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On August 23 NATO announced that a Canadian officer, Major-General Fortin, will be the new commander of NATO forces in Iraq for the continuation of what the invading and occupation forces call a “training mission.” Previous objections to the presence of foreign forces in Iraq by the Iraqi government were more or less ignored by the United States and its jackboots, and by Canada, one of the little poodles always running along side the top bulldog with its tail up and tongue out, so any objections now will count for nothing.
These two nations, well, we can call the US a nation, Canada a shell of one, claim to act in the interests of peace and security in Iraq and the Middle East. But the Iraqis know what colonialism is. They have resisted it since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1921; against the British, the French, the Americans and now Canada, which continues its role in the American colonial system as part of the enforcement unit.
The invasion and occupation of Iraq was, the world knows, a war of aggression, a war crime, and this crime continues so long as the occupation continues. Everyone connected with that aggression and occupation are war criminals and this of course includes the members of the Canadian government and armed forces. In fact the entire NATO alliance is now a party to the crime and so every leader of every NATO country is a war criminal. This is the absurdity to which the world has descended, a world in which international law, the United Nations Charter, the Nuremberg Principles are regarded as only fit for confetti and every western leader is a criminal.
Last January an Iraqi general, working with the US forces, claimed the foreign forces were “necessary” to preserve a “fragile peace,” though it is more likely he wanted to fill the hole in his pocket, while Nayef al-Shamri, deputy chairman of the Iraqi parliament’s security committee, countered that, “Iraq does not need the presence of U.S. ground forces or military bases”. He said “U.S. forces had no actual presence in battles against the Islamic State, only stopping at air and logistical support.”
At the beginning of the year the Americans had stated that they were going to reduce or withdraw their forces in Iraq but by May it became clear that they were increasing them and, as their proxy forces in Syria collapsed, increased the presence of its intelligence operatives on the Iraqi-Syrian border, as well as centers such as Erbil and Mosul. Yet in December 2017 Iraq’s Prime Minister Haider al Abidi declared his country liberated from ISIS, so even the claimed pretext used by the US and its NATO servants for remaining in Iraq does not exist.
The real reasons for the continued occupation are stated by the British commanding officer in Iraq, Major-General Gedney to a British newspaper that,
“British (and so NATO) forces will need to remain in Iraq for the next several years to ensure instability, hopelessness and desperation never again become the breeding ground for radicalization.”
But hopelessness is the only thing the British and their partners in crime bring to the people of Iraq, denied their sovereignty, their self–esteem, their ability to govern themselves freely and without interference. Foreign invasions and occupations are always met with the duality of hopelessness and resistance. Hopelessness leads to desperation then to resistance. One leads to the other for one act of resistance restores the hope and with the hope the resistance increases.
The British general added that,
“we have to continue our fight against Deash’s corrupt narrative, and only then will we see their lasting defeat.”
In other words he is saying
“we must increase our propaganda containing our corrupt narrative and stay in Iraq to silence anyone who opposes us or our local puppets, increase our control of thought and speech, increase our control of the Iraqi political scene and ensure that only those loyal to us can have control; the control for geostrategic and energy reasons, the same reasons that ever motivated the aggression against Iraq.”
But speaking of “corrupt narratives,” it is the British that take the cake. Just today, the 24th of August, a news item appeared on the BBC website about the forest fires that have erupted near Berlin. One of the concerns of local firefighters trying to control the fires is the presence of unexploded ammunition from the Battle of Berlin that took place in April/May of 1945 that resulted in the Red Army liberation of Germany from the harsh yoke of fascism. In the forests around Berlin, and in the city, huge armies, Nazi and Red Army, fought each other in some of the most intense fighting of that war, but, according to the BBC, it is only the Soviet forces are responsible for the unexploded ordinance both sides exchanged during the battle. This is how the BBC framed it,
“The munitions are believed to date from the Soviet Army’s actions in the former East Germany, during World War Two.”
Just let that rest in your mind for a minute or two, let it seep into your mind what the BBC is doing here. For what they are doing is rewriting history on a vast scale and rewriting it to whitewash the Nazis and to cast the liberating Soviet forces as the bad guys, yet once again.
Apparently, for the BBC, the retreating Nazi forces, protecting Hitler and the heart of the Nazi Reich from their just and final end, did not exist. They are not mentioned. The Soviets were just engaging “in actions.” That these actions were caused by the aggression of Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union, in which the German fascist forces, allied with their version of the coalition of the willing, fascists states and forces from across Europe, killed over 27 million people, wounded and maimed millions more, razed to the ground every town and village west of Moscow in a holocaust unprecedented in history, that part of the story has been erased.
But they go further, and in my view establish the BBC as an outright fascist propaganda organ, when they claim the battle took place in something called East Germany. There was no “East Germany” at that time. There was only the Third Reich, the Nazi state, and Berlin was its capital. But the BBC wants you to forget that the Soviet forces were fighting to liberate Europe from the Nazis, that Germany was a fascist state. They want you to forget it existed. So they concoct a battle in a state only created later, cast the Russians as the bad guys, and claim that Germany suffered from their “actions” and suffers from them still.
This is a negation of history in order to erase the crimes of the fascists, to protect them, to rehabilitate them, as we have seen the NATO alliance do in Ukraine. We should not be surprised. We saw them tolerate fascist regimes in the past in Spain, Portugal, in Greece, and fascist elements in the governments and armed forces of West Germany and Italy, to limit ourselves to Europe. Before the disappearance of the Soviet Union at least lip service was paid in the west to the crimes of fascism in Europe. Now even the pretence of condemning fascism is dropped and is replaced with outright distortions of history to accompany the distortions of the mass media repeating the lies of the governments for which they serve as servile mouthpieces. And once again, as in 1941, the fascist propaganda is aimed at the same people, not the soviet people now, but the Russian people, the ones who suffered more than any other people in any war in history
People argue what fascism is and is not, what are its characteristics, but one of them to me is very simple; if you support fascists, if you rewrite history to protect them, you are a fascist. How can it be otherwise?
How can anyone observe what is going on in the United States and not smell fascism in the air as the smoke from their internal battles spreads over the world, threatening to consume us in the fires of another world war. For that is what the internal battle in the United States is ultimately about, an ongoing purge, preparing for war with Russia and its allies that now are China, Iran, Syria, and, the way the US is pushing Turkey over the arrest of the American intelligence operative Mr. Brunson, who claims to be a preacher, but who is seen, in photos posted in the Turkish news, posing with and advising ant-Turkish government rebel groups, may soon include that nation as well. Meanwhile the brave DPRK, undaunted, stands alone against the world, perhaps the only principled nation left on the planet, but it too soon may be reconciled with the others under the common threat from the great behemoth of the USA.
As for the common citizen, well, we can only suffer the lunacy in the United States, in the NATO countries, in the mass media, in our governments’ statements and actions, as they lead us to destruction, suffer or revolt. There are no other choices.
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Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel “Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.” where this article was first published.
Featured image is from the author.
