Institutionalised brutality is a rather easy thing to replicate. It begins with a selected language, and ends up justifying monstrous conduct. It pardons behaviour, and it condemns victims. The global debate on refugees is characterised by its distinct lack of humanity, and Australia, leading the charge, knows no limits on how far that lack of humanity can go.
The response to the claims that a Somali woman was raped, and then brought back to Australia for an abortion from Nauru, only to then have her returned back to the offshore prison camp, is yet another inglorious tale. Canberra’s response was one of genuine disbelief that a traumatised individual might have required counselling about the procedure.
The immigration minister Peter Dutton decided to go one step further about this perceived wobbliness on her part – a “racket” exploited by asylum seekers had grown up to subvert Australia’s mandatory offshore system. (Repulsively, Australian detention centres, privatised and immunised from legal scrutiny, may designate asylum seekers refugees but not send them back to the Australian mainland.)
Accordingly, Dutton’s statement takes aim at refugee advocates and refugees generally. Regarding the circumstances of her rendition, Dutton was convinced that, “Comments from some advocates to the contrary are a fabrication, while some others appear to be using this woman’s circumstance for their own political agenda. They should be ashamed of their lies.”
Dutton certainly baulks against any notion of humanitarianism, a significant handicap given his ministerial portfolio. At 9:00am on Friday, he authorised immigration officials to take Abyan from her room at Sydney’s Villawood detention centre. The intention was to effectively render her back to Nauru. Before her legal team could get an injunction preventing her effective expulsion from the mainland, government lawyers informed the Federal Court that the application was futile – she was already in Honiara on her way to Nauru.[1] When it comes to expelling and rendering refugees, Canberra’s snail-paced bureaucrats suddenly get busy.
The Refugee Action Coalition’s Ian Rintoul explained to ABC’s AM program that, “What we now know is that she was at some point put on a jet to Honiara to get her out of the country, to avoid court action that might have prevented her being removed from Australia.”
The Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, preferred a different tact to explaining why the government effectively sabotaged due process by speedily whisking Abyan away and out of the court’s jurisdiction. “The information I have is that [the] woman in question changed her mind about seeking a termination and that’s all I know.”
Abyan’s lawyer George Newhouse also disclosed to the ABC that his client wished to see a counsellor before going through with the abortion. “We asked for counselling, support and for her to understand the procedure she was about to undertake.” According to Newhouse, it was precisely in asking for such assistance that the government retaliated. “We are gobsmacked.”
There is certainly more to come. Authorities in Nauru, ever willing to show a colonial like submissiveness to the Australian metropole, have been happy to target alleged victims of rape by releasing police file details and names. A Somali woman known as Najma was one such individual. Nauru’s justice minister, David Adeang, shows little interest in the rampant sexual abuse taking place in what effectively are prison conditions for refugees and asylum seekers. He prefers to see detainees as habitual liars and detainee guards as victimised saints.
Adeang, and Dutton, may have minds cut from the same cloth, but ample evidence has been adduced to the Senate select committee investigating the Australian-funded facility of atrocious conditions. Effectively sending detainees back to such conditions brings the Refugee Convention into play, with such rendition violating the rule against non-refoulement.
Last month, the committee inspired by the gruesome findings of the Moss Review, which revealed the alleged sexual exploitation of detainees, including children, by the staff at the processing centre, found it was “not adequate, appropriate or safe for the asylum seekers detained there.” The committee further observed that, “There appears to be no other pathway for those affected by what they have seen and experienced in the Regional Processing Centre (RPC) on Nauru to disclose allegations of mistreatment, abuse or to make complaints.”[2]
Dutton’s desensitised response? It was an obvious witch hunt that unnecessarily rubbished a strong response against scoundrels seeking to come to Australia by unconventional routes.
With the rendering of a pregnant Somali woman back to Nauru, away from judicial scrutiny and review, on a Royal Australian Airforce Aircraft, the deeply militarised approach to refugees have been confirmed. It is a world of secrets guarded by threats of punishment; it is a world policed by former service personnel. And it is one treated as non-Australian, an issue for the Nauru authorities.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email:[email protected]
The Syrian conflict is profoundly misrepresented across the entirety of the Western press.
To call it a civil war is a gross mischaracterization. The entire conflict was engineered and fueled from beyond Syria’s borders. And while there are a significant number of Syrians collaborating with this criminal conspiracy, the principle agents driving the conflict are foreigners. They include special interests in the United States, across the Atlantic in Europe, and regional players including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Israel.Syria is far from an isolated conflict. America’s interest in dividing and destroying Syria is part of a much larger agenda serving its aspirations both in the region and globally. The division and destruction of Syria as a functioning, sovereign nation-state is admittedly meant to set the stage for the conquest of Iran next.
US End Game in Syria is Just the Beginning for Wider Regional War
Reuters recently published an op-ed titled, “Syria’s one hope may be as dim as Bosnia’s once was,” which argues that the only way the US can cooperate with Russia regarding Syria is if all players agree to a weakened, fragmented Syria.
If this scheme sounds familiar, that is because this op-ed was authored by Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution – a corporate-financier funded think-tank that has in part helped engineer the chaos now consuming the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). O’Hanlon previously published a paper titled, “Deconstructing Syria: A new strategy for America’s most hopeless war,” in which he also calls for the division and destruction of Syria.
In it, O’Hanlon calls for the establishment of “safe zones,” the invasion and occupation of Syrian territory by US, European, and Persian Gulf special forces, the relaxing of criteria used to openly fund what would essentially be terrorists operating in Syria, and openly making the ousting of the Syrian government a priority on par with the alleged US fight against the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS/ISIL).
“Relaxing” criteria regarding who the US can openly fund and provide direct military support for, is nothing less than tacit support for terrorism and terrorists themselves.
But none of these treacherous methods should be shocking. That is because O’Hanlon is also a co-author of the 2009 Brookings Institution report titled,
In this signed and dated criminal conspiracy, methods for covertly overthrowing the Iranian government with US-backed mobs augmented with armed militants, the use of US listed foreign terrorist organizations to wage a proxy war against Iran, the provocation of open war with Iran, and the use of Israel to unilaterally attack Iran first, before bringing America inevitably into the war shortly after are all described in great detail throughout the 156 page report.
While some have tried to dismiss this report as a mere theoretical exercise, suggestions like having terrorist organization Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) removed from the US State Department’s foreign terrorist organization list so that the US could openly arm and fund it in a proxy war against Iran, has since come to pass. The report was written in 2009, MEK was de-listed in 2012.
Additionally, the report also suggests luring Iran to the negotiating table where the United States would place before it a deal so irresistible that when Iran either rejected it or accepted it and then appeared to violate it, subsequent US military intervention would be seen by the world as a reluctant option of last resort that Iran brought upon itself. This has since manifested itself as the much lauded “nuclear deal.”
And almost to the letter, every criminal conspiracy laid out in this report meant for Tehran, has been each in turn used against Syria. The report noted that Syria and Lebanon’s Hezbollah would be significant obstacles to dividing and destroying Iran and that each must be dealt with first. The report was written in 2009, the war in Syria began in earnest in 2011.
Understanding that Syria is not an isolated crisis, but is tied to US designs aimed at Iran and beyond, illustrates why O’Hanlon and other Western policymakers’ proposals for a “political transition” or the partitioning of Syria are unacceptable. It will not be the end of regional conflict, but rather the end of just the beginning. The successful destruction of Syria will portend war with Iran and beyond.
Solving Syria at the Source
Regarding what the West claims is Russia’s true motivation for intervening in Syria, O’Hanlon’s op-ed in Reuters claimed:
Putin’s real goal in Syria is almost surely not to fight ISIL. His more plausible aim, as reflected in his military’s initial bombing targets, is to bolster President Bashar al-Assad’s shaky regime by attacking insurgent groups close to ISIL strongholds — even if they are relatively moderate and unaffiliated with ISIL or al-Nusra, an al Qaeda offshoot. Putin wants to protect his own proxies, retain Russian access to the naval facility along the Mediterranean coast at Tartus and embarrass the United States while demonstrating Russia’s global reach.
Surely that is what O’Hanlon expects most Reuters readers to believe, but he unlikely believes it himself. Russia’s involvement in Syria is tied to self-preservation. Moscow likely understands that a “settlement” in Syria is a misnomer, and that the collapse of Syria as a functioning nation-state will be only one of several events in a chain reaction that will effect first those along Russia’s borders, then everything within its borders.
O’Hanlon’s op-ed is chilling. In it he claims:
Assad is responsible for killing most of the 250,000 Syrians who have died in the civil war to date — and caused most of the massive displacement and refugee flows as well.
It is chilling because readers must remember that O’Hanlon himself signed and dated the Brookings paper “Which Path to Persia?” where he and his colleagues at Brookings deliberately engineered the very chaos that has consumed Syria and cost so many people their lives. Syrian President Bashar Al Assad is only guilty of holding power when those who underwrote Brookings’ criminal designs had them aimed at the nation of Syria and executed.
President Assad did what all responsible leaders have done when faced with a foreign threat endangering the survival of their nation – stood and fought back. That O’Hanlon has since repeatedly called for the division and literal “deconstruction” of Syria but still blames President Assad for the chaos that entails, only further illustrates the depravity from which Western foreign policy flows and the dishonesty they present the results of their criminal conspiring to the public with.
However, O’Hanlon, and even Brookings itself are not solely responsible for the death and destruction Syria now suffers, or Libya, Iraq, and others have suffered before it, or even those the US plans to target next will suffer. They are but individual cogs in a much larger machine. To understand the scope of that machine, one must look at who underwrites and ultimately directs the work Brookings does. By doing so, we can understand the very source of what drives the chaos in Syria, and then go about stopping it.
The Source
Brookings’ 2014 annual report (.pdf) reveals among others, the following sponsors from big-finance; JP Morgan Chase & Co., Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, State Farm, MetLife, and GEICO. From big-defense there’s; General Electric, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. Big-telecom is represented by; Comcast, Google, Facebook, AT&T, and Verizon. Big-oil; Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, British Petroleum, and Shell. And even consumer corporations like Pepsi and Coca Cola help underwrite what are essentially policy papers conspiring to commit crimes against humanity that have since been systematically carried out at the cost of hundreds of thousands of innocent lives.
It is the Fortune 500, centered on Wall Street and London, driving the conflict in Syria and the larger arc of chaos consuming the MENA region and beyond.
Russian and Syrian efforts aimed at stemming the flow of weapons and cash over Syrian borders alone is not going to “solve Syria.” Clearly the problem is larger than Syria, and even larger than the geopolitical chaos the US has created arcing over the MENA region. It is the unwarranted wealth, power, and influence that drives that chaos that constitutes the ultimate source of the problem. Disrupting or displacing that power will be difficult, and the failure thus far to significantly disrupt or displace it is precisely why this chaos continues.
Multipolarism and Localism
For Moscow’s part, particularly in the wake of Western sanctions targeting Russia, the search inward to become more self-sufficient and less dependent on foreign imports, foreign financial institutions and systems, and other features of Wall Street and Washington’s “international order,” has set an example for other nations to follow in undermining and ultimately uprooting this global threat at its very source.
Understanding the premeditated nature of the West’s war on Syria and the fact that this current conflict serves only as a stepping stone toward a well-defined strategy to next destroy Iran explains why “partnering” with the US in any kind of solution regarding Syria is an impossibility. A “political settlement” that results in the division of Syria or the removal of the current government is also entirely unacceptable for this same reason.
Russia’s decision to defend the sovereign government of Syria and assist in the elimination of Syria’s enemies within its borders, as well as the warding off of its enemies beyond them is the most immediate course of action to “solve Syria.” Inviting Iran and even China to take take part in a larger campaign to secure Syria’s borders and assisting in the restoration of order within the country is a concrete next step. Expanding this coalition to cover Iraq next will create a geopolitical “no-meddling-zone” the West will find itself outside of.
However, ultimately, it is Russia’s concept of a multipolar world displacing the unipolar international order established by the West – an order that breeds servile dependency among all drawn into it and which seeks to destroy all who try to avoid it – that stands the best chance of not only “solving Syria,” but preventing other nations from suffering its fate. Multipolarism aims straight at the source of Western global hegemony – at the corporate-financier, political, and institutional monopolies which prop it up. Multipolarism emphasizes national sovereignty and a decentralized global balance of power.
And while Russian, Syrian, Hezbollah, Iranian, and Iraqi forces stand on the front line of the true free world, for the rest of us, we need to understand that full-spectrum domination pursued by the West requires full-spectrum resistance from the rest of humanity. The corporations underwriting Brookings’ abhorrent work enjoy impunity, immense wealth, and nearly unlimited influence and power solely because each and every person on Earth takes their paycheck every month, and renders it to them, at the shopping mall, at the new car lot, in Starbucks, at McDonald’s, or at the pump.
A multipolar world not only means a distribution of global power, but also a distribution of global responsibility and wealth. And this extends not only to nations, but also states and provinces, as well as communities and even individuals. However insignificant individual efforts may seem to decentralize power and wealth away from existing monopolies, they are no less insignificant than the efforts of individual soldiers fighting and winning in Syria. Indeed their individual contributions alone are meaningless – but collectively they lead to victory.
Solving Syria truly, means solving the problem presented to us by the prevailing unipolar order itself. It is not a battle simply for Syria and its allies to fight within the borders of Syria, but a battle for all who oppose unipolar global hegemony to fight. Maybe not with bullets, bombs, and missiles, but a fight nonetheless.
Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine“New Eastern Outlook”.
This territory has never been in the hands of the Islamic State, deputy chief of the Russian General Staff Andrey Kartapolov points out
Traces of airstrikes against household buildings have been found at the Syria-Jordan border, where Russian warplanes have performed no missions, deputy chief of the Russian General Staff Andrey Kartapolov said on Friday.
“We have spotted ruins of household buildings destroyed by bombing near the settlement of Kherbet Ghazala at the Syrian-Jordan border,” he told a briefing for foreign military attaches and journalists.
“Russian warplanes have never performed any missions there and, as far as we know, the Syrian aviation has not been used there either,” he stressed. “This territory has never been in the hands of the Islamic State. Moreover, this area has been controlled by the Free Syrian Army since 2013.”
He demonstrated photos of the area featuring bomb-destroyed buildings. “You can see on these photos that there are no signs of military activity around these cottages, there are no military hardware, not even signs of military hardware. These are regular gardens and fields with buildings to keep farming tools,” he said.
“Why destroy these buildings? It looks like somebody’s pilots were just training their skills or dropped bombs to report to their command about completed mission,” Kartapolov said.
Airstrikes by US-led coalition in Syria increase refugee flow to Europe
Airstrikes of US-led coalition on civilian facilities o the Syrian territory lead to increasing refugee flows to the European Union, Kartapolov went on to say.
“Over the last two weeks, we have provided enough video materials confirming the precision of [Russian] airstrikes. Our jets deliver airstrikes at facilities located outside of settlements,” Kartapolov said.
“It is not in our rules to advise colleagues on where to deliver their airstrikes. However, on October 11, near the settlement of Tel-Alam, the coalition’s jets destroyed by airstrikes a thermal power plant and transformer substation,” he added. As a result, hospitals and schools in Aleppo were left without electricity. Water pumping stations and sewage also stopped working which can be very harmful in the conditions of high temperatures.
“I think that it is unlikely that our partners did not know that the thermal power plant worked only eight hours per day. Airstrikes were delivered for several days, and on October 11, the power station was completely destroyed. One might het an impression that someone is deliberately destroying infrastructure in settlements, thus making the life of local population impossible. Because of that, civilians leave these settlements after losing living conditions and increase the refugee flow to Europe,” Kartapolov noted.
Chica de entrega flores a las fuerzas del orden libanesas (febrero de 2005)
Logo del movimiento “14 de Marzo” libanes
Algunos ejemplos de uso del puño cerrado de Otpor de Serbia (Otpor), Egipto (Movimiento del 6 de abril) , Georgia (Kmara)
El millonario sionista Sheldon G. Adelson y su “gran ” amigo Benjamin Netanyahu (Jerusalén , 12 agosto 2007)
Slim Amamou y Lina Ben Mhenni ( 3er Encuentro de Bloggers Árabes , Túnez 2011)
Razan Ghazzaoui y Alaa Abdelfattah Ali Abdulemam (Budapest 2008 )
Jacob Appelbaum (3er Encuentro de Bloggers Árabes, Túnez 2011)
Manifestantes del movimiento “apestas!” preparan pancartas (Beirut 29 de agosto de 2015) Tenga en cuenta que Gandhi fue también el “mentor” de activistas de Otpor e inspirador de Gene Sharp
1- Bassem Samir ; 2- Sherif Mansour ( Freedom House ) ; 3- Saad Eddin Ibrahim ; 4- Dalia Ziada ( egipcia ciber-activista, miembro de Fikra ) ; 5- Israa Abdel Fattah
Marwan Maalouf, tras ser dispersado junto a sus seguidores después de intentar asaltar la sede del Ministerio de Medio Ambiente ( Beirut , 01 de septiembre 2015 )
Assaad Thebian (Beirut, 28 Agosto, 2015)
Lucien Bourjeilly después de conseguir su pasaporte libanés (23 de mayo de 2014)
Michel Elefteriades con su “Movimiento disgustado”
In a policy brief written in September 2013 by Alan J. Kuperman, an Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, who also holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kuperman outlines that NATO’s only objective in Libya was to force regime change in the country. Despite the inverted narrative promulgated by the Western establishment that the war was a “humanitarian intervention”,
